[The first short piece reproduced here appeared in the Winnipeg Jewish Review (23 November 2010),

http://www.winnipegjewishreview.com/article_detail.cfm?id=558&sec=4. The two footnotes in the present

version have been added to the text. The first of these provides information about the Ottawa conference, hosted
by the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA), at which the article by Catherine
Chatterley to which I objected was first presented, and about my participation in the press conference held at
the same time on Parliament Hill by Independent Jewish Voices to protest against that conference.
In August 2010, my book Antisemitism Real and Imagined, which assembled an array of texts by human
rights activists and human rights organizations as well as my own contributions, had been praised by Gerald
Caplan in the Globe and Mail as important, timely, and indispensable. It is perhaps not surprising that
Chatterley's article attempted to smear me as exemplifying what she called Antisemitism Denial (a concept
that chimes obliquely with Holocaust Denial).
Together with my response, the WJR printed a rejoinder by Chatterley that contained another much
nastier oblique smear. But the WJR's response to a letter from Professor Joanne Naiman reproaching Chatterley
for the tone and content of her second textit printed two absurd letters from hardcore Zionists in Canada and
Israel, together with a shrill editorialdissuaded me from wasting any further time in attempting to reason with
such people.
In August 2014, however, the exposure by the American website Common Dreams of hasbara smear
tactics reminiscent of Chatterley's behaviour prompted me to write a sequel analyzing her reply to me. This text,
the second one provided here, has not previously been published.]

[Index: antisemitism, Israel, Palestine, Iran]

[Date: November 2010, August 2014]

A Double Bouquet for Catherine Chatterley

Michael Keefer

1. Right of Reply: A Response to Catherine Chatterley (2010)

I applaud Dr. Catherine Chatterleys statement (in her November 15, 2010 article
on Campus Antisemitism) that debates over subjects like antisemitism, Israel, and
Palestine must be self-reflexive, reasoned, and accurate, and that we need to avoid ad
hominem attacks, so as to encourage intelligent discussion and debate that employs
meaningful, ethical, and accurate languagethe italics are Dr. Chatterleysto
describe what are truly difficult, complex, and contested histories.1
1 Catherine Chatterley, Campus Antisemitism: Combating Israel Apartheid Week on Campus

But Dr. Chatterley abandons her own standards of ethics and accuracy when she
refers to me as exemplifying what she calls Antisemitism Denial. It is not unduly
sensitive to hear in these words a deliberate echo of Holocaust Denialand therefore a
vicious ad hominem attack. Dr. Chatterleys claim that I have gone on the assault against
antisemitism as a contemporary problem, arguing that there is no such thing and
comparing this so-called phantom to the real antisemitism of the past, goes beyond
mere inaccuracy: it is a flagrant falsehood.
In addition to my work in other fields, I am the editor and part-author of
Antisemitism Real and Imagined: Responses to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to
Combat Antisemitism (Waterloo: The Canadian Charger, 2010). This book includes texts
by eleven Canadian scholars and human rights activists (a majority of whom, as it
happens, are Jewish), and by the leaders of seven human rights organizations. Far from
minimizing the reality of contemporary antisemitism, these texts recurrently express
concern that uncritical support for the state of Israels systematic violations of Palestinian
human rights could feed a renewal of antisemitic prejudice and hatred in this country.
My own contributions, which make up just over half of the book, include an
extended analysis of the statistical evidence relating to antisemitic incidents and hate
crimes. My study of UK government figures, Statistics Canada data, the annual incidentreport tallies published by the Community Security Trust (CST) in Britain, and Bnai
Brith Canadas annual audits of antisemitic incidents, led me to conclude that the
CPCCAs claims of an alarming resurgence of antisemitism in Canada are untrue, and
Bnai Briths figures seriously inflated.2 But after noting that police statistics show a
Thoughtful Engagement Required, Winnipeg Jewish Review (15 November 2010),
http://www.winnipegjewishreview.com/article_detail.cfm?
id=518&sec=1&title=_CAMPUS_ANTISEMITISM:_COMBATING_ISRAEL_APARTHEID_WEEK_
ON_CAMPUS_-_THOUGHTFUL_ENGAGEMENT_REQUIRED. That article offers the text of a
paper Dr. Chatterley delivered at the Ottawa conference of the Interparliamentary Coalition for
Combating Antisemitism (ICCA), November 7-9, 2010, an event hosted by the Canadian Parliamentary
Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA). I was in Ottawa at the same time, and as I said in my
Statement at the Independent Jewish Voices Press Conference on Parliament Hill (8 November 2010):
The conference is being held under false pretences because the CPCCA and the ICCA are not so much
concerned with real and actual antisemitism as they are with extending the definition of antisemitism to
encompass any systematic criticism of the state of Israel's systematic violations of international law in
its oppressive occupation and colonization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. [....] [T]he CPCCA is
attempting to create a climate of opinion in which Canadian defenders of Palestinian human rights and
exponents of the universal principles of international law can be smeared as antisemites and
disseminators of hatred. For an account of the origins of the ICCA and CPCCA, see my Introduction to
Antisemitism Real and Imagined: Responses to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition for Combatting
Antisemitism (Waterloo: The Canadian Charger, 2010), pp. 12-18.
2 See Michael Keefer, ed., Antisemitism Real and Imagined, pp. 165-77, 185-205. Prior to the publication
of this book, suspicions that B'nai Brith Canada's annual tallies of antisemitic incidents are significantly

declining trend in hate crimes, I wrote that I am not suggesting that we should find
anything very reassuring about the data analyzed in this chapter: Jews are indeed being
disproportionately targeted by hatemongers.3
Readers of my contributions to the book will find many further examples of a
lively concern over real present-day antisemitismtogether with a strong critique of the
deceptions practiced by those who imagine that they can get away with smearing
advocates of international human rights law by labelling their criticisms of Israeli policies
as instances of a new antisemitism.
As for Dr. Chatterley: If she genuinely wishes to earn a reputation for responsible,
accurate, and ethical scholarship, she will have to begin by making some effort to live up
to her own ideals.
Michael Keefer
Professor, School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph

2. Dr. Chatterley's Scurrilous Sequel (2014)

A reply by Catherine Chatterley which appeared in the same November 23, 2010
issue of the Winnipeg Jewish Review made it clear that the scurrilous overtones of her
first reference to me were not accidentaland that her commitment to the ethics of
scholarly discussion is, as one might already have suspected, a pious fraud.
Dr. Chatterley began by quoting, to no obvious effect, from comments I had made
about my book Antisemitism Real and Imagined in an interview with Mordecai
inflated had been voiced by Gerald Caplan in the Globe and Mail and by Jonathan Kay in the National
Post. Their suspicions are understandable, given such statements by B'nai Brith as that the eighteen-fold
increase in the number of antisemitic incidents recorded since the organization first began to tally them
in 1982 reflects a corresponding worsening of antisemitic hatred in Canada (rather than, for example, a
substantially increased effort devoted to tracking such incidents). My conclusion that B'nai Brith's
figures are inflated arose primarily out of comparative study of the parallel tallies of antisemitic
incidents kept since the early 1980s by the Community Security Trust (CST) in the UK.
3 Ibid., p. 191.

Briemberg on the Redeye program of Vancouver Public Radio,4 in one of my public

lectures during a book tour across western Canada in September-October 2010, 5 and in an
interview with Jack Etkin on a community television program in Victoria, BC. 6 In your
public discussions about this book, she wrote,
you make a distinction between what you view as real
antisemitism and the new antisemitism, which you call a
rhetorical shell game and rhetorical trickery. You say that real
antisemitism is a toxic prejudice, now largely on the wane in
Canada, and that the new antisemitism is not new and it's not
antisemitism but it makes use of this history of suffering, this
history of martyrdom, in a way that is at the service of
unacceptable political positions. You argue that in 1973, when
real antisemitism was in rapid decline ... leading figures in the
Anti-Defamation League [tried to] redefine antisemitism to
incorporate criticism of the State of Israel, and to use that as a
way for providing public support ... to hold on to the conquered
territories, the occupied [Palestinian] territories.7
The point of this unfocused sequence of quotations may seem opaque: the matters
alluded to are all exhaustively documented in the final three chapters of Antisemitism
Real and Imagined. The only distortion appears in the last sentence, which alludes not to
any argument originated by me, but rather (as anyone doing scholarship in the field
should know) to my repetition of plain facts that had been laid out five years previously
by Norman G. Finkelstein in his book Beyond Chutzpah,8 and that have remained
4 Interview with Mordecai Briemberg, Antisemitism: Real and Imagined, Redeye (Vancouver
Community Radio), 14 September 2010. posted at Rabble.ca,
http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/redeye/2010/09/antisemitism-real-and-imagined.
5 Public lecture at the Nanaimo Harbourfront Library, 25 September 2010,
http://www.pasifik.ca/2010/09; Chatterley's link is to a reproduction of this video at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5g4xQdnqLk.
6 Interview with Jack Etkin, Face to Face with Jack Etkin: #46. Professor Michael Keefer: Criticize
IsraelGo To Jail? ICTV Victoria, 7 October 2010, http://www.vimeo.com.15655804. Chatterley
provided a link to the reproduction of this interview at Wide Eye Cinema, http://wideeyecinema/?
p=9534, where it is followed by three comments. The first two, posted on October 24 and November 1,
2010, are discussed below. The third comment, posted much later, in September 2011, is likewise
antisemitic, but in a tone of arrogant pseudo-erudition rather than of neo-Nazi ranting.
7 Dr. Chatterley's Response to Professor Keefer's Right of Reply, Winnipeg Jewish Review (25
November 2010), http://www.winnipegjewishreview.com/article_detail.cfm?id=558&sec=4.
8 Norman G. Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 21-27. Finkelstein devotes the entire first part of
this book (pp. 21-85) to an incisive demolition of the ideology of the new antisemitism. My own

unchallenged since then.

However, Dr. Chatterley's purpose became clear when, having provided links to
the lecture and the interviews from which she quoted, she wrote (in italics) that The two
public comments below your discussion on the last site clearly illustrate the consistencies
between old and new, or classic and contemporary, antisemitism.
Following the link that Dr. Chatterley gave, which takes the reader, not to the
original online posting of the television interview I did with Jack Etkin of ICTV Victoria
in early October 2010, but rather to an unauthorized reproduction of it at Wide Eye
Cinema,9 one discovers that the first two comments on my interview which appear at this
internet site are vehemently antisemiticindeed, neo-Naziin tone. These semi-literate
rants, posted on October 24 and November 1, 2010, by 'paschn' and 'Annie Ladysmith'
respectively, attribute the murder of tens of millions (in the second comment, 60
millions of white Christains [sic], plus a further 10 millions of the same in the Ukraine,
hung up to trees after torture) to the Jew treachery of the Bolshevik Revolution. In
the words of 'Annie Ladysmith', capitalized by herself for emphasis, this was
HOLOCAUST BY THE JEWS.10 There's none of the sophistication here that
Chatterley and other Zionist ideologuesamong them, Prime Minister Stephen Harper 11
have ascribed to the so-called new antisemitism. As the commenters' linking of Jews
and Bolsheviks makes plain, this is old or classic antisemitism of the Joseph
Goebbels variety.12

9
10
11

12

critique of this ideology (which includes detailed citations of Finkelstein's work) can be found in the
final two chapters of Antisemitism Real and Imagined (pp. 165-259).
See note 6 above.
Wide Eye Cinema, http://wideeyecinema/?p=9534.
In his address to the Israeli Knesset on January 20, 2014, Prime Minister Harper proposed that serious
criticism of the policies and structures of governance of the state of Israel must be understood as
impelled by a mutation of the old disease of anti-Semitism and the emergence of a new strain, a
translation into more sophisticated language for use in polite society of the old hatred that led to
the horrors of the [Nazi] death camps. See Read the full text of Harper's historic speech to Israel's
Knesset, Globe and Mail (20 January 2014), http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/read-thefull-text-of-harpers-historic-speech-to-israels-knesset/article16406371/?page=1.
The reference in these comments to supposed genocidal atrocities committed in Ukraine and blamed on
Jews might suggest some connection to the organized and institutionally supported antisemitism now
widely disseminated in Ukraine: see Per Anders Rudling, Organized Anti-Semitism in Contemporary
Ukraine: Structure, Influence and Ideology, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes
48.102 (March-June 2006): 81-119; available online at
http://www.academic.edu/380652/_Organized_Anti_Semitism_in_Contemporary_Ukraine_Structure_In
fluence_and_Ideology_Canadian_Slavonic_Papers-Revue-candienne_des_slavistes_XLVIII_12_March_June_2006_81-119. The accusation, together with the Jew/Bolshevik motif, of hallucinatory
numbers of Ukrainians hung up to trees after torture, is a marker of the historical layering of
antisemitic hatred: in many medieval and more recent Christian devotional texts, the cross on which
Jesus was crucified (after torture) is spoken of as a tree. The wording of the comments thus evokes the
original blood libel of the canonical gospels (in which the Jews were said to accept guilt for the

Dr. Chatterley's point was obvious enough. She was implying (with what she
perhaps believed to be cunning indirection) that if these comments represent the old
antisemitism, then my television interview exemplifies the new antisemitism whose
actuality I was challenging. It need hardly be said that in asserting the existence of
consistencies between my interview and the deranged ranting of neo-Nazis, Dr.
Chatterley was not trying to encourage intelligent discussion and debate that employs
meaningful, ethical, and accurate language.
For her polemical purposes, neo-Nazis like these two commenters are useful
idiots. In some instances, however, comment posters of this sort turn out to be useful
idiots of another kind: hasbara agents whose deliberate function is to litter the internet
with antisemitic filth, for the precise purpose of enabling slander tactics like those of
Catherine Chatterley.
Such a pattern might seem improbable. But in August 2014, an investigation
conducted by the news website Common Dreams revealed that more than a thousand
inflammatory antisemitic comments posted at the site during the preceding two years,
under dozens of different screen names, had all been authored by a Jewish Harvard
graduate in his thirties who was irritated by the website's discussion of issues involving
Israel.13 One of the masks this man adopted, the African-American identity of 'DeShawn
S. Williams', cemented his antisemitic street creds by posting not just at Common
Dreams, but also at the white-supremacist Vanguard News Network, where his more than
1,400 posts included over 200 comment-thread exchanges in which 'Williams'
encouraged the malevolence of Frazier Glenn Miller, the neo-Nazi [who is] accused of
killing three people whom he believed were Jews outside a Jewish community centre and
retirement home in Kansas in April [2014].14
This hyperactive Harvard man, now a graduate student at a midwestern university,
appears to have devoted more effort to sleazy hasbara work than to his studies. When he
was not inciting Vanguard's antisemites to acts of violence, he was posting neo-Nazi rants
in the comments sections of the Common Dreams site, most frequently under the screen
shedding of Jesus's blood), while also alleging a multiplication of that original crime that is suggestive
of the reign of Antichrist prophesied in a long tradition of commentaries on the New Testament book of
Revelations. A demonizing of Jews in apocalyptic speculations forms a consistent part of patristic,
medieval, and more recent forms of antisemitism.
13 Lance Tapley, The Double Identity of an 'Anti-Semitic' Commenter: Smearing a Progressive Website
to Support Israel, Common Dreams (20 August 2014), http://www.commondreams.org/hambaconeggs.
14 Ibid.

name 'HamBaconEggs'and at the same time, entering into earnest debates with that
persona under the screen name 'JewishProgressive'.
The aim of this shadow-boxing was of course to show up Common Dreams as a
website that had itself to blame for attracting antisemitic commenters, for the simple
reason that it published articles that were themselves antisemitic. In one exchange,
'JewishProgressive' wrote:
I stopped posting on this site and others like it a long time ago,
as it became increasingly clear to me that genuine anti-Semitism
and their purveyors were becoming tolerated and, at worst,
embraced by so-called progressive communities [....]
I would challenge anyone to find a Common Dreams article
relating to African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, or LBGT
people containing the volume of hateful, venomous garbage
found in the comments section of this article. Sadly, I would
offer the additional challenge of finding any CD article relating
to Israel that doesn't contain copious amounts of Jew-hatred.15
In another posting, once again in debate with his alter ego 'HamBaconEggs',
'JewishProgressive' declared more emphatically:
Common Dreams and Stormfront: the web's foremost hubs of
unapologetic anti-Semitism. True progressives don't support this
sort of rank Jew-hatred, even though it's become increasingly
conflated with legitimate criticism of Israel.16
What then about the comments on my interview to which Dr. Chatterley referred
readers of the Winnipeg Jewish Review? One might well suspect that the hateful,
venomous garbage of 'paschn' and 'Annie Ladysmith' came from a single keyboard and
IP address. I do not mean to imply that Catherine Chatterley'Lady Chatterley', I am
tempted to call her, in ironic deference to her less than flawless mannersand 'Annie
Ladysmith' could be one and the same person. The neo-Nazi author of both comments
could well be someone from Ladysmith, South Africa, or the Gulf Islands village of
Ladysmith, BCor possibly even someone actually named 'Annie Ladysmith'.
But while Dr. Chatterley has, one must hope, been spared the multiple-personality
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid. Stormfront is a white supremacist and neo-Nazi website that describes itself as the voice of the
new, embattled White minority.

disorder that afflicts 'HamBaconEggs', a.k.a. 'JewishProgressive' and 'DeShawn S.

Williams', she is playing a less elaborate form of the same dirty game. Someone else may
have written the neo-Nazi filth that she found posted at a site that reproduced my
interview, but she is the one who turned it into a smear by claiming to find
consistencies between my interview and comments that at no point intersected with
anything I had said.
*

Two other features of Dr. Chatterley's response might also be of passing interest.
She of course did not acknowledge, much less apologize for, the initial misrepresentation
to which I drew attention. But her rejoinder exposed a derisory lack of scholarship when,
to display her understanding of the global resurgence of antisemitism, which is in fact a
very serious problem, she wrote:
The most obvious example is the leader of Iran, who routinely
threatens the nuclear destruction of the Jewish State, which
constitutes incitement to genocide and is a clear violation of
international law.17
This sentence drew a rebuke from Joanne Naiman, Professor Emerita of
Sociology at Ryerson University, who wondered politely what sources Chatterley might
be relying on, and quoted recent news reports which make it clear that the Israelis and
Americans know full well that Iran does not yet have nuclear weaponry, and that it is
Israel and the U.S. that are routinely threatening Iran militarily, not the reverse.18
The Winnipeg Jewish Review promptly published stern but foolish rejoinders from
David Matas, B'nai Brith Canada's Senior Honorary Legal Counsel, 19 from Professor
17 Dr. Chatterley's Response to Professor Keefer's Right of Reply.
18 Joanne Naiman, RE: Catherine Chatterley's Response to Dr. Michael Keefer, Winnipeg Jewish Review
(27 November 2010), http://www.winnipegjewishreview.com/editorial.cfm?pg=32. Professor Naiman
also described Chatterley's response as shoddy and a weak piece of propaganda masquerading as
academic analysis.
19 David Matas, To the Editor, Winnipeg Jewish Review (1 December 2010),
http://www.winnipegjewishreview.com/article_detail.cfm?id=616&sec=1. Matas declared that
Independent intelligence sources consistently over years have reported that Iran is developing nuclear
weaponry. Since this is the precise inverse of the truth, and U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies have
in fact come to the opposite conclusion, independent intelligence sources must mean something like
PR flaks of Dick Cheney and Benjamin Netanyahu. Matas proposed as authoritative an article by
Gregory S. Gordon, From Incitement to Indictment? Prosecuting Iran's President for Advocating
Israel's Destruction and Piecing Together Incitement Law's Emerging Analytical Framework, Journal
of Criminal Law and Criminology 98.3 (2008): 853-920. This article, an exemplary instance of

Elihu Richter of the Hebrew University-Hadassah in Jerusalem, who is also active in an

organization called Genocide Prevention Now,20 and from the WJR's editor, Rhonda
Spivak:21 these contributed some heat to the discussion, but no light.
Despite the rhetoric of Matas, Richter, and Spivak, Dr. Chatterley's sentence does
indeed contain compounded stupidities. Although there's evidence that the former
President of Iran to whom she was referring, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is indeed an
antisemite, he was not the leader of that country (a position held rather by the Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei). Akbar Ganji wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2008 that Despite all the
attention he receives, Ahmadinejad does not even rank among Iran's top 100 leaders over
the past 30 years [...]. Ahmadinejad is only as powerful as he is devoted to Khamenei and
successful in advancing his aims.22
Moreover, the statement that Dr. Chatterley was rememberingmade in a speech
Ahmadinejad delivered in October 2005, and subsequently repeated in variant forms
was mistranslated in the Western press, and misrepresented as a threat of military action,
a threat to literally wipe Israel off the map. It was in fact no such thing, but rather a restatement of a supposed prophecy.
Ahmadinejad reminded his audience that the Imam Khomeini, the founding leader
lawfare, the deliberate perversion of international law in the interests of U.S. and Israeli political
goals, fails to distinguish between critically established evidence and journalistic or governmental
propaganda. Noting the judgment of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimates that Iran has no nuclear
weapons program, Gordon attempts to counter this with the opinions of Henry Kissinger and other
experts (864), and states, without further evidence, that Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons
for the ostensible purpose of annihilating Israel (900). His treatment of translation issues (896-99) is
comparably slipshod. And nowhere, in his concern with possible or prospective genocide, does he ask
why legal precedents in the field should apply to the Iranian presidentbut not to U.S. and Israeli
leaders, who have threatened to use nuclear weapons in first-strike attacks on Iran (with obviously
genocidal consequences), and who actually possess such weapons.
20 Elihu D. Richter, To the Editor, Winnipeg Jewish Review (1 December 2010),
http://www.winnipegjewishreview.com/article_detail.cfm?id=616&sec=1. Richter referred readers to
the website of Genocide Prevention Now, where one finds, from 2012, his open letter, Israeli Genocide
Scholar Protests Israeli President Shimon Peres Opposing Military Action Against Iran,
http://www.genocidepreventionnow.org/Home/tabid/39/ctl/DisplayArticle/mid/1144/aid/645/Default.asp
x. This might seem an odd position for a scholar concerned to prevent genocide to take. In one of the
footnotes in Antisemitism Real and Imagined (p. 258 n. 142), I commented on another genocide scholar
who in 2009 recommended putting an end to what he called Gaza's extreme demographic armament
by de-funding UNRWA and thereby starving the people of Gaza: see Gunnar Heinsohn, Ending the
West's Proxy War Against Israel, Wall Street Journal Europe (12 January 2009),
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12317117974341961.html. One would think scholars in this field ought
to understand the difference between researching genocide and helping to provoke it.
21 On the same page, Rhonda Spivak provided several paragraphs of irrelevancies, focusing largely on the
fact, revealed by Wikileaks, that authoritarian Arab states allied to the U.S. (Saudi Arabia, the Gulf
States, Jordan, and Egypt) have also advocated pre-emptive war against Iran. What bearing she thought
this might have on the issues raised by Professor Naiman is anyone's guess.
22 See Akbar Ganji, The Latter-Day Sultan: Power and Politics in Iran, Foreign Affairs 87.6 (2008): 46,
available online at http://content.akbarganji.org/docs/foreign_affairs.pdf.

of Iran's theocracy, had said that the Shah of Iran's regime must go, had predicted the
end of the rule of the East (the USSR), and had said that the Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein must go amid unprecedented humiliation. To this sequence of fulfilled
prophecies of regime changes Ahmadinejad added a fourth as yet unfulfilled one: The
Imam said (Imam ghoft) this regime (een rezhim-e) occupying Jerusalem (ishghalgar-e
qods) must vanish from (bayad [...] mahv shavad) the page of time (az safheh-ye
ruzgar).23
Arash Norouzi, whose transliteration and translation of the Farsi I have borrowed,
noted that Ahmadinejad would seem to be calling for regime change, not war.24
Jonathan Steele of The Guardian, who is well enough informed to know that
Ahmadinejad had misquoted Khomeini, saying page instead of stage of time (the
Farsi words safheh and sahneh also rhyme),25 likewise judged that the sentence is not a
military threat,26 and found support in the reference to the fall of the Shah's regime for the
view that Ahmadinejad was talking about regime change, not the end of Israel. 27
University of Michigan Middle East scholar Juan Cole was of the same opinion,
remarking that the Khomeini quotation does not imply military action, or killing anyone
at all.28
Given Dr. Chatterley's taste for ad hominem smears, it is perhaps necessary to
remark that Arash Norouzi and Juan Cole, my main sources on this translation issue, are
not supporters of the Iranian regime. Cole has written that he despises everything
Ahmadinejad stands for, not to mention the odious Khomeini, who had personal friends
of mine killed; while Norouzi, after citing a statement of the Iranian president to the
effect that History shows us that oppressive and cruel governments do not survive,
23 See Arash Norouzi, 'Wiped off the Map'The Rumor of the Century, The Mossadegh Project (18
January 2007), http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/rumor-of-the-century/. I have altered
slightly the Farsi word order to conform with the word order of the English translation; the original is as
follows: Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad. Claims
that the Farsi verb rendered as vanish is active and transitive and hence deserves a more forceful
translation (see Gordon, From Incitement to Indictment? 897-98) do not alter the fact that the
sentence does not identify any agency that is to produce this effect of the vanishing of a regimeunless
perhaps the divine will with which Khomeini was supposedly in touch.
24 Ibid.
25 Jonathan Steele, Lost in translation, The Guardian (14 June 2006),
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jun/14/post155.
26 Jonathan Steele, If Iran is ready to talk, the US must do so unconditionally, The Guardian (2 June
2006), http://www.theguardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jun/02/comment.usa.
27 Steele, Lost in translation.
28 Juan Cole, Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist, Informed Comment (3 May 2006),
http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html.

commented that With this statement, Ahmadinejad has also projected the outcome of his
own backwards regime, which will likewise 'vanish from the page of time'. 29 But along
with their contempt for the Iranian theocracy, both writers also share a commitment to
truth.
As Karim Sadjadpour has observed, the consistent position of the Ayatollah
Khamenei has been that Iran's goal is not the military destruction of the Jewish state or
the Jewish people.... In Khamenei's own words, in June 2005, [the] solution to the issue
of Palestine [...] is to hold a referendum with the participation of all native Palestinians,
including Muslims, Jews and Christians, the Palestinians who live both inside and outside
the occupied territories. Any government that takes power as a result of this referendum
[...] will be an acceptable government....30 In his speech at Columbia University in
September 2007, Ahmadinejad echoed this position: What we say is that to solve this
60-year problem, we must allow the Palestinian people to decide about its future for
itself. [....] We must allow Jewish Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians and Christian
Palestinians to determine their own fate themselves through a free referendum. 31 But to
supporters of the Zionist project who believe that full rights of citizenship in Israel must
continue to be reserved for Jews alone, a democratic solution to the Israel-Palestine
conflict is anathema.
However unpleasant some of Iran's public discourse may be, and however violent
its suppression of internal dissidence, Dr. Chatterley was wrong in claiming that
Ahmadinejad threatened Israel with war, or with nuclear destruction. Any such threat,
moreover, would have been toothless, for as U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly
acknowledged, Iran has no nuclear weapons and (whatever its ambitions may have been
more than a decade ago) no nuclear weapons program.32
29 Cole, Hitchens the Hacker; Norouzi, 'Wiped off the Map'. (The name of Norouzi's website, The
Mossadegh Project, is indicative of a commitment to secular democracy.)
30 Karim Sadjadpour, Reading Khamenei: The World View of Iran's Most Powerful Leader (Washington,
DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009), p. 20; available online at
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/sadjadpour_iran_final2.pdf.
31 President Ahmadinejad Delivers Remarks at Columbia University, Washington Post (24 September
2007), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/24/AR2007092401042.html.
32 See Rory McCarthy, Israel considering strike on Iran despite US intelligence report, The Guardian (7
December 2007), http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2224052,00.html; Gareth Porter, Iran Nuke
Laptop Data Came from Terror Group, Antiwar.com (1 March 2008), http://www.antiwar.com/porter/?
articleid=12443; US believes Iran not trying to build a nuclear bomb, Ynet News.com (24 February
2012), http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4194307,00.html; John Glaser, US, Europe, Israel
Agree on Solid Intel: Iran Nuke Threat Far Off: Solid, in depth intelligence confirms with high
confidence Iran has no weapons program, but peace is still rejected, Antiwar.com (23 March 2012),
http://www.news.antiwar.com/2012/03/23/the-us-europe-israel-agree-.... See also Ed Cropley, Massive

One last issue raised by Dr. Chatterley's rejoinder remains to be discussed. In

2010 she became the founding director of the Canadian Institute for the Study of
Antisemitism (CISA)from which position she declared, in a 2011 op-ed on disputes
over the allocation of exhibition space in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, that
Subjective feelings are influencing [the Museum's] content and design choices rather
than objective historical and legal reality and this does not bode well for the international
reputation of this institution.33 She rightly reproached the Ukrainian Civil Liberties
Association for its interventions in that debate, which included the distribution of
antisemitic postcards. But it does not bode well for the future of CISA, as a centre whose
professed aim is to support research, that its director has shown so little respect for the
ethics of scholarship in her own public pronouncementsand that in the closing
paragraphs of her rejoinder to me she revealed a strangely deficient understanding of the
very issues CISA was founded to study.
Dr. Chatterley objected there to my statement that the texts by scholars and human
rights activists that I had published in Antisemitism Real and Imagined recurrently
express concern that uncritical support for the state of Israel's systematic violations of
Palestinian human rights could feed a renewal of antisemitic prejudice and hatred in this
country.
Her first reason for objecting is a foolish and dishonest non sequitur: First, I do
not know anyone who actually supports human rights violations in the Palestinian
territories or anywhere else.34 The range of Dr. Chatterley's acquaintanceships was not a
matter I had raisedbut she is mistaken. A moment's attentiveness to the Socratic
injunction Gnothi seauton35 would show her that she knows one such person rather well.
In a situation in which Jews were being violently persecuted, with the facts
authenticated by human rights organizations and agencies of the United Nations, we
Diplomatic Leak Exposes Israel Claims on Iran: Mossad Contradicted Netanyahu 'Red Line' Speech,
Forward: The Jewish Daily (24 February 2015), http://forward.com/articles/215378/massivediplomatic-leak-exposes-israel-claims-on-i/?.
33 Catherine Chatterley, The war against the Holocaust, Winnipeg Free Press (2 April 2011),
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/the-war-against-the-holocaust-119110699.html.
34 Dr. Chatterley's Response to Professor Keefer's Right of Reply.
35 Know thyself!

would not hesitate to declare that any scholar or public intellectual who denied that
human rights violations were taking place was by that act lending support to their
continuation.
Consider, in this light, the essay on Campus Antisemitism in which, while
accusing me of Antisemitism Denial, Dr. Chatterley argued that
The seriously flawed accusations that underpin IAW [Israeli
Apartheid Week] events must be addressed head on by reasoned
academic presentations given by leading scholars. [....] What we
need [...] is high quality academic programming that both
unpacks and counters the Israel Apartheid propaganda that we
see on our campuses and actually engages with the difficult and
contested reality of the conflict.
[....] Students care about racism and human rights [...]. As a
result, they are easily and actively mobilized against those
labeled racists and human rights violators, for whom there is
little sympathy in our contemporary culture. IAW relies on the
lack of public and student knowledge about Israel and the
complex history of the Middle East, and it also depends upon
the widespread ignorance about the system of Apartheid and the
history of South Africa.36
She is claiming, in an essay whose title implies that IAW events foment
antisemitism,37 that only people befuddled by propaganda and false labelling could
believe Palestinians to be victims of systematic policies of racism and human rights
violations. It follows that she is a supporter of and apologist for Israeli policies of internal
discrimination and of violent oppression in the occupied territoriespolicies that have
been correctly identified, by South African legal scholars among others, as involving the
crime of apartheid, defined under international law as a crime against humanity.38
36 Chatterley, Campus Antisemitism.
37 My own experience goes counter to this claim. I have been an invited speaker at Israeli Apartheid Week
events on four occasions at three different Canadian universities. On those occasions anyone who spoke
in defence of Israel was given a courteous hearing, and the organizers made it clear that any expression
of antisemitism or any other form of racism would not be tolerated.
38 See Antisemitism Real and Imagined, pp. 231-32. Israeli behaviour in the occupied territories has been
denounced as not merely answering to the legal definition of the crimes of apartheid and of colonizing,
but also as being genocidal in intention and effect: see, for example, Kathleen and Bill Christison,
Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 136-37.
For discussion of this and similar opinions, see Antisemitism Real and Imagined, pp. 234-38; and for

Secondly, Dr. Chatterley says,

antisemitism is not a form of normal human hostility or even a
function of normal human outrage, both of which are inevitable
human reactions to war and conflict. This is precisely why
criticism of Israel is not by definition antisemitic.
Antisemitism is never a legitimate reaction to the behaviour
of Jews, either as a collective or as individuals. Antisemitism is
the product of a conspiratorial ideological way of thinking about
Jews that relies on a belief in the actual existence of Jewish
power and its evil machinations for control. To understand the
nature and motives of antisemitism one does not study Jews or
their behavior but those who manifest this antisemitic mindset.39
Let's be clear: no form of racism is ever legitimate; and whatever the boundaries
of normal hostility or outrage might be, most of the manifestations of antisemitism that
go beyond sullen prejudice into hurtful action fall outside them. But Chatterley's thinking
here is coarse, and tells against the point she would like to make.
Set aside the fact that serious historians and sociologists study all aspects of such
matters, perpetrators and victims alike. Set aside the fact that throughout nearly all of the
long and atrocious history of antisemitism it has been obvious to even the most blinkered
antisemites that, whatever fantasies they might entertain about the synagogue of Satan
or some demonic conclave of Jewish Elders, the Jewish communities they were
assaulting were largely powerless and unable to defend themselves, whether against
judicial persecution or mob violence.
Delusions about Jewish power and machinations did become a significant part of
antisemitic discourse during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; 40 and as the
historian Tom Segev has shown, Chaim Weizmann made astute use of such beliefs prior
to and during World War I in the maneuverings that culminated in the 1917 Balfour
indications of the increasing willingness of Israeli politicians, state agencies, and a large part of the
Israeli public to accept genocidal discourse and implicitly genocidal treatment of the Palestinians as
normative, see Max Blumenthal, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (New York: Nation
Books, 2013), pp. 250-60, 278-84, 303-29, 353-64.
39 Dr. Chatterley's Response.
40 Close analogues to these delusions are provided by some of the Sherlock Holmes fictions of Conan
Doyle, in which all of the criminal activity in London is ascribed to a single mastermind, Moriarty, the
Napoleon of crime; and by a similarly conspiratorial mindset evident in the spy fictions of John
Buchan, such as Greenmantle (1916).

Declaration.41 During recent decades, however, Jewish elites have come to exercise a
very considerable degree of actual power, in the United States especially.
That power may to a considerable degree be permissive or derivative in nature
based, that is, on a combination of geopolitical calculations by Western political elites
which find Israel useful as a proxy and assistant in their own imperial ventures; of
religious beliefs, ranging from the colonial impulses of Christian Zionists since the midnineteenth century to the apocalyptic fanaticism of present-day Christian fundamentalists;
and of guilt, stemming from memories of institutionalized antisemitism and of the failure
during World War II to mitigate the Shoah by any timely intervention.
Western political elites have found it convenient to have an Israel that is also a
Spartan garrison-state, militarized to the hilt, nuclear-armed, and bristling with advanced
weaponry. They are happy to make use of Israeli technologies of surveillance, policing,
and population control. They don't seriously object to Israel's seizure and colonization of
Palestinian land and resources, or to its increasingly bloody-minded treatment of the
rightful owners of that land and those resources. If anything, they find the political
interventions of Zionist organizations, pressure groups and ideologues congenial, because
these prod their populations, for the most part, in directions they have already decided
upon themselves.
If I am right in thinking of the power exercised by Western Jewish elites in
support of the actions of the state of Israel as at least partially permissive or derivative,
that doesn't make it any the less real as power, any less dangerous to its primary victims,
the Palestinians42or for that matter, any less dangerous, in a secondary manner, to
Jewish communities worldwide.
Among people who have studied such matters, it is patently obvious that there is a
direct connection between the recurrent surges of violence against Palestinian civilians by
the state of Israellet us call it the behaviour of the Jewish elites who govern that state
and corresponding surges in antisemitic incidents acts in Western countries.43
41 Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, trans. Haim
Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), pp. 38-50.
42 Middle Eastern Muslims in other countries have also been victims of the power exercised by
organizations like AIPAC in the U.S. The Israel lobby was strongly supportive of the George W. Bush
regime's invasion of Iraq, supported the bombing campaign that reduced Libya to chaos, continues to
support the proxy war that has devastated Syria, and has agitated for a war of aggression against Iran.
43 See, for example, Anti-Semitic attacks reach record UK high, Israel's Gaza offensive blamedstudy,
RT (5 February 2015), http://rt.com/uk/229555-jewish-antisemitism-hate-crime/. Robert Cohen is one of
many who have stated the obvious fact: What's clearly nonsense is to claim that Israel's behavior plays
no part in the political and cultural dynamic that is provoking growing racism against Jews. When

Dr. Chatterley's apparent denial of any such connection is a further sign that her
scholarship is no less shoddy than her ethics.

things kick off in Israel and the Occupied Territories anti-Semitic attacks spike in Western Europe.
When peace is being talked about, with real plausibility, anti-Semitism in Europe dies down. Robert
Cohen, #JeSuisUnJuifBritannique, Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in the Middle East (18 January
2015), http://mondoweiss.net/2015/01/jesuisunjuifbritannique.