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An article of mine from 2010

Jay KnottLeave a comment

Originally published at Dissident Voice.

Faithful Circle

A Response to Noam Chomsky’s Book “Fateful Triangle”

by Jay Knott / September 18th, 2010

Hypotheses and Tests

1. Hypotheses

Dear Mr. President: We write to affirm our support for our strategic partnership with Israel, and encourage you to continue to do before international organizations such as the United Nations. The United States has traditionally stood with Israel because it is in our national security interest and must continue to do so. Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East and a vibrant democracy. Israel is also a partner to the United States on military and intelligence issues in this critical region. That is why it is our national interest to support Israel at a moment when Israel faces multiple threats from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the current regime in Iran.
– Jewish Virtual Library1

This is the beginning of the resolution passed by the US Senate on June 21 2010, supporting Israel’s attack on a convoy of unarmed aid ships headed toward Gaza, which killed nine people.

It begins with four sentences, each one of which asserts that Israel is a strategic asset of the USA. But if Israel is such an ally, why the need to emphasise it? It’s as if the senators are arguing with someone who says that Israel is NOT as useful as we tend to believe. Whoever that is, it’s not Noam Chomsky. Both left-wing thinkers like Chomsky and establishment politicians reinforce the idea that US interests coincide with those of Israel, though they differ on how good US interests are. Sometimes, when people say something too stridently, it is because they secretly know that it is false.

This review was sparked off by an online critique of Noam Chomsky’s views on the Middle East by Jeff Blankfort, a reply to it, and the internet discussions around them.2 , 3 Several contributors to these discussions come from traditional anti-racist left-wing backgrounds, but, unlike most of the left, have taken it to its logical conclusion, opposing Jewish power as the most important form of ethnically-based oppression in the West today.

Chomsky fan Hammond3 urges Blankfort’s supporters to read Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle.4 So I did. I am not impressed by Chomsky’s fame nor by the book’s approximately two thousand references. I look at the arguments.

Professor Chomsky made one of the greatest discoveries in twentieth-century science, the language instinct, in a 1959 critique of psychologist B. F. Skinner.5 Because he’s a genius, we expect more of him than unsubstantiated platitudes. But everyone makes mistakes. Einstein spent the better part of his career trying to explain why the universe is not expanding, and Chomsky didn’t figure out that there are genes for grammar.6

He flayed Skinner on the vagueness of his terms, and for changing the meaning of words when convenient. Chomsky therefore knows that vagueness makes a hypothesis untestable, and therefore unscientific.

Chomsky brought clarity to the science of language development, but he is surprisingly contradictory on the politics of the Middle East, for a man with such a scientific, logical brain. For example, on the one hand, he denies the importance of the Israel Lobby. After all, if Israel is helping US ‘elites’ maintain their ‘hegemony’ in the ‘region’, they would hardly need a lobby to remind them of it. Universities and co-operatives are tentatively discussing a boycott of Israel. Chomsky argues against a boycott of Israeli produce, because the Lobby would call us ‘hypocrites’, unless we boycott the US too.7 So he thinks this ‘unimportant’ Lobby could undermine a boycott of Israel by mere accusations.

By page 4, Chomsky already makes it clear that he defends the Jewish State. He criticizes its current policies, which he says are caused by American Zionists, who cause its “moral degeneration and ultimate destruction”. In my pamphlet The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism, I sarcastically cited Stephen Zunes8 for claiming America was responsible for pushing poor little Israel into Lebanon in 2006. I didn’t realize how close Zunes’s attempt to make excuses for Jewish murderers was to Chomsky’s position until I read Fateful Triangle. Chomsky and his followers want us to believe that Israeli ethnic cleansing has ‘degenerated’ since 1948 because of American influence. This means the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 was morally superior to those in Lebanon in 1982, but the Hanukkah slaughter of 2008-9 was worse.

He says US ‘support’ has blocked Israel trying more moral policies, to the ‘despair’ of progressive Israeli Jews, on page 442. There is a cruder version of this ‘corruption’ narrative. It is part of the almost universally believed story of Jews as eternal victims. It enables Jewish Americans to support apartheid whilst thinking of themselves as liberals. They blackmail the left into accepting a much softer attitude toward Jewish supremacy than toward white identity.

Chomsky is by no means the worst example of chutzpah in the left. He is contradictory rather than duplicitous. He exposes Jewish emotional blackmail. He is contemptuous of professional Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel. He is fearless and merciless at ridiculing the hypocrisy and hysteria for which American Jewish organizations are notorious, who claim that critics of the Lobby are anti-Semitic. Some on the left also harass and slander pro-Palestinian peace activists. Since Israel is the only beneficiary of these divisive tactics, we call them ‘crypto-Zionists’.

But Chomsky’s main weakness is his failure to scientifically test his assertion that Israel is an ally of the USA. On page 3, without evidence, he says that US policy favors “a Greater Israel that will dominate the region in the interests of American power”.

To this end, Chomsky assumes that Arab nationalism is anti-West, whereas Jewish nationalism is pro-West. The former was allied to the Soviet Union. But this is at root a circular argument – the US supports Israel because it is an ally, and Israel is an ally because the US supports it. The reason some Arab leaders temporarily turned to Russia is because they were rejected by America, and the main reason for that is the influence of Israel. Chomsky confuses cause and effect.

The phrase ‘control of the oil’ is thrown around by Chomsky and his circle as liberally as the word ‘region’. It’s a vague leftist feel-good dumbing-down designed to prevent us from thinking through exactly what ‘control’ means, why precisely cruise missiles are useful to oil companies, and if killing Palestinian children helps US interests.

At this point, I should define ‘US interests’. I mean the interests of the US capitalist class. Unconditional support for Israel is obviously against the interests of the majority of Americans, who belong to the proletariat. But in that respect, it doesn’t differ from other unethical US foreign policies. What differentiates Zionism is that it is opposed to the interests of most of the ruling class too.

I used a Marxist phrase there. Chomsky prefers saying ‘elites’ rather than ‘bourgeoisie’ in his bestselling books. Even if the ‘elites’ really do ‘perceive’ it is in US interests to throw seven million dollars a day into a black hole, they are mistaken, and Palestine Solidarity has the task of explaining that to them and to those who work and vote for them.

Chomsky claims that the US supports Israel because Israel supports US war crimes – “Israel showed how to treat third-world upstarts properly” (page 29). This puts the cart before the horse. Right after World War II, Zionists were third-world upstarts themselves, engaged in terrorism in Palestine against an imperialist power. President Truman supported these upstarts, and later, when they were no longer upstarts, president Eisenhower supported upstarts against them.

This shows two things:
1. America doesn’t automatically oppose upstarts, and
2. Israel persuaded America to support its fight against upstarts which threaten Israel, rather than America supporting Israel because it combats upstarts which oppose America.

Israel has never fired a shot in the defense of American interests. But its friends in the media make it look as if the two countries’ enemies are the same, by amalgamating very different Arab and Muslim causes and parties. Most of these oppose Israel in principle – only a very small subset are inherently anti-American. It is in America’s interests to divide them. It is in Israel’s interests to prevent this. And it is in humanity’s interest to divorce America and Israel.

Chomsky’s claim to be a Zionist means a binational state, with the right of ‘self-determination’ of the two nations within Palestine. It’s clear which of the nations would dominate the other, but Chomsky appears to be unaware of this.

To his credit, on page 442 of his book, Chomsky predicted the defeat of the Israeli Defense Forces, which didn’t happen until seven years later, in Lebanon, in 2006. The Gaza flotilla massacre of 2010 was another disastrous error for Israel, leading to a split with Turkey, formerly its most important ally in the ‘region’. There is an opportunity to start to undermine Zionism, the only remaining example of serious racial oppression in the Western world. Is Chomsky on board?

Contradicting his view that Israel obeys America, Chomsky refers to the normal state of politics in the USA as ‘complete obedience’ to Zionist opposition to freedom of speech, on page 337, under the heading ‘The West Falls Into Line’. He also says how the allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’ is used to blackmail the elite political spectrum in Western countries into supporting Jewish supremacy in the Middle East, but then he drops the ball, reiterating hackneyed rhetoric about US policy. It’s not really US policy. It is the policy of supporters of a foreign power pretending to be pro-American.

Note that my argument does not imply promoting patriotism. It means saying, in effect, IF you are a patriotic American, you should oppose your country’s ardent support for Israel. Neither does it imply anti-Semitism. It means recognizing that the interests of most of the inhabitants of the USA would be served by reducing support to Israel. The interests of the Jewish minority would be served by increasing it. This should not be controversial. In particular, the American left, with its keen awareness of ‘privilege’, should be able to listen to this argument. But mostly, it cannot.

At one point, Chomsky discusses the hypocrisy of the Israeli leaders in using pogroms against Jews in Russia in the nineteenth century as an excuse for doing the same thing in Lebanon in 1982. But he doesn’t try to question the view that Jews have always been victims, wherever they have wandered. This myth was reiterated by Republican president George Bush Senior when he was trying to defend himself against the ‘anti-Semitism’ slur by groveling to the Lobby in 1991.

On page 446, Chomsky describes young American Jews, raised on the handouts of the Anti-Defamation League, having a ‘corrupting’ effect on Israel. He must also be very aware of the corruption of Israeli teenagers effected by taking them to the ruins of German concentration camps and teaching them to hate,9 or the Hillel Jewish campus organization which teaches young American Jews that Israel is their homeland. He doesn’t go far enough in criticizing the obsession with ‘the’ Holocaust which gets more intense the further it recedes into history.

After complaining about Israel’s rape of Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties for a few hundred pages, Chomsky resorts to the ‘region’ trick to try to explain it. Page 442:

The US has been more than pleased to acquire a militarized dependency, technologically advanced and ready to undertake tasks that few are willing to endure – support for the Guatemalan genocide, for example – while helping to contain threats to American dominance in the most critical region in the world, where ‘one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ [the Saudi oilfields] must be firmly held.

On page 462, he regrets Israel’s “dependence on the US with the concomitant pressure to serve US interests”. One would expect that the USA would not give a country $7 million a day, more than all other countries combined – without demanding that it serves its interests. But the predictions of this hypothesis fail. Israel feels no pressure at all to serve US interests, and Israeli politicians boast of American subservience, whilst their American accomplices harass those who state this simple truth. This is true whether you are a media mogul, a movie star, a politician, or an anti-war activist.

At the beginning of his book, Chomsky claims that Israel helps the US by protecting the Saudi oilfields. At the end, he says it blackmails the US by threatening to launch a nuclear attack on this great material prize. Iran could also greatly harm the Western world by blocking the Strait of Hormuz through which fleets of oil tankers pass – but somehow, America stands up to Iran. Why can’t it stand up to Israel? Because it’s an asset?

Chomsky expounds a deal of effort showing how the US media is biased in favor of Israel and against Palestinians, but he doesn’t call a spade a spade: the only serious racial prejudice left in America is pro-Jewish bias. That is why Israeli children’s deaths are reported at a rate seven times higher than those of Palestinians.10

2. Tests

I propose testing Chomsky’s views using the time-honored methods of asking

  • what does the theory predict will happen, and does it actually happen?
  • is the theory the simplest explanation of what happens?
  • what would we expect to happen if the theory was not true, and does it actually happen?
  • is there an alternative theory which better explains what happens?

There are two rival hypotheses:
1. The main reason for the USA’s unconditional support for Israel’s unique persistence in imposing apartheid is that it is in US capitalist interests
2. The main reason for this support is the power of American Jewish organizations

Chomsky defends, with contradictions, the first hypothesis. Mearsheimer and Walt defend the second.

Let’s test each theory using scientific methods. Politics is not an exact science like physics, but we can at least try.

1. The basic principle of science: does Chomsky’s hypothesis4 lead to a simpler explanation of events than Mearsheimer and Walt’s Israel Lobby theory11 ?

2. An abstract test. ‘Abstract’ does not mean ‘vague’, but is scientifically respectable. Without any concrete examples, one can test the Chomsky hypothesis as follows: it is reasonable to say that, for any two nations, they have areas where their interests coincide, and areas where they clash. The USA never acts against Israel’s interests, with some very minor exceptions. This means that, without giving any examples, we can say that America always supports Israel’s interests when their interests collide.

3. Falsification: ask what would be the case if Chomsky’s hypothesis is wrong. What would poor little Israel do if it were NOT serving US interests, if Americans ceased to corrupt it? Would it let the Palestinians back, decommission its nuclear weapons, and abandon its racial definition of citizenship?

4. Which of the arguments depends on the scientific methods outlined above, and which on vague, shifting definitions?

Chomsky makes, without argument, the assertion that if it were not for Israel’s ‘perceived geopolitical role’, a trite, content-free phrase, the Israel Lobby would ‘probably’ be unable to persuade the ‘elite’ to support Israel (page 22). So why do they bother, then? Why do Jews rant and rave in the media about ‘anti-semitic incidents’ whenever anyone in the US makes timid criticism of their country? It’s not that politicians perceive that Israel is an asset, it’s just that they know what happens to those who perceive otherwise – the Lobby makes some calls, and they lose their jobs.12 Chomsky’s theory that Israel is an ally would predict the Israel Lobby would barely exist – real allies of the US like Japan don’t have energetic, well-funded lobbies in Washington DC, ready to call on hordes of faithful followers to phone politicians and write letters to newspapers defending their nations’ interests. They don’t need them. Chomsky’s theory fails the test.

There is more to it than just rich Jewish organizations like the ADL and AIPAC. There is social pressure not to mention the Lobby. Whereas no-one accuses Chomsky of racism for claiming that Jews suffer for the interests of other Western peoples, in complete defiance of the evidence, those of us who point out that the reverse is true, with the facts on our side, are accused of anti-Semitism. If Israel were an asset, there would be no need for this manipulation of our Western European culture, which has a unique record of abandoning racism, despite what the left tells us.

The ‘Israeli Sparta’ argument put forward in the Wall Street Journal etc. by Jewish neo-conservatives posing as classical scholars can easily be disposed of. Sparta defended Greece. Israel does not defend America. On page 21, ignoring the evidence, Chomsky agrees with the pseudo-Hellenists, saying that the Israeli Defence Forces provides a backup for the US armed forces. In fact Israel has never been able to supply soldiers for any US operation in the region. In the Iraq crisis of 1990, Syria gave military support to the US, but not Israel. Israel was unable to respond even when Iraqi missiles landed on Tel Aviv, because it would have split the coalition invading Iraq. Chomsky’s argument fails the test.

Chomsky reviewed The Israel Lobby when it broke through the censors of the US liberal left.13 “Another problem that Mearsheimer and Walt do not address is the role of the energy corporations. They are hardly marginal in US political life… How can they be so impotent in the face of the Lobby?” he asks.14 Chomsky’s review of The Israel Lobby implies the oil companies CANNOT be powerless in the face of a mere lobby. But the assumptions behind Chomsky’s question don’t stand up. Mearsheimer and Walt DO address the role of these companies, explaining how, if they had their way, US policy in the Middle East would change. Leftists in America half-adopt Karl Marx’s ‘materialist conception of history’ without naming it (they say ‘corporate greed’ instead). It is one of the few aspects of Marxism which can be tested, and it fails miserably to explain the US position on the Israel/Palestine question. The interests of big corporations do not lead to invading Lebanon, persecuting Palestine, and stirring up Islamic extremism.

Why has the US consistently supported Israel, and inconsistently supported Arab nationalists? Egypt’s Nasser, Iraq’s Hussein and Syria’s al-Assad all had a pretty good record of keeping down ‘upstarts’, particularly radical Islamic ones, so why not, according to Chomsky’s logic, ally with the radical Arab nationalist states? The US has allied with various Middle Eastern states at various times, but only its support for Israel is invariant. Again, these questions constitute a test of Chomsky’s hypothesis. You try to figure out what the hypothesis would predict, then try to find counter-examples, where the actual events are incompatible with the predicted ones. It isn’t difficult, particularly in this case.

Chomsky claims that one reason America supports Israel is because it is a ‘laboratory’ for US military and surveillance technology. This is easily tested by asking if any other country would be eager to take Israel’s place.

The argument that oil is the main reason for US support for Israel is too trivial to waste time on. When America attacks a Middle Eastern country, the left chants ‘no war for oil’. If the policy causes the price of oil to drop, capitalism benefits. If the price rises, the oil companies benefit. Either way, the left trumpets the evidence. The ‘oil’ explanation cannot be falsified. It is not wrong – it is not even a valid hypothesis.

In a similar violation of scientific methodology, Chomsky tries to use the fact that the USA approves of Israeli war crimes as evidence that the dog wags the tail, that Israel serves Uncle Sam. In fact, this ‘evidence’ contributes nothing at all to our understanding of the relationship between the two states. It is equally compatible with the two opposing arguments, so it is not a test which selects which of them are true. Chomsky does give some of the same examples of American subservience as Mearsheimer and Walt in The Israel Lobby:

– US presidents mildly criticize Israel building settlements on Palestinian land
– Israeli politicians express open contempt for the supposedly most powerful man in the world, bragging of how ‘The Jewish Lobby’ (their words) will bring this uppity goy into line
– And so it comes to pass
but Chomsky doesn’t ask the obvious question: is this all

1. an elaborate charade to make it look as if the Lobby can determine US policy regarding Israel in order to cover up for white/US/capitalist hegemony, by diverting attention to the Jews, or
2. is the most elegant/economical/likely explanation that Jewish power trumps Western European interests in the USA?

By means of the Lobby, the tail wags the dog. Its the simplest, clearest, and most economical explanation of the facts. This is how science progresses. A good example of why simpler is better can be found in a recent paper on the evolution of social insects such as ants and bees.15 We should try to use the same criterion in the study of human societies.

Like everything else, the question of Jewish control of the media can be approached emotionally. I prefer the scientific approach. I approach the argument about Jewish control of the press, etc., on its merits, not on how much it reminds people of ancient Tsarist calumnies. Surely the most simple explanation of the fact that

Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in mainstream journalism and scholarship. (page 31)

is because Jews are overrepresented in mainstream journalism and scholarship, and quite a few of these Jews defend Jewish interests. This kind of statement is acceptable in Israel, whose inhabitants are mostly proud of what they call ‘the Jewish Lobby’ in America. It is acceptable in countries like Malaysia. Why is it so difficult for us?

The answer is obvious. We are afraid of being anti-Semitic. I found a solution to this problem. I stopped caring about it.

  • First published at Palestine Think Tank.
    1. US Senate Resolution. [↩]
    2. Jeff Blankfort. [↩]
    3. Jeremy Hammond. [↩] [↩]
    4. Fateful Triangle, Noam Chomsky, South End Press, 1999. [↩] [↩]
    5. “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” Noam Chomsky. [↩]
    6. The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, November 2000. [↩]
    7. Alison Weir, radio interview with Noam Chomsky. [↩]
    8. “How Washington Goaded Israel Into War,” Stephen Zunes, August 2006. [↩]
    9. Defamation – a movie about the Anti-Defamation League [↩]
    10. If Americans Knew media analyses. [↩]
    11. The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2007. [↩]
    12. They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, Paul Findlay, Lawrence Hill Books, 1989. [↩]
    13. The Atlantic magazine rejected the original ‘Israel Lobby’ paper, on the transparently false grounds of ‘poor scholarship’. When it came out as a book, the authors toured the USA to promote it, but found that local papers didn’t send reporters to cover it. The Lobby demonstrated the authors’ hypothesis by trying to suppress it. [↩]
    14. “The Israel Lobby?” Noam Chomsky, 2006. [↩]
    15. “Natural selection alone can explain eusociality,” Nowak, Tarnita and Wilson. [↩]
    Jay Knott wrote The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism. Read other articles by Jay.

    This article was posted on Saturday, September 18th, 2010 at 7:00am and is filed under Israel/Palestine, The Lobby, Zionism.

    An article of mine from 2013

    Jay KnottLeave a comment

    Originally published at Dissident Voice.

    Invention, Imagination, Race, and Nation

    by Jay Knott / October 3rd, 2013

    A Victorian bishop’s wife allegedly reacted to Darwin’s findings as follows: “My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”1

    imagined_DVIn this article, I consider three books which claim races and nations are “constructed”: Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson,2 The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand,3 and The Invention of the White Race, by Theodore Allen.4 The latter work was positively reviewed on Counterpunch.5 However, I aim to show that evolutionary approaches are better at explaining both ethnic and national identity than the methodology used by these authors.

    Benedict Anderson’s famous account of the origins of nationalism, Imagined Communities begins with an extract from a poem by Daniel Defoe:

          Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
          That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
          In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
          Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot…
          From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, …
          Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane…

    Defoe’s intention was to defend the king of England, who was Dutch, against xenophobic criticism: “we don’t belong to one race, so how can we demand that our king belongs to it?”

    More recently, John Barnes made a strong case for rejecting the concept of biological race: ‘Racism came from the idea of race, which is a man-made construct. Race is not scientific or genetic. It does not actually exist. Race came about to validate and justify colonialism and slavery.’6

    sand_DVShlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People agrees with the idea that race is a “construct” which deceives people into believing they have common interests. Sand’s specific claim is that the majority of the world’s Jews have no ancestors who lived in Palestine, and that therefore the state of Israel is based on a lie. For a few centuries after Christ, he claims, Judaism actively sought converts. He says it’s not true that Jews were thrown out of Palestine and then wandered the world for two thousand years – rather, a few who left voluntarily converted many, including the whole nation of the Khazars, located by the Crimean sea. Many of the Khazars’ descendants ended up in Europe.

    Though popular in Palestine solidarity circles, Sand accepts that his work has had no effect on Israeli nationalism nor on Jewish identity worldwide. Why is this so? If you expose a delusion, wouldn’t you expect significant numbers to abandon it, and thank you?

    whiterace_DVThe argument of Theodore Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, is another contribution to the view that racial identity is a cultural construction. He argues that white Americans weren’t originally “racist” toward black ones, but they were taught to be by their rulers, because the latter had an interest in keeping their subjects divided.

    Anderson, Sand, and Allen are all left-wing academics. In attempting to show weaknesses in their arguments, I am going to make selective use of the work of two very right-wing scholars, Frank Salter and Kevin MacDonald. This should not be seen as an endorsement of their politics.

    aborigine-boat-peopleFor example, Frank Salter, the author of Genetic Interests,7 is a white Australian who opposes immigration from the developing world into “his” country. I completely reject this opinion, agreeing instead with left-wing Australian journalist John Pilger on this question.8 Considering how white Australia was founded, it’s unethical to try to stop third world refugees settling there.

    American evolutionary historian professor Kevin MacDonald is also a right-winger. His Evolutionary Strategies of Ethnocentric Behavior9 argues that “ethnic affiliations are extraordinarily robust” and that this is because racial identity is biologically beneficial to the genes which cause it.

    But the notion that racial identity is adaptive does not imply that it is morally justifiable, any more than accepting the obvious fact that heterosexuality is more adaptive than homosexuality has any consequences whatever for one’s views on gay rights.

    To put it another way, lack of empathy with Salter’s and MacDonald’s political views is no reason at all to reject their factual assertions, which they claim are based on science.

    Salter’s demonstration that ethnic identity is adaptive,7 and MacDonald’s attempt to use evolutionary psychology to explain ethnic conflict,9 stand independently, and have to be approached like any other theory which claims to be scientific.

    And regardless of the views of MacDonald and Salter, a more fundamental influence on my perspective is the work of evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, who happens to be a leftist. His recent book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life10 provides a solid foundation for understanding the Darwinian approach to human beliefs and behavior. Genes “deceive” us into working to make copies of themselves. This is a key to working out a scientific explanation for the appeal of nationalism.

    Benedict Anderson argues that nations are “imagined communities.” But, if you claim that some national identities are completely invented, for example, Indonesian, you concede that some are less so. The fact that nations, unlike tribes, have the characteristic that most of its members will never meet each other – one of Anderson’s central motifs – doesn’t seem to me to be as important as it does to him.

    Human beings may feel strong ethnic identity with people whom they’ll never meet. For example, white Britons often feel above-average empathy with white Australians, on the other side of the world. This feeling is conceivably an extension of tribal identity, which might be explained as an adaptive trait which evolved during the Stone Age.

    Theodore Allen’s argument is the antithesis of the above speculation; an uncompromising example of class-based leftism. He believes that “whiteness” is an “ideology”. He thinks working-class Americans of European origin have often been victims of a capitalist strategy to divide the poor by making some of them feel they have “white privilege.” He tries to prove his thesis by aggregating facts which he thinks conform to it. On page 215, he claims that because there was a revolt of both African and European laborers against their employers in 1676 this is “supreme proof that the white race did not exist.” It proves nothing of the sort. The fact that the degree of white identity went up and down says nothing about whether it ever corresponded to real interests.

    Why did some poor Americans accept that they belong to “the white race” if their only interests were class interests, as Allen argues? How did the ruling class manage to persuade them they have ethnic interests too?

    In complete contrast, Kevin MacDonald tries to show that ethnic identity has a biological basis. Among other examples, he cites Pierre van den Berghe to the effect that “many ethnic groupings are remarkably stable; the Flemings and Walloons of Belgium are ‘almost exactly where their ancestors were when Julius Caesar wrote De Bello Gallico.‘”

    Frank Salter relocates this argument on scientific grounds, in his book, Genetic Interests.7

    Most readers will have no difficulty with the argument that the maternal instinct can be explained by the fact that, since large female mammals have few offspring, it is adaptive for the genes in those mammals to produce caring for each of those offspring, in preference to non-relatives.

    Yet we know that we share most of our genes – over ninety-nine percent – with all other human beings, and up to ninety-six percent with other apes.

    Salter’s theory says that what makes our genes code for preferring one individual over another is the difference in our relatedness to each of those two individuals.11

    It’s only the genes which differ between individuals which count. Of the genes which differ, those in our relatives are more likely to be copies of our own.

    This is why we are altruistic to our kin.

    Evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane worked out that it makes genetic sense to die for two or more brothers or sisters, or eight or more first cousins, but not fewer.

    But the percentage genetic advantage in choosing to be altruistic toward an individual from among millions of people somewhat related to you, over someone much more distantly related, is about the same as that in choosing to be altruistic to your relatives over individuals in those millions of somewhat related people. That is one explanation of ethnic identity.

    So what about nationalism?

    Anderson claims that nationalism arose among the creoles – upper-class colonials like Washington and Bolivar – and describes in great detail the appropriation of ancient buildings by modern nations, the rise of national languages via newspapers and novels, and so on. But this all fails to answer the question with which he begins his book – why are so many people prepared to die for “their” nation?

    “This style of imagining did not come out of thin air” he writes (page 189) but he doesn’t explain where it did come from. Anderson argues nationalism evolved in Latin America partly as a result of the way the Spanish Empire was administered. For example, a functionary from Medellin (in Colombia) was able to win promotion to Bogota (also in Colombia), but not to Caracas (in Venezuela). But why would this lead to deep feelings of identity with Colombia and not Venezuela?

    Wars between the “liberated” South American states have been among the worst in history. Why would anyone risk their life for Paraguay versus Uruguay? Saying that the poor are victims of “bourgeois ideology” when they line up outside recruiting stations merely says that some people manage to convince others that their interests coincide, when they don’t. It doesn’t say how they manage to achieve this.

    In chapter five of his book, Shlomo Sand tries to discredit Zionism and the conception of Jews as a race, by showing how it had much in common with the crude racist theories of its time, including National Socialism. Sand puts “language and culture” before “biology”, and expresses as much instinctive hostility to Darwinism as a bishop’s wife. But where do language and culture come from, if not from our genes? You can’t say cultural artifacts are produced by culture ad infinitum; at some point, you have to explain culture without reference to itself.

    Sand’s dismissal of a Darwinist approach relies heavily on selecting the worst of its mistakes from the early 20th century. But evolutionary theory, applied to human beings, has made advances subsequently. On page 266 Sand disagrees with Sandler’s claim that Jews in effect have become a “racial entity”. But strong feelings of Jewish identity exist. Will informing Western Jews they are really Khazars, and have no connection with Palestine, undermine support among many of them for the ongoing ethnic cleansing of that country?

    Isn’t it possible that, “in effect”, genes for ethnic identity which arose during the Stone Age because it was adaptive, can “deceive”10 individuals into feeling more related than they really are? And that this is the most economical explanation of the old lie “dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori”?

    Feelings of ethnic identity can be mistaken. But if there is ethnic solidarity among initially unrelated people, intramarriage will gradually make that solidarity more adaptive.

    The fact that races difficult to define and are fuzzy at the edges doesn’t make the concept “race” meaningless, as “anti-racists” often aver. Families are fuzzy too. Do your second cousins, who share two great-grandparents with you, belong to your family? It’s a question of degree.

    But one can be more precise. Just as one can calculate exactly how many cousins it is worth (from the point of view of genes) laying down one’s life for, one’s race is the set of people with whom it is adaptive for one to ethnically identify.

    Thus, in peaceful times, it might be adaptive for Walloons to distinguish themselves from Flemings. But when the Romans invaded, this may have changed.

    This approach would have explanatory power even if the whole of humankind could be arranged in a spectrum in which any two neighboring people were genetically equidistant. By this, I mean that, for any individual, copies of his genes would be as likely to survive, if he died for the person to his left, as for the person to his right. Of course, this is a thought experiment.

    When Genghis Khan’s grandsons invaded Europe, alleles in Europe’s inhabitants which coded for European identity would be more likely to cause copies of themselves than alleles which did not.

    The reader may doubt that such genes exist. Further research, if the political climate allowed, might be able to find out.

    Some leftists have had an uneasy relationship with defenders of an evolutionary approach to human nature.

    Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s autobiography describes a lifetime of facing up to left-wing hostility to Darwinism in academia.12 In chapter 14, Chagnon gives a detailed account of what he calls “Twilight in Cultural Anthropology: Postmodernism and Radical Anthropology Supplant Science”. He details unscholarly attacks on his findings, which were inconvenient for the dominant trend in anthropology, the school of Franz Boas and his followers, like Margaret Mead and Marshall Sahlins. On pages 386-387, Chagnon describes a particular low point, an organized physical attack on leading Darwinist scholar Edward Wilson. In 2000, a left-wing journalist published a book of outrageous libels against Chagnon. Though the claims of the book were ridiculous, and the American Anthropological Association’s leaders knew they were ridiculous, they nevertheless had to pretend to take them seriously, for political reasons. I witnessed this first-hand at their meeting in San Francisco.

    This is unfortunate. A realistic view of race and nation should begin with the observation that human beings are the products of evolution by means of natural selection.

    1. Alleged quotation from the Bishop of Worcester’s wife, 1860. [↩]
    2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983 (new edition 2006). [↩]
    3. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, Verso, 2010. [↩]
    4. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, volumes I and II, 1994 and 1997. [↩]
    5. Jeffrey B. Perry, review of The Invention of the White Race, Counterpunch, 2013. [↩]
    6. John Barnes, A Nation of ‘Passive Racists’, Daily Telegraph, 2012. [↩]
    7. Frank Salter, Genetic Interests, Transaction Press, 2007. [↩] [↩] [↩]
    8. John Pilger, Australia’s ‘stop the boats’ policy is cynical and lawless, The Guardian, 2013. [↩]
    9. Kevin MacDonald, Evolutionary Strategies of Ethnocentric Behavior (PDF), Rutgers University, 2002. [↩] [↩]
    10. Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books, 2011. [↩] [↩]
    11. Answer to the question ‘If I share 98% of my genes with a chimpanzee and 60% with a banana, how come I only share 50% of my genes with my own daughter?‘ [↩]
    12. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes–The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists, Simon & Schuster, 2013. [↩]
    Jay Knott wrote The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism. Read other articles by Jay.

    This article was posted on Thursday, October 3rd, 2013 at 5:32pm and is filed under Book Review, History, Philosophy, Science/Technology.

    The One-Sided View of Hate in Hate Studies

    Jay Knott5 Comments

    stencil_graffiti_palestine

    The following paper was submitted to The Journal of Hate Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, USA, on March 14, 2012. It was rejected without explanation. My paper criticizes the approach the discipline of Hate Studies had taken hitherto. It argues that Hate Studies has over-estimated the extent of white racism in the USA, and neglected Zionism as a source of hate. It backs up these criticisms with evidence, and a rigorous approach to evaluating it.

    Abstract

    The Journal of Hate Studies asks for “cutting-edge essays, theory, and research that deepens the understanding of the development and expression of hate”. The following submission for the 2012 issue of the journal (Call for Papers, Tsai, R.L., 2012) is all of the above. It argues that Zionism  generates hate, and that hate studies writers have neglected it. Further, it produces evidence that hate studies researchers have exaggerated the amount of racism in white gentile America. In the process, it examines the methodologies which have led to this miscalculation, and suggests a more balanced approach.

    I. Introduction

    In his paper Hate, Oppression, Repression, and the Apocalyptic Style, (2004), one of the founders of hate studies, Chip Berlet, defines the field as “inquiries into the human capacity to define, and then dehumanize or demonize, an ‘other,’ and the processes which inform and give expression to, or can curtail or combat, that capacity”. The current paper argues that Zionism includes examples of the above “human capacity”, but that no contributor to hate studies, until now, has noticed them.

    Noel Ignatiev’s contribution to the Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, (2007, pp. 240–244), describes the Zionist state of Israel as a “racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race”. Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (2006), shows how Israel was initiated by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their homeland, because they were not Jewish. I therefore argue that Zionism is a valid subject of hate studies.

    However, a survey of the current publications of hate studies reveals a lack of concern with Zionism, in contrast to an emphasis on anti-Semitism and white racism. I illustrate this below with citations from the major works of hate studies, analyzing examples of alleged hate incidents to suggest a more scientific approach to the evaluation of hate. I cite the recommended works which allege there is an “epidemic” of hate crimes, and the one book currently in print which directly falsifies this hypothesis, Hate Crimes – Criminal Law & Identity Politics (Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., 1998). I make use of Steven Pinker’s recent work on the decline of violence, including hate crimes, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Pinker, S., 2011), and a number of newspaper and online reports of alleged hate crimes.

    II. Inadequate attention to Zionism

    The Zionist justification for expelling Palestinians has included expressions of “the human capacity to define, and then dehumanize or demonize, an ‘other,’” (Berlet, C., 2004). When Zionist leaders  recognize the Palestinians’ existence, they sometimes refer to them as “devil’s spawn” (Rachel Abrams’ weblog; 2011). Other representative epithets include “drugged cockroaches”, “two-legged animals” and “Arab scum” (according to the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, 14 January 2002, citing The New Statesman, June 25, 1982). Some Zionists go so far as to say it would be justified to kill gentile babies “if they would grow up to harm us” – Rabbi Shapira, reported by Roi Sharon in Maariv, 2009. The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, in a book about self-deception, The Folly of Fools, the logic of deceit and self-deception in human life, (2011), in a section entitled “False Historical Narratives”, contrasts the Zionist myth with the reality:

    a racialist (and then racist) country was shoehorned into the Middle East, so that Jewish people (half and quarter also) from around the world can immediately claim citizenship to this land but none of those who were so recently expelled could do so. (p. 236).

    Nevertheless, only one of the papers for hate studies’ most recent conference mentions Zionism, and not to criticize it for racism, but to ask at what point criticism of it becomes racist – “Not every criticism of Israel and Zionism was viewed as antisemitic, but on many occasions such comment served to mask antisemitism” – Michael Whine, The Community Security Trust – Best Practice in Combating Antisemitic Hate, (2011), Journal of Hate Studies (vol. 9, p. 114).

    Kenneth Stern, a founder of the discipline of hate studies, vigorously defends Zionism against the “racism” charge. In his first pamphlet on anti-Semitism for the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Zionism, the Sophisticated Anti-Semitism, (1990), Stern wrote: “This anti-Semitic slander – that Zionism was racism – first appeared at the United Nations in the early 1960s” (p. 6). Even the Jewish Agency for Israel says, of the right of return for Jews, “It has been suggested that an immigration policy which explicitly gives priority to one ethnic or religious group cannot be justified in liberal democratic terms” (2004). But Stern has consistently argued that describing the Law of Return as racist, is itself racist (Stern 2006). In an extensive survey of the literature, I have been unable to find anything recommended by the hate studies department at Gonzaga University’s Bibliography of Hate Studies Materials (Thweatt, E., 2002), which agrees with the United Nations that Zionism as a form of racism.

    As well as the United Nations, Stern’s complaints about “anti-Semitism” are directed at rural political movements, known as “militias”, in the USA. In 1996, Stern wrote an article for USA Today entitled Militia Mania, a Growing Danger, and published a book called A Force Upon the Plain, subtitled The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate, claiming that anti-Jewish attitudes are central to these movements’ ideologies (p. 246). Concern about militias is a recurrent theme in the hate studies literature (Dees, M., 1997; Berlet, C. & Lyons, M, 2000; Thweatt, E., 2002).

    An example is Public Eye journal – “Researching the Right for Progressive Changemakers” – edited by hate studies pundit Chip Berlet. In her article for the journal, The Montana Human Rights Network, (2005), Abby Scher claims the following statement, from a leaflet produced by a militia in Montana, is an example of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory: “George Bush… cynically used the tragedy of September 11th to silence dissent and to launch the war for Israel his Zionist neocon handlers wanted.” Arguments for the claims that the neoconservative movement is overwhelming Zionist, and that it was instrumental in persuading the US government to attack Iraq in 2003, include scholarly ones such as those of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (The Israel Lobby; 2007). Deciding how much truth there is in this view is beyond the scope of the present essay – my point is simply that classifying this analysis as “anti-Semitic” may tend to discourage us from asking legitimate questions.

    III. The influence of pseudo-science

    The field of hate studies has made use of the evolutionary approach in understanding ethnic conflict, for example in publishing Harold Fishbein’s The Genetic/Evolutionary Basis of Prejudice and Hatred (2004), and James Waller’s Our Ancestral Shadow: Hate and Human Nature in Evolutionary Psychology (2004). However, less scientific ideas have also been given credit. For example Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt’s Hate Crimes, (1993), which is recommended in hate studies’ bibliography (Thweatt, E., 2002), and referenced in several papers in the field, relied on a 1950 treatise on hate and prejudice, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J., & Stanford, R.N., 1950): “Decades ago, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality recognized that prejudice satisfies a deep-rooted psychological need to protect or enhance self-esteem” (p. 48).

    In The Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno and his colleagues claimed to have found “quantifiable relations” between conservatism and anti-Semitism via the “Politico-Economic Conservatism” scale, the “Ethnocentrism” scale and the “Anti-Semitism” scale (p. 49).

    person-a-and-her-beliefs

    The above diagram illustrates the general principle. If person A believes P and Q, and person B believes P, the likelihood that person B also believes Q is greater than the occurrence of belief Q in the general population. This is as true of any one class of beliefs as of any other. Yet the Frankfurt School believed it could derive “the determination of the potential fascist in childhood” (Adorno et al. 1950, p. 56) from this statistical banality.

    The authors claimed that a German who joined the Nazis “can apparently never quite establish his personal and masculine identity; he thus has to look for it in a collective system where there is opportunity both for submission to the powerful and for retaliation against the powerless” (page 370); they did not apply this psychological explanation to Communist Party recruits of the same period.

    The Frankfurt School’s approach still has influence. As a contemporary example of the use of psychoanalysis to reinforce political, and possibly racial, bias, consider Naomi Klein’s recent article about climate change for The Nation, Capitalism vs. the Climate (2011). She argued that “conservative white men” tend to disbelieve the theory of unprecedented anthropogenic global warming “because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview”.

    Though work such as The Authoritarian Personality is taken seriously by some contributors, hate studies has also made some use of a truly scientific approach, such as the papers by Harold Fishbein and James Waller in The Journal of Hate Studies, (2004), which rely on evolutionary psychology. But no contributor so far has referenced Professor Kevin MacDonald, whose Separation and its Discontents – toward an evolutionary theory of anti-Semitism, (2004) locates the genesis of anti-Semitism in genetic interests:

    An evolutionary perspective is also highly compatible with the falsity and contradictory nature of many anti-Semitic beliefs. Evolution is only concerned with ensuring accuracy of beliefs and attitudes when the truth is in the interests of those having those beliefs and attitudes. (pp. 18-19).

    Steven Jacobs may be right to say, in The Last Uncomfortable “Religious Question”? in The Journal of Hate Studies, (2008), that MacDonald’s work has “been almost universally condemned”, but, since science is not a democracy, this is hardly relevant to a scholarly evaluation of his work.

    IV. An unscientific approach to hate crime claims

    At the hate studies founding conference, in his paper Hate, Oppression, Repression, and the Apocalyptic Style, (2004), Chip Berlet claimed there was “chronic underreporting” of hate crimes. There is evidence for this hypothesis. As The Leadership Conference states in the introduction to its Confronting the New Faces of Hate: Hate Crimes in America, (2009), some victims fail to report hate crimes. For example, illegal immigrants are concerned about deportation. People of color may not trust the police. Lesbian and gay victims may not want to “come out” to family members and co-workers by publicizing a homophobic hate crime.

    But the scientific approach looks for refutation as well as confirmation. There is also over-reporting of hate crimes, which, if uncritically accepted, exaggerates the amount of hate in our society. I identify five variants of this phenomenon, and give examples below:

    1. protected speech is sometimes listed with violent crimes under the broad label “hate incidents”;

    2. the degree of hate involved in some actual crimes is exaggerated;

    3. there are claims of hate crimes which didn’t happen;

    4. there are “hate crimes” committed by the alleged victims themselves;

    5. there are unsubstantiated assertions that hate crimes are on the increase.

    As an illustration of type 1. above, consider Oregon’s Coalition Against Hate Crimes. This organization claims, on its website, to support the United Nations “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, which declares that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression”. But the Coalition contradicts itself immediately; its list of “hate incidents” equates real crimes like the murder of an Ethiopian immigrant, with a talk by a “holocaust denier” (2010). In Hate Crimes (chapter 4; 1998), James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter found that the term “hate incidents” has been used by a number of organizations interchangeably with “hate crimes” to exaggerate the incidence of the latter.

    Hate crimes happen. For example, in Texas in 1998, African-American James Byrd was dragged behind a truck by three white men, motivated by racial hatred, until his head came off.

    Other notorious cases, such as the murder of Ethiopian Mulugeta Seraw by neo-Nazi skinheads in Portland, Oregon in 1988, and of gay student Matthew Shepard in Wyoming in 1998, were not quite what subsequent political campaigns made of them. According to Elinor Langer’s book, A Hundred Little Hitlers, (2003), the Seraw case was not a premeditated lynching. Had the skinheads murdered Seraw in Florida rather than Oregon, it would not have been a hate crime: the Florida Supreme Court explicitly excluded from that category “arguments over a parking space, which escalate into fist fights accompanied by racial or other slurs” – which is exactly what the Portland case was, except a baseball bat was used (Hate Crimes, Jacobs, J.B., & Potter, K., 1998; p. 32). An investigation by Elizabeth Vargas for the ABC News program “20/20” on December 3, 2004, described by Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times, found the assumption that the murder of Matthew Shepard was homophobic to be unsubstantiated.

    Another illustration of type 2., exaggerating the amount of hate in real crimes, is the 1996 panic about “black churches” being set on fire. President Clinton said “racial hostility” was behind the crimes. But according to statistical analysis in an article about the scare by Michael Fumento in Commentary magazine, (1996), confirmed in Hate Crimes (Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., chapter 4; 1998),

    1. the number of torched churches nationally was below average,

    2. the ethnicity of the buildings had no effect on their risk of arson, and

    3. there was no inverse correlation between convicted arsonists’ race and that of the churchgoers.

    Type 2 is also illustrated by the one alleged anti-Semitic lynching in US history, which occurred in Georgia in 1915. It resulted in a boost in membership for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which had been founded two years earlier. The victim, Leo Frank, had been convicted of child-murder, but his death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment; a mob abducted him from prison and hanged him from a tree. His conviction allowed the other suspect, who was black, to walk. The Anti-Defamation League’s evidence for the theory that it was an anti-Semitic lynching, in its People v. Leo Frank Teacher’s Guide, (2009), such as shouts of “Hang the Jew” from the mob, is necessary, but insufficient, to prove it. If a convicted child-killer who was not Jewish would also have been murdered, anti-Semitism had no part to play.

    The Anti-Defamation League is consulted by the federal Departments of Education and Justice, the California Probation, Parole and Correctional Association, and other government bodies, according to Hate Crimes (Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., chapter 4; 1998). An example can be found on the Department of Justice’s web page about the Sacramento “Hate Crimes Task Force” (2010). Some years ago, the ADL was found by the San Francisco DA to have spied illegally on dozens of people and organizations, fed information about South African dissidents to the apartheid regime, and committed numerous other violations of trust (Blankfort, J., 2002).

    A comprehensive survey of examples of type 3. above, completely invented hate crimes, would be beyond the scope of this paper. A small sample can be found in the appendix, Hate Crime Hoaxes, along with some examples of type 4., fake hate crimes committed by pseudo-victims.

    Type 4. was discussed by Gabriel Winant in an article for Salon.com, Fake hate crimes: not just for liberals anymore, (2008). She argued that the majority of fake hate crimes consist of minority persons manipulating sympathy for personal and political gain. She suggests this is why there is an epidemic on college campuses – in this milieu, a fake hate crime victim may find sympathy even after her hoax is exposed. In San Diego, a program was announced to “address diversity issues” after a “minority student” admitted hanging up a noose and a white hood in the library at the University of California in February 2010, an example of type 4. The program, entitled Racism – Not In Our Community, includes statements like “hurtful incidents” and “ensuring diversity”. The hypothesis that racism is a problem was so strongly entrenched that evidence known to be fabricated was used to attempt to confirm it (University of California at San Diego, 2010).

    Some hate studies research falls into type 5. above, the allegation that hate crimes are increasing. Mari Matsuda wrote that “a marked rise of racial harassment, hate speech, and racially-motivated violence marks the beginning of the 1990’s” in Words That Wound (1993; page 44). Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt’s Hate Crimes complained of “a rising tide of bigotry and bloodshed” at that time (1993; p. xi). Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, wrote a book entitled Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat, in 1997. Kenneth Stern’s article Militia Mania, a Growing Danger, (1996), claimed that local officials in rural America were being intimidated by right-wing terrorists – “According to the Rural Organizing Committee, elected officials on the local level have been forced by armed militia members who pack their meetings to enact ordinances they know are illegal, under threat of death”. The National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence alleges there is an epidemic of “ethnoviolence” in higher education facilities, but its definition of the term includes any “perceived expression of insensitivity”, including denial of tenure to an Asian-American academic, and a piece critical of affirmative action in a campus newsletter (Hate Crimes, Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., 1998; p. 49).

    In fact, the incidence of hate crimes in the USA declined during the 1990s, continuing a century-long trend. Steven Pinker’s history of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, (2011; p. 385) used a chart from James Payne’s A history of force, (2004), which shows how racist lynchings declined steadily from 150 per annum in the 1880s to close to zero by the end of the 1960s. Another graph in his book covers racist murders, 1996-2008 (p. 386), using statistics from the FBI. Most of these murders were of African-Americans. The chart shows a decline from five victims per annum in 1996, to one in 2008. One is less than 0.006 percent of the total number of murders in the country per annum, approximately 17,000. James B. Jacobs and Kimberly Potter, in Hate Crimes – Criminal Law & Identity Politics, (chapter 4, Social Construction of a Hate Crime Epidemic; 1998) also studied the evidence, and analyzed the politics, of the “rising tide” hypothesis:

    This chapter explains how the hate crime epidemic has been socially constructed. We identify the leading proponents of the epidemic claim – advocacy groups, the media, politicians, and academic commentators – and show that this claim lacks any empirical basis. (p. 46).

    The alarmist claims of Levin, McDevitt, Stern, Matsuda, et. al. (Levin, J. & McDevitt, J., 1993; Stern, K., 1996; Matsuda, M., et. al., 1993), cannot survive the gauntlet of attempted falsification by scientific methods. Examining why they are part of the hate studies canon is beyond the scope of the current paper, but I intend to return to that question in further research.

    An opportunity to subject the beliefs of some hate studies writers to scientific scrutiny occurred at Duke University in North Carolina in 2006. When a black woman accused three white students of rape, the DA said it was a “hate crime”. Stuart Taylor Jr. and K.C. Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent: political correctness and the shameful injustices of the Duke lacrosse rape case, (2007), explains the political assumptions behind the credulity which greeted the woman’s claim. As the article Duke’s Reign of Terror by local journalist Arch T. Allen, in Metro magazine, (2007), explains, with few exceptions, the local and national media were biased against the accused. The rush to judgement of some of the faculty, students and outside activists, based on nothing more than the accused students’ sex, race, and alleged class, is a valid subject of hate studies research.

    Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith, in African American Families, (2007), said the case was about how “the class and race dynamics of the individuals involved (affluent white men and a low-income African American woman) shaped this incident differently from how it would have been shaped had they been absent”. The case does reinforce that view, but in the opposite direction to the one these theorists believe. Instead of doing empirical research into the difference between how the Duke three, and black students accused of similar crimes, were treated, they assumed that “members of the team are almost perfect offenders in the sense that Kimberlé Crenshaw writes about – the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus”. Inspired by these words, and similar analyses (Matsuda et. al. 1993; Fish, S., 1994; Crenshaw et. al. 1996; Berlet C., & Lyons, M., 2000), eighty-eight academics signed a statement implying the students’ guilt by saying something “happened to this young woman”, but carefully avoiding saying what it was. The document in which they made this allegation subsequently disappeared, without explanation, from the African and African-American Studies website.

    After the students’ lawyers uncovered the truth, the DA was dismissed, and his replacement said the students were “innocent”, rather than just “not guilty”, their academic accusers had an opportunity to reflect on the flaws in their methodology which led to their mistake. Instead, after the case, “I am less interested in trafficking through declarations of guilt and innocence in the case”, wrote one of the eighty-eight professors who had “trafficked” in the declaration of guilt (Taylor & Johnson, 2007).

    I argue that hate studies should insist that a theory’s claims are subject to testing and reevaluation, and changing its predictions when they are falsified ought not to be acceptable.

    V. Conclusion: a consistent and rigorous approach to understanding hate

    “Whenever an ideology justifies baby-killing – even at the fringes of the fringes – that is an especially strong danger signal” – Kenneth Stern, A Force Upon the Plain. (1996, p. 249).

    “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us” – “The complete guide to killing non-Jews” – Yitzhak Shapira and Yossi Elitzur, rabbis in the Od Yosef Hai yeshiva, Yitzhar, near Nablus, reported by Roi Sharon in Maariv (2009).

    The influence of Zionism extends beyond Israel. Consider Rachel Abrams, who is married to Elliot Abrams, an influential advisor to the US government, who served under presidents George Bush Senior and Ronald Reagan, describing, in her weblog, the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from captivity by Hamas in October 2011:

    Celebrate, Israel, with all the joyous gratitude that fills your hearts, as we all do along with you. Then round up his captors, the slaughtering, death-worshipping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women — those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others — and their offspring — those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god — as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose. (2011).

    Hate studies would be enriched by studying how the influence of Zionism can produce this kind of hate. It would have more credibility if claims of the prevalence of white racism were evaluated more scientifically. It would also benefit by examining examples of hoaxes by which resentful members of minorities, encouraged by academic exaggerations of the extent of white privilege, contributed to a positive feedback loop, which appeared to confirm the hypothesis that the USA is suffering from a rising tide of bigotry and hate.

    Appendix – Hate Crime Hoaxes

    Associated Press (1998, November 22). Conviction in Phony Hate Mail Case. Sunday Star-News. NC: Wilmington.

    Associated Press. (2004, April 20). Colleges perfect milieu for hate crime hoaxes. San Diego Union Tribune. Retrieved  2012, January 29. http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20040420-0247-ca-hatecrimehoaxes.html

    Bensen, Jackie. (2010). Jewish student caught painting swastikas on her own door then claiming anti-Semitic attack. NBC News4. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLt5U7VcHw8

    Boyd, C. (2001, June 12). Woman Who Claimed to be Victim of Hate Crime Accused of Stealing Van. MN: St. Paul Pioneer Press.

    Delgado, R. (1999, May 8). Man Admits Inventing Racist Assault in San Francisco. San Francisco Examiner.

    Eskenazi, J. (2004, May 21). Arson at Chabad House. Jewish Weekly. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/22706/arson-at-chabad-house

    Kansas City Star. (2001, December 12). Linda Man, Woman Pleads Guilty to Harassing Other Black School Bus Drivers.

    Leinwand, D. & Alexander, A. (1993, December 30). Swastika scrawling thieves staged insurance scam, police allege. Highbeam Business News. Retrieved March 12, 2012. http://business.highbeam.com/4331/article-1G1-14690014/crime-swastikascrawling-thieves-staged-insurance-scam

    Perez, M. (2003, November 20). Fake hate crimes not new: colleges experience recent rash of bogus hate incidents. Golden Gate Express.  Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/news/000424.html

    Register-Guard. (2003, May 27). Coast Guardsman Admits False Report of Racism. OR: Eugene.

    WBAL. (2008, October 7). Police ID 3 Charged in Synagogue Vandalism. WBAL TV. MD: Baltimore. http://www.wbaltv.com/news/17646190/detail.html

    References

    Abrams, Rachel. (2011). Rachel Abram’s webblog. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://badrachel.blogspot.com/2011/10/gilad.html

    Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J., and Stanford, R.N., (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Brothers.

    Allen, Arch T. (2007). Duke’s Reign of Terror. Metro magazine, Raleigh, NC, 2007, November. Retrieved  2012, January 29. http://www.metronc.com/article/?id=1448

    Anti-Defamation League. (2009). People v. Leo Frank Teacher’s Guide. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.adl.org/leofrank/The-People-v-Leo-Frank-Teachers-Guide_ADL.pdf

    Berlet, C. & Lyons, M. (2000). Right-wing populism in America: too close for comfort. New York: Guilford Press, 2000

    Berlet, C. (2004, March). Hate, Oppression, Repression, and the Apocalyptic Style. Chip Berlet. Paper presented at the Conference to Establish the Field of Hate Studies. Journal of Hate Studies, 3. WA: Spokane.

    Blankfort, J., Poirier, A. & Zeltzer, S. (2002, February 25). The ADL Spying Case Is Over, But The Struggle Continues. Counterpunch. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/02/25/the-adl-spying-case-is-over-but-the-struggle-continues

    Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies. (2002, January 14). Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and all Forms of Discrimination, citing The New Statesman, London. (1982, June 25). Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/0/d96d50d790ad4a47c1256b760047dac7

    Crenshaw, K., (Author), Gotanda, N. (Author), Peller, G. (Author), Thomas, K. (Editor) (1996). Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. New York: The New Press.

    Dees, M. (1997). Gathering Storm: America’s Militia Threat. New York: Harper Perennial

    Department of Justice. (2010). Hate Crimes Task Force. Retrieved 2012, January 29. http://www.justice.gov/usao/cae/hate_crimes/index.html

    Fish. S. (1994). There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too. Oxford University Press.

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    Anti-racism or Palestine Solidarity?

    Jay KnottLeave a comment
    8million
    This billboard helps the Palestinian cause – Detroit

    The Western countries encouraged South Africa to abandon apartheid, but their unquestioning support for Israel ensures the continuation of this crime against humanity. Might it have happened the other way round? Could the USA and its allies have decided to pressurize the Jewish state into granting the right of return to the Palestinians, while supporting a nuclear-armed white apartheid state in southern Africa?

    If it had happened the other way round, there would be non-stop wailing that Western Europeans once again abandoned the Jews, while continuing to defend their racist cousins. But it didn’t. This is not a coincidence. The political atmosphere encouraged the West to abandon white power, and reinforce Jewish power. This is something the current anti-racist approach has difficulty comprehending.

    Palestine solidarity in Western countries has tended to assume that, since Zionism is a form of racism, it can be defeated in the same way apartheid in Africa and segregation in America were defeated. Like the anti-apartheid movement, Palestine solidarity has been dominated by the left. Unlike the anti-apartheid movement, it has been unsuccessful.

    Not everyone is a liberal. Rather than pointing out that Israel is “Islamophobic”, it might be more effective to raise the wider truth that Zionism ethnically cleansed the Palestinians because they are not Jews, not because many of them are Muslims. Lauren Booth’s phrase “we are all Palestinians” is a teeny bit exaggerated (Booth, L.; 2012). But it is true that Jewish supremacy is harmful to most of us, over 95% of the inhabitants of the Western world, rich and poor. Exposing Israeli anti-gentilism and Christophobia might be more persuasive to most of this population than the left-wing anti-racist argument that Zionism is an offshoot of their own racist, imperialist, Western attitudes.

    The post-world war two academic left-wing consensus includes

    • the Franz Boas school of anthropology, which lied about the peaceful nature of hunter-gatherer life in contrast to European civilization
    • scientists Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and others, who slandered academic rivals, who tried to apply the Darwinian approach to human beings, as “racists”
    • the “critical race theorists”, who excoriate and exaggerate white ethnocentrism, but give Zionism a pass

    For example, Mari Matsuda, in Words That Wound, (1993; p. 40), says: “I reject the sweeping charge that Zionism is racism”, and goes on to claim that Jews can only be racist if they identify themselves as white. Stanley Fish agrees with former president George Bush senior, that to equate Zionism with racism is to twist history, which tells us that Jews have always been persecuted (1994; p. 60).

    Not all of these theorists are self-identified Jews, but many, if not most, are. They say things like

    it’s hard to see racism when you’re white”

    while denying that “race” is a meaningful concept, and relying on the taboo against mentioning their Jewishness. In their introduction to Alas, Poor Darwin, Steven and Hilary Rose approve of Boas’s 1950 claim that “the concept of race is not science but pseudo-science” (Rose & Rose; 2000). Richard Lewontin concurs, on the grounds that there is approximately seven times as much genetic diversity within human populations as there is between them (cited in Frank Salter, Genetic Interests, 2007; p. 92).

    But, regardless, it is in every one of your genes’ interests to influence you to favour individuals with copies of itself over those without. Of the genes you don’t share with the whole of humanity, there are, on average, more copies of those genes in individuals whose ancestors lived in the same area as yours than there are in people whose ancestors have not.

    Frank Salter explains that, if everyone in the world were cousins, altruism would not be adaptive at all. It’s the difference between our relatedness to each of two individuals which makes us prefer one over the other. Of the genes which differ between individuals, those in our parents, children, and siblings, are more likely to be copies of our own. This is why we are altruistic to our relatives. Evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane worked out that it makes genetic sense to die for two or more brothers or sisters, or eight or more cousins, but not fewer (cited in Connolly, K., and Martlew, M., 1999; p. 10).

    But what about choosing to help someone from the local population, rather than another person taken at random from the world population? The percentage increase in selective advantage is just as great as that in choosing your relatives over random individuals in the local population. I am inclined to spoil my granddaughter rather than nearby children who look similar to her. My genes also code for favouring those nearby children over children from far away who look different to them. But we’re taught that the first of these indulgences is a grandparent’s privilege, whereas the second is a symptom of white privilege.

    A rough measure of the explanatory power of a theory about society is how infrequently it uses the word “ideology”. Racial identity isn’t ideology. It is the result of the workings of natural selection. Perhaps even ethnic hostility is genetic. There is evidence of inter-tribal massacres during the Stone Age (Keeley, L.; 1996). Given its adaptive character, it would be surprising if genes failed to code for ethnic identity; it is no great leap of faith to suggest that xenophobia may have a biological basis too.

    Given the genetic basis of race, what needs explaining, is not white identity, but its relative absence. Yet we are supposed to believe that this identity is strongly entrenched, uniquely malevolent, and invariably xenophobic.

    Some readers will think, mistakenly, I’m advocating white self-awareness to counter Zionist influence. But that misreading only illustrates my point; we are always on the lookout for “racism”.

    It could be wrong – that’s the nature of scientific theories – but the evolutionary approach at least helps us steer clear of anti-white attitudes. It also avoids hatred toward Zionists; we can understand why Jewish xenophobia exists – because it works. Whether or not the Jewish people were “invented”, any group which intramarries, homogenizes. Ethnic cleansing can be adaptive too. There might be payback, but genes have no foresight. Throwing away our Rose- (and Gould-) coloured glasses, enables us to understand Zionism, rather than moralizing about it, which can be dangerous; it might lead you to try to blackmail the driver of an Israeli bulldozer, by standing in front of it.

    In the co-op movement on the American west coast, crypto-Zionists undermined the campaign to boycott Israeli goods by slandering Palestine solidarity activists as “racists”, who needed to “unlearn oppression”. Similar things happen in universities. White guilt has also begun to influence the workings of mainstream society. Minnesota is having a campaign against white privilege, featuring highway billboards of a blonde, blue-eyed girl with anti-racist messages written all over her face (Unfair Campaign, 2012), and a sermon by Jewish critical race theorist Tim Wise.

    Palestine solidarity in Australasia, North America and Western Europe would be more effective it it

    • emphasized the differences between Jewish and gentile interests
    • proclaimed the virtues of Western tolerance in contrast to Israel
    • exposed covert Jewish ethnocentrism, and
    • unceremoniously junked Jewish-dominated left-wing anti-racist pseudo-science
    anotherwhiteskinfairskinposter
    This billboard doesn’t help the Palestinian cause – Duluth

    References

    • Booth, L., 2012. We are all Palestinians now. Lauren Booth, January 12, 2012.
    • Fish, S., 1994. There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too. Oxford.
    • Keeley, L., 1996. War Before Civilization – the myth of the peaceful savage. Oxford
    • Haldane, J.B.S., cited in Connolly, K. and Martlew, M., 1999. A Book of Quotations. BPS Books
    • Matsuda, M., 1993. Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Mari Matsuda et. al.. Westview Press.
    • Rose, S., & Rose, H., 2000. Alas, Poor Darwin. Steven and Hilary Rose. Harmony publishers.
    • Salter, F., 2007. Genetic Interests, Frank Salter. Transaction publishers.
    • Unfair Campaign, 2012.