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JOURNAL for the STUDY of ANTISEMITISM

Volume 3, Issue #2, 2011 Campus Antisemitism Guest Editor, Kenneth L. Marcus

http://jewishresearch.org/Gary_Tobin_Video.html

Gary A. Tobin (1949-2009)


Gary A. Tobin was one of the first to see the dangers of the new antisemitism on American college campuses and one of the strongest voices in resisting it.

Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA)


Steven K. Baum and Neal E. Rosenberg, Editors, Marlton, NJ Steven L. Jacobs, Associate Editor; Judaic Studies, University of Alabama Lesley Klaff, Associate Editor/Law, Sheffield Hallam University, UK Florette Cohen, Associate Editor/Research, College of Staten Island Kenneth L. Marcus, Associate Editor/Academia, IJCR & Louis D. Brandeis Center, DC Shimon Samuels, Chair, Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Paris Ayaan Hirsi Ali, AHA Foundation, AEI, Washington, DC Paul Bartrop, Historian, Bialik College, Melbourne, Australia Hadassa Ben-Itto, Author/Judge (Ret.), Tel Aviv Michael Berenbaum, Sigi Ziering Institute, Los Angeles Andrew Bostom, Brown University, Providence, RI Jonathan Boyd, Jewish Policy Research, London Israel W. Charny, Encyclopedia of Genocide, Jerusalem Richard L Cravatts, Education, Boston University Bernie Farber, Canadian Jewish Congress, Toronto Robert Fine, Sociology, University of Warwick, UK Manfred Gerstenfeld, JCPA, Jerusalem Sander Gilman, Humanities, Emory University, Atlanta Ari Goldberg, AIPAC, Washington, DC Clemens Heni, Political ScienceMEF Funded, Berlin Jim Heller, Gadfly/Blogger, Victoria, BC Douglas Hoffman, Grant Writer, New Mexico State University Paul Iganski, Sociology, Lancaster University, UK Dennis L. Jackson, Statistics, University of Windsor Andras Kovacs, Sociology, Central European University, Budapest Neil J. Kressel, Psychology, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ Richard Landes, Department of History, Boston University Walter Laqueur, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University, Washington, DC Kenneth Lasson, Law, University of Baltimore Marcia Littell, Holocaust Studies, Richard Stockton College of NJ Judith Bosker Liwerant, Political Science, UNAM, Mexico City Hubert G. Locke, University of Washington, Seattle David Matas, Hon Counsel-Bnai Brith Canada, Winnipeg Joanna B. Michlic, HBI, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA Fiamma Nirenstein, Italian Chamber of Deputies, Rome Andre Oboler, Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism, Melbourne Darren OBrien, Australian Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney Andrei Oisteanu, Institute History of Religions, Bucharest John Pawlikowski, Catholic Theological Union, Chicago Winston Pickett, Communications, Brighton, UK Daniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, Philadelphia Dina Porat, Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv University Lars Rensmann, Political Science, University of Michigan Paul Lawrence Rose, European History and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University Richard L. Rubenstein, President Emeritus, University of Bridgeport Frederick Schweitzer, Manhattan College, NYC Milton Shain, History, University of Cape Town, South Africa Marc I. Sherman, Index/Bibliography, Jerusalem Marcia Sokolowski, Baycrest Hospital, University of Toronto Philip J. Spencer, Helen Bamber Center, Kingston University, UK Pierre-Andre Taguieff, CNRS (Sciences Po), Paris Diana Siegel Vann, American Jewish Committee, Washington, DC Sue Vice, English Literature, University of Sheffield, UK James E. Waller, Cohen Chair, Keene State College, NH Shalva Weil, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Robert Wistrich, Sassoon Center/SICSA Hebrew University of Jerusalem Bat Yeor, Independent Scholar, Switzerland

JSA Submission Guidelines


The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA) is the peer-reviewed work of a select group of independent scholars who examine antisemitism in traditional and emerging forms. This group is not affiliated with any institution or financially dependent on a single source of funding. We have in common an understanding of antisemitism as a social pathology that must be eradicated. We are an educationally based concern. E-mail submissions should be original, either on hard copy or an electronic copy in MS Word format. Citations should be in Chicago Manual of Style format. Send submissions and questions to the editors of the JSA via mail, telephone, or e-mail. Mailing address: Editors, JSA P.O. Box 726 Marlboro, NJ 08053 Ph (856) 983-3247 Electronic journal submissions: jsantisemitism@gmail.com Electronic book reviews: c/o Book Review Editor: jsantisemitism@gmail.com. The ideas represented in the JSA are those of the contributing authors, and not reflective of the JSA, its board members, or the authors institution. The JSA welcomes unsolicited manuscripts. Executive Committee Jeffrey Diamond Simon Firer Philip Kirschner John Nettleton Joan Levy Rosenberg Leon Rosenberg Neal Howard Rosenberg Arnold Staloff

TABLE OF CONTENTS Volume 3 Number 2

Special Issue: Campus Antisemitism . . . . . . . . . . . Guest Editor: Kenneth L. Marcus 321 From the Editors: The Year in Hate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steven K. Baum 325 and Neal E. Rosenberg Antisemitic Incidents from Around the World: JulyDecember 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editors 333 Articles In an Academic Voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kenneth Lasson 349 Antisemitism and the Campus Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Cravatts 407 Antisemitism at the University of California . . . . . . . Leila Beckwith 443

On Whiteness and the Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Linda Maizels 463 Holocaust Envy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gabriel N. Brahm Jr. Of Scientific Note Mental Models of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict . . . Wilhelm Kempf 489

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Resentment Reloaded . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lars Rensmann 543 Essays Operation Mural and Moroccos Jewish Children . . . . David Littman 575 Jerusalem or Al-Quds? The EUs Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bat Yeor 581 Conspiracy, Nest-ce Pas? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hadassa Ben-Itto 597 What Happened to Pakistans Jews? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shalva Weil 603

Remembrance of Warwick Days. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Smadar Bakovic 607

Die Linke and The Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sebastian Voigt 611 What My Daughters Friend and Ambassador Gutman Need to Know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Landes 623 Antisemitism and the Dutch Soccer Fields . . . . Manfred Gerstenfeld 629

Was Cesare Lombroso Antisemitic? . . . . . . . . . . . . Gabriel Cavaglion 647 Jews in Afghan Eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Silinsky 667 Saint Chesterton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simon Mayers 683 Nicholas Kristof, Israel, and Double Standards . . . Jeffrey Grossman 689 The CST: A Vital Partnership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Whine 695

Economic Crisis and Blaming You Know Who . . . . Karin Stoegner 711 The Inane Politics of Tony Cliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Camila Bassi 729

Sayeeda Warsi: A Trifle Confused . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melanie Phillips 739 Captain Basto, the Portuguese Dreyfus . . . . . . . Isabel Ferreira Lopes Last Week, They Defaced My Temple . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barbara Silver 743 745

Reviews Marcuss Jewish Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lesley Klaff 747 Gilberts In Ishmaels House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen Riley 759

Jacobsons The Finkler Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sue Vice 767 Hermans An Unfortunate Coincidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Fraser 771 OBriens Pinnacle of Hatred . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anthony Bale 781

Pollacks Antisemitism on the Campus . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Cravatts 785 Livaks The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Harriet Murav 791

Rensmann and Schoepss Politics and Resentment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steven K. Baum

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Sackss The Great Partnership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steven L. Jacobs 801 Achcars The Arabs and the Holocaust . . . . . . . . . . Matthias Kuntzel 805 and Colin Meade Colons Rasputin and the Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Israel Drazin 821

The Debt, Sarahs Key, Unmasked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joanne Intrator 823 and Scott Rose Shamirs Defamation: A Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nathan Abrams 833 Antisemitica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 837

In America, Jews feel very comfortable, but there are islands of antisemitism: the American college campus. Natan Sharansky

Introduction: Special Issue on Campus Antisemitism


Kenneth L. Marcus1
The present is an especially appropriate time to dedicate a special Campus Antisemitism issue of this journal to the memory of my late colleague and friend, Dr. Gary A. Tobin. Tobin was one of the first to see, and among the most stalwart to fight, the resurgence of antisemitism in American educational systems. His last and most passionate contributions to social science were landmark volumes on antisemitism in higher education (The Uncivil University) and in American textbooks (The Trouble with Textbooks). Two years after his premature passing, Tobins Institute for Jewish & Community Research (IJCR) is issuing another sobering report on the state of antisemitism in academia.2 As editors Steven Baum and Neal Rosenberg report, the IJCRs new poll of U.S. students reveals that over 40 percent of Jewish American college studentsmore than two in fivehave experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents on their campus.3 This is a sobering figure in light of common perceptions that the last few years have marked a golden age for Jewish students in post-secondary education. The situation is even more disturbing when one drills deeper into the IJCRs new data. First, most nonJewish students appear to be entirely oblivious or insensitive to the challenges facing their Jewish classmates. According to the IJCR study, barely one in 10 non-Jewish college students say that they have witnessed antisemitism around them. This is 75 percent less than the figure for the Jewish students. For this reason, the IJCRs Aryeh Weinberg has entitled the new study Alone on the Campus, as non-Jewish students either dont see or dont understand or dont care about what is going on around them. Second, Jewish students are not being overly sensitive. If anything, they seem to significantly underreport bias incidents directed against Jews. The 40 percent figure may sound high until one sees that even higher percentages of Jewish students answer affirmatively when asked more specifically about antisemitic incidents. For example, when Jewish college
1. The author acknowledges Dorothy Tananbaum for her thoughts and support in preparing this introduction. 2. This author succeeded Tobin as director of The Anti-Semitism Initiative at IJCR. 3. Aryeh Weinberg, Alone on the Quad: Understanding Jewish Student Isolation on Campus (San Francisco: Institute for Jewish & Community Research, 2011).

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students are specifically asked whether they have heard derogatory remarks leveled against Jews on their campus, more than half answer affirmatively. This is roughly 25 percent higher than the number who answer affirmatively to the more general question about antisemitic incidents. Paradoxically, the figures are even higher when the questions get more specific, although they should be lower (since the general encompasses the specific). For example, nearly two thirds of Jewish college students have heard people on their campus specifically berating Jews for being greedy. In other words, Jewish students are if anything reluctant to characterize campus conduct as antisemitic unless they are questioned very specifically. There may be good reason for this; they likely are aware, as the data demonstrate, that so many of their non-Jewish classmates are largely indifferent, oblivious, or uncaring about what they are facing. Given this data, it is important to understand exactly what is going on in American higher education and why. These are the questions to which this special issue of JSA is dedicated. By way of context, it is important to emphasize that the level of antisemitism in American higher education declined steadily and dramatically from the end of the Second World War until the turn of the new century. Institutional antisemitism, such as quotas on students or faculty, has long since been eliminated. Most of todays Jewish college students enjoy opportunities of which their grandparents could not have dreamed. Moreover, aggregate faculty attitudes toward Jewish students are quite favorable compared to virtually any other group. Most Jewish American college students will witness little or no antisemitism, other than perhaps a passing remark or inappropriate joke or fleeting insult. Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that the long steady progress against this old hate has stalled if not reversed, and there are pockets of academe within which rather severe incidents are now reported. Thus, it is important to understand the nature of the old-new bigotry that is arising again. In these pages, Kenneth Lasson and Richard Cravatts provide comprehensive and detailed presentations of the state of antisemitism in American academe; Leila Beckwith focuses more intensively on the situation on California campuses; while Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr. and Linda Maizels assess some of the reasons for this troubling phenomenon. At the University of California, Beckwith reports, Jewish students have been subjected to: acts of physical aggression; intimidation; swastikas; speakers, films, and exhibits that use antisemitic imagery and discourse; speakers that praise and encourage support for terrorist organizations; the organized disruption of events that Jewish student groups had sponsored; and the promotion of student resolutions for divestment from Israel that demonize and delegitimize the Jewish State. Lasson, similarly, argues from the East Coast that Jewish and pro-Israel students across the country are patronized, mocked,

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intimidated, and sometimes physically attacked. . . . Cravatts points to an intensifying campus war against Israel and argues that derision of Zionism and the denunciation of Israel have become a convenient way for antisemites to mask their true prejudice against Jews by claiming that their problem is only with the policies of Israel, not with Jews themselves. Since the name of Marx appears prominently, if rather unsympathetically, in these pages (at least in Lassons and Cravatts analyses), it is worth observing in Marxian terms that the ultimate goal of this exercise is not to understand this world but to change it. This issue describes quite a number of potential avenues for combating the problems that it describes. Lasson cautions, wisely enough, against the long-term dangers of university actions that could be perceived as censoring constitutionally protected speech. At the same time, there are many ways of addressing campus incidents while fully protecting freedom of speech. For example, Beckwith describes how 700 University of California students signed a petition expressing outrage at the climate toward Jewish students on their campuses and demanding change. She also describes letter-writing campaigns and urges university administrators to use their discretion to specifically condemn antisemitic incidents. Such approaches are both commendable and impressive, but Beckwith, Cravatts, and Lasson all concede that legal measures, consistent with the freedom of speech and doctrine of academic freedom, may also be required. Indeed, all three authors describe the use of lawsuits and federal investigations to redress extreme hostile environments against Jewish studentsa topic not unknown to readers of this journal.4 The question of legal action brings several thoughts to mind. Many people, even within the Jewish community, are reluctant to introduce such powerful methods into the university context. This caution is appropriate enough. Whenever it is feasible, and where applicable statutory limitations periods permit, non-legal approaches should be tried first. There are times, however, when no other approach will suffice. Even in higher education, it is now universally acknowledged that basic civil rights would not have been extended to African-American students across large swaths of the United States absent the forceful use of legal means. For black students in the South, many years of patient, forceful efforts were required to achieve ultimate victory. For Jewish students on some campuses, similar efforts will be required. There are some who fear now, as others feared then, that strenuous civil rights efforts will provoke resentment or backlash. There are not frivolous concerns. It is prudent to craft strategies that will minimize these risks. At the same time, those who take a long view of this old hate will
4. See Kenneth L. Marcus, The New OCR Anti-Semitism Policy, Journal for the Study of Antisemitism 2 (2011): 479.

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observe that the timid have too often stayed the hand of justice when the time for action had come. The portrait that emerges from the studies presented in this issue, together with the data newly released by IJCR, reinforces the need for serious and deliberate response, up to and including the judicious use of legal action.5

5. Appropriately enough, the next issue of this journal will be devoted to law.

A Note from the Editors: The Year in Hate


Natan Sharansky almost had it right when he made the statement in 2006 that an island of antisemitism exists on the American campus. He could have never predicted that anti-Zionistbased antisemitism would pop up on colleges campuses in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Capetown, Madrid, Manchester, Mexico City, Paris, Sydney, and Toronto as wellnor could he have predicted a time when to be Israeli would be the new prejudice. Just ask Smadar Bakovic, an Israeli graduate student at Warwick University. Bakovic had to fight for a year so her doctoral dissertationinitially rejected by an anti-Zionist professorwould finally be deemed acceptable. I am sure that had I been gay or black and Professor Pratt were to sign petitions to boycott all gays and/or blacks, Warwick would have kicked her out a long time ago, Bakovic stated in a recent interview. But in the current pro-Palestinian British culturewhere all things Israeli are evilan anti-Zionist professor had thwarted Bakovic from obtaining her doctoral degree based on nothing more than anti-Zionist politics. Her story appears in this issue. Anti-Zionist politics seems to dominate campus life, and segue quickly into generic antisemitism. This issue of the JSA is dedicated to understanding how it happens. We are proud to announce that the issue, which marks a milestone in JSA scholarship, has been edited by an expert in law and campus antisemitism, Kenneth L. Marcus (Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America, Cambridge University, 2010). We are also proud that almost half the essays are written by Israeli Jewsthose very same people from a country that annual BBC polls report is among the most disliked nations, even though their rank scores also consistently place them among the least corrupt (http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/) and most generous nations (http://www.cafamerica.org/dnn/). Israeli Jews, in sixty-three years of the countrys existence, have produced more Nobel laureates than Spain or all Muslim nations combined. Yet, the evil Israelis, who despite Arab Spring continue as the only democracy in the Middle East, are subject to extreme criticism.1 In balanced reporting of the Middle East, reasonable people would be thinking of Israel as democratic, generous, least corrupt, and with the most advancements in medicine and the sciencesand asking what are
1. Since Israels birth in 1948, the death tolls of Arabs (7,900) and Israeli Jews (1,500) receives daily news coverage. Contrast this against the dramatic absence in the scrutiny of Assads killing of 5,000 Syrians from March to December 2011, Jordans killing of several thousand Palestinians in the 1970 Black September uprising, Algerias killing of 100,000 mainstream Muslims, and Sudans killing of 400,000 non-Muslims.

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they doing right? Instead, public opinion is busy pointing out everything Israeli as wrong. Influenced by Arab propaganda, a naive news media, and the Church, the image of Israelis (Jews) killing innocents becomes quickly acceptedaccompanied, of course, by the time-honored solution: Israel/ Jews must be contained, killed, or expelled from the social body. Below are public statements of the past year, collected by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, that reflect whats on the publics mind: Not all the Jews in the world are evil . . . the ratio is 60-40. Sixty percent are evilTawfig Okasha, presidential candidate, Egypt. I love Hitler . . . People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be fucking gassedJohn Galliano, designer, Dior. I am very much for Jews. No, not too much, because Israel is a pain in the ass . . . Im very much for Speer. Albert Speer . . . He was also maybe one of Gods best children . . . Im a NaziLars Von Trier, film director. Everything that happens today in the world has to do with the Zionists . . . American Jews are behind the world economic crisis that has hit Greece alsoMikis Theodorakis, composer of the score for the film Zorba the Greek. The source that finances and incites all these international organizations . . . especially in the Arab world . . . are led by a single, evil organization, known as Zionism. It is behind all these movements, all these civil wars, and all these evils . . . Jesus Christ healed the sick among the Jews . . . and resurrected their dead. [How did they repay him?] They strived to crucify him until he died . . . George Saliba, bishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Lebanon. Oppose the moral blackmail of the so-called Holocaust!Hermann Dierkes, Die Linke (The Left Party), Germany. The state of Israel is an illegal, genocidal place . . .Rev. Jeremiah Wright, speech in Baltimore. But anti-Israeli opinion does not only extend to public statements in the press. In the past year, such tropes infuse antisemitic sentiment as well, as shown in several surveys done in 2011. Below are the results of these surveys.

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In an Institute for Jewish and Community Research poll of 1,400 U.S students, 41% of Jewish students report hearing anti-Israeli remarks in the classroom, and about the same confirm antisemitism on their campuses as normalized and underreported. A breakdown of the rhetoric appears in the graph above. A National Jewish Students survey finds 42% of UK college respondents experiencing an antisemitic incident since the beginning of the academic year, but only two in 10 say they were concerned about campus antisemitism. A CST report shows 427 antisemitic attacks in 57 countries between 1968-2010. France had the highest number of attacks (51), followed by the United States (34), Italy (33), Argentina and Germany (29), and the UK (28). An Argentina survey revealed that 82% of the respondents thought that the main interest of the Jews is to make money. The same poll, conducted by the Gino Germani Institute of the University of Buenos Aires, found that 45% of those polled would never marry a Jew and that 30% would not live in a neighborhood with a large presence of Jews. According to the Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea (CDEC) (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation) and the Institute for Social and Political Opinion Research (ISPO), one in three Italians considers Jews not very nice and 44% declare that they feel no sympathy toward Jews. Fifteen percent of antisemites base their attitude on what they think they know about Jews. A German study found that almost half (47.7%) of Germans accept the notion that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.

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An Australian study lists a record 517 attacks, 38% above the average of the previous two decades. A Jerusalem survey finds that only one in three Palestinians (34%) accepts a two-state-for-two-people solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Fifty-two percent of Spanish students declared that they would not like to have a Jewish classmate sitting next to them, and 58% of adults thought that Jews have too much power and that they are all too rich, according to a poll presented at Madrids Fourth International Seminar on Antisemitism. A November 2011 poll by Andras Kovacs notes the number of Hungarians who find Jews repugnant (24%) had significantly increased prior to the election years, a fact indicating that political endeavors augment anti-Jewish sentimentnamely, the Jewish Question. There were still other survey findings, which afford additional insights. Sweden reported a record high of 161 antisemitic hate crimes in the past year. A German report recorded that 20% of the population holds strongly antisemitic views (the percentage in most democratic nations, though Holland is the lowest and Spain, Eastern Europe, and Russia the highest); the ADL-USA reports findings of approximately 1,200+ antisemitic incidents. This is one of the lowest in the past decade, but offset by annual antisemitic incidents everywhere else that are at record highsGermany (1,520 incidents) and Canada (1,306 incidents) have the dubious honor of topping the annual list again, most of the perpetrators being young, male, and rightwing Muslim. But it is not only angry, authoritarian, young male Muslims who are making the surveys. An April 2011 study by lead author Andreas Zick at Germanys University of Beilefeld, titled Intolerance, Prejudice and Discrimination, www.uni-bielefeld.de/ikg/zick/ZicketalGFEengl.pdf, surveyed by phone approximately 1,000 people in eight European nations. The findings revealed that nearly 50% of Germans believe that Jews try to take advantage of having been victims of the Nazi era. As cited earlier, almost half believe that Israel is conducting an all-out war to exterminate Palestinians, while a third (35%) agree with this statement: Considering Israels policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews. Whether it is the mainstream news medias influence. as Richard Landes essay in this issue suggests, the political lefts influence, or both remains uncertain. According to German sociologist Samuel Salzborn, The pattern is always the same: ostensibly it is couched as criticism of Israel, but the arguments reveal themselves as antisemitic to the core.

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So this issue on campus antisemitism could not have come at a better time, as campuses continue to send the message throughout the world that if Israel would disappear, Jihad would go away. If you are Lars Rensmann, you focus on popular cultures underlying resentment of Jews as the major cause of antisemitism. His examination of envy and acrimony is backed by evidence in several nations to fortify his position. The statistics of social scientist Wilhelm Kempf echo Andreas Zicks findings that anger at the Israelis vis-` -vis the Palestinian conflict is a stirring up a hornets nest. Yet if you are Richard Landes, youll have none of this. Landes makes a brilliant case for the mainstream media machines promoting the Arab position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Sebastian Voigt and Jeffrey Grossman similarly point out how you are what you read, and invariably those reading the statements of Die Linke or articles in The New York Times will soon hate Israel as well. Middle East politics never take a holiday. Melanie Phillips is quick to point out how UK politicians like Sayeeda Warsi have much to say but that little of it holds up to any kind of scrutiny. Unfortunately, Warsi is not an isolated case. Earlier this year, Baroness Tonge was told to step down for her Israeli organ harvesting comments. Then, of course, there are the years apologies. British MEP Sir Robert Atkins apologized for suggesting that British Jews are pressuring Israel to stop the Palestinian conflict; MP Paul Flynn apologized for questioning if there are dual loyalties of Britains first Jewish ambassador to Israel; then there was the Conservative MP who hosted a Nazi party, later apologized, and got sacked; and so on.

Not to be undone, some Israeli Jews got into the act, such as British jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, author of The Wandering Who? (http:// youtu.be/BFjejrGxFY4). The books theme of an insiders look at the Jewish (and Israeli) problem received immediate endorsements from British journalist Alan Hart, renowned anti-Zionist professors Richard Falk and

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John Mearsheimer, a litany of pro-Palestinians, and eventually U.S. presidential candidate Ron Paul. Hadassa Ben-Itto notes that the refrain sounds oddly familiar in her reexamination of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Along these lines is Camila Bassis expose of Israeli Tony Cliff and Gabriel Cavaglions indictment of Cesare Lombroso. It makes traditional antisemites like G. K. Chesterton, as rendered by Simon Mayers, pale by comparison. There is a history of anti-Zionistbased antisemitism, but none Gilad Atzmon wants to remember. David Littman recalls that it was not so long ago that Mossad asked him to help rescue Jewish children in Morocco as part of Operation Muraland without any training, he did. His wife, Bat Yeor, reminds us that same could occur again globally and challenges the European Union to pay attention to the Al-Qud factor. The same year David Littman was rescuing Jewish children1961Isabel Lopes grandfather (Captain Autur Barros Basto) died. Captain Basto, who had been given a dishonorable discharge from the Portuguese army, died in shame. In March 2012, Lopes will petition the Portuguese Parliament to exonerate her grandfather and clear his name from the crime of being too Jewish in fascist Portugal; see http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/pardon-Capt-Barros-Basto/. Manfred Gerstenfelds essay asks us to pay more attention to the antisemitism inherent in sports in general and the soccer fields in particular, while Mark Silinksy points up how the same hate readily transfers to Third World Afghanistan or, as Karin Stoegner observes, travels to the modern nation state of Austria. Barbara Silver focuses on the inevitable consequence of all such hate as she copes with her temples defacement in the middle of Canada. What is the answer? No one is quite certain, but Shalva Weil knows some inevitable consequences as she documents the demise of Pakistans Jewish community. Michael Whine makes the case for organizations, such as the British CST, monitoring hate groups and continuing their mission to help Jews when the need arises. The need seems to always arise. We have books and films to help us feel less alone in the world and to advance our understanding of our uncertain environment. There are Nathan Abrams analysis of the off-beat film Defamation and Joanne Intrator and Scott Roses informed reviews of the films The Debt, Sarahs Key, and Unmasked. Also included are Sue Vices review of Howard Jacobsons novel The Finkler Question, as well as reviews of good solid books on campus antisemitism, such as Lesley Klaff on Jewish Identity by Kenneth Marcus, this issues guest editor; Richard Cravatts on Eunice Pollacks Antisemitism on the Campus; and Stephen Rileys account of Martin Gilberts In Ishmaels House. There are Matthias Kuntzel and Colin Meades incisive indictment of Arab politics in Gilbert Achcars The Arabs and the Holocaust; British law professor David Fraser analyzing Didi Hermans An

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Unfortunate Coincidence; and Anthony Bale on the blood libels described in Darren OBriens Pinnacle of Hatred. Steven Baum reviews the empirically based Politics of Resentment, edited by Lars Rensmann and Julius Schoeps, and Rabbi Steven L. Jacobs reviews chief rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks The Great Partnership. Finally, we have Israel Drazins review of Rasputin and the Jews by Rasputins great-granddaughter Delin Colon. We look forward to our fourth year in 2012, with special issues in law (guest editor, Kenneth Lasson) and Eastern European antisemitism (guest editor, Andras Kovacs). Thanks and deep appreciation go to our sponsors: the Jewish Community Foundation and the New Mexico and Texas law firm of Jeff Diamond; to all our contributors and reviewers; to our associate editors, Florette Cohen, Steven L. Jacobs, Lesley Klaff, and Kenneth Marcus; to our chair, Shimon T. Samuels; and particularly to our readers, who continue to make this journal a success. The next year promises to be both challenging and fulfilling as the JSA continues its mission to document antisemitism in all its poisonous forms and search for antidotes. Steven K. Baum and Neal E. Rosenberg, Editors

Special thanks to:

In Loving Memory of our Father Norman Diamond WWII Veteran 19242011 Jeff and Connie Diamond

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JSA BEST AWARDS


The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism is pleased to announce the following recipients of JSAs Best Awards for 2011: BEST BOOK Lars Rensmann and Julius Schoepss Politics and Resentment, Brill (Best Book, Academic) Howard Jacobsons The Finkler Question, Bloomsbury (Best Book, Fiction) Bat Yeors Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate Farleigh Dickinson University Press (Best Book, Israeli-Arab Conflict) Didi Hermans An Unfortunate Coincidence, Oxford University Press (Best Book, Law) Honorable Mention Robert Michaels A History of Catholic Antisemitism, Palgrave Macmillan BEST ORIGINAL ARTICLE Models of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Wilhelm Kempf Mexico in a Region of Change, Judit Bokser Liwerant BEST ESSAY Antisemitism and the Dutch Soccer Fields, Manfred Gerstenfeld What My Daughters Friend and Ambassador Gutman Need to Know, Richard Landes BEST BOOK/FILM REVIEW Gilbert Achcars The Arabs and the Holocaust, Matthias Kuntzel and Colin Meade Martin Gilberts In Ishmaels House, Stephen Riley Kenneth L. Marcuss Jewish Identity and Civil Rights, Lesley Klaff The Debt, Sarahs Key, Unmasked, Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose

Antisemitic Incidents from Around the World A Partial List JulyDecember 2011
JULY Toronto, July 4: Auroras Abbotsford Animal Hospital, on Yonge Street, was the target of antisemitic vandalism. The vets office was littered with several Nazi symbols and antisemitic graffiti, and rocks had been thrown through windows at the clinic. I never experienced something like this, said veterinarian Jory Bocknek, who is Jewish. The first thing I thought was I didnt want my kids to see it. Im very disappointed. Las Vegas, July 6: Gravestones in Montefiore Cemetery became the latest monuments to be vandalized at this historic burial ground on the northwestern edge of the city. Although one local man thinks the incident was an antisemitic attack, the local police chief and the cemeterys caretaker believe the vandalism, involving several knocked-down and broken grave markers, was an indiscriminate act. The cemetery, named for the British Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore, was established in 1881 on land that originally was part of the adjoining Masonic Cemetery. Today, it has 80 to 90 graves. London, July 10: Baroness Tonge, a Liberal Democrat frontbencher, has been sacked after calling for an inquiry into allegations that Israeli soldiers supporting the relief effort in Haiti had been involved in organ-trafficking. New York, July 10: The Anti-Defamation League has called on the United Nations human rights chief to publicly condemn Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, for posting an antisemitic cartoon on his personal blog. The cartoon depicted the United States as a vicious dog wearing a skullcap, urinating on what is meant to be Lady Justice while feasting on a pile of blood and bones. Jerusalem, July 12: The Simon Wiesenthal Center strongly criticized the Lithuanian government for trying to hide or minimize the highly significant role of local Nazi collaborators in Holocaust crimes and attributed the desecration of the memorial at Ponar, the site of the mass murder of 70,000 Jews during the Holocaust, to the falsification of World War II history by local historians with governmental sponsorship and support.

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Jerusalem, July 15: Only one in three Palestinians accepts two states for two peoples as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to an intensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip completed this week by American pollster Stanley Greenberg. Respondents were asked about U.S. president Barack Obamas statement that There should be two states: Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people. Just 34% said they accepted that concept, while 61% rejected it. Sixty-six percent said the Palestinians real goal should be to start with a two-state solution but then move to one Palestinian state. Asked about the fate of Jerusalem, 92% said it should be the capital of Palestine, 1% said the capital of Israel, 3% the capital of both, and 4% a neutral international city. Seventy-two percent backed denying the thousands of years of Jewish history in Jerusalem, 62% supported kidnapping IDF soldiers and holding them hostage, and 53% were in favor or teaching songs about hating Jews in Palestinian schools. When given a quote from the Hamas Charter about the need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews, 80% agreed. Seventy-three percent agreed with a quote from the charter (and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad) about the need to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees. Budapest, July 18: Hungarian war-crimes suspect Sandor Kepiro was found not guilty by the Buda District Court. He had been charged with complicity in the Novi Sad massacre of January 1942 in northern Serbia, in which as many as 1,250 Jews, Serbs, and Roma were murdered, and with direct responsibility for the death of 36 people. Budapest, July 25: Hungarys new media law, which went into effect on July 1, carries a distinctly unpleasant whiff of the countrys fascist and communist past. Under its provisions, all media outlets are required to register with a body called the Media Council. The council is empowered to impose fines of nearly $1 million upon those publications and broadcasters deemed to have insulted a particular group, along with an amorphous entity defined as the majority. In another case, by contrast, reader comments on an article in the pro-government newspaper Magyar Hirlap were riddled with antisemitic slurs of jaw-dropping foulness, yet not a peep has been heard from the Media Council. The Magyar Hirlap article reported on an opinion piece by Karl Pfeifer, the veteran Austrian Jewish journalist, in the Vienna daily Die Presse. In that piece, Pfeifer relayed the contents of an article by Zsolt Bayer, a Hungarian rabble-rouser with close ties to the ruling Fidesz party who passes himself off as a journalist. Bayers style mirrors the screeching, obscene rants of Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi

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rag Der Sturmer. His rambling tirade included a reference to a stinking excrement called something like Cohen, followed by an expression of regret that theymeaning the Jewswere not all buried up to their necks in the forest of Orgovany, the site of a pogrom during the Hungarian White Terror of 1919-20. Kuala Lumpur, July 28: The Chelsea football club has made an official complaint following what it describes as antisemitic abuse directed at Israeli player Yossi Benayoun at a match where he helped Chelsea beat Malaysian XI. The Israeli became the first footballer from the Jewish state to play in a match in Malaysia in many years; Israelis Tal Ben Haim and Avram Grant were denied visas to enter the Muslim-majority country for matches in recent years. But despite being allowed to play, things did not go smoothly for Benayoun. Instead, many in the 85,000-strong crowd jeered and booed him when he came in contact with the ball, and he was substituted at halftime. Little Rock, AK, July 29: In a letter to the FBI, obtained by The Associated Press under a Freedom of Information Act request, Abdulhakim Muhammad said he fired 10 rounds at the home of Rabbi Eugene Levy days before he fatally shot Pvt. William Andrew Long and wounded Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula in June 2009. A judge sentenced Muhammad to life in prison without parole this week after prosecutors accepted his plea agreement during his capital murder trial for killing Long and hurting Ezeagwula. In the letter, dated November 24, 2009, Muhammad said he targeted Levys house after researching Jewish leaders in Little Rock, Nashville, Tenn., and his hometown of Memphis, where he was born with the name Carlos Bledsoe. He changed his name after converting to Islam in college. Figured the FBI wasnt watching me anymore, he wrote. I started my Plans to Attack, recruitment centers, Jewish organizations, across America . . . London, July 30: The Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity based in Great Britain, released a new report entitled Terrorist Incidents against Jewish Communities and Israeli Citizens abroad 1968-2010. The report indicates that between 1968 and 2010, 427 attacks have occurred in 57 countries. France had the highest number of attacks (51), followed by the United States (34), Italy (33), Argentina and Germany (29 each), and the United Kingdom (28). AUGUST Dublin, August 1: During a church sermon, Fr. Eddie Conway described Alan Shatter, the minister of justice, as a non-practicing Jew who has used

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the recent child sex abuse scandal to specifically target the church. Several mass goers walked out in response to his comments. Budapest, August 5: Anti-government protests broke out following the governments announcement to abolish early retirement. While the protest was predominantly composed of public service employees, several members from two right-wing extremist groups also participated. Hungarian public television reported that a white cloth with a Star of David was burned during the protest. Prague, August 5: Despite calls from government officials and NGOs to remove Ladislav Batora from the Ministry of Education, Czech education minister Josef Dobes insists that Batora is a dutiful person, a patriot, and a conservative Roman Catholic. He also insists that there is no evidence proving that Batora is a racist. Batora has been accused of having connections to racist and antisemitic organizations. Toronto, August 5: A swastika and the words Islam Will Rule were found drawn on a wall of a Jewish school, and two other swastikas were found on a nearby Korean-language church; details regarding a third incident are not available. Toronto and Canadian Jewish communities have condemned the incidents. Paris, August 12: A fashion icon whose name has become shorthand for timeless French chic, a shrewd businesswoman who overcame a childhood of poverty to build a luxury supernova and . . . a Nazi spy? . . . Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life, by Justine Picardie, alleges that in 1940, Chanel was recruited into the Abwehrher nom de guerre borrowed from another of her lovers, the Duke of Westminster. A year later, the book says, she traveled to Spain on a spy missionon condition that the Nazis release her nephew from a military internment campand later went to Berlin on the orders of a top SS general. Picardie suggests that Chanels alleged antisemitism pushed her to try to capitalize on laws allowing for the expropriation of Jewish property to wrest control of the Chanel perfume lines from the Wertheimer brothers, a Jewish family whod helped make her Chanel No. 5 a worldwide bestseller. Berlin, Aug 22: Vandals struck Weissensee Cemetery in the former East Berlin, Europes largest Jewish cemetery, after damaging 16 gravesites and stealing 47 items from Weissensee, and Jewish leaders are asking area metal dealers to check for wrought-iron objects that might have been stolen

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from the cemetery. According to the community, renovations on some of the tombs had been completed as recently as last April.

London, August 21: It is time, Brothers and Sisters, for Al Quds to be liberated. For Islam and people of the world who wish to pray there to the one God. And we say here today to you, Israel, we see your crimes and we loathe your crimes. And to us your nation does not exist, because it is a criminal injustice against humanity. We want to see Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt go to the borders and stop this now. Liberate Al Quds! March to Al Quds! These were the words spoken by Lauren Booth (Tony Blairs halfsister-in-law) at the Al Quds Day terror rally organized by the Islamic Human Rights Commission in Trafalgar Square. Placards (see above) that read Israel Your Days Are Numbered, Death to Israel, Down Down Israel, For World Peace Israel Must Be Destroyed, The World Stopped Nazism, The World Must Stop Zionism, and We Are All Hizbollah were displayed. Fife, Scotland, August 23: Student Paul Donnachie, 19, put his hands down his trousers, then rubbed them on a flag of Israel belonging to Jewish student Chanan Reitblat; Donnachie also accused Reitblat of being a terrorist during the incident at the residence halls in March. The case against his coaccused Samuel Colchester, 20, was found not proven. Donnachie has been expelled from St. Andrews and Colchester has been suspended for one year. Cupars Sheriff Court had earlier heard evidence from Reitblat, a chemistry student on a one-term exchange from the Jewish Yeshiva University in New York, who said he felt violated and devastated by the incident. Ramallah, August 28: Issa Qaraqi, the Palestinian minister of detainees and ex-detainees, accused Israel of harvesting parts from the bodies of dead Palestinian martyrs without the consent of their families. Qaraqi spoke during the national day of the Palestinian campaign to retrieve martyrs bodies.

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Israel is the major harvesting and trading centre in the world, he claimed. Israel holds the remains of Palestinian martyrs to conceal the crimes it committed against the martyrs bodies and to punish their families, Qaraqi said. Holding of the martyrs remains for many years casts doubts and [causes] accusations that Israel assassinated them after detention or harvested their organs, the minister said, adding that Israel is holding the remains of 338 Arab and Palestinian fighters in the secret Israeli cemeteries known as the Cemeteries of Numbers. Toronto, August 28: The traditional rally marking Al-Quds Day was held at Queens Park in front of the parliament of Ontario. The rally was attended by hundreds of people, and extreme anti-Israel speeches were heard. Zafar Bangash, president of the Islamic Society of York Region, attacked the United States and Israel, and expressed his belief that Palestine will soon be liberated from the current Jewish-Zionist regime. SEPTEMBER

Bialystock, Poland, September 2: Vandals destroyed a monument to victims of a World War II pogrom against Jews in Poland, covering it with racist inscriptions and swastikas in green paint, police said. It was the latest in a recent series of racist and xenophobic acts of vandalism targeting the small Jewish and Muslim communities in eastern Poland as well as the tiny Lithuanian minority. Bialystock, Poland, September 5: Polish media report that hundreds of people are marching in to protest racist and antisemitic attacks in the area, but a small group chanting nationalist slogans is trying to disturb the Sunday demonstration; the PAP news agency says Bialystok mayor Tadeusz Truskolaski and lawmakers of the ruling Civic Platform party are leading the protest march in downtown Bialystok. A monument to hundreds of Jews burned alive by their Polish neighbors in Jedwabne village during World War II was desecrated. Other recent attacks have targeted a synagogue in

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the village of Orla, a Muslim center in Bialystok, and the Lithuanian minority in the Punsk region. Cairo, September 10: Three were killed and 1,049 were injured in clashes outside the Israeli embassy late Friday and early Saturday, the health ministry said. The Israeli ambassador, his family, and working staff left Cairo early Saturday on an Israeli military plane as protesters who stormed into the embassy were still clashing with the Egyptian police and military forces in Giza. Egyptian commandos had entered the embassy building as it came under attack to escort six Israeli citizens to safety, the AFP reported. Only one Israeli diplomat stayed in Egypt to handle embassy affairs, an Israeli official told Reuters. Meanwhile, the Egyptian prime minister Essam Sharaf called a cabinet crisis meeting. Hundreds of protesters converged on the embassy throughout the afternoon and into the evening, tearing down a large graffiti-covered security wall outside the 21-story building that houses the embassy. The wall was erected on a bridge that runs along the street on which the building is located; it was built following ongoing protests against the killing of five Egyptian soldiers on the Sinai border last month. The police made no attempt to intervene as protesters were tearing down the wall with sledgehammers and their bare hands. New York, September 12: The sports network ESPN has removed fantasy leagues with antisemitic names from its Web site after the Simon Wiesenthal Center pointed them out. The Jewish human rights organization praised the sports network for its quick response to the complaint, which noted offensive names that included Jews Are Immoral and Jews Are Terrible. Network spokesman Josh Krulewitz said that while ESPN has systems in place to protect against inappropriate team and league names, clearly, with millions of users and deceptive ways around the safeguards, we can never completely eliminate [these incidents]. Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Wiesenthal Center said that ESPN responded in good faith to its concerns. Washington, DC, September 13: According to the 13th annual State Department Report on International Religious Freedom, antisemitism can be found in nearly every corner of the globe, and it is on the rise. Trends include increases in the traditional anti-Semitic actions and accusations that have plagued the world for millenniaincluding desecration of cemeteries, graffiti, and blood libel accusationsas well as Holocaust denial, revisionism, and glorification, the report found; some of this increase in antisemitism is part of the campaign to delegitimize and demonize Israel. The State Department is required to report regularly to Congress by the International Relig-

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ious Freedom Act of 1998; this edition covers the last half of 2010. It found spikes in anti-Semitic expressions in private as well as official media notably cartoonsin several countries, including Poland, Spain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Cairo, September 15: While walking in the street someone pushed me from behind with such force that I nearly fell over. Turning around, I found myself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch me in the face. I stopped the attack by pointing out how shameful it was for a Muslim to assault a guest in his country, especially during Ramadan. Relieved that a seemingly random assault was over, I was appalled by the apology offered by one of my assailants. Sorry, he said contritely, offering his hand, we thought you were a Jew. BBC Cairo Correspondent Thomas Dinham. London, September 15: The British government confirmed on Thursday that the UK will not take part in the UN-sponsored Durban III anti-racism conference on September 22. Foreign secretary William Hague said the original Durban conference 10 years ago had been an ugly affair. The conference, and the anti-Semitic atmosphere in which it was held, was a particularly unpleasant and divisive chapter in the UNs history. It is not an event that should be celebrated, he said. The British government remains fully committed to tackling all forms of racism, both domestically and internationally, something recognized by the recent report of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Hague said. The UN is the right place to discuss these important issues, in a serious way that delivers genuine progress. The UK continues our work with the UN to implement many of the commitments from the 2001 World Conference Against Racism. Ten of the UNs 193 member nations have now joined Israel in pulling out of Durban III: the UK, Germany, the United States, Canada, Italy, Austria, Australia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. Edmonton, September 17: A giant swastika carved into the side of a hill in Castle Downs Park in Edmonton, Alberta, seems to reflect a larger trend of antisemitic incidents and racism across Canada. The swastika was found by a park worker, who said he witnessed a group of young men carving the image into the hill. John Reilly, a spokesperson for Racism Free Edmonton, says such incidents are a disturbing consistent presence within our communities. According to Bnai Brith Canadas annual Audit of AntiSemitic Incidents, there has been a fivefold increase in harassment and violence against Jews in Canada in the past 10 years. More than 1,300 incidents were recorded in 2010the highest in almost 30 years, with the majority occurring in Ontario and Quebec. The incidents include harass-

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ment, stereotyping, discrimination, threats, violence, and vandalism involving crimes of messagingoffensive graffiti that contain racial slurs or swastikas. The identity of the perpetrators is largely unknown because the crimes are frequently anonymous, but the audit reported 97 cases where the perpetrator self-identified as being of Arab origin, followed by seven blacks, three Chinese, and one German. Reilly says there are known white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that are often the perpetrators of antisemitic attacks, but in a survey of Jewish Canadians commissioned by Bnai Brith, the greatest single concern among Jewish communities was about extremist Islamic organizations and dictatorships, not neo-Nazis or other sources. The audit also reported that social media and the Internet were increasingly being used for spreading hate or for assembling groups to participate in anti-Jewish events. OCTOBER New York, October 4: Following a consistent trend over the last several years, the Anti-Defamation League Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents found that the number of antisemitic incidents increased slightly in 2010, to a total of 1,239 incidents of assault, vandalism, and harassment, compared to 1,211 incidents reported in 2009. It is the first increase reported by the ADL since the numbers hit a record high in 2004, when the United States experienced 1,821 incidents of antisemitism. Since 2004, the total number of anti-Jewish incidents had declined incrementally each year. Buenos Aires, October 6: Two reports that reveal the extent of antisemitism in Argentina were released by DAIA, the Jewish umbrella organization. An opinion poll conducted by the Gino Germani Institute of the University of Buenos Aires found that 45 percent of those polled would never marry a Jew and that 30 percent would not live in a neighborhood with a large presence of Jews. The poll also showed that four out of 10 respondents have a negative opinion of Jews being involved in politics and five out of 10 think that Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. Some 54 percent of those polled agreed that Jews are the first ones to turn their backs on the needy. DAIA called the results of the poll disturbing and alarming. The survey was commissioned by DAIA and the Anti-Defamation League, which interviewed more than 1,500 people from across the country. According to Nestor Cohen, lead investigator from the University of Buenos Aires, Jews are perceived as powerful, not supportive, and not loyal to Argentina. He added that in this case, discrimination has more to do with an anti-Jewish and not an anti-Israeli feeling; it is not related to Israels political decisions. Meanwhile, the Annual Report on Anti-Semitism in Argentina showed that in 2010, anti-Jewish expressions appeared in public

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spaces, including graffiti with Nazi symbols, and there was a large increase over previous years in digital and virtual antisemitism. Approximately 300 antisemitic incidents are reported in the country every year. London, ON, Canada, October 16: Huron University College (the University of Western Ontario) announced the appointment of Ingrid Mattson, a professor at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and former president of the Islamic Society of North America, as the first London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies at its Faculty of Theology. The move validates widespread concern, by Canadian journalist Barbara Kay, that the support of several Islamist groups in funding the chair would lead to the appointment of a radical Islamist as the first holder. Rome, October 17: The Committee for the Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, chaired by MP Fiamma Nirenstein, has presented its Final Report to the public in the prestigious Hall of the Presidency of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, called Sala della Lupa. The report was unanimously approved by all members of the committee, formed by 30 MPs from the Constitutional Affairs and Foreign Affairs committees. The hearings and the initiatives that have accompanied the Committee works have been proceeding for the last two years. We have been attempting to understand the new aspects of this phenomenon, which is as aggressive and genocidal as it always was, but it is presently hiding itself by assuming new forms, MP Nirenstein explained. The work of the inquiry has brought up alarming data: 44% of the Italians declare that they do not feel any sympathy toward the Jews; there is an exponential proliferation of antisemitic Web sites and social networks; and the level of hatred against the State of Israel passes the limits of legitimate criticism and aims to destroy the Jews. New York, October 19: The Republican National Committee attacked Democrats for staying silent about extreme antisemitic, anti-Israel comments reported at the Occupy Wall Street protests. RNC communications director Sean Spicer blasted top Democrats for voicing their support for the demonstrations, even as some of the protesters make antisemitic, antiIsrael comments, according to a memo first reported in Morning Score. NOVEMBER London, November 1: The National Jewish Student Survey, conducted by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, found that more than four out of every 10 Jewish students at British universities reported witnessing or experiencing antisemitic incidents between October 2010 and this March, but that only two in 10 said they were concerned about campus

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antisemitism. Released in September, the survey also showed that respondents were generally comfortable with their religious identity, and relatively unconcerned about antisemitism and anti-Israel activity on campus. The survey is the first-ever study examining Jewish campus life in Britain. It was commissioned by the Pears Foundation and the Union of Jewish Students, the umbrella group that oversees Jewish societies at more than 100 British universitiesessentially the British equivalent of Hillel Houses in the United States. See http://www.jpr.org.uk/downloads/NJSS_report%20 final.pdf. Oxford, UK, November 8: Four members of the Oxford University Conservative Association have resigned over antisemitism and snobbery. The four senior members said they were quitting the association after members sang a song with a Nazi theme during an evening meeting billed as port and policy, the Telegraph reported. The members reportedly sang a song that begins with the line Dashing through the Reich . . . killing lots of kike. Student members of the club are facing disciplinary action by the university and the Conservative Party. Both have launched investigations into the incident, according to the newspaper. Two prime ministers and 13 cabinet ministers are among the clubs alumni. The club has faced accusations of racism in the past. In 2000, four members were expelled for making Nazi salutes.

Brooklyn, November 11: Three cars were torched and antisemitic graffiti was spray-painted at the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Midwood. Residents were awakened early by fire engines and were horrified to find three vehicles that were parked on Ocean Parkwaya BMW, a Jaguar. and an Audiburnt to a crisp. Swastikas, references to the SS and the KKK, and the slogan F the Jews were daubed on nearby vehicles, benches. and the sidewalk.

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Windsor, ON, Canada, November 12: Members of Congregation Beth El, a Conservative synagogue on Mark Avenue in South Windsor, discovered antisemitic graffiti on their building earlier this month. The exterior rear and west walls of the synagogue were spray painted with blue and red swastikas; in addition to the swastikas, the words Free Palestine were written on one wall. Its obviously upsetting, said Hillery Guttman, president of the congregation. There are members of the congregation who had family in the Holocaust, he said. He did not think that the incident, which he called isolated, is reflective of the broader community; he considers it the work of a tiny group of delinquents. Guttman said he stumbled on the graffiti when he arrived at the synagogue on Sunday morning to set up for an event. Malmo, Sweden, November 17: Police in Swedens third-largest city are reporting a significant rise in the number of reported antisemitic hate crimes this year. Recent statistics from Swedens National Council on Crime Prevention (Brottsforebyggande r det) revealed that nationwide in 2010, there a were 161 reported antisemitic hate crimes. We reluctantly are issuing this advisory because religious Jews and other members of the Jewish community there have been subject to antisemitic taunts and harassment. There have been dozens of incidents reported to the authorities but have not resulted in arrests or convictions for hate crimes, the center said in a statement. The upswing in antisemitic violence in Sweden is being attributed to two key factors: the exponential increase in the number of Muslim immigrants in the country, thanks to some of the most liberal immigration laws in Europe; and to those left-wing politicians who never miss an opportunity to publicly demonize Israel. Muslims are now estimated to comprise between 20 and 25 percent of Malmos total population of around 300,000; much of the increase in anti-Jewish violence in recent years is being attributed to idle Muslim immigrant youth. Sydney, November 28: Jews in Australia faced 517 incidents of harassment or intimidation in the year to September 30, a 31 percent rise from the year before, according to the Jewish communitys annual report on antisemitism. Put bluntly, in Australia this year, 10 times a week, every week, Jewish Australians were attacked or threatened, report author Jeremy Jones said. It is the 22nd year that Jones, community affairs director for the Australia/ Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, has produced the report, which showed a 38 percent increase over the average of the previous 21 years but an 80 percent drop on the record tally (2009).

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DECEMBER Cardiff, December 2: A Welsh MP has been accused of antisemitism after questioning whether a Jew ought to be Britains ambassador to Israel. Paul Flynn, who represents Newport West, made the remarks while questioning Sir Gus ODonnell during an inquiry by the Public Administration Select Committee into the role of the head of the civil service. The present civil service chief was being questioned about his investigation into Adam Werritty, the controversial friend of former defense secretary Liam Fox. Flynn questioned the appointment of ambassador Matthew Gould, who took up the post in Israel last year. Conspiracy theorists have alleged that Gould, Fox, and Werritty all met with Mossad, the Israeli secret service, in order to discuss a possible strike on Iran. I do not normally fall for conspiracy theories, but the ambassador has proclaimed himself to be a Zionist and he has previously served in Iran, in the service, Flynn said. Winnipeg, December 6: Police confirmed that a 15-year-old boy had been charged with assault with a weapon for allegedly using a lighter to burn the hair of a Jewish classmate while uttering antisemitic remarks in the halls of Oak Park High School. But while police said it was still being determined whether the boy will be charged with hate crimes, the boy had a message of his owna picture of himself on his Facebook page wearing a shirt with a slogan relating that he loves haters. And hes being lauded by others online for the alleged attack. The case shows the durability of antisemitism, said David Matas, a prominent Winnipeg lawyer who is senior honorary counsel for Bnai Brith. The fact that it should arise in somebody so young shows that its going to be projected into the future, Matas said. It just seems never to end. London, December 22: A 19-year-old man has been questioned by police on suspicion of throwing eggs at Jews in two drive-by attacks in Hendon and Golders Green, in northwest London. In the first incident, four Jewish girls in their early 20s had eggs thrown at them as they walked along Golders Green Road. A similar attack took place when two Jews, a 29-yearold man and a 20-year-old woman, were egged and subjected to racial taunts. Hackensack, NJ, December 23: The Conservative Temple Beth El was vandalized on the first night of Hanukkah, according to reports by NBC and CBS news. Swastikas were scrawled on the front door and west side of the synagogue, along with four marks of white supremacy. In addition, the phrase, Jews did 9/11 was sprayed on the sidewalk leading to the building, NBC reported.

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San Francisco, December 26: A lawsuit by two Jewish students accusing UC Berkeley of turning a blind eye to alleged intimidation by Arab students and fostering a climate of antisemitism has been dismissed by a federal judge, Richard Seeborg, who said school officials have no duty to intervene in campus political disputes. The plaintiffs, a current student and a recent graduate, said they and other Jews have been harassed during Apartheid Week, held by Muslim student groups each year to protest Israeli policies. They said organizers set up checkpoints where demonstrators in military attire brandished fake weapons and asked passing students whether they were Jewish. When plaintiff Jessica Felber walked by with a sign reading Israel wants peace at the March 2010 protest, a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine rammed her with a shopping cart, the suit alleged. The suit said demonstrators at other UC Berkeley events in the past decade have spat at Jewish students, disrupted pro-Israeli speakers, and compared Israels government to Nazi Germany.

Warsaw, December 29: The city published a calendar that includes a poster depicting Jews as rats. The glossy publication, produced in conjunction with leading Polish artists and arts organizations, contains a foreword from Warsaws mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Walc, who describes the calendar as a beautiful showcase for the masterpieces of Polish graphic art. She adds: We can feel the atmosphere of bygone days. Council spokesman Bartosz Milczarczyk admitted that he had looked at all the illustrations carefully,

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with deputy mayor Wlodzimierz Paszynski, and decided it contained nothing inappropriate. New York, December 30: Fox Latin America ran a poll on its Facebook page asking people to choose between Pontius Pilate, the high priests, and the Jewish people. The poll was placed to promote a National Geographic Christmas special. Fox spokeswoman Guadalupe Lucero said that the network had put measures in place to prevent a repeat of the incident. In a letter to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, she said the poll contradicted the mission and spirit of National Geographic worldwide. We sincerely apologize for the publication of a poll that might have unintentionally given place to interpretations, opinions or expressions of intolerance affecting the Jewish community, she said. We deeply regret the incident. The suggestion that Jews were responsible for the deicidethe killing of Jesushas been something that has damaged Jewish-Christian relations for centuries, but even the Vatican disowned the idea more than four decades ago. Dr. Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal Centers director for international relations, said it was an outrage to see repeated a slur that resulted in persecution and murder of Jews for two millennia.

In an Academic Voice: Antisemitism and Academy Bias


Kenneth Lasson*
Current events and the recent literature strongly suggest that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are often conflated and can no longer be viewed as distinct phenomena. The following paper provides an overview of contemporary media and scholarship concerning antisemitic/anti-Zionist events and rhetoric on college campuses. This analysis leads to the conclusion that those who are naive about campus antisemitism should exercise greater vigilance and be more aggressive in confronting the problem.

Key Words: Antisemitism, Higher Education, Israel, American Jews

In America, Jews feel very comfortable, but there are islands of antiSemitism: the American college campus. Natan Sharansky1

While universities like to nurture the perception that they are protectors of reasoned discourse, and indeed often perceive themselves as sacrosanct places of culture in a chaotic world, the modern campus is, of course, not quite so wonderful. The romanticized vision of life in the Ivory Towera peaceful haven where learned professors ponder higher thoughts and where students roam orderly quadrangles in quest of truth and other pleasureshas long been relegated to yesteryear. In fact, the academic enterprise in America was besmirched by racism early in its history: until the latter part of the twentieth century, segregation and ethnic quotas were the norm, not the exception. But what was once accepted prejudicial policy has now given way to an aberrational form of political correctness, which still vividly illustrates failures of scholarly rigorthe abandonment of reliance on facts, common sense, and logic in the pursuit of narrow political agendasand which are all too often
1. Natan Sharansky came to prominence as a prisoner in the former Soviet Union. From 2003 to 2005 he served as Israels minister for diaspora affairs, and is currently chairman of the Jewish Agency. He made these remarks in the documentary film Columbia Unbecoming. See Campus Anti-Semitism: A Briefing Before the United States Commission on Civil Rights Held in Washington, D.C., November 18, 2005, http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/081506campusantibrief07.pdf.

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presented in the academic voice. Instead of a community of scholars thirsting for knowledge in sylvan tranquility, what we frequently encounter (particularly in England and Europe, but in elite American universities as well) are hotbeds of radical turmoil. Among the abuses of intellectual honesty that have been taking place in American universities, particularly over the past decade, is the loud and strident opposition to Israel. Frequently camouflaged as righteous protests against the apartheid policies of an oppressive regime, vehement protests against the Jewish State are held on a growing number of campuses. While the number of overt antisemitic incidents has declined in the United States over the past few years, there has been a significant increase in anti-Zionist rhetoric and activity on campuses around the country. Though the two concepts are not always identical, in todays world they almost completely overlap. Indeed, modern anti-Zionism and antisemitism are virtually confluentand ultimately impossible to distinguish in any way but semantically. Thus has anti-Zionismwhich in its narrowest dimension is an argument directed against the political realization of the State of Israel, but in its latter-day context has provided those who dislike Jews a convenient cloak behind which to hidemorphed into antisemitism. Many such sentiments are expressed by individual professors. The most notorious recent example is the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.2 Words matter. They can cause damage. They have consequences.3 Moreover, articulate academic anti-Zionists use well-crafted rhetoric to diffuse critics.4 While the First Amendment broadly protects freedom of speech, even for libertarians, the Constitution has limits. Defamation is pun2. See notes 172ff. and accompanying text [unless otherwise noted, all references to notes in these footnotes are to other footnotes in this same list]; see also Rupert Cornwell, Out of America, www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/ rupert-cornwell-out-of-america-464069.html. 3. See Victor Sharpe, Words Have Consequences, The Jerusalem Connection Report, July 14, 2011, http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2011/07/14/ words-have-consequences.html; and Mary Elizabeth Williams, The New High Price of Mouthing Off, Salon, http://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/megan_fox_john _galliano_anti_semitism/. 4. See, e.g., comments to Alex Katz, Antisemitism Thrives in Academia, Stanford Review, January 18, 2011, http://stanfordreview.org/article/anti-semitismthrives-in-academia; see also comments to Eric T. Justin, Protocols of the Elders of Crazy, Harvard Crimson, October 3, 2011, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/ 2011/10/3/arab-world-antisemitism-jews/. For a broader discussion of this phenomenon, see note 55ff. and accompanying text.

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ishable, for example, as is speech that incites to violence. But the problem with regulating hate speech is where to draw the line. While an academic institution should not allow itself to become a forum for bigotry, neither should its freedom of expression be limited. It is better to err on the side of liberty; an excess of tolerance is still preferable to censorship.5 Students today increasingly find themselves confronted by curricula manipulated by scholarly extremists. Principles of academic freedom and the universality of science should have prevented such noxious campaigns, but they have not. The much-ballyhooed quest for balance raises problems of its own. Must Holocaust studies be balanced by Holocaust denial? To what extent can evolution be balanced by intelligent design? Does the obligation toward balance cover every point taught in a course, or only major disputes? Who is to enforce the norm? Antisemitism is not just name-calling, but something much more corrosive and damaging. Responses to hate speech or disruptive behavior must be firm, immediate, and consequential. To the extent that those who spout antisemitic rhetoric are in our faces, we must be in theirs. Ironically, perhaps the most pernicious effects of academic antisemitism can be illustrated by looking at what happened to the short-lived Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA).6 This article examines how the relationship between antisemitic and anti-Zionist speech and conduct both play out on contemporary university campusesand suggests ways in which such rhetoric and conduct can be confronted without doing harm to First Amendment principles.7

5. See Assaf Sagiv, A Study in Hate, Azure (Spring 2010):14. 6. See section in this article entitled The Yale Initiative. 7. I have addressed most of the issues treated herein in other forums. See, e.g., Kenneth Lasson, Antisemitism in the Academic Voice (chapters in two books: Antisemitism on Campus: Past and Present, Eunice Pollack, ed. [Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011], and Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity, Charles Small, ed. [Brill Academic Publishers, 2012]; see also Kenneth Lasson, Defending Truth: Legal and Psychological Aspects of Holocaust Denial, Current Psychology (November 2007); and Scientific and Scholarly Boycotts of Israel: Abusing the Academic Enterprise, Touro Law Review 21 (2006):989.

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THE BACKDROP: FROM MARX

TO

BIG LIES

Religion is the . . . opium of the people. Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals. Karl Marx and Edmund Wilson

Antisemitism in the academy is not a new phenomenon. Much of it can be traced to Karl Marx, whose 1844 essay On the Jewish Question was an early reflection of modern leftist thought. What is the profane basis of Judaism? asked Marx. Practical need, self-interest, he answered. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself . . . the emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.8 Marx was a classic antisemite, not unlike those fabricators of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, who viewed civilization as having been captured and destroyed by Jewish values, practices, and conspiracies. Let the world be rid of the Jews was (and is) the message, and all will be well.9 Some historians offer a psychological explanation for Marxs hatred of Jews. No matter what he did in his life, he could not shed being branded a Jewalthough he did not consider himself one. In fact, when he was born, in 1818, his father, who had changed his name from Herschel Levi to Heinrich Marx, had already converted to Christianity and had his own six living children baptized.10 Marxism was not the only early antecedent to modern Jewish leftists hostile to Jews in general and Israel in particular. Jewish members of the Communist Party had good reason to draw a line between themselves and
8. Sally F. Zerker, quoting Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, in AntiZionist Jewish Leftists Are Part of a Line Stretching Back to Marx, Canadian Jewish News, November 26, 2009. Ms. Zerker is a professor emeritus at York University in Canada. Marx also famously said (in 1843, in his Contribution to Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right) that religion is the opiate of the masses, to which Edmund Wilson responded over a century later: Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals (conservativeforum.org, http://www.conservativeforum.org/auth quot.asp?ID=958). The quote is originally attributed to Raymond Aron, LOpiom des intellectuals (1955). 9. Zerker, Anti-Zionist Jewish Leftists. 10. Karl Marx was six years old when he was converted to Christianity. Zerker, Anti-Zionist Jewish Leftists.

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the Jewish community at largeeven though they had to form their own branch of the party, which at the time was blatantly antisemitic.11 Academic antisemites in Germany may not have participated in pogroms, but their scholarship during the Third Reich served to legitimize anti-Jewish policies. Much about them is surveyed by Alan Steinweis in his book, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany, which reveals how willingly some scholars were to endorse the Nazis world view prevailing at that time. Moreover, they continued their academic antisemitism after the war. Alan Steinweis effectively illustrates what is at stake when scholarship is placed at the service of politics.12 Through it all, ample usage has been made of the Big Liea classic modern-day manifestation of the truth-twisting tactic made notorious by Nazi propagandists during World War II.13 Israel has long stood accused of conducting a harsh military occupation of Arab lands inhabited by an indigenous, peace-seeking Arab populationdespite overwhelming evidence that such charges have no basis in fact. The misnamed occupation allegedly began after Israels 1967 victory in the Six-Day war, when Jews began to settle in the disputed biblical areas known as Judea and Samaria. Initially, Arab reactions were positive:
11. Zerker, Anti-Zionist Jewish Leftists. 12. Alan E. Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). See also Mikael Tossavainen, review of Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany, Canadian Journal of History, December 22, 2006. 13. The Big Lie as a tool of propaganda was introduced by Adolf Hitler in his 1925 autobiography Mein Kampf. To be effective, he wrote, it must be so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. He went on to suggest that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily. The Big Lie was used by Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, who understood that not only must the false claim be colossal, but it also must contain at least a kernel of truth, and be repeated with great frequency. In the Middle East today, the necessary kernel of truth is that in fact Israel does occupy Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalembut in the same way it occupies Tel Aviv and Haifa. So too does the United States occupy Miami and Los Angeles, with their minority Latino populations, as does Canada occupy Quebec, with its minority French population. See Zelig Fried, OccupationThe Big Lie, Arutz Sheva (Israel National News), December 27, 2007, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ Articles/Article.aspx/7656. See also Israel Frederick Krantz, On Campus: Defending the University Means Winning the Ideoloical War, Israfax, August 23, 2009, 266.

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Jews would regularly visit Arab towns and villages, and employ and provide assistance to local townspeople; the Arab standard of living improved significantly as per-capita income increased and modern infrastructures roads, water supplies, electricity, medical care, and telephone communicationswere developed. Tourism flourished. Arabs and Jews worked and shopped together in Haifa, Ramallah, and Bethlehem. Roadblocks were virtually unknown.14 Following Egyptian president Anwar Sadats groundbreaking visit to Jerusalem in 1977 and the Camp David peace accords, Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula and has been at peace with Egypt ever since. These pacific relationships were dramatically altered in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo Accords, which ceded administrative control of the West Bank to the Palestinian National Authority (formerly the PLO). Emboldened by the promise of an independent Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, Arab leaders urged their constituents to demand the removal of all Jewish communities in their midst, which they now claimed as exclusively their own. In 1994, Israel granted the Palestinian Authority autonomous control of the major Arab cities and towns in these territories.15 For its part, the PA agreed to end propaganda attacks that called for Israels destructiona promise it never fulfilled. Instead, a new rallying call was introduced: End the Occupation. The modern rebirth of Israel began in the nineteenth century, with the reclamation of largely vacant land by pioneering Zionists, who soon became a Jewish majority. Few thought it odd that, although throughout their 2000-year exile there was a continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land, they were now accused of occupying it. Few questioned the historical incongruity that, having been sovereign in Judea, Samaria, and the lands west of the Jordan River for a thousand years, they would be branded occupiers. Judea, after all, had been named after its Jewish residents.16

14. Fried, Occupation. Occupation is a hyperbolic term when used in this contextsimilar in nature to Nakhba (Arabic for catastrophe, the word used by Palestinians to describe Israels independence in 1948). 15. Fried, Occupation. In 1995, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Egypt. 16. It was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the majority of Arabs living west of the Jordan River migrated to the area. During that period, the land was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, and, subsequent to that, until the founding of the state of Israel, it was under the control of the British Empire. Fried, Occupation. Following Israels War of Independence, in 1948, Egypt occupied Gaza, Jordanthe West Bank, and Syriathe Golan Heights. None were there to help the Palestinians create their own homeland.

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Moreover, Jerusalem had been known since the dawn of history as a Jewish city: it is mentioned in the Old Testament no fewer than 600 times but not once in the Koran. Nowhere has the Big Lie been more popular than in the universities, where to this day scores of anti-Zionist professors seek to denigrate Israel at every opportunity. The occupation mantra has assumed such magnitude that it has spawned a host of related myths, particularly that Israels military has met Arab resistance with cruelty and insensitivity by setting up purposefully humiliating checkpoints to harass innocent Arabs. This too flies in the face of ample evidence to the contrary. No army besides Israels has had to deal with more suicide bombers, deadly ambushes, drive-by shootings, kidnappings, and rock throwing interspersed with rifle fire, on a daily basis and for so extended a period. The Israel Defense Forces are widely viewed by other democratic nations as models of humane behavior, thoroughly trained to respect the sanctity of life and to demonstrate an individual and collective morality greatly exceeding that of other military regimes.17 In the best tradition of the Big Lie, propaganda is promulgated as fact. Thus, there have been repeated assertions that Israel: (a) is the primary stumbling block to achieving a Two-State Solution; (b) is a nuclear power that presents the greatest threat to peace and stability in the Middle East; and (c) is an apartheid state deserving of international boycotts, divestment campaigns, and sanctions; (d) plans to Judaize Jerusalem by building thousands of new homes in the eastern part of the Holy City; (e) adopts policies that, besides endangering U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, are the root cause of worldwide antisemitism; and (f) is primarily responsible for a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, against whose citizens it committed war crimes. Trumpeting these claims loudly and often enough has allowed them to take on the character of unassailable truths. Were they subjected to the same objective scrutiny that academic historians and political scientists traditionally require of their disciplines, many if not all of them would prove without merit. Todays Muslims and Palestinians draw on the earlier experiences of radical black students. The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, and

17. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW5VaxxBhCw; see also http:// www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/IDF_ethics.html.

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Stokely Carmichael pioneered the demonizing of Jews and Israel in the universities.18 The Pavlovian responses of university administratorsa combination of fear and condescensionhave set the bar of incitement from todays protected groups so high that only physical violence is treated as offlimits.19 CANARDS ON CONTEMPORARY CAMPUSES: ANTISEMITISM VS. ANTI-ZIONISM
One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Abba Eban20

In the first decade of this century, antisemitism and anti-Zionism were systemic in the United States and elsewhere. Jewish and pro-Israel students across the country are patronized, mocked, intimidated, and sometimes physically attacked, while anti-Israel professors exercise bully pulpits, expressing the dominant narrative that the Palestinians are cruelly oppressed, and that Arabs are suffering needlessly at the hands of racist, apartheid, and genocidal Israeli occupiers.21
18. See Eunice Pollack, African Americans and the Legitimization of Antisemitism on the Campus, in Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present, Eunice Pollack, ed. (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011). 19. Alex Joffe, Jewish Ideas Daily: Anti-Semitism 101, Jerusalem Post, April 8, 2011. 20. In his career, Abba Eban (1915-2002) was the Israeli foreign affairs minister, education minister, deputy prime minister, and ambassador to the United States and to the United Nations. He was also vice president of the United Nations General Assembly and president of the Weizmann Institute of Science. After leaving government service, in 1980, he devoted the rest of his life to writing and teaching, including serving as a visiting academic at Princeton, Columbia, and George Washington universities. 21. Joffe, Jewish Ideas Daily (note 19). Notable recent books on academic antisemitism include Manuel Gerstenfeld, ed., Academics Against Israel and the Jews (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007); Kenneth Marcus, Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which addresses legal issues related to Jews as an ethnic group; Jerome Karabels study, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), which is on the history of admissions policies at elite institutions that discriminated against Jews on account of their character; the new collection by Eunice Pollack, Anti-Semitism on the Campus: Past and Present (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011); and Gary Tobin et al.,

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In this centurys second decadealthough there has been neither a broad-based resurgence of antisemitic attitudes on college campuses nor a widespread rejection of Israel in favor of the Palestinian causea hard-core minority of anti-Israel and antisemitic academics have gained disproportionate influence in university life.22 STATISTICS
AND

NARRATIVES

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), since 2002 there have been close to 100 major antisemitic incidents per year occurring on American university campuses.23 The most overt acts have come in the form of harassment and intimidation; they range from minor physical contact (such as spitting) to more extreme violence involving lethal weapons.24 A pattern of antisemitism, usually camouflaged as anti-Zionism, has emerged at elite universities in California and the Ivy League. At the University of California Irvine, for example, with a student population of about 24,000a thousand of whom are Jewishthere have been numerous incidents of property destruction, physical threats, and actual violence.25 In 2002, an article appeared in a UCI student publication claiming that Jews are a genetically different and inferior race. Posters began appearing
Uncivil University: Politics and Propaganda in American Education (San Francisco: Institute for Jewish and Community Research, 2005). 22. Kenneth Marcus, Fighting Back Against Campus Antisemitism, Jewish Ideas Daily, March 28, 2011. 23. This number represents only those incidents that have been reported and documented. It is likely that many such acts go unreported because of fear, intimidation, or embarrassment. The exact number of incidents per year are: 2002: 106; 2003: 68; 2004: 74; 2005: 98, 2006: 88; 2007: 94; 2008: 85. For current statistics, see 2010 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, Anti-Defamation League, http://www. adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_Domestic/2010_Audit. 24. Such a trend can be traced back at least fifteen years. In March 1995, for example, at the University of Pennsylvania, two Jewish students were walking near campus when they heard derogatory epithets shouted at them by two other students. One of the harassers went into a nearby house and returned with a threatening shotgun. Police and university officials questioned the perpetrators and confiscated their weapons. Ultimately, the harassed students decided not to press charges; one of the perpetrators was voluntarily separated from the university. See Jeffrey Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate: Antisemitism on Campus (1997), http:// www.adl.org/sih/SIH-print.asp (hereinafter Schooled in Hate). 25. Susan B. Tuchman, Statement Submitted to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Briefing on Campus Antisemitism, Briefing Report on Campus Antisemitism, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, July 2006, 13, 14. For a discussion of antisemitism as anti-Zionism, see notes 36-63 and accompanying text.

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on campus depicting the Star of David (the traditional Jewish symbol) dripping with blood, and equating it with the swastika.26 In 2003, a Holocaust memorial on the campus was destroyed almost immediately after it was set up. Jewish students commemorating the Nazi horrors found a swastika carved into a table near where they had gathered.27 In 2004, a confrontation between Jewish and Arab students became a campus cause c l` bre. The ee Jewish student, wearing a skullcap and a pin captioned United We Stand and framed by American and Israeli flags, was walking inside an academic building. He was soon surrounded and threatened by Arab students, one of whom shouted Ee Bakh al Yahud! (Slaughter the Jews!).28 UCI, of course, does not stand alone as a focal point for such intimidation and harassment.29 In May 2002, at San Francisco State University, four hundred Jewish students held an Israeli-Palestinian Sit-in for Peace in the Middle East an attempt to engage in a civilized dialogue with their counterparts. The Jewish students spoke of their support for Israel, and their hope that a peaceful settlement could be achieved. When the event concluded, about thirty of the Jewish students were surrounded by a group of pro-Palestinian students, who shouted, Hitler didnt finish the job, F the Jews, and Die, racist pigs. University and city police were quick to react, forming a barrier between the Jewish and pro-Palestinian students and eventually leading the Jewish students out of the plaza. A freelance reporter wrote that she was convinced that if the police had not been present there would have been violence.30
26. Kenneth L. Marcus, The Resurgence of Antisemitism on American College Campuses, Current Psychology, 26(3-4, 2007):206, 210; and Anti-Zionism as Racism: Campus Anti-Semitism and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal (2007):837. 27. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Briefing Report on Campus Antisemitism (2005), 14. 28. Soon thereafter, the Jewish student left the university to study somewhere else. At least one other student has also left UCI because of the hostile environment on campus. Briefing Report on Campus Antisemitism (2005), 14. For recent responses to the UCI incidents noted, see notes 212ff. and accompanying text. 29. In April 2002, a Jewish student at Illinois State University was solicited to sign a petition in support of Palestinians; when he asked whether the petition addressed the issue of suicide bombings, an organizer of the group told him it addressed how to blow off the Jewish students head. antisemitism/Anti-Israel Events on Campus (May 14, 2002), http://www.adl.org/CAMPUS/campus_ incidents.asp. 30. Karen Alexander, San Francisco Dispatch, The New Republic (June 24, 2002):17. See also Briefing Report on Campus Antisemitism, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, July 2006, 24.

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On the same campus, antisemitic activities are often the focus of proPalestinian rallies. In 2002, an anti-Israel rally staged by Arab and Muslim students featured posters with pictures of soup cans reading Made in Israel on the label: under the contents, the words Palestinian Children Meat was found, and a photo of a baby with its stomach sliced open and the words according to Jewish Rites under American license were pictured on the bottom of the can.31 Psychological intimidation may be the most prevalent form of harassment, often experienced through acts of vandalism to public and private property. In February 2006, at the University of California, Berkeley, the word kike was painted on the front porch of a Jewish fraternity house.32 Similar incidents were reported in October and December of the same year in other American universities.33 A more extreme example of intimidation and violence occurred in 2008 near the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island. In March of that year Yossi Knafo, an emissary from the Jewish Agency of Israel, was in his kitchen when firebombs were thrown at his building, burning the outside.34 Although Knafo was unharmed, the incident had a profound effect on students on campusthe Hillel house was locked down, and a police officer had to be stationed outside. Students told administrators that they felt unsafe and vulnerable.35 Stanford University, the august Harvard of the West, has been similarly tainted by antisemitic incidents and rhetoric. In late 2009, a sukkah (the temporary hut constructed in celebration of the festival of Tabernacles) in front of Stanfords Hillel building was vandalized with graffiti; Stanford professor Joel Beinin is well known for his vitriolic anti-Israel lectures.36
31. Alexander, San Francisco Dispatch. 32. Antisemitic Incidents in U.S. Decline in 2006, Despite Year Marked By Violent Attacks (2006), http://www.antisemitism.org.il/eng/adl. 33. Antisemitic Incidents in U.S. Decline. At the University of Northern Colorado, the words Fing Jews was written on a Jewish students dormitory room door. At Ramapo College, in New Jersey, a professor found swastikas and the words Die, Jew Bitch written on her whiteboard. At the State University of New York, Albany, students found swastikas and KKK painted on the walls near a lecture center. 34. Jayakrishna Nandini, Hillel Staffer Moving On After Attack, Brown Daily Herald (April 9, 2008), http://www.browndailyherald.com/2.12235/hillel-staffermoving-on-after-attack-1.1670469. 35. Nandini, Hillel Staffer. 36. Alex Katz, Antisemitism Thrives in Academia, Stanford Review, January 18, 2011, http://stanfordreview.org/article/anti-semitism-thrives-in-academia.

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ANTI-ZIONISM

AS

ANTISEMITISM

In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to separate statements critical of Israel from those that are motivated by antisemitism. The former are often thinly veiled versions of the latter.37 Anti-Zionist incidents tend to increase in frequency with the changing intensity of perceptions about the State of Israel. During the intifada of the 1980s, for example, there was a sharp rise in anti-Zionism, reflecting the perceived evils perpetrated by the Israeli army against the Palestinian people. In the 1988-89 academic year, the University of Michigans student newspaper published a good number of anti-Israel rhetoric, including several editorials censuring a Jewish student group that sought to call attention to Arab terrorism.38 Although the mood changed somewhat after the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent election of the Labor government in 1992, and there was a similar period of relative tranquility following the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (in November 1995), anti-Zionist rhetoric began to increase shortly thereafter. California State (Fresno) Universitys Daily Collegian carried a particularly anti-Jewish article: one student was quoted as saying that When they [the Jews] disobeyed G-d, they broke the covenant; from that point on its no longer their land.39 In the early part of the 21st century, with the start of the second intifada and Yasser Arafats refusal to accept the Oslo Accords, anti-Zionist and antisemitic incidents began to increase. At the University of California Irvine, a registered student group initiated annual weeklong events entitled Anti-Zionist Week, Zionist Awareness Week, and Israel Awareness Week. The message was always the same: the Jews control the U.S. government and use the media to brainwash others; in turn, Jews need to be rehabilitated from the psychosis that exists in the Jewish community.40 Such strident propaganda leaves many Jewish students feeling alienated and marginalized, afraid to identify themselves as Jewish or as supporters of a Jewish state.41
37. This sentiment is hardly unique to the author. See, e.g., Caroline Glick, See No Evil, Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2010. 38. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate (note 24). 39. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate. 40. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Briefing Notes (note 25). 41. In 2002, a female graduate student wrote a letter to the UCI chancellor, explaining: Not only do I feel scared to walk around proudly as a Jewish person on the UC Irvine campus, am terrified for anyone to find out. Today I felt threatened that if students knew that I am Jewish and that I support a

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In 2002, a construction site for new dormitories at UC Santa Barbara was defaced with anti-Israel/antisemitic graffiti, including the phrases Anti Zion/Nuke Israel, G-d Hates Jews, and Burn the Torah. At the University of Colorado Boulder, antisemitic messages, including the phrase Your Tax Dollars Are Paying to Kill Palestinian Children, appeared on sidewalks throughout the campus on the first day of the planned observance of Holocaust Awareness Week. The next day at UC Berkeley, 79 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested after storming into a classroom in an attempt to disrupt a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration. At San Francisco State University, following a pro-Israel rally, Jewish students, faculty, and campus visitors were verbally assaulted and threatened. A group of proPalestinian counter-demonstrators hurled epithets at the crowd, including, Go back to Russia and Hitler did not finish the job. In 2008, of the 85 antisemitic incidents reported on college and university campuses (compared to an annual average of 88 incidents each year since 2002),42 many of them were of an anti-Zionist nature and, as before, many such demonstrations occurred in California. In September of that year, for example, a pro-Israel poster displayed at a bus stop at UC Berkeley was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas, and a proIsrael poster was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, also including swastikas.43 In May 2009, a large Apartheid Wall display was erected at UC Irvine showing inflammatory photographs and accusing Israel of deliberately killing Palestinian children.44 At UC Santa Cruz, a building was vanJewish state, I would be attacked physically. It is my right to walk around this campus and not fear other students and hear condemnation from them. It is my right for my government to protect me from harm from others. It is my right as a citizen who pays tuition and taxes to be protected from such harm . . . YOU may claim the first amendment. I claim the right to be safe and secure. You cannot use the first amendment as an argument against my safety. MY SAFETY SUPERCEDES FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS (emphasis in original). Notably, the chancellor never responded. An administrator who did respond suggested that the student visit the Counseling Center to help her work on her feelings. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Briefing Notes. 42. Campus Incidents by Year, as Compiled by the Anti-Defamation League: 2008: 85; 2007: 94; 2006: 88; 2005: 98; 2004: 74; 2003: 68; 2002: 106. For current statistics, see 2010 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, Anti-Defamation League, http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_Domestic/2010_Audit. 43. Emily Friedman, assistant director, Washington, DC, Anti-Defamation League, e-mail message to author, November 16, 2009. 44. Photos of Anne Frank were used to compare her fate at the hands of the Nazis with what is happening to Palestinians today. See Creating Hate at UC

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dalized with antisemitic graffiti alleging that Jews were behind the 9/11 attacks.45 Other campuses around the country experienced similar incidents in 2008, including Anna Maria College (swastikas and white power drawn on hallway walls); Baylor University (swastikas near dorm room of student who had recently converted to Judaism); Colorado University at Boulder (Jewish student subjected to antisemitic harassment by her roommate); Illinois State University (KKK fliers distributed on campus); Middlesex County (N.J.) College (antisemitic graffiti); Rowan University (dormitory painted with swastikas and the phrase Hitler is awesome); Rutgers University (antisemitic graffiti in stairwell); Saint Xavier University (neo-Nazi group demonstrating outside the building at which Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was presenting a lecture); Seton Hall University (numerous antisemitic and racial slurs drawn on the walls of the mens restroom); Temple University (two individuals physically assaulted and subjected to antisemitic taunts); the University of North Carolina (Jewish student harassed by new roommate, who claimed that Jews control worlds banking and entertainment industries); the University of North Dakota (student harassed by others with antisemitic slurs, then shot at with pellet gun); and the University of Oregon (Holocaust denier David Irving addressed students at an event sponsored by Pacifica Forum).46 In January 2009, at San Francisco State University, reacting to an antiHamas, anti-terror petition, members of a group called the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) assaulted students of the SFSU College Republicans, who had set up the petition.47 The GUPS accused the Republicans of acts of incivility, intimidation, and the creation of a hostile environment on campusdespite the fact that the GUPS routinely sponsors radical speakers who demonize Jews, Zionists, Israel, Republicans, and America.48
Irvine, May 13, 2009, http://www.standwithus.com/app/iNews/view_n.asp?ID= 1033. 45. Creating Hate at UC Irvine. 46. Creating Hate at UC Irvine. 47. The Republicans allowed students to throw a shoe at a Hamas flag, which was similar to their 2007 anti-terrorism rally, where they invited students to stomp on the flags of Hezbollah and Hamas. Richard L. Cravatts, Hate Speech at San Francisco State University, American Thinker, http://www.americanthinker.com/ 2009/o2/hate_speech_at_san-francisco_s.html. 48. Cravatts, Hate Speech. The Supreme Court has repeatedly declared that burning, defacing, or desecrating flags is protected speech under the First Amendment. See Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989), and U.S. v. Eichman, 496 U.S. 310 (1990).

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Unfortunately, the above cases are merely illustrative of many other antisemitic incidents that have been reported on American campuses. Similar situations occur at universities around the world. In April 2010, two pro-Israel students at Carleton University in Ottawa were physically and verbally assaulted off-campus by ten men, who accused them in Arabic for being Zionists, hit one of them in the back of the head, calling him a fing Jew, and came at them with a machete.49 During Israeli Apartheid Week at Carleton, the campus safety department discovered and reported to the police antisemitic graffiti in a bathroom Kill a Jew slow + painfully, Nuke Israel, and White Power.50 A spokesman for the university responded to these incidents by stating that certain kinds of behavior are not acceptable,51 but pointedly refused to address the issue of antisemitism on campus, stating that its role is to provide a forum for debates and discussions regarding the Middle East.52 Echoing that view, a member of the Faculty for Palestine group, which supports the student group that organizes Israeli Apartheid Week at Carleton, believes that the controversy is healthy and that there is nothing wrong with heated debate.53 York University in Toronto has likewise been the scene of overt antisemitism in recent years. In April 2008, Yorks Hillel brought thenKnesset member Natan Sharansky to the campus for a speaking engagement. Members of the Palestinian Students Association and Students Against Israeli Apartheid@York (SAIA) shouted down Sharansky, yelling
49. Dave Rogers, Machete Used in Antisemitic Attack in Gatineau, Carlton Students Say, The Ottawa Citizen, April 6, 2010, http://www.vancouversun.com/ Machete+used+anti+Semitic+attack+Carleton+students/2766537/story.html; Adam Daifallah, The Bitter Campus Divide, National Post, April 8, 2010, http://net work.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/04/08/adam-daifallahadding-a-machete-to-the-bitter-campus-divide.aspx. 50. Matthew Pearson, Hate Crimes Unit Probes Antisemitic Graffiti on Campus, The Ottawa Citizen, April 7, 2010, http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Hate +crimes+unit+probes+anti+Semitic+graffiti+campus/2770759/story.html. 51. Rogers, Machete Used (note 49). 52. Pearson, Hate Crimes Unit Probes (note 50). 53. Pearson, Hate Crimes Unit Probes. In reaction to the incidents at Carleton University, Adam Daifallah, a Canadian journalist of Palestinian descent, noted the degree to which student governments have become involved. Like Arab-Israeli journalist Khaled Abu Toameh, Daifallah agrees that one can be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine: To be truly pro-Palestinian is to oppose the murderous kleptocrats running the Palestinian Authority and to oppose the use of violent intimidation in the campus debate. Unfortunately, says Daifallah, most Palestinian activists, especially the younger and more radical, do not share this view. Daifallah, The Bitter Campus Divide (note 49).

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Get off our campus, you genocidal racist, and [Y]ou are bringing a second Holocaust upon yourselves.54 In February 2009, police had to usher Jewish students to safety after 100 Palestinian sympathizers barricaded the Jewish students in the campus Hillel offices.55 (The question has been asked why in Canada, where multiculturism is valued and criticism of protected minorities has been criminalized as hate speech, are radical students allowed to get away with targeting one group [Jewish students] with speech and actions that are specifically forbidden against any others.56 The same question can certainly be asked about what regularly occurs on American campuses, where university officials declare their firm commitment to the constitutional principle of freedom of speech, yet appear to enable certain groups to defame Israel and Jews under the pretense that they are fostering intellectual debate and constructive political discourse. Can this fairly be called scholarshipor is it merely antisemitism in the academic voice?) Although anti-Israel activity may not necessarily constitute antisemitism, when individuals or groups accuse Israel of committing war crimes by responding forcefully to terrorist bombardments of its citizensas happened most recently in the incursion into Gaza known as Operation Cast Leadthe sentiment becomes clear. As Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, puts it: Sixty years after the Holocaust, we are watching one layer after another of the constraints against antisemitism, which arose as a result of the murder of six million, being peeled away. The world is losing its shame about antisemitism. As a result, antisemitism is becoming more acceptable in wider circles.57 As noted earlier, articulate academics can use words effectively to diffuse criticism that their anti-Zionism is in fact a form of antisemitism.58 For example, an article in The Stanford Review, entitled Antisemitism Thrives in Academia, elicited various comments to the effect that there is no antisemitism at Stanford.59 Being against the practices of Israels government, said one, isnt any more antisemitic than being against the practices
54. Pearson, Hate Crimes Unit Probes. 55. Richard L. Cravatts, Is Assaulting Jewish Students on Canadian Campuses Now Legitimate Criticism of Israel?, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, February 10, 2010, http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=6480. 56. Cravatts, Is Assaulting Jewish Students. See also Barbara Kay, Toxic Classrooms, National Post, November 30, 2009. 57. Abraham H. Foxman, speech in Indianapolis, November 23, 2009, http:// www.adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_Domestic/Indiana_Achievement_Address.htm. 58. See notes 3-4 and accompanying text. 59. Alex Katz, Antisemitism Thrives in Academia, The Stanford Review, XLV, 7 (2011).

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of Americas government is anti-American or being against the practices of Irans government is anti-Islam. Many people who critique Israeli militarism also critique American militarism and human rights practices in China and Saudi Arabia.60 If only that were so. In fact, Israel is frequently singled out for criticism (especially human-rights abuses) that would bebut all too often is notmuch more accurately leveled at other countries. Similarly, an article in the Harvard Crimson entitled Protocols of the Elders of Crazy generated a slew of well-stated anti-Zionist comments.61 In response to the statement that Jews have a right to national homeland, a reader posted the following:
A right granted by whom exactly? Do left-handed people have a right to a left-handed homeland? Do the people whose families lived in Palestine for centuries have a right to continue to live there, or does the right of a political movement (Zionism) claiming falsely to represent all the worlds Jews trump that right? Does Israel have a right to seize territory in violation of international law and to settle it, again in violation of international law, with rabidly bigoted religious extremist settlers?62

The author of this posting thus ignores the full scope of both history and law, not only minimizing an early Jewish presence in the Holy Land, but also failing to recognize the virulent antisemitism in Arab and Islamic countries (much like that in Christian lands) that far predated modern Zionism. Likewise ignored is the fact that todays Palestinians seek a homeland that is completely free of Jews.63 On the other hand, words (especially when coupled with action/initiative) can have a positive effect as well.64
60. Katz, Antisemitism Thrives. A more intelligent comment to the same article, also in Katz: Lets concede the fact Israel is threatened daily with a call for complete extermination and by terrorist acts from groups like Hamas who have sworn to continue their jihad-like movement until the liberation of Jerusalem. Lets also concede that there are many, many Palestinians who just want to live in peace. Acknowledging both the positive and negative actions taken on all sides is absolutely essential to finding a solution. 61. Eric T. Justin, Protocols of the Elders of Crazy, Harvard Crimson, October 3, 2011, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/10/3/arab-world-anti semitism-jews/. 62. Justin, Protocols. 63. See, e.g., 66% of Palestinians Want Israel Destroyed, The Student Room, August 3, 2011, http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/show/thread.php?t=1727117; http://www.thejc.com/print/56021. 64. For example, Kasim Halfeez, an Arab schooled in hatred of Israel, changed his views after reading a book by Alan Dershowitz entitled The Case for Israel. Halfeez explains: As I read Dershowitzs systematic deconstruction of the lies I

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ANTISEMITISM

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All too often, antisemitism in the academy goes beyond the student body and emanates from faculty. From behind their lecterns or under the cover of published scholarship, statements that in other venues would be considered unacceptable bigotry are viewed in the Ivory Tower as part of honest debate in a respectable marketplace of ideas.65 Leonard Jeffries, former head of the Black Studies Department at the City College of New York (CCNY), began teaching in 1972, but did not come to national attention until several decades later, when it was reported he was telling his students that the rich Jews who financed the development of Europe also financed the slave trade.66 More notoriety ensued in 1991, following a speech Jeffries gave at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, where he reiterated his claim that wealthy Jews enabled the slave trade, adding that they also control the film industry, which paints blacks in a brutally negative stereotype.67 He also attacked Diane Ravitch, then the assistant U.S. secretary of education and a white Jewish member of the task forceformed to combat racism in the public school curriculum and upon which he also satcalling her as a sophisticated Texas Jew, a debonair racist, and Miss Daisy.68 In October 1995, Jeffries was a featured speaker at the Black Holocaust Nationhood
had been told, I felt a real crisis of conscience. I couldnt disprove his arguments or find facts to respond to them with. I didnt know what to believe. Id blindly followed for so long, yet here I was questioning whether I had been wrong? Halfeez decided to visit Israel to find the truth. He found himself confronted by synagogues, mosques and churches, by Jews and Arabs living together, by minorities playing huge parts in all areas of Israeli life, from the military to the judiciary. It was shocking and eye-opening. This wasnt the evil Zionist Israel that I had been told about (Kasim Halfeez, From Antisemite to Zionist, The Jewish Chronicle, October 7, 2011). His conclusion: to let Israels history speak for itself. Instead of meekly trying to avoid coming across as too pro-Israeli or too Zionist, it is time to make the facts known, to defend Israel against delegitimisation. It is time to stem the tide of Israel bashing before it becomes even more mainstream and consumes even more people like me (Halfeez, From Antisemite). 65. Natan Sharansky (see note 1) has astutely pointed out that in the academic world, it is the faculty who remain active for decades, disseminating their warped perspective on Israel and the Middle East conflict, while students come and go every few years. See also Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate (note 24). 66. The comment was reported in The New York Times. 67. Lionel Jeffries, Our Sacred Mission, speech given at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, New York, July 20, 1991, http://www. archive.org/details/OurSacredMission. 68. Jeffries, Our Sacred Mission.

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Conference held in Washington D.C., a group that is commonly recognized as both anti-white and antisemitic. Jeffries still teaches at CCNY as a tenured professor, and still speaks at colleges and universities.69 At the elite all-women Wellesley College in Massachusetts, a strict quota on the number of Jews admitted was in place through the 1960s. Requests by Jewish students to postpone examinations on Yom Kippur were routinely denied, as were bids for tenure by religiously observant Jewish faculty. Before he retired in 2007, Anthony Martin was a tenured professor in the African Studies Department of Wellesley College. He came to national prominence in 1993, when it became known that he required students to purchase the Nation of Islam book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, for one of his courses. An anonymously written conspiracy theory, the book described an overwhelming Jewish domination of the Atlantic slave tradecontradicting the weight of historical evidence, which indicates that Jews played a very minor role.70 In response to the controversy that ensued, Martin gave two speeches to the Wellesley College Academic Council in March of 1993, where he again asserted Jewish control over the Atlantic slave trade and made numerous new accusations: that Jews controlled the civil rights movement to the detriment of African-Americans; that Jewish-owned publishing companies conspired with Jewish academics to control African-American scholarship
69. Jeffries newfound notoriety was uncomfortable for City College, which reduced his term as head of the African-American Studies from three years to one and sought to remove him from the department. Jeffries sued the school. A federal jury found that his First Amendment rights had been violated, and he was restored as chairman and awarded $400,000 in damages. On appeal, the federal appeals court upheld the verdict, but removed the damages. One month later, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in another case, Waters v. Churchill, that a government agency may punish an employee for speech if the agency shows reasonable predictions of disruption. 114 S.Ct. 1878, 511 U.S. 661 (1994). Using this new decision, the New York State attorney general, G. Oliver Koppell, appealed Jeffries case to the Supreme Court. In November 1994, the high court ordered the court of appeals to reconsider its findings; it did so in April 1995, when it reversed its earlier decision, upholding the dismissal. See also Jeffries v. Harleston, F.3d 9 (2nd Cir. 1995) and Richard Bernstein, Judge Reinstates Jeffries as Head of Black Studies for City College, The New York Times, May 12, 1993, http://www.nytimes .com/1993/08/05/nyregion/judge-reinstates-jeffries-as-head-of-black-studies-forcity-college.html. 70. See Jerrold Auerbach, Wellesley College: Antisemitism with White Gloves, in the ADL Report, Eminent Scholars on The Secret Relationship, in Pollack, Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present (note 7).

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and culture; and that Jews were presently engaged in a racist offensive against black progress.71 In a self-published book (The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront), Martin describes a conspiracy against him by the school, three Jewish students who attended his class, and the ADL. The president of Wellesley College, Diane Chapman Walsh, wrote to alumni and parents to denounce Martins book for its application of racial and religious stereotypes. More than half of the faculty signed a similar statement of repudiation.72 Perhaps it is a perverse but inevitable irony that Israel itself has its share of anti-Zionist academics. Antisemitism in the academy surprisingly comes also from Jewish scholars and intellectuals, sending an equally strong message to Jewish students, especially those on historically Jewish campuses. In recent years, the late Hebrew University professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz called his country a Judeo-Nazi state.73 Moshe Zimmerman, director of the Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University echoed that sentiment, claiming that an entire sector in the Jewish public can be equated to German Nazis, and that Hitler did not intend to kill the Jews, but to raise the question of the Jews.74 Yitzhak Laor, an Israeli poet, author, and journalist, wrote a play, Ephraim Returns to the Army, which drew parallels between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Nazi occupation of Europe.75 One of the most outspoken critics of Israel has been Ilan Pappe, formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (19842007), and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000-2008). Before he left Israel in 2008, he had been formally censured by the Knesset, Israels parliament.76
71. The first speech was called An Answer to My Jewish Critics; the second speech was called Broadside No. 1. Auerbach, Wellesley College. 72. Although the college did not officially censure Martin and his tenure remained unaffected, in the summer of 1994 he was denied a merit raise because of his writings, and the history department dropped his courses from its catalogue. Auerbach, Wellesley College. 73. Seth J. Frantzman, Terra Incognita: Israels Democracy Wars, Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2010, http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id= 174680. See also Steven Plaut, Israels Tenured Extremists, The Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2011. 74. Frantzman, Terra Incognita. 75. Frantzman, Terra Incognita. 76. Pappes scholarship has also come under attack. See Ilan Pappe, Check Your Sources, CAMERA, November 4, 2011, http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x

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ANTISEMITISM OUTSIDE

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CLASSROOM

Outside the classroom, anti-Zionist groups often hold rallies and screen films that portray Israel in the harshest of terms, and disrupt proIsrael events. Jewish students increasingly find it challenging, if not frightening, to show their support for Israel.77 In November 1993, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a spokesman for Louis Farrakahns Nation of Islam, gave a lengthy speech at Kean College in New Jersey in which he demonized Jews, declaring that they were to blame for the Holocaust because they took over Germanys financial infrastructure, and were still sucking our blood on a daily and consistent basis.78 At the same event, Muhammad also sought to justify the Holocaust:
[E]verybody always talk about Hitler exterminating 6 million Jews. . . . But dont nobody ever asked what did they do to Hitler? What did they do to them folks? They went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped, they turned around and a German, in his own country, would almost have to go to a Jew to get money. They had undermined the very fabric of the society.79

Muhammad proceeded to instruct all whites to leave South Africa with 24 hours, or risk being killed.80 Kean Colleges response was both weak and belated. Eleven days after the speech, its president, Elsa Gomez, issued a statement that did not mention Muhammad by name, nor address antisemitism. Instead, she reiterated the schools firm support of free speech and freedom of dissent.81
_context=8&x_nameinnews=122&x_article=2145. Called Israels most contentious new historian, Pappe left his job as senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa after he endorsed the international academic boycott of Israeli institutions, provoking the university president to call for his resignation. See Tamar Traubman, Haifa University President Calls on Dissident Academic to Resign, Haaretz, April 6, 2005. 77. Charles Jacobs, Rampant Anti-Semitism on American Campuses, The Jewish Advocate, February 28, 2011. 78. Who is it sucking our blood in the Black community? A white imposter Arab and a white imposter Jew. Muhammad was brought to campus by a black student organization; he was paid by student activity funds. See generally Khalid Abdul Muhammad, Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ jsource/anti-semitism/Khalid.html. 79. Muhammad, Jewish Virtual Library. 80. Muhammad, Jewish Virtual LIbrary. 81. Vern E. Smith and Sarah Van Boven, The Itinerant Incendiary, Newsweek, September 14, 1998, http://www.newsweek.com/id/113381.

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Muhammad went on to give similar talks at Howard University, where he called Jews no-good, dirty, low-down bastards and declared that he was not impressed by the pile of shoes at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; and at San Francisco State University, where he denied the Holocaust, and claimed that Jews control the U.S. government.82 On occasion, there is more antipathy toward Israel on American campuses than within the Palestinian territories themselves. This appeared to be the case in March 2009, when an Arab-Israeli journalist named Khaled Abu Toameh toured the United States in an effort to promote peaceful dialogue about the Middle East conflict. He was often confronted by hostile audiences, who told him that Israel has no right to exist, that its apartheid system is worse than the one that existed in South Africa, and that Operation Cast Lead was launched not in response to four years of incessant rocket fire launched at Israeli communities like Sderot, but because Hamas was beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace. Toameh was further informed that all the reports of financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority was Zionist propaganda, and that Yasser Arafat had done wonderful things for his people, including the establishment of schools, hospitals, and universities.83 Toameh concluded that what is happening on U.S. campuses is less about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish statethat it is not about ending the occupation but about ending the existence of Israel.84
82. ADL Alerts Nations Academic Leadership About Virus of Bigotry Being Spread by Kahlid Abdul Muhammad, July 1, 1997, http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ ASUS_12/3005_12.asp. 83. Khaled Abu Toameh, On Campus: The Pro-Palestinians Real Agenda, Hudson Institute/New York, March 25, 2009, http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/03/ on-campus-the-pro-palestinians-real-agenda.php. 84. Toameh said that he regarded his hecklers as hard-line activists/thugs who would intimidate anyone who dared say something with which they disagreed: If these folks really cared about the Palestinians, they would be campaigning for good government and for the promotion of values of democracy and freedom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their hatred for Israel and what it stands for has blinded them to a point where they no longer care about the real interests of the Palestinians, namely the need to end the anarchy and lawlessness, and to dismantle all the armed gangs that are responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent Palestinians over the past few years. The majority of these activists openly admit that they have never visited Israel or the Palestinian territories. They dont knowand dont want to knowthat Jews and Arabs here are still doing business together and studying together and meeting with each other on a daily basis because they are destined to live together in

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Similarly, Noam Bedein, an Israeli photojournalist who regularly tours American campuses, reported that he had been subjected to a barrage of insulting signs and posters, as well as a by a large group of anti-Israel protesters. The shock came after they uploaded a video of my speech and the protests against me to YouTube. They edited the video to make me look like a demon. . . . [T]his is the first time I have ever experienced antiSemitism, of a particularly nasty, medieval sort, in which Jews are identified with demons and Satan. Bedein added his view that there are so many anti-Zionist activities on campus today that supporters of Israel are worn down, afraid to present even the most basic humanitarian facts about our side of the story.85 A large part of the anti-Israel lobbying taking place on American campuses is funded by an Iranian front organization, the Alavi Foundation, which makes ample use of pro-Iranian anti-Zionist professors. For example, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been donated to the Middle East and Persian Studies programs at Columbia University and Rutgers, for courses taught by academics who openly express sympathy for the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas. The Alavi Foundation donated $100,000 to Columbia University in 2007 after that institution agreed to host Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who frequently denies the Holocaust and questions Israels legitimacy as a state.86 The Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at Britains Brunel University reported that up to 48 British universities have been infiltrated by Muslim fundamentalists, all heavily financed by major Muslim groups, at a cost of more than one quarter billion Sterling.87 A recent report by the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv-based national security and socioeconomic policy think tank, describes a new battlefield it calls Hubs of Delegitmization, in which Israel finds the legitimacy of its existence attacked by a wide array of organizations and individualsmany of
this part of the world. They dont want to hear that despite all the problems life continues and that ordinary Arab and Jewish parents who wake up in the morning just want to send their children to school and go to work before returning home safely and happily. (Khaled Abu Toameh, On Campus) 85. Samuel L. Blumenfeld, Anti-Semitism on American Campuses, The New American, November 18, 2010. 86. Some $650 million of the Alavi Foundation was seized by U.S. federal law enforcement. Malkah Fleisher, US Colleges Teach Anti-Israel, Pro-Iran Courses Thanks to Alavi, Israel National News, November 24, 2009, www.IsraelNational News.com /News/News.aspx/134601 (quoting news reports by the New York Post and New York Times). 87. Fleisher, US Colleges Teach.

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them academicin London, Toronto, Brussels, Madrid, and Berkeley. The new front focuses its attack on Israels political legitimacy, painting it as a pariah state and mobilizing its Arab minority to engage in the struggle.88 Reuts report distinguishes between soft critics of Israel and hardcore delegitimizers, the latter consisting of anti-Zionists, antisemites, and radical Islamists, whose goal is to blur any distinction between intellectually honest criticism of Israeli policy and the Jewish States basic legitimacy.89 The report suggests that Israels traditional enemies have increasingly been joined in battle by widespread networks of anti-Zionist groups, including hostile human-rights organizations and homegrown radical Islamists, who, in the process of demonizing Israel, employ cultural, academic, legal, and financial weapons against it. The groups support an all-or-nothing dynamic, in which boycotts are presented as the only option.90 In March 2010, Jessica Felber, a Jewish undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, was holding a placard bearing the words Israel Wants Peace when she was physically attacked by a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). What made this case different is that Felber fought back, charging in a federal lawsuit that physical intimidation and violence were frequently employed as a tactic by SJP and other campus groups in an effort to silence students on campus who support Israel, and that the administration of UC Berkeley possessed substantial evidence of anti-Jewish animus and should be held liable for the injuries she suffered.91 At the University of California Santa Cruz, lecturer Tammi RossmanBenjamin made a similar case against her own employer. For several years, she had spoken out against antisemitism and anti-Zionism on her campus, describing an atmosphere at Santa Cruz in which taxpayer-supported, university-sponsored discourse demonizes Israel, compares contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, calls for the dismantling of the Jewish State, and holds Israel to an impossible double standard. Like Felber, Rossman-Benjamin also filed a civil rights action with the U.S. Department of Educations powerful Office for Civil Rights, arguing that UCSC had created a hostile environment for Jewish students.92
88. Amir Mizroch, Study Surveys Hubs of Delegitimization Where Israel Is Under Heaviest Attack, Jerusalem Post, December 25, 2009. 89. Mizroch, Study Surveys Hubs. 90. Mizroch, Study Surveys Hubs. 91. Kenneth L. Marcus, Fighting Back Against Campus Antisemitism, Jewish Ideas Daily, March 8, 2011. 92. Marcus, Fighting Back. (OCR sent a powerful signal to academia when it informed Rossman-Benjamin that it is formally opening an investigation of her

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Antisemitic activity on campuses continued in 2010 and 2011. In April 2010, at Carleton University, a (non-Jewish) supporter of Israel and his Israeli roommate were attacked by an Arab-speaking mob, one of whom wielded a machete.93 At Amherst in the fall semester of 2010, a pro-Israel female student was repeatedly harassed by masked individuals calling them baby killers, genocide lovers, apartheid supporters, and racist. After receiving an e-mail that read Make the world a better place and die slow, she moved off the campus. She is still afraid to disclose her identity.94 At Indiana University in November 2010, five incidents of anti-Jewish vandalism were reported in one week, including rocks thrown at Chabad and Hillel; sacred Jewish texts were placed in restrooms and defiled, and a Jewish Studies bulletin board was vandalized.95 In January 2011, Rutgers University hosted an event that likened Palestinians to victims of the Holocaust. The program had been advertised as free and open to the public; Palestinian supporters were let in without charge. The university, however, required a group of pro-Israel students and Holocaust survivors to pay an entrance fee.96 One might reasonably ask, what would have happened on campus, in the media, or in the community if these incidents had been directed at African American, Hispanic, or Muslim students? The answer might be suggested by actual events. In October 2009, a noose was found at the University of California San Diego library. Students occupied the chancellors office. The governor, the chancellor, and student leaders condemned the incident. The university established a task force on minority faculty recruitment and a commission to address declining African-American enrollment, and vowed to find space for an African-American resource center.97
claims.) See also Manfred Gerstenfeld, Academics Against Israel, Ynet News, September 14, 2011, http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11691. 93. See students-attacked-with-machete-at-carleton-university/. 94. Monumental Jewish Failure: Ceding the Campus and Abandoning Our Students, Talking Tachlis, February 25, 2011, http://talkingtachlis.blogspot.com/ 2011/02/monumental-jewish-failure-ceding-campus.html. 95. Campus, Community Respond to Recent Antisemitic Incidents, The College Magazine, Fall 2010, http://college.indiana.edu/magazine/fall2010/incidents. shtml. 96. Alyssa Farrah, Rutgers Bars Jews from Anti-Zionist Gathering, WorldNet Daily, January 29, 2011. 97. A few weeks later it was discovered that the noose had been planted by a minority student. Jacobs, Rampant Anti-Semitism (note 77).

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ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS

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ISRAEL

The idea of an academic boycott against Israel was born in Great Britain, whose largest faculty association has voted several times in the past five years to encourage a boycott of Israeli universities and professors over what it views as Israels apartheid policies toward Palestiniansadvocating that union members refuse to cooperate with Israeli academics who do not disassociate themselves from such policies.98 These boycotts likewise have antecedents in Nazi Germany. During Hitlers rise to power, some of his staunchest supporters were university professorsmany of whom were drawn into the higher echelons of the Nazi party and participated in its more gruesome excesses. Mussolini also had a large following of intellectuals, and not all of them Italian. So did Stalin, as well as such postwar dictators as Castro, Nasser, and Mao tzetung.99 The current campaign against Israeli scholars began in Great Britain a little more than eight years ago. Its specific goals were to inhibit Israeli scholars from obtaining grants; to persuade other academic institutions to sever relations with Israeli universities and faculty; to convince academics not to visit Israel while simultaneously not inviting Israelis to international conferences; to prevent the publication of articles from Israeli scholars and to refuse to review their work; to deny recommendations to students who wish to study in Israel; to promote divestment of Israeli securities or those of American suppliers of weapons to Israel by university foundations; and to expel Jewish organizations from campus.100 Well over 700 academics ultimately signed the boycott petitionmost of them British, but a considerable number of scholars hailed from a host of other European countries as well.101 In 2009, following Israels military campaign into Gaza to stop Hamas rocket fire that had barraged the country for six years, a group of American
98. Israel Apartheid Weeks have been celebrated worldwide every year since 2005. See http://apartheidweek.org/en/history; on occasion, politicians state their opposition to independent pro-Israel activists do not form the sole source of opposition to the Israeli Apartheid Week movement. On February 25, 2010, Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs) of varying political ideologies in Ontario collectively and unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week. 99. See, e.g., A. James Gregor, Mussolinis Intellectuals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 100. Douglas Davis, Fears Voiced that Academic Boycott of Israel Could Endanger Lives, Jerusalem Post, December 15, 2002. 101. Bill L. Turpen, Reflections on the Academic Boycott Against Israel, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1, 2003, 58.

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professors joined the call for an academic boycott. The group recommended divestment initiatives modeled on those used against apartheid South Africa. As educators of conscience, we have been unable to stand by and watch in silence Israels indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip and its educational institutions, declared the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. According to David Lloyd, a professor of English at the University of Southern California, the initiative was impelled by Israels latest brutal assault on Gaza and by our determination to say enough is enough. The statement was a response to what it called the censorship and silencing of the Palestine question in U.S. universities, as well as U.S. society at large, he added. The response has been remarkable, given the extraordinary hold that lobbying organizations like AIPAC exert over U.S. politics and over the U.S. media, and in particular given the campaign of intimidation that has been leveled at academics who dare to criticize Israels policies.102 Can it be true that anti-Zionist professors tremble in fear when they criticize Israel? Not likely, says Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, if you have any sense of whats going on on college campuses today, where Israelbashing is rampant among hard left faculty and students. At Columbia University, a group of professors sought to rebuke Columbias president, Lee C. Bollinger, for expressing his personal views about the Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They also want to muzzle students and alumni who have legitimate complaints about the Middle East Studies Department, which broadly reflects the political views of radical Islam.103 Ahmadinejads comment is reminiscent of that made long ago by the anti-Zionist historian Arnold Toynbee, who declared that the displacement of the Arabs was an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.104 The formula is clear: if youre against Israel, you should have complete freedom to speak your mind; if youre not, you should be stifled. Even at Harvard and Columbia, the First Amendment means free speech for me, but not for thee!105 To be sure, there have been swift condemnations of the academic and scientific boycotts against Israelmost notably by the former president of
102. Raphael Ahren, For First Time, U.S. Professors Call for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, Haaretz, January 29, 2009. See also Mission Statement, U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, http:// www.usacbi.org/mission-statement/. 103. See Alan Dershowitz, Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee!, Huffington Post, November 27, 2007. 104. See Eric Hoffer, Israels Peculiar Position, Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1968, http://www.factsandlogic.org/outstanding_hoffer.html 105. Dershowitz, Free Speech.

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Harvard, Lawrence Summers; by Judith Rodin, president of the University of Pennsylvania; and by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University. All of them pointed out that many countries involved in the current Middle East disputes have been aggressors, and calls for divestment against them have been notably absent.106 But no presidential statements have been able to quash anti-Israel faculties, protected as they are by academic freedom and tenure. On some campuses, the driving force behind the academic boycotts are Arabist professors who seek to prosecute the war against Israel as a way of diverting attention away from corrupt regimes. In the academic world, the radical agenda is supported by faculties in mid-Eastern and Islamic studies. Antisemitic statements emanate from prominent academics. Columbia University has had its share of problems in this regard. There have been numerous reports of intimidation and hostility by faculty members in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Culturesat least part of whose funding comes from the United Arab Emirates. In one incident, Professor Joseph Massad demanded of an Israeli student, How many Palestinians have you killed?107 He told a class that the Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the new Nazi.108 According to another account, he repeated twenty-four times in one half-hour period that Israel is a racist Jewish apartheid oppressive state, and he allegedly yelled at a Jewish student, I will not have anybody here deny Israeli atrocities.109 More than one-third of Columbias Middle East Department signed a petition for the university to divest its holdings in companies doing business with Israel. The chairman of the department, Hamid Dabashi, openly talks about Israels brutal massacres of innocent Palestinians.110 In 2005, the academic boycotts were pressed anew in Great Britain and elsewhere. Despite the fact that Great Britains Chief Rabbi, Jonathan
106. Lawrence H. Summers, Address at Morning Prayers, http:// www.ajc.org, September 17, 2002, 22. See also Edward Alexander, Pushing Divestment on American Campuses, Jerusalem Post, May 12, 2004, 13. In November 2002, seventy U.S. medical professors, of whom twelve were from Harvard, held an international conference in Jerusalem to protest the divestment campaign and other antiIsrael activities on American campuses. Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, 70 Medical Professors Coming to Protest Divestment,Jerusalem Post, November 18, 2002. 107. Editorial, New York Sun, December 10, 2004, 14. 108. Eric J. Greenberg, Jewish Students Accuse Columbia University of Bias, The Jewish Daily Forward, October 29. 2004. 109. Uriel Heilman, Columbia to Review Antisemitism Charges, Jerusalem Post, December 8, 2004. 110. See A Not So Academic Debate, Notebook, The New Republic, January 24, 2005, 8.

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Sacks, had been told privately (in 2002) by Prime Minister Tony Blair that the British government would not tolerate a boycott of Israel, the university establishment there and here has plodded on in that direction.111 Meanwhile, a silent boycott is already well in place. In 2006, for example, Bar-Ilan University made public a letter in which a British professor refused to write for an Israeli academic journal because of what he called the brutal and illegal expansionism and the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Israeli government.112 Could it be possible that the true motivation behind the boycott campaigns against Israel is anti-Zionism, whichas many point outis a razor-thin line away from antisemitism? ISRAEL
AS AN

APARTHEID STATE

As noted earlier, Israel Apartheid Weeks have been celebrated every year since 2006, and in growing numbers.113 The aim of such events, according to their organizers, is to contribute to this chorus of international opposition to Israeli apartheid . . . [and] an end to the occupation and colonization of all Arab landsincluding the Golan Heights, the Occupied West Bank with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Stripand dismantling the Wall and protecting Palestinian refugees right to return to their homes and properties.114 Academics worldwide are quick to join such demonstrations, which often end up demonizing what they call the Jewish apartheid state, likening Israel to segregated South Africa during the latter part of the twentieth century. The truth is that Israel is a democratic state; its 20% Arab minority enjoys all the political, economic, and religious rights and freedoms of citizenshipincluding electing members of their choice to the Knesset. In stark contradistinction to apartheid South Africa, both Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have standing before Israels Supreme Court. (In contrast, no Jew may own property in Jordan, and neither Christian nor Jew can visit Islams holiest sites in Saudi Arabia.)115
111. Francis Elliott and Catherine Milner, Blair Vows to End Dons Boycott of Israeli Scholars, The Daily Telegraph, November 17, 2002. 112. See Phyllis Chesler, Ivory Tower Fascists, National Review, May 30, 2006, http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/176/ivory-tower-fascists. 113. See note 98 and accompanying text. 114. See note 98 and accompanying text. 115. See 2010 Top Ten Anti-Israel Lies, Simon Wiesenthal Center, www.wiesenthal.com/toptenlies. See also Richard Goldstone, Israel and the Apartheid Slander, The New York Times, October 31, 2001.

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Even those who regularly criticize Israel, like Michael Ignatieff (the intellectual leader of Canadas Liberal Party), are uneasy with such events. The activities planned for this week will single out Jewish and Israeli students. They will be made to feel ostracized and even physically threatened in the very place where freedom should be paramounton a university campus.116 What can one say about the comparisons made between modern Israel and the apartheid South Africa of the late twentieth century? The fundamental differences between the two are clear and factual, and should go without saying, but many distortions of Israeli-Arab realities are promulgated by the Palestinians and perpetuated in the media. Although academic boycotts were virtually unknown before the days of apartheid in South Africawhere they were used largely at the behest of that countrys own scholars as a pressure tactic against the minority white governmentthere was never an attempt to cut off all South African academics from international discourse with their peers. In the process of the campaign to compare Israel with apartheid South Africa, short shrift is given to certain incontrovertible facts: Israels Declaration of Independence (1948) declared that the state will ensure equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.117 Israeli Arabs attend and lecture in every Israeli university. Moreover, an overwhelming majority of Israeli Arabs consistently state that theyd prefer to remain in Israel rather than join a future Palestinian state. Israeli Arabs serve in the Knesset (currently eleven in all, including two in the dominant Likud party), and can serve in the army if they wish. An Arab justice (Salim Joubran) holds a seat on Israels Supreme Court. Israel even opens diplomatic positions to Israeli Arabs, who have held posts in the United States, South America, Finland, and elsewhere.118 Needless to say, no such exercises in democracy occurred in apartheid South Africa. Yet, Israel is singled out, while there is no call for a boycott against academics in China, Russia, Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe, and North
116. Israel Resource Review, May 2, 2010, http://www.israelbehindthenews. com/bin/content.cgi?ID=3972&q=1. 117. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948. 118. Distorting Israeli Arab Reality, HonestReporting, May 18, 2005, http:// www.honestreporting.com/SSI / main / send2friend.asp?site = www.honestreporting. com&title=distorting%20Israeli%20Arab%20Reality&url=distorting_Israeli_Arab _Reality.asp.

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Koreaall of which oppress academics far more than Israel ever has. Why are there no boycotts of Muslim countries, where academic freedom either doesnt exist or is under constant attack, such as Syria, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia? Is the answer that the boycotters true goal is the elimination of Israel, which they condemn as a colonial apartheid state, more insidious than South Africa?119 No one has proposed that Chinese scholars be boycotted over what their government does to the Tibetans, or Russian scholars for their actions against Chechnya, or Indonesians for their treatment of civilians in East Timor. Indeed, a number of other countries todayincluding China, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Spain, even Francecontrol disputed land and rule over people who seek independence. Those pushing for academic boycotts against Israel might be asked why, since 1948, the United Nations has passed many hundreds of resolutions censuring Israelbut not a single one condemning known terrorist organizations or states.120 Other countries, in fact, have treated Arabs more harshly: Jordan killed more Palestinians in one single month (an estimated four thousand, in September 1970) than Israel ever has; Kuwait expelled 300,000 Palestinians during the Persian Gulf War.121 Today in Mauritania, some 90,000 slaves serve the ruling class. In Sudan, Arab northerners raid southern villages, killing the men and taking the women and children to be auctioned off and sold into slavery. These are verifiable facts, yet there was no academic outcry against slavery in 2007. Nor have there been any academic protestations of note against blatant apartheid in Saudi Arabiaour erstwhile allywhich severely limits the rights of women, Christians, Jews, and Hindus. On the other hand, diversity on campus remains an illusory concept. In practice, intellectual contention is often drowned out in a sea of false emotion; members of designated victim groups respond to a serious argument with pain and shock and
119. British Professors Ban Israeli Universities, Israel Insider, April 25, 2005, http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/AntiSemi/5375.htm. See also Goldstone, Israel and (note 115). 120. One glaring example is UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, urging the elimination of Zionism, declaring it a form of racism and racial discrimination. UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/3379, November 10, 1975. 121. On the other hand, no Arab country has contributed to the Palestinians humanitarian needs nearly as much as have their primary benefactors, the United States and Israel. See Thirty Trucks Loaded with Food Enter the Gaza Strip, Infopod, Global News Wire, March 12, 2003. In addition, three truckloads of medicine and medical supplies entered the West Bank; eighteen permits for the purpose of improving medical service in Israel and the Palestinian territories were issued.

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accusations of hate, and university administrators make a show of pretending to carethe very kind of emotional frenzy that is inimical to the spirit of rational inquiry universities are supposed to encourage.122 In April 2010, Brandeis University (the only Jewish-sponsored, nonsectarian university in America) announced that it had invited Israeli ambassador Michael Oren to deliver the forthcoming commencement address. Critics called him an inappropriate choice for keynote speaker, arguing that Orens presence would transform the commencement ceremonies into a politically polarizing event. A student group demanded that Oren be disinvited, claiming that his presence would suggest that Brandeis is affiliating itself with a rogue state apologist, a defender ofamong other thingsthe war crimes and human rights abuses of the war on Gaza.123 Few if any academics defended Oren primarily on First Amendment groundsi.e., that repressing pro-Israel advocates is wrong if only because doing so is an assault on freedom of speechalthough some students did take that position.124 DIVESTMENT CAMPAIGNS A newer incarnation of the anti-Israel boycott is the university divestment campaignsimilar to the one directed at the apartheid regime in South Africa during the late twentieth centurydemanding that universities divest from companies that do business with Israel. Here again the Big Lie comes into play. Each of the various arguments put forth to justify divestmentthat Israel is responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, that it is Judaizing the Holy City of Jerusalem, that its policies endanger U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraqare but preludes to othersthat the only hope for peace in the Middle East is a single, binational state, and that Israel
122. James Taranto, The Diversity Sham, The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2009. 123. Brandeis sociology professor Gordon Fellman contended that [h]is role obligates him to defend Israeli policies. Josh Nathan-Kazis, Oren Speaking at Brandeis Creates a Commencement Controversy, The Jewish Daily Forward, May 7, 2010, http://www.forward.com/articles/127613/. 124. A blogger using the name Rabbi Tony Jutner claimed that a student referendum would soon formally call on Brandeis to bar all faculty from collaborating with Israeli scholars, and that Brandeis will play a key role in the US-Iranian rapprochement by inviting high-ranking officials of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to campus. The rabbi also contends that the majority of Brandeis students find the concept of a Jewish state offensive. Nathan-Kazis, Oren, Speaking.

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itself is the root cause of worldwide antisemitism. All these arguments are easily refuted by reference to history and facts on the ground.125 A University of California Berkeley group calling itself Students for Justice in Palestine was the first to launch an organized divestment campaign. Since then, many campuses have followed suit. At least two major universitiesCalifornia and Michiganhave hosted divestment conferences. The faculties at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched an ongoing divestment campaign in the spring of 2002.126 In early 2010, the student government at UC Berkeley passed several anti-Israel resolutions. The first, in February, voiced opposition to academic sanctions against students who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Orens speech on its campus.127 The second, in March, would have required the school to divest from corporations deemed supportive of the Israeli military, the West Bank separation barrier, and settlement buildingnamely, General Electric and United Technologiesbecause of their military support of the occupation of the Palestinian territories.128 That same month, at the Oxford (England) Student Union, Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalons speech was interrupted by a group of demonstrators carrying Palestinian flags, and chanting war criminal and Slaughter the Jews!129
125. See note 118 and accompanying text. 126. See Report of the Third North American Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 1012, 2003, http://www.divestmentconference.com. See also Richard Lacayo, A Campus War over Israel, Time, October 7, 2002, 63. 127. Josh Nathan-Kazis, At Berkeley, Divestment Vote Divides Students, Draws Veto, The Jewish Daily Forward, March 25, 2010, http://www.forward .com/articles/126902/. Angered by the resolution, some Jewish students made speeches before the student legislative council, each concluding with the question: When will this student government stand up for me? Nathan-Kazis, At Berkeley. 128. The resolution passed 16-4. The president of the student government vetoed the latter resolution, arguing that the comparison of the Israel/Palestine conflict with that of South African apartheid in the 1980s is highly contested. The veto was narrowly upheld in late April 2010. Similar legislation was introduced at UC San Diego. See http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/57942/divestiture-saga-rollson-in-berkeley-and-now-san-diego/. 129. Jonny Paul, At Oxford, Student Shouts Kill the Jews at Ayalon, http:// www.jpowt.com/International/Article.aspx?id=A68275. This was hardly the first time that a pro-Israel speaker was hounded off a campus podium. Before he became president of Harvard, Laurence Summers was prevented from making a speech to the University of California Board of Regents. Israels former prime minister Ehud Barak was prevented from speaking at Concordia University in Canada

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As has been observed concerning the divestment campaign at Berkeley, the exercise puts all other Jews on notice: either stand with the guilty partyi.e., Israelor with all right-thinking people. Speaking out in opposition, pointing to the explicit double standards and implicit antisemitism of the attackers, is routinely denounced as censorship.130 American universities are not yet so poisoned as are their counterparts in Great Britain and elsewhere, just as the American people are nowhere near as antisemitic or as anti-Israel as are Europeans and others. But the gap is decreasing.131 Although some university presidents, faculty, and students have spoken out strongly against such divestment campaigns, it is clear that criticism of Israeli policies in mainstream academiawhich one observer has called a bacchanal of invectivehas become much more acceptable.132 Moreover, faculty members who support divestment and academic/scientific boycotts often chafe under the criticism that they are antisemitic.133 Jewish professors who condemn Israel, although relatively few in number, are an especially troubling breed. Some draw politically correct inferences from the Holocaustand concluding that, whatever happens in world events, Jews should always conduct themselves as humane, progressive, and peacelovingin other words, beyond reproach.134 When viewed this way, however, they become acceptable only as victims.

by a hard-left anti-Israel crowd of violent censors. See Dershowitz, Free Speech (note 103). 130. Alex Joffe, Anti-Semitism 101, Jewish Ideas Daily, May 6, 2011. 131. Joffe, Anti-Semitism 101. The academic groups endorsing the Israel Divestment Campaign (http://israeldivestmentcampiagn.org/content/endorsements/ organizational.htm) is illustrative. 132. See note 3. 133. A Harvard professor, for example, told a reporter that he didnt consider himself antisemitic at all, but that he was definitely hostile to the aggressive eyefor-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth policies of the current Israeli leadership. Patrick Healy, Summers Hits Antisemitic Actions, Boston Globe, September 20, 2002, A1 (quoting Peter Ashton, a research professor of forestry). 134. Rebecca Spence, Controversial Professor Loses Battle for Tenure, The Jewish Daily Forward, June 15, 2007, http://www.forward.com/articles/10947/. Finkelsteins 2005 book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Antisemitism and the Abuse of History, purports to pick apart Professor Alan Dershowitzs pro-Israel book, The Case for Israel (2003); see Healy, Summers Hits (note 133).

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COUNTERING OTHER CANARDS Thus it is all the more important to confront those who would single out Israel for condemnation, and to illustrate how they are betrayed by both their rhetoric and actions. The Big Lies must be countered by a recitation of the facts, to wit: From the Inquisition to the pogroms to the Holocaust, history has shown that antisemitism existed long before creation of the State of Israel.135 The building of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem does not mean a takeover of the city. Jerusalem is a holy place to three major faiths; its diverse population includes a Jewish majority and Muslim and Christian minorities. When Israel took over in 1967, full freedom of religion was granted to everyonefor the first time in modern history.136 The claim that Israel endangers American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan is a contemporary version of the blood libel promulgated by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and reiterated by renowned antisemitic figures such as Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin.137 So is the claim that Israel is responsible for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. On this issue facts are harder to come by, but there are certainly two sides to be heard. According to Palestinian supporters, Gaza is an impoverished and overcrowded coastal strip of scrub desert, its people the desperate victims of decades of war and suffering under an Israeli economic blockade that began after Hamas took over in 2005. The UN and various international aid agencies assert that the blockade has led to worsening poverty, rising unemployment. and deteriorating public services that threaten basic health care, water treatment, and sanitation.138 The Israeli government tends to dismiss those claims by asserting that it permits the import of humanitarian goods but reserves the right to ban products that can have a military use. To Israel, the Palestinian-controlled area of sand dunes and refugee camps squeezed between southern Israel and
135. See 2010 Top Ten Anti-Israel Lies, Wiesenthal Center (note 115). 136. Muslim and Christian religious organizations control their own holy sites. Wiesenthal Center, 2010 Top Ten. 137. Holocaust Encyclopedia, Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm .org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005516. Successive U.S. administrations have recognized Israel as a major strategic asset. Wiesenthal Center, Top Ten. 138. UN officials have called the blockade a collective punishment that amounts to a war crime. Amnesty International says it harms the most vulnerable, such as children, who make up more than half Gazas population, the elderly, the sick, and impoverished refugees. See Peter Goodspeed, Policy Under Siege, National Post, June 4, 2010.

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the sea is a terror state funded by the Iranians. The fact that Gaza may be economically crippled is regarded as the self-inflicted byproduct of a corrupt regime that constantly attacks Israel with rockets and refuses to recognize its right to exist.139 According to a report issued in 2010 by the Israel ministry of foreign affairs, well over a million tons of humanitarian supplies entered Gaza from Israel over the last 18 monthsequaling nearly a ton of aid for every man, woman and child in Gaza. In 2009 alone, more than 738,000 tons of food and supplies entered Gaza, the report says. Indeed, photographs in Palestinian newspapers show local markets filled with fruit, vegetables, cheese, spices, bread, and meat. This humanitarian conduit is used by internationally recognized organizations, including the United Nations and the Red Cross.140 Yet in June 2010, when Israel prevented a flotilla of ships ostensibly carrying humanitarian supplies from breaking the Mediterranean blockade it had set up, it was roundly condemned by the international community.141 Academics added vociferously to the chorus of condemnation. The martyrs of the ships are heroes, wrote Mark LeVine, professor of history at the University of California Irvine. They are warriors every bit as deserving of our tears and support as the soldiers of American wars past and present.142 Ignoring the overwhelming video and documentary evidence that terrorist activists had initiated the hostilities, various other professors of Middle East studies lined up to denounce the Jewish State. Those ships were just bringing aid to impoverished Palestinians, said New York University professor Zachary Lockman.143 Amid the cacophony of recriminations against Israel following the flotilla incident, the silence from the academic community was once again deafening. While their colleagues in the humanitarian community loudly bemoaned the dire situation of the Palestinians, few bothered to point out
139. Goodspeed, Policy. 140. Goodspeed, Policy; see also Kenneth Lasson, What Else Is New?, Baltimore Jewish Times, June 25, 2010. 141. See, e.g., Tobias Buck, Israel Condemned after Flotilla Attack, Financial Times, June 1, 2010. 142. See Brendan Goldman, Middle East Studies Profs Usurp New Roles to Censure Israel over Gaza Flotilla, American Thinker, July 20, 2010, http://www. americanthinker.com/2010/06/middle_east_studies_profs_usur.html. 143. Professor Lockman added that Its not [the Palestinians] fault they are under Hamas rule. Could he have forgotten that Hamas was democratically chosen by the Palestinians to lead them in January 2006? Goldman, Middle East Studies.

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thatas the Palestinian leadership sops up Western aid dollarsPalestinian markets are full and bustling.144 There are, of course, other canards-camouflaged-as-fact that somehow emerge as objective reportssuch as that Israel traffics in human body parts, or poisons Arab children, or massacres civilians, or, for that matter, whose very existence endangers American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. HOLOCAUST DENIAL
IN THE

ACADEMY

Holocaust denial as a form of antisemitism has received much media notoriety in the United States, especially as it targets university students.145 Campus newspapers (articles, op-eds, and advertising), videotapes, DVDs, and the Internet inflame the debate over whether the Holocaust happened. Under the guise of academic scholarship, and often in an attempt to gain personal notoriety, some self-styled intellectuals are able to disseminate their message of hatred of the Jews, presenting their work as legitimate inquiry and exposition. They have found fertile ground among student editors eager to demonstrate their commitment to free speech and the airing of controversial ideas. Such inexpensive methodology allows deniers to reach the minds of impressionable young students, often with little knowledge of the Holocaust, who are in the process of forming their own perceptions of world history.146 Holocaust deniers claim to be legitimate historical revisionists, seeking to uncover the truth behind what they term as the largest hoax of the twentieth century. They need not convince students that the Holocaust is a myth; they score propaganda points merely by convincing them that the Holocaust is debatable. Holocaust revisionism first emerged as an organized movement in 1979, when Willis Cartos Liberty Lobby, the nations largest antisemitic organization, established the California-based Institute for Historical Review. Together with its publishing arm, Noontide Press, the IHR has put
144. Perhaps the professors could be excused because of a paucity of research opportunities: It was rarely reported thatdespite alleged shortages in building materials and crippling povertynew malls and upscale restaurants in Gaza were doing a booming business in the summer of 2010. See Tom Gross, A Nice New Shopping Mall Opened Today in Gaza: Will the Media Report on It?, Mideast Dispatch Archives, http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/ 001127.html. 145. See Kenneth Lasson, Holocaust Denial and the First Amendment: The Quest for Truth in a Free Society, George Mason Law Review, 6, no.1 (1997). 146. Lasson, Holocaust Denial.

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out a number of books on white racialism, including Francis Parker Yockey and David Hoggans The Myth of the Six Million, two of the first books to deny the Holocaust.147 For the most part, the authors are would-be scholars with limited credentials in history, writers without academic certification, and other antisemites engaged in Holocaust denial.148 The Institute for Historical Review has been able to make its biggest impact on college campuses under its media projects director, Bradley Smith, who leads what he bills as the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust. In 1991, Smith bought a full-page advertisement in The Daily Northwestern, the student publication of Northwestern University. The ad had the appearance of a newspaper article, appearing under the headline, The Holocaust Story: How Much Is False? The Case for Open Debate. In it, Smith argued that the Holocaust lobby prevents scholars from thoroughly examining the orthodox Holocaust story. He alleged a lack of proof that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz, and that the photographs of the piles of corpses at Bergen-Belsen were a result of disease and starvation and not the result of the Nazi plan to murder Jews. Smiths arguments were made in the academic voicehe used no blatantly antisemitic terms, but employed a seemingly thoughtful, rational discourse intended to provoke serious academic consideration.149 Smiths article in The Daily Northwestern sparked a flurry of op-ed pieces, letters to the editor, and on-campus lectures and forumswhich in turn created even wider media coverage in the Chicago area. Emboldened, Smith subsequently submitted his ad/essays to other university newspapers around the country, beginning with the University of Michigan. Within a year, his handiwork had appeared in more than a third of the 60 student newspapers to which it had been submitted.150 During the 1993-94 school year, Smith launched another campaign, this one challenging the authenticity of the newly opened U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also attacked the scholarship of Professor Deborah Lipstadt in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. Smith charged that Lipstadt and those like her strive to suppress revisionist research, and called for an end to their fascist behavior.151
147. Willis A. Carto, Fabricating History, Anti-Defamation League, 2009, http://www.adl.org/Holocaust/carto.asp. 148. See Marcus, The Resurgence and Anti-Zionism as Racism (note 26). 149. Marcus, The Resurgence and Anti-Zionism as Racism. See also Kenneth Lasson, Defending Truth: Legal and Psychological Aspects of Holocaust Denial, Current Psychology (November 2007). 150. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate (note 24). 151. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate.

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By the end of that academic year, Smiths ad had been published in 32 more campus newspapersamong them was The Justice, the student publication of predominantly Jewish Brandeis University. The ad, which cost $130, created a propaganda bonanza: it was featured in major media outlets, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time.152 Toward the end of the 1995 spring semester, Smith launched yet another campaign, using the same advertisement hed sent out the year before. The submission was timed to appear on or around Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Hashoah). Although only 17 school newspapers printed the advertisement, given the timing an effective response was almost impossible to achieve.153 Bradley Smith and the IHR have been equally active over the last decade. In September 2009, the Harvard Crimson published an IHR essay that raised questions about General Dwight Eisenhowers account of World War II and the existence of Nazi gas chambers.154 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejads recent declarations that Israel must be wiped off the map and that the Holocaust was a fabricated legend are but more candid statements of what academics the world over have been saying for years.155 Former DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein, for example, has argued that Israel inappropriately invokes the Holocaust as a moral defense for mistreating Palestinians.156 Thus, another Big Lie is promul152. Brandeis never cashed the check for the ad, donating it instead to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museumwhich itself declined to cash it. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate. 153. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate. 154. The ad was quickly criticized, and the student editor issued an apology. Evan Buxbaum, Harvard Crimson Says Holocaust Denial Ad Published by Accident, CNN.com (September 10, 2009), http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/09/09/ massachusetts.harvard.Holocaust/index.html. 155. See, e.g., Ahmadinejad Says Holocaust a Lie, Israel Has No Future, Reuters, September 18, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USTRE58 H17S20090918. Ahmadinejads statements have been widely quoted. See, e.g., Tamer El-Ghobashy and Bill Hutchinson, Grinning Madman Ahmadinejad Squirms at Columbia, New York Daily News, September 25, 2007, http://nydaily news.com/news/2007/09/25/2007-9-25_grinning_madman_ahmadinejad_squirms_ at_c.html. 156. See Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000). In June 2010, Finkelstein was deported from Israel and banned from returning for ten years, after accusing Israel of using the genocidal Nazi campaign against Jews to justify its actions against the Palestinians. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the deportation of Finkelstein was an assault on free speech. The decision to prevent someone

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gated and allowed to fester without being challenged. Academics could, but largely dont, refer their students to the evidence: that Israel existed as a thriving country three thousand years before the Holocaust. Its kings and prophets walked the streets of Jerusalem (which, as noted earlier, is mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures 600 times). Throughout the 2,000-year exile of the Jewish people, there was a continuous Jewish presence in the Holy Land. The modern rebirth of Israel began in the 1800s, with reclamation of the largely vacant land by pioneering Zionists, blossoming into a Jewish majority long before the coming of the Nazis.157 LOUD AMERICAN VOICES Antisemitic or anti-Zionist academics are not always naysayers like Finkelstein, who remain relatively obscure except for their notoriety as individuals who would deny or diminish the Holocaust. Famed MIT professor Noam Chomsky has strongly criticized the United States support of the Israeli government and Israels treatment of the Palestiniansarguing that supporters of Israel are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction, and that Israels very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to that consequence. Chomsky disagreed with the founding of Israel as a Jewish state (I dont think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.).158 In May 2006, Chomsky began an eight-day visit to Lebanon, where he met with leaders of the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Chomsky received a heros welcome. During his trip, he endorsed and repeated much of Hezbollahs rhetoric on Lebanese television, including on its own Al Manar

from voicing their opinions by arresting and deporting them is typical of a totalitarian regime, said the associations lawyer, Oded Peler. A democratic state, where freedom of expression is the highest principle, does not shut out criticism or ideas just because they are uncomfortable for its authorities to hear. It confronts those ideas in public debate. Toni OLoughlin, US Academic Deported and Banned for Criticizing Israel, The Guardian, June 6, 2010. 157. 2010 Top Ten, Wiesenthal Center (note 115). 158. Deborah Solomon, Questions for Noam Chomsky: The Professorial Provocateur, The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003, http://www.ny times.com/2003/11/02/magazine/way-we-live-now-11-02-03-questions-for-noamchomsky-professorial-provocateur.html.

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TV,159 and expressed support for the arming of Hezbollah (in direct contradiction to UN Security Council Resolution 1559).160 Chomsky embraced Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, who refers to Jews as the grandsons of apes and pigs,161 and whose ideology is rooted in the groups fundamentalist and antisemitic interpretation of Islam, which has been described as the direct ideological heir of the Nazis.162 Chomsky declared that Hezbollahs insistence on keeping its arms is justified. . . . I think [Nasrallah] has a reasoned . . . and . . . persuasive argument that they [the arms] should be in the hands of Hezbollah as a deterrent to potential aggression.163 Chomskys statements and actions typify what has been called the unholy alliance between Islamic extremists and secular radicals in the West.164 Indeed, he describes the United States as one of the leading terrorist states, and claims that the attacks of September 11, 2001, pale in comparison to the terror that he suggests America perpetrated during the 1973 Allende coup in Chile.165 These statements are nothing new for Chomsky, who has spent decades promoting virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda. Although they are sometimes dismissed by his supporters as simple eccentricity, in fact they represent something far more damaging.166 Chomsky has used his influence as a prominent linguist to support militant organiza159. See Tzvi Fleisher, The Far Left and Radical Islamic International Alliance, The Australian, June 8, 2006, 11. 160. The resolution declares the Security Councils support of free, fair Lebanese presidential elections and calls for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon. 161. Zachary Hughes, Noam Chomskys Support for Hezbollah, CAMERA, July 20, 2006, http://www.CAMERA.org/index.asp?x_content=7&x_issue=11&x_ article=1551. 162. See Jeffrey Goldberg, In the Party of God: Are Terrorists in Lebanon Preparing for a Larger War?, The New Yorker, October 14, 2002, 180. 163. Chomsky, Militants Meet, The Jewish Daily Forward, May 19, 2006, 7. Shortly after Chomsky left Lebanon, Hezbollah used its arms to launch an unprovoked attack on Israel. The attack seriously destabilized the already tense relationship among Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. See Noam Chomskys Support for Hezbollah, CAMERA, June 20, 2006, http://www.CAMERA.org/index.asp?x_ context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1151. 164. David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, Noam Chomskys Love Affair with Nazis, FrontPageMagazine.com, May 15, 2006, http://97.74.65.51/readArticle .aspx?ARTID=4437. 165. Alan Taylor, Noam Chomsky . . . Still Furious at 76, The Sunday Herald, March 20, 2005, 4. 166. Zachary Hughes, Noam Chomskys Support for Hezbollah, CAMERA, July 7, 2006.

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tions and murderous dictatorships, including not only Hezbollah and Hamas, but also the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia.167 His advocacy for these groups serves to minimize the atrocities they have committed. While whitewashing them, he implicates those he perpetually paints as the guilty partiesthe United States and Israel.168 Although one might conclude that Chomskys selective use of history and frequent use of the Big Lie to advance the agenda of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas is intellectually shameful and incendiary,169 it is of course necessary to recognize that he is entitled to his say. (As he himself has pointed out, If we dont believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we dont believe in it at all.)170 It is equally necessary, however, to challenge him forcefully on the facts. The Israel Lobby is a book that has been especially damaging to both Israel and the concept of honest scholarship. It was written by Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer (the former from Harvard, the latter
167. Hughes, Support for Hezbollah. 168. On May 16, 2010, Israeli authorities detained Chomsky and refused to allow his entry into the West Bank, where he was scheduled to lecture at the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Ramallah. Amira Hass, After Denied Entry to West Bank, Chomsky Likens Israel to Stalinist Regime, Haaretz, May 17, 2010. Reporting on the story, The New York Times Jerusalem correspondent noted that Chomsky has objected to Israels foundation as a Jewish state, but he has supported a twostate solution and has not condemned Israels existence. Ethan Bronner, Israel Roiled After Chomsky Barred from West Bank, The New York Times, May 17, 2010. See also Robert Mackey, An Al Jazeera Interview with Noam Chomsky, The New York Times, May 16, 2010; Ed Pilkington, Noam Chomsky Barred by Israelis from Lecturing in Palestinian West Bank, Manchester Guardian, May 16, 2010, guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/israel-noam-chomsky-palestinian-westbank. 169. See Mark Lewis, Nonfiction Chronicle, The New York Times, November 20, 2005, 24 (commenting on critique of Chomsky by Alan Dershowitz). 170. Noam Chomsky. BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2010, http://www.brainy quote.com/quotes/quotes/n/noamchomsk108350.html, accessed June 29, 2010. Alan Dershowitz, among other true civil libertarians, has long defended the free speech rights of those whose views he despisessuch as Professor James D. Watson, whose theories of racial inferiority resulted in the cancellation of his speech at Rockefeller University; the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois; and the right of Tom Paulin, who advocated the murder of Israelis, to state his views. He also opposed Harvards attempt to prevent students from flying the Palestinian flag to commemorate the death of mass murderer Yasser Arafat. See A Conversation with Alan Dershowitz, http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-130083 .html.

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from the University of Chicago)two respected scholars. In todays world, unfortunately, that characterization does not do them justice. The book presents a wholly conspiratorial view of history in which the so-called Israel lobby has a stranglehold on American foreign policy, the American media, think tanks, and academia. Three of its major weaknesses were identified and analyzed by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz: quotations are wrenched out of context, important facts are misstated or omitted, and embarrassingly poor logic is displayed. In sum, Professor Dershowitz asks why these professors would have chosen to publish a paper that does not meet their usual scholarly standards, especially given the riskwhich should have been obvious to the authorsthat their imprimatur as prominent academics would be trumpeted on extremist Web sites.171 Among the assertions made by The Israel Lobby is that the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel. There is no question, for example, that many Al Qaeda leaders, including Bin Laden, are motivated by Israels presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians.172 In fact, the historical evidence strongly suggests that Bin Laden was primarily motivated by the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, which had asked the United States to defend the Arabian peninsula against Iraqi aggression prior to the first Gulf War. Thus, it was Americas ties to and defense of an Arab state (from which 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers originated)and not the Jewish statethat most clearly precipitated September 11. Prior to that event, Israel was barely on Bin Ladens radar. Nor does Israels supposed domination of American public life explain terrorist massacres in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere. Europe, after all, is praised for being more immune to the lobbys manipulation tactics.173 Mearsheimer and Walt claim that contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better-equipped, and better-led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence.174 Here, the authors purport to persuade their read171. Alan Dershowitz, Debunking the Newestand OldestJewish Conspiracy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt Working Paper, Harvard Law School, April 2006, 5. See also Nicholas Rostow, Wall of Reason: Alan Dershowitz v. the International Court of Justice, 71 Alb. L. Rev., 71 (2008):953, 953ff.; Alex Safian, Study Decrying Israel Lobby Marred by Numerous Errors, CAMERA, March 20, 2006, http://www.CAMERA.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=35&x_article= 1099; Eli Lake, David Duke Claims to Be Vindicated by a Harvard Dean, New York Sun, March 20, 2006, 1. 172. Safian, Study Decrying Israel Lobby. 173. Safian, Study Decrying Israel Lobby. 174. Safian, Study Decrying Israel Lobby.

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ers that, despite the Arab worlds several attempts to eliminate the Jewish state and exterminate its inhabitants, Israel has never been in serious danger. To the contrary, however, the invading Arab armiestrained professional military forcespossessed armor and a steep manpower advantage, whereas Israel had few heavy weapons and no artillery, armored vehicles, or planes.175 Accounts of the number of soldiers and armament in the 1948 war vary considerably. One estimate shows the Arab armies with ten times more aircraft than the Israelis, and one could easily observe the great disparity.176 Anti-Zionists often claim that Jews have no historical right to the land of Israel. To do so, one must deny Jewish history, which is precisely what University of Michigan professor Juan Cole doesmost recently in an article published by Salon online magazine in which Cole asserted that Jerusalem was neither built by the likely then non-existent Jewish people in 1000 BCE nor even inhabited at that point in history. Instead, Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon.177 Yet, as anyone who has actually been in Jerusalem can attest, it is all but impossible to be physically present in the oldest areas of the city and not encounter relics dating from between 1000 and 900 BCE. In revising history, Coles motivation is like that of the openly genocidal antisemitic Muslim world, as well as that of many liberals who claim to oppose bigotry. As one astute observer pointed out, For these people, pretending away their prejudice is the key to their continued claim to enlightenment.178 Why do so many left-leaning Jewish academics support regimes and ideologies that seek to annihilate Israel? During the summer of 2006 and in the following years, while Hezbollah was raining rockets on northern Israel and Hamas was doing the same in the south, leftist professors rushed to condemn the Jewish State for going into Lebanon and Gaza to try to stem the fire. A thousand of them signed a petition denouncing Israel for its brutal bombing and invasion of Gaza and its acts of Israeli state terrorism in Lebanon. There was no denunciation of Hamas or Hezbollahonly a call for the immediate release of jailed terrorists (whom the petition described as Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners) and a condemnation of Israels destructive and expansionist policies, which, the petition said,
175. 176. 177. Salon, 178. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, 30 (note 134). Dershowitz, The Case for Israel. Juan Cole, Ten Reasons Why East Jerusalem Does Not Belong to Israel, http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/03/23/jerusalem_israel. Caroline Glick, See No Evil, Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2010.

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were primarily to blame for the seemingly perpetual Middle East crisis. 179 Three of the most prominent signatories of the petition were Chomsky, Finkelstein, and Stanfords Joel Beinin (all of them Jewish).180 Such attitudes, of course, are not limited to the Ivory Tower. Former president Jimmy Carter is not an academic, but his bestselling book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, is likewise replete with twisted history. Mirroring the views of many anti-Israel professors, a considerable number of the facts upon which his books premise rests are demonstrably false.181 While honest academicians should have been quick to criticize the inaccuracies of Carters book, this time it was the media that were in the forefront of taking the former president to task. The Providence Journal called the book a scathingly anti-Israel polemic, which absurdly [charges] that Israel engages in worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa. It questions how a former president can stoop to such journalistic lows, without any sense of balance. Carter blames minuscule Israel, bordered by enemies who desire its annihilation, for the failure of peace with the Palestinians, while skimming over the latters terrorist attacks and their refusal to recognize even Israels right to exist.182 The Atlanta Journal Constitution listed a number of former Carter loyalists who, because of the book, felt the need publicly to distance themselves from their erstwhile mentor. When such people feel so betrayed by
179. Jamie Glazov, Leftist Jews Who Worship at Altar of Anti-Semitism, WorldNetDaily, March 4, 2009, http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/6996. 180. In 2004, Beinin wrote an article entitled The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East, in which he denounced the Ford Foundations decision to withdraw funding from any university grantee that finances the promotion of violence, terrorism, or bigotry or the destruction of any state. What worried Beinin was that such restrictions could potentially hurt a Palestinian student group [that] called for the replacement of the state of Israel with a secular, democratic state, meaning one seeking the extermination of Israel. Steven Plaut, Joel Beinin Whines about Israeli Airports Harassment, FrontPage, December 1, 2009, http://frontpagemag.com/2009/12/01/joel-beinin-whines-about-israeli-airports-harassment-by-steven-plaut/. 181. See http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2007/02/everything-you-wantedto-know-about.html. Mearsheimer and Walt seem to adopt Carters views; see Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky, Stephen Walts War with Israel, American Thinker, http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/03/stephen_walts_war_with_ israel.html. 182. Carter Versus Israel, Editorial, Providence Journal, January 2, 2007, http://www.projo.com/opinion/editorials/content/ED_jimmy2_01-02-07_0H3K9A B.204ccd9.html.

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the assertions in his latest book that they divorce themselves from his legacy work, the rest of us should surely take notice.183 Former American diplomat Dennis Ross pointed out essential flaws in Carters book in a New York Times article: Mr. Carters presentation badly misrepresents the Middle East proposals advanced by President Bill Clinton in 2000, and in so doing undermines, in a small but important way, efforts to bring peace to the region. The reader is left to conclude that the Clinton proposals must have been so ambiguous and unfair that Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was justified in rejecting them. But that is simply untrue.184 The Times own Middle East correspondent, Ethan Bronner, was equally critical, calling Carters work
a strange little book about the Arab-Israeli conflict from a major public figure. It is premised on the notion that Americans too often get only one side of the story, one uncritically sympathetic to Israel, so someone with authority and knowledge needs to offer a fuller picture. Fine idea. The problem is that in this book Jimmy Carter does not do so. Instead, he simply offers a narrative that is largely unsympathetic to Israel. Israeli bad faith fills the pages. Hollow statements by Israels enemies are presented without comment. Broader regional developments go largely unexamined. In other words, whether or not Carter is right that most Americans have a distorted view of the conflict, his contribution is to offer a distortion of his own.185

A reviewer for the Washington Post said that Carter blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew, and manufactures sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed.186 THE YALE INITIATIVE Ironically, perhaps the most pernicious effects of academic antisemitism can be illustrated by looking at what happened to the short-lived Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA).
183. Carter Aside, Israel Deserves Total Support, Editorial, Atlanta JournalConstitution, January 14, 2007, C6. 184. Dennis Ross, Dont Play with Maps, The New York Times, January 9, 2007. 185. Ethan Bronner, Jews, Arabs and Jimmy Carter, The New York Times, January 7, 2007. 186. See Jeffrey Goldberg, What Would Jimmy Do?, Washington Post, December 10, 2006.

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In 2005, Professor Charles Small founded the Institute for the Study of Global Anti-Semitism and Policy as an independent research organization to study global antisemitism and other forms of racism. In 2006, the center became part of Yale Universitys Institution for Social and Policy Studies, as YIISA. At the time, it was the fourth university center for antisemitism to be established, following similar centers at Berlins Technical University, the Hebrew University, and Tel Aviv University. In August 2010, YIISA sponsored an international conference entitled Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity,187 which featured scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds;188 some of these scholars highlighted instances of antisemitism in the Arab-Muslim world. Almost immediately, the U.S. representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization accused Yale of hosting a conference catering to rightwing extremists.189 Various other Arab individuals and groups followed suit, expressing dismay at what they perceived as Yales endorsement of bigotry and bias.190 Whether Yale capitulated to the charges of bias, and if so for what reasons, is open to questionbut its actions are not. In early June 2011, the university announced that it would be closing YIISA because it had not met its academic expectations. That decision sparked widespread criticism from the American Jewish community.191 David Harris, executive director
187. The conference was cosponsored by the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research (University of Cape Town); The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (Hebrew University, Jerusalem); the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism (Tel Aviv University), the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (Indiana University), the Rabin Chair Forum (George Washington University), and the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (Birbeck College, University of London). 188. Among the keynote and plenary speakers were Irwin Cotler (McGill University, Canada), Jeffrey Herf (University of Maryland), Richard Landes (Boston University), Deborah Lipstadt (Emory University), Meir Litvak (Tel Aviv University), Menahem Milson (Hebrew University), Dina Porat (Tel Aviv University), Milton Shain (University of Cape Town), Bassam Tibi (University of Goettingen, Germany), and Ruth Wisse (Harvard University). 189. Nora Caplan-Bricker, Palestinian Representative Calls Yale Conference Anti-Arab, Yale Daily News, September 2, 2010. 190. See, e,g., Yaman Salahi, Anti-Semitism but Not Anti-Hatred, Yale Daily News, September 1, 2010, and Adam Horowitz, Yale Anti-Semitism Conference Continues to Make Waves, Mondoweiss, September 8, 2010, http://mondoweiss. net/2010/09/yale-anti-semitism-conference-continues-to-make-waves.html. 191. Jordana Horn, Jews Decry Yale Closing Anti-Semitism Study Center, Jerusalem Post, July 9, 2011.

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of the American Jewish Committee, said the initiatives termination would create a very regrettable void. Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, stated, Especially at a time when anti-Semitism continues to be virulent and anti-Israel parties treat any effort to address issues relating to anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism as illegitimate, Yales decision is particularly unfortunate and dismaying.192 Others charged that Yales decision to close YIISA was primarily political in nature, due to its focus on Muslim antisemitism, because it refused to ignore the most virulent, genocidal and common form of Jewhatred today: Muslim anti-Semitism.193 Walter Reich, a member of the board of advisors of YIISA and a former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, wrote that the closure had come from a firestorm that had ensued after the conference YIISA hosted in August 2010, entitled Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity.194 Within a month after Yale said YIISA would be closed, the university announced the creation of a new center for the study of antisemitism, to be called Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism (YPSA).195 The new program is supposed to focus primarily on the study of historical antisemitism, as opposed to what goes on in the twenty-first century. But doing that

192. Ron Kampeas, Shuttering of Yale Program on Anti-Semitism Raises Hackles, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 10, 2011. See also Tovia Smith, Yale Shuts Down Anti-Semitism Program, National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/ 2011/06/17/137241373/yale-shuts-down-anti-semitism-program. 193. See, e.g., Abby Wisse Schachter, Yales Latest Gift to Anti-Semitism, New York Post, June 6, 2011; and Caroline Glick, Yale, Jews and Double Standards, Jerusalem Post, June 9, 2011. 194. Walter Reich, Saving the Yale Anti-Semitism Institute, Washington Post, June 13, 2011. Conversely, Antony Lerman, a British scholar, argued that YIISA had become politicized and that its demise should be welcomed by those who genuinely support the principle of the objective, dispassionate study of contemporary antisemitism. Daniel Treiman, Lipstadt on Yale Anti-Semitism Initiative: Advocacy Sometimes Trumped Scholarship, JTA. June 16, 2011. Robert Wistrich, the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University, agreed with the decision to close the the center, saying that there was no way that Yale could have come to a different decision given the programs perceived lack of academic rigor. Raphael Ahren, Jerusalem Anti-Semitism Scholar Backs Yales Move to Ax Program, Haaretz, July 15, 2011. 195. Yale to Launch New Anti-Semitism Program, The Jewish Daily Forward, June 20, 2011. See also Jessica Shepherd, Yale University Caught in New Antisemitism Controversy, The Guardian, June 22, 2011.

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serves to gloss over issues that scholars must address today, especially in view of the real threat of contemporary radical Islamist antisemitism.196 PRACTICAL
AND

LEGISLATIVE REMEDIES

University leadership should set a moral example by denouncing antiSemitic and other hate speech . . . U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Regarding Campus Anti-Semitism

Although freedom of speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment, and should protect both the individual as well as the idea of academic freedom on university campuses, constitutional remedies are nevertheless available to address the problems of antisemitism. Principal among them is the right (if not the obligation) to recognize antisemitism when it occurs, to present the facts clearly and accurately, and to condemn it vociferously. Failure to speak out, on the other hand, sends a message that such hatred is tolerable and acceptable. Indeed, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) specifically endorses the condemnation of hateful and bigoted speech and conduct by college and university faculty and administrators.197 Moreover, although words themselves can have injurious effects, antiIsrael and antisemitic activists consistently go beyond mere rhetoric and use violence to coerce adherence to their point of view. The First Amendment does not protect either words or actions that are directed toward incitement of immediate lawlessnessand certainly neither words nor actions that are intended to place Jews and other pro-Israel students in fear of immediate bodily harm.198 It has long been established, of course, that there can be Constitutional limits on speech: defamation, fighting words, conspiracies, misleading advertisements, threats, or exhortations that create a risk of imminent vio196. Jordana Horn, Yale University Launches New Program on Anti-Semitism, Jerusalem Post, June 22, 2011 (quoting Charles Small, the former executive director of YIISA). See also Michael Rubin, A Challenge to Yale University on Anti-Semitism, Commentary, July 1, 2011; Ron Rosenbaum, Yales Newest Jewish Quota, Slate, July 1, 2011; and Adam Brodsky, Yales Anti-Semitism Whitewash, New York Post, July 6, 2011. 197. The AAUP is an organization, founded in 1915, comprising faculty librarians and academic professionals at two- and four- year accredited public and private colleges and universities. Its mission is developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this countrys colleges and universities. 198. See Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969); Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire 315 U.S. 568 (1942).

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lence. Comparing the harms to the speaker and the victim of hate speech suggests that limiting the latter may be cost effective.199 In recent years, there has been increasing debate over the question of whether it is permissible for the government to curb hate speech, understood to mean that which demeans or expresses hostility or contempt toward target groups based on their race, religion, ethnic background, sexual orientation, or other identifying characteristics. The Supreme Court has never specifically adjudicated the constitutionality of a campus hate speech code, but several lower courts have struck down such codes as unconstitutional restrictions on freedom of speech.200 Every Western democracy except the United States regulates hate speech. Many particularly prohibit and punish Holocaust denial.201 A popular academic exercise often admiringly analyzes other countries legislation limiting hate speech.202 But comparing the American approach to others is inherently problematic. Our system has served us well. Universities must also ensure that they have continual systems and programs in place to monitor the climate on their campuses. In the course of promoting the values of respect, tolerance, diversity, and inclusiveness, they must also allow and encourage vigorous debate and academic freedom. One way to handle hecklers seeking to disrupt speakers at university forums is as follows: When controversial speakers appear on campus, in advance of the event, clearly announce to and notify students that they will have an opportunity to question or challenge or make commentsbut that interruptions will not be tolerated. Moreover, students who engage in disruptive speech or behavior will be firmly sanctioned, either with suspensions or expulsions. If such a policy were strictly enforced, it would go far to deter both bully pulpits and hostile audiences. Other remedies that have been proposed range from simply lodging a complaint with the authorities to imposing boycotts of alumni funding pro199. See Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Four Observations about Hate Speech, Wake Forest L. Rev., 44 (2009):353. 200. Thomas A. Schweitzer, Hate Speech on Campus and the First Amendment: Can They Be Reconciled?, Conn. L. Rev., 27 (1995):493. 201. See Kenneth Lasson, Holocaust Denial and the First Amendment: The Quest for Truth in a Free Society, Geo. Mason L. Rev., 6 (1997):35. 202. To a number of scholars, German hate-speech regulation is particularly attractive. Given the fundamental differences between the two approaches to free speech, however, and consequently to hate-speech regulation, we should not be so quick to adopt the German approach. Claudia E. Haupt, Regulating Hate SpeechDamned If You Do and Damned If You Dont: Lessons Learned from Comparing the German and U.S. Approaches, 23 B.U. Intl L.J., 23 (2005):299.

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grams. The problem with the former is that it is difficult to draw a line between censuring intimidation and restricting free speech or academic freedom. Moreover, one does not wish to feed a culture of complaint.203 Boycotts, on the other hand, cut both ways, and can cause more harm than good.204 Direct confrontation thus remains the best remedy. Academics should denounce antisemitism with the same rational resolve as people like Pilar Rahola, a Spanish politician, journalist, activist, and member of the far left:
I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not anti-Israeli like my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the nonJews. As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles. Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty, I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too.205

To be sure, there are a few hopeful signs on the horizon. One is Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Governed and directed by academics, SPME envisions a world in which Israel exists as a sovereign Jewish state within secure borders and her neighbors achieve their legitimate peaceful aspirations. However, as its mission statement observes:
[A]cademic discourse is increasingly influenced by ideological distortions, politically biased scholarship, and agenda-driven speakers who demonize Israel and Zionism as bearing full responsibility for the Middle-East conflict. Such indoctrination violates academic traditions of scholarly integrity and degrades the academic enterprise. It poisons debate about the Middle East, inflames hatred of Israel, spreads anti203. For example, students at Columbia University filed a complaint against Professor Joseph Massad for intimidating students with anti-Zionist diatribes. See Sagiv, A Study in Hate, 14 (note 5). 204. Sagiv, A Study in Hate. 205. Pilar Rahola, A Leftist Speaks Out, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, March 24, 2010, 50.

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Semitism, incites anti-Israeli militancy, and serves to excuse or tolerate terrorist attacks and genocidal threats against Israel. Anti-Israel slanders exacerbate conflict and undermine prospects for peace.206

Some student groups, such as the Union of Jewish Students, have also become increasingly active.207 On occasion, politicians have been unusually forthright in stating their opposition to events like Israeli Apartheid Weeks on campus. In February 2010, for example, Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs) of varying political ideologies in Ontario collectively and unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week, which one MP contended was about as close to hate speech as one can get without getting arrested, and Im not certain it doesnt actually cross over that line,208 specifically noting that the name itself is offensive to the millions of black South Africans who experienced oppression under a racist white regime until the early 1990s. Addressing Canadas worldwide notoriety as a pro-Israel country, Peter Shurman further argued, [If] youre going to label Israel as apartheid, then you are also calling Canada apartheid and you are attacking Canadian values. The parliamentarians encourage constructive, respectful debate about the Middle East, but the use of inflammatory wordslike apartheiddo not provide any benefit to the discourse. The minister of training, colleges and universities, John Milloy, believes that campuses are places for debate and discussionthey often get into areas that can offend people . . . the goal has to be . . . to make sure that theres not hatred on campusnothing that would make a student feel threatened. Actions like that of the Ontario legislature illustrate the potential for change, and marks a small, yet noteworthy, step

206. Mission Statement, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, http://spme.net/. 207. The UJS today enjoys relatively better funding and organization than it did in the past, but if it and other student groups are to take an effective stand against antisemitism on campus they will need considerably more support and resources from those with positions of power and influence. Jan Shure, We Could Have Dealt with Campus Hate Long Ago, The Jewish Chronicle Online, February 12, 2009, http://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/we-could-have-dealt-campus-hatelong-ago. 208. Peter Shurman, remarks in support of condemnation of Israeli Apartheid Week. Dan Verbin, Ontario Legislature Denounces Israel Apartheid Week, ShalomLife, February 26, 2010, http://www.shalomlife.com/eng/6838/Ontario_ Legislature_Denounces_Israel_Apartheid_Week/. See also Robert Benzie, MPPs Decry Linking Israel to Apartheid, Thestar.com, February 26, 2010, http:// www.thestar.com/news/Ontario/article/77161mpps-decry-linking-israel-toapartheid; Goldstone, Israel and the Apartheid Slander (note 115).

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toward widespread condemnation of hateful, antisemitic speech in the academic voice.209 There are some legislative remedies available as well. Title VI, 42 U.S.C. 2000d et seq., of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, requires recipients of federal funding to ensure that their programs are free from harassment, intimidation, and discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin. In order to receive federal funding from the U.S. Department of Education, colleges and universities must comply with Title VI; the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education is charged with the responsibility of ensuring that colleges and universities are in compliance. Historically, the OCRs interpretation of Title VI did not protect against antisemitism, on the grounds that the law did not cover religious discrimination. This policy was changed in 2004, when the OCR confirmed that Jewish students are protected under Title VI. This decision was made based on the idea that being Jewish is not simply a religious characteristic; it is also a racial and ethnic characteristic, describing a people who share not only a religion, but also a common ancestry, history, heritage, and culture. The decision to incorporate Jews under Title VI is in line with the U.S. Supreme Courts decision in Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, where the civil-rights protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1866 were extended.210 But legislative remedies have to be initiated by individuals and groups, and actively pursued. In October 2004, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) filed a complaint with the OCR under Title VI on behalf of Jewish students at the University of California Irvine (UCI), arguing that the university had long been aware of a hostile and intimidating environment for Jewish students, but that it did not take adequate steps to protect the students. Despite an abundance of data provided by the ZOA, the OCR found insufficient evidence to support the complainants allegation that the University failed to respond promptly and effectively to complaints by Jewish students that they were harassed and subjected to a hostile environment.211
209. See references in note 208. 210. 481 U.S. 615 (1987). 211. The ZOA has indicated that it will continue to fight for the students at UCI and across American campuses through an appeal of the OCR decision. Title VI is usually used to fight discriminatory practices during admission, and not for a students protection against racial discrimination or bias. Its use in this manner could depend largely on ZOAs appeal of the UCI decision. Morton Klein, ZOA Condemns Office for Civil Rights Decision Not to Protect Jewish Students from Antisemitic Harassment, Zionist Organization of America, December 19, 2007, http://www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=264.

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In March 2010, a number of Jewish-American associations joined in a letter to Arne Duncan, secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, addressing the very issue of Title VI and its application to Jewish students. In their letter, the associations explained how the OCR has retreated from its 2004 position, and urged Secretary Duncan to ensure that the OCR once again interprets Title VI to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. They point out that the Hon. Russlyn Ali, assistant secretary of education for civil rights, wrote, in a July 2009 letter to California congressman Ben Sherman, that Title VI does not cover antisemitic harassment, intimidation, and discrimination. This statement from Assistant Secretary Ali indicates that the OCR has effectively concluded that it will discontinue its enforcement of Title VI in cases where a Jewish student asserts racial or ethnic discrimination based on his or her status as a Jewish individual. This sends an official government message to campus perpetrators, the associations contended, that they can continue their antisemitic behavior because colleges and universities no longer have a legal obligation to report hateful conduct, and campus administrations are therefore free to simply not respond to antisemitism on their campuses, even when their Jewish students feel threatened and intimidated.212 In contrast, see what happens when students and faculty do fight back, as is beginning to occur in California. The Felber and Rossman-Benjamin cases represent an important departure for a community that has often been divided between accommodationist and defensive positions.213 Professor Rossman-Benjamins case is notable because it brings accountability to both the university and the federal government. She filed her case with the OCR, arguing that Santa Cruz violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964the same statute that bars racial segregation in the public schools, but that is applied more broadly to racial and ethnic discrimination in federally-funded programs. It is important to understand that this approach does not require (or even permit) universities to censor or regulate speech, which is protected under the First Amendment. There are, however, numerous actions the university could take, such as issuing formal statements condemning the discriminatory conduct, developing educational resources to demonstrate the irrationality of the biased statements, and providing counseling for students who are adversely affected.214
212. Russlyn Ali, letter to education secretary re: Antisemitic Intimidation on Campus, Anti-Defamation League, http://www.adl.org/Civil_Rights/letter_associa tionjlj_2010.asp. 213. See Marcus references, note 26. 214. See Marcus references, note 26. In 2011, the OCR informed Rossman-Benjamin that it is formally opening an investigation of her claims.

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In July 2010, the Congressional Taskforce Against Anti-Semitism sent a letter to secretary of education Arne Duncan, expressing concern that various complaints about antisemitic incidents at UC Irvine had never been properly addressed by the OCR. The letter noted the rising number of such incidents on college campuses, which it called significant and disturbingespecially in view of the fact that racism is generally decreasing in the United States. In addition, the letter suggested that even more such incidents go unreported because of discriminatory harassment and intimidation.215 College campuses in the United States are meant to be positive, safe and open forums for intellectual expression, conducive to learning, wrote Congressman Ron Klein, a Florida Democrat and member of the task force. We believe that enforcing Title VI to protect Jewish students who, in rare but highly significant situations, face harassment, intimidation or discrimination based on their ancestral or ethnic characteristicsincluding when it is manifested as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist sentiment that crosses the line into anti-Semitismwould help ensure that were preserving the integrity of our higher education system by affording the same protection to all ethnic and racial groups on our college campuses.216 Another letter about antisemitism on UC campuses, written by twelve pro-Israel groups, was sent to UC president Mark Yudof. The letter was supported by some 700 UC students, who signed an online position asserting that the universitys response to recent antisemitic incidents on campus has caused many students to feel as if they are in an environment of harassment and intimidation. Yudof, who is Jewish, responded, urging that the groups support UCs newly formed Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion. The council had been created in response to
215. The complaint had argued that the OCR did not exercise jurisdiction following its 2007 investigation of the ZOAs 2004 complaint with the OCR, alleging that failed to promptly and adequately respond to Jewish students complaints that they experienced severe and persistent antisemitic intimidation and harassment on campus. It said that UCI should be subject to investigation/penalties under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; that the incidents were based on the students ancestry or ethnic characteristics, rather than their religious identity, and thus fell within the scope of the OCRs jurisdiction under Title VI; and that the OCRs ruling was inconsistent with its own policy statements for enforcing Title VI as expressed in recent years. 216. The task force sought clarification of the OCRs investigation and enforcement authority to remedy instances of harassment/discrimination/intimidation against Jewish students, requesting that it hear from the OCR before the start of the new school year. The letter was signed by 36 members of Congress. See http:// www.zoa.org/media/user/images/Congressional-Taskforce-Against%20Anti-Semi tism-Letter-to-Secretary-Duncan.pdf.

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numerous incidents of harassment on campus, including spray-painting swastikas on the UC Davis campus.217 The council held its first meeting this summer. The students who wrote the letter argued that UCs response to the antisemitic acts has been too weak. Yudof said he will do everything in [his] power to protect Jewish and all other students from threats or actions of intolerance, but he also criticized the letter as a dishearteningly ill-informed rush to judgment against our ongoing responses to troubling incidents that have taken place on some of our campuses. He added that the Jewish groups may have based their concerns on an unreliable sampling of student opinion and that most Jewish UC students perspectives are more mixed than you suggest. 218 Meanwhile, in response to the incident in which Israeli ambassador Michael Oren was hounded off the rostrum at UC Irvine by anti-Israel demonstrators, administrators embarked on a four-month-long investigation, and announced in June its unprecedented recommendation to suspend the Muslim Student Union, a registered campus organization, for its involvement in disrupting the ambassadors speech. Eleven students were arrested, and may face criminal charges as well as university disciplinary action. The decision came after several months of intense pressure by a number of offcampus Zionist organizations. In February, the ZOA called upon Jewish donors to withhold donations from UC Irvine and urged Jewish students not to enroll there. The Muslim Student Union is appealing the decision.219 CONCLUSION In sum, there are a variety of ways to confront and condemn antisemitism in the academic voice and remain in harmony with First Amendment values. One recommendation is to exercise a bit of self-restraint. Instead of crying Nazi every time the Israeli Defense Force does something with which an academic disagrees, or urging a boycott of Israeli academics, or signing petitions encouraging soldiers to desert their units or calling on
217. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/uc-president-mark-yudof-c _n_637311.html. 218. UC President in Unusual Public Dispute with Several American Jewish Groups, Los Angeles Times blog, July 6, 2010. 219. Omar Kurdi, UC Irvines Message: Criticize Israel, Get Suspended, LATimes.com, June 22, 2010, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/laoew-0622-kurdi-uci-muslim-20100622,0,1942963.story.

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European powers to immediately intervene to save the Palestinians from a genocide, hold your tongue.220 Another is to assist Israels defenders in driving a wedge between the Jewish States soft- and hard-core criticsbetween, for example, humanrights groups like Oxfam, which take issue with Israeli policy, and radical Islamists who deny the states very legitimacy.221 It is the obligation of all academics either to recognize or refute claims that have no basis in fact or logicnot to ignore them. Not only can offensive speech and conduct be constitutionally confronted and condemned, but responsible administrators, faculty, and students have a moral imperative to do so. Not only are the principles of academic freedom and the universality of science at stake, but ultimately so are democratic values in a free society. Not only should scholars shoulder their responsibility to be informed and aware, but they also should recognize their obligation to respond when they see logic and common sense gone awry and objective fact and documented history either ignored or denied. Academics everywhere should likewise not allow history and logic to be rendered meaningless by twisted rhetoricwhether it emanates from the candid rant of the president of Iran, or a former president of the United States who receives substantial sums of money from Arab governments, or a somewhat more subtle but equally antisemitic university professor speaking in an academic voice.
*Kenneth Lasson is a professor of law at the University of Baltimore. He is Regents Scholar, University System of Maryland, and director of the Haifa Summer Law Institute. Professor Lasson is the author of Trembling in the Ivory Tower (Bancroft, 2003), and has written book chapters in Eunice Pollacks (ed.) Antisemitism on the Campus (Academic Studies, 2011) and in Steven K. Baum, Florette Cohen, and Steven L. Jacobs (eds.) North American Antisemitism, Vol. 15 (Brill, in preparation).

220. [W]hen children dont behave correctly, it is the parents responsibility to correct this, not scream hysterically that the children are little Nazis and leave the house. . . . The Israeli academy is like a parent to the citizenry of the state, but the behavior of some of its members has come to resemble that of spoiled children. Frantzman, Terra Incognita (note 73). 221. See Mizroch, Study Surveys (note 88 and accompanying text).

Antisemitism and the Campus Left


Richard Cravatts*
The campus war against Israel and Jews is indicative of the devolution of higher education, where scholarship has been degraded by bias on the part of a Leftist professoriate. The professoriates political agenda enlists Israel as the new villain in the name of social justice. University leaders have been feckless in moderating this new antisemitism. Either they 1) are unaware of fields of study that have been hijacked by academic frauds and morally incoherent scholars, or 2) sympathize and have become complicit in the production of pseudo-scholarship, academic agitprop, and disingenuous learning experiences. The result has produced a one-sided, biased approach to understanding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Key Words: Antisemitism, Anti-Israelism, Anti-Zionism, Palestinian

The universitys war against Israel has been pervasive and intensifying, promulgated by the active participation both of leftist faculty and radical Muslim student groups on campuses where the long-suffering Palestinians have replaced South African blacks as the lefts favorite victim groupwhose behavior, however violent and politically irrational, is excused as justifiable in a 63-year-old campaign to demand that Israel grant the Arabs self-determination and social justice. The other, and related, trend of anti-Israelism on campusesand, indeed, off campuses as wellis that derision of Zionism and the denunciation of Israel has become a convenient way for antisemites to mask their true prejudice against Jews by claiming that their problem is only with the policies of Israel, not with Jews themselves. While classic antisemitism is no longer considered acceptable in most Westernized societies, especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jew-haters (and some liberal, Israel-hating Jews themselves) have found a convenient and effective way to mask their true feelings: they single out the worlds only Jewish state for condemnation and hold it to a standard higher than they do for any other nation, not coincidentally including those Arab states and the Palestinians themselves, against whom Israel is perpetually and unfairly compared in action, selfdefense, and self-determination. Thus, on campuses today Israel is regularly, though falsely, condemned for being created illegallythrough the theft of Palestinian lands and propertyand therefore has no right to exist. The government

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is accused of a brutal, illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, especially Gaza and the West Bank, of being a colonial settler state, a Zionist regime, a land-hungry nation building an apartheid wall as a further land grab, a usurper of property that was lived on and owned by a Palestinian people from time immemorial. Zionism is regularly equated with Nazism, and the perceived offenses of Israels government and military are likened to Nazi crimes against humanity; the conceit is that Israel is creating a Holocaust on the Holy Land through ethnic cleansing, ongoing genocide of Arabs, and the elimination of the rights of an innocent, indigenous people who merely seek self-determination and the peaceful creation of a Palestinian homeland. The very existence of the country is described as being the greatest threat to world peace, the core cause of Muslim anger toward the West, the root of the Palestinians suffering; the nation has even been referred to publicly as a shitty little country by the French ambassador to Britain. These beliefs permeate the vocabulary of Israel-hatred on campus, and are dangerous and troubling not merely because they vilify the Middle Easts only democracy and Americas principal ally in that region; they are also of concern because they are based on misrepresentations of history; exaggerate current conditions in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; and, most seriously, put forward a complete inversion of truth that enables Israel-haters to load cruel and destructive invective on Zionism without apology, while in reality they are promulgating vile opprobrium that frequently shows its true face as raw antisemitism. In The Return of Anti-Semitism, Gabriel Schoenfeld noted how language itself has become a form of turnspeak; that the . . . language in which such accusations are leveled is extravagantly hateful, drawn from the vocabulary of World War II and the Holocaust but grotesquely inverted, with the Jews portrayed as Nazis and their Arab tormentors cast in the role of helpless Jews.1 THE NEW ACADEMIC FACE
OF THE

WORLDS OLDEST HATRED

The unending streams of venom regularly hurled at Israel by academics, of course, are rarely positioned as anything other than simple criticism of a particular nation for a set of particular complaints; there is never any admission or acknowledgement on the part of Israels many world-wide campus critics that anything other than a concern for the Palestinian cause and a dislike of Israels current politics are at work in their relentless criti1. Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004).

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quing of the Middle Easts only democracy. In fact, when confronted with the suggestion that their excessive and compulsive demonization of Israel along with continual attempts to hobble, weaken, or dismantle the Jewish state on behalf of social justice for Palestiniansmight sometimes be seen as antisemitic in cause or intent, the academic enemies of Israel bristle with indignation and often make wild claims that the dreaded Israel Lobby has attempted to silence them and stifle critical discussion about Israeli/Palestinian politics. But, in fact, it has thankfully become more difficult for actual antisemites on campus to inoculate themselves with this defense by merely contending that they are not self-professed antisemites, but simply wish to rant against Israels existence based on a higher moral calling to protect the self-determination of Palestinians. For many actual antisemites, as well as those who merely loathe Israel, deranged enmity toward the Jewish state has become a covert, and surrogate, form of antisemitism itself, a fact that was addressed in a 2005 working definition of antisemitism produced by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), which itself had evolved from a comprehensive study of antisemitism in the EU it had completed in the previous year. The term working definition was significant, not only because it affirmed the importance of guarding against the classic strains of antisemitic sentiment, language, and action, but also because it created an explicit equivalence between the hatred and demonization of Israel and Zionism and a yet another stream of Jew-hatred, what is now sometimes called the new antisemitism. So while the EUMC working definition acknowledged the older manifestations of Jew-hatred such as Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism . . . directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities,2 it also provided a more comprehensive view of antisemitic inclinations, deeply relevant to the current discussion, when it went on to suggest that such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity, or [m]aking . . . allegations about . . . the power of Jews as collectivesuch as . . . the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions [as is often brought up in accusations of a Israel Lobby working behind the scenes, for example].3
2. The European Forum on Antisemitism, Working Definition of Antisemitism, 2008, http://www.european-forum-on-antisemitism.org/working-definitionof-antisemitism/english/?fontsize=0. 3. Schoenfeld, The Return.

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Even more relevant was the EUMC language, which linked anti-Israel ideology and radicalism with antisemitism, including examples of the specific types of speech and behavior that animates the anti-Israel ideology of academia. Specifically, that would include: Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor. Applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.4 A look at the prevailing ideologies on campuses will reveal that these precise tropes and biases against Israel and Jews currently define the academic left, and are manifested in virulent teaching, writing, activism, scholarship, and other academic activities, purportedly in pursuit of social justice for the long-suffering, perennially victimized Palestinians. Why the animus against democratic Israel in academe as the nation defends itself from an unending campaign of aggression from Arab countries? One trend that has permeated the universityand that has had a subsequent influence on the way Israel is perceivedwas the coming of two watchwords of higher education: diversity and multiculturalism. Diversity has seen administrations bending over backward to accommodate the sensitivities of minorities and perceived victims of the majority cultureusually at the expense of fairness and rationality. Multiculturalism has brought with it a type of moral relativism in which every country or victim group is equal, regardless of what vagaries, weaknesses, or fundamental evil may underpin its social structure. Thus, the decades-old emphasis on bringing multiculturalism to campuses has meant that faculty as well as students have been seeped in an ideology that refuses to demarcate any differences between a democratic state struggling to protect itself (such as Israel) and aggressive, genocidal foes who wish to destroy it with their unending assaults (such as Hamas and Hezbollah). For the multiculturalist left, the moral strengths of the two parties are equivalent, even though the jihadist foes of Israel, for example, have
4. Schoenfeld, The Return.

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waged an unending struggle with the stated aim of obliterating the Jewish state through the murder of Jews. Thus, this inclination to worship multiculturalism forces liberals to make excuses for those cultures that have obvious, often irredeemable, moral defects, such as the Islamist foes who currently threaten Israel and the West. The believer cannot accept the truth about Islamism or much of Islam, observed Jamie Glasov in his recent book, United in Hate: The Lefts Romance with Tyranny and Terror, because he would then have to concede that not all cultures are equal, and that some cultures (e.g., Americas, with its striving for equality) are superior to others (e.g., Islams structure of gender apartheid). For the believer to retain his sense of purpose and to avoid the collapse of his identity and community, such thoughts must be suppressed at all cost. One way these truths are suppressed, says Glasov, is in those instances when liberals make their seemingly irrational judgments about the essential worth of clearly defective culuresthe construction of a curious double standard when looking at cultures other than their own Western models.5 The visceral hatred by the left toward their favorite hobgoblins, imperialist America and its codependent oppressor, Israel, finds similar expression from other left-leaning, Israel-loathing professors, such as University of Michigans Juan Cole, whose regular rants in his blog, Informed Comment, take swipes at Israeli and American defense, while simultaneously excusing Arab complicity in violence or terror. In fact, according to Cole, it is the militancy of the West that causes the endemic problems in the Middle East, and marks America guilty for its moral and financial support of Israel. When Ariel Sharon sends American-made helicopter gunships and F-16s to fire missiles into civilian residences or crowds in streets, Cole wrote in 2004, as he has done more than once, then he makes the United States complicit in his war crimes and makes the United States hated among friends of the Palestinians. And this aggression and disregard of Arab life on the part of the proto-fascist Israeli right has gotten more than one American killed, including American soldiers.6 There is, of course, no mention in Coles fantasies about why American or Israeli soldiers would be involved in military actions in the first place, affirming the view that it is Western imperialism and oppression that disrupt and embroil the otherwise taciturn political state of the Arab world.
5. Jamie Glasov, United in Hate: The Lefts Romance with Tyranny and Terror (Los Angeles: WND Books, 2009). 6. Juan Cole, Have Arabs or Muslims Always Hated Jews? Informed Comment, December 14, 2004, http://www.juancole.com/2004/12/have-arabs-ormuslims-always-hated.html.

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Violence on the part of the oppressed is accepted by liberals because it is deemed to be the fault of the strong nations whose subjugation of those defenseless people is the cause of their violent resistance. In fact, when leftist professors, such as Columbia Universitys Joseph Massad, apologize for Palestinian terror, they justify it by characterizing the very existence of Israel as being morally defective, based, in their view, on its inherent racist and imperialist natureone of EUMCs definitions of antisemitism. For Massad in particular, nations that are racist and imperialistic cannot even justify their own self-defense, while the victims of such oppressive regimes are free to resist, based on the lefts notion of universal human rights but especially for the weak. What the Palestinians ultimately insist on is that Israel must be taught that it does not have the right to defend its racial supremacy, Massad wrote during the 2009 Israeli defensive incursions into Gaza, and that the Palestinians have the right to defend their universal humanity against Israels racist oppression.7 Academics charge of Israel as racist also enables liberals to excuse the moral transgressions of the oppressed, and, as an extension of that thinking, to single out Israel and America for particular and harsh scrutiny owing to their perceived institutionalized racism and greater relative power. The self-righteousness the left feels in pointing out Zionisms essential defect of being a racist ideology insulates it from having to also reflect on Arab transgressions, since, as Ruth Wisse has pointed out in If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, liberals can excuse their own betrayal of Israel by holding it fully responsible for the very hatreds it inspires. Ascribing to Israel the blame for its predicament, democratic countries can pursue their self-interest free of any lingering moral scruple, Wisse said. Israel is examined for its every moral failing to justify policies of disengagement, while the moral failings of Arab countries are considered no ones business but their own, so that their blatant abuses of human rights should not get in the way of realpolitick.8 The charge of racism against Israel, of course, has been increasingly uttered by the Jewish states enemies, particularly after the 1975 United Nations invidious proclamation that Zionism is racism, thereby branding the very ideological existence of Israel as a racist act. This issue [of Israel] boils down to racism, Julian Perez, a member of Yale Universitys Students for Justice in Palestine wrote in the Yale Daily News, one of many examples of this widely held view of Israels essential racist ideology. An
7. Joseph Massad, Israels Right To Defend Itself, The Electronic Intifada, January 20, 2009, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10221.shtml. 8. Ruth Wisse, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

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entire indigenous population is being denied their human rights by a colonial state that is based on religion and ethnicity, he concluded, promulgating the myth that Palestinian Arabs were indigenous to the region that became Israel, and that the existence of the Jewish state further denies Arabs rights they would otherwise be enjoying had Israel not existed.9 Of the many libels from the world community against Israel, perhaps none has gained such traction on campuses as the accusation that the Jewish state now practices apartheid, that the checkpoints, security barrier, Israelionly roads, barricades, and other remnants of occupation are tantamount to a racist system that victimizes the indigenous Palestinians, just as South African apartheid oppressed and devalued indigenous blacks while stripping them of them civil rights. The same left-leaning activists from universities who carried the banner against the South African regime have now raised that same bannerwith the same accusatory languageand superimposed on Israel that it is yet another apartheid regime oppressing Third World victims. Occasionally, the racism libel against Israel is momentarily softened, as happened when the controversial Judge Richard Goldstone (author of the Goldstone Report on the Gaza War, which severely rebuked Israels actions in Operation Cast Lead) announced in a November 2011 oped in The New York Times that In Israel, there is no apartheid. But the apartheid charge still resonates effectively on campuses and is used as a theme for continuing to demonize Israel and call into question the Jewish states moral standing in the community of nations. This moral self-righteousness about Israeli racism from the left has trickled down to campuses, where the same language is frequently heard as part of student-run protests, divestment campaigns, class for boycotts, and Israel-bashing in general. Former Bard professor Joel Kovel, the anti-Zionist who advocates dismantling Israel completely through the creation of a single, binational state, was direct in his denunciation of Israels existential sins, including the complicity of the United States in the oppression of the Palestinians under what he too describes as an apartheid system. The recent efforts of activists to publicize the parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa, then, are an essential element in the one-state strategy, Kovel told an interviewer. The anti-Israeli-apartheid campaign is energizing forces of opposition across the world to build a powerful political movement to oppose Zionism and its lobbyists in the major capitalist/ imperialist countries. This is significant, because Israel simply cannot sustain itself without the support of the capitalist/imperialist powers, the
9. Julian Perez, Divest Now from a Racist Government, Yale Daily News, November 15, 2002, http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2002/nov/15/divest-now -from-a-racist-government.

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United States in particular. Its current prosperity is entirely dependent on them.10 This kind of language in academia helps reinforce the lefts notion that the imperialism of Western nations is once again responsible for setting up racist, oppressive caste systems in developing countries, systems that have to be dismantled through protest, resistance, and divestment campaigns. It has also formed the basis of divestment petitions that become working documents in the strategic vilification of Israel. A January 2003 document created by New Jersey Solidarity and the Rutgers University Campaign for Divestment from Israeli Apartheid, Acting for Human Rights, Taking a Stand for Justice, for instance, proclaimed that The world, and specifically the United States, can no longer be silent about the criminal Israeli regime. Conceived by colonial powers without the consent of the indigenous Palestinian people, the State of Israel has continued to pursue its institutionalized policies of racism, discrimination and oppression. Whats more, the petition claimed, the United States, in providing continuous financial support for Israel, was directly responsible for the social injustices taking place in the occupied territories. Unlike other countries receiving foreign aid, the petition continued, Israels aid is unencumbered with restrictionsthus, it may be used directly to promote settlements, engage in military incursions inside the occupied territories, and other acts in violation of international law.11 The much-reviled security barrier, which Israel began building around the West Bank in 2005 as a tactic to reduce terror attacks on its citizenry (and which has been successful in reducing the frequency of those attacks by 90 percent), is, in the eyes of Israels critics, not a means of defense, but what is indiscriminately termed the apartheid wall, a type of racial fence built merely to create Palestinian Bantustans, which segregates Jews from Arabs, and which is, for many, emblematic of Israels never-ending ambition to steal Arab land, disrupt Palestinian life, and expand its Zionist dream to ever-broader borders. Today in Palestine, Humza Chowdhry, a graduate student at San Jose State University, wrote in the schools newspaper, the Spartan Daily, an apartheid wall continues to be constructed

10. Joel Kovel, The One-State Solution: Zionism and the Future of Israel/Palestine, Briarpatch, July 20, 2007, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/theone-state-solution-zionism-and-the-future-of-israelpalestine. 11. New Jersey Solidarity; Rutgers University Campaign for Divestment from Israeli Apartheid. Divestment for Israeli Apartheid: Acting for Human Rights, Taking a Stand for Justice, 2003, http://www.rutgersdivest.org/whydivest.html.

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around the region with land grabs at every corner cutting through college campuses and dividing families.12 Thus, the charge of apartheid is valuable to Israels detractors, for it both devalues the nation by accusing it of perpetuating what is to the left the greatest crimeracismin the form of apartheid, which Israel enforces with the complicity of the United States, while simultaneously absolving Arabs of responsibility for the onslaught of terror they continue to inflict on Israel. By pointing to the weakness of the oppressed Palestinians against the superior military and economic might of Israel, the rationale that the wall was built for as a security measure is made to look ridiculous, as if Israel has nothing to fear by being surrounded by a sea of jihadist foes bent on its destruction. Coupled with academias fervent desire to make campuses socially ideal settings where racial and cultural strife cease to exist is the other newly popular impulse: to inculcate students with a longing for what is called social justice, a nebulous term, lifted from Marxist thought, that empowers left-leaning administrators and faculty with the false ethical security derived from feeling that they are bringing positive moral and ethical precepts to campuses. For the left, according to conservative commentator David Horowitz, social justice is the concept of a world divided into oppressors and oppressed.13 Those seeking social justice, therefore, do so with the intention of leveling the economic, cultural, and political playing fields; they seek to reconstruct society in a way that disadvantages the powerful and the elites, and overthrows them if necessaryin order that the weak and dispossessed can acquire equal standing. In other words, the left yearns for a utopian society that does not yet exist, and is willing to reconstruct and overturn the existing status quooften at a terrible human costin the pursuit of seeking so-called justice for those who, in their view, have been passed over or abused by history. In the mind of the academic left, coming out of years of seeking social justice and diversity for everyone by applying low standards to all, there are no superior national behaviors; all nations are equal in value and in the court of world opinion. Professor Bruce Thornton of California State Fresno saw an intellectual defect on the part of left-leaning academics who serve up these apolo12. Humza Chowdhry, The Holocaust of Our Era, Spartan Daily, March 18, 2008, http://spartandaily.com/2.14808/letter-to-the-editor-the-holocaust-of-our-era1.1935770. 13. David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2004).

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gies for terror on behalf of the heroic self-determination of the Palestinians, and who see homicidal attacks on Israeli civilians at cafes and on buses as being the same rational actions as the defensive actions of the Israeli government in trying to protect its populace from attack. Leftists not only equate the acts of violence from both sides; they also give greater credibility from the nihilistic violence of terror out of what Thornton called the sentimental Third-Worldism that idealizes the non-Western other, and from another troubling trend in the politics of the left, what he observed as the juvenile romance with revolutionary violence.14 This rationalization that violence is an acceptable, if not welcome, component of seeking social justicethat is, that the inherent violence of imperialism, colonialism, or capitalism will be met by the same violence as the oppressed attempt to throw off their oppressorsis exactly the style of self-defeating rationality that has proven to be an intractable part of the ages war on terror. This trait, in which leftists flirt with a romanticized idea of insurrection and violence, seems to confirm Jamie Glazovs thesis that the lefts current romance with Islamism is just a logical continuation of the long leftist tradition of worshipping Americas foes . . ., with militant Islamism now viewed as a valiant form of resistance against American imperialism and oppression. For Glasov, sympathy for jihadists is part of an enduring ideological legacy, and the Left clearly continues to be inspired by its undying Marxist conviction that capitalism is evil and that forces of revolution are rising to overthrow itand must be supported.15 Stanford Universitys Joel Beinin, for instance, a self-avowed Marxist and former president of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, specifically excused Palestinian violence during the first Intifada in a piece entitled Was the Red Flag Flying There? Palestinian attacks on civilians (and even armed soldiers) were widely condemned as terrorism by international opinion and media, Beinin wrote, but terrorism was clearly the Palestinians primary weapon of resistance given the political impediment they facednamely, the colonialist thrust of the Zionist project, and the complicity of hegemonic, imperialist powers in inspiring the terror wrought against them.16

14. Bruce Thornton, High Anxiety: How Modernity Feeds Arab Anti-Semitism, VictorHanson.com, December 20, 2006, http://www.victorhanson.com/ articles/thornton122006PF.html. 15. Glasov, United in Hate. 16. David Horowitz, Joel Beinin: Apologist for Terrorism, FrontPage Magazine.com, May 19, 2006, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx? ARTID=4357.

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When he did admit to Palestinian terrorism, Beinin wove a fabulous tale about relatively innocent stone-throwing on the part of restless Arab teenagers that escalated into violence and the death of civilians on both sides only after Israels disproportionate and unreasonable response to protect its citizens from being murdered. The typical pattern for the first several weeks of the intifada was that Palestinian civilians engaged in peaceful protest marches, Beinin wrote, attempting to make the jihadists seem Gandhi-like in their non-violent approach to social change. Beinin admits, however, that toward the end of the protests, youths taunted and threw stones at Israeli troops . . ., causing the soldiers [to fire] on stone-throwers and non-stone-throwers alike, rapidly escalating their responses . . . .17 Similarly, Joel Kovel has seen terrorism as the logical, and excusable, end result of occupationsomething for which, in his view, not only Israelis but all Jews must share in the blame. Why have a substantial majority of Jews, he wrote in Tikkun magazine, chosen to flaunt world opinion in order to rally about a state that essentially has turned its occupied lands into a huge concentration camp and driven its occupied peoples to such gruesome expedients as suicide bombing? Most curious has been the betrayal of Israel by some liberal Jewish academics, who, poisoned by a pathology that enables them to deflect the hatred of others by absorbing it themselves, have reacted by attacking the Jewish state, the hatred of which is unavoidably tarring them as Jews, in a prejudice they are unwilling to have directed at them. As one example, Professor Jennifer Lowenstein, director of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Wisconsin, glorified Palestinian resistance and the yearning for Arab self-determination while describing Israel as a nation that speaks with a vipers tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security. Then there was the late Tony Judt, of New York University, who claimed that Israel is an oddity among nations, which no one wants to have in existence because it is a Jewish state in which one community Jewsis set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place, ultimately meaning that as a Jew, Judt will have to suffer the moral scolding of the worlds antisemites on behalf of Israels sin of merely existing something he is disinclined to do.18 Echoing one of Israel-haters current favorite slanders is Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law and policy at Princeton University and the UNs preposterously titled Special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories
17. Horowitz, Joel Beinin. 18. Tony Judt, Israel: The Alternative, The New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003.

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occupied since 1967, who wondered if it was an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? on the part of Israel, and then quickly answered his own question by saying, I think not.19 SAIDISM
AND THE

ACADEMIC ROOTS

OF

PALESTINIANISM

Were it not for Edward W. Said, the Palestinian cause may have echoed through the halls of the United Nations, and influenced diplomacy and statecraft in the Middle East and in the West, but never have captured the imagination of academe. Said, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, published in 1978 a provocative and highly influential book, Orientalism, that not only had a profound effect on the direction of Middle East studies here and abroad, but eventually provided a foundation for the intellectual aspect of Palestinianism, and inspired reverence from the left and the intellectual elite. Orientalism gave expression to Saids belief that the Wests perception of the Middle Eastindeed, the way the East was understoodwas the product of cultural imperialism, the tendency, in his view, of Western scholars, artists, writers, sociologists, archeologists, and others to define the East based on its presumed cultural, racial, intellectual, and political inferiority. Not only was this practice endemic in the Wests relations with the East, but it represented an insidious aspect in the study and understanding of the Orient by the Occidentthat is, Orientalism was, in Saids words, a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. More pointedly, Said announced that no European was even capable of studying the East without superimposing his or her own cultural biases and intellectual imperialism, leading Said to the breathtaking thesis that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was . . . a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.20 Here, Zionism is the construct superimposed on the East (and the hapless Palestinians) by the imperialistic West, another form of aggressive Orientalism. The act of dispossession is itself a violent, racist act, Said asserted, based on the assumption that Western colonial settlers can create a narrative that empowers them and deprives the Eastern other of his property and history. Orientialism empowered non-Westerners to believe in the inherent racism and imperialism of Western scholarship and politics, and, according to Martin Kramer in his insightful book, Ivory Towers on Sand:
19. Richard Falk, Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust. Middle East, June 29, 2007. 20. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

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The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, is one of Saids lasting contributions to the intellectual climate on campuses when scholars took sides on issues affecting the Middle East. Orientalism, according to Kramer, also enshrined an acceptable hierarchy of political commitments, with Palestine at the top, followed by the Arab nation and the Islamic world. They were the long-suffering victims of Western racism, American imperialism, and Israeli Zionismthe three legs of the orientalist [sic] stool.21 Once the Saidian post-colonialists could neutralize the impact of the West in its assessment of the Orient (which for Said and his disciples had come to mean specifically the Middle East), they initiated an entire intellectual enterprise that devalued any scholarship conducted by Westerners, called into question the justice of the imposition of Western culture on nonWestern nations, and, in the case of Israel, denounced the creation of this European, colonial settler-state, a cultural construct in the midst of the passive, less powerful Muslim world. M. Shahid Alam, for instance, a professor of history at Northeastern University, regularly rants in the virulent online journal Counterpunch about the perfidy of Israel, echoing Saids delineation of the hegemonic, racist West imposing its cultural will on the East. This is the language of racial superiority[,] the doctrine that believes in a hierarchy of races, Alam wrote about Israel, where the higher races have rights and inferior races are destined for extinction or a marginal existence under the tutelage of higher races. Under the Zionist doctrine, the Jews are a higher race . . . This superiority is also empirically established: the Zionists wanted to take Palestine from the Palestinians and they made it a fact.22 Saids charge of Orientalism also stripped Western scholars of their standing in Middle Eastern studies, discrediting them and their potential contribution to scholarly inquiry because of their innate biases and Orientalist orientation. If Western academics were no longer able to conduct scholarship about the Orient that was authentic and valid, who, then, could? The answer, of course, was clear: Middle Easterners and Arab-Americans, who, after the publication of Orientalism, began to fill the academic slots in departments of Middle Eastern studies in increasing numbers in a type of academic affirmative action program. The language of the scholarship of these post-colonial academics is often harsh, and, when involving Israel, sometimes borders on the kind of
21. Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001). 22. M. Shahid Alam, How to Be a Good Victim, Counterpunch, August 2728, 2005, http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/08/27/how-to-be-a-good-victim.

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raw, antisemitic ranting that is constant in the state-controlled media of the Arab world. As an example, Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia, ensconced in the same department where Said himself once sat, wrote a psychobabble-filled narrative during a visit to Israel. Published in Al-Ahram Weekly, it dehumanizes the entire Jewish state in language that drips with repulsive images and hatred:
What they call Israel is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their soul . . . Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people . . . There is . . . a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. No people can perpetrate what these people and their parents and grandparents have perpetrated on Palestinians and remain immune to the cruelty of their own deeds.23

This lurid, hateful language used in the critiquing of Israel, given academic respectability by an Ivy League professor, has also begun to show itself in the attitudes and language of studentswho themselves regularly engage in half-truths, counter-historical appraisals of Middle Eastern history, and emotional outbursts bordering on what, in a different context, might well be considered antisemitic hate speech. CHOMSKY, FINKELSTEIN, AND SOME OF ISRAELS OTHER ACADEMIC DETRACTORS In the morally incoherent pantheon of the academic defamers of Israel, perhaps no single individual has emerged as the paradigmatic libeler, the most vitriolic and widely followed character in an inglorious retinue as Norman Finkelstein, late of DePaul University. Finkelstein has loudly and notoriously pronounced his extreme views on the Middle East, not to mention his loathing of what he has called the Holocaust industry, something he has called an outright extortion racket; in fact, he blames Jews themselves for antisemitism. Writing in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, his off-handed, sardonic response to Harvard professor Alan Dershowitzs book, Chutzpah, Finkelstein accused Jewish leadership, a group he defines as a repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums,
23. Hamid Dabashi, For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine,Al-Ahram Weekly, September 23-29, 2004, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/709/cu12.htm.

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and hucksters, of creating a combination of economic and political power from which has sprung, unsurprisingly, a mindset of Jewish superiority. He has called Nobel Prize winner Eli Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and author of Night, a clown. What is more, he continued, echoing the familiar refrain that it Jews themselves who inspire antisemitism, from this lethal brew of formidable power, chauvinistic arrogance, feigned (or imagined) victimhood, and Holocaust-immunity to criticism has sprung a terrifying recklessness and ruthlessness on the part of American Jewish elites. Alongside Israel, they are the main fomenters of antisemitism in the world today.24 Finkelstein, who was denied tenure at DePaul, has now also adopted the position that this professional setback is the direct result of being bold enough to speak up against Zionism and Israel, and he has been punished into silence accordingly. Despite this analysis of why his professional academic career has stalled, Finkelstein has now become what Washington University professor Edward Alexander called the dream-Jew of the worlds anti-Semites,25 and regularly visits college campuses nationwide to speak at rallies, anti-Israel events, and symposia and conferences where anti-Israel, anti-American biases infect scholarship and undermine the credibility of the events. In fact, suggested StandWithUss Roz Rothstein, Finkelsteins true occupation is as a member of a traveling circus, a freak show of anti-Semites who promote anti-Israel propaganda from campus to campus.26 While Finkelstein was busy demonizing Israel and America at his many campus appearances as a lecturer, he coddled homicidal Palestinians and defended terrorists. In 2009, when Israel was pounding Hamas strongholds to weaken the terrorist underbelly and minimize the likelihood of continuing rocket attacks into southern Israeli towns, Finkelstein, with apologetics matching those of Harvard Universitys Sara Roy, wildly proclaimed it was Hamas, not Israel, who had kept the truce and was softening its rhetoric, and it was Hamas, not Israel, who actually wanted peace. Hamas has pure political intentions and passively yearns for truces and safe borders, according to Mr. Finkelstein, while the invidious state of Israel, fearing moderate Arab foes who would force it into peace, is obdurate, con24. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 85. 25. Edward Alexander, Academics Against Israel: Martin Jay Explains How Jews Cause Anti-Semitism,Ariel Center for Policy Research.org, December 23, 2009, http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/issue1/alexander-1.htm. 26. Roz Rothstein, Beware the Finkelstein Syndrome. The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, June 8, 2006: http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/ beware_the_finkelstein_syndrome_20060609/.

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niving, and bellicose. In fact, Finkelstein suggested, Israel was collectively going mad, while everyone else in the rational world yearned for Middle Eastern peace:
I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. And we have to be honest about that. While the rest of the world wants peace, Europe wants peace, the US wants peace, but this state wants war, war and war. In the first week of the massacres, there were reports in the Israeli press that Israel did not want to put all its ground forces in Gaza because it was preparing attacks on Iran. Then there were reports it was planning attacks on Lebanon. It is a lunatic state.27

If Finkelstein lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies, conspiracies, and intellectually imbecilic distortions of history and fact, his spiritual mentor, MIT professor emeritus of linguistics Noam Chomsky, has inhabited a similar ideological sphere, but has become an even more widely known, eagerly followed creature of the Israel-hating, America-hating, antisemitic left. Chomskys vituperation against America has been a defining theme in his intellectual jihad, but an obsessive, apoplectic hatred for Israel has more completely dominated his screeds and spurious scholarship. In all of his work, suggested Paul Bogdaner, an essayist who has extensively examined Chomskys scholarly output, one theme is constant: his portrayal of Israel as the devil state in the Middle East, a malevolent institutional psychopath whose only redeeming feature is the readiness of its own left-wing intelligentsia to expose its uniquely horrifying depravity.28 And Israeli Jews are not solely responsible for the crimes of the Jewish state; American Jews, too, in Chomskys opinion, share culpability. In the American Jewish community, he stated, there is little willingness to face the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historical injustice, whatever one may think of the competing claims. Until this is recognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.29 Indicting American Jews for the offenses he perceives as having been perpetrated by Israel is another way in which Chomsky allows his rabid antiZionism to engulf Diaspora Jews as well, making them morally responsible
27. Selcuk Gultasli, Norman Finkelstein: Israel Is Committing a Holocaust in Gaza, Todays Zaman, January 19, 2009, http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/ detaylar.do?load=detay&link=164483. 28. Paul Bogdanor, The Devil State: Chomskys War Against Israel, PaulBogdanor.com, December 17, 2009, http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/ bogdanor.pdf. 29. Noam Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.

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for the crimes of the Jewish statewith which they may, or may not, share any affinity. What is more, Jews support of Israel, and their abrasive and powerful presence in the world, are factors contributing to the increase in world-wide antisemitismnot, of course, the malevolent impulses and psychological defects of Jew-hating antisemites themselves. Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population, Chomsky claimed. Not only that, but with the same sentiment articulated in such spurious histories as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or even the Israel Lobby, he asserted that Jews strove for even more omnipotence, and that privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% controlthe basis of why antisemitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of antisemitism; they want to make sure theres no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.30 Jewish power is a repellent notion for Chomsky, just as the hegemonic might he ascribes to the terror states of Israel and Americanot the destabilizing barbarism of Islamismis the scourge of peace. The existence of Israel not only subjugates the long-suffering Arabs, but also is driving the entire globe toward annihilation, Chomsky suggested, using the same image used by Finkelstein of Israels having succumbed into a kind of moral madness. Its very psychosis had become a source of power, and the exercise of that power would bring about global genocide. Israels secret weapon . . ., Chomsky wrote, evoking an apocalyptic vision, is that it may behave in the manner of what have sometimes been called crazy states in the international affairs literature . . . eventuating in a final solution from which few will escape.31 ACADEMIC FREE SPEECH
AS A

COVER

FOR

CAMPUS ANTISEMITISM

While academics fulminate regularly against Israel and America, give tacit support to these countries enemies, and heap vitriol on the Jewish state and its supportersmuch of it approaching or exceeding what would be considered reasonable or rational criticism of a democratic statethey regularly cloak themselves with the protective shield of academic free speech, that sacrosanct philosophy that has come to mean that liberal academics can express themselves, even loathsomely, and expect no one to question their poisonous rhetoric or answer back with a vigorous defense
30. Noam Chomsky, Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Palestinians, Variant.org.uk, October 11, 2002, http://www.variant.org.uk/16texts/Chomsky.html. 31. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 468-69.

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from the other side. When the left derides Israel and promotes false, biased, or hateful ideas about Zionism, provoking the Israel government, or military policies, and defenders to speak back (as they did, for instance, when Walt and Mearsheimer published their controversial study of the Israel Lobby) and commentators to call them on their defective views, the common claim is that the outspoken critics of Israel have been silenced by the accusation of antisemitism and that their free speech is being suppressed. It is, of course, perfectly acceptable for academics to question the status quo and challenge prevailing ideas as they help students to find some truth amid many ideological options; indeed, that is one of the chief roles of the university, and should be. What is not acceptable, and in fact is damaging the very core of higher education in its one-sided, doctrinaire approach to learning, is the pattern of lies, contortions, and mistaken assumptions endemic to discussions about the politics, military actions, and very existence of Israel. Moreover, while leftist and radical professors profess to be guarding the tradition of academic freedom and free speech on their campuses, universities as a lot have been subsumed by a rank hypocrisy when it comes to actually balancing competing views from different sides of academic debates. What has been dubbed political correctness is actually the subversion of the stated goal of promoting the free expression of all views within the university community. What it has come to mean, unfortunately, is that only those views conforming to prevailing political orthodoxies are considered to be acceptable by the guardians of what may be said and who may say it. Unfortunately, concern for Jewish students well-being and emotional safety do not seem to be viewed with any great alarm by college administrations. This has meant that Jewish students at UC Irvine, San Francisco State University, and York University in Toronto, to name a few schools, have had to endure being assaulted by waves of anti-Israel propaganda, vitriolic speeches, hate-fests, and lengthy campaigns of anti-Zionist vilification, including physical intimidation and assaults. University officials have been slow to address these incidents, and have not regularly taken strong public moral stands against the professors and students groups who have conjured up this odious brew against Israel and Jews. That does not mean that university administrations are unaware of certain groups concerns when their rights or feelings are trampled on; it does mean that Jewish studentslike Caucasians, heterosexuals, Christians, conservatives, or Republicansare not perceived as being a group needing protection. So, in the greatest moral fraud perpetrated by universities claiming to be diverse and all-inclusive, diversity on most campuses today encompasses diversity of thought, as Professor Thornton put it, on a con-

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tinuum that starts at liberal and ends at radical leftist.32 In their mission to protect the sensibilities and emotional well-being of identified campus victim groups, universities, often violating their own written guidelines and codes of behavior, have instituted speech codes to prevent what is generally called hate speech now, but that has become a tactic to marginalize, and exclude, the speech and ideology of those with whom liberals and leftists do not agree. These tactics are evident as Muslim students sensibilities become offended when critics of Islamism come to speak on campuses; administrators now deem offensive behavior and speech to be harassing and intimidating when it is directed at Muslims or Islam, not merely expressive. On college campuses, to paraphrase George Orwell, all views are equal, but some are more equal than others. The moral relativism that imbues academic free speech was clearly at work on one campus during the tenure of Lawrence Summers as Harvards president between 2001 and 2006. Summers ignoble loss of his presidency confirmed the reality that, despite its claims to the contrary, academia, even at hallowed Harvard, was no longer the certain intellectual marketplace for open discourse and free speech, even on matters of controversy where vigorous debate and alternate views would be productive. One of Summers defining moral decisions was embodied in his controversial 2002 speech, in which he rejected a divestment petition to withdraw funds from Israel signed by, among others, seventy-four Harvard professors, many from the College of Arts and Sciences. He observed that antisemitic and anti-Israel attitudes, once the invidious products of fringe groups and right-wing cranks, had begun to appear on college campuses, that profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people, he said in the most pointed section of his comments, are advocating and taking actions that are antisemitic in their effect if not their intent. But even as he was cautioning divestment proponents to examine the true nature of their attitudes and the ramifications of their actions, Summers, unlike his critics, was willing to let even foolish views be heard. We should always respect the academic freedom of everyone to take any position, he said. But, he added, those who take provocative positions have to assume that their views can and will be challenged; that academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism.33
32. Bruce Thornton, Ideology Trumps Truth on Campus, City Journal, November 25, 2007, http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-11-21bt.html. 33. Lawrence Summers, Address at Morning Prayers, Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 17, 2002, http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_ 2002/morningprayers.php.

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One thing those on the left despise is being questioned about their integrity, and so it was with the indignant petition-signers and their fellow travelers, who accused Summers of being intellectually oppressive and stifling debate by questioning the morality of their actions and raising a point about the true intent of the divestment effort: singling out Israel specifically among all nations for economic sanctions. The offended faculty never forgave Summers for expressing his opinion, engaging in intellectual inquiry, and naming them for what they were. That same sensitivity to language about Israel and antisemitism did not seem to faze faculty members and liberals, however, when Harvards English department in 2002 invited poet Tom Paulin to speak as a prestigious Morris Gray Lecturer, and did so, according to English Department chair Lawrence Buell, to affirm a belief in the importance of free speech as a principle and practice in the academy. That of course is a noble and purposeful role for universities, save for the fact that Paulin, poet and lecturer at Oxford University, had been quoted articulating the appalling sentiment that Brooklyn-born Jewish settlers [in Israel] should be shot dead. He told Egypts al-Ahram Weekly, I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them. I can understand how suicide bombers feel . . . I think attacks on civilians in fact boost morale.34 In those instances when controversy arises because Israel-hating or antisemitic professors have publicly expressed radical views, not only is there general silence from most faculty and administrators about how these views may have harmed the collegiality of academic community, but many will reflexively defend the speech, regardless of how outrageous the content or potentially hurtful the message. In January of 2009, for example, a tenured sociology professor, William I. Robinson, of the University of California Santa Barbara, sent an odious e-mail to the 80 students in his Sociology 130SG: The Sociology of Globalization course. Under the heading Parallel Images of Nazis and Israelis, the e-mail displayed a photo-collage of 42 side-by-side, grisly photographs meant to suggest a historical equivalence between Israels treatment of Palestinians in its occupation of Gaza and the Third Reichs subjugation of the Warsaw Ghetto and its treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Robinson sent the e-mail without supplying any context for it, nor did it seemingly have any specific relevance to or connection with the courses content. Robinsons e-mail contained the following commentary:
34. Robert F. Worth, Poet Who Spoke Against Israel Is Reinvited to Talk at Harvard, The New York Times, November 21, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2002/11/21/education/21POET.html.

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I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the most frightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of the carnage but that which shows Israeli children writing with love on a bomb that will tear apart Palestinian children. Gaza is Israels Warsawa vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians, subjecting them to the slow death of malnutrition, disease and despair, nearly two years before their subjection to the quick death of Israeli bombs. We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide . . ., a process whose objective is not so much to physically eliminate each and every Palestinian than to eliminate the Palestinians as a people in any meaningful sense of the notion of people-hood.35

In response to the inflammatory e-mail, two students dropped the course and immediately filed a complaint with the universitys Academic Senates Charges Committee, and also went to two off-campus advocacy groups, the Anti-Defamation League and StandWithUs. Not surprisingly, charges of antisemitism came from some of Robinsons critics, as well as from those who believed, like StandWithUss Roz Rothstein, that professors should [not] be using their class roster to sell their own political opinions . . . Our concern, she said, is that he abused his position and that it was unrelated with his class.36 But many students and professorial colleagues at UCSB immediately came Robinsons defense, forming an ad hoc group called the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom (CDAF) at UCSB, dedicated to organizing students on campus against nationwide campaigns against political repression, and also resisting what they ominously referred to as a silencing campaign waged against Robinson by outside forces who had undertaken a flagrant and baseless affronts to academic freedom on this campus and to Professor Robinson in particular. In June, five months after the university had initiated its investigation into Robinsons conduct, officials dismissed all charges and terminated the case without any negative findings against the sociology professor, and the CDAF smugly asserted that the charge of anti-Semitism [was] made in bad faith, and that its real purpose is to vilify and stifle any honest critiques of the state of Israels policies and practices.37
35. Maane Khatchatourian and Jenna Ryan, Officials Investigate Questionable Email, Daily Nexus, May 21, 2009, http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a= 19071. 36. Elliott Rosenfeld, Investigation of Professor Forges Ahead, Daily Nexus, June 4, 2009, http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=19161. 37. Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB, About Us, 2009, http://sb4af.wordpress.com/about-us/.

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Apparently, Professor Robinson shared the committees belief that sinister, outside thought policemen had instigated a campaign of suppression against him. Like professors Matory and Walt at Harvard, Robinson knew exactly where to assign blame for the scrutiny he had undergone as a result of his provocative e-mail. The Israel lobby is possibly the most powerful lobby in the United States, he told the Daily Nexus, UCSBs student newspaper, repeating the same accusation that is common to those who have actually acted in an antisemitic way, and what they do is label any criticism of anti-Israeli conduct and practices as anti-Semitic. . . . This campaign is not just an attempt to punish me. The Israel lobby is stepping up its vicious attacks on anyone who would speak out against Israeli policies.38 So in Professor Robinsons morally incoherent mind, depicting Israeli Jews as the new Nazis who are committing genocide against the Palestinians is merely instructive content for a sociology course, but when those who believe that the comparison between Nazis and Jews is a perverse and libelous reading of historical fact answer back, it is a vicious attack, a tactic of pro-Israel forces to deflect criticism and obscure the malignancy of their deeds. THE ANTI-ISRAEL HECKLERS VETO: SHOUTING DOWN CONSERVATIVE SPEECH When campus radical and leftist professors are not moaning about how the dreaded Israel Lobby is attempting to suppress all criticism of Israel, or complaining about how any scrutiny of radical Islam, Palestinian terror, or Arab intransigency constitutes hate speech that will intimidate or harass Muslims, they have found other means to ensure that countervailing opinions about Israel and the Palestinians are shut out. With greater frequency, Muslim student groups, radical, anti-Israel professors, and even college officials have taken it upon themselves to either restrict the ability of conservative or pro-Israel speakers to appear on campuses, or to deny them access to a campus altogether. In October 2009, for example, St. Louis Universitys College Republicans and Young Americas Foundation had invited conservative author David Horowitz to deliver a talk entitled An Evening with David Horowitz: Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rightsbut university administrators, once again choosing to avoid a close examination of radical Islam, cancelled Horowitzs planned appearance. What St. Louis Universitys administration had done in this instance was essentially to exercise the hecklers veto, shutting down speech with
38. Rosenfeld, Investigation.

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which it did not agree or that is felt was too controversial for certain protected minorities on campus. Ominously, however, and in seeming contradiction to the schools own stated policy to promote the free and open exchange of ideas and viewpoints, even if that exchange proves to be offensive, distasteful, disturbing or denigrating to some, this particular speech was suppressed in advance of the event, based on a belief that the speakers words would possibly insult Muslim students and inflame their sensibilities. The school officials decision seemed to belie the universitys own contention, in its Policy Statement on Demonstrations & Disruption, that it encourages students, faculty and staff to be bold, independent, and creative thinkers, and that fundamental to this process is the creation of an environment that respects the rights of all members of the University community to explore and to discuss questions which interest them, to express opinions and debate issues energetically and publicly, and to demonstrate their concern by orderly means. There were troubling issues here, putting aside the basic question of fairness of denying certain students, with certain political beliefs, the opportunity to invite speakers to campus to share their views. Horowitzs speech was canceled (and he had appeared, by his own account, on more than 400 campuses in the past), not because it might contain speech that was demonstrably false or even incendiary, but because some individuals might be offended or intimidated by speech that they were perfectly free never to hear. For me, it was . . . the content, explained the universitys dean of students, Scott Smith, in rationalizing the decision to rescind Horowitzs invitation to speakparticularly, the blanketed use of the term IslamoFascism.39 The school was also concerned that the speech would be seen as attacking another faith and seeking to cause derision on campus. But where does a college administration, whose own institution claims to value speech that is even offensive, distasteful, disturbing or denigrating to some, decide that this particular topicradical Islamcannot and should not be spoken about? Is this not a relevant discussion in a world where, since 9/11, over 15,000 acts of terror have been committed by murderous radicals in Islams name? Does not an ideology that has as its aim the subjugation of other faiths and a world-wide caliphate under sharia law, and is fueled by billions in petro dollars, deserve, and in fact require, some critique and evaluation?
39. Kelly Dunn, Horowitz Speech Rejected by SLU, The University News, October 1, 2009, http://media.www.unewsonline.com/media/storage/paper953/ news/2009/10/01/News/Horowitz.Speech.Rejected.By.Slu-3790132.shtml.

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Most disingenuous is how institutions of higher education like St. Louis University, while horrified by the prospect of a David Horowitz visit, use their claims of academic free speech as a cover for regularly bringing outrageous, out-of-the-mainstream views to campuseseither in studentrun organizations, in course materials and teaching philosophies, in the sponsorship of festivals and cultural events, or in the person of controversial speakers and artists. For example, the concern over offending certain student groups suddenly did not have the same sense of urgency when speakers, with views certainly as controversial as Horowitzs, were enthusiastically invited to the Washington University campus, notable among them Norman Finkelstein, who spoke in 2007 as part of Palestine Awareness Week, sponsored by the on-campus group Saint Louis University Solidarity with Palestine. Horowitz had been prevented from speaking and shouted down by ideological bullies before. In 2007 at Emory University, as a guest of Emorys College Republicans, Horowitz was scheduled to speak to an audience of some 300 people as part of that years Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. While boos, catcalls, and shouts of Heil Hitler filled the room, and protestors stood, backs turned to the stage, Horowitz attempted to deliver his speech. Finally, the hecklers, raucous members of radical groups such as Amnesty International, Veterans for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Muslim Student Association (MSA) were sufficiently intrusive and belligerent enough to prevent Horowitz from speaking any further, and the speech was cancelled as police, finally unable to calm the angry crowd, escorted Horowitz off stage to safety. Ideological thugs were also present at the University of Chicago in October 2009 to greet Israels former prime minister Ehud Olmert, who was invited to speak at Mandel Hall as part of the King Abdullah II Leadership Lecture series organized by the Harris School of Public Policy. Dozens of protestors inside the hall and some 100 outside, from Chicagos Muslim Students Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as groups from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and Northwestern, were intent on disrupting the speech with catcalls, jeers, and outrageous threats and condemnation, and were so effective in their incivility that the planned 20-minute presentation ran nearly an hour and a half. Police had to forcibly drag a vociferous protestor out the door as others hurled invectives, condemnation, and epithets at Olmert, calling him a murderer, war criminal, and racist. One student who had attended the speech, Frank Pucci, a political science and history major, wrote in the universitys student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, his view that Ehud Olmert is not an academic who happens to have a difference of opinion that must be respected; he is responsi-

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ble for the deaths of thousands. As the first protester who stood cried out, War crimes are not free expression. Not only that, Pucci claimed, but the mere fact that Olmert was invited to speak was insulting and hurtful to the campus community. In light of the grave moral injustice engendered by Olmerts presence, the only responsible course of action is for the University of Chicago to apologize to the members of the Arab, Muslim, and proPalestinian community for allowing such a blatant display of bias and insolence against them.40 Apparently, no groups of students were hurt and offended by blatant display[s] of bias and insolence against them at Yale University, for example, when a former Taliban member matriculated on campus, or in 2003, when Yales Afro-American Cultural Center and the Black Student Alliance invited Amiri Baraka, former Black Panther and the soon-thereafterdismissed, and embattled, poet laureate of New Jersey, to speak. It surprised and annoyed some in the Yale community that Barakaa virulent antiwhite, antisemitic, anti-Establishment leftistwas invited to the university in the first place, but not Pamela George, assistant dean of Yale College and director of the Cultural Center; she drew a comparison between Barakas hate-filled visit to that of Yoni Fighel, a former Israeli general and soldier who had come to Yale earlier that semester to engage in apolitical discussions on Middle East security and Israel. Perhaps the comparison was made precisely because Mr. Baraka had been under assault by many who were shocked by the conspiracy-laden antisemitism of his poem Somebody Blew Up America, in which he referred, among other wild claims, to Israels foreknowledge of and complicity in the bombing of the World Trade towers. But the poem also had words to denigrate American culture, imperialism, the white race, Zionism, and other sinister powers in Barakas cynical imagination. But more revealing than the fact that such a seemingly antisemitic speaker was invited, and then celebrated, at Yale was the reaction of one student whose theory was that the only reason that there was controversy about Barakas poetry and slurs of Jews was because, incredibly, that Jews control the press. Writing one of his regular columns in the Yale Daily News, Sahm Adrangi decided that, in this casewhere, after all, it was only Israel, Jews, and America being slurredstudent groups who invite controversial speakers ought to be congratulated, not condemned. Contrarian thinkers and conspiracy theorists, he mused, expose us to vantage points we rarely encounter in fellow Yalies. Their arguments are often more
40. Frank Pucci, War crimes Are Not Free Expression, Chicago Maroon, October 20, 2009, http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2009/10/20/war-crimes-are-notfree-expression#.

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sophisticated than wed expect and in debating them, we gain a deeper understanding of our own opinions.41 That aside, however, the real lesson to be gleaned from incendiary anti-Israel speakers like Baraka isnt really about free speech, Adrangi cautioned; its about how special interests manipulate the public discourse to advance their agendas. And who were those special interests attempting to make much ado about Barakas poetic ravings? The Jewish press, of course. Jews tend to sympathize with Israel more so than non-Jews. And in my three years at the Yale Daily News, Jewish students have comprised a majority of management positions . . . . Adrangi was quick to point out, however, that he was not suggesting there was a conspiracy among Jewish journalists to tilt the argument in Israels favor. But, he asked rhetorically, and apparently knowingly, does the prevalence of Jews in American media, business and politics help explain Americas steadfast support for Israel, whose 35-year occupation of Palestinian lands is an affront to human decency? Of course.42 THE MUSLIM STUDENT ASSOCIATION AND ANTISEMITIC RADICALISM CALIFORNIA CAMPUSES
ON

If any area of the United States can be identified as the epicenter of anti-Israelism on campus, California, the nations most populous state, can certainly be said to have earned that dubious distinction. In fact, observers of out-of-control anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity on campuses consider Californias universities to be the veritable ground zero of such vitriol, with particularly troubling and persistent problems of radical student groups, venom-spewing guest speakers, annual hate-fests targeting Israel and Jewish students, and a pervasive mood on campus in which Jewish students and other pro-Israel faculty and students experienced visceral and real harassment, intimidation and discrimination, as a 2004 Zionist Organization of Americas complaint to the U.S. Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights described the situation on one campus, the University of California Irvine. In fact, even after the U.S. Office of Civil Rights had initiated their 2004 inquiry into rampant antisemitism on campusincluding at UC Irvine, a focus of their studya second similar effort, the Task Force on Anti-Semitism at the University of California, Irvine, was launched in
41. Sahm Adrangi, Not Just Another Conspiracy Theory: Manipulating Anger, Yale Daily News, February 26, 2003, http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/ 2003/feb/26/not-just-another-conspiracy-theory-manipulating. 42. Adrangi, Not Just Another Conspiracy.

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December 2006 by the Hillel Foundation of Orange County and staffed by local professionals, religious leaders, and academics. Feeling that the federal inquiry had uncovered some troubling trends on the Irvine campus, but delivering a somewhat soft response to the universitys administration, the Orange County task force decided to revisit some of the incidents in an attempt to show a pattern of anti-Israelism and antisemitism as endemic to the Irvine campus. Its stated goal was to study, investigate and issue a report on alleged incidents of racism and anti-Semitism at the University of California Irvine (UCI). We are not singling out any specific group. We are looking at all instances of alleged anti-Semitic and racist activity. The U.S. Office of Civil Rights, as the task force report noted, had focused more specifically on issues of discrimination based on students national origin, and the investigation applied narrow legally technical analysis about whether UCI violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implementing regulations. The task force came to the following conclusions, based on their own extensive interviews with students, faculty, and UCI administrators (at least those who agreed to respond to inquiries): Jewish students have been subject to physical and verbal harassment because they are Jewish and support Israel. Hate speech, both direct and symbolic, is directed at Jews by speakers and demonstrators. An annual week-long event sponsored by the Muslim Student Union is an antisemitic hate fest targeting Israel and Jews using lies and propaganda dating back to the antisemitism of the Middle Ages. Speakers who are pro-Israel and/or those who condemn speakers who espouse anti-American and anti-Israeli views are subject to disruptive behavior by Muslim students and their supporters. Jewish students state that they are subject to a hostile class environment by faculty members who adopt an anti-Israel bias. Materials contained in certain Middle-East studies courses are biased and indicative of a leftist orthodoxy that characterizes this area of study. The UCI administration is not responsive to complaints by Jewish students. Jewish students complain of a double standard when the administration enforces campus rules and regulations.43
43. Orange County Task Force, Report on Anti-Semitism at UCI, February 12, 2008, http://octaskforce.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/orange-county-task-forcereport-on-anti-semitism-at-uci.pdf.

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These are troubling assessments, but not at all uncommon on campuses across the country, and in Canada and Great Britain, as well. Yet, despite the two protracted investigations into antisemitic activities at UCI, the incidence of hate-fests, protests, and incendiary speakers has not subsided. In fact, in May 2009, the Muslim Student Union continued its tradition of sponsorship of vile, hate-spewing events to further demonize Israel, this time an 18-day extravaganza offensively named Israel: The Politics of Genocide, which preposterously proclaimed on their posters announcing the event that Israel has resulted in 61 years of illegal occupation. 61 years of statelessness. 61 years of systematic ethnic cleansing. The Palestinians have lost thousands of lives and millions of have been displaced from their homes. Despite all of this, their resolve remains steadfast, their resistance enduring, their fire unflinching. However, though Israel continues to violate international law and inflict these injustices, Palestinian blood stains our hands, too. If the astounding claim is made here that the existence of Israel represents 61 years of illegal occupation, then that either exposes a sore lack of historical insight on the part of the sponsors, or, more likely, it reflects the notion held in much of the Arab world that all of Israelnot just the occupied territories gained in 1967is occupied Muslim land and that Israel is therefore illegal and not a nation at all. The Politics of Genocide event included speeches by such notorious figures as the vitriolic Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, a black Imam associated with the Masjid Al Islam mosque in Oakland and the frequent guest of the Irvine MSU. Malik-Ali, former Nation of Islam member, convert to Islam, and cheerleader for Hamas and Hezbollah, has been a ubiquitous, poisonous presence on the Irvine campus who never hesitates to castigate Israel, Zionists, Jewish power, and Jews themselves as he weaves incoherent, hallucinatory conspiracies about the Middle East and the West. As an example, UCIs student newspaper, The New University, reported that Malik-Ali, in a February 2004 speech, America under Siege: The Zionist Hidden Agenda, implied that Zionism is a mixture of chosen people-ness [sic] and white supremacy; that the Iraqi war is in the process of Israelization; that the Zionists had the Congress, the media and the FBI in their back pocket; that the downfall of former Democratic [presidential] front-runner Howard Dean was due to the Zionists; and that the Mossad [Israels intelligence agency] would have assassinated Al Gore if he had been elected [in 2000] just to bring Joe Lieberman (his Jewish vice president) to power.44 Malik-Ali used a February 2005 MSU-organized event to proclaim that Zionism is a mixture, a fusion of the concept of white supremacy and
44. Discover the Networks, Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, DisoverTheNetworks.org, http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2102.

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the chosen people. He complained about Zionist control of the American media, Zionist complicity in the war in Iraq, and Zionists ability to deflect justified criticism. You will have to hear more about the Holocaust when you accuse them of their Nazi behavior, he warned, after railing against Zionist control of the press, the media, and the political decisions of the American government. And what was his vision for Israel and the Palestinians? One state. Majority rule. Check that out. Us. The Muslims.45 In May 2006, speaking from a podium under a banner reading Israel, the 4th Reich, Malik-Ali referred to Jews as new Nazis and a bunch of straight-up punks. The truth of the matter is your days are numbered, he admonished Jews everywhere. We will fight you. We will fight you until we are either martyred or until we are victorious.46 Another guest speaker who regularly makes appearances on the MSA hate-fest circuit is Muhammad al-Asi, an antisemitic, anti-America Muslim activist from Washington, D.C., who has written, among other notorious ideas, that The Israeli Zionist are [sic] the true and legitimate object of liquidation. At an MSU-sponsored event in February 2008, From Auschwitz to Gaza: The Politics of Genocide, which tried to draw parallels between the Holocaust and Hamas-controlled Gaza, al-Asi was a featured speaker. In his remarks, he repeated the canard of Jewish control of world politics, suggesting that Zionists or what some people call the Jewish lobby had reduced the United States to playing second fiddle to the Israeli government. This situation had to end, he warned, before the perfidious Zionists draw America into yet another war for their own benefit. How long are we going to take the Israeli dog wagging the American tail? he asked. Now the pro-Zionist, Israeli crowd in the United States says the United States should go to war against Iran.47 Just months after 9/11, al-Asi had similar invective to utter toward Jews, in the context of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Using his favorite image of the ghetto when describing Jews, he observed that, We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you cant take the ghetto out of the Jew, and this has been demonstrated
45. Terrorism Awareness Project, The Muslim Student Union at the University of California Irvine, TerrorismAwareness.org, http://www.terrorismawareness. org/muslim-groups-on-campus/128/the-muslim-student-union-at-the-university-ofcalifornia-irvine/. 46. Terrorism Awareness Project, The Muslim. 47. Anti-Defamation League, Backgrounder: Mohammad al-Asi, ADL.org, http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Israel/al_asi.htm.

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time and time again in Occupied Palestine. What is worse, he continued, this behavior on the part of the malicious Jews would likely continue, since now they have American diplomats and politicians and decision makers and strategists in their pocket.48 San Francisco State University is not far behind UC Irvine in the way it has enabled its Muslim students organizations to create a veritable reign of terror on campus against Jewish and pro-Israel students. Most notorious was the Muslim student-sponsored, pro-Palestinian April 2002 demonstration at SFSU that included grotesque flyers and posters depicting a dead Palestinian baby on a soup-can label imprinted with the words Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license, echoing the centuries-old blood libel of European antisemitism that accused Jews of murdering Gentile children and using their blood to bake matzosa slander that has, not surprisingly, currently gained credence in the Arab world. Not content just to mount their own vile protests against Zionism, Jews, and Israel, the following month the pro-Palestinian student groups disrupted a vigil for Holocaust Remembrance Day, where some 30 Jewish students who were reciting the Mourners Kaddishthe Jewish prayer for the deadwere shouted down by protesters, who countered with grisly prayers in memory of Palestinian suicide bombers. The pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators, armed with whistles and bull horns, physically assaulted the Jewish students, spat on them, and screamed such epithets as Too bad Hitler didnt finish the job, Get out or we will kill you, F**k the Jews, Die racist pigs, and Go back to Russia, Jews. The violence escalated to the extent that San Francisco police officers finally had to usher the Jewish students to safety off campus. Laurie Zoloth, SFSUs director of the program in Jewish studies at the time of the incident, described the event in an open letter: The police could do nothing more than surround the Jewish students and community members who were now trapped in a corner of the plaza, grouped under the flags of Israel, while an angry, out of control mob, literally chanting for our deaths, surrounded us . . . There was no safe way out of the Plaza. We had to be marched back to the Hillel House under armed S.F. police guard, and we had to have a police guard remain outside Hillel.49 In July 2006, SFSUs General Union of Palestinian Students co-sponsored with Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, yet another
48. Anti-Defamation League, Backgrounder. 49. Melissa Radler, Anti-Semitic Riot at San Francisco State University, Free Republic.com, May 16, 2002, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/684040/ posts.

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hate-fest against Israel, this time the Fourth International Al-Awda Convention, the overarching ambition of which is to enforce the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes in what is current-day Israel, with the express purpose of demographically eliminating Israels Jewish identity and continued existence. Racism, tribalism, all the isms were fighting, you cannot exclude Zionism from, proclaimed Michel Shehadeh, the host of the tellingly named Radio Intifada, a KPFK-FM Los Angeles radio program, and one of the conventions featured guest speakers. If struggling against Zionism isnt at the core of defining yourself as a progressive, then youre not. You cannot be progressive if youre not fighting fascism and Nazism. Its a package. You cant be selective in this.50 Al-Awdas intransigency regarding the mere existence of Israel, and its radical stance with respect to terrorism and a desire to totally replace the current state of Israel with an Islamic Palestine, are so breathtakingly extreme that it is difficult to see how any university could look at the tone and content of this conference and pretend that it created productive dialogue or inspired positive academic debate. It is one-sided and biased in the extreme, and barely disguises the overt antisemitism amid its calls to dismantle what it describes as an illegal Zionist regime. Another of the conferences speakers, Lamis Jamal Deek, an attorney and a member of Al-Awda New York, summed up the overriding sentiment of the movement: There can never be a place for Zionism in the Arab world . . . Zionism will never be allowed to exist peacefully among the people. Today we again demand the end of the Zionist presence in the Arab world. At San Francisco State University, such sentiments seem to have found a welcoming home. ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK: AN ANNUAL ON-CAMPUS OPPORTUNITY DEMONIZE ISRAEL AND JEWS
TO

Initiated in 2004 at the University of Toronto, Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) was held in 40 locations worldwide by 2008, with the stated purpose of educating people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as part of a growing global BDS movement.51 IAW uses as its primary tactic what has been referred to the Durban strategy, referring to the 2001 anti-Israel
50. Joe Eskenazi, Vitriolic Anti-Israel Gathering Held at SFSU, Jweekly, July 21, 2006, http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/29842/vitriolic-anti-israel-gatheringheld-at-sfsu. 51. Israel Apartheid Week, Israel Apartheid Week.org, November 9, 2009, http://apartheidweek.org/en/about.

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hate-fest in South Africa, where the representatives of member countries perversely defined Zionism as racism. Events were held on the campuses of academic institutions that included Berkeley, Toronto, Boston College, Yale, Michigan, and Columbia. In addition to the racism charge, IAW events continue debate on the other thorny issues of the Palestinian question: the right of return of all Palestinians to their old homes in what is now present-day Israel, dismantling the security wall, and forming a binational state in which Jews, then a minority, would be but one class of citizens into whatever type of political structure that state evolvedin short, a world without Israel. Since the motive of the sponsors in producing these events seems pureending racismthe stridency of the message and the vitriol of the speakers and marketing materials of the IAW has ramped up as supporters have become emboldened by their mission. In some instances, such as at the University of Manitoba in the weeks after the 2009 Gaza incursion by Israel, when sentiments ran high, posters for the event created by the Muslim Students Association were so extreme that school officials reigned in the incendiary marketing efforts. One of them depicted a Jewish fighter plane targeting a baby stroller, reported a National Post article. Another featured a caricature of a hooked-nosed Hasidic Jew with a star of David, pointing a bazooka at the nose of an Arab carrying a slingshot; a third one showed an Israeli helicopter with a swastika on top, dropping a bomb on a baby bottle. Even on university campuses, where the right to speak offensively and often seems to be one of the bulwarks of higher education, the grisly and explicitly antisemitic tone of the posters was all a little too much, the Post reported, and the school forced their removal the same day.52 In a statement in which he defended the universitys decision to permit the event, Deputy Provost and Vice-Provost of Students David Farrar said that despite numerous requests from opponents of the IAW to have the event canceled, We will not. To do so would violate the universitys commitment to freedom of speech . . . As an academic community, we have a fundamental commitment to the principles of freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech and freedom of association . . . [T]he university has no reason to believe that the activities will exceed the boundaries for free speech. . . .53 But that spirit of freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech seemed to be absent from the actual goings-on during the event, according to at
52. Craig Offman, Campuses Awash in Tension over Israel Apartheid Week, National Post, March 2, 2009, http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id= 1343206. 53. Graham F. Scott, Apartheid: Is This the Israel You Know?, The Varsity, February 3, 2005, http://thevarsity.ca/articles/15158.

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least one attendee, Ilan Nachim. I think its one of the most racist presentations Ive ever seen, he told the schools newspaper. I was not allowed to express myself at any point during this evening, from beginning to end. We had our hands up, we did not open our mouths. We were not allowed to express ourselves. This is what the university calls free speech?54 More ominously, by 2009 the annual event had so degenerated into a racist, rabid rally that proceedings were closed to cameras and reporters, and individuals who actually attempted to participate in a dialogue about the issues being raised by the event in the first place were confronted with physical intimidation and threats, encountering the dark side of proPalestinianism. One of these individuals, Isaac Apter, a Jewish alumnus of the University of Toronto, recounted how he and others in the audience of one evenings events quizzed a speaker about why Hamas had persistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of Israeldid Israel have the right to exist? and when the speaker repeatedly sidestepped the questioning, some audience members shouted out, Answer the questions! Apter found himself approached from behind by a member of a private guard retained by Students Against Israel Apartheid, slapped in the head, yanked from his seat, and yelled at with the warning, You shut the fuck up! A second Jewish attendee was similarly assaulted that night by one of the hired security team and given a far more chilling warning, particularly in light of the practice of beheadings in the Middle East: Shut the fuck up or Ill saw your head off.55 In fact, the IAW event, by singling out Israel and attacking it for its alleged racism, might well be a violation of Canadian and international laws. In a paper published in the Jewish Political Studies Review, Avi Weinryb suggested that by allowing the IAW events to be held, the University of Torontos decisions conflicts with the 2004 European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC)s working definition of antiSemitism . . . which includes such examples of anti-Semitism as: denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor), [and] applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.56 The University of Toronto is not the only Canadian institution of higher education to become a breeding ground for anti-Israel radicalism.
54. Scott, Apartheid. 55. Offman, Campuses Awash. 56. Avi Weinryb, The University of Toronto: The Institution Where Israel Apartheid Week Was Born, Jewish Political Studies Review, December 2008.

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There was, notably, the infamous riots at Montreals Concordia University in September 2002, where mobs of marauding students smashed windows and destroyed furniture and fixtures to express their displeasure at the invitation to Benjamin Netanyahu to speak there. Torontos York University has also recently defined itself as having a rabid antisemitic leaning when, in February 2009, some 100 pro-Palestinian students initiated a near-riot, and police had to be called to usher Jewish students to safety after they had been barricaded inside the Hillel offices and were isolated and threatened, according to Hillel itself, by the physically and verbally aggressive demonstrators. Parroting the morally incoherent and factually incorrect exhortations of Israel-haters elsewhere of Zionism equals racism! and Racists off campus!, the York mob, members of both the York Federation of Students and Students Against Israeli Apartheid, demonstrated once again that what is positioned as intellectual debate on campuses about the Israeli/Palestinian issue has changed into something that is not really a conversation at all; instead, it is more akin to an ideologically driven shout-fest with a new version of pro-Palestinian brown shirts. Yorks supporters of the cult of Palestinianism apparently no longer felt even a bit uncomfortable voicing what was actually on their minds when the subject of Israel comes up: when the York Hillel students were trapped inside locked offices, surrounded by an increasingly violent and aggressive mob, the intellectual debate that day included such raw slurs as Die Jewget the hell off campus.57 That thuggery by anti-apartheid Jew-haters had already become something of a tradition on the York campus. A year earlier, in April 2008, Barbara Kay of Canadas National Post reported that Yorks Hillel had invited then-Knesset member Natan Sharansky to deliver an address. Not content with allowing anyone with a pro-Israel viewpoint to share his or her views on campus, the Palestinian Students Association and Students Against Israeli Apartheid@York (SAIA) used the common tactic of intellectual bullies: they jeered at and shouted Sharansky down, spoke loudly among themselves during his talk, and generally prevented anyone in the audience from listening to the content of the speechbut not before they had articulated their own vitriol with such comments as Get off our campus, you genocidal racist and You are bringing a second Holocaust upon yourselves.58
57. Ron Csillag, Cops Quell Anti-Israel Attack at Toronto College, JTA.org, February 13, 2009, http://www.jta.org/news/article/2009/02/13/1002990/cops-quell -anti-israel-attack-at-york-u. 58. Barbara Kay, York University Must Get Serious about Taking Back Their Campus from Anti-Zionist Radicals, National Post, April 16, 2008, http://network .nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/04/16/165656.aspx.

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The universitys jihad against Israel and Jews is a grim reminder that the worlds oldest hatred has not yet vanished; in fact, either because of the widespread negative attitudes toward Israel, or simply due to a lingering, poisonous Jew-hatred in the Arab world and increasingly in the West as well, Jews once again are targets of libels, denunciation, demonization, and slurs against Judaism, against Zionism, and against Israel itself, the Jew of nations. This hatred metastasized on campus, when it was promulgated by leftist professors with a reverence for Palestinian victimization and by Muslim student groups with a theologically based hatred of the Jewish state. It spread though being enabled by administrators who allowed their campuses to be hijacked by radicals with the purported objective of elevating the Palestinian cause, but whose actual purpose was promoting their own agenda for vilifying and eventually eliminating Israel. The manifestations of these on-campus hatreds have been obvious and ugly: ripped Israeli flags drizzled with blood; Stars of David juxtaposed with swastikas; charges of apartheid, racism, and genocide leveled against Israelis and also assigned to their proxies, American Jews; accusations of dual loyalties, with American Jews accused of undermining American interests with the covert purpose of assisting Israel; physical threats against Jewish students; and blood libels that transform Israelis into murderous, subhuman monsters who almost gleefully shed Arab blood in their insatiable quest for landland that, their critics say, they neither deserve nor for which they have any legitimate claim. The campus war against Israel and Jews is also indicative of the compromised purpose of higher education, where scholarship has been degraded by bias and extremism on the part of a leftist professoriate with a clear political agenda that cites Israel as the new villain in a world yearning for social justice. University leaders and other stakeholders have been noticeably negligent in moderating this radicalism, either because they are unaware of how whole fields of study have been hijacked by academic frauds and morally incoherent scholars, or because they sympathize with the intellectual approach of their faculties and have become complicit in the production of pseudo-scholarship, academic agitprop, and disingenuous learning experiences that have a one-sided, biased approach to understanding the Middle East, and particularly the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. That all this is taking place in the rarified air of college campuses, where civil discourse is the expected norm and scholarly inquiry is the anticipated intellectual product, makes the seething hatreds and bias against Israel and the Jews all the more unexpected and morally dangerous. Only

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65 years after one of the most horrific crimes against humanity that saw the murder of some six million souls, the same unsettling tropes against Jews are being restated, this time often targeting the Jewish state that arose, in part, from the ashes of the Holocaust. One would hope this battle would not have to be waged again, that college students, Jews and non-Jews alike, would not have to be confronted with the longest hatred once again, this time conflated with the very survival of a democratic Jewish state, precariously coexisting amid a sea of jihadist foes who seek its very elimination.
*Richard Cravatts, PhD, is professor of practice and director of the Masters Program in Communications Management at the Simmons College School of Management. Dr. Cravatts is the author of the forthcoming Genocidal Liberalism: The Universitys Jihad Against Israel and Jews; in addition, he has published over 350 articles, op-ed pieces, columns, and chapters in books on antisemitism, anti-Israelism, higher education, and campus free speech, terrorism, Constitutional law, politics, and social policy. He is a board member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, the Investigative Taskforce on Campus Anti-Semitism, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law.

Antisemitism at the University of California


Leila Beckwith*
Antisemitic speech and actions have occurred on the University of California (UC) campuses for more than ten years, initiated by registered Muslim and pro-Palestinian student groups and some faculty. Jewish organizations and individual members of the California Jewish community have urged the administration to enact and implement policies to protect Jewish students from harassment and intimidation. The present paper analyzes the responses of the university administration to the problem: the degree to which antisemitism is acknowledged, identified, combatted, and condemned. The analysis shows the administration to be averse to acknowledging antisemitism; therefore, its policies in combatting anti-Jewish bigotry are incoherent and ineffective.

Key Words: Antisemitism; Muslim Student Association; Olive Tree Initiative; Students for Justice in Palestine; University of California

The crown jewel of Californias public higher education system is the University of California (UC). Yet, bigotry against Jewish students has occurred on University of California campuses over many years and on many campuses. Jewish students have been subjected to: acts of physical aggression; intimidation; swastikas; speakers, films, and exhibits that use antisemitic imagery and discourse; speakers that praise and encourage support for terrorist organizations; the organized disruption of events that Jewish student groups had sponsored; and the promotion of student resolutions for divestment from Israel that demonize and delegitimize the Jewish State.1
1. See Kenneth Marcus, A Blind Eye to Campus Anti-Semitism, Commentary, September 2010; Campus Anti-Semitism: Briefing Report, United States Commission on Civil Rights, Washington, D.C., July 2006; Muslim Students Association: The Investigative Project on Terrorism Dossier, The Investigative Project on Terrorism, http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/84.pdf; Emerging Anti-Israel Trends and Tactics on Campus, Anti-Defamation League, October 2011, http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Israel/campus_anti_israel_trends_ activity.htm; Anti-Semitism at UC Irvine, Anti-Defamation League, July 27, 2010, http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Israel/Anti-Semitism+at+UC+Irvine .htm;Task Force on Anti-Semitism at the University of California, Irvine Report, Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism at the University of Cal-

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OFFICIAL POLICY

AND THE

UC COMMUNITY

Discrimination against Jews, of course, is not a policy of the University of California. Old-fashioned antisemitism, in which a quota existed for Jewish students and the number of Jewish students and Jewish faculty were deliberately minimized, no longer exists in the United States. In fact, Jewish students and faculty, although members of a very small ethnic/religious minority among the American populace, exist in disproportionately higher numbers at UC. The overwhelming majority of UC students, faculty, and staff show no antisemitic attitudes or feelings. Yet, some campuses have become places in which hostility is shown to Jews and the Jewish state. THE EXISTING HOSTILITY This hostility is often manifested in the guise of anti-Zionism and antiIsraelism. Whereas historically antisemitism was manifested under a religious guise, then a racial guise, it is now evidenced in a political/ideological guise. What is often disguised as legitimate criticism of the Jewish nations policies frequently morphs into the tropes of classical antisemitism, such as blood libels and Jews controlling the United States. As Bernard Lewis2 points out, the political aspect is marked by the same two features that mark classical antisemitism: Jews and/or the Jewish state are portrayed and accused of cosmic evil; Jews and/or the Jewish state are judged by a standard different from that applied to others. Is the University of California atypical among American universities in its manifestation of antisemitism? It is unlikely that UC is an exception. As will be seen in the following sections, the sources of antisemitic acts and discourse on campus are Muslim and pro-Palestinian student groups, as well as some individual faculty and staff. Those agents share a common ideology, exist in universities across the United States, and make it likely that animus against Jews will occur at least sporadically. Some of UCs characteristics, however, may fuel the depth and extent of manifestations of anti-Jewish bigotry. One such element, as pointed out by Alvin Rosenfeld,3 the left-wing political culture on the West coast
ifornia, Irvine, 2008, http://octaskforce.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/orangecounty-task-force-report-on-anti-semitism-at-uci.pdf. 2. Bernard Lewis, The New Anti-Semitism, The American Scholar, 75 (Winter 2006):25-36. 3. Alvin Rosenfeld, Responding to Campus-Based Anti-Zionism: Two Models, in Anti-Semitism on the Campus: Past and Present, ed. Eunice G. Pollack (New York: Academic Studies Press, 2011).

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allows ideologically extreme positions to be influential; a significant thread in left-wing discourse is obsessive pro-Palestinian/anti-Israelism. Two, the students and faculty at UC are heirs of the Free Speech movement, initiated and organized by some students at UC Berkeley in 1964-1965. The movement, through a series of acts of civil disobedience, successfully broke the administrations ban on campus political activities by students; its success unleashed student groups to engage in and advocate for political causes. Activist politics by students on campus probably contributed to the loosening of restrictions on faculty. The broadening of the UC academic freedom rules for faculty in 2003, directly related to allowing pro-Palestinian propaganda in an official university course, allows faculty to engage in political advocacy in classrooms and official university events.4 SOURCES
OF

HOSTILITY

TO

JEWS

AND

ISRAEL

Student groups.5 Two officially registered student groups at the University of California, the Muslim Student Association, sometimes named the Muslim Student Union (MSA/MSU), and the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), exert considerable influence in promoting a hostile antisemitic environment. The student groups are supported by mandatory fees that are collected from every student, although most UC students would condemn antisemitism. The MSA/MSU exists on nine of the 10 campuses of the university, and the SJP is extant on six of the 10 campuses. Both student groups are represented across North America, with approximately 600 chapters of the MSA/MSU and more than 75 chapters of SJP in universities in the United States and Canada. Since at least 2001, MSA/MSU and SJP, individually and in collaboration, have invited speakers, posted flyers, and staged events whose rhetoric and imagery fit the U.S. Departments Working Definition of Anti-Semitism. These include classical antisemitic tropes of blood libels and accusations of Jews controlling the U.S. government, as well as more current tropes of equating Jews/Israelis with Nazis and denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination by falsely identifying Israel as a racist, white4. Martin Trow, Californians Redefine Academic Freedom, Center for Studies in Higher Education, February 2005, http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/ publications.php?id=60. 5. Leila Beckwith, The Contribution of Student Groups to Anti-Semitism at the University of California, Paper presented at the Summer Research Workshop, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., July 26-August 6, 2010; Leila Beckwith and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, Are Jewish Students Safe on California Campuses?, American Thinker, April 25, 2010, http://www. americanthinker.com/2010/04/are_jewish_students_safe_on_ca.html.

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supremacist, colonialist nation that should be boycotted and/or destroyed. In fact, a stated aim of the SJP is to mount boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns. Faculty. Some UC faculty also have contributed to the hostile environment for Jewish students by promoting a virulently anti-Israel ideology on occasion in their classrooms, in university-sponsored events, and in official university media. Some also use their university affiliation to promote an academic and cultural boycott of Israel faculty, students, scientists, artists, and cultural institutions.6 Their anti-Israel activism is not deterred by its violation of basic academic precepts, as asserted by the American Association of University Professors in 2006, almost 300 university presidents in 2007, and 38 Nobel laureates, who condemned the boycott as antithetical to principles of academic and scientific freedom, and antithetical to principles of freedom of expression and inquiry.7 An example of the interjection of inflammatory anti-Israel material into the classroom was seen when William Robinson, tenured professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, in April 2009 sent an e-mail to his students with a set of photos that attempted to equate Nazi atrocities in the Warsaw ghetto with Israel soldiers defense of their citizens in the war with Hamas in Gaza.8 Some students viewed the material as antisemitic, quit the course, and filed a misconduct grievance against Robinson. The university charges officer summarized the allegations in an e-mail to Robinson: You, as professor of an academic course, sent to each student enrolled in that course a highly partisan e-mail accompanied by lurid photographs. The e-mail was unexpected and without educational context. You offered no explanation of how the material related to the content of the course. You offered no avenue to discuss, nor encouraged any response, to the opinions and photographs included in the e-mail. You directly told a student who inquired that the e-mail was not connected to the course. As a result, two enrolled students were too distraught to continue with the course. The constellation of allegations listed above, if substantially true, may violate the Faculty Code of Conduct. The faculty committee ruled that no further investigation was necessary, and the charges were dismissed.
6. Elizabeth Redden, Israel Boycott Movement Comes to U.S., Inside Higher Ed, January 26, 2009, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/26/ boycott. 7. 38 Nobel Winners Slam Academic Boycotts Against Israel, The Jerusalem Post, November 2, 2010, http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=193700. 8. Scott Jaschik, Crossing a Line, Inside Higher Ed, April 23, 2009, http:// www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/23/ucsb.

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In 2009, a faculty member, the head of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Near East Studies, exemplified the misuse of university-sponsored events by organizing a conference in which she invited four other faculty, longtime demonizers of Israel, to discuss the topic Human Rights and Gaza. As reported by UCLA professor Judea Pearl,9 the speakers attacked the legitimacy of Israel, condemned its birth and survival, and portrayed Hamas as a guiltless, peace-seeking organization. During the Q&A, the audience chanted Zionism is Nazism, and F, f Israel. The next day, the UCLA Bruin, the student newspaper, published an uncritical article entitled Scholars Say Attack on Gaza an Abuse of Human Rights. When Professor Pearl tried to enlist Jewish faculty into speaking out, the new Marranos, as he named them, insisted on keeping their pro-Israel sentiments secret in order to protect themselves from condemnation by other faculty. Thus, the event influenced the attitudes of students and faculty. EFFECT
ON

STUDENTS

Many Jewish students are affected by the antisemitic manifestations on campus. In May 2010, more than 700 Jewish UC students10 signed a petition expressing outrage at anti-Jewish rhetoric and imagery on their campuses. They asserted that these incidents are as offensive and hurtful to Jewish students as a Compton cookout or a noose are to African-American students. In addition, dozens of Jewish students from three different UC campuses, who responded to an on-line questionnaire, described feeling harassed and intimidated by the promotion of hatred against the Jewish State and of Jews. Almost all of the students felt that the administrators on their campuses did not treat Jewish concerns as sensitively as they did the concerns of other minorities such as African Americans and Latinos. President Yudof, in a public response,11 criticized the sampling of student opinion as unreliable.
9. Judea Pearl, The Rhino Tramples Through, The Current, www.columbia. edu/cu/current/articles/spring2009/pearl.html. 10. Larry Gordon, Jewish Organizations Protest UC Presidents Handling of Reports of Anti-Semitism, Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2010, http://articles.latimes. com/2010/jul/07/local/la-me-0707-uc-jewish-20100707. 11. Yudof: Letter from 12 Jewish Organizations Concerning Campus AntiSemitism: Dishearteningly Ill-Informed Rush to Judgment, Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, July 6, 2010, http://octaskforce.word press.com/2010/07/06/yudof-letter-from-12-jewish-organizations-concerning-camp us-anti-semitism-dishearteningly-ill-informed -rush-to-judgment.

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EFFECT

ON

FACULTY

Faculty also are affected by the hatred against Jews and Israelis on campus. Whereas many faculty self-censor, as pointed out by Professor Pearl, others speak out. In May 2010, 63 faculty members at UC Irvine published a letter12 in which they stated that they are deeply disturbed about activities on campus that foment hatred against Jews and Israelis. They described the troubling events over the past few years as including the painting of swastikas in university buildings, the Star of David depicted as akin to a swastika, a statement (by a speaker repeatedly invited by the Muslim Student Union) that the Zionist Jew is a party of Satan, a statement by another MSU speaker that the Holocaust was Gods will, the tearing down of posters placed by the student group Anteaters for Israel, and the hacking of their web site. They reaffirmed that Some community members, students, and faculty indeed feel intimidated, and at times even unsafe. UC Irvine Chancellor Drake did not respond. RECOMMENDATIONS
TO

UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION

In June 2010, leaders of 12 Jewish organizations, including the Wiesenthal Center, the Orthodox Union, and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, wrote to UC president Mark Yudof,13 expressing their concern about the hostile environment faced by Jewish students on UC campuses, and calling on him to address this serious problem. They recommended that he issue a written statement to the UC community condemning all forms of antisemitism, including language or behavior that demonized and delegitimized Israel as included in the Working Definition of Antisemitism of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. They also recommended that a campus policy be established that included a definition of antisemitism and differentiated it from other bigotries.
12. UC Faculty Letter Update: Some Community Members, Students, and Faculty Indeed Feel Intimidated, and at Times Even Unsafe, Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, May 17, 2010, http://octaskforce.word press.com/2010/05/10/some-community-members-students-and-faculty-indeed-feel -intimidated-and-at-times-even-unsafe/. 13. The letter is published in the Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, June 28, 2010, http://octaskforce.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/ letter-to-president-yudof-6_28_10.pdf.

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President Yudof responded14 by ignoring the recommendations and asking Jewish leaders to have patience and faith in the newly established Advisory Councils on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion, which he had organized in June 2010 in response to a spate of acts of bigotry, including antisemitism, that had occurred on several UC campuses, with nooses at UC San Diego, a fraternity party that mocked Black History month at UC San Diego, anti-gay graffiti and swastikas at UC Davis, and the deliberate disruption, by the Muslim Student Union, of an invited speech by Israel ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine. One year later, growing impatient with the universitys efforts, more than 5,200 members of the California Jewish community, including 1,400 UC alumni and current students, more than 2,200 UC parents and family members, and more than 230 UC faculty and staff members, signed a letter to President Yudof15 expressing their grave concern for Jewish students. In their letter, they stated their opinion that although it had been over a year, the Advisory Councils had recommended no policies and issued no public statements informing the UC community about the problem of antisemitism or how it would be addressed. Their letter again recommended incorporating a definition of antisemitism that provided concrete examples, in accordance with the EUMC and the U.S. State Department working definitions, of how such a definition would be incorporated into UC policies and practices on antisemitism. UC ANTISEMITISM ACKNOWLEDGED President Yudof, in his reply16 to the Jewish community, continued to ignore its recommendations. He did, however, publicly acknowledge the presence of antisemitism on campus, and affirm that it is the responsibility of the UC administration to combat it. In an official UC Web site posting in October 2011, he stated:
I am extremely sympathetic to the concerns of Jewish students. . . . sadly the cancer of bigotry and antiSemitism runs deep and long through human history. As Berkeley Law Dean Chris Edley, who is acting as a 14. The letter is published in the Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, July 2, 2010, http://octaskforce.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/letterfrom-yudof-7_2_10.pdf. 15. Amcha Initiatives Letter to UC President Yudof, Amcha Initiative, September 19, 2011, www.amchainitiative.org/letter-to-president-yudof. 16. President Yudof Addresses Campus Climate Concerns from Jewish Community, University of California Newsroom, September 21, 2011, http:// www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/26327.

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special advisor to me on these issues, told the Universitys Board of Regents, this is not rocket scienceits more difficult than rocket science. Such difficulties, of course, do not lessen our obligation to do everything in our power to eradicate this cancer whenever and wherever it flares anew.

Yudof reiterated his personal and official commitment to answering every act of violence, hatred, and intimidation by any member of the community, and to ensure that he and the chancellors made certain that all students, regardless of their faith, encounter an atmosphere that is conducive to their intellectual and personal growth. INCOHERENT RESPONSES
TO

BIGOTRY

Given that the president of UC acknowledges antisemitism on its campus and takes responsibility for combatting it, it would be reasonable to expect that the university has written, adopted, and communicated coherent policies to the campus community, including effective policies of censure. This report, however, examines four steps the administration has taken to combat bigotryand finds their measures to be intellectually incoherent and pragmatically ineffective. Administrators Free Speech to Condemn Bigotry President Yudof, the chancellors of the 10 UC campuses, and the chair and vice chair of the university-wide Academic Senate issued a statement17 on February 26, 2010, in which they condemned all acts of racism, intolerance and incivility. When violations occur it is incumbent on us, as leaders and as stewards of free speech on our campuses, to push back. We have a responsibility to speak out against activities that promote intolerance or undermine civil dialogue. This policy statement is consistent with a recommendation made on October 26, 2010, by The Office of Civil Rights (OCR),18 that oversees possible discrimination in higher education. The OCR advocated that university administrations speak out and condemn antisemitism as a remedial step to bigotry on campus. Earlier, the U.S.
17. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/documents/chancellors_state ment_022610.pdf. 18. Dear Colleague Letter Harassment and Bullying, U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, October 26, 2010, http://www2.ed.gov/about/ offices/list/ocr/docs/dcl-factsheet-201010.pdf.

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Commission on Civil Rights,19 examining the problem of campus antisemitism, also specifically recommended that university administrations condemn antisemitic speech. Despite the stated policy, UC chancellors and other UC administrators are very reluctant to name and condemn antisemitic acts. They often ignore, but sometimes sanction, intolerance toward Jews. Since the UC administration refuses to incorporate into policy a working definition of antisemitism, they often do not identify antisemitic discourse and imagery. What they cannot identify, they cannot condemn. The pattern existed before the policy and continues to be manifested after. To mention only one example of many,20 before the policy was stated, the UCIrvine Alumni Association and vice-chancellor of UC Irvine, Manuel Gomez, in April 2006, honored Vanessa Zuabi Zuabi for making the campus . . . a better placedespite her being vice president of a student organization that displayed posters of the Star of David defaced by the swastika, and had excluded Jewish groups from an antihate rally. Gomez spoke at the rally, although he knew that Jewish student groups were excluded, and thus conferred official endorsement of an event that discriminated against Jews. Even after the policy was enunciated, the UC administration continues to condone, sometimes engage in, and often not condemn antisemitic actions on campus. For example, Chancellor Michael Drake at UC Irvine praised Apartheid Week 2010 as the hallmark of an educational institution committed to an exchange of ideas, while he disregarded the statement at the event made by Malik Ali, one of the invited speakers, that you Jews are the new Nazis.21 A year later, in June 2011, a few weeks after another Apartheid Week of events demonizing Israel and featuring speakers who advocated for boycotts and elimination of the Jewish state, the UC Irvine Muslim Student Union was given an award for demonstrating a commit-

19. Findings and Recommendations of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Regarding Campus Anti-Semitism, April 3, 2006, http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/ 050306FRUSCCRRCAS.pdf. 20. Leila Beckwith, Anti-Zionism/Anti-Semitism at the University of California-Irvine, in Academics Against Israel and the Jews, ed. Manfred Gerstenfeld (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, September 2008). 21. Leila Beckwith, Most Anti-Semitic College, Minding the Campus, September 16, 2010, http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/09/post_70 .html.

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ment to transforming structures of inequality and injustices through reflection and action by the UC Irvine Office of the Dean of Students.22 In October 2010, a letter23 to UC Berkeley chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau, sent by the author, Roberta Seid, and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, protested the sponsorship by a unit of UC Berkeleys College of Letters and Sciences of an event promoting the boycott of Israeli academics and businesses. The letter pointed out that the action established an official association of the University of California Berkeley with the promotion of a boycott against Israel. The letter asked Chancellor Birgeneau to detach the universitys involvement with the event and publicly condemn the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign as contributing to a hostile environment for Jewish students. Birgeneau was silent. In stark contrast to his silence about rhetoric offensive to Jewish students, however, Birgeneau has vigorously condemned speech and behavior that he perceives gives offense to other identity groups, specifically, African Americans and Latinos. In May 2010, in response to the state of Arizonas passage of an immigration bill, Bill SB1070, Birgeneau posted on the official Web site of UC Berkeley the following statement:24 I made it widely known last week to our campus community that I was horrified by this law. I, along with many others on this campus, and others across the nation, am profoundly disturbed by the passage of this bill, which so many of us personally believe cannot be implemented without engaging in racial profiling. The drafting of similar bills by other states is truly frightening. More recently, he again used his own free speech to condemn the Berkeley College Republicans25 for holding a bake sale that priced the goods according to a persons ethnicity, race, or gender. Chancellor Birgeneau perceived that event as hurtful to African Americans and Latinos and spoke out. Yet, he has been unwilling to condemn speech and behavior offensive to Jewish students.
22. UC Irvine Awards MSU Legitimacy, The Investigative Project on Terrorism, June 3, 2011, http://www.investigativeproject.org/2939/uc-irvine-awardsmsu-lefitimacy. 23. Serious Concerns about UC Berkeley BDS Event Tuesday October 26, Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, October 24, 2010, http:/ /octaskforce.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/3001/. 24. Chancellor Birgeneau Denounces Arizona Immigration Bill, UC Berkeley News Center, May 7, 2010, http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/05/07/ immigration/. 25. Javier Panzar, UC Berkeley Administrators Send Out Campuswide Letter Condemning Bake Sale, The Daily Californian, September 27, 2011, http: //www.dailycal.org/2011/09/26/uc-berkeley-chancellor-sends-campus-wide-lettercondemning-bake-sale/.

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Chancellor Birgeneaus reluctance to intrude in the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement on his campus is mirrored by President Yudof. Only after the pain of a bitter student battle at UC Berkeley in 2010 and the defeat of the student resolution that called on the university to divest from American companies doing business in Israel did Yudof notify26 the campus that the Regents had established a policy in 2005 that would not allow for divestment from Israel. Although President Yudof, in his letter to the Jewish community of October 12, 2011, touted his leadership in notifying the university community of the Regents policy as responding assertively to anti-Jewish bigotry, the action was peculiarly hesitant, since it occurred only after students had experienced intense harassment from fellow students and from organizations and persons outside of the university community. President Yudolfs Advisory Council In June 2010, President Yudof established the Presidents Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion, in response to multiple acts of bigotry that targeted African Americans, Jews, and gays on several of the UC campuses. The choice of members of the council was directly guided by assumptions that underlie principles of diversity; people were chosen by their racial and ethnic identity, and because they were active advocates for their identity groups. President Yudof then established working groups within the council. Some of those groups were directed specifically to address concerns of African-American, Latino, and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered students. Jewish students and antisemitic hostility was not set as a specific focus of any working group. A review of more than 600 pages of documents received under a public records request about the proceedings of the Advisory Council during the 2010-2011 academic year revealed that there was virtually no discussion of anti-Jewish bigotry. After a proposed letter signed by many thousands from the California Jewish community came to President Yudofs attention, he instructed two members of the UC Advisory Council to speak with Jewish students in an effort to better understand both their challenges and positive experiences on our campuses. The representatives visited UC Irvine, UC Davis, and UC Santa Cruz, where they spoke to small groups of selected students for little more than an hour on each campus. UC Santa Cruz students who attended
26. UC Regents Statement on Divestment, Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, May 10, 2010, http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/2010/05/ 10/uc-regents-statement-on-divestment/.

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the meeting reported that they were given insufficient time to speak about their concerns. Several students also stated that one of the two representatives was surprisingly ill informed about campus anti-Jewish harassment and instead tried to emphasize to the students how privileged Jewish students were. For Jewish students, the councils success will depend specifically on its commitment to address antisemitism and its ability to identify discourse, imagery, and actions that are unacceptable expressions of antisemitic bigotry. The evidence is not reassuring. Diversity Initiatives In March 2010, at the special Regents meeting called specifically to address the acts of bigotry that had occurred on several of the UC campuses in the previous month, the UC Regents response27 was to pledge to increase diversity throughout the UC system, to raise more scholarship donations for underrepresented minorities, and to expand the use of holistic admission criteria. Increasing diversity at UC was already a well-funded activity. Heather Mac Donald, in July 2011 in an article published in Minding the Campus,28 documents the enormous enterprise to promote diversity, comprising many people and entities within the university. As an example, she mentions one campus, UC San Diego, that closed substantive academic studies because of severe budget cuts, but added a new full-time position of vice-chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion. The position increased the enormous diversity enterprise that already existed, including: the Chancellors Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, and the Diversity Council.

27. Regents Pledge Diversity Action, UC Newsroom, March 24, 2010, http:// universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/23079. 28. Heather Mac Donald, Less Academics, More Narcissism, Minding the Campus, July 18, 2011, http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/07/ less_academics_more_narcissism.html.

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Diversity is a social ideal29 that has been embraced by university administrations, including UC. UC, in a Regents Policy,30 defines diversity as the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews that arise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences include race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and geographic region, and more. The policy explicitly commits the university to remove barriers to recruitment, retention, and advancement of students, faculty, and staff from historically excluded populations who are currently underrepresented. Thus, diversity is acclaimed as compensation for past grievances. Equally important, it is touted as a way to combat bigotry, based on the assumption that when members of groups of diverse backgrounds are brought together, their attitudes will be transformed into tolerance and respect. Given human history, such an assumption is doubtful, and despite the high moral standards ascribed to diversity, it has come down to racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation interest groups vying for the universitys resources. Diversity efforts do not combat antisemitism; its ideology and the way in which it is practiced ignores Jews. To the degree that diversity acts to include more members of underrepresented minorities on the UC campus, it ignores Jews. To the degree that diversity acts to provide more resources to members of underrepresented minorities, it ignores Jews. To the degree that diversity promotes more special programs for or about underrepresented minorities, it ignores Jews. To the degree that diversity encompasses the belief that proximity and/or social intercourse is a magical solution to bigotry of others, it ignores history and fails Jews. Olive Tree Initiative In 2007, a group of students of different ethnic and religious identities at UC Irvine formed the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI). Its stated goal was to promote dialogue and discussion regarding the Israeli-Arab conflict. The program became an integral part of the UC Irvine Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, with a salaried director and faculty from the School of Social Sciences. There have been four trips to Israel and the West Bank, as
29. Peter Wood, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003). 30. Regents Policy 4400: University of California Diversity Statement, September 15, 2010, http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/coordrev/policy/PP063006 DiversityStatement.pdf.

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well as more than seventy events on and off campus. There are now chapters at UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and UCLA.31 President Yudof, in his letter of October 2011 to the Jewish community, identified the OTI as being in the best tradition of activism, public service and open discussion, and affirmed that he was a strong supporter of the program. In fact, in May 2010, President Yudof did publicly congratulate the OTI and two of its student leaders with a first-ever Presidents Award for Outstanding Leadership. UC Irvine Chancellor Drake has also honored the OTI by giving its founders an award for Living Our Values. At the Regents meeting on March 24, 2010, held specifically to address a rash of incidents of bigotry, including the disruption at UC Irvine by the MSU of the lecture by the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Chancellor Drake also acclaimed the OTI as proof that students at UC Irvine live and practice tolerance. Thus, the UC administration touts the OTI as one of their deliberate steps to combat anti-Jewish bigotry. Yet, the program itself involves individuals and groups who have ties to terrorist groups, who advocate for the destruction of Israel and its citizens, and who promote boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israelis and American companies doing business with Israel. While the program tries for a superficial balance of Palestinian and Israeli speakers, since the overwhelming majority of the Palestinians have expressed virulent enmity to Israel and its people, the program succeeds in giving equal time to those who advocate for the destruction of Israel and its citizens, and Jews who advocate for maintaining their own nation and lives. A revealing incident about the Orwellian designation of the OTI as a way to combat anti-Jewish bigotry was the inadvertent disclosure, revealed by a Public Information request made by a member of the Jewish community, that the UC Irvine faculty and staff of the OTI arranged for OTI students in the fall of 2009 to meet with Hamas leader Aziz Duwaik. Hamas is openly antisemitic; it is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department; its charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews. Compounding the recklessness of the program, the organizers told the students to keep the meeting secret from Israeli officials and from anyone who would have disagreed with this meeting.
31. See Leila Beckwith, The Olive Tree Initiative: A Fig Leaf for Anti-Semitism?, American Thinker, January 2, 2011, http://www.americanthinker.com/ 2011/01/the_olive_tree_initiative_a_fi.html; Leila Beckwith, The University of Californias Antisemitism Problem Deepens, American Thinker, April 5, 2011, http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/04/the_university_of_californias.html; Frank Crimi, The Olive Tree Initiative and Terror, Front Page Mag, October 6, 2011, http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/06/the-olive-tree-initiative-and-terror-1-1/ 2/.

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Equally egregious, UC Irvine Chancellor Drake, who was notified in October 2009 about the meeting, did not inform the public, did not censure the organizers, but six months later touted it as the way in which he was combating antisemitism on his campus. President Yudof dismisses the significance of the event. But rather than designating it as an isolated incident to be forgotten, it can be perceived as a glaring expression of the moral confusion of the program. The University of California administration does not propose a similar solution to bigotry against any other group. When it acts to combat racism, it does not give a platform to racists to state their antipathy to African Americans. It does not give a platform to those who consider homosexuality a moral sin when it acts to combat bigotry against gays/lesbians/bisexuals/transgendered. Unexplained is the singular and distorted response to bigotry against Jews. LEGAL REMEDIES
TO

COMBAT ANTISEMITISM

Given the ineffectiveness of the university administration in combating anti-Jewish bigotry, legal remedies have been sought by individuals. Their effect is not yet apparent, since the federal actions are still ongoing. But one court case in the state of California has weighed in and has determined that an action that resulted from the extreme animus of the Muslim Student Union to Israel was unlawful. Federal suit against UC by Jessica Felber and Brian Maissy. Jessica Felber and Brian Maissy have brought the first federal lawsuit against the University of California, in which they allege that the administration allowed a hostile environment to exist that led directly to Felbers being physically assaulted.32 On March 5, 2010, Felber, then a student at UC Berkeley, was attacked and injured on campus during a pro-Israel event while she was holding a sign stating Israel wants Peace. Her assailant, Husam Zakharia, also a UC Berkeley student, was the leader of Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley. The attack was not the first she or other Jews had experienced on campus from students who were members of SJP and similar student groups. The suit alleges that the UC administration had been made fully aware of the hostile environment, and failed to take adequate measures to quell it; instead, it has condoned, allowed, and enabled student groups to threaten, harass and intimidate Jewish students.
32. Jamie Glazov, Berkeley on Trial over Jewish Students Assault, Front Page Mag, March 8, 2011, http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/08/berkeley-on-trialover-jewish-students-assault/

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The case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Seeborg on December 22, 2011.33 The judge ruled that much of the alleged harassment constituted protected political speech, and that the plantiffs had failed to show deliberate indifference of the university administration to the conduct not amounting to protected speech. Nevertheless, the court granted Felber leave to file an amended complaint, which means that she will have another opportunity to make her case. Title VI complaint against UC Santa Cruz for allowing faculty to engender a hostile environment for Jewish students. In June 2009, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UC Santa Cruz, sought legal remediation for a hostile environment for Jewish students at UC Santa Cruz by filing a Title VI Complaint with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education.34 At that time, and until October 2010, Jewish students were excluded from the protection of the civil rights law because Jews were viewed as exclusively a religious group not covered by the statute that protected ethnic and racial groups from discrimination, intimidation, and harassment institutionally tolerated by a school that received federal funds. In October 2010, the OCR reinterpreted the law to cover any discrete religious group that shares, or is perceived to share, ancestry or ethnic characteristics (e.g., Muslims or Sikhs), including Jewish students. On March 7, 2011, the OCR determined that the issue was appropriate for investigation under the new guidelines, and identified the following issue for investigation: The recipient (UC Santa Cruz) failed to take steps in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to respond to notice of a then existing hostile environment for Jewish Students based on their actual or perceived ancestry or ethnic characteristics. Rossman-Benjamins complaint alleges, among other things, that antiIsrael discourse and behavior in classrooms and that departmentally and university-sponsored events had created an emotionally and intellectually hostile environment for Jewish students and had adversely affected their educational experience at UC Santa Cruz. The complaint further alleges that: rhetoric heard in Santa Cruz classrooms and at numerous events spon33. Felber v. Yudof, N.D.CA., case no. C 11-1012 RS (December 22, 2011) (slip op.) (order granting motions to dismiss). 34. Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education (OCR) Opens Title VI, Civil Rights Act of 1964 Investigation at the University of California Santa Cruz, Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, March 13, 2011, http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/office-of-civil-rights-of-the -u-s-department-of-education-ocr-to-open-a-title-vi-civil-rights-act-of-1964-investi gation-at-the-university-of-california-santa-cruz/.

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sored and funded by academic and administrative units on campus went beyond legitimate criticism of Israel and crossed the line into antisemitism according to the standards employed by the U.S. Department of State; and that there were students who felt emotionally and intellectually harassed and intimidated to the point that they were reluctant or afraid to express a view that was not anti-Israel; and that some students stayed away from courses because they knew that the courses would be biased against Israel and intolerant of another legitimate point of view. Rossman-Benjamins complaint also chronicled the failure of numerous efforts that she and others had made from 2001 to encourage UC Santa Cruz faculty and administrators to acknowledge and address the problem. The acceptance by the OCR of Rossman-Benjamins complaint is a landmark step in extending the same federal protection to Jewish students that exists for other students for their racial, ethnic, and sexual orientation membership. A previous Title VI complaint, filed by the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) in 2004 on behalf of Jewish students at UC Irvine, was dismissed under the interpretation by the OCR that the law did not protect Jews. The investigation, however, is still open by the OCR for a new Title VI complaint against UC Irvine, filed by the ZOA. Legal action against Muslim Student Union members for disrupting Ambassador Orens speech at UC Irvine. Student members of the MSA/ MSU and SJP over the years, on several occasions at several campuses, had deliberately attempted to silence lecturers with whom they disagreed. They did so February 10, 2004, at UC Berkeley, attempting to stifle Dr. Daniel Pipes, by standing up and calling out racist and Zionist. They did so again, October 22, 2007, at UC Berkeley, repeatedly interrupting Nonie Darwish, shouting out Facist and Racist. There were no consequences to the student disrupters. At UC Irvine, February 8, 2010, Michael Oren, Israeli ambassador to the United States, was invited to speak at UC Irvine by the School of Law, Department of Political Science, Center for the Study of Democracy, seven student groups, and community co-sponsors. The MSU, in an organized campaign, planned beforehand, as revealed by e-mails and minutes of a meeting anonymously sent to the university administration, deliberately disrupted the lecture, calling out Killer and How many Palestinians did you kill? Eleven students, eight from UC Irvine and three from UC Riverside, were arrested and cited for disturbing a public event. UC Irvine found the MSU guilty of dishonesty, obstructing disciplinary procedures, disorderly conduct, and participation in a disturbance of the peace of unlawful assembly, and suspended the MSU for Fall Quarter 2010. The district attorney of Orange County brought charges against the students. During the trial, conflicting views of who was being censored

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were argued by the prosecutor and defense attorneys. Although the MSU attempted to turn their action of suppressing others free speech into an expression of their First Amendment rights, the jury convicted 10 of them of two misdemeanors of conspiring to and disrupting a public event.35 CONCLUSIONS The university administration can be perceived as being quicker to condemn acts of bigotry that may be hurtful to some groups, but less likely to condemn rhetoric, imagery, and acts that may hurt Jews. Since they avoid adopting a working definition of antisemitism, they avoid recognizing many manifestations of antisemitism, particularly those that demonize Israel or supporters of Israel. They also, then, do not grapple with differentiating legitimate criticism of policies from demonization of Jews. Therefore, even clearly antisemitic statements such as You Jews are the new Nazis, when they are embedded in a screed about Israel, is overlooked by the administration. The university administrations muddle arises from their refusal to acknowledge the specificity of antisemitic bigotry; that in contrast to other groups against whom bigotry might exist, anti-Jewish bigotry does not operate now to restrict the presence of Jews on campus. Jews also, in contrast to other ethnic groups, are not demanding a different allocation of university resources. But harassment and intimidation of Jews on campus does need to be confronted. The university administration cannot do so as long as it refuses to acknowledge that demonization and delegitimization of the Jewish state are manifestations of antisemitism. Proposing diversity as a solution to antisemitism is either wishful thinking or deliberate obfuscation. A basic tenet of diversity is promoting equal access to membership in and resources of the university. It does not address what the manifestations of antisemitism are, who on the university campus engages in antisemitic behavior, or how to confront it. If diversity is a solution, it is to a different set of problems. Using a diversity model will not have the effect of reducing bigotry against Jews. The only way to combat antisemitism is to identify and condemn it when it occurs in rhetoric, imagery, and actions; to identify its agents and condemn them; to grapple with the hard distinctions between free speech and allowing and fostering a hostile environment for Jewish students; and to institute policies based on those realities.
35. Lauren Williams, Nicole Santa Cruz, and Mike Anton, Students Guilty of Disrupting Speech in Irvine 11 Case, Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/24/local/la-me-irvine-eleven-20110924.

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*Leila Beckwith is professor emeritus of pediatrics at UCLA, and a Board member of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the California Association of Scholars, and the Amcha Initiative. For the past several years, she has used her scholarship to battle anti-Israeli rhetoric on university campuses and to protect Jewish students from harassment and intimidation.

On Whiteness and the Jews


Linda Maizels*
In the 1990s, the American academy witnessed attempts by both individuals and groups to promote and legitimize inaccurate or false historical narratives, specifically Holocaust denial and the allegation that Jews were disproportionately responsible for the African slave trade. This article offers the hypothesis that the label of Jewish whiteness has been used as a rationalization to deny Jews a voice in the discourse of identity on contemporary campuses and also to portray antisemitic rhetoric as protected political speech.

Key Words: Identity Politics, Jews, Multiculturalism, New Antisemitism, Whiteness

On two different occasions during the 1990s, the governing council of the American Historical Association (AHA) was compelled, however reluctantly, to take a stand against individuals and groups who promoted and tried to legitimize inaccurate or false historical narratives. The first issue that occupied the council was Holocaust denial. Those who denied the Holocaust styled themselves as revisionists, asserting that the attempted genocide of European Jewry was nothing but a hoax and that Jews ultimately benefitted from this false story because it allowed them to capitalize on their role as victims to reap material gain, garner support for the state of Israel, and position themselves as an oppressed minority group.1 The second issue that drew the attention of the council was the allegation that Jews were largely responsible for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Those who promulgated this view accused Jews of minimizing or denying their own culpability in this historical injustice and, at the same time, privileging their own history as victims, which had the effect of obscuring the pernicious
1. For rebuttals to the basic tenets of Holocaust denial, see Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993); Kenneth S. Stern, Holocaust Denial (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1993); Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Pierre Vidal Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide, trans. Mary Byrd Kelly (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

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effects of the actual role played by Jews (and Israelis) as oppressors of other minority groups or peoples.2 Although these issues were addressed by the AHA in this order, it does not mean that they did not overlap; instead, they each experienced peaks of importance at specific times during the decade.3 As we shall see, in both instances the common approach appeared to be to falsify or distort the larger discourse about an historical event or series of events by accusing Jews as a collective of having falsified or distorted the historical record and then using their influence to cover up their actions. Similarly, in both cases there appeared to be resentment at the concept of Jews as victims and corresponding assertions about the power that Jews wield both as privileged individuals and as a collective. The Jews were able to maintain such elaborate artifices about historical events, according to their accusers, because of the disproportionate influence they enjoy in government, the media, the academy, the world of finance and banking, and the like. Certainly, this canard about undue Jewish power and influence is nothing new. One relic of late 19th- and early 29th-century antisemitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, continues to be of interest in various parts of the world, and the attacks of September 11, 2001, have provided even more fodder for anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists of all types. It is interesting to note, however, that, in the 1990s, Jewish machinations were seen not as attempts to manipulate economies or governments but as efforts to erase larger truths by rewriting history. And these accusations about Jews prompted the AHA to do what it had hardly ever done beforeto affirm the existence of certain historical verities.4
2. For answers to these charges, see Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the American Slave Trade (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998); Eli Faber, Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Harold Brackman, Ministry of Lies: The Truth Behind the Nation of Islams The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1994). 3. The book used most often to substantiate charges against the Jews concerning their involvement in the African slave trade was The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, published in 1991, at the same time that interest in Holocaust denial was reaching a peak. And Bradley Smiths Committee for the Open Debate of the Holocaust (CODOH) was still sending advertisements espousing Holocaust denial to college newspapers in 1999 (Shermer and Grobman, 64). 4. Toby Axelrod, Combating a Monumental Lie, Jewish Week, February 16, 1995. Axelrod reported that the AHAs statements about Jewish involvement in African-American slavery and on Holocaust denial were the only public announcements on a historical topic that had been released by the organization within recent

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Because of this emphasis on the historical record, it might be said that the effects of these efforts to discredit Jews were felt most keenly within the insular community of American academia. This leads me to the first question I ask in the course of this essay: What made the political culture of the American academy in the 1990s susceptible to attempts to manipulate and falsify historical narrative? The second question that concerns me is this: Why was it that Jews and Jewish issues appeared to be at the center of some of the most serious of these attempts? It is my contention that the most influential factor in regard to the falsification of the Jewish role in history at that time was the question of Jewish whiteness, and that this factor became especially salient in the cultural climate of American academia in the 1990s. When confronted in the early 1990s with repeated efforts to position Holocaust denial as a legitimate attempt at revisionist history, the governing council of the American Historical Association was at first reluctant to act. The council decided in the fall of 1991 not to issue a statement that would reaffirm the truth of the Holocaust, in part because some in the association felt strongly that the AHA, in words of its president, William E. Leuchtenberg, ought not to get into the business of certifying what is and is not history. Instead, the council issued a statement that called on historians to initiate plans now to encourage study of the significance of the Holocaust. Later that year, though, the council did take action on the closing day of the associations annual meeting, when some historians at the conference pressed for a more forceful response. In December 1991, the governing council of the AHA unanimously adopted a statement condemning attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust and underlined that no serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place.5 It is simple enough to diagnose the underlying motives of Holocaust denial as antisemitic and be done with the matter. Although there are those in the denial movement who eschew overt Jew-hatred as injurious to their overall cause, that the deniers harbor ill-will toward Jews and the state of Israel will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with their tactics and overall agenda. One of the reasons that deniers harbor antipathy toward Jews that is germane to my central assertion is that the many of those within the denial coterie see Jews as racially different from others of European
memory. See also Karen J. Winkler, Group Issues Statement on Role of Jews in Slave Trade, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 1995. 5. Lipstadt, 205. See also Karen J. Winkler, How Should Scholars Respond to Assertions That the Holocaust Never Happened? Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 1991, and Ellen K. Coughlin, Denials of Holocaust Are Condemned, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 1992.

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descent, an attitude that hearkens back to 19th-century racially based antisemitism. The non-whiteness of Jews fits neatly with the allegation that the hoax of the Holocaust was disseminated to defame white Europeans and burden them with guilt, and it also feeds into conspiracy theories that purport to explain world events and the dispossession of whites from their rightful place in the racial hierarchy.6 While there are some within the white nationalist world who have accepted Jews as white, this attitude appears to be a minority viewpoint, and there are those who have conjectured that this might be a ploy or a tactic to attract people to the cause of white nationalism who might otherwise be averse to raw anti-Jewish hostility.7 This conception of Jews as non-white, however, does little to explain the attitude that deniers found for the dissemination of their ideas, especially within the extracurricular side of American campus culture. Certainly, by the 1990s, racially based hatred toward Jews had been largely discredited in the United States outside of certain fringe groups, and quotas that used to separate Jews from other whites in the interest of college admissions were largely abolished by the 1960s.8 The number of minority students, including people of color, that attended American universities had also expanded exponentially since the end of World War II as the American academy purposefully broadened its educational mission to include talented students from all walks of life.9 Yet, Holocaust denial still found expression on American campuses at the end of the twentieth century.
6. Leonard Zeskind described the attitude toward Jews within the white nationalist movement and concludes that, with certain exceptions, most of those within the denial movement classify Jews as non-white. Leonard Zeskind, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009), chap. 37 (especially pp. 373380). See also Evelyn Rich, Ku Klux Klan Ideology, 1954-1988, dissertation, U.M.I. Dissertation Service, 1989. 7. Zeskind, 373-80. 8. For Jewish whiteness and the assimilation of Jews as white ethnics, see Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). On discrimination at American universities in the prewar period, see Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), and Harold S. Wechsler, The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admissions in America (New York: J. Wiley, 1977). 9. John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), chap. 7.

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One reason for this somewhat ironic state of affairs was that the deniers were successful at repositioning their arguments so that, to the untrained eye, they appeared to be making a political argument rather than one that hinged upon antisemitism of a racial or conspiratorial nature. As has been well documented, perhaps the most familiar instances of Holocaust denial on campus concerned the efforts of Bradley Smith and the Committee on Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) to place advertisements with titles such as The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate or The Holocaust Story: How Much Is False? The Case for Open Debate in campus newspapers. While many of the periodicals that Smith approached refused to run the advertisement, others, influenced by the positioning of Holocaust denial as a challenge to the excesses of political correctness on American campuses, argued that the publication of these ads was an issue of freedom of speech.10 In the mid-1990s, just a few years after the ideological debates over Holocaust denial on campus reached a peak, the subject of disproportionate Jewish involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade became a recurring issue on American campuses. At that time, the AHA governing council took more decisive action than it had previously when dealing with Holocaust denial and passed a policy resolution on February 8, 1995, that condemn[ed] as false any statement alleging that Jews played a disproportionate role in the exploitation of slave labor or in the Atlantic slave trade. The council also cited the Davis-Drescher statement, submitted to the council by historians David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher, both noted experts on the history of slavery and antislavery movements, which described a number of egregious assaults on the historical record in institutions of higher learning and at educational conferences over the past few years, the statement confirmed that these types of allegations about Jews so misrepresent the historical record . . . that we believe them only to be part of a long antisemitic tradition that presents Jews as negative central actors in human history. When asked why the AHA had created the resolution in connection with allegations about the slave trade, AHA president John Coatsworth explained that the organization acted because of the particularly pernicious character of this falsehood that seemed directed toward defaming a particular ethnic or religious group. He added that, While the association does

10. For rebuttals of the freedom of speech argument, see Lipstadt, chap. 10; Stern, 10-14 and Appendix A; Shermer and Grobman, 13, 62-63.

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not have a policy of correcting every false statement about history that its members encounter, in this case we were compelled to act.11 If we view the events that precipitated the councils policy resolution through the lens of Jewish whiteness, we must turn to The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, a polemic published by the Nation of Islam that remains one of the most popular sources for allegations about Jews and the slave trade. In the introduction to the book, the Jews are depicted not only as white people but also as a representative symbol of some of the worst qualities of white people:
Jews have been conclusively linked to the greatest criminal endeavor ever undertaken against an entire race of peoplea crime against humanitythe Black [sic] African Holocaust . . . Deep within the recesses of the Jewish historical record is the irrefutable evidence that the most prominent of the Jewish pilgrim fathers used kidnapped Black [sic] Africans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history . . . The immense wealth of Jews, as with most of the White [sic] colonial fathers, was acquired by the brutal subjugation of Black Africans purely on the basis of skin color [my italic emphasis added].12

A number of scholars and Jewish professionals addressed the issues that resulted when professors, including Tony Martin of Wellesley College and Leonard Jeffries of City College of New York, employed this book in the classroom, and others took on the issue of incendiary black speakers making appearances on American campuses.13 To further illuminate the issue of Jewish whiteness, though, I will examine a lesser known incident that occurred at Ohios Kent State University. The events that took place at
11. American Historical Association, Statement about Jews and the Slave Trade. Press release, February 8, 1995. See also Axelrod, 1995, and Winkler, 1995. 12. The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, prepared by The Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam (Chicago: Nation of Islam, 1991). 13. For information on this type of anti-Jewish rhetoric on American campuses, see Spencer Blakeslee, The Death of American Antisemitism (Westport CT: Prager, 2000); Henry Louis Gates Jr., Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars, The New York Times, July 20, 1992; Cornel West, Black Anti-Semitism and the Rhetoric of Resentment, Tikkun, Vol. 7, No. 1, January/February 1992; Dennis Ross, Schooled in Hate: Anti-Semitism on Campus (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1997); Jeffrey A. Ross and Melanie L. Schneider, Antisemitism on the Campus: Challenge and Response, in Antisemitism in America: Outspoken Experts Explode the Myths, ed. Jerome Chanes (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995).

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KSU will serve as an example, albeit an extreme one, of the ties that exist between Jewish whiteness and the refashioning of historical narrative.14 In this particular case, an article appeared in a KSU journal called Uhuru (Swahili for freedom) that was specifically devoted to black student interests and concerns and was published by the Black United Students (BUS). The article that spawned such controversy and argument, The Paradox of European Jewry, was published in the spring 1994 issue of Uhuru. It was written by Terry Shropshire, at the time a sophomore at the University of Akron. The article began with the acknowledgement that the Holocaust was one of the most horrific crimes ever committed against mankind, and included the authors assertion that his empathy for the horrors that had befallen Europes Jews stemmed from his African descent. Nothing in the first two paragraphs of the article can be construed as either anti-Jewish or antisemitic. There were, however, two elements that provided semantic clues on what would follow. First, the word Jews, mentioned twice in the first paragraph, was always qualified by a reminder of Jewish whiteness; hence, By 1945, over one-third of all of the worlds Caucasian Jews had been stuffed into ovensas the world watched. In all, approximately eleven million Caucasian Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables had been eliminated [my italic emphasis added]. Second, the word Holocaust was qualified by the word Jewish; hence: The Jewish Holocaust was a crime that can never be forgotten and we must all ensure that something like this is never repeated. This detail indicated that, for the author, there had been more than one holocaust in human history. Although such a contention is not in itself an offensive or unusual opinion, it did reflect one of the main assertions of the articlenamely, that blacks had suffered more because of their enslavement than had Jews because of the Holocaust.15 The rest of the article was less ambiguous in its intent. The second section, subtitled Victims Only? listed the many times in history that Caucasian Jews had portrayed themselves as victims, but then questioned whether Jews could legitimately claim to have been victimized in each instance. In particular, the article cast doubt on the veracity of the existence of Arab and black antisemitism, and then proceeded to assert that Jews have exercised (what some call) an inordinate or disproportionate role in the decimation, defilement, cultural colonization, enslavement and genocide of
14. The documents pertaining to events at Kent State University were collected by Lewis Fried, who was a professor of English at KSU, and are housed at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. 15. Terry Shropshire, The Paradox of European Jewry, Uhuru, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Spring 1994): 34.

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many of the worlds people up until today. The article also questioned how Jews had the audacity . . . to perpetually illuminate or highlight their own victimization while conveniently forgetting their role in the destruction, murder and dehumanization of millions of others.16 The next section, subtitled The So-Called Chosen People, employed a multiplicity of information and quotes taken from a number of sources to support and, ostensibly, to prove the authors contention that Jews were disproportionately involved in the African slave trade. A significant number of these sources were described as direct quotes from the work of Jewish scholars, a point that Shropshire was careful to make when he referred to them.17 The article also emphasized that present-day Jews were unrelated to the original Israelites of the Bible because they were descendants of Russian-steppe tribesmen found in the dark caves of the Caucasus mountains, and concluded that the claims of Caucasian Jews after World War II for a land in ancient Palestine, in the Middle East, looks absolutely absurd, ludicrous, grotesque. In addition, Shropshire inserted references to Afrocentric scholars who asserted that the authentic heirs to Biblical Jewish tradition were black and not white.18 The following section, Spanish Inquisition and After, explained that Jewish money financed the first voyage of Christopher Columbus and that, in later years, many of the conquistadors were Jewish and took a disproportionate role in the decimation of the native peoples of the Americas. With the continent now largely depopulated of a native workforce, Caucasian Jews then became some of the leading slave traffickers in the Americas. In short, says Shropshire, Jews were major participants in the slaughter of the Native Americans, and were major participants in the greatest human tragedy history knows (no, not Hitlers Holocaust), the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.19
16. Ibid., 34-35. 17. Many of the quotes in the article attributed to Jewish scholars were taken from The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, prepared by The Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam (Chicago: Nation of Islam, 1991). 18. For a critical analysis of anti-Jewish thought in Afrocentric theory, see Amy Newman, The Idea of Judaism in Feminism and Afrocentrism, in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, eds. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: Verso Books, 1998). 19. Shropshire, 36.

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The rest of the article drove home the point that while Christian whites were also involved in the Holocausts of Native Americans and Africans, Jews were disproportionately involved: Caucasian Jews outnumbered their Caucasian Christian brethren in the number of slaves owned by almost two to one . . . THESE ARE FACTS SUPPORTED BY THEIR OWN SCHOLARS, HISTORIANS, AND RABBIS [emphasis in the original]. In addition, the whiteness of Jews was used to suggest their unqualified support for the Confederacy, their instrumentality in instituting Jim Crow laws, and the unholy, ungodly alliance that existed between the political state of Israel (occupied Palestine) and the barbaric, blatantly racist regime of white South Africa. Jews were subsequently characterized as perniciously and atrociously anti-Black, anti-Arab, [and] anti-Native American.20 The article accused Jews of bad faith in their participation in movements for social justice and civil rights because of their clannishness and ethnocentrism. Do the Caucasian Jews only take care of themselves and continue to discard, and defile, and trash, and defecate on the rest of the world? Shropshire asked. Dont be fooled by the facades and affectations, for they have not behaved like friends or benevolent allies to African, Arab or Native American people. These are the works of those who should be described as enemies of our people, our struggle, our children, and our future.21 Shropshire concluded that the relationship between Jews and other minority groups was built upon injustice, lying, thievery, murder, hypocrisy, duplicity, deceit and the distortion of historical facts. Jews used the name of God to facilitate [their] racist, narrow-minded mentality and gutter practices of religious doctrine . . . [and] to facilitate murder, oppression, imperialism, international warfare, the taking of someone elses land, or the acquisition of power and wealth. He also emphasized that he had written the article because [t]he only route to racial, ethnic, or religious reconciliation is through the distribution or dissemination of truth [and] of facts.22 Clearly, the subject matter covered in this article went far beyond the specific issue addressed by the AHAs policy resolution condemning the allegation that Jews had played a disproportionate role in the African slave trade, although the timing of the publication of the piece (Spring 1994) suggests that it may well have been one of the incidents that spurred the AHAs resolution on February 8, 1995. It is perhaps not too difficult to extrapolate that the authors of the AHA policy resolution and the DavisDrescher statement were aware of the types of excesses that could accom20. Ibid., 36-37. 21. Ibid., 37. 22. Ibid., 42.

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pany the initial allegation about Jews and the slave trade and, although they did not explicitly condemn the types of statements that appeared in the Shropshire article, implied their condemnation through their unequivocal statement against antisemitism.23 As we will see below, the deeper issues in the case at KSU were the overall relationship of some members of the university community to the concept of the historical truth and, consequently, their assessment of both the whiteness of Jews and the Jewish response to the article. Upon publication, the article immediately struck a nerve among faculty members and subsequently split them into two rough factions, though neither faction openly supported either the methodology or the conclusions reached by the student author. Instead, the split was based on whether Uhuru should have published an article that carried false and defamatory allegations about Jews as a corporate entity. This type of faculty involvement ensured that the ensuing debate would eventually include both detractors and supporters who were part of the established university structure. It is for this reason that the administration in general was inclined to take what its members called a balanced view of the conflict in an attempt to promote dialogue and to use the article to create a teachable moment for the campus community that would be a responsible way to engage in more dialogue.24 It was exactly this quest for evenhandedness, however, that suggested to some Jewish faculty and students that the issues at stake for both Jews and the larger community were neither understood nor taken seriously at Kent State University. A salient detail is that Uhuru was not formally affiliated with an academic department but did have a faculty advisor from KSUs Department of Pan-African Studies, both of which were influenced by theories of Afrocentrism. The discourse surrounding the article was tinged with negative assertions about Afrocentrism, and thus the hostile reactions to the article were often understood by its defenders not only as criticism of the student author and the student-run magazine but also of an academic unit of the university.25
23. To read both the AHA policy resolution and the Davis-Drescher statement, see http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1995/9503AHA.CFM. 24. Quotes are from KSU president Carol Cartwright in the article by Douglas Feiden, Ohio Campus Torn by Tract Against Jews, The Forward, April 14, 1995. 25. At the height of the conflict, Ken Calkins, a KSU history professor who opposed the Uhuru editorial policy, sent several articles to his colleagues that explained some of the tenets of Afrocentrism, accompanied by this note: Here is a little light reading to wile away the time. I send it with some trepidation. You must promise to stop immediately if you begin to tense up. This is quite a revelation to me. It appears that [the Department of Pan-African Studies is] teaching a kind of

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A resolution consisting of three short paragraphs was presented to the Faculty Senate on May 11, 1994, proposing that the Senate express its deep concern and claiming that the article was marked by virulent antiSemitism and devoid of reasoned argument or responsible scholarship. The authors concluded that the article represented a blatant attack upon the values of the University and should not have been published in a periodical which is supported and publicly endorsed by major offices and programs within our institution, and asked that faculty connected to the publication endeavor to teach the methods and values involved in the scholarly pursuit of truth.26 The resolution was tabled and a committee was formed to write a more general version that acknowledged other acts of racism and prejudice on campus.27 A group of concerned scholars sent a letter to the Senate outlining their reaction to some of the major issues surrounding the controversy. Responding to the charges of antisemitism made by those who opposed the article, they acknowledged that Shropshire made problematic references to the linkages between the Caucasian Race and the Jewish Religion and Culture in Eurasia, and concluded that The claims by many of this articles critics are true on this point, and from their perspective, they are justified in expecting a disavowal of these references.28
religion (taken from a memo from Ken Calkins addressed to Greer and sent to other colleagues (Helga, Mark, Gary, David, and Mike), dated October 20, 1995. Calkins also copied a memo from George R. Garrison, the chair of the Department of Pan-African Studies, to Calkins, dated October 9, 1995, that included a proposed agenda for a meeting between members of the Department of Pan-African Studies and those who opposed the Uhuru article. Calkins underlined and emphasized with an ironic exclamation point the proposed addition of Semitism as a subject to accompany the discussion over Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism. 26. Faculty Senate Resolutions, Uhuru Na Mazungumzo (Freedom and Civil Discourse) (Spring 1995): 38-39. 27. Ibid. According to the editor(s), who appended an introduction to the reprinting of the resolutions in Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, While Senators were generally sympathetic with the resolutions concern about the hostile tone of campus discourse, many were uncomfortable with the wording. Several expressed concerns about the possibility of censorship implied by the call to reconsider Uhurus financial support; and many objected to the resolution singling out Uhuru and Shropshires article as if this were the only significant act of intolerance to occur in Kent over the past academic year. 28. Letter from E. Timothy Moore, acting chair of the Department of Pan-African Studies and the faculty advisor to Uhuru; Dr. Alene Barnes-Harden; Dr. Francis Dorsey; Dr. Kwame Nantambu; and Dr. Meli Temu to Robert Johnson, chair of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, and to the members of the Faculty Senate, dated May 18, 1994. Reprinted in Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, Spring 1995.

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The members of this group, however, were not willing to condemn the publication of the article, despite the fact that their letter had, somewhat obliquely, acknowledged its problematic content. The reasoning, which would be echoed by many others who would later defend the article, was that Shropshire was justified in articulating his rage and frustration because of the fact that he, along with the majority of the African-American community, had been brutally oppressed by American society. In these faculty members words: Due to the fact of institutional racism and other forms of bigotry and hatred that are a part of our larger society, our magazine has allowed for the articulation of perceived or experienced levels of frustration and anger that students have felt, and do feel, toward segments of society or within its smaller microcosm, the university.29 Although those who wrote the letter admitted that they had not read any of the books cited in the Uhuru article, they contended that other African Americans, some of them bitter from past and present injustices, had reached similar conclusions.30 This appeared to suggest that if the student or othershad reached erroneous conclusions in the course of their research, this was understood to be less important than the right to express anger, pain, and frustration at societal injustice. A second version of the original resolution, more general in its tone and language than the previous version, was drafted by a follow-up committee and adopted by the Faculty Senate. This version referred to the Faculty Senates concern about an increase in intolerance on campus as well as in society at large and listed several grievances, including anonymous racist flyers distributed on campus, an anti-gay/lesbian display at the Student Center, and derogatory depictions of women. It specifically mentioned, however, the Uhuru article as marked by virulent anti-Semitism and devoid of reasoned argument and serious scholarship. As such, it represents a direct challenge to both the Universitys academic values and its commitment to encouraging respect for diversity.31 Students who defended the article not only stood for the right of Uhuru to publish the article but also supported its methodology and conclusions as correct. The campus newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater, printed a letter from Adisa A. Alkebulan, a senior in the Pan-African Studies Department and the assistant editor of Uhuru, who wondered, Why is it racist or antisemitic for Afrikan people to discuss their own history? Dont we have
29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Kent State University Faculty Senate, Minutes of the Meeting, July 18, 1994. See also Roger J. Mezger, KSU Faculty Senate Passes Anti-Intolerance Resolution, Akron Beacon Journal, July 19, 1994.

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that right? He called the Faculty Senates resolution racist, and asserted that most of the faculty were unqualified to accurately and truthfully say that the information in this article or any other publication indicating Jewish involvement in our holocaust is inaccurate. He concluded that this was a very touchy subject among European Jews and Judeophiles, not because it was an attack on Jews but because it was a well researched issue that drew a painful conclusion. Alkebulan called the issue exaggerated and alleged that the opponents of the Uhuru article were ignorant and racist.32 Later in the year, an advertisement signed by 300 members of the KSU faculty and administration with the title, A Call for Civil Discourse, was published in the Daily Kent Stater. The ad condemned the Uhuru article as blatantly antisemitic and warned that:
[A]rticles such as the one in question pose a peculiar educational dilemma. Refuting them point by point elevates an inflammatory and academically indefensible article to the level of a serious scholarly document. Not responding opens the door to claims that silence confirms the validity of the data and charges as presented.33

One solution offered by those who supported the publication of the article was to issue a general invitation to those who opposed the article to take this article and disprove it in an empirical and scholarly manner to show that indeed Mr. Shropshire and all of the points that he raised, or the authors/texts he cited were in actuality what your assertions suggest.34 For the most part, those who supported the right of Uhuru to print Shropshires article welcomed the invitation as a positive attempt to begin a healing dialogue on campus; the university administration, despite its condemnation of the content of the article, also promoted this strategy. Thus, despite the misgivings of those who sponsored the advertisement condemning the article, the peculiar educational dilemma that they had hoped to avoid became the proposed solution. In the spring of 1995, a special issue of Uhuru, entitled Uhuru Na Mazungumzo: This Teachable Moment, was published. The issue comprised a reprint of the original article, Paradox of European Jewry, and nine response articles, three from students and six from KSU faculty. Of the three student articles, two came
32. Adisa A. Alkebulan, Editorial, Daily Kent Stater, September 28, 1994. 33. Campus Campaign for Civil Discourse, Daily Kent Stater, October 12, 1994. Later, the accusation was made that some of those who signed the advertisement only did so as a result of pressure or because they thought it was the politically correct thing to do (E. Timothy Moore, Faculty Advisors Notes, Uhuru Na Mazungumzo [Spring 1995]). 34. Op. cit., Moore et al.

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from editors of Uhuru who were supportive of the magazines right to publish the article and one came from a self-identified Jewish student who opposed the contents of the article. Of the six faculty contributions, two opposed the article while the other four, although they may not have embraced Shropshires conclusions, defended Uhurus right to publish the article. The student editors of Uhuru expressed their disappointment that they had received relatively few submissions from those opposed to the article. While the student editors suggested that the reason for the scant number of opposition pieces was that those who styled themselves adversaries were not truly interested in sponsoring tolerance and understanding within the campus community, those who opposed the article explained that they were not interested in dignifying the original article with a response and, consequently, elevating its ideas to the status of legitimate debate.35 The edition ended with an appendix consisting of a bibliography of the works that Shropshire used to write his article. The appendix was titled, Notes: African-Jewish RelationshipSomething to Cherish? The first five works that were cited were followed by selective quotes that supported not only Shropshires contentions but also accused Jews of racism and intolerance and made reference to the resolution passed in the General Assembly of the United Nations in November 1975 that equated Zionism with racism.36
35. This strategy of non-response, often used in connection with instances of Holocaust denial, resulted in a dearth of material documenting Jewish reactions to the incident. 36. Another 33 titles were listed with these prefatory comments: A call number listed for any of the following books indicates they can be found in the Kent State University Library. (After this, there will be absolutely no excuse for the distinguished professors, administrators, and other members of the community to use ignorance, amnesia or slight memory loss as a justification for not speaking about these issues) [sic]. The rest of the special edition consisted of a note from Moore in his capacity as faculty advisor to the magazine; notes from the two student editors; two poems that, albeit obliquely, expressed the views of those who supported Shropshire; a reprinting of the Faculty Senate Resolutions (with brief, introductory comments), accompanied by a copy of Moores letter to the Faculty Senate and a transcript of the remarks of Dr. Richard Feinberg to the Faculty Senate (Feinberg contributed an article supportive of Shropshire to the special edition of Uhuru); an editorial piece by one of the student editors of Uhuru that was sent to the Daily Kent Stater on September 28, 1994; a copy of the full-page advertisement taken out by the Campus Campaign for Civil Discourse in the Daily Kent Stater on October 12, 1994; a resolution written by the Pan-African faculty and staff; a resolution of support passed by the Black Graduate Student Association; and a postscript signed

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The two faculty members who wrote in opposition to the article, history professors Kenneth Calkins and Robert Swierenga, were careful to point out the problems with Shropshires methods of scholarship. They accomplished this, in part, by meticulously checking Shropshires numerous footnotes; indeed, Calkins acknowledged that one of the most striking characteristics of the piece was the large number of quotations and citations of authority that it contained. Nevertheless, he notes,
When one scrutinizes these sources, however, one soon discovers that Mr. Shropshire apparently had little interest in conveying what they actually say about the issues he addresses. Of the seventeen direct quotations I have been able to check, for example, only one is completely accurate. Some of Shropshires errors seem to be simply the product of slip-shod scholarship. On other occasions, however, it would appear that the quotations were altered with a calculated intention to mislead the reader . . . One of the reasons for his difficulty in providing accurate quotations, however, is that in at least six cases he has not gone directly to the sources himself, but has rather used quotations which appear in a book published by the Nation of Islam entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.37

Similarly, Swierenga added:


The facts are undeniable. Jews were not the instigators or major players in the enslavement of Africans, either as traders or owners, and contemporary Jewish scholars have not been silent about the involvement of their ancestors. Shropshire and his Nation of Islam tutors need to look again at the facts of history.38

Of the four faculty members who wrote in support of the article, two specifically called attention to their own whiteness through their appeals to others of European descent to form their opinions of the article by attempting to understand it through the lens of the African-American experience. Christina McVay, an instructor of English and German who was on the faculty advisory board for Uhuru, expressed regret concerning the characterization of Judaism as a gutter religion, as well as other anti-Jewish expressions and inaccuracies in the article, but reasoned that, although this type of rhetoric was common in the black press, it was not the real
by four of the members of the Editorial Advisory Board, who also wrote supportive articles for Uhuru. 37. Kenneth Calkins, An Historians Response to Terry Shropshire, Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, Spring 1995, 14. 38. Richard Swierenga, Jews and American Slavery, Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, Spring 1995, 31.

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problem. I fear many of us educated white folks are missing the forest for the trees, McVay noted, and concluded, [I]t all boils down to the pervasive and longstanding ignorance of whites (including Jews) regarding the black experience, and more importantly, the refusal to acknowledge that there is much in that experience worth learning. In trying to characterize the relations between the two groups, McVay claimed that the root cause of what was termed black antisemitism was the lack of acknowledgement by white people of black suffering and asked her white readers to consider the issue from the black perspective. To do so, she suggested asking a number of questions:
Why does the U.S. now have a National Holocaust Museum but no museum dedicated to the people upon whose backs this country was quite literally built? (And if we did have one, would throngs of Americans visit it, as they do the museum in Washington?) Why do taxpayers say nothing about the billions of dollars we send to Israel every year but begrudge every dollar that goes to inner-city schools? Why had six out of the twenty white students in one of my classes last spring seen Schindlers List while none had seen Malcolm X, which had been in the theaters a few months longer? Why are Jews called the Chosen People? And does that mean that their suffering counts for more than that of blacks? Why is the Jewish Holocaust treated with awe and respect, while the African Holocaust is passed over as though it is insignificant? In short, why do we believe we must remember the gas chamber but not the auction block?39

Clearly, some of McVays questions (and particularly the one pertaining to the Chosen People) betrayed an irritation toward Jewish claims of victimization, as well as discomfort with the concept of a collective Jewish identity as an oppressed minority group. This impression was confirmed in the next paragraph, when she referred to the ultimate paradox that American Jewsacknowledged victimsare living very well these days, and reminded her readers that some blacks are skeptical now about the motives behind Jewish participation in [the Civil Rights] movement. McVay justified the anger in the black community through the desire to reveal Jews as more than simply long-suffering victims, but as victimizers as well, and concluded, Our nation, especially those of us in education, must take steps to ensure that no more generations of Americans of any color are allowed to pass through our educational system without gaining the same reverence

39. Christina McVay, Speaking of Paradox, Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, Spring 1995.

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and respect for the black experience that most of us have for the Jewish experience.40 The confidence with which McVay asserted her conclusion that Americans demonstrated reverence and respect for the Jewish experience was rooted in her assessment of Jewish whiteness. This was echoed in an article by Richard Feinberg, professor of anthropology, who wrote, [T]he Kent community owes Shropshire and Uhuru a debt of gratitude for raising important issues and forcing us to talk about them openly. While he acknowledged Shropshires incendiary language, Feinberg reasoned that such verbiage obscured a complex set of societal problems and readers should focus more on what the author was trying to accomplish than on the accuracy of the article itself. Therefore, he asserted,
What seems to bother Shropshire is that some Jews call upon historical oppression as a license for self-righteous indignation, and they are sometimes so caught up in their own suffering that they fail to notice when their actions injure others. I have heard comments from Jews regarding Arabs (and occasionally blacks or other peoples of color) that are as blindly hostile as the most offensive passages in Shropshires essay.41

Feinberg concluded by petitioning whites, and particularly Jews, to avoid over-reaction. The rhetoric contained in Shropshires article, he hypothesized, while it may have seemed unfair to Jews, was essentially harmless because blacks have little institutional power and limited opportunity to cause you serious injury.42 The two essays excerpted above demonstrate that the much of the discourse surrounding Shropshires article was not simply a case of what some might label black antisemitism or even a black-Jewish disagreement.43 Rather, they provide a window into a campus culture in which the label of Jewish whiteness was, according to some members of the KSU community, enough to render Jewish objections to blatant falsehoods about Jews
40. Ibid. 41. Richard Feinberg, Jews, Africans, and Human Liberation: Reflections on Terry Shropshires Paradox of Eastern Jewry, Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, Spring 1995. 42. Ibid. 43. An online version of a publication by the ADL, entitled Schooled in Hate: Anti-Semitism on Campus (1997), did not list the incidence at KSU under the heading Black Anti-Semitism but included it under the more general rubric Examples of Serious Campus Anti-Semitic Incidents. This Web page is titled Schooled in Hate: Anti-Semitism on Campus and subtitled Specific Examples of Serious Anti-Semitic Incidents, from the Anti-Defamation League Web site, http:// www.adl.org/sih/SIH-Examples.asp, accessed December 28, 2011.

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and Judaism irrelevant and even mean-spirited. Thus, even though it is undeniably true that American Jews have benefited handsomely from what is referred to as white privilege in American society in general, one wonders whether the whiteness of Jews can be seen a disadvantage specifically within the milieu of the campus. Naturally, the students affiliated with Uhuru supported the right of the periodical to publish Shropshires piece. Editor Enloe Wilson wondered about the true motivation of the onslaught [of criticism], especially because, despite the humbly admitted mistakes of Shropshires article, a notable body of similar works came to the same conclusions. For Wilson, the real issue was that:
Many have speculated as to whether the true underlying source of discomfort has been Shropshires supposedly elaborate excursions in twisted logic or alternate truths, or the fact that a student of color (especially an Afrikan student) had the nervethe gall to study a component of a European peoples history and to be forthright in expressing alarm at what he found.44

Assistant editor Alkebulan hypothesized that the article gave people the opportunity to attack Afrocentricity in general and the Department of Pan-African Studies and Black United Students in particular, and commented on the absurdity of putting oppressed people in the position of defending themselves against being racist and antisemitic.45 Only one student essay appeared in the special issue that opposed the content of the Uhuru article. Mirroring the tendency of students who supported the article to use more strident language than the faculty who did so, this student, Stephen Weinberg, was willing to make more controversial allegations than those of the faculty members who opposed the publication of the article. Weinberg asserted that an ideology allowing hostility toward Jews and Jewish issues had made a negative impact on contemporary campus culture. He contextualized the article with his contention that similar incidents had taken place across the country, and claimed that rhetoric such as Shropshires was proof that hate is being legitimized in the classroom. While Weinberg did not specifically point to black studies programs, he alleged that:

44. Enloe Wilson, This Teachable Moment, Uhuru Na Mazungumzo (Spring 1995): 77-78. 45. Adisa A. Alkebulan, Lessons Learned, Uhuru Na Mazungumzo (Spring 1995): 80-81.

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At many universities, and Kent as well, resources are being diverted into programs that are distant and separate from the main campus community and its goals. These programs abandon academics and instead allow ideological indoctrination to flourish. The result of this has been racist dogma justified behind the tutelage of multicultural education, and its various offshoots.46

Weinberg was prepared to attack the entire edifice of multicultural learning, condemning the cultural relativity that he felt serve[d] to deconstruct any notion of universal values and universal knowledge. He cautioned that those who touted the benefits of multiculturalism, like the supporters of the article, were able to lay claim to absolute knowledge of the subjects of their choice and could argue that, Anyone who disagrees with them has simply soaked up the views of what is perceived as the dominant, oppressive, societal view. At the same time, the ideas advanced by Shropshires article could be validated simply because they were widely held in the black community. Such a stance promoted intolerance, Weinberg claimed, because it assumed that attitudes are racially based. Therefore, even though the article was shown to be historically inaccurate, the only possible claim for its validity must be made on ethnic grounds.47 For Weinberg, this meant that the right to criticize Uhuru was unfairly portrayed as a politicized racial issue.48 Weinberg expressed his disappointment over the aftermath of the incident, focusing specifically on the responses of some of the KSU faculty, whom he characterized as not interested in truth. Similarly, he intimated that Jewish students were powerless in the face of politically motivated anti-Jewish rhetoric because of the prevailing climate of opinion on campus and its indebtedness to concepts of multiculturalism. There is nothing

46. Stephen Weinberg, Legitimizing Hate, Uhuru Na Mazungumzo (Spring 1995): 32. 47. Ibid., 32-34. Weinberg also published an opinion piece in the Daily Kent Stater in which he echoed various faculty members assertions that Shropshire used his sources and quotes incorrectly, mostly because of his reliance on The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (Steven B. Weinberg, Jews Not Solely to Blame for Slave Trade, Daily Kent Stater, October 12, 1994). 48. Other articles used for this section on Uhuru include: Douglas Feiden, Kent State University, Ohio Campus Torn by Tract Against Jews, The Forward, April 14, 1995; Marcy Oster, Book May Drive Deeper Wedge between KSUs Blacks, Jews, Cleveland Jewish News, Friday, April 14, 1995; Notebook, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 1995.

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[Jewish students] can do except congregate at the Hillel House and prepare for the next attack, Weinberg alleged.49 The animosity that Weinberg, as a student of the 1990s, harbored toward the concept of multiculturalism is particularly salient. According to American studies scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson, Multiculturalism as a coherent phenomenon captured little attention until the 1990s, even though it had been building as a movement for the previous twenty years and had its roots in the formation of the New Left. Specifically, as the New Left fragmented and group-specific identity politics surged, a relationship was formed between Civil Rights-New Left activism, education, and multiculturalism.50 Perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of Jews in the heyday of the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s expressed discomfort concerning antipathy toward Jews and Jewish issues, particularly the prevailing discourse over the state of Israel, in the political rhetoric that was such an integral part of campus culture at that time.51 Eric Goldstein has also argued that Jews were not entirely comfortable with the postwar description of Jewishness as an ethnicity because it did not totally resolve the dilemmas of asserting a distinctive identity in a society organized around the categories of black and white. By the mid-1960s, when the emergence of black nationalist groups led to a redefinition of whiteness that stressed the negative aspects of attachment to the dominant group, some Jews began to look for ways to reassert their group distinctiveness.52 That there would then be Jews who expressed discomfort with multiculturalism and the place of Jews within that discourse was certainly in keeping with that earlier tradition. Indeed, a number of analysts have referred to the difficulties that Jews faced when they tried to assert themselves qua Jews within the multicultural discourse that was a pronounced

49. Weinbergs comment was taken from Osters article in the Cleveland Jewish News (see note 40). 50. Jacobson, 226-28. 51. See, for instance, Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New AntiSemitism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974); Martin Peretz, The American Left and Israel, Commentary, Vol. 44, No. 5 (November 1967); Milton Himmelfarb, In the Light of Israels Victory, Commentary, Vol. 44, No. 4 (October 1967); Seymour Martin Lipset, The Return of Anti-Semitism as a Political Force, in Israel, the Arabs and the Middle East, eds. Irving Howe and Carl Gershman (New York: Bantam Books, 1972); Seymour Martin Lipset, The Socialism of Fools: The Left, the Jews, and Israel, Encounter, December 1969. 52. Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 190, 208.

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characteristic of campus culture in the 1990s.53 Political philosopher Marla Brettschneider, for instance, discussed the need for careful, reflective analysis of the role, importance, and even the dangers of multiculturalism to the Jewish community. While she and others have acknowledged the positive impact of multiculturalism through the freedom that Jews have found to incorporate their Jewishness with their political progressivism, Brettschneider also warned that:
As identities become fair game in politics, Jewishness takes a beating from the Left in ways Jews are usually more accustomed to being attacked from the Right. Even in a politics that courageously seeks to understand, name, and overcome oppression as well as to rethink and rewrite history, historic antisemitic fantasies have resurfaced at times now from marginalized, rather than powerful, groupsabout how Jews run the world and are to blame for all the worlds problems. Recent media attention to particular antisemitic Black Muslim speakers or the Holocaust hoax problem only amplifies what Jews and multiculturally oriented student activists have faced every day around the country. The campus has felt like a battleground and Jews too often have found complications with progressive efforts to diversify canonically based curricula. Despite our communitys apparent success, we remain marginalized from the majority Christian culture; adding insult to injury, despite our minority status and experience, often we are marginalized in multicultural circles.54

Similarly, analysts Jeffrey Ross and Melanie Schneider explored the relationship between multiculturalism and anti-Jewish hostility on American campuses when they wrote:
[These problems are] compounded and, to a degree, made possible by many of the trends in academe that are included under the otherwise well-intentioned phenomenon of multiculturalism. They include pressures to modify traditional academic standards in admissions, faculty hiring, and curriculum development as campuses are subject to politicization and made to respond to claims of group entitlements.55 53. See, for instance, Peter F. Langman, Jewish Issues in Multiculturalism: A Handbook for Educators and Clinicians (Jerusalem: Jason Aronson Inc., 1999), and Sanford Gutman, The Marginalization of Antisemitism in Multicultural Curricula, in Approaches to Antisemitism: Context and Curriculum, ed. Michael Gary Brown (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1994). 54. Marla Brettschneider, Multiculturalism, Jews, and Democracy: Situating the Discussion, in The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Views on Multiculturalism, ed. Marla Brettschneider (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 1-2. 55. Ross and Schneider, 268.

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Ross and Schneider, however, were also careful to point out that these issues were not necessarily the norm on American campuses. Paradoxically, as they explained, these disturbing trends have emerged at the same time that American colleges and universities have witnessed an unprecedented flowering of Jewish achievement.56 In other words, Ross and Schneider (and Brettschneider) were in agreement that multiculturalism as an ideology or a general discourse was not in and of itself the problem. Thus, if multiculturalism itself is not the issue, we might ask what factor or factors were subsumed under the rubric of multiculturalism that allowed for the falsification of history that is part of both Holocaust denial and accusations about disproportionate Jewish culpability for the African slave trade? In the case of Uhuru at Kent State University, the author of the article in question, as well as some of its supporters, were fairly open in their emphasis on Jewish whiteness as a reason that the article, whether or not it adhered to standards of objective truth, was an example of protected political speech rather than an antisemitic screed. In this case, my contention concerning Jewish whiteness as a salient factor is fairly easy to support. In other words, as Sander L. Gilman has observed, Jews are simply dismissed as white in the multicultural discourse. Further, once they became white, they [are] quickly lumped with the forces of patriarchy and oppression by the new voices of multiculturalism. Their whiteness seems to deny them any presence in a world of hybridity defined by skin color as cultural difference.57 The perhaps unintended side effect of this use of Jewish whiteness, though, was that it offered protection for other antisemitic rhetoric, including that which pilloried Jews, however obliquely, for reasons based on nonwhiteness, under its wide umbrella. As we have seen, for many of those who espouse Holocaust denial, the underlying issue, whether it is openly disclosed or not, is that Jews are different from white, Christian Europeans. Many of the deniers who harbor personal antipathy toward Jews, however, take great pains to mask their hatred with a pseudo-scholarly veneer that presents Holocaust denial as legitimate revisionist history rather than base antisemitism. And it was this pretense of intellectual inquiry and academic neutrality that lent a sort of credence to the deniers basic argument as champions of freedom of speech and allowed them to portray Holocaust
56. Ibid., 268, 277. 57. Sander L. Gilman, Multiculturalism and the Jews (New York: Routledge, 2006), 180. In an article, Gilman writes about the marginalization of Jews within the discourse of multiculturalism while simultaneously using Jews as a model for the multicultural (Sander L. Gilman, Were Not Jews: Representing Jews in Contemporary Multicultural Literature, Modern Judaism, Vol. 23, No. 2 [2003]).

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denial as one more in a series of controversial political topics that challenged Establishment norms and values. In short, the argument may be made that those who portrayed Jews as white Europeans in order to subject them to anti-Jewish hostility in the guise of protected political speech offered sanctuary to those whose underlying objective was to attack Jews because they were different from white Europeans. Both groups espoused antisemitic canards when they attacked Jews, but the anti-Jewish hostility that each group expressed was based on a different assessment of the Jewish relationship to whiteness. Thus, Jewish whiteness was the salient factor that allowed both groups, however dissimilar in methods and members that they might have been, to promulgate inaccurate historical narratives concerning Jews and to insist that such falsehoods were to be welcomed because of the tenets of academic freedom and freedom of speech. And it was the growing prevalence of this type of falsehood that led, in turn, to the AHAs decision to issue two different statements about historical truth that both involved Jews and Jewish history. Neither the advent of the modern age nor modernity itself was the reason that Jews suffered in the 19th and 20th centuries from antisemitism. Instead, the classification of Jews as a race was the salient factor encompassed by the general rubric of modernity, which eventually led to the murderous campaign against European Jewry. Similarly, multiculturalism may have been the overarching climate within which both types of anti-Jewish hostility in the 1990s were made possible, but multiculturalism in and of itself was not the reason that Jews found themselves in a difficult position vis-` -vis the multicultural discourse on campus. The salient factor in that a instance was the relationship that Jews were imagined to have with the concept of whiteness. To bring this argument to a close, we might take a brief look at the situation of Jews on campus in contemporary times and note that some analysts have claimed that the campus, more than any other sector of American society, has proved to be susceptible to expressions of anti-Jewish hostility, particularly in the period after World War II.58 I would offer the caveat that
58. See Phyllis Chesler, The New Antisemitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 143-49, 215-16; Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004), 120-23; Gary Tobin, Aryeh K. Weinberg, and Jenna Ferer, The Uncivil University (San Francisco: The Institute for Jewish and Community Research, 2005). For a critical assessment of some of these books, see Jerome A. Chanes, How, Why, Who Hates Us: Various Takes on Old and New Antisemitisms, The Forward, November 27, 2009. In this book review, Chanes recommends a recent book on antisemitism: Murray Baumgarten, Peter Kenez, and Bruce Thompson, eds., Varieties of Antisemitism: History, Ideology, Discourse (Newark: University of Dela-

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such statements must be tempered by the fact that Jewish students and faculty, by most standards, are thriving on American campuses. They are represented disproportionately at many colleges and universities, including some of the most prestigious campuses in the nation. Jewish studies programs continue to grow, and the student group Hillel is highly successful. Still, this general state of affairs may well lead us to ask about the losses that Jews as a collective have sustained in order to make such impressive gains. As David Biale, Susannah Heschel, and Michael Galchinsky reminded us, at the close of the 1990s,
Never before have so few barriers existed to Jews entering the corridors of political, cultural, and economic power. Yet the path to integration has also created enormous contradictions in Jewish self-consciousness. Identification and integration with the majority stands at odds with the Jews equal desire to preserve their identity as a minority.59

In short, the desire of some American Jews to maintain a particular Jewish identity conflicts with their designation as part of the white American majority. For many Jews in the United States, possibly even the majority, the conflation of Jews and whiteness is not problematic because of the benefits such a designation can confer upon the bearer. Thus, Jewish difference may well be acceptable to the larger community when it is presented under the encompassing label of Euro-American difference.60 But if Jews, in this case Jewish students, view themselves as separate from others of European heritage and ask others to acknowledge this type of particularity, they can be rejected because of the dictates of the surrounding campus culture. As Biale, Heschel, and Galchinsky note, Jews are a boundary case, occupying a liminal zone of identity that makes them insiders who are outsiders and outsiders who are insiders.61 Relying in part on their examinations of the paradox of the anomalous status of Jews in 21st-century America, a number of contemporary scholars continue to probe the limits to the ways that Jews and Jewish issues are
ware Press, 2009) and especially Yehuda Bauers essay, Problems of Contemporary Antisemitism as a counterbalance to the books listed above. 59. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, Introduction: The Dialectic of Jewish Enlightenment, in Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, eds. David Biale, Michael Galinchy, and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5. 60. Richard D. Allen has argued for the diminution of ethnic identity among Americans of European heritage in Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of White America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 61. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, Introduction: The Dialectic.

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accepted within contemporary campus culture. Gary Tobin, Aryeh Kaufmann Weinberg, and Jenna Ferer have looked at the overall climate of the campus and the problems that Jewish students face when they identify as part of the larger Jewish community or with certain Jewish issues. Eunice Pollack has expressed concern over what she sees as a resurgence of antisemitism on American campuses. And, perhaps most germane to this topic, Kenneth L. Marcus has examined the need to place Jewish students under the protections of civil rights laws so that they will have recourse in the event of damaging anti-Jewish or anti-Israel actions and rhetoric to seek legal assistance. In the course of developing this project, Marcus has argued that some of the most damaging anti-Jewish rhetoric on todays college campuses involve efforts to reracialize Jewishness as preeminently white and therefore imbued with racist and colonial guilt.62 We know, too, that there are those who see the focus of contemporary anti-Jewish hostility on campus as a product of antipathy toward the state of Israel that goes beyond legitimate criticism and should be called antisemitic. Often, this phenomenon is labeled the new antisemitism. To tie this into the larger themes of this essay, there are those who asserted long ago that much of the hostility toward Israel is based on the perception that Israel is a white and imperialist nation.63 As Gilman explains, among many non-Jewish multicultural writers the fantasy of a monolithic Zionism has become the enemy of the multicultural. 64 Thus, it may well be that the trouble that some Jewish students have found in answering the charges against Israel have to do not only with the perceived whiteness of the country but also with their own whiteness and the culpability that this implies. Perhaps another salient factor that we must consider if we view the Jewish experience on campus through the lens of whiteness, though, is that while Volume One of the Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews was published in 1991, Volume Two was more recently released in 2010. The subtitle of the new release is How Jews Gained Control of the Black American Economy. Whether or not this particular volume will make a new and different impact on reactions to Jews and Jewish issues on campus, of course, remains to be seen.
62. Gary Tobin, Aryeh K. Weinberg, and Jenna Ferer, 2005; Eunice G. Pollack, ed., Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011); Kenneth L. Marcus, Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 63. See, for instance, Percy Cohen, Jewish Radicals and Radical Jews (New York: Academic Press, 1980), and the authors listed in note 43. 64. Gilman, 181.

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*Linda Maizels is the Faculty Fellow in Jewish Studies at Colby College. She recently completed her doctorate at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, a division of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation was entitled Charter Members of the Fourth World: Jewish Student Identity and the New Antisemitism on American Campuses, 1967-1994.

Holocaust Envy: The Libidinal Economy of the New Antisemitism1


Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr.*
According to the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, enjoyment, in the psychoanalytic sense, should be understood as the paradoxical satisfaction produced by a painful encounter with an impossible Thing that upsets the balance of the pleasure principle. Nowadays, the Holocaustor, more specifically, Jews perceived (fantasized) enjoyment of ithas become just such a fascinating and disconcerting, seductively irritating object of obsessive overinvestment for the new antisemitism. In a Lacanian reading of the foundations of human rights discourse, a pathological Holocaust envy is diagnosed as a symptom of neo-antisemitisms rivalrous identification with Jews.

Key Words: Antisemitism, Psychoanalysis

Envy,

Holocaust,

Jouissance,

Lacan,

1. This paper was originally prepared as a pair of talks, and retains some of that character. First (as Post-Holocaust, Postcolonial Theory), it was part of a panel presentation, on post-Zionism and the Holocaust, at the Association for Israel Studies 27th International Conference (organized around the theme of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State), Brandeis University, June 13-15, 2011. Second (as Enjoyment of the Holocaust: The Latest Thing in Antisemitism), it was given as a lecture at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, September 15, 2011. I wish to thank the organizers of the Brandeis conference, the attendees, and my co-panelistsEugene Sheppard (chair), Elhanan Yakira, Bruno Chaouat, and Robert Meisterfor their insightful comments. I thank Bruno Chaouat additionally, in his role as director of CHGS, for arranging my visit there, and the wonderful audience on that occasion for a stimulating discussion of my work. Thanks, however, in one case are not enough: I wish therefore to dedicate this essay to my teacher and friend of many years, Robert Meister, who long ago played a priceless role in my learning to understand the politics of enjoyment (and the enjoyment of political theory). We may disagree in important ways about Israel and other sub-theoretical details (the flaws in the argument you are about to read, needless to say, are entirely my responsibility), but Bobs intellectual curiosity and integrity of mind, at once playful and serious, remain for me the most pure and infectious I have ever encountered. For that inspiration, among other things, I am forever grateful. This paper could not have been written had I not once been privileged to serve as a teaching assistant in his legendary course, After Evil, nor without his recently published book of the same name. Individual citations to that text in what follows cannot do justice to the intellectual debt this paper owes to that rich and important volume.

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The Other is he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. Jacques-Alain Miller2 Why is it that American academic anti-Zionism so frequently challenges, distorts, or seeks to appropriate Jewish Holocaust memory? To understand this is to understand the way in which a new antisemitism has arisen, paradoxically, from envy for what in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacans terms can be understood as an imagined Jewish/Israeli enjoyment of their own past collective suffering. The antisemitic thought process proceeds in this way: The Other deprives me of my true enjoyment, or, what I most urgently require, namely my innermost capacity to feel, in my bones, that I am living fullyand I want it back. So . . . I plan to retake from him this missing affective substance, my jouissance, in return for the (fantasized) harm he has done me initially. Thus does one of the fundamental tropes of racism appear, typically, according to Lacanian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, as the largely unconscious conviction that the Other is alwaysand alreadyresponsible for my miserable lack of existential heft. If I can neither feel successful no matter what I do nor even suffer my endemic failure properly (if, in other words, something is always missing), it is because my neighbor, who is really an alien and doesnt belong here, is a metaphysical gonifsomeone from whom, not incidentally, I am therefore legally, morally, and above all libidinally entitled to steal/reclaim all that I can for myself. Racist enjoyment is the (real enough, albeit frustrated) perverse enjoyment of the Others (imaginary, albeit nonetheless alluring) enjoyment. Racist desire manifests reactively, as a symptom in the form of a fantasy of the Others desirea necessary misrecognition, constitutive of the racist subjects very identity. Antisemitic fantasies provide the paradigm case:
In terms of racism, the intersubjective element of fantasy means that, paradoxically, the racist stages the desire of his victim. The racist, confronted with the abyss of the Jews desire, makes sense of it by constructing a fantasy in which the Jew is at the center of some nefarious plot. . . . In this way, the desire of the racist to rid the country of Jews is actually a means of concealing the anxiety generated by the desire of the Jews.3

2. Quoted in Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 203. Subsequent references to this edition appear cited in the text. 3. Tony Myers, Slavoj Zizek (New York: Routledge, 2003), 98. Subsequent references to this edition appear cited in the text.

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Today, aiming less to rid a given country of its Jews than to rid the world of the Jewish State, the new antisemitism follows a similar but distinct logic. For the postmodern antisemite, it is not so much the desire of Jews per se, but that of Israel, that generates anxiety. The nefarious plot is no longer whatever it was Jews were supposed to be up to in Europe, but what Israel is supposed to be up to in the Middle East. The latter, it is believed, is supported by an inordinate possessiveness concerning the Holocaust and the privileges this custodianship is felt to confer. Therefore, in a symptomatic wish to retrieve the memory and meaning of the Holocaust from greedy Jewish hands, the new antisemite desires the delegitimization of a nation seen as founded on (illicit) enjoyment of the Holocaust. Following Jacques Lacan in his later period, Zizek sometimes refers to this sort of investment in the Others imagined enjoyment as sinthome (in the antique French spelling of the term), in order to emphasize its structuring role for subjectivity. The subject not only suffers from its sinthome; it needs to suffer from it in order to be itselfthe subject that it is. In this understanding of symptom/sinthome, it is important to emphasize that if the symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet, disintegrates. . . . [A]ll his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspended from his symptom, is externalized in his symptom.4 Without the structuring effect of a peculiarly central symptom, in other words, there is no reality as the subject postulates it, and no subject either. With this in mind, is it hard to see that Israel, in the eyes of its detractors, serves as the worlds sinthome after the end of the Cold Warfor what other nation on the map is talked about as if perhaps it doesnt belong there? Israels unnaturalness is in this regard is a key to the spurious sense of entitlement enjoyed narcissistically by the rest. In other words: Since, in fact, as historians well know, all nationalities and perforce all nation-states and national boundaries are (many of them recent) humanly made political constructs, to talk about one in particular as if it alone were guilty of being more invented than the others is to allow the rest the fantasy of their own ostensibly more substantial identities. Jews who support the existence of Israel, or even those who are merely associated with it metonymically, risk embodying racist enjoyment as the symptomatic standin for the evils of the world.

4. Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (Routledge: New York, 1992), 154.

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THE NEW ANTI-ZIONISM Such scapegoating is not entirely new, of course, but it has gotten worseas I will maintainwith the rise of human rights discourse as the consensual idiom of an increasingly global legal-moral order. In such a context, the Holocaust plays a crucial role as the imagined source of legitimacy (or illegitimacy) both of Israel alone, as one nation among others, and also of the community of nations (the others plus Israel). For only in such an ideological environment does it make sense that, as Edward Alexander warned presciently nearly two decades ago, the campaign to steal the Holocaust from its Jewish victims [threatens to] remove whatever impediments of conscience may yet stand in the way of the anti-Israel crusade.5 For where conscience (or super-ego) is at stake, in a competition over scarce resources under capitalism, the best way to evade censorship, unleash desire, and appropriate the desired object is to assert property rights. Thus, what Alexander spied the roots ofthe self-righteous campaign to redress a primal Jewish theft of enjoyment from the world at large, a movement fortified excessively by the indignant perception that too much is made of Jewish sufferingis now in full swing, thanks in part to the expansion of an international order that makes everyone, in principle, equally a victim or potential victim of human rights abuse. And the politics of representation at a deep level, not only consciously, but at the level of enjoyment as a political factor,6 have never been worse for Israelseen as the victim/survivor nation par excellence, and therefore the one that gets away with enjoying this status too much. Well-publicized fights over the meaning of the Holocaust around the world,7 thereforeas what one might call a Jewish and democratic genocidehave implications, affectively as well as cognitively, for the concept of a Jewish and democratic state (Israels longstanding self-definition). In each case, those impatient with the first term in the equation (Jewish and democratic), and who therefore cant see what it has to do with the second (particular and universal), have important things in common. In influential sectors of the academy, post-Zionism and postcolonial theory harmonize as mutually supportive ways of being post-Holocaustin the sense of
5. Edward Alexander, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 206. Subsequent reference to this edition appears cited in the text. 6. Enjoyment as a political factor is the subtitle of Zizeks second book in English. See Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991). 7. For example, in Europe, and particularly France; in the Middle East, and notably Iran.

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being, in effect, over it. The post-Holocaust postcolonial post-Zionist can thus dispense with the very idea of a Jewish state, because he has revised his estimation of the proper meaning of the Holocaustin order to transgress a once potent taboo and go beyond notions, seen as myths/ideologies, of the events uniqueness. Thus, an alt-neu prejudice (does not new antisemitism sound almost like an oxymoron, given the longevity of Jewhatred?) adopts a distinctly anti-Zionist shape, as Israels Jewish-majority population is pilloried for supposedly mismanaging the memory, meaning, and significance of their tragedy. Understood as the ideological cornerstone of post-World War II global civil society, the memory of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews can both grant legitimacy and take it away. The philosopher and public intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy articulates the nexus of attitudes that must be understoodventriloquizing todays Israel/Holocaust-obsessed Judeophobiaas follows:
We have nothing against Jews, the new antisemite protests, as always. What were against is [1] people who traffic in their own memory . . . and [2] push out the memories of others . . . for [3] the sole purpose of legitimizing an illegitimate state.8

These three pillars, as Levy calls them, of the new anti-Zionist antisemitismthe belief that Jews and the Jewish State run a Holocaust industry, by means of which they monopolize compassion for racist/colonialist purposesare mutually interdependent, and so my analysis necessarily touches on each. But the heart of the matter, the problem on which I therefore concentrate from herethe linchpin joining the restis surely the second of the three elements Levy identifies: the accusation that Jews hoard stockpiles of suffering, thus leaving insufficient funds of pity in circulation for otherswho are also miserable but havent got access to the libidinal backing needed to capitalize their suffering and mass-market it to the worldbecause the Jews have taken more than their share. THE HOLOCAUST THINGGENOCIDE
AND

JOUISSANCE

Holocaust envy, or genocide jouissance, is not to be understood as jealousy concerning the actual events of the Holocaust itself, but rather as the enjoyment of the memory of the Shoah, perceived perversely as a kind of privilege accorded to Jews. Since the notion of skimming surplus compassionexpropriating, stockpiling, and reinvesting someone elses right8. Bernard-Henri Levy, Left in Dark Times (New York: Random House, 2008), 158.

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ful quantum of affect, in order to make a tidy moral profit for oneselfcan only be a fantasy; I have invoked contemporary psychoanalysis to explain it. Keeping in mind that enjoyment is not to be confused with pleasure, but, following Zizek, should be understood as the paradoxical satisfaction produced by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium of the pleasure principle (280), I maintain that the Holocaustor, more specifically, Jews perceived (fantasized) enjoyment of ithas become just such a perturbing Thing, the object of an obsessive libidinal investment on the part of todays new antisemite. It is the antisemites new Thing, and thus the latest thing in antisemitism. The Thing, in Lacanese, is whatever incarnates jouissance, or enjoyment. In the post-World War II libidinal economy of human rights, the Thingthe real thing, what its all about, or, in Zizeks words again, what gives plenitude and vivacity to our [way of] lifewhat allows us to live fully as who we really areis the thought of genocide and the world communitys stand against it, in which we participate as global citizens (201). This community of civilized nations defines itself in principle by the exclusion of genocide and genocidal regimes, which are to be counted as criminal and therefore not regimes whose borders have to be respected. Those who commit or threaten to commit genocide risk loss of standing as moral/legal subjectsand, with that, excision from the human race imagined as the human rights community. In this context, the fear that the Jewish Other, whose sacrificial burnt offering founded the community in the first place, has a unique relationship to the Genocide Thingsome special relationship to its essence that is denied the rest of the worldis evidently one of contemporary antisemitisms driving passions. This fear supplies unseemly affective support for Holocaust denial, minimization, relativization, and resentment of the Holocaust. As Zizek asks rhetorically, Do we not find enjoyment precisely in fantasizing about the Others enjoyment, in this ambivalent attitude toward it? Do we not obtain satisfaction by means of the very supposition that the Other enjoys in a way inaccessible to us? (206). In this case, what makes the Holocaust inaccessible, or seductively forbidden to the antisemite, is the understandable sense that it was in fact a total human rights catastrophe in ways that even other genocides cannot quite match; albeit, this is debated. For, whats not open to debatereally unique tragedy or not, and by what scientific measure?is that the Shoah is certainly the one man-made disaster in history that people argue about in a unique way, debating endlessly whether or not and how it was or wasnt unique. This obsessive investment itself makes it unique, therefore, in one very important way at least: the Holocaust is uniquely discussed for its uniqueness and/or lack thereof. It appears thus to have been more of a genocide than otherseven

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if this more can be difficult to define uncontroversially, or in a way that achieves full consensus among rational people of goodwill (never mind antisemites). Should the real more turn out to be less, or a lack, the symbolic and imaginary more would still be formidable. And because pointing to what in an object is more than itself is another way of talking about the Lacanian Thing, we are definitely in the vicinity of human rights discourses Thing-in-itself. DIALECTICS
OF THE

NEW ANTISEMITISM

Thus, holocaust envy is a subspecies of just the sort of prurient supposition about the Others enjoyment that Zizek famously remarks upon. It has this two-fold intersubjective structure: It comes about when, first, Jews are imagined to enjoy (or get off on) their tragedy more fully than others can; and, second, when Jewish theft of enjoyment (203) is posited as the reason why others can never enjoy fully, can never seem to get in to either the Holocaust or their own tragedies sufficiently. Although psychoanalytic enjoyment is sometimes said to consist in the kind of satisfaction to be garnered from picking at your own festering wound (Myers 86), this is a simplification, insofar as it posits enjoyment as something real rather than imaginary, something objective about the wound itself rather than about the subjective fantasy of the wounds appearance for the gaze, or in the eyes of, (the) other(s) (Myers 86). For my purposes, then, enjoyment is best defined dialecticallyas the satisfaction that the other is imagined to derive from his suffering, translated into the satisfaction that I, as subject-of-enjoyment, in turn derive from obsessing about my own inability to enjoy as much/well as the fantasized other. This is an important distinction because, by this definition, what is perturbing about the Jew finally has nothing to do with the Jew himself, nor even anything to do with the Holocaust, but rather what perturbs is the Jews obscene enjoyment of his festering wound as the antisemitic mind hallucinates it. What Zizek says elsewhere explicitly of the old antisemitism is also trueand even more so, thanks to the power of a globalized human rights discourseof the new:
What the perpetrators of pogroms find intolerable and rage-provoking, what they react to, is not the immediate reality of Jews, but the image/ figure of the Jew which circulates and has been constructed in their tradition. . . . [T]his image overdetermines the way I experience real Jews themselves. What makes a real Jew that an antisemite encounters on the

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street intolerable, what the antisemite tries to destroy when he attacks the Jew, the true target of his fury, is this fantasmatic dimension.9

This fantasmatic overdetermination of Jew-hatred means that not only what Alain Finkielkraut calls the imaginary Jew, but also the imaginary Jewish State of Israel (!) is the bearer of a projected Jew-issance or the supposed enjoyably painful privilege of being Jewish after the Holocaust.10 With these concepts (and bad puns) in mind, one of the more perplexing things about the life of Holocaust memory in recent decadesdifficult to make rational sense of otherwisebecomes suddenly less mysterious. I refer to the observably proliferating phenomenon of those perverse, intense, and destructive rivalries, which, seventy years down the line, remembrance of the Holocaust increasingly stimulatesamong those who would at once identify with the victims of the worst cruelest, most systematic, thorough and senseless genocide in history,11 and who, at the same time, seek to displace those victims. Indeed, this double whammy of empathy/rivalry is what one expects from identities based on identification, as Jacques Lacan explained in his seminal essay The Mirror Stage.12 Today we see this Lacanian jubilation of self-discovery in those subjects who ambivalently find themselves held up to the mirror of the Holocaust by human rights discourse.13
9. Cited in Kenneth L. Marcus, The Definition of Antisemitism (unpublished manuscript). Slavoj Zizek, On Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 66-7. Marcuss impressively well-informed investigation was helpful as I was revising this paper for publication. 10. Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 11. For a well-informed discussion of those properties that make the Holocaust unique, see Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale, 2001). The Holocaust, writes Bauer, has assumed the role of universal symbol for all evil because it presents the most extreme form of genocide, because it contains elements that are without precedent, because that tragedy was a Jewish one and because the Jewsalthough they are neither better nor worse than others and although their sufferings were neither greater nor lesser than those of others represent one of the sources [along with Athens and Rome] of modern civilization (270). 12. Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, trans. Bruce Fink, Ecrits (New York: Norton, 2006). 13. Though tightly held by some prop, human or artificial, Lacan writes of the young child entering the mirror stage, she or he overcomes [feelings of helplessness] in a flutter of jubilant activity, testing even the constraints of his prop [the mother/Other] in order to adopt a slightly leaning-forward position and take an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind (Ecrits 76).

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Victims everywhere, from housewives under patriarchy to Bosnian Muslims to members of the Audubon Society,14 ask to identify/be identified with/as Jews, in order to take their place as the real Jewsthe real victims, the victims whose suffering matters, about whom one properly should care. As Robert Meister states in his extraordinary study, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights:
The global politics of human rights after Auschwitz is still about the Jews. Today oppressed groups can qualify themselves as bearers of human rights by recognizing what happened to Jews during the Holocaust and asserting that another holocaust might happen to them. They are often said to disqualify themselves as bearers of human rights by denying the Holocaust and declaring themselves enemies of the Jews.15

But this recognition and identification, the mandatory price of admission to todays global culture of human rights, as Meister clearly sees, does not yield entirely wholesome results in every case, and can by no means be relied upon to redound to either Jews or Israels benefit over time. Given the complex motivations of human beings, the vicissitudes of moral psychology, and the cynical ways in which the rhetoric of human rights is often deployed in the service of a thinly veiled will-to-powerthe sweet recognition that Meister adverts to can and frequently does in fact turn sour, giving way to scandalized condemnation. This is particularly so among aggrieved groups who feel themselves unrecognized or under-recognized when its their turn to be the Jews. This is even more the case when the underrecognizers are said to be, of all people, the Jews themselveswho should know better, given their access to a surplus genocide-jouissance. As the particular standard bearers for what it universally means to be oppressed, in other words, post-Holocaust Jewrys privileged symbolic position opens it to charges thateven or especially in a secular age that sees itself as transcending the old antisemitismcould only be leveled at Jews. The new antisemitism thus lays down one of its platform planks, carved out of the sturdy cedar of resentment against Jews per se for failing to learn the lessons of the Holocaust that they, of all people, should have learned best but somehow didntor, more diabolically still, which they learned quite well but refuse to apply to others, holding on to their delicious
14. Alvin H. Rosenfeld documents thoroughly the spread of both trivial and notso-trivial analogies to the Holocaust in his important book, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 2011. 15. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 175. Subsequent references to this edition appear cited in the text.

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Jew-issance for themselves. Meister again puts it brilliantly, with reference in particular to Palestinian Holocaust envy (my term, not his):
In a world that has learned to feel good about itself by feeling bad about the Jews, one can take special umbrage at Jews who refuse to apply the Holocausts lessons to their own treatment of Palestinians. These Jews are to be criticized for thinking that they are the only real Jews, and that the Holocaust confers special privilege on actions they take to protect themselves from those who, as enemies of the Jews, become the moral equivalent of Nazis who would bring about the Holocaust again. This attitude has become a seemingly new offense that Jews, and Jews alone, can commit now that their victimary identity has been universalized. (175-176; my emphasis)

Put another way: who are the literal Jews, after World War II, to say that they are the Jews when everyones a metaphorical Jew nowadaysin the age of never again, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and its mandate to stop genocide anywhere and everywhere across the globe? In a democratic age that abhors inherent distinctions of rank, even as it positively valorizes everyones victimary identity, encouraging people to see themselves as constitutively injured subjects and rewarding them for doing soin such a moral universe, is not everyone entitled to an equal share of, or in, suffering, as the essence of subjectivity? Picking at your own festering wound is something were all entitled (commanded) to do nowadays, by the logic of multicultural political correctness. To be a multicultural subject is to be the bearer of just such a wound. So why then do the Jews do it (pick at theirs) more? Can they be allowed to get away with it? They do it too much, and so the rest of us cant get to do it enough as a result. Moreover, their wound, if it was ever as bad as they say, is surely healed by now and a thing of the past. While ours yet bleeds. . . . So, in effect, operate the gears of the new antisemitic unconscious. Perhaps this also helps explain why Jews are not generally included on the syllabus as a subculture, when the topic is ostensibly ethnicity-based multiculturalism on American campuses. That, and the fact that they are now successful as a groupa circumstance leaving Jews simultaneously both too wounded and not wounded enough for multiculturalisms egalitarian freemasonry of the injured and in-need-of-affirmative-action. DISTRIBUTIVE INJUSTICE Applied to genocide, the logic of affirmative action means that everyone is entitled to a piece of the Holocaust, understood as the universal sym-

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bol of Radical Evilan evil taken to operate on at least the principle of equality-of-opportunity if not a more egalitarian, Rawlsian, rough equalityof-results16Although it is Jews and Jews alone, as Meister notes, who are in a position to be regarded as capable of missing this fact, uniquely tempted as they are to seek to monopolize for themselves the properly shared significance of the defining event of the 20th century. Moreover, the Jewish State and the Jewish State alone can beisaccused of instrumentalizing the ultimate example of suffering to serve its national selfinterest. Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira thus meticulously dissects the myth of an Israeli Shoah chauvinism in his recent book, Post-Zionism, PostHolocaust. In ways cognate with and supportive of my argumentthough he eschews my sort of deep analysis of motivations, which he says frankly dont interest himYakira focuses on the cadre of post-Zionist academics inside Israel, identifying there what he calls an opprobrium community or tight-knit club of hyper-intellectuals who cite each others books, all passionately dedicated to trashing Israel from the inside. In my view, this kvetchers network can usefully be understood as another manifestation of what American sociology conceptualized in the 1970s more broadly as the adversary culture of the intellectualsa product of comfortable bourgeois societys tendency to give rise to an influential segment of alienated pseudo-bohemians that rejects the culture in total and in principle (as opposed to the liberal voicing of more modest criticisms aimed at reform). In Israel today, this apparently means rejecting Zionism (the idea of a Jewish and democratic state) by first, claiming falsely that Israels only-ever source of legitimacy flowed from being the alternative to the Holocaust, and second, insisting that it forfeited this passkey to the club of nations by mismanaging its privileged status as the survivor state, almost from the startparticularly if one follows Hannah Arendts influential condemnation of the Eichmann trial as less the prosecution of a mass-murdering fiend than a poor piece of pedagogy.17
16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1971. In Rawlss termstranslated into the present discussion in a way I cannot imagine he would approvein an unequal distribution of misery, privileged victims are entitled to relatively more suffering than underprivileged ones only if the surplus jouissance of the former helps supply, in absolute terms, more enjoyment of suffering for the latter. Otherwise, it needs to be redistributed. 17. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). The popularity to this day of this befuddled textby far the worst thing written by one of the great minds of the 20th century is a mystery for sociology, or psychoanalysis, to explain.

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The problem once again is that the Jews and the Jews alone think theyre the real Jewswhen today in fact (so say the members of the opprobrium community) the Jews themselves behave more like Nazis and the Palestinians, therefore, have become in effect the Jews that matter. The prevalence of such grotesque analogies leads Yakira to protest what he calls forthrightly the systematic, simplistic, tendentious, and utterly baseless way the Holocaust is used to lambaste Israel. Whats more, discerning continuities between post-Zionist uses of the Holocaust and outright Holocaust denialthe latter claiming of course that Jews were never the real victims of the Nazis in the first place, but have always opportunistically exaggerated their suffering to gain leverageYakira writes:
The way the Holocaust figures in quite a number of essays, articles and books written in Hebrew, the way it is used as a central tenet in scathing criticisms of Israels conduct in the occupied territories or of the moral and historical justification given for the establishment of a Jewish state all this reflects a perversion quite similar, if not identical, to that of which Holocaust denial . . . is the most extreme symptom.18

And symptomas I have suggestedis the right word here, as we are dealing with a kind of cultural pathology, or perversion. Without realizing it, Yakira, in his devastating deconstruction of the post-Zionists, has not only revealed the conscious intentions of those he criticizes, but provides the empirical basis for the psychoanalysis of this strange movement as well. For what deniers and the opprobrium community have in common, as the philosophers psychoanalytically tinged vocabulary hints, is a symptom indeed, in the precise sense of a libidinal investment in the perturbing Thing that embodies enjoyment. Symptoms, by definition, are what the subject perversely enjoys suffering from. It appears that, just as Woody Allen once joked, Im the only man ever diagnosed with penis envy, the fact that the post-Zionists whom Yakira disputes with are Israeli Jews does not prevent them from feeling a vicarious Holocaustneid on the part of castrated others. THE HOLOCAUST-ENVY INDUSTRY Holocaust envy, in sum, is that slimy libidinal ooze that palpably coats Holocaust relativization and Holocaust resentment, as well as outright Holocaust denial. Moreover, with respect to the growing problem of campus antisemitism in particular, the obsessively invested symptom of post-Holo18. Elhanan Yakira, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 86.

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caust post-Zionism is also part of the basis of postcolonial theory as an academic subdiscipline. For how can a theory based on epochal grievance fail to envynarcissistically identify and compete with, seek to emulate and displaceJewish sufferers as the bearers of a surplus Jew-issance? Diaspora is a ubiquitous term in postcolonial theory, for example. And as the Jews have their capital-H Holocaust, so too shall the Palestinians have their capital-N Nakba. From the postcolonial point of view, therefore, it is especially easy to see that the Palestinians are now the Jews, and the Jews, by becoming Israelis, have become (worse than) Nazisa claim that goes back to the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism (later revoked, in 1991), and before that to Israels victory in the Six-Day War of 1967, and before that even to the founding of the State of Israel.19 Thus, while the use and abuse of such repugnant rhetoric appears to be on the increase today, in fact the taboo analogy between Zionists and Nazis proved an irresistible frisson for some from the moment it became conceivable, and has not in fact depended on the Palestinians weakness or Israels growing might by comparison. Indeed, it is a Hitlerian inventionalready a symptom/sinthome of the old-fashioned antisemitism, it turns outfrom the start. As is well known, Hitler himself projected blame for starting World War II onto the Jewsfamously displacing Nazisms plans for world domination onto its victims. This same obscene equation of antisemite and Jewso symptomatic of a perverse libidinal investmentis made by postcolonial theory, prevalent on todays university campuses, in one of its founding gestures. Indeed, according to the godfather of postcolonial theory, Edward Said, in his seminal 1978 text Orientalism, post-Holocaust antisemitism is best understood as the prejudice that Arabs [sic] suffer from at the hands of Jews [sic]. At the end of World War II, Said explains to his followers:
The transference of a popular antisemitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same. . . . Thus the Arab is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs the Jew. In that shadowbecause Arabs and Jews are Oriental Semitescan be placed whatever traditional, latent mistrust a Westerner feels towards the Oriental. For the Jew of pre-Nazi Europe has bifurcated: what we have now is a Jewish hero, constructed out of a reconstructed cult of the adventurer-pioneer-Orientalist [ . . . ] and his creeping, mysteriously fearsome shadow, the Arab Oriental.20 19. Norman Podhoretz, The Abandonment of Israel, Commentary (July 1976): 23-31. 20. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 286; my emphasis.

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So it appears, just as Meister says, that today oppressed groups . . . qualify themselves as bearers of human rights by recognizing what happened to Jews during the Holocaust and asserting that another holocaust might [have already!] happen[ed] to them, preferably at the hands of the survivors of the first Holocaust and their descendants. As Alvin Rosenfeld powerfully documents in The End of the Holocaust, the practice of analogizing the Holocaust promiscuously has become widespreadwith not only Palestinians suffering from genocide (while increasing in population), but also Native Americans, African Americans, gays and lesbians, AIDS victims, and fetusesall suffering from their own holocausts. When there is no denying the reality of far too much human misery, the sad point that has unfortunately to be made is that where there is a holocaust there must be a Hitler. According to the same logic as that by which victims everywhere become metaphorical Jews, oppressors across time and space become, in a reductio ad Hitlerum, not just gifted evil-doers in their own right, but morph inevitably into virtual Nazis. As Pascal Bruckner observes:
Nazism is supposed to have begun on the day that the white man, whether Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch, set foot on the shores of Africa or America, sowing death, chaos, and destruction. It is as if the Third Reich had literally swallowed, one after the other, the centuries that preceded it, this becoming the key to violent or atrocious phenomena that occurred several centuries earlier. . . . People find it hard to realize that barbarity is plural, that not all massacres are genocides, that not all genocides resemble each other, that there are degrees and diversity of horror as well.21

What Bruckner colorfully calls Hitlerizing history applies not only to the past, however. And this matters greatly. For the present (and future?) is also swallowed up and Hitlerized when, as Rosenfeld explainsfocusing on the American reception of the Holocaust in light of the identity politics that has been so characteristic of the last thirty years on campus:
This tendency to relativize and universalize the Holocaust has been a prominent part of the American reception of Holocaust representations from the start. It is strong today and seems to be growing, especially within those segments of American culture that are intent on developing a politics of identity based on victim status and the grievances that come with such status. (69; my emphasis)

21. Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 125-126.

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The politics of identity, in other words, are so often anti-Jewish because they are so saturated in Holocaust envy. ANTISEMITIC AGALMACAMPUS CHRISTOLOGY By way of conclusion, it seems important to note the (even) big(ger) picture. As Rene Girard points out, we live today in the Age of the Victim:
Our society is the most preoccupied with victims of any that ever was. Even if it is insincere, a big show, the phenomenon has no precedent. No historical period, no society we know, has ever spoken of victims as we do. We can detect in the recent past the beginnings of the contemporary attitude, but every day new records are broken. We are all actors as well as witnesses in a great anthropological first.22

Under such novel conditions, the Holocaust as universalized revelation becomes not so much a crime perpetrated by some against others, but a new Golgotha, as Bruckner sees it, the gold standard of suffering (113). In the Christological appropriation of history, the gassed Jew, like the crucified one, is no longer simply a Jewand yet, tragically, shamefully, so exquisitely disappointingly once again, it is the Jews themselves (of all people) who fail to get the message. Not only that, but in some of the more aggressive post-Zionist scholarshipsuch as that of Idith Zertal, who follows in the footsteps of Arendt to focus on the role of Jewish councils in supposedly helping to make the Holocaust more efficientit is once again the Jews themselves who murdered Christ (the gassed, shot, and starved millions) or at least handed him over to the Romans.23 In the numismatic reading (with regard to the metaphor of the gold standard): Who are the Jews to hoard their imaginary shekels, thus threatening to destroy an otherwise booming symbolic economy of human rights, which now more than ever, after the end of the Cold War (not to say the End of History), depends upon the smooth convertability of every kind of depoliticized injustice (viz. human rights violation) into every other kind? So, the new antisemitism draws strength from the old, after all, it seems, as fascination with these perennial tropes would indicateeven as it revitalizes itself by enjoying genocide symptomatically, in new postZionist and postcolonial modalities that would have been impossible pre- or post-Holocaust (if I may so inelegantly put it). It all points to a denial that a
22. Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Press, 2006), 161. 23. Idith Zertal, Israels Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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specifically Jewish genocide can also be a democratic one, in the sense of a shared object of veneration that nonetheless concerns a particular group of people in a special way. Instead, Auschwitz has become a monstrous object of covetous lust, as Bruckner says, [w]hence the frenzied effort to gain admission to this very closed club and the desire to dislodge those who are already in it (114; emphasis added). Or, as Alain Finkielkraut says, The model you wish to resemble becomes the rival you must supplant in order to feel alive yourself [to extract your jouissance]. The metaphorical principle (be like the Jews) leads to the violence of this murderous principle: Its us or them.24 And the all-too-literalnot only metaphorical conclusion? If there cannot be a Jewish and democratic genocide, then there can/need be no Jewish and democratic stateits one or the other, us or them. Forgetting that barbarity is pluralas are nationalitiesthe new antisemitism winds up sounding much like the old, only more so. What is not to be underestimated, however, is the virulence of contemporary neo-antisemitisms Jew-issance-ridden manifestations in the form of a metastasizing Holocaust envy. If there is a long-term menace to the way Israels miraculously imagined community is imaginedand, with G-ds help, continues to be realizedthis is part of it.25 For, as Edward Alexander said in his courageous 1994 book, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas:
The campaign to steal the Holocaust from its Jewish victims expresses a deep-seated wish to transform the Nazi murder of the Jews, a crime of terrifying clarity and distinctness, into a blurred, amorphous agony, an indeterminate part of mans inhumanity to man. It subserves the designs of those who wish to release the nations of the West from whatever slight burden of guilt they may still bear for what they allowed or helped Hitler to do to the Jews of Europe, and so remove whatever impediments of conscience may yet stand in the way of the anti-Israel crusade. (206)

In keeping with Alexanders foreboding, my concern is that in order to steal the Holocaust from the Jews in good conscience, and so help release the brakes on a disgustingly moralized campaign against Israel as uniquely illegitimate among all the nations because of its impure founding, the anti-Zionist antisemite first fantasizes the treasure (in Lacanese, agalma) of the Holocausts significance as primordially stolen from innocent mankind as a wholedefiled luxuriantly by corrupt Jewish thieves to begin
24. Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 113. 25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983), cited in Zertal, Israels Holocaust.

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with. From such preternatural thieves, naturally, one has every right to steal it back in returnwhile enjoying doing so.
*Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr. is a research fellow in Israel studies at Brandeis University, and assistant professor of English at Northern Michigan University. His latest book (co-authored with Catherine Carlstroem and Forrest G. Robinson) is The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud and Marx (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2011). Contact: gbrahm@nmu.edu.

REFERENCES
Alexander, Edward. 1994. The Holocaust and the War of Ideas. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso. Bruckner, Pascal. 2010. The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Finkielkraut, Alain. 1994. The Imaginary Jew. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. . 1998. The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Girard, Rene. 2006. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Press. Lacan, Jacques, Bruce Fink trans. 2006. Ecrits. New York: Norton. Levy, Bernard-Henri. 2008. Left in Dark Times. New York: Random House. Marcus, Kenneth L. The Definition of Antisemitism. Unpublished manuscript. Meister, Robert. 2010. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press. Myers, Tony. 2003. Slavoj Zizek. New York: Routledge. Podhoretz, Norman. 1976. The Abandonment of Israel. Commentary (July): 2331. Rosenfeld, Alvin. 2011. The End of the Holocaust. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2011. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Yakira, Elhanan. 2010. Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zertal, Idith. 2005. Israels Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zizek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press. . 2008. On Violence. New York: Picador.

Mental Models of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict


Wilhelm Kempf*
We need to reconstruct mental models according to which the participants make their own meaning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as they take a stance. Starting from the perspective that mental models have both emotional and cognitive components, this paper introduces a questionnaire designed to measure these components and a two-step process of data analysis with which the mental models can be reconstructed. The results of a pilot study using German and Austrian participants support the validity of this methodological approach. As in previous research, the results are also consistent with the assumptions that: (1) the development of an interpretive frame requires a certain minimum of knowledge and/or familiarity with the issues people are trying to understand; and (2) even those who adopt a war frame to interpret conflict believe in peace as the ultimate goal of war.

Key Words: Israel, Palestinian, War, Empirical

Since the Gaza war of December 27, 2008, criticism of Israeli policy has been on the rise throughout the Western world. The peace movement in Israel and within Jewish communities worldwide appreciates this development, and many of its members even regard it as justifying their position. On the other hand, however, there are Jews inside and outside of Israel who fear that the increasing criticism of Israeli policy might be linked with a new wave of antisemitism. Many Germans and Austrians who have learned the lessons of their history also share this fear. Already, Bergmann and Erb (1991a, 1991b) have pointed out that a taboo against antisemitic utterances in public discourse can encourage using criticism of Israel as a code for expressing antisemitic attitudes. The taboo on antisemitic utterances also appears to be weakening. Not only has the tone of criticism become sharper since the Gaza war, but also some persons and groups have openly taken sides against Israel, and expressions from the repertoire of secondary antisemitism such as Holocaust bonus have found their way into political discourse. In reaction to the Israeli military operation against the Gaza aid convoy on May 31, 2010, there was a deluge of antisemitic comments on the Internet. In the social networks, Twitter and Facebook, we can find examples of the entire antisemitic repertoire, including utterances that have nothing to do with objective criticism of Israel comments like:

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Lock all the Jews in gas chambers and gas them!!! My idol is Adolf HITLER (Der Standard, January 6, 2010). TOO BAD THAT ADOLF HITLER DID NOT KILL ALL THE JEWS (Spiegel Online, April 6, 2010). SHIT JEWS SIEG HEILLLLL (Spiegel Online, April 6, 2010). Such vicious antisemitic utterances are not only posted in the Internet anonymously; often, the authors also give their real names and photos. As disturbing as this development undoubtedly is, it would nevertheless be wrong to automatically regard any criticism of Israel as motivated by antisemitism. Criticism of Israeli policy can be due to a multitude of factors ranging from concern for the future of Israel via partisanship for the Palestinians to hatred of Jews. And insofar as antisemitic attitudes play a role, they may either stand at the very beginning of Israel criticism (i.e., ersatz communication), or they may come at the end of a process in which criticism of Israel is transformed into making Israel the enemy and finally twisted into antisemitism. Previously, however, little was known about the relationship of antisemitism and attitudes critical of Israel. The available studies have methodical weaknesses, and their results are contradictory. Using 2004 survey data from the Anti-Defamation League, Kaplan and Small (2006) conclude that antisemitic attitudes increase with growing acceptance of anti-Israeli statements. Yet, correlation studies are only to a limited extent conclusive. Participants who unconditionally support Israeli policy will hardly be burdened with long-held antisemitic attitudes, and dyed-in-the-wool antisemites will probably not be sympathetic to Israeli policy; already, these two extreme groups are causing a moderate correlation between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Still, this correlation, as with other correlation studies (Baum, 2009; Cohen, Jussim, Harber, and Bhasin, 2009), says little regarding the extent that antisemitism motivates criticism of Israel. A study by Heyder, Iser, and Schmidt (2005), on the other hand, gives the impression that attitudes critical of Israel are not motivated by antisemitism. While about three-quarters of all Germans in all educational groups were found to harbor critical attitudes toward Israeli Palestinian policy, antisemitic attitudes were inversely proportional to the educational levels of study participants. A Swiss study that differentiates between cognitive attitudes and situational emotions toward Israel on the one side, and attitudes hostile to Jews on the other, also concludes that anti-Israeli attitudes are to be viewed as an independent phenomenon and evaluated independently of actual antisemitism (GfS 2007, 48).

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Bergmanns analyses (2008, 493) likewise point in this direction. He has compiled various empirical findings indicating that attitudes toward the Middle East conflict are strongly politically steered and not simple expressions of sympathy or antipathy toward Jews and Palestinians. Thus, among other things, Bergmann includes a 1991 Emnid study showing that sympathy for the Palestinians correlates positively with sympathy for the Arab side, but has no influence on sympathy for the Jews in Israel. To the contrary: Anyone who lacks sympathy for the Jews in Israel has an aboveaverage tendency to lack sympathy for the Palestinians, and anyone who sympathizes with the Israelis also tends to sympathize with the Palestinians. A cluster analysis by Frindte, Wammetsberger, and Wettig (2005a, 2005b), finally, suggests that there are two different types of criticism of Israel: (1) criticism of Israel motivated by antisemitism and (2) criticism of Israel independent of antisemitic prejudices. Kempf (2010) reaches a similar conclusion on the basis of a secondary analysis of data from Petzold (2004). Latent-class-analysis of the data identified seven classes of participants who display typical response patterns: one class supportive of Israel (typical of 18.2% of all participants), two classes that refrain from criticizing Israel (18.97%), and four classes that are critical of Israel (63.21%). In addition, among those who criticized Israel, the majority (38.23% of all participants) appears to be free of antisemitic tendencies, criticizing Israel in a rather moderate way and not siding with the Palestinians. The rest of the Israel critics (27.65% of all participants) positioned themselves on the side of the Palestinians, and their criticism of Israel did not refrain from encouraging antisemitic sentiments. If we want to understand what sources give rise to criticism of Israeli policies toward Palestine, we must study other motivations besides antisemitisme.g., pacifistic vs. bellicose attitudes, and the human rights orientation of the participants as well. Above all, we must not forget that the Middle East conflict is precisely not just a conflict between Jews and nonJews; it is also a conflict that as such is conditioned by the same psychological framework as other conflicts. Of great importance in this connection is the distinction going back to Deutsch (1973), between constructive and destructive conflicts. Whether a conflict can be constructively settled or whether it will take a destructive course depends essentially on whether the conflict parties conceptualize the conflict as a cooperative (win-win model) or competitive (win-lose model) process. According to Deutsch, competitive misperceptions represent the motor of conflict escalation, which in cases of long-term (intractable) conflicts ultimately harden into societal beliefs (Bar-Tal, 1998). These beliefs form an essential component of the psychic infrastructure that enables the

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members of a society to endure the burdens of war. They include, among others, the justness of ones cause, ones victim status, the illegitimacy of the enemys cause, the defense of personal and national security through a policy of strength, andlast but not leastthe belief in peace as the ultimate goal of war. According to Deutsch, a process of competitive misinterpretation begins with the conflict parties divergence of perspectives. Due to the resulting asymmetry of trust and suspicion, the level of conflict ratchets up so that the conflict parties become less and less willing to (also) view the opponents actions from their perspective. Accordingly, the conflict parties begin to lose the ability to receive information that could correct their prejudicial interpretations of the opponents actions and tend to regard their own aims and actions as more appropriate and justifiable than those of the opposing side. Even in cooperative conflicts, however, characteristic forms of misunderstanding and misjudgment arise. Cooperation tends to weaken the perception of contradictions and to strengthen the partners goodwill. According to Deutsch, these typical changes have the effect of containing conflict and making escalation less likely, but they also pose the danger that some conflict issues may be overlooked, or that the conflict parties may engage in premature cooperation. The members of a society directly affected by a conflict are not the only ones who develop such convictions. Outsiders trying to make sense of a conflict in which they are not themselves engaged will also interpret it either in the sense of a win-win model (peace frame) or of a win-lose model (war frame) (ASPR, 2003). How a person positions himself toward a conflictwhich side he takes, e.g., in the Israeli-Palestinian conflictthus depends essentially on the mental model he forms of the conflict. The concept of mental models that we thereby adopt originally stems from cognitive psychology, where it was first used by the Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik in his book The Nature of Explanation (1943). He writes therein about how people construct models of reality in their minds that they use to derive conclusions, give explanations, and predict events. According to van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), a mental model is a dynamic mental representation of a situation, an event or an object. It serves as a cognitive-emotional interpretive frame (Kempf, 2008), which organizes the processing and organization of incoming information and endows it with meaning. Mental models have both an emotional and a cognitive component. In the case of conflict, the emotional component is formed by (at least) two factors: (1) concern about the conflict, and (2) the emotional ambivalence of its consequences. The cognitive component is constituted by the frame

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according to which the conflict is interpreted and ranges from a peace frame to a war frame and from a neutral frame to a partisan one. Only when we have reconstructed the participants mental models can we relate them to antisemitic attitudes and/or to the media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and investigate whether what makes people critical of Israel is the reported facts themselves, or instead the specific way these facts are framed by the media. The present paper discusses a questionnaire that we designed to help in reconstructing mental models and, in addition, presents the results of a pilot study in which we tested it. METHOD To assess participants mental models, we designed three separate scales and applied a two-step Latent-Class-Analysis procedure. In this way, we identified typical response patterns that give us clues as to the participants mental models of conflict. Emotional closeness to a conflict refers to the participants familiarity with and concern about the conflict, and was assessed by a total of nine items, as shown in Table 1. TABLE 1: ASSESSMENT
OF THE PARTICIPANTS CONCERNMENT FOR THE CONFLICT

Knowledge Concernment Partisanship Experience

emo01: How would you judge your knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? emo02: How deeply does the conflict affect you? emo03: Which side do you feel more attached to? emo04: Have you ever been in Israel? emo05: Have you ever been in the Palestinian territories? emo07: Have you ever had personal contact with Palestinians? emo09: Do you have Palestinian friends, acquaintances or relatives?

Personal contact emo06: Have you ever had personal contact with Israelis? Relatedness emo08: Do you have Israeli friends, acquaintances or relatives?

Emotional ambivalence refers to the fact that the frames according to which people interpret conflict not only represent cognitive patterns, but also have emotional dimensionsand indeed in an ambivalent way, for both the war and the peace frames promise security, yet simultaneously they also create insecurity (Kempf, 2010).

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The war frame offers security, because familiar, tried-and-true action patterns can be continued, but it also creates insecurity, because it poses the threat of continued antagonism and violence. The peace frame also offers security, because it promises an end to violence, but at the same time it creates insecurity, because new behavioral patterns must be tried whose efficacy is still uncertain. In our present research, the emotional ambivalence of the frames was assessed by eight items, which are shown in Table 2. TABLE 2: ASSESSMENT
OF THE PARTICIPANTS EMOTIONAL AMBIVALENCE

For Israelis War frame Offers security ambi01i: With firm resolve and military strength, Israels existence can be secured in the long term Creates threat ambi02i: As long as Israel tries to control the conflict by military means (alone), its population will be exposed to the constant threat of Palestinian violence

For Palestinians ambi01p: Through persistent armed resistance, a Palestinian state can be brought about by force ambi02p: If the Palestinian leadership does not prevent the use of force, the Palestinians will not be allowed to found their own state ambi03p: A little more flexibility would make it possible for the Palestinians to have a lasting peace with Israel ambi04p: A compromise with Israel would mean selling out Palestinian interests

Peace frame Offers security ambi03i: The complete return of the occupied territories would make it possible for Israel to have an enduring peace with the Palestinians Creates threat ambi04i: Returning to the borders of 1967 would represent a great security risk for Israel

Participants responded to the items on a 5-point Likert scale: disagree completelyrather disagreeneither disagree nor agreerather agree agree completely, with dont know as an additional response category. Positioning to the conflict: No less ambivalent is how people in Germany or Austria position themselves in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Kempf, 2010). The World War II lesson of never again fascism, never again war implies a tendency toward the peace frame (never again war). It is ambivalent, however, in regard to the human rights question (never again fascism), which can be interpreted in two ways: 1. Support for the victims of National Socialism, which implies a tendency toward unconditional solidarity with Israeli policy and a weakening of the peace frame. This can go so far that it turns into a

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war frame: never again fascism, therefore war, as was the case (in part) in the Gulf War discourse in 1990-91 (Kempf, 1994). 2. Support for human rights worldwide, which implies a tendency to refrain from endorsing at least some aspects of Israeli policy and includes expressing solidarity with the Israeli peace movement and at least a certain degree of empathy with the Palestinian side. Although this at first means a strengthening of the peace frame, it then can create the danger of shifting to a war frame and taking sides with the Palestinians. With regard to positioning toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we can thus identify various positioning patterns that result from the two dimensions of war frame vs. peace frame and from taking sides with either of the two parties (Table 3). TABLE 3: PATTERNS OF POSITIONING TOWARD ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT
Pro-Israel War frame Uncritical support of Israeli policy, delegitimation of the Palestinians, and justification of Israeli violence Criticism of both sides policies, accentuation of the vital needs of both societies, and condemnation of violence on both sides Neutral
THE

Pro-Palestine Criticism of Israeli policy, delegitimation of the Israelis, and justification of Palestinian violence Criticism of both sides policies, accentuation of the vital needs of the Palestinians, and condemnation of violence on both sides

Peace frame Criticism of both sides policies, accentuation of the vital needs of the Israelis, and condemnation of violence on both sides

In order to reconstruct the participants positioning patterns, we designed a questionnaire consisting of 14 statements, shown in Table 4, to which the participants responded on the same 5-point Likert scale as described above. In order to reconstruct the participants mental models, a two-step Latent-Class-Analysis (LCA) was applied, and the set of classes that provide an optimal description of the data was determined according to Akaikes (1987) information criterion (AIC). As a first step, we identified (latent) classes of typical response patterns for each of the three scales: emotional closeness, emotional ambivalence, and positioning to the conflict.

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TABLE 4: ASSESSMENT

OF THE PARTICIPANTS POSITIONING

TO THE CONFLICT

Pro Israeli Endorsement of peace Accentuation of vital needs

Pro Palestinian

npeace01: A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be found through negotiation. npeace03: A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must take account of the necessities of life of both populations. ipeace01: All the participants should work for the Israelis to be able to look forward to a peaceful future free of fear. ppeace01: All the participants should work for the Palestinians to be able to lead a peaceful, self-determined life. pwar01: The Israeli government can only be forced to make concessions by using military force. pwar02: Israel is intransigent and tries to maintain the existing conditions by the use of force. pwar03: The aim of the Israeli policy is the continued oppression and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians. pwar04: The Palestinians are conducting a legitimate war of liberation against the Israeli occupation. pwar05: Israels military operations against the Palestinians are exorbitant and unjustified.

Refutation of a peaceful conflict resolution Criticism of opponents policy

iwar01: The Palestinian leadership can only be made to recognize Israel by force of arms. iwar02: The Palestinian leadership is not ready to make compromises and tries to impose its maximum aims without regard to losses. iwar03: The goal of the Palestinian leadership is the destruction of Israel.

Delegitimation of the opponent

Legitimation of own sides warfare Condemnation of opponents violence

iwar04: The Israelis are conducting a legitimate defensive war against Palestinian terrorism. iwar05: The Palestinian terror attacks against the Israeli population can be justified by nothing.

In these analyses, missing data and dont know responses were treated as separate response categories of their own. In the subsequent computation of mean judgments within the groups, on the other hand, they were recoded as neither disagree nor agree. In a second step, the participants mental models were identified by means of a second-order LCA in which we entered the participants class memberships as variables. Before the background of German and Austrian postwar history (lessons of World War II), we can expect that the majority of the participants will tend to be peace-oriented (Hypothesis 1). To be able to position themselves in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, they need a minimum of familiarity with the conflict (Hypothesis 2). Thereby, it will be possible to find not only pro-Israeli, but also neutral and pro-Palestinian peace frames (Hypothesis 3). The more familiar the participants are with the conflict, the stronger the pressure will be for them to take a position in favor of one side or the other (Hypothesis 4).

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Cooperative misperception (Deutsch, 1973) favors overlooking not only the ambivalence of the peace frame, but also that of the war frame and perceiving for both sides only the negative aspects of war and the positive aspects of peace (Hypothesis 5). The more familiar the participants are with the conflict and the stronger the positioning pressure, the more likely it is that the participants will shift to a war frame (Hypothesis 6). A minority of the participants will therefore interpret the conflict either in the sense of a pro-Israeli or a proPalestinian war frame (Hypothesis 7). Due to a belief in peace as the highest aim of the war (Bar-Tal, 1998), however, even participants who interpret the conflict in the sense of a war frame will agree with the demand for a negotiated settlement (Hypothesis 8) that takes into account the necessities of life of both populations in equal measure (Hypothesis 9). We expect that this tendency will increase in strength as the radicalism of the war frame increases (Hypothesis 10). The more the participants position themselves in favor of one side, the more they will emphasize this sides necessities of life as opposed to those of the opposing side (Hypothesis 11). SAMPLE Data collection took place about a year after the Gaza war, from the start of November 2009 until February 2010. In all, 68.5% of the data was collected in Germany and 31.5% in Austria. The total number of participants in the study was N = 553. The age of the participants ranged from 17 to 63 (M = 22.73; SD = 5.245); 64.7% were female, and 35.3% were male. The great majority of the participants were students: 6.9% had completed job training, 9.9% had completed a vocational-technical school, 11.0% had a university degree, and 0.9% had a PhD. In terms of religion, 47.6% were Catholic, 25.5% Protestant, 1.4% Muslim, and 0.7% were Jewish; 4.4% belonged to another (mainly Christian1) religion, and 20.4% claimed to be non-religious. Of the participants, 12.8% had a background in migration, whereby about a third of the migrants came from the former Soviet Union. RESULTS An LCA of the participants emotional closeness to the conflict identified four classes (Figure 1), which are clearly ordered with respect to the participants emotional closeness: EmoClass 3 (20.2% of all participants): very low; EmoClass 1 (40.5%): low; EmoClass 2 (33.8%): moderate, and
1. The only exceptions were two Buddhist participants.

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FIGURE 1: CLASS

SIZES

EmoClass 4 (5.5%): relatively high. The LCAs goodness-of-fit statistics are shown in Table 5. TABLE 5: PARTICIPANTS EMOTIONAL CLOSENESS TO THE GOODNESS-OF-FIT STATISTICS OF THE LCA.
Number of classes 1 2 3 4 5 Saturated model LOG-LIKE 3359,30 3060,17 3018,67 2944,04 2926,28 2495,01 n(P) 27 55 83 111 139 194399 df 194372 194344 194316 194288 194260
CONFLICT:

AIC 6772,60 6230,34 6203,34 6110,08 6130,56 393788,02

With increasing closeness, the share of participants who do not feel attached to either side declines (Figure 2), the participants attachment shifts toward the Israelis (Figure 3), the participants feel more deeply affected by the conflict (Figure 4), and they also feel better informed about it (Figure 5). The greater their closeness, the more often they have visited Israel and/or the Palestinian territories (Figure 6), the more they have had personal contacts with Israelis and/or with Palestinians (Figure 7), and the more they have Israeli and/or Palestinian friends, acquaintances, or relatives (Figure 8). The relatively low familiarity of the participants with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is also reflected in the results on emotional ambivalence. On average (Figure 9), the participants have no opinion about whether peace

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FIGURE 2: ATTACHMENT

TO NEITHER SIDE

FIGURE 3: ATTACHMENT

TO ONE OR BOTH SIDES

FIGURE 4: AFFECTED

BY THE CONFLICT

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FIGURE 5: KNOWLEDGE

FIGURE 6: VISITS

TO

ISRAEL

AND/OR THE

PALESTINIAN

TERRITORIES

FIGURE 7: PERSONAL

CONTACT WITH

ISRAELIS

AND/OR

PALESTINIANS

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FIGURE 8: ISRAELI

AND/OR

PALESTINIANS

FRIENDS,

ACQUAINTANCES, OR RELATIVES

FIGURE 9: EMOTIONAL

AMBIVALENCE

would be threatening for the Israelis (ambi04i = 3)2 or whether it could offer them security (ambi03i = 3). Otherwise, they prefer a peace solution to the status quo (war): War is regarded as threatening not only for the Israelis (ambi02i = 4) but also for the Palestinians (ambi02p > 3), and able to offer security to neither the Palestinians (ambi01p = 2) nor the Israelis (ambi01i < 3). Conversely, at least for the Palestinians peace does not represent a threat (ambi04p < 3), and can even offer security (ambi03p > 3).

2. All statements are based on a level of significance of p < 0.05.

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The distribution in Figure 9 is, however, not homogenous, but rather a mixed distribution of various answer patterns. The LCA of the emotional ambivalence scale identified six typical patterns that, altogether, regard the consequences of peace as less threatening and offering more security for Palestinians than for Israelis, for whom peace is (in part) even regarded as a security risk. In addition, the status quo (war) is regarded as more threatening to the Israelis, buton the other handis judged to threaten Palestinian security interests even more than those of the Israelis. The LCA goodnessof-fit statistics are given in Table 6. TABLE 6: PARTICIPANTS EMOTIONAL AMBIVALENCE: GOODNESS-OF-FIT STATISTICS OF THE LCA
Number of classes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Saturated model LOG-LIKE 6633,36 6217,59 6072,16 5968,23 5892,23 5817,95 5773,37 3410,73 n(P) 48 97 146 195 244 293 342 5764800 df 5764752 5764703 5764654 5764605 5764556 5764507 5764458 AIC 13362,72 12629,18 12436,32 12326,46 12272,46 12221,90 12230,74 11536421,46

AmbiClass 6: No opinion. Class 6 is a very small class that includes only 1.3% of all the participants. The members of this class leave more than 64% of all questions unanswered, answer 3.5% of the questions with dont know, and have no opinion about whether war or peace creates threats or offers security for either side (Figure 10). All the other classes agree that war does not offer security for the Palestinians and poses threats for the Israelis. AmbiClass 5: Rather weak judgments. Among these other classes, Class 5 (Figure 11) is also characterized by rather weak judgments (78.6% dont know responses). Nonetheless, the participants in this class regard war as threatening for the Israelis (ambi02i > 3) and have a significant opinion that war can offer security neither for Israel (ambi01i < 3) nor for the Palestinians (ambi01p < 3). But they are undecided about whether war is threatening for the Palestinians as well, and/or what the consequences of peace might be for either of the parties. AmbiClass 1: Distinct judgments, with no ambivalence. Class 1 is characterized by rather distinct judgments (5.4% dont know responses) with no

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FIGURE 10: NO

OPINION

FIGURE 11: RATHER

WEAK JUDGMENTS

FIGURE 12: DISTINCT

JUDGMENTS, WITH NO AMBIVALENCE

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ambivalence (Figure 12). War is threatening for both sides (ambi02i > 4; ambi02p = 4) and cannot offer security for either party (ambi01i < 2; ambi02p < 2). Peace offers security for both sides (ambi03i > 3; ambi03p > 3) and poses no threat for either side (ambi04i < 3; ambi04p < 3). AmbiClass 2: Less distinct judgments, but skeptical about the consequences of peace for Israel. Class 2 (36.4% dont know responses) shows a similarthough less distinctpattern (Figure 13; ambi01i < 3; ambi01p = 2; ambi02i = 4; ambi02p > 3; ambi03p > 3; ambi04p < 3). Participants in this class, however, are more skeptical about the consequences of peace for the Israelis. They doubt whether peace can offer security for the Israelis (ambi03i < 3), and they have no opinion about whether it might pose threats for them (ambi04i = 3). AmbiClass 4: Distinct judgments, without any opinions about the consequences of peace for Israel. Class 4 (10.7% dont know responses) is characterized by rather distinct judgments as well (Figure 14; ambi01i < 3; ambi01p < 2; ambi02i > 4; ambi02p > 4; ambi04i = 3; ambi03p > 3; ambi04p < 3). In contrast to Class 1, however, participants in this class have no opinion about whether peace can offer security for the Israelis (ambi03i = 3). AmbiClass 3: Less distinct judgments, with no opinions about the consequences of peace for Israel. Class 3 (7.5% dont know responses), finally, shows a similarthough less distinctpattern (Figure 15; ambi01p < 3; ambi02i > 3; ambi02p > 3; ambi03i =3; ambi03p = 3; ambi04i = 3). Participants in this class, however, likewise have no opinions about whether war might offer security for Israel (ambi01i =3) and whether peace might be threatening for the Palestinians (ambi04p = 3). On average (Figure 16), the participants display a neutral peace orientation that, to be sure, is more critical of Palestinian terror attacks (iwar05 = 4) than of Israeli military operations (pwar05 > 3), but conversely, however, is only against denying legitimacy to the Palestinians (iwar03 < 3), but not against denying legitimacy to the Israelis (pwar03 = 3). While the participants tend to dispute not only the legitimacy of the Palestinian liberation struggle (pwar04 < 3), but also that of the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 < 3) and to accuse the Palestinian leadership of stubbornness in similar measure as they accuse Israeli leaders of this (iwar02 > 3) (pwar02 > 3), they reject the conception that the Israeli state must be compelled to yield by means of military force (pwar01 < 2) just as clearly as the view that the Palestinian leadership can only be induced to recognize Israel with military force (iwar01 < 2). Instead, the participants clearly think that a solution to the conflict can only be found through negotiation (npeace01 > 4), that it must take into

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FIGURE 13: LESS

DISTINCT JUDGMENTS, BUT SKEPTICAL

ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES OF PEACE FOR

ISRAEL

FIGURE 14: DISTINCT

JUDGMENTS, WITHOUT ANY OPINIONS

ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES OF PEACE FOR

ISRAEL

FIGURE 15: LESS

DISTINCT JUDGMENTS, WITH NO OPINIONS

ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES OF PEACE FOR

ISRAEL

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FIGURE 16: POSITIONING

TO THE CONFLICT

account the necessities of life of both populations (npeace03 > 4), and that all the participants should work toward ensuring that not only will the Israelis be able to look forward to a peaceful future without fear (ipeace01 > 4), but also that the Palestinians will be able to lead a peaceful and self-determined life (ppeace01 > 4). The distribution in Figure 16 is, however, not homogeneous, but rather a mixed distribution of various answer patterns. The LCA of the positioning scale identified eight typical patterns, all of which support conflict resolution through negotiation and condemn Palestinian terror attacks. Two of the latent classes (10.07%) endorse peace but are not sufficiently familiar with the conflict to have a clear opinion about it (5068% no response or dont know). Three of them (31.84%) interpret the conflict within a more or less neutral peace frame with relatively high uncertainty (20-25% no response or dont know). Two of them (51.11%) hold a pro-Palestinian frame and are rather sure of their evaluations (max. 3% no response or dont know); and A small group of participants (7%) that is fairly sure of its evaluations (3.4% no response or dont know) interprets the conflict according to a pro-Israeli war frame. The LCA goodness-of-fit statistics are given in Table 7. PosiClass 8: Support of peace without partisanship. Class 8 (Figure 17) is a very small class that includes only 1.64% of all participants. The members of this class leave 46% of all questions unanswered, answer 5% of the ques-

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TABLE 7: PARTICIPANTS POSITIONING TO THE CONFLICT: GOODNESS-OF-FIT STATISTICS OF THE LCA


Number of classes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Saturated model LOG-LIKE 11085,26 10374,51 10069,66 9830,46 9673,03 9487,20 9389,14 9303,28 9255,27 3474,71 n(P) 84 169 254 339 424 509 594 679 764 6,78223E+11 df 6,78E+11 6,78E+11 6,78E+11 6,78E+11 6,78E+11 6,78E+11 6,78E+11 6,78E+11 6,78E+11 AIC 22338,52 21087,02 20647,32 20338,92 20194,06 19992,40 19966,28 19964,56 20038,54 1,36E+12

FIGURE 17: SUPPORT

OF PEACE WITHOUT PARTISANSHIP

tions with dont know, and have no opinion about most issues. In contrast to the members of all the other classes, who condemn Palestinian terror attacks, they do not even have an opinion on this question (iwar05 = 3). Instead, they tend not only to deny the legitimacy of the Israeli defensive struggle (iwar04 < 3), but also to reject the exercise of military force against Israel (pwar01 = 2) and to support a negotiated settlement (npeace01 = 4).

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FIGURE 18: SUPPORT

OF MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL PEACE

PosiClass 5: Support of mutually beneficial peace. The answer pattern in Class 5 (Figure 18) is characteristic of 8.43% of the participants. The members of this class likewise have no opinion with regard to many issues and answer 68% of all questions with dont know. In comparison with Class 8, the members of this class favor a negotiated settlement somewhat less strongly (npeace01 >3). They instead advocate a conflict settlement that would take into account the necessities of life of both populations (npeace03 = 4), and in particular guarantee a peaceful future without fear for the Israelis (ipeace01 = 4) but also ensure a peaceful, self-determined life for the Palestinians (ppeace01 > 3). At the same time, they tend not only to reject military pressure against Israel (pwar01 < 3), but also against the Palestinians (iwar01 < 3). PosiClass 3: Neutral peace frame. The answer pattern in Class 3 (Figure 19) is characteristic of 15.9% of the participants, who answer 26% of the questions with dont know. The members of this class emphasize the necessities of life of both the Israelis (ipeace01 > 4) and the Palestinians (ppeace01 > 4) in the same measure and advocate a negotiated settlement (npeace01 = 4) that takes into account the necessities of life of both societies (npeace03 > 4). They reject equally definitely the notion that the Israeli state can only be induced to yield by military force (pwar01 = 2) and the view that only by force of arms can the Palestinian leadership be induced to recognize Israel (iwar01 = 2). They reject the legitimacy of the Palestinian liberation struggle (pwar04 < 3) as much as they do that of the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 <

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FIGURE 19: NEUTRAL

PEACE FRAME

3) and criticize Israel (pwar02 > 3) and the Palestinian leadership (iwar02 > 3) equally for stubbornness and/or intransigence. While they disapprove of violence on both sides, they nonetheless condemn Palestinian terror attacks more strongly (iwar05 = 4) than Israeli military operations (pwar05 > 3); at the same time, they also doubt that the destruction of Israel is the goal of the Palestinian leadership (iwar03 < 3). PosiClass 4: Neutral peace frame, more definite but less critical. The answer pattern in Class 4 (Figure 20) is characteristic of 10.8% of the participants, who answer 29% of the questions with dont know. The members of this class differ from Class 3 in favoring a negotiated settlement somewhat more strongly (npeace01 > 4) and still more emphatically reject the employment of military force not only against the Israeli state (pwar01 < 2), but also against the Palestinian leadership (iwar01 = 1). As well they reject the legitimacy of the Palestinian liberation struggle (pwar04 = 2) and/ or the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 = 2) somewhat more definitely and reject Palestinian terror attacks still more strongly than does Class 3 (iwar05 > 4). On the other side, they criticize neither Israel (pwar02 = 3) nor the Palestinian leadership (iwar02 = 3) for being stubborn and/or intransigent. PosiClass 7: Peace frame, critical of Israel. The answer pattern in Class 7 (Figure 21) is characteristic of 5.14% of the participants, who answer 24% of the questions with dont know. The members of this class favor a negotiated settlement somewhat less strongly (npeace01 > 3) and emphasize the necessities of life of both populations (npeace03 = 4; ipeace01 > 3; ppeace01 > 3) to a lesser extent than the other two classes. They also, but

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FIGURE 20: NEUTRAL

PEACE FRAME, MORE DEFINITE BUT LESS CRITICAL

FIGURE 21: PEACE

FRAME, CRITICAL OF

ISRAEL

less definitely, reject the employment of military force against the Israeli state (pwar01 < 3) and/or against the Palestinian leadership (iwar01 < 3). Unlike the other two classes, they do not defend the Palestinian leadership against the accusation that they aim to destroy Israel (iwar03 = 3), but they do impute to Israeli policy the aim of continuing to oppress and disenfranchise the Palestinians (pwar03 > 3). At the same time, they dispute only the legitimacy of the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 < 3), but not, however, that of the Palestinian liberation struggle (pwar04 = 3); they condemn Palestinian terror attacks less strongly than the other two classes (iwar05 > 3);

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and criticize only Israel (pwar02 < 3), but not the Palestinian leadership (iwar02 = 3) for being stubborn and/or intransigent. PosiClass 1: Peace frame, pro-Palestinian. The answer pattern in Class 1 (Figure 22) is characteristic of 26.24% of the participants, who answer less than 3% of the questions with dont know or leave them unanswered (0.26%). Similar to Class 3 (neutral peace frame), the members of this class also support a negotiated settlement (npeace01 = 4) that takes into account the necessities of life of both societies (npeace03 = 4). They emphasize the necessities of life of the Palestinians somewhat more strongly, however (ppeace01 > 4), than those of the Israelis (ipeace01 = 4). Like Class 3, they also reject the view that the Israeli state can only be induced to yield by force of arms (pwar01 = 2) just as definitely as the view that the Palestinian leadership can only be induced by military pressure to recognize Israel (iwar01 = 2). In agreement with Class 3, they reject the legitimacy of the Palestinian liberation struggle (pwar04 < 3) to the same extent as that of the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 < 3) and criticize Israel (pwar02 > 3) and the Palestinian leadership (iwar02 > 3) to the same extent for stubbornness and/or intransigence. Also similar to Class 3, they doubt that the destruction of Israel is the goal of the Palestinian leadership (iwar03 < 3). While they condemn the violence on both sides equally strongly (iwar05 >3; pwar05 > 3), they disapprove of Palestinian terror attacks somewhat less strongly than does Class 3. FIGURE 22: PEACE
FRAME, PRO

PALESTINIAN

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PosiClass 2: Pro-Palestinian frame, with an enemy image of Israel. The answer pattern in Class 2 (Figure 23) is characteristic of 24.87% of the participants, who answer less than 3% of the questions with dont know or leave them unanswered (0.44%). The members of this class favor a negotiated settlement (npeace01 > 4) that would take into account the necessities of life of both populations (npeace03 >3) still more strongly than Class 1; they emphasize as well the necessities of life of both the Palestinians (ppeace01 > 4), and the Israelis (ipeace01 > 4) to a somewhat greater extent. In addition, they more strongly reject the view that the Israeli state (pwar01 < 2) or respectively the Palestinian leadership (iwar01 < 2) can only be induced to yield or respectively to recognize Israel by employing military force, and they condemn the violence on both sides (iwar05 = 4; pwar05 >3) still more strongly than the members of Classes 1 and 3. They contest, however, the legitimacy of the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 < 2) even more strongly than that of the Palestinian liberation struggle (pwar04 < 3) and accuse only Israel (pwar02 = 4), but not the Palestinians (iwar02 = 3) of stubbornness and/or intransigence. And, while they defend the Palestinian leadership against the accusation that they are pursuing the goal of destroying Israel (iwar03 < 3), they accuse Israel of aiming to continue to oppress and disenfranchise the Palestinians (pwar03 > 3). FIGURE 23: PRO-PALESTINIAN
FRAME, WITH AN ENEMY IMAGE OF

ISRAEL

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PosiClass 6: Pro-Israeli war frame. The answer pattern in Class 6 (Figure 24) is characteristic of 6.97% of the participants, who answer somewhat more than 3% of the questions with dont know. To be sure, the members of this class also favor a negotiated settlement (npeace01 = 4) that takes into account the necessities of life of both societies (npeace03 > 4), emphasizing, however, Israeli necessities of life (ipeace01 > 4) somewhat more strongly than those of the Palestinians (ppeace01 > 4) and rejecting the notion that the Israeli state can only be forced by military means to cooperate (pwar01 < 2) more strongly than the view that the Palestinian leadership can only be induced with military pressure to recognize Israel (iwar01 = 2). With regard to all other issues, they display a clearly polarized pattern: Whereas they accuse the Palestinian leadership of stubbornness (iwar02 = 4), they defend Israel against the accusation of intransigence (pwar02 < 2); whereas they defend Israel against the accusation of pursuing the continued oppression and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians (pwar03 = 2), they allege that the Palestinian leadership aims to destroy Israel (iwar03 = 4); whereas they emphasize the legitimacy of the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 = 4), they reject the legitimacy of the Palestinian defensive struggle (pwar04 = 2); and whereas they condemn Palestinian terror attacks (iwar05 = 4), they justify Israeli military operations (pwar05 = 2). FIGURE 24: PRO-ISRAELI
WAR FRAME

A second-order LCA identified 5 groups of participants (Table 8) that can again be classified with respect to the participants emotional closeness to the conflict.

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LCA

TABLE 8: GOODNESS
Number of classes 1 2 3 4 5 6 Saturated model

OF FIT STATISTICS OF THE SECOND-ORDER

LOG-LIKE 2589,22 2429,21 2385,66 2348,81 2320,41 2308,51 2264,14

n(P) 15 31 47 63 79 95 191

df 176 160 144 128 112 96

AIC 5208,44 4920,42 4865,32 4823,62 4798,82 4807,02 4910,28

With increasing emotional closeness, the distinctness of the participants opinions regarding the consequences of war and peace also increases, and the mental models according to which they interpret the conflict change from sympathy for Israel (Class 4: 11.68%) to understanding for Israeli concerns about peace (Class 2: 21.94%); to a pro-Palestinian perspective in favor of peace (Class 3: 20.68%) to a peace perspective to the benefit of both sides (Class 1: 35.94%); and finally to a polarization between peace and the perpetuation of the status quo (Class 5: 9.76%). Class 4: Sympathy for Israel. Though the participants in this group are quite unfamiliar with the conflict and do not have a distinct frame from which they could take a stance, they display some empathy for Israels concerns about peace and believe that both war and peace are a greater risk for Israel than for the Palestinians (Figure 25). In this group, most of the participants reveal very little emotional closeness to the conflict (EmoClass 3: 72.3%), and the distinctness of their opinions regarding the consequences of war and FIGURE 25: SYMPATHY
FOR

ISRAEL

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peace is also mostly low (AmbiClass 5: 72.1%). For the Palestinians, war might perhaps create a threat (AmbiClasses 1-4: 27.8%) and offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-5: 99.9%). Peace might not create any threat (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4: 25.8%) and might even offer them security (AmbiClasses 1-4: 27.8%). For Israelis, war creates a threat (AmbiClasses 1-5: 99.9%) and offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 97.9%). Peace promises neither to create no threat (AmbiClass 1: 2.4%) nor to provide security (AmbiClass 1: 2.4%). Peace could possibly even pose a security risk (AmbiClass 2: 23.4%). Most participants in this group (79%; PosiClass 5 = 77.4%, PosiClass 8 = 1.6%) endorse peace and condemn Palestinian violence but are not sufficiently familiar with the conflict to have a distinct frame according from which they could take a position. Class 2: Understanding for Israeli concerns about peace. On the basis of (slightly) greater familiarity with the conflict, the participants interpret it according to a neutral peace frame and reveal increased empathy for Israeli concerns about peace (Figure 26). In this group, the participants show only FIGURE 26: UNDERSTANDING
FOR

ISRAELI

CONCERNS ABOUT PEACE

slightly more emotional closeness to the conflict (very low, EmoClass 3 = 38.4%; low, EmoClass 1 = 39.6%) and the distinctness of their opinions regarding the consequences of war and peace is mostly moderate (AmbiClass 2+3 = 66.1%). For Palestinians, war creates a threat (AmbiClasses 1-4: 88.4%) and likewise offers no security (AmbiClasses 15: 99.9%). Peace probably would not create any threat (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4: 77.9%) and does offer security (AmbiClasses 1-4: 88.4%). For Israelis, war creates a threat (AmbiClasses 1-5: 99.9%) and offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 89.4%). But peace neither promises not to create any threats (AmbiClass 1: 13.7%) nor to offer security (AmbiClass 1:

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13.7%)and is probably even a security risk (AmbiClass 2: 55.6%). Nearly all of the participants in this group (96.4%) interpret the conflict according to a neutral peace frame (PosiClass 3 = 66.5%; PosiClass 4 = 29.9%). Class 3: Pro-Palestinian perspective in favor of peace. As their (still low) familiarity with the conflict further increases, the participants become less convinced of the threat the war poses to Israel, their empathy for Israels concerns about peace again decreases, and the peace frame according to which they interpret the conflict becomes biased in favor of the Palestinians (Figure 27). In this group, the participants emotional closeness to the conFIGURE 27: PRO-PALESTINIAN
PERSPECTIVE IN FAVOR OF PEACE

flict ranges from very low (EmoClass 3 = 30.7%) through low (EmoClass 1 = 31.4%) to moderate (EmoClass 2 = 33.8%), and the distinctness of their opinions regarding the consequences of war and peace is mostly moderate (AmbiClass 2+3 = 76.1%). For Palestinians, war creates threat (AmbiClasses 1-4: 93.8%) and offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-5: 93.8%). Peace might perhaps create no threats (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4: 39.9%) and does offer security (AmbiClasses 1-4: 93.8%). For Israelis, war does create threats (AmbiClasses 1-5: 93.8%) and might perhaps not offer any security (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 39.9%). Peace promises neither to create no threat (AmbiClass 1: 17.7%) nor to offer security (AmbiClass 1: 17.7%). Peace might perhaps even create a security risk (AmbiClass 2: 22.2%). The great majority of participants in this group (87.4%) interpret the conflict according to a peace frame that is either pro-Palestinian (PosiClass 1: 68.3%) or critical of Israel (PosiClass 7: 19.1%).

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Class 1: Peace perspective in both sides benefit. As familiarity with the conflict increases, the participants believe that peace could offer security and not create any threat for either of the sides. Losing their empathy for Israels concerns about peace, they regard Israel as the main obstacle to peace. The pro-Palestinian bias increases, and an enemy image of Israel develops (Figure 28). FIGURE 28: PEACE
PERSPECTIVE IN BOTH SIDES BENEFIT

In this group, the participants show somewhat more emotional closeness to the conflict (low, EmoClass 1 = 52.1%; moderate, EmoClass 2 = 36.8%), and the distinctness of their opinions regarding the consequences of war and peace is mostly high (AmbiClass 1+4 = 81.6%). For Palestinians, war creates threat (AmbiClasses 1-4: 98.9) and offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-5: 100%). Peace would not create any threats (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4: 91.7%) and does offer security (AmbiClasses 1-4: 98.9%). For Israelis, war does create threats (AmbiClasses 1-5: 100%) and does not offer security (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 92.9%). Peace would probably not create threats (AmbiClass 1: 67.5%), probably offers security (AmbiClass 1: 67.5%), and does not appear to create a security risk (AmbiClass 2: 10.1%). The great majority of participants in this group (89.3%) interprets the conflict according to a pro-Palestinian frame which is either a pro-Palestinian peace frame (PosiClass 1: 34.4%) or a peace frame bordering on a war frame that already includes an enemy image of Israel (PosiClass 2: 54.9%). Class 5: Polarization between peace and the perpetuation of the status quo. In this group, which is the one (relatively) most familiar with the conflict, the uncertainties of peace for Israel split the participants. They either form

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an enemy image of Israel or of the Palestinians, and they expect the enemy to bear the burdenseither of peace to the benefit of the Palestinians or of perpetuating the status quo (Figure 29). In this group, the participants emoFIGURE 29: POLARIZATION
BETWEEN PEACE AND THE PERPETUATION OF THE STATUS QUO

tional closeness to the conflict is either mainly moderate (EmoClass 2 = 61.7%) or relatively high (EmoClass 4 = 27.4%), and the distinctness of their opinions regarding the consequences of war and peace is also high (AmbiClass 1+4 = 79.5%). For Palestinians, war creates threats (AmbiClasses 1-4: 99.9%) and offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-5: 99.9%). Peace probably does not create any threats (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4: 79.5%) but does offer security (AmbiClasses 1-4: 99.9%). For Israelis, war creates threats (AmbiClasses 1-5: 99.9%) and probably offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 79.5%). But peace neither promises to create no threats (AmbiClass 1: 0.8%) nor to offer security (AmbiClass 1: 0.8%). Nonetheless, peace is also not regarded as a security risk (AmbiClass 2: 0%). The great majority of the participants in this group (88.8%) are for one or the other side in the conflict. They interpret the conflict either according to a pro-Palestinian frame with a clear enemy image of Israel (PosiClass 2 = 45.7%) or according to a pro-Israeli war frame (43.1%). DISCUSSION The results of this pilot study show that both the scales we constructed and the strategy of data analysis we employed are suitable for reconstructing the mental models with which the study participants interpret the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nonetheless, we intend to modify the scales

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somewhat in our forthcoming field study. Since the positioning items iwar01 and pwar01 were rejected throughout by all of the groups who had formed a mental model of the conflict, we will replace them with the weaker statements: iwar01The Palestinian leadership must be forced to recognize Israel; pwar01The Israeli government must be forced to make concessions to the Palestinians. The results of the study also support most of our hypotheses. In agreement with Hypothesis 1, the majority of the participants (PosiClasses 1, 3, 4, and 7; 58.08%) interpret the conflict according to a peace frame. In order to be able to position oneself, however, a minimum of familiarity with the conflict is necessary (Hypothesis 2): PosiClasses 5 and 8 (10.07%) endorse peace, but they are insufficiently familiar with the conflict to have a clear opinion about it. Contrary to expectations (Hypothesis 3), in our sample we could to be sure identify neutral (PosiClasses 3 and 4; 26.7%), Israel-critical (PosiClass 7; 5.14%), and pro-Palestinian (PosiClass 1; 26.24%) peace frames, but no pro-Israeli peace frame. In agreement with Hypothesis 7, only a minority of the participants interpret the conflict in a war frame. While there is certainly a relatively large group of participants who interpret the conflict according to a pro-Palestinian frame that borders on a war frame (PosiClass 2; 24.87%), contrary to our expectations, however, we could find only a pro-Israeli (PosiClass6; 7.0%), but not a pro-Palestinian war frame. Based on the tendencies we found, the results of the second-order LCA nevertheless confirm our supposition that as familiarity with the conflict increases there is pressure to take a stance in favor of one party or the other (Hypothesis 4), and finally also in the direction of a war frame (Hypothesis 6): Those participants (Class 4) who are the least familiar with the conflict do indeed display sympathy for Israel, but most of them, however (79.0%), are not sufficiently familiar with the conflict to have a distinct frame according to which they could take a position. In all, 96.4% of the members of Class 2, who are only slightly more familiar with the conflict, interpret the conflict according to a neutral peace frame, and those participants who are the most familiar with the conflict (Class 5) are polarized into the most radical pro-Israeli (PosiClass 6; 43.1%) and pro-Palestinian (PosiClass 2; 45.7%) positions. Also, most (89.3%) of the members of Class 1, which is in second place, interpret the conflict according to a partisan (pro-Palestinian) frame. That the ambivalence of the frames is often overlooked due to cooperative misperception (Hypothesis 5) is likewise confirmed: The ambivalence of the war for both sides is consistently overlooked. Apart from a very small minority (AmbiClass 6; 1.3%), all agree that war can offer the Palestinians no security and is a threat to Israel. The largest group of participants

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(AmbiClass 1; 29.9%) perceives for both sides only the negative aspects of the war and only the positive aspects of peace. That peace is ambivalent for the Palestinians is not seen by any of the groups. Only 1/4 of the participants (AmbiClass 2; 24.2 %) grasps that peace can also represent a security risk for Israel, and about 1/3 of the participants (AmbiClasses 3 and 4; 33.6%) have no opinion regarding the consequences of peace for Israel. The expectation was likewise confirmed that participants who interpret the conflict in the sense of a war frame also agree with the call for a negotiated settlement (Hypothesis 8) that takes equal account of the necessities of life of both populations (Hypothesis 9): Like all the other classes, not only PosiClass 6 (pro-Israeli war frame), but also PosiClass 2 (pro-Palestinian frame bordering on a war frame) favor a negotiated settlement of the conflict (npeace01) that must take into account the necessities of life of both populations (npeace03). The supposition is not confirmed, however, that this support will increase if the radicalism of the war frame increases (Hypothesis 10): Whereas PosiClass 2 supports both demands (negotiated settlement and taking account of both sides needs) the most strongly of all the classes, PosiClass6 is only in the middle range with regard to both demands. But Hypothesis 11 was confirmed: The more the participants position themselves in favor of one side, the more they will emphasize the necessities of life of this side more strongly than those of the opposing side: PosiClass 2 and PosiClass 6 are the only classes that emphasize the necessities of life of one side significantly more strongly than those of the other (p < .05). PosiClass 2 emphasizes those of the Palestinians more strongly (M = 4.77) than those of the Israelis (M = 4.47), and PosiClass 6 emphasizes those of the Israelis (M = 4.85) more strongly than those of the Palestinians (M = 4.51). Although the present study is not representative, it still gives some insight into how (mainly) young educated people in Germany and Austria relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Conflict resolution through negotiation is supported by the participants across the board, and yet the participants still consistently condemn Palestinian terror attacks more severely than Israeli military operationseven after the Gaza war, which saw public opinion shift toward a quite critical view of Israeli warfare. Participants unfamiliar with the conflict show sympathy for Israel (second-order LCA, Class 4) and/or understanding for Israeli concerns about peace (second-order LCA, Class 2). Those participants who sympathize with the Palestinians (second-order LCA, Class 3) also favor peace and do not interpret the conflict according to a war frame.

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The largest group of participants (second-order LCA, class 1: 35.94%) has a mental model calling for a peace settlement in the interest of both sides. The participants in this group, however, show no empathy for Israels concerns about peace, they tend to form an enemy image of Israel; and, due to the disappointment of cooperation expectations, express a change in their peace frame to a war frame that seems to be programmed. Those participants who are most familiar with the conflict (second-order LCA, class 5), finally, are divided into the groups of unconditional supporters of Israeli policies who interpret the conflict according to a pro-Israeli war frame and sympathizers of the Palestinians, who interpret it according to a frame that borders on a war frame. However we interpret these results, they speak in any case for the view that criticism of Israel is a far too complex issue to simply reduce it to antisemitism. That criticism of Israelbesides other factors like pacifistic attitudes, concerns about human rights, moral disengagement, and/or the way the media report about the Israeli-Palestinian conflictcan also be influenced by antisemitic attitudes is certainly not precluded. The question of whether and to what extent this is the case cannot be answered on the basis of the present data. It will be, however, the focus of forthcoming experiments and field studies.

*Dr. Wilhelm Kempf is a professor of psychological methodology and head of the Peace Research Group at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His special areas of interest are nonviolent conflict resolution, conflict and peace journalism, and the social construction of reality. Since 2002, Dr. Kempf is the editor of conflict & communication online. Currently, he is conducting a research project on the relations between Israel-criticism, modern antisemitism, and the media, funded by the German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG], grant No. KE 300/8-1).

REFERENCES
Akaike, Hirotugu. 1987. Factor Analysis and AIC. Psychometrika, 52, 317-332. ASPR (Austrian Study Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution). 2003. Constructive Conflict Coverage. A Social Psychological Approach. Berlin: Regener. Bar-Tal, Daniel. 1998. Societal Beliefs in Times of Intractable Conflict: The Israeli Case. The International Journal of Conflict Management, 9/1: 22-50. Baum, Steven K. 2009. Christian and Muslim Antisemitism. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 24: 137-155. Bergmann, Werner. 2008. Vergleichende Meinungsforschung zum Antisemitismus in Europa und die Frage nach einem neuen europ ischen Antisemitismus. In a

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Judentum. Antisemitismus in Europa, edited by Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps, 473-507. Berlin: Verlag fur Berlin-Brandenburg. Bergmann, Werner, and Rainer Erb. 1991a. Mir ist das Thema Juden irgendwie unangenehm. Kommunikationslatenz und die Wahrnehmung des Meinungsklimas im Fall des Antisemitismus. Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 43(3): 502-519. . 1991b. Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Ergebnisse der empirischen Forschung von 1946-1989. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. Cohen, Florette, Lee Jussim, Kent Harber, and Gautam Bhasin. 2009. Modern Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(2): 290-306. Craik, Kenneth. 1943. The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Der Standard, 1/6/2010. Gaza-Hilfsflotte: User toben sich auf Facebook antisemitisch aus. http://derstandard.at/1271377916109/Gaza-Hilfsflotte-Usertoben-sich-auf-Facebook-antisemitisch-aus. Retrieved August 11, 2010. Deutsch, Morton. 1973. The Resolution of Conflict. New Haven: Yale University Press. Frindte, Wolfgang, Dorit Wammetsberger, and Susan Wettig. 2005a. A New Type of Antisemitism in Germany: Is Reconciliation Possible? In Democratization, Europeanization, and Globalization Trends, edited by Russell Farnen, Henk Dekker, Christ de Landtsheer, Heinz Sunker, and Daniel B. German, 277-293. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. . 2005b. Old and New Antisemitic Attitudes in the Context of Authoritarianism and Social Dominance OrientationTwo Studies in Germany. Peace and Conflict: The Journal of Peace Psychology, 11(3): 239266. GfS (Gesellschaft fur Sozialforschung). 2007. Kritik an Israel nicht deckungsgleich mit antisemitischen Haltungen. Antisemitismus-Potenzial in der Schweiz neuartig bestimmt. Schlussbericht zur Studie Anti-judische und anti israelische Einstellungen in der Schweiz. Bern: GfS. http://www.gfsbern.ch/pub/Schlussbericht%20Antisemitismus%20berdef.pdf. Heyder, Arie, Julia Iser, and Peter Schmidt. 2005. Israelkritik oder Antisemitismus? Meinungsbildung zwischen Offentlichkeit, Medien und Tabus. In Deutsche Zustande, Folge 3, edited by Wilhelm Heitmayer, 144 165. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Kaplan, Edward H., and Charles A. Small. 2006. Anti-Israel Sentiment Predicts Antisemitism in Europe. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50(4): 548-561. Kempf, Wilhelm. 1994. Manipulierte Wirklichkeiten. Medienpsychologische Untersuchungen der bundesdeutschen Presseberichterstattung im Golfkrieg. Munster: LIT-Verlag. . 2008. The Impact of Political News on German Students Assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. conflict & communication online, 7/2. . 2010. Patterns of Criticizing Israel and Their Relationship to Modern Antisemitism. conflict & communication online, 9(1).

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Petzold, Sebastian. 2004. Antisemitische Einstellungen in DeutschlandEine Explorationsstudie. Friedrich-Schiller-Universit t Jena: Diplomarbeit. a Spiegel online, 4/6/2010. Antisemitismus. Offentliche Judenhetze im Netz. http:// www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,698848,00.html. Retrieved August 11, 2010. van Dijk, Teun A., and Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.

Resentment Reloaded: How the European Radical Right Mobilizes Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism
Lars Rensmann*
Radical right parties have successfully mobilized voters in Europe in the last few years. Yet, empirical studies of the radical rights political ideology are scarce. This article offers a comparative analysis of party platforms and political mobilizations of relevant radical right electoral competitors. It reveals not only cross-national variations but also an emerging transnational and modernized ideological profile: the combination of anti-immigrant politics with fierce opposition to cultural and economic globalization, and especially an increasing presence of antisemitism. Corresponding radical right mobilizations are engendered by three favorable conditions: social demand, a changing public climate, and crises of globalization that feed into persistent resentments and antiJewish conspiracy theories. Antisemitism has not been replaced by other resentments; instead, the new radical right plays its part in an evolving a new antisemitic international.

Key Words: Radical Right, Counter-Cosmopolitanism, Antisemitism, AntiMuslim, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Immigrant

THE ANTISEMITISM

OF THE

RADICAL RIGHT

Established parties in advanced European democracies face the persistent challenge of new and modernized radical right parties. They also epitomize challenges to Europes politico-cultural cosmopolitanization (Beck and Grande 2007) and the developing multi-level polity of the European Union at large (Kitschelt 2007; Mudde 2007). In fact, Europes transformation from predominantly ethnic-nationalist self-understandings to the broad recognition of cosmopolitan diversity and inclusion of minorities has come a long way. But it also remains contested and conflict-ridden, as contemporary controversies over immigration policy and anti-immigrant politics indicate. The same can be said about European antisemitism and its legacy. New radical right parties can be viewed as part of that contestation, while their mobilization success varies and is often dependent on contextual factors (Arzheimer 2009). To a large extent, these parties are politically discredited actors and marginalized in European party systems; they also succeed, however, in mobilizing voters in many regions across Europe, and

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they often have direct and indirect political leverage (Minkenberg and Perrineau 2007). To be sure, their partly dramatic electoral successes (See Table 1) and electoral performances fluctuate in most contexts and are more difficult to predict than those of their party system competitors. In several cases, however, they are not marginal any longer but even have become junior partners in elected democratic governments (Frolich-Steffen and Rensmann 2007). This includes the heart of Western Europe. Think of the Lega Nord in Italyone of the European Unions original six members. In Eastern Europe, the radical right party Jobbik, with its strong ties to neoNazis and its own paramilitary organization, gained 17% in the 2010 general parliamentary election in Hungary (Hockenos 2010), a country now TABLE 1: ELECTORAL
RESULTS OF RELEVANT* EXTREME-RIGHT PARTIES IN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN FIFTEEN

EUROPEAN
1995-1999 15,7 8,4-10,1 21,9-26,9 7,4 15,3 0,3 1,8 1,2 9,1 7,8-9,9 8,0-3,9 9,4 15,0 0,1 0,1 4,4 4,5

COUNTRIES,

19842006-2010 11,5** 5,1-8,3 11,017,54*** 13,9 22,9 1,5 0,4 11,7 12,0 -**** 0,15 9,36 4,3 1,9 16,67 1,3 2,5 -******* 3,15

2010.
AN (Italy) LN (Italy) FPO (Austria) DF (Denmark) PP (Norway) NPD (Germany) REPs (Germany) DVU (Germany) SNS (Slovakia) VB (Belgium) LPF (Netherlands) RMZ (Czech Republic) Ataka (Bulgaria) VMRO-BND (Bulgaria) FN (France) BNP (Great Britain) Jobbik******(Hungary) LPR (Poland) Samoobrona (Poland) PUNR (Romania) PRM (Romania) 1984-1989 5,9 (MSI) 9,6 8,35 0,6 1,9 9,7 0,0 1990-1994 5,4-13,5 8,6 16,6 6,3 0,3 2,1-1,9 14,0-5,4 6,6 6,0 6,5 12,6 0,1 2,8 7,9 3,9 2000-2005 12,0 3,9 10,0 12,0-13,3 14,6-22,1 0,4-1,6 0,6 3,3 11,6 11,35 1,0 8,9 5,7***** 11,3 0,2-0,7 7,9-8,0 10,2-11,3 1,4 19,5-13,0

Sources: Norris 2005; Ignazi 2003; www.electionresources.org, www2.essex.ac.uk/elect/database; gesis.org. *Although consistently below the 3% threshold, which we take as a minimum level to classify as relevant, the NPD and the BNP are included as relevant parties because of the regional success and parliamentary representation (NPD) and their success in the 2009 European parliamentary elections and their subsequent parliamentary representation in case of the BNP. **In 2008, AN no longer competed independently but under the umbrella of Il Popolo della Libert` . It is also a no longer classified as extreme right. ***After split from the BZO. ****LPF dissolved and did not compete in the 2006 election. *****On an electoral platform with two other small parties. ******Jobbik was founded as a political party in 2003; in the 2006 elections it ran with MIEP, which had previously gained 5.5% in the 1998 and 4.4% in the 2002 elections, turning the radical right into a consistently relevant competitor. *******PUNR dissolved and did not compete in the 2008 election.

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governed by a national-populist party (Fidesz) facilitating coded antisemitism and courting anti-Jewish voters. Of fifteen European Union member states examined, six countries of the radical right have reached a new peak within the last election cycle (2006-2010). The still widespread claim that the radical right has remained an isolated force or become completely irrelevant within the European Union is therefore difficult to sustain, even if we only looked at electoral results and neglect that the radical right is also a significant social movement and subculture. However, while the radical right has recently been recognized as a force to reckon within fact, the radical right is the most scrutinized European party family today (Mudde 2007)there is still a striking void in systematic comparative studies of the radical rights political ideology, especially of its role in antisemitism. The radical rights anti-immigrant resentments, and especially antiMuslim campaigns, have come under public and scientific scrutiny in recent years (Mammone 2011). Yet, antisemitism as an ideological factor in mobilizing radical right voters has neither been systematically examined in scholarly research nor received much media attention, in spite of some heated scholarly meta-controversies about new antisemitismthat is, the partial or full convergence of radical right, radical left, and Islamist antisemitism in the form of hatred of Israel and the chimera of world Zionism. While there are some notable exceptionsstudies that explore the radical right and antisemitism (e.g., Rensmann 2008; 2011; Weitzman 2006; 2010)public and scholarly debates, in fact, often a priori presuppose that antisemitism is an ideology that is past its expiration date, and thus also without significance in the radical rights political and ideological mobilizations.1 Indeed, it is a widely shared belief in contemporary European publics that antisemitism has largely dissipated, and generally become socially and politically irrelevanteven though such claims are difficult to substantiate and contradict social research findings. If antisemitism surfaces as a problem today, it is frequently suggested that it is instrumentalized and overused, presumably constituting an ubiquitous political charge allegedly employed by Jewish and Israeli lobbies in order to suppress dissent and fence off criticism of Israel in Europe and the United States (see, for instance, Walt and Mearsheimer 2008; for a scholarly critique of these
1. Strangely complementary to such biased presuppositions, some scholars who critically examine the rise of new forms of antisemitism, and who plausibly substantiate the new antisemitisms thesis about a partial left/right/Islamist convergence on the Jewish question and the Israel question, at times tend to view the contemporary radical right as an irrelevant and marginal player, and thus also have turned away from the empirical study of antisemitism in the radical right.

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claims, see Lieberman 2009a, 2009b). In a similar vein, some scholars and political pundits have suggested that the European radical right, with its anti-Muslim vigor, has turned pro-Israel and pro-Jewish (Bunzl 2007), and that Jewish organizations, in turn, now allegedly support the radical right and xenophobia.2 Moreover, it has become popular to view Muslims as the Jews of today, a trope that insinuates that Muslims are the subject of forms of systematic persecution in Europe that is similar to those that Jews have faced in European history; and a trope that suggests that islamophobia has generally replacednot just complementedantisemitism, i.e., hatred of Jews, in 21st-century Europe.3
2. Such claims, based on scarce evidence if any, also have political ramifications: if Jews are linked to or associated with the European radical right and with fascist ideology, they are discredited, along with their possible support of the Jewish state of Israel. As will be shown, the Belgish Vlaams Belang may well be the only relevant radical right party who has seriously triedand failedto court Jewish voters. 3. If antisemitism is no longer viewed as an acute challenge, it is also easier to suggest that those who do address the issue are playing the antisemitism card for political purposes, presumably to immunize Israel from criticism or to advance particular Jewish interests. Over the last years, some media and scholars across the Atlantic have popularized the claim that Islamophobia is the new antisemitism (as opposed to those theories about new antisemitism that seek to conceptualize a new convergence of radical right, radical-left, and Islamist hatred of Jews and Israel), and thus resentmentsunquestionably significantagainst Muslims and Islam have taken antisemitisms place in Europe and beyond (Bunzl 2007; Guarnieri 2010). Yet, it is also popular to suggest that this presumed change is not recognized. While anti-Semitism is recognized as an evil, noxious creed, and its adherents are barred from mainstream society and respectable organs of opinion, Islamophobia is presumably widespread and well respected (Oborne 2008). This proposition is problematic in at least three ways: First, it suggests that antisemitism is always publicly identified as such and publicly refuted; while overt racial and Nazi antisemitism has indeed long become largely illegitimate in mainstream public discourse, it can be questioned how far this applies to more subtle or coded forms and anti-Jewish stereotypes. The meaning of the term Islamophobia is equally unclear: does it entail, for instance, criticism of Islamism and criticism by Muslims and non-Muslims against politicized religious practices, or does it signify racial hatred and discrimination against Muslims, which is a contemporary challenge? Second, the assumption that antisemitism is barred from public life and replaced by presumably legitimate Islamophobia suggests that antisemitism has become irrelevant, although all existing survey data show that antisemitic resentments are far from isolated. Moreover, violent attacks against Jews, Jewish institutions, and synagogues continue to exceedin actual numbersthose against all other minorities (although there are various national exceptions in the case of violence against gypsies), including violence directed against Muslims, Muslim institutions, and mosques. Third, while Jews and Muslims are subjected to

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Looking at contemporary radical right ideology and its political context, this article challenges the aforementioned propositions. It claims that while racialized hostility against Muslims takes an important role in many radical right mobilizations alongside general anti-immigrant resentment, antisemitism remains an integral, indeed in many cases reinforced, element of new radical right ideology. For much of the European radical right, however, antisemitism continues to function as a constitutive, persistent conspiracy ideology to explain the modern world and its crises. New radical right parties thereby tend to modernize their ideology in order to increase their appeal, even though overtly racialized stereotypes of Jews, ethnic minorities, and immigrantsas well as Holocaust revisionismcontinue to surface in political campaigns; the alleged powerful conspirators of world Jewry, for instance, are today often called world Zionists. In general, the word Zionist is increasingly being used as a synonym for Jew to make antisemitic attacks on world Jewry sound respectable. Among the radical right and beyond, the chiffrethe Zionistshas generally become the main code for the Jews in antisemitic discourses. It allows blurring the boundaries between legitimate political critique, innuendo, and overt antisemitism while still mobilizing resentmentsand also helps avoid potential legal prosecution. In this ideological construct, Jews and the Zionists seek to dominate the world, orchestrate Zionist-Occupied Governments (ZOG) behind the scenes, and personify globalism and global modernity, including American and Zionist imperialism, the global financial system, and global capitalism.
discrimination in Europe today, it is empirically unjustified to simply pit one set of resentments against another. Both racist prejudices against Muslims and antisemitism are on the rise, according to various survey data (PEW Global Attitudes Project 2008). It is also worth mentioning, however, that the latter is quite distinct in its nature. Antisemitism has generalizable dimensions, which are similar to other forms of racial discrimination, and specific dimensions: antisemitism is a conspiracy theory and, ultimately, a world explanation that, among other things, personifies problems of the modern world with Jews and explains these problems by pointing to Jewish machinations. In contemporary antisemitism, Jews are viewed as a secret power behind the worlds cosmopolitan cultural change, economic modernization, wars, and global conflicts. It is not just a generalizable form or religious hatred or prejudice; it also serves as a conspiratorial world explanation. In spite of its generalizable dimensions, it is distinct in its profile from other forms of racial hatred (Rensmann and Schoeps 2011). Antisemitism is also different in consequence. Equating modern racism with antisemitism misconceives not only the nature of antisemitism, but also its societal origins, functions, and dynamics. The claim that Jews have been replaced by Muslims as the target of discrimination is therefore problematic. As David Ceserani (2008) has pointed out, The Jews of Today are, and remain, Jews.

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Furthermore, it is suggested that the radical rights political antisemitism does not harm their political mobilizations but, on the contrary, feeds into an increased public legitimacy of hostility against Jews; a hostility that is fueled by social perceptions of the Middle East conflict and widespread hatred of Israel as well as recent globalization crises. Such resentment marches in step with, and complements, anti-immigrant resentments and prejudices against ethnic minorities. In the following section, we summarize findings of qualitative content analyses of radical right party manifestos and public campaigns in order to establish the constitutive features of the European radical rights contemporary ideology, which we summarize in comparative findings. We then look at the demand side, the general political context, and favorable conditions for radical right mobilizations of resentment, focusing especially on the neglected resurgence of political antisemitism and the origins and causal mechanisms thereof. A SEVEN-NATION SAMPLE Here, we examine seven European national cases of radical right party mobilization and ideology based on a comparative study of 11 countries altogether.4 The study focuses on platforms and manifestos of relevant radical right parties, including public statements by leaders, party Web pages, and political campaigns as components shaping the political ideology of the European radical right.5 Special attention is paid to the modernization of radical right party ideology. This includes the radical rights responsiveness to counter-cosmopolitanism, and the way it modifies its propaganda against blacks, immigrants, and Muslims, and particularly the role old-fashioned and modernized antisemitism plays in radical right mobilizations. Poland Success of the two most relevant extreme-right parties in Polandthe extreme right League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich RodzinLPR) and the national-protectionist agrarian-populist party Samoobrona, led by Andrzej Lepperhas been fluctuating, along with the still unconsolidated and fluid Polish party system in its entirety. Both parties had temporarily
4. Summaries of the other qualitative content analyses have been discussed elsewhere (Rensmann 2011). 5. We classify parties as relevant that at least have shown some level of electoral success, that is, scoring at least temporarily 3% or more in regional or national elections.

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significant electoral success in the first half of the 2000s: In the 2001 landslide parliamentary elections, the LPR, just created before the elections, received 7.9%; Samoobrona, previously lacking electoral success, received 10.2% and became the third-strongest party in Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament. Both parties repeated their success in 2005 (8.0% LPR; 11.3% Samoobrona). While the LPR is also anchored in the ideologies of the nationalist prewar movement Endecja and Polish Catholic fundamentalism, it links those traditions with contemporary issues, modernized antisemitism, and anti-globalization rhetoric in the core of party ideology. In the first election campaign, LPR attacked President Aleksander Kwasniewski of bowing to Jewish interests (Pankowski and Kornak 2005, 159). In its successful 2005 campaign, the party combined national protectionism with economic protectionism against globalization and mobilized the national solidarity of a new IV Republic of Poland against privatization robbery (Kostrzebski 2005, 220ff.), thereby finding support among globalization losers. Moreover, the LPR unconditionally opposes European Union membership, which it characterizes as anti-Christian (Kostrzebski 2005, 214). After 2005, however, the party lost its initial support of some powerful Catholic civil society agents and media such as Radio Marija, which is connected to the Schiller Institute of the antisemitic U.S. billionaire Lyndon LaRouche (Gazeta Wyborcza, March 9, 2005). The agrarian-populist Samoobrona party lacks Catholic rhetoric, or a similarly distinct radical right and antisemitic programmatic profile. Yet, in spite of socialist economic policy orientations, the party can be classified as populist radical right, and it also nurtures a combination of authoritarian ethno-national populism, anti-immigrant resentments, and antisemitism, which is characteristic for both old and new radical right party ideology. Party leader Lepper, for instance, publicly glorifies democratic dictatorship, the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels, and the French radical rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen (Pankowski and Kornak 2005, 160). While Goebbels represents the old fascist/Nazi and antisemitic right, Le Pen represents, as Piero Ignazi (2003) has pointed out, the prototype of the new extreme or radical right. Samoobrona modernized its ideology, distanced itself from right-wing extremism, and received dramatic electoral gains in return. The party now focuses on political isolationism and a national-protectionist anti-globalization and anti-European Union platform, though there are links to open antisemitism through the personnel of the party elite (http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2005/poland.html). While their new ideological formulas and political mobilizations have proven successful in reaching out to broader parts of the disenfranchised electorate, their short performance as junior partners in government in 2006-2007 was not: in response to party scandals and the unwillingness to

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agree to new elections, turnout for both parties collapsed at the ballot box in 2007 (1.3% LPR; 2.5% Samoobrona) and they had to leave the Sejm. Roman Giertych stepped down as LPR party leader; neither party recovered from this slide in the 2009 European elections. In terms of ideological supply-side transformations, however, both parties exemplify (a) the turn to counter-cosmopolitan modernization and (b) subsequent electoral success. Hungary MIEP (Magyar Igazs g es Elet P rtja-Hungarian Party for Justice and a a Life) has been the electorally most successful radical right party in postCommunist Hungary but faded in relevance in recent years. Under the authoritarian leadership of Istv n Csurka, the party promotes exclusivist a nationalism and expansionist ambitions, especially with regard to the Hungarian ethnic minority under foreign rule (www.miep.hu). The 2002 national electoral campaign particularly focused on an interrelated set of anti-globalization, antisemitism, anti-Communism, and anti-Israel issues. Initially viewing any cooperation with the West as part of a U.S.-Zionist plan, MIEP continues to oppose European Union membership and promotes a distinctly anti-Jewish anti-globalization ideology: bankers, for instance, are portrayed as a bunch of Jews sucking the money of average people. Viewing cosmopolitan Judeo-Bolshevik plutocrats and cosmopolitanism and globalization as the main enemy, the party has explained electoral successes of the left and allegedly ongoing Communist rule by referring to Jewish-Zionist activity (Stephen Roth Institute 2002). According to Csurka, Hungarians are being exploited and oppressed by Jews, who dominate the economy and literature. He also fears a Jewish conspiracy, whose perpetrators are sitting in New York and Tel Aviv (cited in Bos 2011). Antisemitism and hatred of Israel are the core elements of this extreme ethnonationalist party, while resentment against minorities (or Muslims) is part of the party ideology but less central to its identity. The party, however, has continuously lost votes since 1998 (5.5%) (2002: 4.4%). By 2006, electoral support for MIEP was down to 2.2%, in spite of the fact that it formed an electoral alliance with the initially even more radical Jobbik Magyarorsz g rt Mozgalom (Movement for a Better a e Hungary), and it virtually dissolved. Jobbik had taken MIEPs place as the most significant political and electoral extreme-right force in Hungary, and outperformed MIEP. By 2008, the now independent Jobbik was already at 7% in national polls, and the party initially received a stunning 14.77% of the vote in the 2009 European elections. This turned Jobbik into the third strongest party in Hungary, gaining three seats in the European Parliament.

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It consolidated this position in the Hungarian party system by mobilizing an average of 16.67% of the voters in the two rounds of the 2010 national elections. Replacing MIEP without being less radical in its ethnic nationalism, xenophobia, and especially antisemitism, Jobbik has managed to gain wider electoral appeal after its separation from MIEP. Jobbiks current chairman is the young historian G bor Vona, the modern face of the party, and its a best-known and most popular politician is the human rights lawyer and law professor Krisztina Morvai. Though Morvai, the head of Jobbiks EP delegation, had worked as a womens rights advocate at the United Nations and also has a strong record in anti-Israel advocacy, her leadership role in this radical right, extremely nationalistic party took many by surprise, and it instantaneously helped Jobbik gain broader legitimacy in spite of its radical platform and the catering to militant fascists. Jobbiks campaign platform for the 2010 electoral campaign declared the reunification of the Hungarian nation, the rebuilding of Greater Hungary from before 1919, and thus the redrawing of Hungarys borders, to be the first priority and the partys most important political goala radical right, nationalist, and expansionist claim that could ultimately be the cause for a war with its European neighbors. It shows very little political constraints and fosters an agenda of radical orientation and rhetoric that openly attacks gypsies and Jewish capital. Its propaganda, along with a certain political symbolism, is clearly reminiscent of the NYKP, or HungaristsHungarys Nazi party, which ruled in Hungary during the Nazi occupation between 1944 and 1945 and which established a ruthless terror regime that collaborated in the Holocaust (Maegerle 2009). Jobbiks slightly more strategic mobilization focus is nostalgic Hungarian nationalism opposition to globalism in its economic, political, and cultural dimensions. Along with the leadership role of a feminist human rights lawyer, its fashionable opposition to globalism, the European Union, and foreign investment may turn the party into a prototype of a countercosmopolitan, modernized radical right party that seeks to mobilize both nationalist core constituencies of radical right voters and a broader spectrum of globalization losers. While all the indicators of counter-cosmopolitan ideological transformation are prevalent and highly significant, however, the party neither sacrifices its traditional fascist ideology and selfdeclared radicalism (www.jobbik.com) nor certain demonstrated militancyboth of which, however, do not seem to alienate voters anyway. In 2007, Jobbik created the Magyar G rda Kultur lis Egyesulet (Cula a tural Association of the Hungarian Guard). The Hungarian Guard is, along with the movement by the same name, a paramilitary, uniformed street militia with sworn-in members designed to awaken the active self conscious-

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ness of the nation; in 2009, the guard was prohibited. Jobbik has never shied away from radical nationalist, racist, and antisemitic rhetoric. We find party-affiliated publications that employ inflammatory rhetoric against Jews, Roma, and gays. Party members are also linked to anti-Roma and antisemitic violence (Freeman 2009). Jobbik also proposes the creation of a national special police unit to deal with gypsy delinquency. While the party is open to militant Christian Hungarian nationalism and radicalism displayed by subgroups of the party and segments of the party-elite level, it effectively broadened its appeal and transformed its party ideology and identity; first and foremost, this entailed a strategic major focus on opposition to globalization and Europeanization. Reaching out to various disenfranchised segments of the Hungarian electorate, the modernized party platform is still dedicated to a combination of anti-globalization views and coded popular antisemitism, alongside its previous support of Christian values, Hungarian nationalism, and attacks on Roma and other ethnic minorities. Serving both radical nationalists and disillusioned voters, Jobbiks economic policies are primarily directed against the neoliberal ideology dominated policies during these years under the name of privatization, liberalization and deregulation (Jobbik 2009), while it also rejects the Lisbon treaty and European integration. In this way, Jobbik is capitalizing on increasing joblessness, corruption crises, and social unrest caused by the global economic crisis. In light of widespread economic and cultural fears, the party mobilizes political and cultural resentments not only against pro-European and pro-cosmopolitan elites and minorities but also against multinational corporations, America, and Israeli.e. globalism, imperialism, and international institutions. Jobbiks rise indicates that there is considerable legitimate political space for such counter-cosmopolitan, nationalistic, and antisemitic views in Hungarian politics. Its success, in fact, is accompanied by a broader rightwing nationalist turn in Hungarian politics. Challenging conventional wisdom about electorates and their spatial representation in the party system, there seems to be no tradeoff between party constituencies supporting xenophobia and nationalistic claims. On the one hand, due to various factors including major corruption casesthe left-center Magyar Szocialista P rt a (MSZP), which was the major governing party for most of the post-Communist period, collapsed at the 2010 national elections, scoring only 19.3%. Severely weakened, MSZP is now barely the biggest opposition party. On the other hand, the national populist FIDESZ-Hungarian Civic Union (FideszMagyar Polg ri Szovets g) gained 52.73% of the vote in 2010. a e Thus, it achieved an absolute majority that equipped the party with a 2/3 majority in the national parliament and with the governmental power to make sweeping changes to the legal system.

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The national-populist FIDESZ, led by the populist prime minister Viktor Orb n since its inception, also campaigns against anti-national elea ments. While FIDESZ is less radical than Jobbik and combines various political constituencies in its policies, it also provides a government that is apparently sympathetic to radical nationalism and antisemitic resentment. Without being penalized by the party, FIDESZ member of parliament Oszk r Moln r, for instance, stated: I love Hungary, I love Hungarians, a a and I prefer Hungarian interests to global financial capital, or Jewish capital, if you like, which wants to devour the whole world, but especially Hungary. Moln r, who also suggests that there is an Israeli conspiracy to a colonize Hungary, found widespread support, even though FIDESZ represents a government that ratified an authoritarian media law severely restricting freedom of speech under the pretense of fighting hate speech. Hungarys restrictive media laws and poor civil rights record as well as discrimination policies have increasingly come under scrutiny by the European Union. However, it may also be a sign of the times and of a new assertiveness of the populist and radical right in Hungary and across Europe with regard to both xenophobia and antisemitism that Jobbik can flourish and that even politicians of the ruling party also mobilize resentments against Jews and gypsies without facing effective political opposition. The Cultural Institute of the Republic of Hungary, operating under the auspices of the FIDESZ government, today initiates discussions about what they call the Jewish problem and how to deal with it. It is doing so in Germany, that is, as part of transnational Hungarian cultural policy (Balassi Institute 2011). Another sign of public collaboration with the radical right and the legitimacy of ethnic nationalism and antisemitism in Hungary is the fact that the mayor of Budapest, Istv n Tarlos, recently appointed Istv n Csurka, a a and the nationalist Gyorgy Dorner as the directors of the leader of MIEP, the Hungarian capitals prestigious New Theater, despite concerns by Jewish groups and international condemnation. The new directors want to rename the theater and act against what they call the degenerate sick liberal hegemony, and they demand that only Hungarian drama is performed and want to stop what they refer to as foreign garbage, which is viewed as a code word for Jewish and other non-Hungarian productions (Bos 2011). Slovakia The most relevant radical right party in Slovakia, Slovenska Narodna StranaSNS (Slovak National Party), has made attempts to modernize its ideological profile as well. SNS describes itself as a modern, national, conservative, right-wing, Christian parliamentary party (www.sns.sk). Accord-

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ing to three programmatic pillars, it also seeks to transcend the left-right cleavage by claiming to be socialist, an ideological aspect that helped its promotion to become junior partner in the socialist center-left government led by Smer, which is part of the Party of European Socialists of mainstream European social-democratic and socialist parties.6 The coalition government, which makes the SNS the only Eastern European radical right party in a national government of a European Union member state, was formed after the 2006 parliamentary elections, when SNS scored 11.7%, its strongest showing since the first post-Communist election in 1990. Yet, in spite of its partially modernized image, its electoral success, and its assumed respectability as member of a government in the European Union, SNS hardly disguises its simultaneously radically ethnic-nationalist ideological orientation and its successful creation of sustainable bridges to its radical right core constituencies. The party explicitly praises radicalism, Slavic brotherhood, and the original Slovak culture on its Web sites and in its party platform. It also continues to promote xenophobia and barely coded antisemitism (People Against Racism & Milo 2005, 213ff). Even the name SNS points to its roots in a Slovak radical nationalist party of the 19th century. Contrary to other modernized radical right parties, it does not distance itself from fascist and antisemitic roots but seeks, in fact, to rehabilitate Jozsef Tisos fascist war regime, which collaborated in the Holocaust. Tiso is portrayed as a martyr in the fight against Bolshevism and liberalism (People Against Racism & Milo 2005, 213ff; http://www.tau.ac.il/AntiSemitism/asw2008/slovakia.html Thus, while the SNS does adapt to new issuesinitially, it primarily mobilized for national independence from the Czech Republicits ideological modernization is very limited. Its core agenda is determined by conventional Slovak ethnic nationalism, which marches in step with both antiimmigrant racism and antisemitism; globalization is not a central campaign issue or a major factor shaping any ideological reorientation. While the party attacks the European Union and supports both cultural/national and economic socialist protectionism, it is successful enough and not in need of modernizing its image, especially in times of a larger European Union crisis. Its campaigning is aimed at law and order issues, which are combined with overt discrimination and attacks against ethnic minorities, especially the Hungarian minority and Rom peoplewhich, according to the SNS, are criminals who should be sterilized (People Against Racism & Milo 2005, 214; http://www.sns.sk). The racist ideological profile of this anti-liberal radical right government party certainly creates problems for
6. The party had been in government for the first time under the populist HZDS and Vladimir Meciar between 1994 and 1998.

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European Union anti-discrimination guidelines and the European Unions cosmopolitan image and legitimacy. Italy While the Alleanza Nazionale, successor to the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), can no longer be classified as right-wing extremist (Ignazi 2003), the only relevant extreme-right party in Italy is the separatist Lega Nord (LN) under the leadership of Umberto Bossi. The party is currently a junior partner in the Berlusconi administration as the only Western European extreme-right party in government. After some internal crises and programmatic shifts, the LN has turned to counter-cosmopolitan identity populism (Betz 2002). Opposition to economic, cultural, and political globalization has become its major campaign focus.7 While for the LN regionalist separatism and the fight for the people of the North remains the major objective, the Lega Nord per lindipendenza della Padania continues to support the creation of the fictional state of Padania and separation from southern Italy. It has adjusted its program accordingly, molding it into its anti-Southern racism, which is also still characteristic for the party (Gomez-Reino Cachafeiro 2001). Recently, the LN began to specifically target Muslim immigrants and illegals, responding and reinforcing current public discourses. It claims that Italians live on a reservation like Native Americans, and calls for a stop of the invasion by immigrants (www.leganord.org). The partys participation in government, its focus on identity politics, and the mobilization of new popular resentments against globalization helped to regain electoral successes. After its modest reform and as a junior partner in government, the LN recovered from its poor electoral results of the early 2000s, receiving 4.6% in the 2006 national parliamentary elections and 8.3% in 2008. The partys radical opposition to cultural globalization is more modest in economic terms, but it is supplemented by strong anti-European Union statements, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and modernized antisemitism. The latter, however, is primarily limited to statements by politicians rather than evident in party platforms and programs. On a local level, the party collaborates with the openly antisemitic, neo-Nazi Forza Nuova (www.eumc.eu.int 2004; Caiani & Parenti 2009).
7. In the 1990s, Bossi began focusing on globalization, attacking materialism and the evil high finance controlling all economic power by means of globalization as main enemies (Die Presse, October 20, 1999).

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Austria The Austrian radical right Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei OsterreicheFPO), which was by far the most successful radical right party in Western Europe and the second strongest party in the Austrian parliament, experienced electoral seesaws over the last ten years since it joined the government as a junior partner in 2000. After its split into FPO (Bundnis Zukunft OsterreichsAlliance for the Future of Aus and BZO tria) and the departure of its charismatic populist leader Jorg Haider, the party kept an ethnic-nationalist and antisemitic ideological profile. However, popular opposition to the European Union in favor of Austrian patriotism and independence (www.fpoe.at), populist calls for referenda, and anti-establishment rhetoric and economic national protectionism against globalization have also been its modernized ideological focal points for more than a decade. In recent years, the FPO further focused its ideological message and effectively responded to new issues while keeping some of its hard-line ideology. In the 2008 electoral campaign, it demanded a halt to immigration, a ministry for repatriating foreigners, and the return of powers conceded to the European Union (www.fpoe.at). The party now mobilizes popular resentments, especially against Muslims (for instance, party leader Strache campaigned for a ban on Islamic dress)8; it also articulates antiimperialist anti-Americanism and antisemitism in global politics. By such emphasis on both modernized anti-Muslim xenophobia and antisemitism, the party almost doubled its vote (www.elections2009-results.eu/en/austria_en.html) in the European elections after a campaign against European Union accession of Turkey and Israel (www.derstandard.at, May 21, 2009). To be sure, Israel has never been under consideration for candidacy. The combination of ethnic-nationalist populism and effective counter-cosmopolitan mobilizations against the foreign forces Turkey and Zionism consolidated the partys electoral success (17.5% in the 2008 parliamentary elections, in addition to 10.7% of the radical right competitor BZO). The UK The British National Party (BNP) has moved from the extremist fringes to becoming the first radical right party in British history to win seats in a national vote, namely, in the 2009 European elections. Agenda
8. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/3097540/ Austria-election-delivers-gains-for-far-Right.html.

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changes seem to have come to fruition here: The new success can be viewed as a reflection of its programmed modernization, trying to appear more respectable (suits not boots strategy), and its reorientation toward a counter-cosmopolitan ideology. This entails a focus on protection of national identity, anti-European Union positions, opposition to the Europhiles and the hypocrisy of the liberal elite and its multicultural experiment, national economic and cultural protectionism against globalization, workfare instead of welfare, andlast but not leastan anti-immigrant policy outlook that especially targets Muslims (www.bnp.org.uk; Goodwin 2007). The undisputed party leader and chairman, Nick Griffin, attacks the Islamification of the West; Britains becoming an Islamic state or like Africa; Islamofascism; and the vicious faith of Islam (BBC News, July 16 2004; www.timesonline.co.uk, November 11, 2006). The party primarily combines issues of inner security with anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant resentment, leading to apocalyptic scenarios such as: Europe is sooner or later going to have to close its borders or it is simply going to be swamped by the Third World (www.bnp.org.uk). Yet, the party also attacks European Union policy and the European Unions moves on Iran, and the antiimperialist dictatorship of the Islamic Republic. The BNP modernizes and at times downplays its antisemitism, but Griffin, for instance, has never distanced himself from his Holocaust denialhe refers to the Shoah as Holohoax.9 France Similar transformations could be observed in case of the Front National (FN), the prototype of the new radical right. The FN has been the model for many other European radical right parties because it was able to respond to, as well as frame and generate new issues and thereby modernize its ideological image in a way that appealed to, new potential voters. In the past, it was among the first to mobilize Euro-skepticism, address the representation crisis, launch attacks against immigration, and exploit anti-establishment effects (Ignazi 2003, 95ff.). While the partys anti-globalization rhetoric and national protectionism, including protectionist economic policies and attacks on multinational corporations, became conspicuous during the 1990s, it was relegated to a less prominent role in recent years. Today, antisemitism, in its overt or coded variations, is present but secondary in the FN and its campaigns. Still, party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen openly displays
9. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/3097540/ Austria-election-delivers-gains-for-far-Right.html.

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his friendship with the actor Dieudonne Mbala Mbala and supports his Islamic fundamentalist, anti-Israel, and antisemitic viewpoints. The main issue for the FN today, however, is immigration. This dominant issue is linked to the primacy of the French (www.frontnational.com) in opposition to multicultural diversity, cosmopolitanism, new Muslim minorities, and cultural globalization. Though it had long benefitted from its powerful party leader Le Pen, the partys dramatic loss in the 2007 election (4.29%) may be attributed to some program modernizations initiated by his daughter Marine Le Pen. An anti-establishment campaign poster during the 2007 electoral campaign featuring an immigrant complaining about the usual suspects of politics may have been too much to swallowand too much modernization of the party image for some of the FN right-wing core constituencies. Even if not central to the partys recent campaigns, Holocaust relativity and antisemitic innuendo remain an essential part of the partys ideological fabric. RESENTMENTS
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IDEOLOGY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT: COMPARATIVE FINDINGS

In sum, the comparative analysis of party ideologies and mobilizations discloses a partly heterogeneous picture. Political contexts and contextdependent variables play a significant role, and campaigns are hardly unified transnationally; in part, they respond to specific national issues and electoral demands. Even though ideological priorities and mobilizations vary, however, there are some prevalent ideological features that have emerged, and that overall characterize the contemporary European radical right. First, all radical right parties share a high level of xenophobia and antiimmigrant resentment. Immigrants are blamed for all kinds of economic and social woes, as well as for a loss of cultural identity. In particular, this resentment is currently oftenthough by no means exclusivelydirected against Muslim immigrants and, depending on the country, specific ethnic minorities. Such resentment, which is intimately related to an opposition to cosmopolitan diversity, expresses an ethnic nationalism and collective selfunderstanding that remains a constitutive core feature of the European radical right. There are, however, exceptions to the rule. In Eastern Europe, anti-Muslim prejudice plays only a marginal role, if any, in public mobilization of the radical right. Hungarys Jobbik, the most successful radical right party in Europe, is predominantly antisemitic and also discriminates against Rom; Muslims are largely irrelevant in campaigns. Second, several relevant European radical right parties, while retaining an ethnic-nationalist ideological profile, have also partly become transna-

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tional in their outlook. They claim to defend a Europe of nations against cosmopolitan influences and immigration; multinational corporations; and global political norms and institutions, including European Union governance. Some parties develop a significantly modernized, radically countercosmopolitan, anti-globalization identity (Mudde 2007) that reflects widespread counter-sentiments in the electorate. The counter-cosmopolitan defense of cultural particularism includes, but is not limited to, national particularism. Third, and intimately related to the second feature, is that antisemitism remains a core element of radical right ideology, old and new. In several cases, there is even a noticeable resurgence of antisemitism, at times coded in radical anti-Israel resentments, world Zionism or foreign influence, and conspiracy theories.10 Such antisemitic mobilizations are often directly linked to the anti-globalization discourse, whereby Jews are identified as the key agents of cosmopolitan cultural change, global power, and the global financial or economic system. Jews, once again, serve as a personified, reified world explanation. The demonstrable relevance and revival of antisemitism in radical right ideology, to be sure, is at odds with popular perceptions of the radical right. Moreover, some premature scholarly claims that antisemitism has virtually disappeared from new radical right mobilizations and as a mobilizing resource due to its allegedly bygone appeal, runs counter to our findings. Instead, we see the contours of an emerging, new ideological combination that couples domestic resentment against Muslims with hatred of Jews and opposition to cosmopolitan norms and the cosmopolitanization processes; in several cases, Israel, world Zionism, and Israel lobbies have become the primary target in the radical rights view of foreign affairsan ideology that engenders support for radical Islamists terror against Jews and Israel abroad, even though Muslim immigrants are not accepted as equal members of society. BACK
BY

POPULAR DEMAND: COUNTER-COSMOPOLITANISM, XENOPHOBIA, AND ANTISEMITISM

Before we explore several hypotheses to explain why such an ideological combination, and the resurgence of antisemitism in particular, may be an effective mobilizing tool in party systems of the contemporary European Union, we have a close look at the changing political climate and the increased popular demand for counter-cosmopolitan, xenophobic, and antisemitic politics. It is displayed in continuously widespread, in part
10. This should not be misunderstood as any kind of lexical ordering.

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increasing resentments against Jews, Muslims, and immigrants; an increased public and political salience of these subjects and related issues; and economic and socio-cultural globalization crises that tend to embolden and help intensify previously existing antisemitic undercurrents, including reified perceptions of globalization and the cosmopolitanization of societies as Jewish machinations. Increased Resentments PEW data indicate a strong relationship between anti-Jewish and sentiments against Muslim immigrants. Indeed, in six European countries included in the PEW survey, the correlation between unfavorable opinions of Jews and unfavorable opinions of Muslims is remarkably high (neg .80; PEW 2008). Overall, negative views of Muslims have increased over a four-year period; exceptions are Spain and Germany, where negative views of Muslims are nevertheless still high (52% and 50%, respectively).11 Moreover, there has been considerable progress in the cosmopolitanization of European societies, i.e., the diversification of European societies and the recognition of cosmopolitan diversity and norms. Yet, there is still a considerable segment of the electorate that is hostile to immigrants and the sociocultural change they represent. Largely overlooked in public debates, antisemitism has surged and resurged in Europe since the turn of the century (see Table 2). Antisemitism is a far cry from being merely a historical legacy. Instead, empirical data show that antisemitic attitudes remain an undercurrenteven if varying in scope and intensityamong parts of European societies. Not only that: suveys indicate that such resentments are now more prevalent than in previous decades and they matter more to certain segments of voters. Antisemitism, like xenophobia, is no marginal minority opinion at the fringe of society.
11. A 2009 study on group-focused enmity conducted by researchers from University of Bielefeld in Germany finds, however, that hatred of Muslims to some extent decreased, while, according to this study, hatred of Jews and homosexuals is growing. The level of resentment against most minorities declinedsexism and racism even considerably, resentments against Muslims slightly, while the percentage of people who believe that there are too many Muslims in their country is still especially high in those countries that actually have a low percentage of Muslim minorities. According to the study, 41.2% of Europeans believe that Jews try to take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era, and 45.7% of respondents supported the contention that Israel in general is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians, thereby equating the Jewish state with the genocidal Nazi regime and reverting colonial and Holocaust-related European guilt to the Jews (Stricker 2009).

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TABLE 2: NEGATIVE
50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 2004 11 9 20

RESENTMENT RELOADED
VIEWS OF

561
2004 (PERCENT).

JEWS

IN

EUROPE

SINCE

46 39 36 32 27 21 16 13 9 6 2005 6 2006 2007 22 Britain 25 20 Germany France Spain Poland

Sources: PEW Global Attitudes Project (2008); Unfavourable Views of Jews and Muslims on the Increase in Europe (Washington, DC: PEW), http:// www.pewglobal.org/2008/09/17/unfavorable-views-of-jews-and-muslims-on-theincrease-in-europe/.

On average, antisemitic attitudes have been on the rise in Europe since 2000, although there are fluctuations and considerable cross-national variations. Moreover, hatred of Israel and Zionists has become a medium to express hatred of Jews. Forms of radical anti-Zionism, wishing for the destruction of the Jewish state and the de-Zionization of the world, may also be motivated by secondary antisemitism (Rensmann 1998): the desire to morally demonize Jews because they are living reminders of the German and European atrocities committed against them during the Nazi era. Equating the Zionists with Nazis is a way to project ones guilt and settle an old score. According to a seven-country survey, including the most populous European member states, almost every second European (45.7%) uses Nazi associations and comparisons when thinking of Israeli.e., they somewhat or strongly agree that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians, while 37.4% agree that considering Israels policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews (Zick 2009, 13). Increased Awareness Antisemitism and hostility against Muslims have become more prominent issues to the public, in politics, and in modern media. The latter, antiMuslim hostility, seems to benefit from certain media debates about mosques and the alleged introduction of Sharia law. In recent years, to be

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sure, political and public discourse in Europe is also characterized by a high level of awareness and alertness in the face of anti-Muslim campaigns or statements. For instance, a best-selling book by a former German politician, Thilo Sarrazin, which includes blatantly xenophobic, racialized anti-Muslim claims, was subjected to scathing criticism across the German public and its political class. After the terrorist acts by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in 2011, this public debate about anti-Muslim hostility reached a new peak, and anti-Muslim radical right groups such as Stop the Islamization of Norway (Stopp islamiseringen av NorgeSIAN) have come under renewed, particular public scrutiny. Anti-Muslim resentments have increasingly become scandalized in European publics, and at least parties associated with anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim resentments have recently lost electoral supportfor example, the national populist Progress Party of Norway has suffered significant losses in local elections in the aftermath of the Breiviks acts of terror.12 However, while the public focus has shifted on anti-Muslim prejudiceswhich remains a controversial subject from which the radical right might draw long-term gainsradical right parties can also benefit from an increasingly legitimate public discourse that is hostile to Jews. This aspect has been neglected in recent research: We observe an expanding zone of acquiescence in relation to antisemitism, which also finds reflection in the radical right, that has hardly been recognized yet in research on the subject. This increased legitimacy or public tolerance of anti-Jewish resentment is characterized by changing boundaries in what is a respectable conversation about Jews and Zionists. It also finds expression in the rise of conspiracy theories, which often directly lead to a reservoir of antisemitic images of Jews allegedly pulling the strings and controlling the world. Furthermore, antisemitism is also nurtured by a popular Manichean world view
12. On the one hand, some critics of Islam in European public discourse tend to conflate political Islamism with private religious practices and downplay existing racist discrimination against Muslim immigrants. On the other hand, many critics of Islamophobia conflate these distinctions as well by suggesting that all criticism of Islamism and of Islamic rule is illegitimate, prejudiced, and driven by hatred including criticism from Muslims and secularized citizens with Muslim background who oppose pious interpretations of Islam in Europe and abroad. In this logic, which centers on blasphemy rather than the discrimination of individuals and the violation of individual rights, the Islamophobia charge has also been misused. It can function as a sweeping brush against dissidents criticizing the discrimination of women and gays in the name of Islam, or of radical Islamists genocidal antisemitism. In its most extreme version, it is used by radical Islamists to block off criticism of anti-gay, anti-feminist and antisemitic statements by claiming that such criticism would be Islamophobic.

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that is not necessarily antisemitic in itself but helps create a climate of antiJewish hostility, and has increasingly gained traction in European publics. It portrays the two countries in which most of the worlds Jews live, the United States and Israel, as the mainif not the onlyvillains of world politics and of the world economy, while letting brutal dictatorships and repressive regimes across the world off the hook. Anti-Israel sentiments and anti-Zionism that go far beyond criticism of the Israeli government and its policies are in most cases no longer discredited as illegitimate resentments against another group or country but have become a badge of honor even among publicists and politicians on the left who otherwise tend to support anti-discrimination policies and universal human rights (Hirsh 2007; Markovits 2011; Rensmann/Schoeps 2011; Wistrich 2010). In its radical version, this Manichean world view manifests itself in publicly articulated stereotypes about war-mongering Zionists and a globally powerful Israel lobby that dominates governments and stifles free debate about Israels atrocities against innocent peoples, especially the Palestinians. Such claims go hand in hand with a wide-spread immunization strategy in the form of antisemitism denial that reaches deep into the public and the political left; in this view, antisemitism today is a generality relevant only insofar as it is seen as a spurious charge that the Zionists or the pro-Israel lobby would throw at critics of Israel (Hirsh 2007, 73). Flanked by the claim that criticism of Israel cannot be antisemitic (cited in Hirsh 2007) and the belief that if there is any antisemitism it is Israel that causes its emergence,13 there are highly emotionalized boycott campaigns across Europe exclusively directed against the Jewish state. These campaigns are emboldened by widely popular charges that Israel is an apartheid regime that deserves to be dismantled.14 Singling out Israel as the pariah among the nations, such aggressive demonization of the Jewish state goes far beyond
13. Of course, criticism of Israeli policies does not have to be antisemitic. Often it is not. There can, however, be antisemitic criticism of Israel, just as there can be racist criticisms of African or Arab countries. It is equally implausible, and prejudiced, to claim that an African regime is the cause for racist perceptions of Africans as it is to say that Israel is the cause for antisemitic perceptions of Jews. 14. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis, who constitute 20% of the nations multicultural citizenry and is equally represented at Israeli universities, have the same civil and political rights as Jews and Christians (unlike Palestinians in Syria, for instance). Israel hardly resembles the South African apartheid regime with which it is often compared. It is, in fact, a safe haven for Arab gays and religious minorities such as the Bahai. Most striking is the double standard of the apartheid charge, which indicates more than a biased predisposition: countries that systematically discriminate against, indeed persecute, ethnic and religious minorities and violate human rights, such as Iran or Sudan, are not subjected to similar boycott campaigns.

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any rational criticism, and the simultaneous denial of the problem of antisemitism is not limited to the radical right. Anti-Israel demonstrations resonate in public segments across the political spectrum and in civil society, including left-wing student and teacher unions and media. More often than not, such aggressive anti-Zionism slips into overt antisemitic stereotypes and resentment. For instance, the left-leaning British newspaper the Guardian recently published an article in which journalist Deborah Orr claimed that the Israel-Hamas prisoner swapHamas released the captured soldier Gilat Shalit in exchange for the release of 1,000 Palestinians responsible for the death of 600 Israelis, most of the victims women and childrengave evidence that Israel nurtures a supremacist Jewish selfunderstanding of being a chosen people whose lives are worth a thousand times the lives of others (Orr 2011).15 There is, at any rate, a noticeable erosion of more rigorous discursive boundariesabout what is tolerated as part of public discourse and what is classified or scandalized as hate speechwith regard to Jews and Zionists, boundaries that had evolved in postwar Europe. The most recent indicator of antisemitisms renewed public toleration, if not legitimacy, is the fact that the extreme nationalist, radical right LAOS party, with its chairman, Georgios Karatzaferis, is part of the new Greek coalition government that was established in response to the European debt crisis. LAOS, claiming to represent the true Greeks instead of Jews, homosexuals, and Communists, particularly campaigns against Jews and Israel. The party received 7% of the vote in the last national election. Karatzaferis is a professed Holocaust denier who hates Israel and is known for his openly antisemitic statements. After the 9/11 attacks in New York, he posed the question: Why were all the Jews warned not to come to work that day? before the Greek parliament. Karatzaferis also questions the tales of Auschwitz and Dachau. During Israels Operation Cast Lead in 2008, Karatzaferis said that the IDF was acting with savage brutality only seen in Hitlers time towards helpless people (Uni 2011).

15. In this case, the editor of the Guardian was forced to publish an unusual apology three weeks later, in which he recognizes that Chosenness, in Jewish theology, tends to refer to the sense in which Jews are burdened by religious responsibilities; it has never meant that the Jews are better than anyone else. Historically it has been antisemites, not Jews, who have read chosen as code for Jewish supremacism.

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Crises of Globalization Crises of globalization have provided a fertile climate for mobilizations of resentments against immigrants and Jews that portray them as responsible for social problems. Personifying the origins of theses crises in immigrants, foreign capital, and particularly Jews, the radical right can tap intoand strengthen the link betweenexisting social resentments and current multifaceted crises of global modernity. In particular, the identification of Jews with globalism and cosmopolitan political, economic, and socio-cultural transformations corresponds to what we call counter-cosmopolitanism, that is, the generalized, particularistic opposition to the combined set of political, cultural, and economic transformations associated with globalization and cosmopolitan value change (Markovits and Rensmann 2010; Rensmann 2011; Rensmann & Miller 2010).16 Counter-cosmopolitanism, as the unqualified rejection of all forms of sociocultural, economic and political globalization as well as cosmopolitan norms and diversity, is likely to become more prevalent during crises of globalization. Counter-cosmopolitan parties, which generally oppose globalization and the cosmopolitanization of society (Beck and Grande 2007), seek to strategically mobilize those citizens who identify with the national community, citizens from economic strata that have traditionally been protected by the nation-state and now find themselves increasingly exposed to foreign competition, and those who lack the cultural competence to meet the economic and cultural challenge of a globalizing world (Kriesi et al. 2006). While counter-cosmopolitanism bolsters hostility against immigrants and cultural change, it particularly predisposes toward hostility against Jews. As a form of a reified critique of globalization, such generalized counter-cosmopolitanism is highly susceptible to conspiracy theories that invoke the old social image of the cosmopolitan, wandering Jew. In antisemitic narratives, Jews have traditionally been identified with modernity, cosmopolitanism, and globalism. Jews or Zionists are now often charged with cosmopolitan social change, global wars, and global domination, cultural diffusion, the global erosion of the nation-state, dual loyalty, and capitalist crises. It is, after all, one of modern antisemitisms distinct features to function as an objectified explanation of the modern world. In this ideology, Jews are seen as the embodiment of these cultural and eco16. This rejection is part and parcel of, but not limited to, nationalistic attitudes; it can also entail religiously or culturally grounded motivations, and it can be expressed transnationally in its own organizational outreach or political alliancebuilding.

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nomic modernization processes (including immigration), and as the ones who orchestrate them. In a world of abstract domination-governed complex, abstract, and anonymous social relations, the antisemites present the worlds problems as a Zionist scheme. The widespread uneasiness in the changing world society of postmodernity and in the global village can therefore be projected onto the image of Jews. Even if such projection is not framed as a global Jewish conspiracy, global problems are often squarely blamed on the Zionists and their allegedly disproportionate Jewish political and media influence through powerful, secret Israel lobbies and Holocaust industries ruling politics domestically and in world affairs. CONCLUSION Based on an analysis of contemporary radical right party platforms and mobilizations, we have shown that there is continuity and change in the political ideology of relevant radical right parties in Europe: a focus on antiimmigration issues and anti-Muslim resentment is accompanied by virulent antisemitism. Contrary to common perceptions, this antisemitism remains an integral part of the radical rights political identity and mobilizations. While anti-Muslim resentments often matter, the claim that antisemitism has been replaced by other resentments cannot be substantiated; it is equally invalid that the European radical right has largely turned pro-Israel (Bunzl 2007). Instead, most of the radical right prominently features modernized, anti-globalist, and anti-Zionist antisemitism. Cross-national variations notwithstanding, antisemitism has gained in importance. This is especially the case among the most successful radical right parties in Eastern and Western Europe, such as Jobbik (Hungary), LAOS (Greece), and FPO (Austria), in many instances, radical right parties cater to broader counter-cosmopolitan constituencies. Thus, a modernized ideological profile tends to emerge: it combines xenophobic resentment against immigrants and European Muslims with a counter-cosmopolitan agenda and antisemitism domestically, as well as modernized anti-Zionist antisemitism in foreign affairs. Even though Muslim immigrants are rejected domestically, radical Islamists may hereby gain radical right sympathies for their struggle against world Zionism. These mobilizations and transformations on the radical right supply side are supported by a set of favorable conditions. Radical right parties express an evident electoral demand by catering to significant counter-cosmopolitan constituencies that harbor resentments against social and cultural change in general, and immigrants and Jews in particular. Moreover, they benefit from a broader European public climate in which certain anti-immigrant resentments surface, and in which especially forms of modernized

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antisemitism (Rensmann and Schoeps 2011) have become increasingly respectable and tolerated. Finally, the radical right is one of several agents that seeks to exploit current European and globalization crises that affect European citizens, such as the European financial debt crisis, and that feed into persisting anti-Jewish undercurrents and conspiracy theories. These crises can also be seen as crises of cosmopolitanism that help engender counter-cosmopolitan responses, including hostility against immigrants and Jews. The radical rights resurgent and reloaded politics of paranoia in Europe find a special target in Jews and Zionists. The new and modernized radical right, emulating the old, hereby plays its part in an emerging new international antisemitism. In particular, the often neglected, and at times denied, revival of antisemitism in radical right party ideology and beyond epitomizes, both on the political demand and supply side, what can be conceived of as situated in a deeper political crisis in Europe. The broader resurgence of antisemitism can be theorized as an anti-modern, countercosmopolitan response to rapid economic and cultural change and current crises in the 21st century. Part and parcel ofbut far from being limited tothe radical right, there are indicators that this reaction has begun to move from the fringes into the center.
*Lars Rensmann, PhD, is DAAD assistant professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His recent publications include Politics and Resentment (Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2011), ed. with Julius H. Schoeps, and Gaming the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), with Andrei S. Markovits.

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Meguid, Bonnie M. 2008. Party Competition Between Unequals: Strategies and Electoral Fortunes in Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Minkenberg, Michael. 2003. The West European Radical Right as a Collective Actor: Modeling the Impact of Cultural and Structural Variables on Party Formation and Movement Mobilization, Comparative European Politics 1 (2): 149-170. Minkenberg, Michael, and Pascal Perrineau. 2007. The Radical Right in the European Elections 2004, International Political Science Review 28 (1), 2955. Mudde, Cas. 1999. The Single-Issue Party Thesis: Extreme Right Parties and the Immigration Issue, West European Politics 22 (3): 182-197. . 2003. The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press). . 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Norris, Pippa. 2005. Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market (New York: Cambridge University Press). Oborne, Peter. 2008. The Enemy Within? Fear of Islam: Britains New Disease, The Independent, July 8, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ the-enemy-within-fear-of-islam-britains-new-disease-859996.html. Oesch, Daniel. 2008. Explaining Workers Support for Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway and Switzerland, International Political Science Review 29 (3): 349-373. Orr, Deborah. 2011. Is an Israeli Life Really More Important Than a Palestinians?, The Guardian, October 19, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/2011/oct/19/israeli-lives-more-important-palestinian, retrieved November 5, 2011. Pankowski, Rafal, and Marcin Kornak. 2005. Poland. In Racist Extremism in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Cas Mudde, 156-183 (London: Routledge). Pennings, Paul, and Jan-Erik Lane. 1998. Introduction. In Comparing Party System Change, edited by Paul Pennings and Jan-Erik Lane, 1-19 (New York: Routledge). People Against Racism and Daniel Milo. 2005. Slovakia. In Racist Extremism in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Cas Mudde, 210-242 (London: Routledge). PEW Global Attitudes Project. 2008. Unfavourable Views of Jews and Muslims on the Increase in Europe (Washington, D.C.: PEW), http://www.pewglobal.org/ 2008/09/17/unfavorable-views-of-jews-and-muslims-on-the-increase-ineurope/, retrieved November 24, 2011. Rensmann, Lars. 1998. Kritische Theorie uber den Antisemitismus (Hamburg Argument). . 2006. From High Hopes to On-Going Defeat: The New Extreme Rights Political Mobilization and Its National Electoral Failure in Germany, German Politics and Society 24 (2): 67-92.

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. 2008. Rechtsextreme Parteien in der Europ ischen Union: Welche Rolle a spielen Globalisierung und Antisemitismus? In Feindbild Judentum: Antisemitismus in Europa, edited by Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps, 399-453 (Berlin: Verlag Berlin-Brandenburg). . 2011. Against Globalism: Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the Party Ideology of the Radical Right in Europe. In Politics and Resentment: Counter-Cosmopolitanism and Antisemitism in the European Union, edited by Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps, 117-146 (Boston/ Leiden: Brill). Rensmann, Lars, and Jennifer Miller. 2010. Xenophobia and Anti-Immigrant Politics. In International Studies Encyclopedia: Ethnic Minorities and Migration, edited by Robert A. Denemark, 7628-653 (Oxford: Blackwell). Rensmann, Lars, and Julius H. Schoeps. 2011. Politics and Resentment: Examining Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union and Beyond. In Politics and Resentment: Antisemitism and CounterCosmopolitanism in the European Union, edited by Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps, 3-79 (Leiden and Boston: Brill). Rydgren, Jens. 2005. Is Extreme Right Populism Contagious? Explaining the Emergence of a New Party Family, European Journal of Political Research 44 (3): 413-437. Sartori, Giovanni. 1976. Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University). Siderov, Volen. 2002. Globalization: The Last Stage of the Colonization of the Orthodox East, Radio Islam: International Conference on Global Problems of World History, www.radioislam.org/conferences. Spirova, Maria. 2006. The Parliamentary Elections in Bulgaria, June 2005, Electoral Studies 25 (3): 616-621. Stricker, Sarah. 2009. Europe: Antisemitism Up, Islamophobia Down, Muslim Media Network, http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?tag=university-ofbielefeld; http://www.antisemitism.org.il/eng/events/44847/Europe%E2%80% 93Study:antisemitismup,Islamophobiadown, retrieved November 12, 2011. Swank, Duane, and Hans-Georg Betz. 2003. Globalization, the Welfare State and Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe, Socio-Economic Review 1: 215245. Uni, Assaf. 2011. Holocaust Denier Set for Key Role in Greek Government?, Ynet News, November 11, 2011, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L4146898,00.html, retrieved November 11, 2011. van der Brug, Wouter, and Meindert Fennema. 2007. Causes of Voting for the Radical Right, International Journal of Public Opinion 19 (4): 474-484. van der Brug, Wouter, Meindert Fennema, and Jean Tillie. 2000. Anti-Immigrant Parties in Europe: Ideological or Protest Vote?, European Journal of Political Research 37 (1): 77-102. Ware, Alan. 1995. The Party Systems of the Established Liberal Democracies in the 1990s: Is This a Decade of Transformation?, Government and Opposition 30: 312-326.

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Weiss, Hilde. 2003. A Cross-National Comparison of Nationalism in Austria, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, and Poland, Political Psychology 24 (2): 377-401. Weitzman, Mark. 2006. Antisemitismus und Holocaust-Leugnung: Permanente Elemente des globalen Rechtsextremismus. In Globalisierter Rechtsextremismus? Die extremistische Rechte in der Ara der Globalisierung, edited by Thomas Greven and Thomas Grumke, 52-69 (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fur Sozialwissenschaften). . 2010. Magical Logic: Globalization, Conspiracy Theory, and the Shoah, sicsa.huji.ac.il/weitzman.pdf. Zick, Andreas, et al. 2009. European Conditions. Findings of a Study on GroupFocused Enmity in Europe (Berlin: Amadeu Antonio Stiftung/Universit t a Bielefeld).

Operation Mural and Moroccos Jewish Children


David G. Littman*
In November 1960, as a British citizen, I was newly established with my wife in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I began reading William Shirers Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It led me to ask the following questions: What could a Jew, living in a neutral country like Sweden or Switzerland during World War II, have done to help Jews? What can I do for Jews in distress right now? I knew of the plight of Jews in Arab lands after the birth of Israel, when hundreds of thousands were forcedor felt obligedto leave their native countries. Like 25,000 others, my wife, Gis` le, had fled Egypt a year e after the Suez War in the wake of the Free Officers Revolt. I volunteered my services to all international Jewish organizations in Geneva, but there was no enthusiasm until I reached my last door. There, Professor Jacques Bloch, the director of an organization for Jewish children (OSE), had received a visit two days earlier from the Jewish Agencys representative, Naftali Bargiora, who was looking for a volunteer to arrange Swiss holidays for Jewish children from Moroccoand from there to Israel. After meeting Bargiora, I quickly accepted this fascinating mission, to be called Operation Mural (after my code name, Mural). The 1961 story of Operation Mural was first chronicled in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, from a chapter in Shmuel Segevs 1984 book on Operation Yakhin. That led to a public recognition by Chaim Herzog, then president of Israel, followed by the Mimouna award (1986), which Gis` le and I e received from then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres before tens of thousands. A week later, a meeting was arranged in Tel Aviv for us to meet 120 of our children. It was an incredibly moving experience, and joy filled the

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room, with music. We were able to maintain contact with a fewtwo of whom were interviewed for the film Operation Mural: Casablanca 1961 some twenty years later. On June 1, 2008, a special commemorative ceremony was held in President Shimon Peress Jerusalem residence. Alongside former Mossad contacts and family members, Mr. Peres stated:
Well, it is a belated ceremony, but it doesnt lose its value, because what you did stands on its own legs and is not affected by time. I think that the saving of 530 children is, I imagine, the most moving experience a man can have. You say in Hebrew: The one who saves one life is like the one that saved the life of the whole world. But when you save 530 children, its really unforgettable. I want to express, on behalf of our people [and] our nation, our recognition of your courage, your wisdom, of your determination under extremely difficult conditions at a time when our connections were extremely weak [with Morocco]. And I must say, whenever I read again the story, I am moved to see the ingenuity and the courage that you have shown, and the results. So, thanks to it we have 530 people, families, [and] children alive, and its unique because in North Africa our connections were even weaker than in Europe, and the ground was less known And, I think, if you wouldnt do it, it wouldnt be done. In order to do it, you were in touch with the Mossad and I wish to express appreciation [to] the Mossad for all the performance, your activities, under cover, and [the] successful result.

On July 1, 2009, I received the Mossad Hero of Silence Order with these words: An order of highest esteem and appreciation awarded to a clandestine warrior, who risked his life and who served a sacred cause of the People and of the State of Israel. REMARKS
AT THE

PRESENTATION CEREMONY

Efraim Halevy (Mossad chief, 1998-2002), chairman of the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center (MLM), Glilot, Tel Aviv, recounts the operations place in Israels history in his very revealing presentation on July 1, 2009, just before I spoke and the prestigious Order was conferred on me:
It [was] an operation which took place on the background of a crisis which had its origin in the entire operation of bringing the Jews out of Morocco. It was an operation which took place at the time when tension in Morocco was rising, when the Algerian-Moroccan war was beginning to take a very ominous character. Within a couple of years of this operation, Morocco was involved in a war with Algeria. Israel and Israelis played a role in this warfar away from the shores of Israelprobably

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the first time in the history of the State of Israel that Israel began to function and to behave like a strategic power.

Halevy then provided a very revealing personal analysis:


But this operation related to the rescue of Jews, a function which is unique in the history of the international intelligence community. No other intelligence communityno other intelligence organization in the worldhas ever been involved in rescue operations, mass rescue operations of people, because basically the rescue of people, of masses of people, of large numbers of peoples, contradicts the very principle of intelligence activity, especially in enemy countryespecially in hostile environments. Normally, when intelligence operations were carried out, it is essential, it is a rule that you do not expose yourself with your identity to your environment. You dont make contacts, unnecessary contacts with people around you. You certainly dont reveal the nature of what your mission isnot only 10, 20, 50, 100, hundreds of people, but you dont reveal your mission to anybody. When we come to rescue operations, you cannot operate that way; you have to reveal your identity to people around you, and when youre in enemy country you have to expose yourself to hundreds of people at various points, at various stages of your activities. This was the way it has been in Iraq, this was the way it was in Morocco, this was the way it was in Syria, and Iran, and Ethiopia, and in Sudan. And the Israeli intelligence community operated for years in these environments at great riskat enormous risk for the people involved in these operations. Moreover, we dont usually recruit volunteers for these operations. Normally, these operations were carried out by people who served in the Mossad as intelligence officers, who had experience in intelligence activities, who know how to create contacts, who know how to use various types of equipment, who have a background, and, who come from a family of activities which are directly connected to the vision that they have to accomplish. In the case of rescue operations, very often the people who were recruited for these operations were not members of the Mossad, were not officers of the Mossad, very often [they were] volunteers. The risk in operating such an operation was very great, it was a risk taken by the commander . . . but it was also a very, very grave risk taken by the people who volunteeredand one such volunteer was David Gerald Littman, who had no experience at all in intelligence activities, who had no experience at all. [ . . . ] I believe that, in awarding this award to David Gerald Littman, we are bestowing upon him a very, very distinct and a very, very unique honor. But, in his coming here, after so many years, to accept this award, I think he is bestowing something very unique upon us. The realization, once again, of the solidarity of the people of Israel throughout the world is not an empty phrase. Its something very real, its something very concrete and its something which, in the end, continues an immense contribution to perpetuating the people of Israel and the State of Israel.

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Much moved by these words, I declared:


I am truly overwhelmed by what I have heard now and wish to express my profoundest thanks and deep gratitude to all those in the MLM [ . . . ] for their decision to confer on me this prestigious award and great honor for a humanitarian mission in Morocco forty-eight years ago. We shall cherish this moment forever. [ . . . ] I wish to say now a few words on the history of North African Jewry, which offers us a profound lesson in courage, perseverance and moral force, in spite of constant humiliation and discrimination [that] lasted well into the 20th century in Morocco. It ended only in 1912 with the French Protectorate, when the dhimmi system was abolished, whereby even the Chief Rabbi of Fez, Vidal Sarfaty, had to go barefoot on leaving the mellah [the Jewish quarter] as described in a 1911 document that I published in 1975. [ . . . ] After Israels rebirth, approximately 92,000 Moroccan Jews made their aliyah [return to Israel] before the gates were closed in 1956, soon after Moroccos independence. Clandestine departures continued, but somewhat haphazardly. Contacts by the Mossad with the new kings representatives were only beginning when I reached Casablanca on March 16, 1961, as a delegate of an international childrens organization, OSE, renamed OSSEAN [Oeuvre Suisse de Secours aux Enfants de lAfrique du Nord].

OTHER REMARKS

ABOUT

OPERATION MURAL:

I made the following comments about Operation Mural on other occasions:


That was two months after the illegal immigrant ship Egoz had capsized, killing 44 Moroccan Jews, half of them children. The gates of immigration from Morocco were then closed. I arrived in Casablanca on March 16 and Gis` le on the 31, and in early May I brought out our five-monthe old daughter, Diana. Our family cover as a normal Christian family was now complete, with me as OSSEANs emissary. We stayed at the Anfa, the citys prime hotel, and I soon developed contacts with key people in administrative circles, among them a senior official in Moroccos security services. Concurrently, I had clandestine meetings with my contacts, Gad Shahar and Pinhas Katzir, and, on the last evening of Operation Mural, July 23, 1961, with the head of the Mossad in Morocco, Alex Gatmon. I also worked with members of the misgueret, young Jews recruited to help their community to immigrate to Israel. Our goal was clear: to obtain government authorization for any Moroccan children to attend summer camps in Switzerland. With the assistance of the misgueret, I began drawing up lists for collective group passports as the Moroccan authorities preferred, rather than for individual

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child passports (as preferred by the Jewish Agency). The authorities agreed to prepare a list of Muslim children from families of the Martyrs of the Moroccan independence. Between June 26 and July 24, 1961, 530 Jewish children, some as young as seven, left for Switzerland in five convoys and later reached Israel. Operation Mural was soon followed by Operation Yakhin, in which nearly 100,000entire families, the young and the oldreached Israel between 1962 and 1964, using the same agreed system of collective passports, this time with the kings approval, after negotiations with the Mossad.

CLOSING REMARKS I ended my presentation on receiving the Hero of Silence Order with these thoughts:
Looking back, I can truly say that the best decision I ever made in my life was to marry my wife, Gis` le, and the second best was to volunteer to e bring out Jewish children from Morocco to Israel, via Switzerland. Our Casablanca mission remains indelible in our minds, as will this unforgettable moment here. In conclusion, I wish to quote those inspiring words of the prophet Jeremiah: Behold, I will bring them from the north country and gather them from the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child . . .: a great company shall return thither. They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them . . . . And there is hope in thine end, saith the Lord; that thy children shall come again to their own border [31:8-9]. Yes, the children of Israel have returned to to their own border to the Land of Israeland the long history of Moroccan Jewry is a special part of Israels unique saga, achieved with much tears, pain, and suffering, but also with joy and hope, and great expectations over the ages. The Casablanca mission remains indelibly in my mind. When I think of those days, let me say from my heart in simple Hebrew: Toda raba la MalamMany thanks to the MLM.

Operation Mural could not have been successful without the assistance of many others in different fields, especially Alex Gatmon and his wife, Carmit, in Morocco. I also gratefully acknowledge support from the head of the Mossad in Israel (Isser Harel) and his deputy, Shmulik Toledano; from Efraim Ronel in Paris; from my Casablanca contacts: Gad Shahar and Pinhas Katsir; and from Hubert Korshia, the head of the misgueret, and his wife, Miriam. Naftali Bargiora and the Jewish Agency were involved from the start, as was Youth Aliyah, with Moshe Kol as its head.

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*David G. Littmans role in Operation Mural is presented in the documentary film Operation Mural: Casablanca 1961 and in Shmuel Segevs book Operation Yakhim. Littman is now working on a detailed and documented narrative, retelling the story as it occurred 50 years ago.

Jerusalem or al-Quds?: The European Unions Choice


Bat Yeor*
The overwhelming effect of the international campaign of defamation and delegitimization of Israel does not easily allow identifying where the blows come from, nor its original source. Yet the operations and strategic center of this widespread war that seeks to replace Jerusalem with al-Quds is the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which brings together Muslim countries and those with a Muslim majority. Created in 1969, this gigantic multinational religious organization declares that it is rooted in the Koran and Sunna. It includes a large number of subsidiary committees as well as various organizations embracing theological, legal, and political sectors. Since 2000, the OIC stated in many documents that its mission is to speak for the Ummah, the worldwide Muslim community, which also includes those Muslims who emigrated to the West. It claims to be their protector, with a particular responsibility toward those living in Europe, since they are exposed to the immoral customs and ideas of non-Muslims. The OIC constantly castigates these customs and ideas as Islamophobia, making every effort to have it penalized in the international courts and by European governments. Countless international networks of multiculturalism, pro-immigration, and anti-Zionism, financed by European governments and the European Union, are totally devoted to it and act as its sounding board within Western societies. Those promoting the line blaming the West and the victimization of the Palestinians feed from its sap. In Europe its lobbies spread its arguments, and benefit in the universities and at the international level from maximum media exposure as they

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operate with the tacit approval of European governments and churches, which provide them with unofficial, opaque financing.1 This Euro-OIC cooperation takes place through countless dialogue networks, partnerships, and associations that preach diversity and multiculturalism and that generally invoke the noble motives of peace, justice and human rights. Drawn from human rights platitudes, these ideals incorporate the principles of Jihad and dhimmitude, imperceptible for a European public unaware of them. The subversion of the language and the twisting of its meaning are particularly apparent in the OICs declarations. For example, the foreign ministers of the member states of the OIC, meeting in New York in September 2008, reiterated in their final communiqu their commitment to the e noble principles of peace, humanism and tolerance to democracy and transparency, while most of their governments are among the cruelest and most corrupt dictatorships. They declared that the challenges of the 21st century required the solidarity of the OIC member states, rallying round the values of Islam.2 Yet, no country that applies sharia applies democracy and religious freedom as understood in the West. Less than three years later, the Arab masses were rising against the repression of the regimes represented by those same ministers, whose empty speeches slip into readymade phrases to seduce Western leaders. So while these governments promote genocidal jihad against Israel and never condemn the massacres of their non-Muslim and Muslim subjects, their foreign ministers emphasize the paramount importance of protecting cultural and religious diversity, greater freedom of speech, and mutual tolerance and understanding between peoples of different cultures and religions in order to advance the harmony of peace, freedom, and legal rights (11). The final communiqu gave assurances that this diversity should not e be a source of conflicts; but rather a source of mutual enrichment and dialogue between the religions, cultures and civilizations. Despite the respect expressed for diversity, tribal wars, fanaticism, suicide bombings, and religious hate provoked by the governments of these ministers have been rampant throughout the countries of the OIC, including Turkey, which occupies Kurdish lands and part of Cyprus.
1. On this subject, see the files prepared by Gerald Steinberg, NGO Monitor, http:/www.ngomonitor.org/index.php, and the French detailed file Souverainet e sous condition. Lampleur du soutien des gouvernements etrangers a des organiza ` tions politiques en Isra l, in Controverses, no. 15 (Paris: Editions de lEclat, e November 2010), 227-323. 2. Final Communiqu of the Annual Coordination Meeting of Ministers of e Foreign Affairs of the OIC Member States, United Nations Headquarters, New York, September 26, 2008, OIC/ACM-08/FC/FINAL, 4.

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The conference called for the immediate freeing of the Libyan Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of the murder of 270 people in the terrorist attack that exploded on board Pan Am flight 103 over the village of Lockerbie in Scotland on December 21, 1988. The conference also declared its complete solidarity with Omar Hassan al-Bashir, president of Sudan, who, according to the OIC, was unjustly accused by the International Criminal Court (2009 and 2010) of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide as part of the Khartoum regimes jihad wars in Sudan. The intangible and sacred nature of jihad explains the disagreements between justice based on the principles of Western jurisprudence and those based on the criteria of sharia that govern the OIC. Allowing for the European Unions policy of globalization and cross-cultural mixing, which has erased the historical, theological, and legal specificities of the Muslim world, these distinctions are hardly noticed by Europeans. Hence, the conference, basing itself upon the sanctity and laws of jihad, which promote striking fear in the heart of infidels by sudden and indiscriminate attacks, insisted that terrorism totally contradicts the peaceful nature and teachings of Islam, which exhorts tolerance, forgiveness, and non-violence (135). Such position assumes that infidelity being itself, in essence, an aggression against Islam, Muslim defense is called resistance rather than terrorism. These few comments introduce us to the ambiguities of human rights, its abuse of language, and the cracks in justice through the willful ignorance of the inherent contradictions in different and even opposing ethical systems. In its anti-Israel obsession, the OIC is supported and often inspired by the strategies of the pro-Islamists and senior European Union diplomats, only too happy to make available their skills and their countless anti-Israel platforms. After the OIC declared that the Palestinian question was the supreme cause of the Muslim world,3 Europe also hastened to adopt this path. This provides for the Palestinization of the cultural, social, and above all political life of Europe. This OIC position was repeated at its meeting in New York in 2008, where the Foreign Ministers of the member states, referring to Jerusalem, reaffirmed the centrality of the cause of al-Quds alSharif for the entire Islamic Ummah,4 thereby releasing among European Union strategists the motor for a delegitimization campaign against Israel.

3. The Islamic Conference summit meeting in Mecca (January 1981) declared that, The Palestinian should be viewed as the paramount issue of the Muslim nation; cf. extracts from the summit in Bat Yeor, Eurabia: The Euro-Arabic Axis (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), app. 4, 84. 4. Final Communiqu , 20 (italics in the original). e

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For three decades, Europe, servilely imitating the OIC, has effectively created for itself a major problem that is eating away and destroying it. This pathology is Palestine, which it made the hub of its international policy, transforming it into a symbol of peace and universal harmony in a world that would not know justice until its coming. The only obstacle to this paradise is the Machiavellian Israel, the oppressor and usurper of Palestine, whose purity as a peaceful victim is the harbinger of global justice. For forty years this logic has governed perceptions of the Israeli-Arab conflict. Any argument that contradicts it provokes a pathological hatred, while Palestinian-European correctness, totally resistant to both evidence and reason, rejects its author as a pariah. Europe does not yet dare use armed force against Israel, whose existence it claims to defend, while advising it to commit suicide. Europe fights Israel with the infamous Nazi weapons of delegitimization, defamation, propaganda, hatred, and attempts to destroy its economy through boycotts, disinvestment, and sanctions (BDS). Toward this goal it encourages an international campaign of incitement to hatred by financing anti-Israel NGOs and lobbies. Europe claims that Jewish existence in its ancestral homeland, Judea, and in Samaria is an occupation, a colonization. Israel has in this way become a state that is occupying its own historical homeland; in Orwellian language, propagandists speak of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land that is called Judea, and not of the ethnic and religious cleansing of Jews from their homeland through wars, expulsions, dispossession, and the dehumanizing ruling of dhimmitude. Euro-jihadists invoke Palestinian resistancenot a terrorism that has spread throughout the planet. The European Union has used every stratagem to force Israel to selfdestruct in the name of Palestine, which would lead to an era of justice and peace in the world in the same way the charnel houses of Auschwitz were meant to purify humanity from Jews. I want to recall here the three main steps that led to the Palestinization process of Europe, in line with the desires of the OTC: 1. The Declaration of the Nine in November 1973, where for the first time the European community decided that part of the Jordanian people were an Arab Palestinian people, distinct from the Jordanians. It recognized Arafatarch-terrorist and henchman of Egyptas their sole President for Life, and demanded that Israel withdraw to the indefensible 1947-48 armistice lines. France had concocted this position several years earlier and had succeeded in imposing it on the Community of Nine, notwithstanding the reservations of certain countries, including Holland, that deemed it immoral. On the Arab side, this initiative followed the conditions laid down by the Arab League for accepting a European rap-

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prochement policy. On the European side, it continued the traditional antisemitic, anti-Zionist policy of World War II set by those who conceived and carried out the Shoah, and their collaborators, discreetly maintained in their positions in the postwar period. Within this setting the unofficial Euro-Arab dialogue started.5 2. The London Declaration in June 1977, reaffirming with even greater authority the same position as that of the Nine, who had been vexed by the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty (1977-79), whichdespite all their effortsthey were unable to derail. 3. The Venice Declaration in June 1980, particularly severe toward Israel and offered as a consolation to the Arab countries furious at Egypts defection and Europes failure. Faced with the reduced oil supply as a result of the Khomeini revolution of 1979, Europe tried to convince the Arabs to increase production. The moral of the transaction: Israel versus oil required that the State of Israel be demonized. These declarations were issued to mitigate Palestinian international terrorism in Europe, to protect European interests in the Middle East, and to delete the black pages of colonization of Arab countries. Even though these three declarations were purported to be highly moral, they in fact punished Israel for not having let itself be overwhelmed by the armies of three Arab countries that sought to eliminate it in 1967Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, allied to Arab bands within the country. These countries continued Nazi European antisemitic policy, justified solely by European economic and oil interests. Such were the foundation and motives behind the European policy toward Israel. Posing as a doxa based upon morality and peace, Europe, wrapped in a specious ethic, tried to impose it lock, stock, and barrel upon Israel. The Venice Declaration of June 1980 anticipated that of the Islamic summit in Fez in September 1980 and of the OIC meeting in Mecca in January 1981, which bound Muslim countries to impose a political and economic boycott on countries with embassies in al-Quds al-Sharif, Jerusalem

5. We note in particular Walter Hallstein, an officer in the Wehrmacht, who under Konrad Adenauer reached the very highest positions of state and had a leading influence in the Foreign Ministry. He became first president of the European Commission (1957-67) and remained an influential politician until his death in March 1982; Hans Globke, co-author of the Nuremberg racist laws, a minister of Chancellor Adenauer and his eminence grise in the postwar period. On the French side, Vichy ministers and diplomats quietly continued their career in postwar France.

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for Jews and Christians. This Mecca Islamic summit recommended the following: Confirming commitment of the Islamic states to the Liberation Arab al-Quds to become the capital of the independent Palestinian state, and rejecting any situation that may prejudice full Arab sovereignty over the city. Confirming the commitment of Muslim states to utilize all their potentialities to oppose the Israeli decision to annex al-Quds; endorsing the decision to impose a political and economic boycott on those states that recognized the Israeli decision, contributing to its implementation; or setting up embassies in al-Quds al-Sharif. Inviting all countries to respect international legitimacy by abstaining from dealing with the Israeli occupation authorities in any form that may be construed by these authorities as amounting to implicit recognition or acceptance of the status quo, imposed by their declaring that al-Quds to be the unified and eternal capital of the Zionist entity, and in particular inviting all countries to refrain from: a) signing any agreement in al-Quds al-Sharif; b) paying any official visits to al-Quds; c) conducting any formal talks in al-Quds.6 This OIC declaration, in January 1981, called to support the al-Quds Committee and to ratchet up the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinians from Zionist colonialism and occupation. Was that not precisely what Europe was saying to Israel, a colonialist, occupying people, thereby refuting its own roots? Was it not providing political, legal, international, and financial support to the Palestinian terrorist jihad against Israel? This political link between the OIC and the European Union did not only appear in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict but also in internal European politics concerning the massive Muslim immigration into Europe, which started in the years 1974-75. It was then that a joint European-Arab cell, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation (PAEAC), was established with the task of passing on the political demands from the Arab League countries to the European community and to monitor their implementation within Europe. At the Euro-Arab dialogue session held in Tunis February 10-12, 1977, the Arab delegation had proposed a joint EuroArab cell for political consultations.7 In a leaflet prepared in 1994, at the
6. The Conference of the Islamic Summit in Mecca (January 1981), cf. Bat Yeor, Eurabia, 288. 7. Documents DActualit Internationale, Minist` re des Affaires Etrang` res, e e e Paris, nos. 16-17 (1977):319-324, 11.

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time of PAEACs breakup in the official political body of the Barcelona Declaration, PAEAC prided itself on having obtained the Venice Declaration of 1980. Opening the way toward Eurabia, PAEACs networks proclaimed in Europe the grandeur of Muslim civilization, promoted the spread of Arab culture, advocated for changes in teaching in schools and universities, and called for special deference and respect toward immigrants and their culture, blasphemy laws, sex segregation, censorship, and harsh antiZionist policy. These networks imposed multiculturalism and its politically correct lethal framework. Such framework developed rapidly into a multicommunitarianism, recalling the regimes installed in the conquered territories of the Arab and Turkish caliphates founded on jihad and dhimmitude. The terms of settlement of an immigration that was to profoundly transform Europe and the Nines policy toward Israel were jointly discussed in the summaries of the biannual, unofficial meetings of PAEAC (the EuroArab dialogue), co-chaired by an Arab and a European, and sponsored by the General Secretary of the Arab League and the European Commission. This cooperation between Europe and the OIC resulted from innumerable networks bringing these two bodies together at every level over decades. That is how the OIC succeededwithout too much effort, it is trueto Palestinize the European political, cultural, and media sectors and to Islamize its demography, culture, universities, and policies. As is clearly evident from the sessions documents, both cultural dynamics were interrelated. Although Eurabian networks pretend that this whole issue is another conspirational theory, references to this policy exist in numerous sources, not least in the French minister for foreign affairs, in OIC texts, and in U.S. academia. What does Palestinization mean? First, it means creating a people as a substitute for Israel, which takes over its history and therefore its legitimacy. From whence comes the delegitimization of Israel, an intruder state in the region and in history? The Palestinization of history denies Israels identity and its cultural and historic rights within its homeland, including Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem.8 For the OIC, this process is part and parcel of Islamic theology, which regards the Bible as simply a falsified version of the Koran. According to Islam, biblical history is Islamic history, and the biblical characters we see represented in churches are all Muslim prophets who have virtually no connection with the facts reported in the Bible. This context explains the Islamization of the Jewish and Christian religious heritage, an approach that involves denying the identity of these
8. See this attempted subversion of history jointly undertaken by Europe and the OIC in Bat Yeor, Europe: Globalization and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).

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two religions, since Christianity views itself as emerging from Judaism, whose scriptures it adopted. If the Bible is an Islamic account, Christianity and not just Judaism are both falsifications of Islam. The negation of biblical history, with which Europe has assiduously linked itself by claiming that Israel is a colonizing intruder in its own homelandthat is to say, challenging the historic rights of the Jews to their own homelandalso negates Christian history and confirms the Koranic interpretation refuting the historicity of both Torah and Gospels. Hence, if there was never a history of Israel or of the Gospels, but only the history of Ibrahim, Ishmael, Issathe Koranic Jesusif all the biblical kings and prophets were Muslim, in what religious belief is the West rooted? Would it not be in the Koran? That is the logical conclusion of Europes choice, when, furious at the return of the Jews to Jerusalem in 1967, it deliberately decided to chase them out and attribute their heritage to those who, by a war invasion, had illegitimately occupied it since 1948, expelling and dispossessing all its Jewish inhabitants. In a nutshell, if the Israelis are foreign colonialists, occupiers of their own country, it means they have no past, no history; and if Judaism is just a tissue of lies, the same applies to Christianity. If Israel never existed in the past, then its modern restoration is just a colonial deception on territory to which it has no historical, religious, or cultural claims, and so its destruction is justified. But if history testifies to the contrary, then Europe becomes willingly responsible for the abominable crime of genocidewiping out the past existence of a people in order to remove its current legitimacy and its human, religious, cultural, and historical rightsnot to mention the participation, organization, and financing by European nations and the European Commission of an international campaign of incitement to hatred for the dismembering of Israel. The Palestinization of Europe is not just its theological Islamization through Palestinianism, the ideology for Israels demise by disclaiming a peoples territorial sovereignty, history, and culture, in conformity with the jihadist worldview. Palestinianism is also a paranoid obsession to hound Israel while claiming such hounding is for its own good. By proclaiming that the Palestinian cause is the cause of peace and justice, Europe expends great effort, energy, and violence in sending Israel back behind the 1948 lines it knows are indefensible. Hundreds of thousands of books, accusations, and speeches subvert the facts and impose this policy. Since its 1981 symposium, the OICs requests have not changed: Expulsion of Israel from all the territories that were annexed and occupied by Jordan until 1967, including Jerusalem; refusal to renounce or abandon a single inch of these territories; recognition of total Palestinian national sovereignty; the rejection of any situation that would harm Arab sovereignty

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over al-Quds al-Sharif; endorsement of the Arab Palestinian peoples inalienable rights, including the rights of return, self-determination, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. The Mecca summit (1981) recommended: Stressing the commitment to liberate all the Palestinian and Arab territories occupied since the 1967 aggression, including Holy AlQuds al-Sharif; no renouncing or relinquishment of any part of these territories or impairment of the full national sovereignty over these territories [sic]. Rejecting any situation that would prejudice [sic] Arab sovereignty over al-Quds al-Sharif. Pledging to recover the national inalienable rights of the Palestinian Arab people, including their right to return to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on their national soil, led by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people [sic].9 There followed the detailed announcement of the action plan to boycott Israel, the setting of an international defamation campaign, and the continuation of the OIC offensive by any and all means. This same anti-Israel strategy has been repeated and maintained in all its details in the documents of the OIC and reaffirmed at its 2008 New York meeting and thereafter. HUMAN RIGHTS
FOR

EVERYONEEXCEPT ISRAELIS

Europe is not saying anything else, having chosen al-Quds over Jerusalem. On December 6, 2010, a large group of former heads of state and commissioners of the European Unionthat is, those who obeyed the OICs orders and perhaps even encouraged, promoted, and strengthened themsent a letter to the current leaders of the European Union reminding them of the decisions that they had taken concerning Israel and requesting them to oblige Israel to comply with them.10 It is no surprise to note that the European Union is poaching on the OICs preserveadopting its policies, locking up and ghettoizing Israel within its indefensible 1948 armistice lines, and proceeding with the Islamization of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. These leaders, while they acknowledged the enormous sums paid to the Palestinian Authority to build
9. Extracts of this conference are in Bat Yeor, Eurabia, 285. 10. Andrew Rettman, Former EU Leaders Challenge Ashton on Israel, http:// euobserver.com/9/31477, December 10, 2010. Cf. also http://www.dhimmitude. org/eurabia/EU-Anti-Zionist-Campaign-Unveiled.pdf. A comparison of this letter with sections 20-27 of the 1981 Mecca Islamic Conference proves their similarity.

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another state within this area, demanded that the European Union require Israel to cede to the second Palestinian statethe first one being Jordan, with 78% of the League of Nations Palestine100% of the territories that had been liberated from illegal Jordanian occupation in 1967, with Jerusalemthat is, al-Qudsas its capital. The signatories recalled that for decades (in fact since 1973), the European Union had supported and financed the new states institutions and infrastructure, which it was busy building on Israels flank. In order to force Israel to follow their dictates, the signatories forcefully demanded a boycott campaign, sanctions, and reprisals against the Jewish state, because, as they claimed without further explanation, Europe has a vital interest in the creation of a Palestinian state. What is involved, claim the signatories, is the European Unions credibility and good diplomatic and commercial relations with the Arab world. This implies that the European Union is constrained to help in the demise of Israel in not failing its commitments to the Arab world, thereby preserving its good relations with it. The BDS campaign against Israelrequired by the signatories of this letteris based upon two pillars: the OIC, and the one carrying out its nefarious deeds: the European Union, which under the cover of human rights has launched an international campaign of incitement to hatred against Israel, based upon deceitful allegations it had concocted itself, while denying human rights to Israelis. The names of the signatories to this letter will enter history as the founders of the Palestinization of Europe. Among them we can mention European Union functionaries Romano Prodi, Javier Solana, Chris Patten, and Benita Ferrero-Waldner; among heads of state and former ministers, Richard von Weizs cker (former German federal a president, 1984-94), Helmut Schmidt, and the former British minister in the Blair government, Clare Short. The French are the most numerous on the list: Hubert V drine, Herv de Charrette, Roland Dumas, Lionel Jospin, e e Jean-Fran ois Poncet. c PALESTINIANNAZISM CONNECTION: DE-JUDAIZING CHRISTIANITY In a large number of documents going back to the 1970s, the OIC recommends cooperation with churches in the fight against Israel. This emerged in particular from a conference held in Amman in 2004 as part of the Muslim-Christian dialogue. The official theme was the protection against Israel of Muslim and Christian holy places in Palestine. The purpose of the Amman conference was to establish a global strategy for the reIslamization of Jerusalem, because, as one of the lecturers explained, Jerusalem is central in the spiritual edifice of the Jewish Zionist entity, and its

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expulsion would make this entire spiritual edifice and the Zionist entity come tumbling down like a pack of cards. At th Amman conference, the speakers emphasized the major importance of Muslim-Christian solidarity in the fight to seize al-Quds and to drive Israel out of it. Their proposals envisaged a whole range of schemes, including the adoption of the Muslim and Christian holy sites in al-Quds by every mosque, church, and monastery, and by Muslim and Christian institutions worldwide. They recommended a large-scale, joint Muslim and Christian media global campaign in the United Nations, the United States, and international NGOs to expose Israels falsehoods. Promoting al-Quds would be done through films, television, songs, and festivals, under the supervision of a special Muslim and Christian cell that would be working with all the appropriate means. Within this context is the Kairos Palestine declaration of 2010, which brands Israel, using the terms occupation of Arab lands, colonization, and apartheid; while conversely, Palestinians are innocent victims resisting the occupation and aspiring only to security, justice, and peace. The Kairos declaration, hardly surprisingly, condemns all Christian theology that is based upon the Bible or on biblical faith or history that would legitimize Israel. Understand if you can . . . What would remain of Christian theology, faith, or history if you get rid of Israel and the Bible? Would Christian Palestinianism be the camouflage of Nazism, which had planned to deJudaize Christianity? The document ends with a call to people, businesses, and countries to take part in the boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel. This request is in line with the demands of the OIC and similar to the letter of the European former leaders, who are the ones responsible for the current Eurabian situation. What are the consequences of the choice of al-Quds by Europe for its identity, the criteria for assessing its own history, and its immigration policy? The Europe that chose al-Quds and rejected Jerusalem is rejecting its own basic identity. It is denying the Bible, which is not merely a religious text that states various values, but also a chronicle of the coming of Jesus and Christianity, which for Christians is its culmination. If there had not been a Jewish people, nor biblical history or geography, there would not be Christianity either. Accordingly, Judaism and Christianity are just a huge aberration, and what remains are the Koran and the Muslim Jesus, whose eschatological mission is the destruction of Christianity. The choice of al-Quds replaces the Bible with the Koran. Europe knows that the OIC has decided to move its head office from Jeddah to alQuds. The OIC is deemed the most suitable institution to represent the world caliphate, its mission being to work to root the universal Ummah in

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the Koran and Sunna. What church could remain in al-Quds? By seeking to destroy Israel, the Church is destroying its own very existence. With such a disavowal of its own roots and identity, should we still be surprised that Europe has sold off its peoples cheaply on their own territory? In the same way that the European Union has not ceased to harass Israel and to challenge its roots and rights, it has dragged to court those courageous Europeans who have asserted their own identity, rights, and freedoms. Transposing its anti-Israeli policy to Europe, the European Union wants to create a tabula rasa of historical nationalisms and of the privileges of sovereign states to transfer to the United Nationsdominated by the OICthe world governance of human rights. The essential rights of Europeans to security, their history, and freedom of expression are disproved, rebutted, and dismissed by the OIC under the guise of Islamophobia and its vehement request for European multiculturalism. Rooted in the civilization of jihad and dhimmitude, Islamophobia imposes its own criteria through its European and UN go-betweens in its new Western empire. So while Europe prides itself on creating universal, humanitarian governance,11,12 on the international scene, the OIC is implementing a Koranic order of Islamic human rights. The OICs domination of the United Nations was recently illustrated by the Goldstone Report. On its Web site, the OIC states its support for this report, which contains accusations of war crimes allegedly committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip in January 2009. Goldstone, according to the Web site, was adopted by the Human Rights Council in Geneva with the support of the Islamic group, which continues to defend it on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly so that it will be referred to the Security Council. The OIC has reaffirmed its wish to see its content adopted by the international community as an international document. With the repudiation of Israel, the European Union is repudiating itself. It is putting the emphasis on the Greco-Roman heritage and eliminating that of Christianity to please the OIC and Muslim migrants. When its bodies named it, they eliminated its biblical and therefore Jewish basis, as if Christianity had arisen in the world out of nowhere. This identity repression is just one more concession to Islam and its culture that is hostile to Jews and Christians, an issue that has been neither recognized nor repudiated. To throw Judaism (Israel) and Christianity (the West) into the dustbin of his11. Mathieu Bock-Cot , Lempire europ en universel contre le Souverainisme e e am ricain, in Controverses: LEurope, amie dIsra l? no. 16 (Paris: Editions de e e lEclat, March 2011), 91. 12. http://www.oic-oci.org/topic_detail.asp?t_id=5154&x_key=.

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tory is to remove human, historical, religious, cultural, and national rights from Jews and Christians. The destruction of Israel will let Europe free itself from its own identity, one of the central objectives of Nazism. It flaunts itself as global, multicultural, and Islamicdeterritorialized in the vision of Swedens former PM Carl Bildtacculturated and without a past, reduced to being just an ungrateful beneficiary of Islamic cultural superiority and an empty space in which to welcome the immigrants and to subsidize their requirements while financing their economic development in their own countries. As in days gone by, when Byzantine princes paid tribute to the Turks to stop them invading their lands, today Europe has to pay a ransom to Muslim Mediterranean countries to protect itself from their invasion. The world governance the European Union seeks to obtain through the elimination of European national sovereignties and cultures leads it to favor Muslim immigration, a factor for interbreeding, rapprochement, and merger of Europe into the OIC fold. Today, parties on the left are promoting the policy of the OIC and of the Alliance of Civilizations: open up Europe to let young people from Africa and Asia have two- to five-year stays in the European Union and finance their businesses when they go back home. Will Europeans be able to support their fragile economy together with those of Africa and Asia? Are they unaware that they have become the dhimmis of the OIC, governed by their ministers in its service? Eurabia and Palestinianism come from the same rejection and the same policy applied to the destruction of the nation-state and the manifestation of the spirit and culture of peoples condemned to extinction in the globalized, humanitarian utopia. Their points in common are the war against Israel; the de-Judaization of Christianity; the de-Christianization of Europe; and the joint European Union-OIC policy to strengthen UNs global governance that the OIC aims to monopolize. This suicidal approach is specific to Europe; it does not exist in China or in Indiaeven less in Muslim countries. Systematically pursued over decades by Europes chancelleries, this policy requires an infrastructure, bodies, and screening of recruitment in the political, media, and cultural sectors, which have consistently purged any disturbing element. The Palestinization of politics since 1973 led to state control over culture and the media and the development of a single, authoritarian thinking, dictated for the entire European Union by a conclave of commissioners making arbitrary decisions.

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EUROPE GOES

TO

WAR

Europe, it is true, has renounced internal wars, but only to become the mercenaries of the OIC. With its armies, networks, and financing in the billions, it supports the Muslim advance into Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, in the name of a version of human rights that is challenged by sharia and politically tainted, since it refuses equal rights for non-Muslims. Provided with a mandate by the United Nations, which is to say by the OIC, Europe in the name of the right to protection can finally go to war to defend its allies interests. That is why it is helping the Muslim Brotherhood rise in Egypt, supporting Islamist elements in Libya, and trying to replace Israel with the caliphate, after having destabilized Europe. With the anarchic uprisings of the Arab Spring (March 2011), most European countries and the United States, led by France and its foreign minister, Alain Jupp , have become involved in Arab and African tribal e conflicts, invoking the right of interference and the right of protection. These rights, however, as we have said, are applied selectively, because they are never invoked to protect Christians against persecution in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, or Pakistan; they are also not used to protect sailors arbitrarily taken hostage by the Somalis. Europe would find it grotesque and indecent to invoke these rights against the spread of anti-Israeli hatred, calls for genocide against the Jews, against the deluge of rockets launched from Gaza into Israel, or against the hideous crimes perpetrated by its Palestinian allies against Israeli civilians. Nor has it reacted to the Islamization of the biblical holy places in Hebron, both Jewish and Christian, by UNESCO, acting on orders of the OIC. Yet this approach is a serious breach of the religious and historical rights of Jews and Christians, and contradicts human rights. It is evident that those Europeans wishing to restore the essential values that caused the flowering of their civilization can only proceed through the destruction of occult mechanisms grafted, without their knowledge, by those promoting Eurabia onto the recovery of the Nazi heritage and pursued in the postwar period by its servants within the political and diplomatic systems, as has been recently investigated by German historians and journalists. What in the 1970s seemed to be just a little ritual dance about the hopes for the disappearance of Israel and the French infatuation with Arafat, carried out by a corps de ballet of European politicians and diplomats, has proven today to be a hell for Europe. These days of Passovers commemoration remind us that Israel, in its march from slavery to freedom, gave to humanity the principles of equality, unalienable human dignity, and mans individual responsibility. Against this message of freedom and mans basic and imprescriptible rights, the supporters of totalitarianism and of the dehu-

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manizing system of dhimmitude strain unremittingly to replace the right to life by the granting of tolerance to exist in infamous dhimmitude.
*Bat Yeor is an Egyptian-born British writer on Jews and Christians living under Islamic governments. Her several books include Islam and Dhimmitude, Eurabia, and her most recent work, Europe Globalization and the Coming of the Universal Caliphate (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011). She is married to David Littman.

Conspiracy, Nest-ce Pas?


Hadassa Ben-Itto*
We democratic countries see the masses gathered in the public square and are very sympathetic to the outcry against dictatorships and to the fight for freedom. But I am concerned with the masses in the streets and with the outcome of a brainwashing process that has been going on for such a long time. Lies have been spread around the world as a strategic weapon. Public opinion and public discourse have been polluted, and now the masses are standing up and trying to tell the leaders what to do. If you paid careful attention to what happened in Cairos Tahrir Square, for instance, you saw the placards of Mubarak with a Star of David on his face. Lara Logan, an American journalist, was sexually molested in the middle of the square and was called a Jew, although she is not Jewish. She does not have to be Jewish; the word Jew has become an accepted insult in the public square. A well-known preacher stood up and talked not about freedom but about the Jews, about what is going to happen to us when the masses take over. So we are rightfully worried.

THE PROTOCOLS: A LONG

AND

LASTING IMPRINT

These deeply disturbing phenomena of attacks on Jews have been fueled by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a virulent antisemitic screed produced in France in the late nineteenth century. The Protocols, which proclaims that there is a Jewish plan for achieving global domination, has been proven to be both a forgery and a lie.

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World democratic societies have sinned for years by ignoring this phenomenon. After being a judge for many years, I retired to study The Protocols. After six years of research I wrote a book about my findings that has now appeared in ten languages, most recently in Arabic. The Protocols was never translated into Hebrew because we ignored it, thinking it was a bad joke. One of the stories in my book is about a retired agent named Henri Rollin of the French Secret Service, who wrote books about European politics during the 1920s and the 1930s. Rollin was well educated about Russia and, having been a secret agent, had a lot of information that was not available to others. He had realized the importance of The Protocols of the Elders of Zionmaintaining that it influenced everything that was happening in Europe, most important the infiltration of the Nazis into European politics. Rollin wrote an 800-page book entitled Lapocalypse de Notre Temps, all about how The Protocols had left its imprint on European politics. Lapocalypse was published in France on September 3, 1939, and you would think at the beginning of World War II the book would have been completely ignored. The Nazis, however, did not ignore the book. When they conquered France they banned it, and so it vanished. Only in 1991 was Rollins book republished by a small publisher in France. I see myself as continuing in Rollins footsteps by following the history of The Protocols through the last decade and into the twenty-first century, and its impact on world politics. Why is The Protocols, a completely fraudulent document, important today? Because it is being published around the world, with new editions in Arabic almost every year, and in Persian and Turkish as well. These publications are financed by government money and distributed not only in Arabic-speaking countries, but also to Muslim minorities around the world. New editions are necessary because the introductions are updated every year. The introductions say if you do not believe that the Jews are really planning to take over the world, look at what is happening in your country and region. Everything that is happening is rooted in The Protocols, an implementation of the Jewish Conspiracy. If there is a financial crisis, an AIDS or a flu epidemic, a terrorist attack, an upheaval or a catastrophe, one can always point to a chapter or page in The Protocols because it is such a devious document that everything is there. There is a whole detailed plan of how to take over the world.

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THE PROTOCOLS

AS

RATIONALE

During the preparation for the Russian Revolution, Russian Bolshevik cells could not operate openly in Russia, so they were active elsewhere in Europe, including France. A special envoy of the Russian secret police was sent to France to uncover the Bolshevik cells. The Russian Secret Service and the Black Hundreds, an ultra-nationalist movement in Russia whose slogan was Beat the Jews and Save Russia, were trying to convince the czar that the Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution. The czar was already convinced, but they needed proof. More than 100 years ago, a French woman by the name of Juliette Adam had a salon. In those days, women still did not have the right to vote or be elected, but important and educated women who wanted to make a difference established salons. Adam was a very educated womana historian, newspaper owner, and authorand she had a political salon where many antisemites gathered. There is much evidence that the preparations for the Dreyfus trial, in which a French Jewish army officer was wrongly convicted of treason and later exonerated, took place in her salon. Juliette Adams husband was the chief of police in Paris, who collaborated with the Russian envoy sent by the Secret Police, Piotr Rachkowsky, because the French did not like Bolshevik terrorists preparing bombs in small Paris hotels. Rachowsky, who was looking for ways to implicate Jews, was invited to Adams salon, where someone told him of a book, banned in France but that the salon possessed, that could be turned into something against the Jews.

THE PROTOCOLS: ANTISEMITIC PROPAGANDA


The Protocols is a reworking of a book written by a French lawyer, Maurice Joly, in the 1860s. In Jolys biography, he tells how he decided to write a book to describe to the French people the danger they were in from the fearsome dictatorial regime of Napoleon III. He decided to write an allegory in the form of a dialogue between two people in the afterworld: Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Machiavelli would represent the ideas and practices of Napoleon III and his terrible regime, while Montesquieu would represent Jolys liberal ideas. Joly published it in Brussels because the French would not publish it. He was arrested, tried, and went to prison. His book was banned. In Jolys book, Machiavelli explains to Montesquieu why the people are dumb and why a dictator is necessary and what tools he can use to take over, to dominate his country and the world. There are chapters in this book dedicated to each subjecthow to take over the police force, how to take

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over the legal system, how to do away with all the lawyers, how to raise havoc in the labor field, and how to plant bombs in strategic locations. It is a manual on how to dominate the world. The voice of Montesquieu becomes weaker while the voice of Machiavelli becomes stronger, and at the end Montesquieu says, Oh God, what have you allowed? Through allegory, Joly was telling the French people that this was what was happening in France. Some 60 to 65 percent of The Protocols are verbatim passages from this book. Chapters were added to make it the Jewish plan to dominate the world. The Protocols was first published in Russia in 1905 by a religious fanatic in a monastery. From there it went around the world. After the revolution, officers of the White Army, who fled Russia, carried The Protocols with them to convince the world that what happened to the Romanov dynasty in Russia would happen to them. The Jewish plan was to topple all the monarchs and governments in Europe. Between 1919 and 1921, The Protocols was published in every language in the world. Six editions, blaming the Jews for World War I, were published in Germany in one year. The Protocols is not just a libel; it is a political document describing a Jewish criminal conspiracy to dominate the world. Almost the first leader outside Russia who picked it up was Adolf Hitler. As a strategic step, the Nazis decided to use The Protocols as a central part of their ideology, as we know from correspondence between Hitler and Goebbels. A German historian describes in his book how Hitler used The Protocols on the way to the Final Solution, but Hitler had already mentioned it in Mein Kampf. The Nazis were masters of the Big Lie, and their tactics have been adopted by the Muslim world. The theory is that the bigger the lie, the better success of brainwashing the public. THE BERN TRIAL
OF

1934

There was a major trial in Bern, Switzerland, in 1934 after a new Nazi organization started using The Protocols, distributing copies at a public rally. The local Jews, who realized what was happening across the border in Germany, decided to take the Swiss Nazis to trial. In the introduction to the English edition of my book on The Protocols, Lord Chief Justice of England Harry Wolfe wrote that the Bern trial is probably the most important trial ever because in this trial, live witnesses testified in court, describing the origins of The Protocols and the use made of this document. They included the head of the opposition to the czar, historians, politicians, and former agents who escaped the revolution and decided to bear witness to this forgery.

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The Germans established what they called Weltdienst, a center located in Erfurt, headed by Ulrich Fleischhauer, that spread Nazi ideology and propaganda around the world. Nazi branches or organizations with different names started springing up in every country, fed on Nazi ideology and tactics. At the 1934 Bern trial, the Swiss judge ordered both sides to appoint experts. The Swiss Nazi defendants could not find an expert to testify that The Protocols were an authentic document, so Ulrich Fleischhauer came to Switzerland to be the expert. When the judge asked him if he was an expert on The Protocols, he said that he was not, but that he was an expert on the Jews. Every trial against The Protocols before the Bern trial ended with a settlement, because the defendants could never prove the authenticity of The Protocols, but when the Nazis came into power they prohibited any settlement in a trial concerning The Protocols, deciding to use courtrooms as a forum to spread Nazi ideology.

THE PROTOCOLS

IN THE

UNITED STATES

The Protocols was also published in the United States, where its biggest promoter was Henry Ford, who published 97 excerpts in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent; these scurrilous antisemitic articles were then collected in a book called The International Jew. Ford was sued in court by American Jews, and the trial went on for six years (1921-1927). In the end, Ford settled with the Jewish community. In 1964, the United States Senate appointed a committee to study The Protocols. In a unanimous report nine senior senators called The Protocols the hoax of the century and a document endangering America.

THE PROTOCOLS

IN THE

MUSLIM WORLD

The Protocols, first used by the Russian czars and then by the communists, later served as a central theme in Nazi propaganda. It now has been handed over to the Muslim world. The Protocols is a central issue in Arab and Muslim propaganda, even in what we call moderate countries, including countries that made peace with Israel. It is everywhere, in every Arabic book fairmore in Egypt, less in Jordan. It is in public discourse, in newspapers, and even in TV soap operas. It describes world history from beginning to end, including the French Revolution, as part of the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Until the end of World War II, the problem was the Jews, but after the establishment of the State of Israel, the target has become Israel.

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The Protocols is a best-seller in all Muslim countries because this is what they have been told over and over again in their media and schoolbooks. When my book was translated into Arabic, the translator and publisher, both graduates of the Hebrew University, one a Christian Arab and the other a Muslim Arab, told me that until they read my book, they did not know that The Protocols is a forgery. THE DANGER PERSISTS There is no Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, but there is an anti-Jewish conspiracy. Using The Protocols against the Jews for 100 years is part of a conspiracy, and everybody who takes part in it is a conspirator against us. It starts with the Jews, but it does not end with the Jews. The first airplane that was hijacked was an Israeli airplane, and now we line up in every airport for security checks, so the world should be concerned. The danger of contaminating the public discourse with lies is a danger to the whole world.
*Hadassa Ben-Itto, author of The Lie That Wouldnt Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (2005), served for 31 years as a judge in all levels of the Israeli courts, including as an acting justice of the Supreme Court. She has also served as an official representative of the State of Israel in various international forums, including UNESCO and the United Nations General Assembly, and is currently the honorary president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. This essay, which has been modified for publication in this issue of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, first appeared in Jerusalem Issue Brief, Vol. 10, No. 38, and is based on Judge Ben-Ittos oral presentation at the Institute for Contemporary Affairs of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on February 24, 2011.

What Happened to Pakistans Jews?


Shalva Weil*
Pakistan was never traditionally antisemitic. In fact, it may come as a surprise that Pakistan hosted small, yet thriving, Jewish communities from the 19th century until the end of the 1960s. Recently, Yoel Reuben, a Pakistani Jew living in the Israeli town of Lod whose family originated in Lahore, documented some of the history of the Jewish communities with photographs of original documents. When India and Pakistan were one country, before the partition in 1947, the Jews were treated with tolerance and equality. In the first half of the 20th century, there were nearly 1,000 Jewish residents in Pakistan living in different cities: Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta, and Lahore. The largest Jewish community lived in Karachi, where there was a large synagogue and a smaller prayer hall. There were two synagogues in Peshawar, one small prayer hall in Lahore belonging to the Afghan Jewish community, and one prayer hall in Quetta. Even today, according to unofficial sources, there are rumors that some Jews remain in Pakistan, including doctors and members of the free professions, who converted or passed themselves off as members of other religions. The Jews of Pakistan were of various origins, but most were from the Bene Israel community of India, and came to Pakistan in the employ of the British. Yifah, a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, relates that her great-great-grandfather Samuel Reuben Bhonkar, who was a Bene Israel, came to Karachi in British India to work as a jailer, and died there in 1928. The Bene Israel originated in the Konkan villages, but many moved to Bombay from the end of the 18th century on. In Pakistan, they spoke Marathi, their mother tongue from Maharashtra; Urdu, the local language; and most spoke English. Prayers were conducted in Hebrew. In 1893, a Bene Israel from Bombay, Solomon David Umerdekar, inaugurated the Karachi Magen Shalom Synagogue on the corner of Jamila

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Street and Nishtar Road, which officially opened in 1912. During these years, the Jewish community thrived. In 1903, the community set up the Young Mans Jewish Association, and the Karachi Bene Israel Relief Fund was established to support poor Jews. In 1918, the Karachi Jewish Syndicate was formed to provide housing at reasonable rents, and the All India Israelite League, which represented 650 Bene Israel living in the province of Sind (including Hyderabad, Larkuna, Mirpur-Khas, and Sukkur, as well as Karachi), was first convenedfounded by two prominent Bene Israel, Jacob Bapuji Israel and David S. Erulkar. Karachi became a fulcrum for the Bene Israel in India, the place where they congregated for High Holiday prayers. There was also a prayer hall, which served the Afghan Jews residing in the city. A 1941 government census recorded 1,199 Pakistani Jews: 513 men and 538 women. So accepted were the Jews of Karachi in these years that Abraham Reuben, a leader in the Jewish community, became the first Jewish councilor on the Karachi Municipal Corporation. ANTI-ZIONISM BEGINS On August 15, 1947, India was partitioned and the Dominion of Pakistan was declared. Partition effectively signaled the end of the British Empire. Fearful of their future in the new Islamic state, Jews began to flee. Some fled from Afghanistan; the Bene Israel community in Lahore fled to Karachi and from there moved to Bombay. Muslim refugees from India, called Mohajir, streamed into Pakistan and attacked Jewish sites. The situation was exacerbated by the declaration of independence for the state of Israel in May 1948. Many of the Karachi Jews left the city in 1948, after rioters attacked the Karachi synagogue during a demonstration in May of that year against President Trumans recognition of Israel. Some members of the community emigrated to Israel via India, while others settled in Canada and the United Kingdom. Pogroms against the Jews recurred during the Suez War in 1956 and the Six-Day War in 1967. Most of the remaining Jews emigrated and, in 1968, the Pakistani Jewish community numbered only 350 in Karachi, with one synagogue, a welfare organization, and a recreational organization. After 1968, there is no record of any Pakistani Jews outside Karachi. Today, anti-Israel discourse manifests itself in the notion that Israel and Pakistan are ultimately in competition and thus only one can flourish. In April 2008, Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the former chief of Pakistans powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, proclaimed that two states came into existence in 1947 and 1948: one, Pakistan; two, Israel. The two are threats to each other. Ultimately, only one of them will survive. Pakistan aligns itself with

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the Palestinian Muslim cause and rejects the United States insofar as it is allied with Israel. THE KARACHI JEWISH COMMUNITY ENDS The Magen Shalom synagogue in Karachi was destroyed on July 17, 1988, by order of Pakistan president Zia-Ul-Hak to make way for a shopping mall in the Ranchore Lines neighborhood of Karachi. In 1989, the original ark and podium were stored in Karachi; a Torah scroll case was taken by an American to the United States. As late as 2006, the sole survivor of the Karachi Jewish community, Rachel Joseph, a former teacher, then 88 years old, was battling for compensation for the broken promise from the property developers that had demolished the old synagogue; in exchange, she would receive an apartment, and a new small synagogue would be constructed on the old site. While the litigation wore on, she languished in a tiny room. This year, a Muslim Pakistani-American filmmaker, Shoeb Yunus, shot a film about the Jewish cemetery in Karachi. Today, it is part of the larger Cutchi Memon graveyard, which has a Muslim caretaker. It took Yunus eight months to gain admission, and the camera crew was allowed only 10 minutes to shoot. He estimates that there are 200-400 Jewish graves. The neglected cemetery has not been destroyed since its last custodian, Rachel Joseph, died on July 17, 2006.
*Shalva Weil is a senior researcher at the Research Institute for Innovation in Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. A specialist in Indian Jewry, Weil is the founding chairperson of the Israel-India Friendship Association.

Remembrance of Warwick Days


Smadar Bakovic*
It was in the spring of 2010 that the University of Warwicks Student Union called for a referendum to twin with the Hamas-backed Islamic University of Gaza (IUG).1 To me, it seemed irrational that a Western university, which prides itself on inclusivity and on being a free marketplace of ideas, would willingly associate itself with an institution in which Holocaust denial is taught in history classes2 and where a significant segment of Warwick Universitys own student bodygays, women, Jews, and otherswould be excluded. It was then that the vehemence of some students toward Israel, the Zionist project, realizing the national aspirations of the Jewish people, erupted in full force, exposing the ugly, dangerous face of British academia. An anti-Zionist event was held, moderated by a British professor, in which Israels right to exist was challenged. Israel was portrayed as a murderous apartheid regime committing a Holocaust against the Palestinians, and Jews were demonized. In a Western university, in the nation where the Balfour Declaration originated, the Jews right to self-determination was questioned. The organizers, moderator, and supporters were not extreme rightists, and neither were they predominantly Muslims; they were almost exclusively European. Without exception, all would define themselves as leftist liberals defending human rights and freedom around the world. Their hostility, however, was deceitfully directed only toward Israel and its racist, apartheid-like policies. It was not to be directed at Jews after all, the speaker was a Jew and a Jew cant be antisemitic, they said. Unable to focus their hatred at Jews (probably fearing accusations of racism
1. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2096876,00.html; http:// www.terrorism-info.org.il / malam_multimedia / English / eng_n / html / hamas_e093. htm. 2. http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=450.

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and antisemitism), they directed their obsessive anger toward Israel, all the while being moderated by a Warwick faculty member. Israel was portrayed as an illegitimate entity, comparable to apartheid South Africa, and as such must be eradicated. It was not surprising, then, that I was to be called a Nazi by a European student, who shamelessly posted such comments on the Internet. After all, if the existence of the Jewish state can be challenged, dooming Jews to endless antisemitism that results for some in extermination, then any distorted criticism then becomes legitimate. Anti-Zionist and antisemitic sentiments became personal when the Department of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) forced me to work under and ultimately be graded by Professor Nicola Prattthe same professor who moderated the event described above. Professor Pratt is an activist in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which calls to oppose the Apartheid and Zionist nature of the Israeli state.3 She supports the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement by signing petitions that call for boycotting all Israeli institutions4 and demanding Palestinian right of return. Israel, according to the petitions, has no right to exist in its current form. Invariably, the question of what should happen to the Jews is left conveniently open ended and clearly unanswered. I was disturbed to see that a reputable Western institution employed professors who boycott Israeli institutions in a judgment not based on merit. Based on merit, I should have considered Jerusalems Hebrew University which outranked University of Warwick.5 But I wanted an English education. I asked myself how a Western academic institution could embrace those individuals who insisted on continuing the traditional racist antisemitism in which Jews were boycotted as a group, whether in the Middle Ages or in 1930s Germany, where Jews shops were boycotted and Jews were expelled from European universities. Could it be that those who, seventy years ago, would be defined as antisemites are now embraced by academia, under the manipulative guise of human rights activists?
3. http://www.palestinecampaign.org/Index5b.asp?m_id=1&l1_id=2&l2_id= 10. 4. http://www.bricup . org . uk / documents / Gaza / DeclarationSignatories . html; http://www.bricup.org.uk/why.html; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/16/ gaza-israel-petitions; http://Israel-academia-monitor.com/index.php?type=large_ advic&advice_id=121&page_data[id]=178&the_session_id=2aa78d18972c159c8b 9ec8575213547a&cookie_lang=en; http://boycottzionism.wordpress.com/category/ boycott-divestment-sanctions/page/33/. 5. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-201 2/top-400.html.

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When I petitioned the politics department for an alternative professor, I was immediately denied. They were unwilling to understand that an Israeli student working under Professor Pratt would be equivalent of a black student working under the KKK. Had I been a member of a recognized minority group, the university would have resolved the issue and allowed me to work under a different professor; it would also have stated that the university rejects all forms of racism and discrimination, as noted in its Charter of Statutes.6 This option, however, was ignored by PAIS. I am not saying that all British people are racist, as most are certainly not. Neither am I saying that British academic institutions are inherently racist and antisemitic. But there is an culturean ambiancewithin the UK that permits discrimination against Jewish Israelis in favor of current politics. This ambiance is not only wrong, but it also condones excluding Jews. Most infuriating is that the university never reprimanded Professor Pratt. That a university defends those who seek to discriminate against a nation, and employs those who discriminate and silences students of a certain demographic, is tragic. If some elements of British academia are saying yes to discrimination according to religion and nationality, what does this say about the system and the so-called human rights activists? After months of correspondence, participation in a video conference with the universitys Complaints Committee, and fighting against the politics department for nearly a year, I was able to persuade the university that what had I had endured was indeed unjust. When some cosmetic changes were made to my dissertation, and it was re-marked by three professors, I was finally awarded the doctoral distinction I deserved from a year earlier, when Professor Pratt marked me down. It is unfortunate that Warwick University failed to listen to the words of pro-vice-chancellor Susan Brassnett. In 2005, Ms. Brassnett said that the Israeli boycott was wrong, bigoted and racist.7 Had the university heeded her statement,8 Warwick would not find themselves in the media today addressing concerns of racism and antisemitism. And I would not have lost a year of academic life fighting for nothing less than the equal rights of Israeli citizens.

6. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/gov/calendar/section2/charterstatues. http://www2. 7. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/susan-bassnett-thisboycott-is-wrong-bigoted-and-racist-526403.html. 8. http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2829.

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*Smadar Bakovic, who holds a masters in international relations, is the author of Tall Shadows: Interviews with Israeli Arabs (United Press of America, 2006). She has worked with the Jacob Blaustein Institute and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and participated in EuroMed and several Israeli-Palestinian conferences. Bakovic thanks Stella Aniagyei, PhD, for her helpful suggestions on this essay. You can reach Smadar Bakovic at smadar.bakovic@gmail.com.

Die Linke and the Left


Sebastian Voigt*
Recently, a small but audible segment of the German left considers the criticism of antisemitism and equally of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism as central to the renewal of a progressive view of modern society.1,2 This includes support of Israel, which is in direct opposition to the mainstream left.3 The emergence of a pro-Israel left is connected to developments in German society after the reunification in 1990. The discussions within the left have to be regarded as a result of the profound political changes that took place at the time. The reunification was seen by many leftists as a reversal of the outcome of the Second World War. The reunification of Germany coincided with a wave of pogroms and racist attacks against foreigners, asylum seekers, and Jews. Consequently, the fear of a Fourth Reich and with it the fear of a reemergence of German imperialism surfaced. In
1. See the English version of the homepage of Die Linke, http://dielinke.de/ politik/international/english_pages/ (accessed May 7, 2011); see also Dan Hough, Michael Koss, and Jonathan Olsen, The Left Party in Contemporary German Politics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 2. See the homepage, http://www.european-left.org/ (accessed May 7, 2011). 3. For this trend, see the article by Jeffrey Herf, Fresh Air in Central Europe, The New Republic, August 2010, http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/77228/ fresh-air-in-central-europe (accessed May 7, 2011). A good summary of the historical genesis of this pro-Israel leftist position can be found in an interview with the Austrian researcher and Stop-the-Bomb activist Stephan Grigat: Jens Misera, Communism, Anti-German Criticism and Israel. An Interview with Stephan Grigat (first published in Israel Nachrichten, the German daily newspaper, in Tel Aviv in 2004; first published in English at http://info.interactivist.net in 2005); http://www.cafecritique.priv.at/interviewIN.html (accessed May 7, 2011).

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retrospect, these fears were unfounded and proved to be completely erroneous. Nevertheless, the misguided fears were a direct consequence of a decisive rupture in German and European history. The decline of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War caused a collapse of the worldview of many leftists, even if they never supported Soviet-style communism. The apparent victory of capitalism and of liberal democracy turned the established ideology of leftist thinking on its head and caused a fundamental disorientation. At the time, a debate about the history of the left and its mistakes made a cautious stand, and a small segment of the German left began to deal selfcritically with anti-Zionism, anti-imperialism, and their relationship to the state of Israel. Several leftist magazines supported the second Gulf War in 1990/91.4 More members of the left even supported the war against the Taliban after 9/11 and some unexpectedly had supported the overthrow of the Hussein dictatorship in Iraq in 2003.5 BAK SHALOM These changes within left-leaning groups, however, did not affect Die Linke fundamentally until 2007, when a group called BAK Shalom was founded with the purpose of exposing and combating antisemitism, antiZionism, anti-Americanism, and what was termed regressive anticapitalism within Die Linke.6 Although I have never been a member of Die Linke, I was in touch with many party members. In addition, I received a scholarship from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which is closely linked to Die Linke.7 I was myself a founding member of BAK Shalom, wrote articles, and gave talks
4. The most important leftist magazine at this time was (and still is) konkret. It had a long and difficult debate about the Second Gulf War but some authors supported the war, which led to the loss of half the readership. See the konkret homepage, http://www.konkret-verlage.de/kvv/kvv.php (accessed May 7, 2011). There was also an extensive discussion in the left in general; see, for example, Klaus Schonberger and Claus Kostler, Der freie Westen, der vernunftige Krieg, seine linken Liebhaber und ihr okzidentaler Rassismus oder wie die Herrschaft der neuen Weltordnung in den Kopfen begann (Grafenau: Trotzdem-Verlag, 1992). 5. The most important book for the discussion was Jihad und Judenhass by Matthias Kuntzel. The book was translated into English: Matthias Kuntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2007). 6. See the English version of the declaration of principles by BAK Shalom, http://bak-shalom.de/index.php/english (accessed May 7, 2011). 7. See the English version of the homepage of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, http://www.rosalux.de/english/foundation.html (accessed May 7, 2011).

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about antisemitism and anti-Americanism. Despite considering myself quite liberal, I was consequently called an agent of imperialism, a Zionist traitor, and a neoliberal racist. Nevertheless, BAK Shalom managed to make this discussion that had been going on for several years a part of the overall framework of Die Linke. BAK Shalom received considerable media attention and for some time I was so optimistic that I believed it might be possible to substantially influence the discourse within Die Linke.8 Unfortunately, this was not to be. I was obviously too optimistic or may have been too naiveas I was often told from the very beginning.9 CORE IDEOLOGY The fundamental principle of Die Linke is anti-imperialist, both overtly and covertly antisemitic, and adamantly opposed to the existence of Israel. This ideology has achieved predominance in Die Linke. The most recent evidence of this ideology was revealed during the provocation on the Mavi Marmara on May 31, 2010, when a commando of the Israeli defense forces stormed the ship after the captain refused to stop it. Nine people were killed in the ensuing struggle. Two current and one former member of the German Bundestag were on board the Mavi Marmara. AllNorman Paech, Annette Groth, and Inge Hogerare members of Die Linke. They were arrested by the Israeli army, but released shortly thereafter. It is noteworthy to look at what happened when they returned to Germany. They were not taken to task by Die Linke for cooperating with a fascist organization; neither did they have to justify their support for radical Islamists, who are well known to be reactionary to the very core and who blatantly trample on the most basic human rightsnot to mention womens rights. The chairwoman of Die Linke, Gesine Lotzsch, instead expressed pride in their so-called mission.10 The only voice from within Die Linke that criticized the actions of her colleagues was Petra Paus, the vice presi8. Members of BAK Shalom had several articles in leading newspapers. See Sebastian Voigt and Benjamin Kruger, Let the Left Go Forward, Jerusalem Post, December 9, 2009, or Sebastian Voigt, An Israels Seite, Der Tagesspiegel, May 5, 2008. 9. A discussion between Jan Gerber and the author was published in the German leftist weekly Jungle World. Sebastian Voigt, Sich jetzt endlich einmischen and Jan Gerber, Austreten, aber schnell, Jungle World 23, June 5, 2008. 10. See Miriam Hollstein and Thomas Vitzthum, Wir sind stolz auf Ihren Einsatz, Welt Online, June 2, 2010, http://www.welt.de/die-welt/politik/article787932 0/Wir-sind-stolz-auf-Ihren-Einsatz.html (accessed May 7, 2011).

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dent of the German Parliament.11 She faced a storm of criticism from within Die Linke afterward. Paech, Groth, and Hoger call themselves survivors of the Israeli mas sacre and went on a propaganda tour through various German cities in order to tell the story of their heroism firsthand. During one of those events, Paech, the former member of parliament and a retired professor of law, went so far as to suggest that the next Gaza Freedom Flotilla should be accompanied by German maritime forces, which patrol the Lebanese border. If this request were to be carried out, it would de facto amount to using the German military against Israel. The audience loudly roared in response to this suggestion. One member of the audience was so fired up that he expressed his desire to hit the fascist state of Israel next time; Paech called that an idea.12 It needs to be emphasized that this scandalous response was made by a former member of the German parliament and the former foreign policy expert of a legitimate German party, which is represented in the Bundestag. Alas, statements like these are merely the culmination of a phenomenon that has been in the works for some time. Consider that Wolfgang Gehrcke, a member of the Bundestag of Die Linke, wanted to invite representatives of Hamas to a conference in 2006. Fortunately, they were denied entry visas to Germany.13 Many members of Die Linke consider Hamas as the legitimate, democratically elected government of the Palestinians. Hamass ideological and highly undemocratic structure does not raise the red flag within Die Linke and its virulent antisemitism is conveniently ignored. During the Lebanon war in 2006, Christine Buchholz, a hardcore member of Die Linke and a member of the Bundestag, referred to Israel and the United States as warmongering countries, noting that Hezbollah represents, along with the peace movement in Israel and the international antiwar movement, the opposite part of the conflict. This is the position I am hold11. Petra Pau wrote an open letter to the Jewish community in Bremen, in which she criticized the members of Die Linke who were on board the ship, http://www.swr.de/report/-/id=6636856/property=download/nid=233454/mvqbrq/ index.pdf (accessed May 7, 2011). 12. This event was recorded by radio journalists of the independent station Freies Sender Kombinat (FSK) in Hamburg. Afterward, they produced a 60-minute radio program Wie antisemitisch ist die Linkspartei? (How Antisemitic is the Left Party?). The program can be heard online at http://www.freie-radios.net/portal/ content.php?id=35000 (accessed May 7, 2011). 13. See Ulrich W. Sahm, Nahostkonferenz im Berliner Reichstag: HamasSprecher erhalt kein deutsches Visum, hagalil.com, October 23, 2006, http://www. hagalil.com/01/de/index.php?itemid=23 (accessed May 7, 2011).

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ing as well.14 Buchholz went on to define the demonization of Hezbollah as one of the most egregious prejudices of the media that allegedly took place during the war. For a politician of the left to say that she sides with the terrorist organization of Hezbollah is almost beyond belief, but is undeniable proof of very crucial shifts in leftist politics and its ideology. THE UNDERLYING REASONS There are several explanations for the driving forces of the bottomless hatred against Israel within the left. One key factor is anti-imperialism, which is defined by a dichotomous view of the world. According to this worldview, the world and society are split in two opposing groups: one group wants peace and the other group wants to pursue imperialism; in other words, there is an exploiting First World and the exploited Third World. This is as simplistic a concept of the complexity of modern societies as one can imagine, and inherently and inevitably leads to the personification of social relations. One can consequently easily pinpoint the persons responsible for exploitation and oppression. The results are wild conspiracy theories for all those who refuse to use knowledge and rationality in understanding the complex world we are living in. By employing old, deeply entrenched prejudices, Jews are perceived as those pulling the strings; Israel is seen as the spearhead of Western imperialism in the Middle East and as an artificial state that is a foreign object in the organic body of Arab societies.15

14. The quote in German is: Auf der anderen Seite stehen in diesem Konflikt die Hisbollah, die Friedensbewegung in Israel und die internationale Antikriegsbewegung. Das ist die Seite, auf der auch ich stehe. Interview with Christine Buchholz by Rudiger Gobel, Im Krieg muss sich Die Linke positionieren. Die Damonisierung der Hisbollah ist Teil der Kriegsfuhrung, Junge Welt, August 15, 2008. It can be read online at http://www.achse-des-friedens.de/aktionen_lk05.htm (accessed May 7, 2011). 15. Moishe Postone has written extensively about the criticism of antisemitism and the relation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. See his classic essay, AntiSemitism and National Socialism. Notes on the German Reaction to Holocaust, New German Critique 19, Winter 1980, 97-115, and the interview with him by Martin Thomas, Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Left, February 5, 2010, http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2010/02/05/zionism-anti-semitism-and-left (accessed May 7, 2011).

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COMMUNIST IDEOLOGY The roots of this ideology in Die Linke are twofold. The first one is the communist ideology and the politics of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) toward Israel. The GDR was not an antisemitic country per se, although it had several anti-Zionist campaigns that made ample use of antisemitic stereotypes. The so-called Merker trial in the mid 50sduring which Paul Merker and other leading members of the Communist Party were convicted of having collaborated with Israel and the United States, the imperialistic archenemiesis but one example. The GDR considered itself to be an anti-fascist state that engaged in the self-righteous self-deception of having eliminated the roots of fascism by nationalizing the big industries and by expropriating the reactionary Prussian landowners.16 The hegemonic notion of fascism in the GDR stemmed from the orthodox communist view expressed in model fashion by Georgi Dimitrov in the mid 30s. Fascism in power, he said, is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.17 If fascism is regarded as the uppermost system of capitalistic dictatorship, the ideology of antisemitism has to be put on the back burner. Antisemitism was not recognized as the core of Nazi ideology but as a means of distraction by the ruling class to divide the proletariat. Auschwitz and the annihilation of the European Jews were not recognized as ruptures in civilization itself, as Dan Diner has pointed out.18 In the communist countries of Eastern Europe, Jews were not acknowledged as a distinct group of victims; instead, communists and antifascist resistance fighters were the most important people to be memorialized. In this delusion, an adequate research of the Holocaust never took place. In addition, the GDR did not see any reason for normal relations with Israel, and rejected all claims for compensation by Holocaust survivors. The continued antisemitism after 1945, which was very much alive in a large part of the population,
16. See the monumental work by Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 69-105. 17. Georgi Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism. Main Report delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, August 2, 1935, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/ 08_02.htm (accessed May 7, 2011). See also Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus von links. Kommunistische Ideologie, Nationalismus und Antizionismus in der fruhen DDR (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 293-455. 18. Dan Diner (ed.), Zivilisationsbruch. Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1996).

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was never addressed or dealt with becauseaccording to the ideology of orthodox communismthe socialist nations were seen as the true winners of history, bringing progress to the world. Next to the historical context of the Cold War and the strong relationship of the Soviet bloc with the Arab states, this continued ideology plays a major role in explaining the undiluted ferocity of anti-Zionism and the enduring comparison and equation of Israel with Nazi Germany in the GDR. This is not a legitimate form of political criticism, but is instead a fierce form of antisemitic anti-Zionism.19 Such pernicious hatred of Israel, derived from the orthodox communist ideology, is alive and well in a large part of Die Linke to this day. ANTI-ZIONISM
OF THE

GERMAN LEFT

The other justification of hatred of Israel in Die Linke is to be found in the history of the radical left in West Germany. Its relation to Israel differs from those of the GDR. Until the Six-Day War, the majority of leftists in Western Germany had a pro-Israel attitude. The tremendous historical shift after that decisive conflict unleashed a fierce hatred of the Jewish state, which in turn became an integral part of left identity. This hatred has all the attributes of the pathological. Israel was not regarded anymore as the socialist experiment with its kibbutzim and its egalitarian ethos, but was turned into a country of oppressorsby no less than the previous murderous persecutors. It was hence called a racist and occupying power that deprived the Palestinians of their human rights and of their national homeland.20 This hostility toward Israel can only be understood in the context of the widespread romanticism of revolution itself. Since Western democracies had given up on revolutions and since the proletariatwhich was supposed to be the carrier of the revolutionary bannerwas ignorant of its historical obligation, the longing for a revolution had to be transferred to the Third World. The ideology of tiermondisme was on the rise, and the left began to support all kinds of national liberation movements in the Third World as a redirection activity, a transference of the ersatz for what was missing under their very own noses. Some groups even supported the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. But first and foremost, the Palestinians became the main object
19. See Sebastian Voigt, Das Verh ltnis der DDR zu Israel, in Dossier 60 a Jahre Israel, ed. Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung, May 2008, http:// www.bpb.de/themen/XEBFIJ,0,0,Das_Verh%E4ltnis_der_DDR_zu_Israel.html, (accessed May 7, 2011). 20. See Martin W. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke. Zur Geschichte eines schwierigen Verhaltnisses (Frankfurt am Main: Haag + Herchen, 1994), 65-81.

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of solidarity. Their terror attacks were justified as the expressions of the oppressed underdog fighting against a powerful enemy. The Palestinians neatly fitted into the leftist cult of the noble guerillero. Leftist radical groups like the Rote Armee Fraktion even received military training in Palestinian camps; leftist Western German groups went so far as to commit antisemitic crimes. On November 9, 1969, the 31st anniversary of the Night of Pogroms of 1938, a group called Tupamaros Westberlin placed a bomb in front of the Jewish Community Center in Berlin and justified this attack as a necessary reaction to the so-called fascist crimes committed by Zionists and to express solidarity with the fighting fedayin as the avant-garde of worldwide revolution.21 SECONDARY ANTISEMITISM In addition to these explanations, it is obvious that both former East and West Germany cannot be compared to other countries. When all is said and done, the fact remains that contemporary Germany is the successor of Nazi Germany. Thus, a specific aspect has to be added to the leftist hostility toward Israel in order to explain this particular anti-Zionist antisemitism.22 After 1945, the official expression of traditional antisemitism became taboo in both Germanys. Unofficially, antisemitism was nevertheless expressed both overtly and covertly without any restraint. During the following decades, the ever-present antisemitic resentment had to find a different venue to express itself. After the Holocaust, every Jew became the personified accuser of the crimes committed by Nazi Germany. Jews were perceived as an interference to the development of a national identity, disruptive harassers for the positive identification with Germany and its history. They were seen as the permanent accusers of Germans, who, besides causing them a bad conscience, exploited German guilt by demanding reparations. This antisemitism is expertly expressed in the polemic: Germans will never forgive Jews Auschwitz.23 Eventually, this bizarre and twisted
21. See Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im judischen Gemeindehaus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005). 22. See Lars Rensmann, Kritische Theorie uber den Antisemitismus: Studien zu Struktur, Erklarungspotential und Aktualitat (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2001), 231-287. See also Samuel Salzborn, Antisemitismus als negative Leitidee der Moderne: Sozialwissenschaftliche Theorien im Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2010), 317-342. 23. This is how the journalist Henryk M. Broder put it. See Henryk M. Broder, Der Ewige Antisemit. Uber Sinn und Funktion eines bestandigen Gefuhls (Frank furt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1986), 125. See also Andrei S. Markovits, A New (or Perhaps Revived) Uninhibitedness toward Jews in Germany, Jewish Political

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thinking resulted in the externalization of German guilt. Nazis were consequently revealed everywhere, but most specifically in Israel. In due course, Jews were and still are accused of having learned nothing from the Holocaust and of acting like Nazis. On the other hand, Palestinians are considered to be the new Jews, the victims of the former victims. By demonizing and Nazifying Israel, opposing its existence creates the opportunity for German leftists to construct an anti-fascist continuity for themselves and to fight the anti-fascist battle that their Nazi parents and grandparents never fought. The advantage of this secondary antisemitism to German leftists can be observed on an individual, psychological level (Western Germany) as well as on a collective level (Eastern Germany). The defamation of Israel as a fascist country and of Zionism as a fascist ideology conveniently strengthens anti-fascist self-deception. Because antisemitism was never recognized for the core evil it was, and fascism was seen merely as a different kind of capitalistic oppression, the Holocaust was not recognized as the worst genocide ever committed in the history of all of humanity, and consequently lost its abominable horror. The most common expression of current manifestations of secondary antisemitism is anti-Zionism. Although both ideologies are not identical, they do overlap to a large extent. According to a dictum by L on Poliakov, e Israel has become the Jew among all nations; it serves as the collective Jew.24 This antisemitic anti-Zionism is not exclusive to the German left, but it expresses itself in Germany in its most unadulterated form. IDEOLOGICAL IGNORANCE The ignorance about the destructive importance of ideologies seems to be a blind spot of a leftist wordview. This critical blind spot is repeated in the leftist attitude toward Islamism. Evident in Die Linke, it has gained a greater significance during the last few years. In the past decades, the German left supported various so-called national liberation movements, but mainly secular ones. The PLO or the PFLP were supported, but nowadays Hamasa fanatically religious and oppressive organizationis supported.

Studies Review 18:1-2, Spring 2006, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, http:// www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-markovits-s06.htm (accessed May 7, 2011). 24. For the relationship of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, see L on Poliakov, e Vom Antizionismus zum Antisemitismus (Freiburg: ca ira Verlag, 1992).

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This development was recently labeled the leftist-jihadist Querfront (cross front) by the German journalist Ivo Bozic.25 Some parts of Die Linke openly proclaim the collaboration with radical Islamic groups against the U.S. Empire and its ally, Israel. Asked how they could possibly cooperate with radical Islamic organizations and fascist groups, the parliamentarian members of Die Linke either claimed that they didnt know who had organized the Gaza Freedom Flotilla or they audaciously denied that fascist or Islamist groups had indeed participated. In the most benign interpretation, one might consider this naive. It is much more probable that the collaborators of radical Islamists know exactly what they are doing. A particular convergence of orthodox leftist and Islamist ideology is obvious. Both share an anti-imperialist ideology, a deep hatred of Israel and of the United States, and the dystopian yearning for a simple, pre-modern world. Both of these ideologies reject globalization and financial capital as symbols of the exploitative capitalist society; both tend to simplify the complexity of the modern world into a clear-cut black and white without shades of gray; and both feel morally superior and self-righteous. They delude themselves in thinking that they fight for a higher cause and that they are always on the side of the global underdog and the oppressed masses. On a global level, the leftist-jihadist collaboration manifests itself in the alliance of Venezuela and Iran, the self-proclaimed socialism of the 21st century, and the reactionary dictatorship of the mullahs. CONCLUSION Die Linke cannot and must not be dismissed as an irrelevant radical fringe of the German political spectrum. That would be the height of irresponsibility. Because of the lack of political restrictions, Die Linke often expresses a widespread anger mixed with hatred toward Israel more openly than the mainstream parties would dare to. The many incidents of antisemitic anti-Zionism among politicians of all parties are shocking,26 but only parliametary members of Die Linke could participate in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and still be supported by the party leadership. In no other party is the ingrained hatred of the left as rampant. In regard to Israel and the conflict in the Middle East, Die Linke may almost appear to be the avant
25. See Ivo Bozic, Die Entstehung der Mavi-Marmara-Linken, Jungle World 31, August 5, 2010; http://jungle-world.com/artikel/2010/31/41448.html (accessed May 7, 2011). 26. For a profound analysis of antisemitism in the political culture in Germany, see Lars Rensmann, Demokratie und Judenbild. Antisemitismus in der politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Verlag fur Sozialwissen schaft, 2004).

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garde of German society. I do hope that this is an overly pessimistic interpretation, and I would gladly be proven wrong. Still, I cannot avoid the nagging fear that my presumptions are not totally over the top. The following incident shortly after the Mavi Marmara was taken over by the IDF might be an indication. The German secretary for development, Dirk Niebel, was refused entry into the Gaza strip by Israeli authorities. Even though it is widely known that Israel prohibits official visits by secretaries to Gaza to avoid legitimizing the Hamas government, the German Bundestag passed a unanimous resolution condemning Israels actions, including the blockade of Gaza strip.27 Even conservative politicians who are in general considered to be pro Israel praised Die Linke.28 This resolution can only be interpreted as proof that all German political parties presented a united front against Israel. Needless to say, this new and alarming development undeniably strengthened Hamas. The debate within Die Linke is not yet over and done with.29 The eventual development will be crucial not only for people on the left in Germany but in all Europe.
*Sebastian Voigt is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Leipzig and holds a Hans-Bockler-Stiftung scholarship. This paper was presented at Yales YIISA Global Antisemitism conference August 23-25, 2010, New Haven, Connecticut.

27. For the precise wording of the petition dating from June 30, 2010, see http:// dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/023/1702328.pdf (accessed May 7, 2011). 28. The parliamentarian of the conservative CDU, Philipp Missfelder, praised the hardcore leftist member of Die Linke, Wolfgang Gehreke, for sharing common ground concerning the Gaza blockade. The original quote in German is: Selbst wenn in der Assendarstellung haufig der Eindruck entsteht, dass die Linkspartei grundsatzlich anderer Meinung sei, so glaube ich doch, Herr Gehrcke, dass gerade auch die Wortbeitrage, die Sie schon an verschiedenen Stellen abgegeben haben, keinen Zweifel daran lassen, dass Sie sich auf einem ahnlichen, gemeinsamen Boden befinden, wie wir das tun, http://philipp-missfelder.com/de/Politik/Reden/ 70/35_Rede_im_Deutschen_Bundestag/artikel,535,1,1.html (accessed May 7, 2011). 29. See Samuel Salzborn, Die Linkspartei hat ein Antisemitismusproblem, Welt Online, June 8, 2010, http://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article7957984 /Die-Linkspartei-hat-ein-Antisemitismusproblem.html (accessed May 7, 2011).

What My Daughters Friend and Ambassador Gutman Need to Know


Richard Landes*
One of my daughters recently wrote me about a friend who thought that most of the Muslim antisemitism in Europe wasnt based on their dislike of what is going on in Israel and not so much on religion. I knew this belief was widely held not only by anti-Zionists, but also by liberals in general, including Jews. It includes the widely held assumption that suicide bombings were a response to the despair that Palestinians felt because of how Israel treated them. It is also directly related to the problem of Islamophobia is the new Antisemitism, in which speaking of Muslim antisemitism becomes a new form of racist antisemitism. Of course, I did not expect a Jewish U.S. ambassador to make those kinds of remarks, which is just what Howard Gutman said to a group of Jewish lawyers in Belgium:
What I do see as growing, as gaining much more attention in the newspapers and among politicians and communities, is a different phenomena . . . It is the problem within Europe of tension, hatred and sometimes even violence between some members of Muslim communities or Arab immigrant groups and Jews. It is a tension and perhaps hatred largely born of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuing Israeli-Palestinian problem.

Either the good ambassador has no awareness of just how paranoid, genocidal, and depraved Muslim antisemitism is, or he is contemptuous in his lack of standards. He would never excuse virulent Jewish hatred for

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Palestinians merely on the basis of the fact that Palestinians target Israeli children, dance in the street when they succeed, and display exhibits honoring the dead Jews. And yet, somehow, virulent Palestinian hatred is understandable. Of course, the actual situation differs radically from this benign contempt. Most of this regional tension is a product of the mainstream [news] media (MSM), both ours and theirs. Virtually none of the people who hate Israel have seen this matter up close: their impressions and beliefs about whats happening are the product of what they read in the media, and reports from activists who document the apartheid ways. The argument, of course, can work inversely: Palestinians have produced a constant stream of lethal narratives describing Israelis as baby-killers, and have spread the virus throughout the Muslim world. These narratives inspire suicide bombers and their cheering supporters, and the violence that Israel does against the Palestiniansfrom targeted killings to the separation barrier, to the Gaza blockade responding directly to antisemitic propaganda. Because the Western mainstream news media has focused some of this propaganda, people, including my daughters friend, have formed beliefs that are based on the television images and justify their disdain. No wonder French Muslims hate you, the French Christians say to their French Jewish co-citoyens; look at what your brethren in Israel do to their cousins in Palestine. To grant the Palestinians and other Muslims permission to hate the Jews reveals unthinking racism: I dont really expect anything remotely rational or balanced from these folks. If you piss them off, you deserve their rage. The MSM not only report lethal narratives as news, but omit reporting the hatreds that inspired such narratives. In the summer of 2000, the PA was blasting hatred of Israel. If the MSM were surprised by Arafats Camp David no, its because they ignored what he and his friends were saying in Arabic. On the contrary, driven by a belief that peace was around the corner, they felt that dwelling on such bad news would queer the peace process. Nor did the Oslo war make a difference. Sheikh Halabiya gave a sermon calling on Muslims to slaughter the Jews everywhere. William Orme wrote a piece on Palestinian incitement in which he quoted Halabiya saying: Labor, Likud, theyre all Jews. As a result, the ferocious strain of antisemitism in Palestinian irredentism transferred easily from the muftis contribution to the Final Solution, Nazi propaganda, and helping Nazism flourish in Egypt and Syria, to Arafats national liberation and Hamass apocalyptic paranoia. Nor is this merely a quirk of journalism, but a widespread practice of the post-colo-

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nial field of Middle East studies in the wake of Edward Saids masterpiece of cognitive warfare forbidding Westerners from othering Muslims. Yet, what are we to make of crowds rallied by the moderate Muslim Brotherhood chant, One day we will kill all Jews? Since 2000, Arab and Muslim news media have been awash with gory video depictions of the Elders of Zion carrying out their blood sacrifices of innocent Muslim youth. Specialists disagree over whether this is primarily an import from the worst of European hate-mongering, or an indigenous growth with roots in the Koran. European anti-Zionists may like their fantasy that their attitude is not antisemitic, but in the case of the Arab and Muslim world, the slide from opposing Israel to ranting about al Yahud everywhere is effortless.1 Phillip (Mondo) Weisss response to Ambassador Gutman offers additional insight. Citing two other comments, Weiss proves Gutmans thesis by pointing to a study showing that antisemitic incidents in England spiked after the Mavi Marmara incident. Of course, the near doubling of antisemitic incidents did not arise in response to Israels behavior, but to the reports of them, in which the MSM reported unfiltered anti-Zionist lethal narratives about the IDF coming down spraying bullets and killing 19 peaceful, humanitarian activists. He also omits data showing that, compared to Arabs, Israelis commit a faction of violence. Weiss, who never met a lethal anti-Zionist narrative he didnt like, probably still believes the initial reports. But unless you are willing to argue that when Israeli soldiers carrying paint-gun rifles, defending themselves from a lethal assault by Jihadis posing as activists, kill nine of their assailants, that it justifies a wave of antisemitism, this case hardly supports Gutmans analysis. On the contrary, it proves the opposite. No violent anti-Arab demonstrations exploded on British soil when Lebanese soldiers killed seventy Palestinian refugees in a massive air assault in 2007, or during the last year while the Syrian army killed over 3,000 of its own people. If you were to argue that Islamophobia is caused by Muslim behavior, would you not get accused of Islamophobia by the same people so ready to blame Israel for antisemitism? All of it is linked to a particularly dangerous form of political correctness, in which criticism of Muslims is the new form of antisemitism. As a Parisian colleague insisted, The experience of the Muslims in Europe today is exactly the same as the Jews a century ago. Of course, thats not the case at all: both in terms of the wildly different behavior of the two minorities, and in terms of how the European elites reacted to their pres1. Mohammeds mission to retroactively supersede and claim the origins of Judeo-Christian monotheism, then to correct, and finally to complete the Jewish and Christian revelations.

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ence. By that logic, however, any attack on Islam is immediately comparable to an attack on Jews a century ago. Even those Jewish organizations designed to protect Jews from antisemitism share this attitude. Berlins Zentrum fur Antisemitismus forschung held a conference whose main theme was the close identity of Islamophobia and Judaeophobia. In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League released only 2.6 percent of 4,269 press releases since 1995 on either Islamic extremism or Arab antisemitism, of which only .005 were released since September 11, 2001precisely when the threat to Jews from Islamic extremism dramatically increased. That is almost as small as the percentage of Jews in the world, or the percentage of the Arab world occupied by Israel: 0.002. Which brings us to the dilemma that faces the morally concerned Western observer. We are faced with two opposing narratives: one in which the Muslims/Palestinians are victims who might be forgiven their imperialist Israelis hate; and one in which the Israelis are victims, who might be forgiven their resistance to assaults from paranoid, sadistic antisemitism. Why not toss a coin? Aside from the fact that in so doing one would greatly increase support for the imperialist Zionists to 50 percent, there are serious consequences to misreading this situation. If I am wrong, and Palestinian hatred is merely a result of the occupation, then Israeli concessions should lessen Palestinian hatred. Of course, if the Palestinians really are rationalreally want their own state rather than to destroy Israel, then they should be amenable to making some important moves toward reconciliation, such as, for example, cutting off the hate incitement on TV, and resettling their refugees out of the miserable camps theyve been confined to since 1948. If I am right, if Muslim antisemitism is profoundly rooted among Arabs and Muslims today, then its another story entirely. Solving the refugee problem by allowing these poor victims of war to have a real home is not on the Palestinian agenda. On the contrary, these refugees are designated victim-weapons in a war of annihilation. If I am right, then every time Israel makes concessions, it encourages further aggressions. So despite the politically correct paradigm, each time Israel engages in anti-imperialist activitieswithdrawing from most of the West Bank (1994-2000), southern Lebanon (2000), and Gaza (2005) increased aggression occurred. There is a widespread fantasy that throwing Israel into the maw of the beast will somehow solve the problem. Ultimately, the dilemma of antisemitism is not a Jewish but a Christian problem. Granted, the Jews suffer from antisemitism, but the ultimate price is paid by those foolish

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enough to get sucked into the vortex of hatred and paranoia that antisemites peddle. As any historian of World War II can tell you, if six million Jews were murdered, more than ten times as many Christians died in that madness! The Arab world in the latter half of the 20th century offers a striking parallel to Spain in the 16th century. Both worlds had expelled their Jews (Spain in 1492, Arabs in 1948); both experienced a flood of wealth (New World gold and petrodollars); and both failed to parlay that wealth into a thriving culture that made life better for its people. In a recent article, Jeffrey Goldberg tried to acknowledge the problem of antisemitic sentiments pervading the Arab Spring, all the while preserving the belief that the people of the Middle East are finally awakening to the promise of liberty. But the two are intimately related. Indeed, Judeophobia is not the problem, but the symptom. Its the conspiracy thinking that blames everything on the otherMuslims attack Copts? Its the Jews. Arab Spring turning into Islamist Winter? Its the Jews. If youre the BBC, its the Jews, aka outside forces. How can one possibly inaugurate, foster, and sustain a democratic culture of freedom, one that, in words of Isaiah Berlin, considers it shameful not to grant to others the freedom one wants to exercise oneself, without an ability to self-criticize? Antisemitism is everyones problemmy daughters friend, Ambassador Gutman, and the Muslims. The sooner well-meaning progressives stop feeding their antisemitic vulnerabilities and begin critical thinking, the sooner we will see a real Arab Springone in which all people can rejoice.
*Richard Landes is an associate professor of history at Boston University and the author of several books, including Heaven on Earth (Oxford University Press, 2011). He edits The Second Draft and The Augean Stables. This article is reproduced by permission of the author and originally appeared in The Telegraph December 1, 2011, under the title Muslim Antisemitism, Israel and the Dynamics of Self-Destructive Scapegoating.

Antisemitism and the Dutch Soccer Fields


Manfred Gerstenfeld*
In August 2011, the Foundation for the Fight against Antisemitism (BAN)1 took the soccer club ADO to court. On March 20, during a game of this top-league club from The Hague against Ajax from Amsterdam, frequent chants of antisemitic songs were heard. BAN also claimed that ADOs speaker had thanked the public for their support. The clubs lawyer denied this, whereupon the judge remarked that one could hear this on the tape. ADOs lawyer stated that his client had done all it could to prevent antisemitic chants from being sung in the stadium. He listed measures ADO had takensecurity cameras to find the perpetrators, the employment of special guards, banning certain troublemakers from entering the stadium, and a general prohibition on misconduct, discrimination, and insults. The lawyer remarked that ADO also takes its players on visits into neighborhoods of The Hague in order to tell people there that discrimination will not be tolerated in the stadium. BANs lawyer observed that the two parties agree that chants such as horrible cancer Jews and Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas are not permitted. He added that a witness had declared that also other antisemitic chants were sung during the entire game.2 They were aimed at fanatic Ajax fans who call themselves The Jews. In his decision, the judge wrote that the chants sung during the game are considered antisemitic, hurtful, and thus inadmissible. The judge added that he did not believe the claim by ADO management that they had not heard the songs, as there were 150 special guards in the stadium who were in contact with a command room. The judge decided that if during a future home game there were antisemitic chants in which the word Jews
1. Stichting Bestrijding Antisemitisme. 2. Kemal Rijken, Welles-nietes tussen BAN en ADO, NIW, August 5, 2011.

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was mentioned, ADOs management would have to take measures to end these chants and prevent new ones from being sung. If necessary, this would include stopping the game.3 A HISTORY
OF

ANTISEMITISM

The number of antisemitic incidents in the Netherlands has multiplied greatly since 2000. The singing of antisemitic songs on soccer fields, however, began long before. Hate chants in Dutch stadiums have been sung as far back as the 1970s. One of these was Hi, ha, penis of a dog. Gradually, the chants became more hateful and were heard more often against several teams.4 For instance, Feyenoord supporters are called cockroaches. Yet, as has been remarked, cockroaches are not offended by name calling, while Jews are insulted by antisemitic hate songs. In its 1999-2000 Annual Report, Tel Aviv Universitys Stephen Roth Institute of Antisemitism and Racism noted:
Antisemitic slurs have long become the norm at football matches in the Netherlands. Hissing, slogans and chants such as Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas are often heard during games. The spokesperson of the CIV (Center for Information on Football Vandalism) warned that In football arenas, things are accepted which would not be tolerated elsewhere. Even though the authorities, the judiciary and politicians agree that hissing and antisemitic chanting constitute unacceptable behavior, the law is not being enforced and games are not stopped.5

Among the early major perpetrators were the thousands of Rotterdam Feyenoord fans who sang from their stands in games against Ajax: Gas the Jews.6 The Ajax supporters in turn often sang Bomb Rotterdam as a reminder of the lethal German bombardment of the town, which led to the Netherlands rapid surrender to the invading German army in May 1940. Already in 1999, the public prosecutor had investigated possible punishable acts committed by then-Feyenoord player Ulrich van Gobbel. After his
3. LJN: BR4406, Voorzieningenrechter Rechtbanks-Gravenhage, 398200/KG ZA 11-812, August 9, 2011. 4. Jaap Bloembergen, Hatelijke leuzen op de tribunes niet uit te roeien, NRC Handelsblad, October 7, 2003. 5. 1999-2000 Annual Report, Stephen Roth Institute on Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University, 2000. See also www.tau.ac.il/Antisemitism/asw992000/netherlands.htm. 6. Simon Kuper, Ajax, de joden, Nederland, Hard Gras 22 (Amsterdam) (March 2000):141.

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team won the national championship, he shouted Whoever doesnt jump is a Jew eight times from the balcony of the city hall to the public below.7 The public prosecutor decided to dismiss the complaint. The prosecution considered that what Van Gobbel said was improper and unwise but not discriminatory; its spokesman explained that, taking into account the context in which the remarks were made, there was no criminal act. The prosecution also took into account that Van Gobbel had apologized. Jorien van den Herik, the then chairman of Feyenoord, said that he greatly regretted Van Gobbels behavior.8 HATRED
IN THE

NEW MILLENNIUM

The Royal Dutch Soccer Association (KNVB)9 reported that in the season 2001-2002 there were 11 games with antisemitic chants shouted. Many examples of soccer antisemitism were listed in a report by the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI), the leading Dutch organization in combating antisemitism. The report mentions that the Feyenoord management wanted to remain silent about the antisemitic chants from the club. In November 2002, twenty Feyenoord supporters shouted at a suspect during a court session of the attempted murder of one of their friends, Cancer Jew, you will be killed.10 In 2002, the CIDI complained about the shouting of Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas on an open day of Feyenoord. The then deputy mayor of Rotterdam, M. W. van Sluis, replied: I received your letter of 1 August and I share your worries about the shouting of slogans. It is totally unacceptable that such slogans are being shouted at whatever moment and in whatever context. Van Sluis mentioned that because there were no policemen present at the gathering, no direct action had been possible, adding that he would pass the information to the public prosecution and the mayor of Rotterdam would discuss the issue with Feyenoord and the KNVB.11 In 2003, during a game between ADO and PSV from Eindhoven, the fans of the latter shouted Cancer Jew at the referee. The internal prosecu7. Het openbaar ministerie in Rotterdam onderzoekt mogelijke strafbare uitlatingen van Feyenoord-speler Ulrich van Gobbel, Trouw, April 30, 1999. 8. Jaaroverzicht antisemitisme in Nederland 1999, CIDI. 9. Koninklijke Nederlandse Voetbal Bond. 10. Hadassa Hirschfeld, Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzicht over het jaar 2002 en de periode 1 januari5 mei 2003, CIDI. 11. Rotterdam belooft CIDI maatregelen tegen voetbalantisemitisme, CIDI, August 14, 2002.

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tor of the KNVB decided not to follow up on the matter.12 In 2004, Feyenoord supporters brought Palestinian flags to an Ajax game. Thereafter, in the semifinal of the Amstelcup between Ajax and Feyenoord in April 2004, when Israeli or Palestinian flags were banned, Feyenoord fans came to the stadium with flags of the Arab-European League, a radical Arab movement.13 THE FUTILITY
OF

COMPLAINT

After several failures to stop the hate chants, CIDI Director Ronny Naftaniel said in 2004 that it was futile to lodge complaints with the authorities. He mentioned that he had even appealed to the court against the public prosecutor in the Netherlands concerning extreme expressions of discrimination, which the prosecution did not want to deal with. Naftaniel said, If it were useful, I would put forward a complaint, but if we have to bring proof after the fact, that is not possible . . . are we the people who have to clean up the dirt which the police and the justice authorities leave lying around?14 In the KNVB, doubts were expressed about the effectiveness of any measures to be taken in the soccer stadiums. The manager of its competition, Bert van Oostveen, said that all the talk about stopping games didnt mean anything. In the end they [the referees] will let the game go on.15 On many occasions, authorities did nothing; some actually opposed taking action. In 2004. Peter de Jonge, the mayor of Heerenveen, who represented the Dutch municipalities in the Commission on Soccer Vandalism, said that it would be a reward to the hooligans if a game were stopped because of 100 or 200 fans.16 He thus mentioned a substantially lower number of offenders than there frequently are and suggested that the problem should be ignored. This further illustrates how Dutch authorities indirectly assisted in the development of racism and lawlessness in the country for a long time.

12. Hadassa Hirschfeld, Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzicht over het jaar 2003 en de periode 1 januari5 mei 2004, CIDI. 13. Ibid. 14. Milco Aarts, Hooligan baas in stadion, Telegraaf, September 18, 2004. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid.

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A RARE INTERVENTION One of the rare occasions when the authorities took action was in April 2002. Supporters of FC Utrecht shouted, in the Amsterdam Arena train station, such chants as Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas and Send them to the [concentration] camp. The then Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen issued an emergency order, and 670 fans were sent back by train.17 In 2004, the Amsterdam Commission for Complaints against the Police decided that the police had used excessive force in executing the mayors orders. Mayor Cohen replied that he could agree with most of the commissions conclusions, adding that in some cases, the police had reacted to the fans violence.18 In 2003, the same commission had concluded that the police had used unnecessary force against the fans of Feyenoord at a game against Ajax. In 2004, eight of the complainants received financial compensation from the Amsterdam municipality.19 ATTEMPTS
AT

REGULATION

The history of hate slogans in Dutch soccer stadiums in the new century includes frequent complaints, official hesitations, and the announcement of measures, which were then often carried out halfheartedly. At the end of 2004, a referee temporarily halted the game between the professional clubs VVV and Heracles because there were chants of Hi, ha, penis of a dog. A week later, there was a long debate at the General Assembly of the professional soccer clubs about which songs were permissible. A former referee suggested that no action should be taken against Hi, ha, penis of a dog, stating that in the soccer world, this is considered a title of honor.20 In January 2005, a special advisory committee of the professional soccer league prepared a list of chants to be forbidden. This list was accepted by the KNVB. It prohibited all references to prostitutes, illnesses, and genitals. Furthermore, insulting remarks about race, belief, or group of the population were also forbidden, which means that jungle sounds, bleating of sheep sounds, hissing, firework noises, and the expression fucker of goats
17. 18. 2004. 19. 20. Supporters na roepen leuzen teruggestuurd, Volkskrant, April 22, 2002. Amsterdamse politie op de vingers getikt, Volkskrant, September 25, Ibid. Hi-ha-hondenlul is een eretitel, AD, December 7, 2004.

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were prohibited. This list expanded upon one published a year earlier, which had been accepted by the public authorities.21 In September 2004, when ADO played Ajax, the varied chants were so persistent that the trainer of the Amsterdam club, Ronald Koeman, threatened to remove his players from the field if this happened again.22 The media mentioned that besides what they termed the usual antisemitic curses, there was repeated singing of: Sylvie is the prostitute of Amsterdam, a reference to the then-girlfriendand now wifeof Ajaxs international player, Rafael van der Vaart.23 After that game, the Dutch soccer authorities announced new measures. At ADOs next match, the referee told the press that he had been informed in writing by the KNVB that in the event of lengthy and insulting chanting, the match should be ended. He had received written instructions that references to sexual organs, serious illnesses and Jews would not be tolerated. There was singing from time to time about the opponent Vitesse: They are the homos, yes, yes, the homos of Vitesse, but the referee said he had not heard it. Also, when ADO supporters felt the referee had made a mistake, they sang another of their classic chants: Hi, ha, dogs penis. The media was of the opinion that in general, the fans had behaved within the borders of what is presently considered acceptable in stadiums.24 Around that time, CIDI Deputy Director Hadassa Hirschfeld wrote to Wim Deetman, the mayor of The Hague, expressing her disappointment that the police failed to act against the continual singing of antisemitic chants, which included Jews have to be gassed.25 Theo de Roos, a well-known professor of criminal law, commented that many of the usual chants are punishable according to two articles of Dutch law. The first says that nobody may incite somebody else to hate, and the second forbids the racist insulting of a group of the population. All Jews should be gassed is undoubtedly punishable.26

21. Lijst met verboden spreekkoren, Telegraaf, January 21, 2005. 22. Erik van der Walle, Niemand durfde ooit een wedstrijd te staken, NRC Handelsblad, September 14, 2004. 23. Jaco Alberts, ADO-supporters vinden zichzelf nu lief, NRC Handelsblad, September 18, 2004. 24. Ibid. 25. CIDI diep teleurgesteld in politie en gemeente, Haagsche Courant, September 14, 2004. 26. Milco Aarts, Hooligan baas in stadion.

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A STOPPED GAME On October 18, 2004, a match between ADO and PSV was stopped by referee Ren Temmink. Before it started, ADO fans had already thrown e objects onto buses filled with PSV fans. The speaker warned the public before and during the game, but ADO fans regularly sang hate chants, including Temmink is the whore of PSV and Hamas, Hamas, Temmink to the gas. When Temmink stopped the game, he had intended to continue it after a cooling-off period. Riots started, however, and Mayor Deetman then canceled the game altogether.27 Once soccer fans had seen that in the professional leagues hate songs went unpunished, this seeped down to the lower leagues, where at most it was mentioned in the local papers. One example, which was even reported in the national media, happened in a low amateur league in the northeastern part of the Netherlands. In 2004, Lionel Huizing, a football playerwho has a black mother and a white fatherfrom De Weide, a small club in Hoogeveen, was insulted during the entire game by the players of another club, Klazienaveen. The referee stopped the game for a short time in order to explain to the Klazienaveen captain that this was misconduct, but when the game resumed, the insults did not abate.28 A CULTURE CHANGE Until recently, few effective and consistent measures were enacted to counter antisemitic hate songs. Tolerating antisemitic chants in the stadiums for so long was one manifestation of the Dutch gedoogcultuura culture of looking away from transgressions. This also breeds tolerance for intolerance. Partly due to this longstanding culture, it took many years before the KNVB was willing to take action against racist and antisemitic outbursts. Nowadays, this culture has become largely defunct. By 2011, the public mood was finally ready for a zero-tolerance approach toward expressions of antisemitism in the stadiums. Thus, publicity suddenly focused on hate chants at a celebration of ADO supporters after its victory against Ajax. There, the fans, including ADO players Lex Immers and Charlton Vicento, sang with much gusto: We go chasing Jews. Once again, their target was not actual Jews but the players and fans of Ajax. Hamas Hamas, Jews to the gas was also sung; this chant had
27. Robert Misset, Staking na wangedrag ADO-fans, Volkskrant, October 18, 2004; Duel ADO-PSV gestaakt na spreekkoren, NRC-Handelsblad, October 18, 2004. 28. Voetballer doet aangifte van discriminatie, Volkskrant, October 4, 2004.

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already been prohibited by the Supreme Court in 2009.29 The trainer of ADO, John van den Brom, and his assistant, Maurice Steijn, were present at the party. It was filmed by some of those who attended. Reactions differed greatly from those during earlier years. The board of ADO fined Immers heavily. The player offered his apologies, and said: I had been totally carried away by the euphoria after this special victory. I hadnt been aware at that moment of the insulting nature toward a whole group of the population. I mixed up a nickname for a group with that of a segment of the population. I regret this. What I did was not permissible and I of course accept the fine which I received.30 Van den Brom apologized to Ajax. He said: We are role models. This was a very expensive learning experience for us. If you make a mistake, you have to sit on the blisters. I would have preferred to turn the clock back on this incident.31 The KNVB decided not to invite Vicento for the young Dutch national team who would play a friendly game against young Germany.32 GOVERNMENT RESPONSE Parliamentarian Richard de Mos of the Freedom Party, who is also a member of the Municipal Council in The Hague, condemned the antisemitic chants, submitting parliamentary questions asking for measures against antisemitic slogans in professional soccer.33 Thereafter, De Mos, an ADO fan himself, received death threats from supporters of the club. Andre Rouvoet, the leader of the Christian Union party at the time, asked Minister of the Interior Piet Hein Donner how he intended to deal with the misconduct of ADO. Rouvoet said: If influential people allow this to happen, they legitimize it. This illustrates that antisemitism is not only a problem stemming from Moroccan Muslim youngsters, but it is also unfortunately a broader societal problem. This type of reprehensible event at and around the sport fields is unacceptable. The Hague Alderman Karsten Klein, for instance, should quickly enter into discussions with ADO on how the club will assume its responsibility.34
29. Arne Hankel, Ook Hoge Raad vindt Hamas-leus beledigend, Elsevier, September 15, 2009. 30. Geschrokken Immers: Jodenjacht leek mij onschuldig, AD, March 21, 2011. 31. Voorzitter Ajax: Stop met Joden als geuzennaam, AD, March 23, 2011. 32. ADO-feestje kost Vicento plek in Jong Oranje, AD, March 21, 2011. 33. Kamerlid PVV met dood bedreigd door fans ADO, AD, March 23, 2011. 34. Rouvoet wil Donner horen over ADO-wangedrag, AD, March 21, 2011.

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CIDI asked the director of the KNVB, Ronny Naftaniel, to suspend Immers and Van de Brom. Naftaniel replied: Even though we know that the slogans are against Ajax, it is reprehensible that this should happen on the back of the Jews. In the past, such insulting slogans had been tolerated quietly in the stadium. Now one also hears them in the streets. That is even more reprehensible as incidents are on the increase against synagogues and so are threats and violence against recognizable Jews in the street.35 A HARMFUL NICKNAME Uri Coronel, who is Jewish, was the chairman of Ajax in March 2011, but has since resigned. He called on the clubs fans to refrain from using the nickname Jews and said, Our fans are not responsible for people who use such horrible language. Apparently, however, by their songs, they provoke these reactions. They thus should stop [calling themselves Jews].36 Coronel added that he had even heard members of the business club of FC Utrecht singing that they went to chase Jews. He observed that he had once entered the Feyenoord stadium between a double lineup of youngsters who made the Heil Hitler salute; One cannot even describe this experience, he said.37 In 2005, there were complaints in a meeting of the Members Council of Ajax about the nickname Jews because it provoked antisemitic reactions. The board was requested to take action against its use. The thenchairman John Jaakke asked Coronel to talk to the supporters; to them, Coronel said that this way of presenting Ajax as a Jewish club is painful and relates to the Holocaust . . . If Ajax abandons the Jews nickname and related issues one can also ask others to behave differently. Before a game with the German club Bayern Munchen, a banner with the text Jews take revenge for 1945 was removed.38 Coronels meeting with the supporters produced no results. Coronels observations on this issue go back many years. Already in 2000, he was quoted as saying: I have seen things that, if they were filmed, could be compared to Hitlers Germany at the beginning of the 1930s . . . you arrive by bus at Feyenoord or at The Hague; hundreds of people with hatred in their eyes call out Jews, they hiss [as an indication of the gas in Auschwitz] and make the [Nazi] salute.39
35. 36. 37. 38. 39. CIDI eist bij KNVB schorsing Van den Brom, AD, March 21, 2011. Voorzitter Ajax: Stop met Joden als geuzennaam, AD, March 23, 2011. Ibid. Jop van Kempen, Ajax wil van Joden-gedoe af, Parool, January 8, 2005. Simon Kuper, Ajax, de joden, Nederland, 141.

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In 2005, Coronel told this author:


If we were to forbid these Stars of David, we would get riots in return. In general, the authorities are already happy when there are no fights after soccer games. There have been threats to end games, but they didnt go very far. We have, however, slept too long. I think this nickname [the Jews] started in the 1980s. There was no logical reason for it. Ajax had the image of a Jewish club which was not based on anything. If 50,000 people come to a soccer game and among them are 500 Jews, that is a lot for us, in particular if we more or less sit on the same tribune, but basically Ajax has never had many Jewish members and hardly any Jewish players. We had in the 1960s and early 1970s two players who had Jewish fathers and were both on the Dutch national team, Sjaak Swart and Benny Muller. Swart, however, always denied that he was Jewish. There were also some board members who were of Jewish origin. Before the war there had been a Jewish Ajax player, Eddie Hamel, who was on the national team. He died in a concentration camp. We should have objected from the beginning to the nickname, but we didnt realize it. Thereafter the hooligans from some other teams, mainly Feyenoord, ADO and FC. Utrecht started to sing antisemitic hate songs. Our hard-core fans, perhaps 1000 among our 40,000 regular supporters, then started to say you cannot take away our identity. This is of course nonsense. Gradually more and more Israeli flags and Stars of David appeared in the stadium. At a certain moment, some fans started putting tattoos of the Star of David on their hands. After the murder of media maker Theo van Van Gogh in 2004 and the increasing antisemitism from Muslims, there were more and more voices asking for the nickname to be abandoned. It didnt help much even though the number of flags diminished. Then the international publicity about this issue started for instance in The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and Le Figaro in France. Thereafter we got complaints from Israel that we were ashamed of our Jewish image. When Ajax and supporters with it visited there, people loved it and thought that it was a sign of solidarity with Israel. That didnt help us because now our fans started saying, What do you want? People in Israel love it that we call ourselves Jews!40

After the ADO court case, Coronel summed up his current position:
It is annoying that Ajax supporters call themselves Jews, but it does not touch me very much. We should realize that when about thirty years ago Israeli flags appeared on the tribunes, the Jewish community was proud and not annoyed. It became unacceptable due to the reaction of some of 40. Uri Coronel, personal communication to author.

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our opponents. Yet it makes little sense to force Ajax supporters to give up their nickname. First of all it will not succeed and secondly we should concentrate on fighting against what it apparently provokes and not on the use of the nicknames.41

A MAYORS OPINION In May 2011, Eberhard van der Laan (Labor), the mayor of Amsterdam, criticized the fans use of the nickname Jews in an interview. He said that this nickname could result in people coming out against Jews and that this should be prevented. Van der Laan added that he didnt have any illusions about a quick response: It is a matter of change in behavior, which may take ten years. That does not mean that we shouldnt start working on it immediately.42 Robert Flos, head of the Liberal Party (VVD) faction in the Amsterdam Municipal Council, said that Van der Laan should discuss the use of the nickname with the Ajax fan club. Flos mentioned that in Amsterdam, an atmosphere is slowly developing that is very polarizing, noting that homophobia and antisemitism are on the rise. He also thought that the problems related to the nickname of Jew could take five to ten years before they were solved.43 Two months earlier, Van der Laan expressed his anger about a T-shirt that had been designed by a small group of Ajax supporters for the clubs cup final against Feyenoord. The shirt, which was offered for sale on a fan site, had a picture of Rotterdam being bombarded with Stars of David. It had as text Aboutaleb, the Jews are coming. Rotterdams mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb (Labor), is a Moroccan-born Muslim.44 In September 2011, however, the BAN Foundation wanted to cash in on its success in the court case against ADO, and brought a rapid court cause claim against Amsterdam Mayor Van der Laan and Ajax in order to force them to ban the word Jew in slogans displayed in the soccer stadiums. BAN mentioned chants like We are super-Jews or Those who do not jump are not Jews. As a reaction to this, the Ajax supporters club called on the fans to bring Israeli flags, scarves, and objects with the Star of
41. Ibid. 42. Hugo Logtenberg, Van der Laan wil Joden, Joden verbannen uit de Arena, Parool, May 13, 2011. 43. VVD-Amsterdam wil af van term Joden, NIW, May 18, 2011. 44. Van der Laan boos over anti-Feyenoordshirt, Parool, March 7, 2011. Ajaxfans verwijzen met shirt naar bombardement Rotterdam. NRC, March 5, 2011.

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David on them to all games.45 In October 2011, however, BAN withdrew first the court case against Van der Laan46 and thereafter also that against Ajax.47 TRADITION
OF

INSULTING MINORITIES

The antisemitic songs have been heard now for many years by hundreds of thousands of people at Dutch football stadiums. The press has described it as a recurring phenomenon over the years. Occasionally, efforts were made to weaken the songs impact. One example of this is loud music played during a game to drown out the chants.48 Frits Barend, a well-known Dutch TV program host, has a long-term interest in soccer and has produced many programs about it. He mentioned that the first groups insulted on Dutch soccer fields were black players, as well as Moroccans. Barend observed: There was a Dutch international player who was also a MoroccanDries Bousattawho, when he played, songs were chanted such as Your mother has a moustache or Your mother is a whore. On the tribunes, minorities, homosexuals and referees have been cursed terribly. In the Netherlands, these shouts at various minorities have been tolerated for many years. He remarked further: Former black Ajax goalie Stanley Menzo was subjected to jungle noises from his opponents fans. I was once at a cup final in The Hague against Ajax where they threw a banana at him in his goal and made monkey sounds. I taped and broadcast it. After the game, the chairman of the professional soccer section of the KNVB, Andre van der Louwa Labor politicianpraised the public for their excellent behavior. Van der Louws attitude was typical of the mindset of political leaders at the time.49 This behavior continued for years. In 2005, there were both antisemitic and anti-black slogans heard during a home game between Ajax and FC Utrecht. Fans shouted Whoever doesnt jump is a Jew, and there were
45. AFCA: Neem davidsster mee naar ArenA, AT5, September 24, 2011. 46. Toch geen kort geding VDLaan, AT5, October 13, 2011. 47. Stichting BAN trekt kort geding tegen Ajax in, De Pers, October 24, 2011. 48. Willem Vissers, Oplossing voor verbaal geweld: harde muziek, Volkskrant, September 13, 2004. 49. Frits Barend, personal communication to author.

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hissing sounds. When black player Ryan Babel got the ball, jungle sounds were also heard.50 Looking back, Barend says:
Ajax never liked the use of the nickname Jews. One of the chairmen, Michael van Praag, who was of Jewish origin, thought, Dont make a fuss about it. If you dont deal with it, it will go away. I also thought for some time: Lets perhaps not give too much attention to it for a year or two perhaps the problem will indeed go away. It of course didnt disappear, but then the management of Ajax didnt want to deal with it. The issue had already started under Van Praags predecessor, but at a certain moment, Ajax really got the nickname of the Jewish club, and the Israeli flag and the Star of David became a kind of symbol. Of course, one can laugh when, after Ajax scored a goal, they sang the Israeli song Hava Nagila, but then they went further, into We are super-Jews and whoever doesnt jump isnt a Jew. Thereafter, you get reactions from FeyenoordWhoever doesnt jump is a Jew.51

MANAGEMENT

AT

RISK

In describing managements response to antisemitic chanting, Barend observes:


When former Ajax trainer Louis Van Gaals wife died of cancer, in some stadiums supporters chanted: Van Gaal had a cancer prostitute.52 Journalists have also been threatened at times. The throwing of small objects onto the playing field is common, along with excessive imbibing of alcohol and the unauthorized use of fireworks in the stadium. I sat with a colleague of mine at the tribune of honor at PSV in Eindhoven when they played against Ajax. There, respectable people with suits and ties sang Cancer Jew and Hes a friend of the Jews when the referee made calls against the PSV team. The same also happened at Feyenoord. Even when the club management tried to do something about these things, they were at risk themselves. If one excluded a fan, he might throw stones through ones window. These hooligans are anonymous in a bigger group while the leaders of the fan club always distanced themselves from the violence.53 50. Hadassa Hirschfeld, Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzicht over het jaar 2005 en de periode 1 januari5 mei 2006, CIDI, 22. 51. Frits Barend, personal communication to author. 52. Milco Aarts, Hooligan baas in stadion, CIDI. 53. Frits Barend, personal communication to author.

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ATTITUDES NOW SEEPING

INTO

SOCIETY

The authorities lack of desire to deal with the recurring racism and antisemitism in the stadiums has allowed the hate songs to gradually seep into society at large. Once there. it is almost impossible to combat. The antisemitic chants have spread in various directions elsewhere. At demonstrations against Israel, for instance, the chant Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas is often sung, mainly by Muslims. There the target is real Jews. Soccer fans also started to sing the same chants outside of the stadium. The non-Jewish journalist Matthijs Smits relates that he was invited a number of years ago by Jewish friends in Amsterdam for the first evening of the Passover holiday. He entered an electric tram car full of soccer fans of PSV, who were on their way to a game against Ajax. They chanted loudly, Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas. Smits said that he did not know what would have happened if they had considered him a real Jew.54 Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, chief rabbi of the interprovincial rabbinate, tells that he, together with a non-Jewish psychologist, once entered a train full of Feyenoord supporters. When the fans saw them, they started to chant: Jews to the gas. Jacobs said that he had the feeling that this whole train of ordinary Dutchmen was against them. The psychologist shrunk from fear, the rabbi remarked. It seemed to me that that reaction wouldnt help very much, so I feigned that I was indifferent to it as a sign of strength. One can consider this incident as an act of hooliganism, yet if one of these idiots had attacked us, many more would probably have followed him.55 In 2006, The Hague rap group Den Haag Connection (DHC) published a song on the Internet titled Hague Jihad (Haagse jihad). It included texts such as Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas, One day youll get the Hague Jihad on your roof, and Cancer Jews.56 ANTISEMITISM
ON THE

PLAYING FIELD

There was also direct antisemitism against Jews on the soccer fields. One example was in 2002, when a Jewish youth team of RKAVIC in a lower league was physically attacked during a game by a team, mainly consisting of Turkish and Moroccan youngsters, from SC Ori nt in the northern e
54. Matthijs Smits, personal communication to author. 55. Binyomin Jacobs, Rabbijn in een polariserende samenleving. Interview in Manfred Gerstenfeld, Het Verval (Amsterdam; Van Praag 2009), 175-176. 56. Meir Villegas Henriguez, Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzicht over het jaar 2006 en de periode 1 januari5 mei 2007, CIDI, 22-23.

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part of Amsterdam; thereafter, they were harassed in the locker rooms. When these SC Ori nt youngsters also made the Hitler salute, the team was e expelled from the competition.57 On International Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27, 2008, a text message appeared on the video screen at the Vitesse stadium during a game against Ajax. It read, Hoezee, hoezee, Long live Zyklon B, referring to the gas used in extermination camps during the Holocaust.58 A Vitesse spokesperson later expressed the clubs regrets and said that fans can send SMS texts for the video screen. She explained that before being posted, they are checked, but that this particular one had slipped through.59 During that same year, in a professional-league game against RBC from Roosendaal, the Belgian player Daniel Guijo-Velasco of Helmond Sport made the Heil Hitler salute. He was suspended by the KNVB for five games.60 Velasco apologized the next day.61 The many years of unchecked verbal abuse have also occasionally led to physical violence. In April 2004, a number of Feyenoord supporters were wounded after a junior-team game against Ajax. Some of the attackers had their faces covered. In 2004, supporters of the top-league club FC Twente published data on the Internet about their trip to Groningen for a game against the local club, illustrated with a picture of a transport of Jews during the Holocaust. It is one among many incidents during that year reported by CIDI.62 In 2005, three fans of Club Cambuur from Leeuwarden were removed from the stadium in Emmen after they made a Heil Hitler salute and yelled out racist remarks. They also shouted the Nazi slogan Sieg Heil several times.63
57. Hadassa Hirschfeld, Overzicht antisemitische incidenten Nederland 2001 en voorlopig overzicht 2002, CIDI. See also Marc Kruyswijk, Steeds vaker Hitlergroet, AD, May 31, 2002. 58. Antisemitism Worldwide 2008/9, The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, 12. 59. Vitesse betreurt antisemitisme tegen Ajax, Hakehillot Nieuws, February 1, 2008. 60. Midfielder handed five match-ban for Nazi salute, International Herald Tribune, December 3, 2008. 61. Helmond-Sport: taakstraf en schorsing na Hitlergroet, Omroep Brabant, November 29, 2008. 62. Hadassa Hirschfeld en Agnes van der Sluijs, Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzicht over het jaar 2004 en de periode 1 januari5 mei 2005, CIDI, 27. 63. Hadassa Hirschfeld, Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzicht over het jaar 2005 en de periode 1 januari5 mei 2006, CIDI, 22.

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Later, the identification of a group of Ajax fans with the nickname Jews also became known internationally. In 2003, supporters of the Belgian team Club Brugge shouted in Amsterdam, We are going to chase Jews, saying that ADO supporters joined in with the shouting. During subsequent fights with Ajax fans, 100 people were arrested.64 When the top Spanish team Real Madrid came to the Netherlands for a Champions league game in November 2010, part of a group of 200 Spanish fans shouted Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil and Juden Raus, Juden Raus. The fans also made the Heil Hitler salute. Eleven fans were arrested, each receiving a fine of 200 Euro. The Real Madrid fan club paid the fine.65 SOCCER ANTISEMITISM ABROAD Antisemitism in and around soccer fields manifests itself in many ways in several countries. Already in 1999, the Swiss-based International Federation of Football (FIFA) had condemned the racist actions of the Romanian Soccer Federation Vice President Dumitru Dragomir. Dragomir was the editor of a publication in which Jews were referred to as potential soap.66 In 2007, the American Jewish Committee published an overview of antisemitism related to soccer in a number of countries.67 One extreme case resulted in a death. After a match between Paris Saint-Germain and Hapoel Tel Aviv in Paris in November 2006, a fan of both clubs was chased by about 150 Paris Saint-Germain supporters. An undercover police officer who tried to help him was himself attacked and subjected to racial slurs about his black skin color. When the use of tear gas proved insufficient to stop the attackers, the policeman pulled his gun and fired a shot, accidentally killing a Paris Saint-Germain fan and wounding another.68 One among many cases of antisemitism in soccer stadiums in 2011 was when top UK team Chelsea played in Malaysia. There were antisemitic
64. Hadassa Hirschfeld, Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzicht over het jaar 2003 en de periode 1 januari5 mei 2004, CIDI. 65. Real Madrid betaalt boetes antisemitische hooligans, Parool, 18 May 2011. 66. World Soccer Federation Assures ADL Antisemitism Is Unacceptable; FIFA Seeks to Distance the Sport from a Romanian Racist, Anti-Defamation League, August 16, 1999. 67. Yves Pallade, Christoph Villinger, and Deidre Berger, Antisemitism and Racism in European Soccer, AJC Berlin Office/Ramer Center for German-Jewish Relations, May 2007. 68. Ibid.

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chants shouted at its Israeli player Jossi Benayoun.69 Chelsea protested and afterward Malaysia apologized.70 The subject of soccer antisemitism in various countries is widespread enough to warrant an updated study. Elements of incidents similar to those in the Netherlands occur elsewhere in Europe. For instance, after antisemitic insults were made against their club, mostly non-Jewish fans of the London-based Tottenham Hotspur called themselves Yiddos, which has led to demands that this be stopped.71 In Poland, soccer hooligans often shout: Jews to the gas, Kill the Jewish whores, or Hit the Jew on their trap. Soccer clubs have long ignored this, explaining it as Polish folklore. In the summer of 2011, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said that to stop this was of prime importance for him.72 Nowhere, however, does a multifaceted situation exist identical to the Dutch one concerning Ajax. AN IMPORTANT ISSUE Antisemitism in the Dutch soccer world is ubiquitous and has had many negative consequences. Hate songs, which were once confined to specific areasmainly stadiums and their environmenthave now permeated the Dutch public domain. The phenomenon also exemplifies how discriminatory attacks directed at Jews intermingle or are followed by aggression against other groups. The text Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas expresses eloquently how anti-Israelism and antisemitism go together. The official reactions to the phenomenon expose how weak the Dutch justice system has been in implementing existing legislation for a long time. Society is also often more concerned about the polices behavior than that of the hooligans or criminals. Both of these topics are outside the scope of this essay. The history of the antisemitic chants at the Dutch soccer fields also opens up a window onto Dutch society at large and its long culture of tolerance for the intolerable. The brutal murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004 by Mohammed Bouyeri, a radical Muslim, was a warning sign to Dutch society at large and also a turning point; yet, it has taken many more years to begin dealing with the problem on the soccer fields.
69. Dominic Fiffield, Chelsea object to antisemitic abuse of Yossi Benayoun in Malaysia, Guardian, July 28, 2011. 70. Malaysian FA apologises to Chelseas Yossi Benayoun after abuse claim, Guardian, July 29, 2011. 71. Ivor Baddiel, Alarming level of antisemitism in football must be tackled, The Telegraph, April 14, 2011. 72. Antisemitismus als Folklore, TAZ, September 5, 2011.

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For a long time, few understood how an issue unrelated to real Jews mutated into many ugly and antisemitic directions. Even now, some Jews write articles claiming that the hate chants have nothing to do with antisemitismas if that were the crux of the problem.73 Such people lack the ability to see an issue in its full context. The history of antisemitism on Dutch soccer fields shows how Jews are very often drawn into problematic situations against their will. They must always be far more on guard against potential risks than the average Dutchman. Simultaneously, the issue illustrates once again how problems involving Jews offer a prism view onto Dutch society. It is evident that a more detailed analysis of antisemitism and racism on Dutch soccer fields would be important for many reasons. This is so even if a significant percentage of the hate-mongers are marginal individuals in society.
*Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. His background is in chemistry, economics, environmental studies, and Jewish studies. He has been an international business strategist for forty years; his clients have included the boards of several of the worlds largest multinational corporations, as well as governments. Gerstenfeld has published twenty books, including the Italian bestseller Revaluing Italy. His recent book, in DutchThe Decay: Jews in a Rudderless Netherlandshas sparked a major public and parliamentary debate in that country, and has had an international impact as well. The research for this essay was made possible through the support of the Stichting Collectieve Marorgelden Israel (SCMI).

73. Martijn Kleijwegt, Wangedrag supporters is geen antisemitisme, Volkskrant, March 25, 2011.

Was Cesare Lombroso Antisemitic?


Gabriel Cavaglion*
Jewish Italian physician Cesare (Hizkiah Mordecai) Lombroso (18351909) was a reformer in modern penology and is considered by many to be the father of positivist criminology. His writings on race, however, make him unquestionably antisemitic. Why would a Jew write on antisemitism? Whether Lombroso was right or wrong is perhaps in the last analysis not so important as the unquestionable fact that his ideas proved so challenging that they gave unprecedented impetus to the study of the criminal offender. Any scholar who succeeds in driving hundreds of students to search for the truth, and whose ideas after half a century still possess vitality, merits an honorable place in the history of thought (Sellin, 1937). A careful study of Lombrosos heritage, education, environment, and ambition yields some rationales for both his attitude toward his fellow Jews and his influential role in penology and criminology. This essay discusses all these elements in the formation of Lombrosothe scientist and the man. Lombroso went to secular Italian schools in Verona and Chieri, in northern Italy. Here, thanks to his astute and idealistic mother, he was exposed to cultures of the non-Jewish world, rich in poetry and art, so typical of distinguished and respectable Jewish families, in an enlightened, scholarly atmosphere, in which Jewish tradition was utterly compatible with revolutionary ideas (Drapkin, 1977, 25). Unlike his mother, his father was God-fearing, fearful and anxious, unskilled, and, as merchant and breadwinner, a failure. He was a man made happy by a quiet life, study, and reading holy books (Dolza, 1990, 29). His granddaughter, Cesares daughter Gina Lombroso, described him as scholarly, kindhearted, gentle, and mild, but very shy, very religious, awkward, weak, and completely obedient to conservative traditions (G.

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Lombroso, 1915). He caused the economic collapse and the loss of the familys assets when Cesare was a boy. This character, known in Jewish-European satirical literature as a shlemiel (Gilman, 1986), would come to represent the embodiment of traditional Judaism to the adult Cesare and the focus of his attack, as described below. As early as age 10, Cesare rebelled against his father in everything connected with observance of the commandments, and he renounced faith and ritual. He considered himself a free thinker and a rationalist, adopting a worldview of materialism and skepticism, intermingled with the prevailing liberal humanist ideology of the period, as befitted an enlightened northern Italian Jew. As a telling example, his first name, Cesare, meaning a Roman emperor, is a nickname that he adopted as his formal name. By doing so, he allied himself with ancient Italian tradition and with the Romantic pride of modern unified Italy. The names inscribed on his birth certificate, Mordecai and Hizkiah, would be forgotten. The tension he felt with religious conventions would remain conspicuous throughout his lifetime. For example, when he agreed, past the age of 30, to marry a Jewish girl, he refused to consult with family or with a matchmaker, as was the custom then, thus causing great tension between his traditional relatives and himself (Baima Bollone, 1992, 72). Lombroso grew up in a period of historically fateful transformations: the continued emancipation of the Jews of northern Italy and the assimilation of the Jewish middle and intellectual classes into the life of the young nation, and their support for political movements that identified with insurgency and the unification of the state (Risorgimento Italiano). Lombroso served as a military doctor in military prisons in southern Italy (the Calabria region), where he encountered an assortment of dialects and cultures. He later directed a psychiatric hospital, was an academic researcher at the University of Torino, and was a political initiator in the Peoples Party in this town (Wolfgang, 1973, 238). According to Rafter and Gibson in their updated introduction to the Criminal Woman, Lombroso grew up at a time of political and intellectual upheaval, of yearning for the revival, unification, and independence of a divided Italythe dream of expelling the occupying foreign forces, defeating absolutist regimes, and unifying the Italian peninsula under a parliamentary government (in Lombroso and Ferrero, 2004, 15). Lombroso believed in the leaders of the independence movement. Shocked by the poverty, epidemics, ignorance, and malnutrition of the population that he saw as a military doctor in Calabria, he developed a sense of mission to improve the physical and mental health of the lower class. In time, notes the Italian historian Delia Frigessi, impelled by his political and

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social sensitivity, he became an active figure in the Socialist party and served a term as a member of the Torino City Council (Frigessi, 2003, 263). Lombroso was an active person by nature who, according to his daughter Gina, wanted to know everything about everything. He loved to be present where culture was produced and disseminated, and invested great effort in being part of the literary scene. He never missed an opportunity to express his opinion, even if it had no logical basis (Rondini, 2001). As will be seen below, it is not difficult to separate his impetuous, mercurial, and extroverted nature from the form and content of his scientific articles; neither is it a problem to differentiate between his desire to distance himself from what his father, as a believing Jew, symbolized for him and his own convictions regarding the place of the people of Israel. RACIAL SCIENCE THEORY Lombroso, like many doctors of the period, was influenced by Darwinist theory and by phrenology and craniology (measurement of the brain and cranium to identify attributes of character/disposition, morality, and personality of the patient). Among other things, he developed a model for the identification of bodily attributes in criminals by measuring sizes, symmetries, and anatomical proportions. This anthropometry is an area that, despite the credit accorded to Lombroso, began its development as early as Della Porte in 1586 and Lavater in 1775 (for a review, see Jones, 1986, 82). In the Lombrosian model, the concept of atavism is linked to an irreversible process of the hereditary transmission of internal physical characteristics and the creation of populations with inferior development among the species, such as criminals, wild men, and apes. To protect society, Lombroso believed that deliberate selection was appropriate, to complement and fortify natural selection (Lombroso, 1911, xv). In earlier versions, he considered criminals atavistic throwbacks to primitive varieties in the continuum of the development of the species. He determined that the criminal is not at all a member of the race of knowing humans, Homo sapiens, but represents instead a throwback to a residual form of an earlier, more primitive raceHomo delinquens (Shoham, Rahav, and Addad, 1987, 72). Lombroso dealt with issues of eugenics by prescribing programs of physical and mental hygiene. Lombroso considered himself a progressive, scientific emissary, tending to the concerns of the new status of his country, Italy. And as a scientist it was his desire to promote Italy as an equal among the European nations. He felt an obligation to an agenda of Italys internal affairs, wanting among other things to propose a solution for the enormous gap dividing Aryan northern ItalyEuropean, progressive, and highly educatedfrom Semitic

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southern ItalyMediterranean, conservative, poor, distressed, and neglected (Gibson, 1998). One aim of Lombrosos anthropology was to position Italy among modern European nations, thereby creating boundaries around a new Italian citizenry, or, in Horns terminology, an imagined Italian citizenry (Horn, 2003, 33). In Lombrosos world, northern Italians were Europeans in every respect, but he tended to marginalize the southerners, who had joined the unification of Italy in 1871. The southerners were the Otherprimitive, untamed, poor, violent, vengeful, and corrupt. According to Horn (2003, 37-43), Lombrosos preoccupation with crime represented his attempt to eliminate the savage from the European Enlightenment: to demarcate the boundaries between progressive Europe and the inferior third world. In the fifth edition of The Criminal Man (LUomo Deliquente, 1878), Lombroso stated that criminals speak like wild men living within the flourishing European culture. Thus, as a scientist, he proposed a solution involving the identification, classification, and eradication of the wild, a rational management of social deviancy. Not surprisingly, Lombroso provided racist ammunition for Western demagogues. For example, in his book Delitti Vecchi e Nuovi (1902), he says, Regardless of dress or habits that may camouflage the American black man, he has a surfeit of contempt for the lives of others, [has] the pitilessness so characteristic of all wild men (Lombroso, 1902, 12). The white man is most perfect, the black, most imperfect. The black man represents the most primitive race; he has not changed throughout thousands of years, and he still exhibits the childish style, his smile and movements similar to that of the apes (quoted in Gibson, 1998, 105). Lombroso praises Western-Northern civilization, which he defines as industrialized, rich, well educated, and well informed by the press (Lombroso, 1902, 7). Australia is depicted as the most civilized country and a happy civilization, because of its white population and modernity. States with high rates of immigration from barbarian uncivilized countries nevertheless suffer from violent crimes. The presence of colored populations in the United States is characterized by a lower stage of civility, which accounts for the high murder rates. Homicide is part of daily life in the sense that beast-like sexual impulses are as well. Lombroso takes the same attitude toward people from the south of Italy, whom he views as the remnant of barbarian hordes (Albanians and Greeks), living in an inferior moral stage (Lombroso, 1902, 57), thirsting for revenge and perceiving this as natural behavior.

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RACIAL SCIENCE

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RACIAL SILENCE

For the most part, modern Western criminology texts, with a few isolated exceptionse.g., Adler, Mueller, and Laufer, 1991have made little mention of the racial implications of Lombrosian theory. There is no mention whatsoever of this sinister subject either in criminological or in historical texts (Gibson, 1998, 114). An attempt to understand why the texts have repeatedly ignored or muzzled the racial ramifications of Lombrosian theory and his shameless attitude toward Judaism is beyond the scope of this essay. I will mention just two possible explanations for the denial, the ignoring, or the silence: 1) the lack of English translations of a few of the original texts, and 2) criminological positivisms fear of harsh criticism of the founding father of modern criminology, with the result, to be avoided at all costs, that the branch upon which they have been sitting could be cut out from under them. Criminologists consider Cesare Lobrosos methodology to be controversial. Criticism of the methodology of the father of positivism, however, is only part of the story. It is true that Lombroso was guilty of positivist thinkings basic sin: the ability to organize ones arguments with basic internal logic in order to explain how phenomena occur and fall into place. This is the First Commandment of positivism, as defined by Auguste Comte. But surely a more serious sin, as this paper will stress, is its substance. It is primarily Lombrosos flawed methodology that seems to have attracted most of the criticism of these literary genres throughout the years. This gives rise to a certain paradox in the body of our knowledge of criminology: while we can assert that Lombroso was indeed the father of modern criminology, could he also have been the father of criminological positivism, which insists on basing itself on objective and neutral empiricism, appropriate methodology, and the creation of internal logic? A sample of 26 textbooks and introductions to criminology examined from the bookshelves of Israeli institutions of higher education reveals an invariable duplication of content. A thorough summary of this duplication, with an expanded critical discussion of the methodological problem, can be found in Dario Melossi (2008, 49-52): Regarding the nature of the criminal without regard to the cultural variable and its influences on the law enforcement system. A rigid reliance on causal fallacy, using only two variables (for example, body structure as a direct factor in criminal activity). The lack of a control group.

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A disregard of the screening done by the law enforcement system, which tends to imprison certain populations. These are prisoners, not necessarily representative of the criminal population. Internal logic is rarely mentioned as the most damning shortcoming. It would appear that Lombroso took pains to eschew thought of any kind in order to graft the facts onto a supposedly logical theory. Gould (1981) says that Lombroso constructed virtually all his arguments in a manner that excluded defeat, thus making them scientifically meaningless. Whenever he encountered a contrary fact, he performed some mental gymnastics to incorporate it within his system (Gould, 126). His positivist method was thus to create chaos in the course of developing the theory, or the messiness of science-in-the-making (Horn, 2003, 5). Lombroso preferred adding to his publications, including ever newer editions, to processing, fine-tuning, and integrating. He hastened to publish as much as he could, never subjecting his various editions to revision. The result was text that was uneven, confused, and full of contradictions and errors. Lombroso, a man of curiosity, was also impulsive and disorganized. He had an enormous craving for knowledge, information gathering, measurement, and the creation of categories in the nave hope that loading more and more material and creating more categories would result in the creation of knowledge: a considerable amount of work was involved in trying to make these texts cohere, to hold everything together under the umbrella of a new discipline, and to have it all count as science (Horn, 5). For example, the first edition of his book The Criminal Man (LUomo Delinquente, 1876) comprised 252 pages, while the three-volume fifth edition contained 1900 pages. Nothing was deleted from the earlier editions. Criticism relating to Lombroso and the other, which centers on his treatment of women, also takes him to task for contradictions in internal logic (Smart, 1977, 32-34). A number of feminist scholars mention a qualitative defect in his distorted perception of women in general and delinquent women in particular (see a survey in Harrowitz, 1994, chap. 2). Lombroso was faced with a severe problem. He theorized that women turn to crime less than men do; therefore, they must theoretically be less atavistic. On the other hand, he adopted the notion that women are inferior to men and atavistic by nature. If Lombroso the private individual advocated free choice and divorce, Lombroso the researcher spoke of the utter inferiority of women to men (Gibson, 2002, 82). Here there is a failure of logic. As Zedner remarks (1994, 279), if all women are atavistic by nature, it is difficult to identify women who are criminals, because of the lack of external signs. The solution, according to Zedner, was the focus on prostitution, which Lombroso said included unfaithfulness and sexual promiscuity, the

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natural expression of feminine degeneration. Prostitution was the magic word that can make sense of Lombrosos theory regarding female delinquency in general. This contradiction and probable emotional ambivalence regarding women is particularly manifest in Lombrosos family life. He married a young woman and then drove a wedge between her and her observance of the Jewish commandments. Before his marriage, he wrote to a friend that she was young and beautiful, but that she observed the commandments; however, he would see to it that she forgot about them quickly. Although he favored progress, liberalism, and sexual equality, he insisted on signora De Benedettis devoting herself completely to being a wife and mother. Lombroso fell under the spell of a socialist feminist doctor, Anna Kulishov, a frequent guest in his home, who used her influence to further his daughters academic lives. On the other hand, his daughter Gina, a doctor, submitted entirely to his guidance and backing (Melossi, 2008, 61), and served as his personal secretary and faithful emissary of his theories on the American continent. As noted, a review of the literature shows that only a few scholars are conversant with Lombrosos ideas about race and their negative implications for Western culture in the twentieth century. Brennan, Mednick, and Volavka (1995) alone had the perspicacity to say that his ideas provided a rational basis for European imperialism and American racial social policy (Brennan et al., 65), but they do not elaborate. David Garland too (1997) is aware that Lombroso gained popularity in Italy thanks to the fact that the criminal type was both consistent with deep prejudices and endorsed the middle class in its perception of the criminality produced by urbanization processes (Garland, 30). The Jewish question that preoccupied Lombroso, particularly in one of his writings on antisemitism (1894) and in how his writing fanned the flames of racism, is not discussed at all in the criminology literature. The fact that Lombrosos book Antisemitismo e le Scienze Moderne was not translated into English probably explains this avoidance and silence, and it is also likely that, as mentioned earlier, it is hard for contemporary positivist criminologists to tarnish the name of their founding father with charges of racism or, worse, to accuse this enlightened and progressive Jewish doctor of Jew-hatred. RACIAL THEORY Some of Lombrosos followers veered ominously in the direction of race theory when they attempted to identify inferiority in human races, including not only the Homo delinquens and the mentally ill but also infer-

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ior racesin particular Mediterranean/Semites, the black race, and the yellow race. There were those who suggested using selective breeding, social hygiene, or primary prevention (the sterilization of at-risk mothers, among other things) to deal with sub-races found in Europe. In Italy, for instance, the promoter of Mussolinis criminal code, Enrico Ferri, praised positivism as a strong foundation for the fascist doctrine (as did Raffaele Garofalo and Alfredo Niceforo). The scientific alibi and its adoption by totalitarian political ideologies were exploited in other countries as well (Frigessi, 2003, 389). Gibson (2002) says that criminal anthropology promulgated the notion of race as a biological given and focused attention especially on racial differences by creating a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, thus granting legitimacy to acts of oppression by the white regime and providing ammunition for propaganda for Italys colonial policy in Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, and later Libya). Regarding the Italian fascist regime, Gibson (2002) states that the cooperation of criminal anthropologists with Mussolinis regime was not entirely opportunistic, since forms of early positivism and fascism shared ideological affinities. Both promoted surveillance, classification, and discipline. Both wanted to equip officials in the criminal justice system with flexibility and discretion rather than binding them with the rule of law. And both were careless about individual rights in the name of social defense (Gibson, 2002, 202). According to Frigessi (2003), political racism also exploited criminal anthropology in the area of crime, since Lombroso interpreted physical and mental degeneration as a sign of inborn criminality, thus justifying sterilization, capital punishment, or some other form of killing (Frigessi, 382-383), or anything else that might justify forms of prevention, incapacitation, and negative eugenics. Historian George Mosse (1978) asserts that the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy usually rejected Freudian theory, while they embraced Lombrosian psychology, extending the claim of racial inferiority to other populations, obviously including Lombrosos own people:
Nazi euthanasia was based upon the proposition that degeneration as exemplified by habitual criminals or insanity was structural and final. But since the Nazis also believed the Jews to be degenerate as well as habitual criminals, Lombrosos definition of criminality became a part of Hitlers final solution of the Jewish problem (Mosse, 78).

One may say that Lombroso the Jew, the socialist, the liberal, the progressive founder of the science of criminal law, he who took pains in his political activities on behalf of weak populations, had an unintended, indi-

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rect influence on racist thinking one generation later. The concept of degeneration as Lombroso developed it became the intrinsic name for criminality, a soul imprisoned in Hell (Mosse, 83). With passage of the racial laws (leggi razziali) in 1938, Italys Jews officially became the focus of Aryan official racism. Clearly, Mussolini reflected the tradition of racial thinking and the dictionary that criminal anthropology had constructed a few decades earlier (Gibson, 2002, 104). Not only totalitarian regimes were enthusiastic with Lombrosos teachings. His ideas were promulgated among welfare workers, educators, doctors, and clerics, especially after 1890 in the United States (Rafter, 1992), where ideas about eugenics, especially negative eugenics, were proposed. These ideas included sterilization of women with defective genes and heredity research focusing on families with a high incidence of criminality or some other deviancy (for example, the case study of the Kallikaks; for a review, see Akers, 2000, 57-59). In 1927, in the democratic United States of America, Earnest Albert Hooton received generous funding from Harvard University to verify Lombrosos theories. He sampled over 13,000 criminals and more than 3,000 adult men as a control group in ten states. He measured 107 physical traits, crania, and faces, including tattoos. Hooton published his conclusions also in a book of popular science, Crime and Man (Hooton, 1939). He determined, among other things:
We can direct and control the progress of human evolution by breeding better types and by the ruthless elimination of inferior types, if only we are willing to found and to practice a science of human genetics. With sound and progressively evolving human organisms in the majority of our species, problems of human behavior will be minimized, and there will be improved educability. Crime can be eradicated, war can be forgotten.

Lombroso proposed the establishment of penal colonies, the isolation of inferior populations, and the prevention of the possibility to reproduce. It is instructive to read the explicit original that encourages negative eugenics, with an explanation of those with a hopelessly inferior structure who without mitigation will not be worthy of reproduction (Hooton, 392). BLOND HAIR
OR A

HOOKED NOSE?

Many contradictions in internal logic, together with numerous distortions of basic facts, also arrest ones attention in Lombrosos treatment of the Jewish question and antisemitism. In his book Anti-Semitismo e le

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Scienze Moderne (1894), Lombroso manifests ambivalence toward his people: he begins by defending but ends by accusing. In the first part of his book, there is an attempt to define the Jews as having characteristics of the Aryan race . . . with hair lighter than that of the British. This claim is based on paradoxical logic arising from adoption of prejudices, clich s, hearsay evidence, stereotypes, and even grotesque e gossip about his fellow Jews (Harrowitz, 1994, 29). Lombroso did not identify himself as a Jew in his book. He disengaged, estranged himself, and spoke in terms of they and what they must do to gain an equal status and be assimilated among the nations, to emerge from their isolation and their inferiority. Among other things, they should forget primitive customs (something he himself did as a child and coerced his new wife into doing). In a sense, it appears that Lombroso was settling an ongoing account, a psychological unfinished business with his father, and he recommends that his people do what he did to his wife: they should forget tradition and conduct themselves as the Gentiles do. His enlightened aspirations and his apologetic intentions were steeped in ignorance, particularly concerning Orthodox Jewish ritual, which he resisted from early childhood to distance himself from the religiosity of his father (Dolza, 1990, 30). Thus, for example, he called the eating of matzot on Passover a stupid ritual (stupidi riti), and he designated the custom of laying tefillin (phylacteries) as a primitive remnant of the real Orthodox Jew (of whom, fortunately, very few remainLombroso, 1894, 14). Regarding circumcision, he said:
Why should they not rid themselves of the savage injuring that is circumcision, of the many fetishes of their holy books . . . that they disperse throughout their homes [referring to mezuzot] and even affix on their bodies [phylacteries], as if they were amulets. . . . For the same reason, they should leave the liturgical use of the Hebrew language to foreigners, and become convinced that Our Father in Heaven can understand their prayer in whatever language they speak (Lombroso, 1894, 107-108).

There is an identifiable phenomenon in Lombroso characteristic of the spirit of the time: the fear of ritual and of the Holy TongueHebrew. The Holy Tongue is a forbidden language that separates the People of Israel from the enlightened world. It is a language of merchants, of hidden codes, of concealment and falsehood. This belief, which included Yiddish as well, penetrated the consciousness of many enlightened Jews in Europe. It is a kind of Jewish self-hatred, or the adoption of the ancient beliefs of antisemites in Europe. For example, according to Gilman (1986): The fear of the way the Jews interpret Scripture is easily transformed into a fear of the books possessed by the people of the Book. The Jews books become

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the embodiment of the blindness and dangerousness of the Jews (Gilman, 31); in addition, The devious and corrupt language of the Jews reflects and is reflected by their criminal actions against the Christian world. Remove the barrier of language, and one will have reached the first level in civilizing the Jew (Gilman, 85). As an enlightened Jew (or, better to say, as an enlightened Italian with a Jewish background), Lombroso attempted to renounce everything reminiscent of the past. Thus, for example, he asserts that: The ridiculous rituals of matzot on Passover, which run so counter to what is accepted in the countries in which they live, arouse ludicrousness and even revulsion made even more intense by how important the Orthodox [Jews] consider them (Lombroso, 1894, 14). It is not only the Jews behavior and habits that Lombroso attacks, but also their physical and mental traits. Here, Lombroso contradicts himself by attributing to the Jews traits dependent on the body and genetics, not merely on language and customs. He further contradicts himself by identifying the Jews in the beginning of the book as an Aryan people, blonder than the British, but at the end he transforms them into Semites, and thus reprehensible. It is actually at this point that Lombroso proceeds from an apologetic attitude to an antisemitic attack. Thus, for example, although at the outset he defines the Jewish race as superior to the Aryan, he perpetuates prejudices regarding both physical and mental traits. The Jew is weak, physically small, neurotic, wretched, and boring. His morals are also defective: he is a cheat, a liar; he is lecherous and ambitious. Lombroso further confuses inherited and acquired traits, primarily due to ghetto life and employment. Thus, for example, body measurements and wretchedness are intermingled, and this becomes a permanent given: The Jews race is not a strong one. The Jew in large Jewish centers, particularly in the East, is usually small and fragile, his appearance ruinous and wretched (Lombroso, 1894, 18). Lombroso turns fixed habits into hereditary physical traits, like tattoos among born criminals: The habit [of making deals] has been so intensive and has continued for so many years that it has emphasized their habit of cunning and falsehood, the meager muscular energy so prevalent among merchants (Lombroso, 1894, 13); and that Jews make much use of their intellect, which gives rise to their neurotic characteristics (Lombroso, 1894, 84). Their moral inferiority is a result, among other things, of the Jews employment. Not only do they work with their intellect, but they are also traders, and as such, they became the principal moneylenders; they brought to commerce the insatiable spirit of greed, as well as of deceit, which waxed among them from their continued practice [of trading] (Lom-

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broso, 1894, 89). From here he reaches his final conclusion: I agree that most of them are immoral and covet power more than they covet good1 (Lombroso, 1894, 100). Noteworthy are the sources of this moral inferiority, which are the result not only of their traditional occupation, but also of the nations difficult history:
This is one of the most stubborn races in existence; only the strong, the stubborn, the energetic could have insisted on remaining Jews; this is therefore a race of extraordinary stubbornness; but in order to hold their own, it was necessary to cloak their stubbornness in humility and flexibility, a special type of flexibility that also gives rise to moral inferiority (Lombroso, 1894, 16).

If the assertion that a number of Lombrosos followers provided ammunition for racist propaganda in Europe is true, unquestionably these words, even without mediation or interpretation, could also have fanned the flames of Jew-hatred. It is important to note that his book, written in Italian, was translated in the same year (1894) into German, and into French in 1899. THE ZIONIST QUESTION The concept of degeneration that accompanies determinism and the conviction that immutable physical and character traits are ingrained has been interpreted differently by different thinkers. Some see a solution in fusion with other peoples or extermination (negative eugenics); others seek ways to improve the race (positive eugenics); on these concepts see, for example, Beirne and Messerschmidt (1995, 352-353). For example, in the modern Land of Israel, the settlement movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influenced by Max Nordau (1965, 187-188), there was widespread Zionist discussion of questions about Jewish degeneration in the Diaspora, and proposals along the lines of positive eugenics by would-be reformers (Biale, 1992, chap. 8; Cavaglion, 2004, 57-58). The emphasis in this application of the theory was to create a Judaism with muscles and to build the new Jew, who would grow and thrive on his land. In the 1898 Second Zionist Congress in Basel, Nordau, who had become one of the main leaders of the Zionist movement, called Zionism the political remedy to revive the body of the young Jew, after the terrible desolation wreaked among us during 18 centuries of disper1. So that there be no doubt that these words are out of context, I will cite this passage in the original Italian: Convengo tuttavia che la maggioranza loro non e ` morale, e sente piu la bramosia, lavidita del potere che quella del bene (p. 100). ` `

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sion that have led to an effete Judaism (Nordau, 1965, 117-118). Nordau, who became Herzls right-hand man, saw in the teeming ghettoes the reason for the Jews sickness, since they were deprived of decent physical conditions (Nordau, 1965, 187). That being the case, it was not heredity and the rigid determinism of biology but primarily the environment that caused the Diaspora Jews degeneration. Changing the environmentin other words, a return to the bond with the Land of the Fatherswould serve as a blessed cure. Nordau continued the romantic streak of the people of the Enlightenment by depicting the male Jew in the Diaspora as a sickly creature, needing physical virility and a stable and sound marriage and a healthy bond with the land (Biale, 1992). He proposed a unique remedy to combat the frailty of the Jews. National health was guaranteed not only by physical trainingJudaism with muscles, in his wordsand a return to nature, but mainly by aliyah (immigration) to the Land of Israel, with the creation of complete family and community life (see also Gilman, 1985, 130). In Nordaus opinion, it was the task of Zionism as a revolutionary movement to establish in Israel a new kind of deep-chested men, taut of limb, bold of view, strong young men like the legendary Bar-Kokhba (Nordau, 1965, 187-188). Notwithstanding the controversy surrounding the source of the degeneration (usually hereditary according to Lombroso, environmental according to Nordau) and the various eugenic solutions, whether positive or negative, it is important to point out that Lombroso, the assimilated (and antisemitic?) Jew, and Nordau, the nationalist and Zionist, shared great mutual admiration. Each of these doctor-authors dedicated a book to his counterpart. Lombroso met often with Nordau, entertained him in his home in Torino, and on a number of occasions called him my brother in arms. He identified with Nordaus ideas, going so far as to define his thinking as the only true salve I have gotten from the world (Frigessi, 2003, 315). In the Viennese Jewish-Zionist newspaper Die Welt, the two doctors expressed mutual praise on several occasions (Frigessi, 320). Despite his friendship with Nordau, at the beginning of Lombrosos career he considered assimilation a solution for the problem of antisemitism, while the option of Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel were out of the question. He advocated deliberate absorption and the fusion of Judaism, Christianity, and socialisma new religion with political involvement that would bring new tidings to modern man. This was also the message that Lombroso imparted to the members of his family. Regarding Western Jews, he advocated their remaining in their native countries and committing themselves to merging with the Christians,

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moving in the direction of a modern, syncretistic religion, with no narrowmindedness: The perfect solution would be if Jews and Christians, once they rise above the ordinary prejudices would unite in a new religion; in other words, a new, socialist Christianity, in which the Jews, having freed themselves of old and ridiculous rituals, could blend without shame or coercion (Lombroso, 1894, 109). Gibson (2002, 103) notes that the Jews of Italy became assimilated into the surrounding culture more quickly than their coreligionists in other Western European countries. They fought for the unification of Italy and were committed patriots of the new country, which promised their emancipation. It is thus easy to understand why in the early years Lombroso opposed Zionism in utterances such as the following:
One must also take into consideration that an extremely small proportion of the Jews, from Russia and Romania [Eastern Jews], will continue to feel an attraction to these countries (PalestineEretz IsraelJudea), which are not even their homeland. . . . We have seen, similarly, that from both an anthropological and a moral point of view, and even in terms of language and dress, they [Western Jews] have blended in their homelands and have been planted in the spirit of the land in which they live. . . . Thus, in Italy they are not merely Italians but also Venetians in [the] Veneto [region], Piedmontese in [the] Piedmont [region]. Now, how could they possibly be transformed into patriots of Judea? And what manner of farmers could all these or matchmakers, jewelers, wine-makers [be], and what kind of agricultural land can the desolate wasteland of Palestine [provide]? . . . If emigration at all, it should veer toward more modern centers, in Australia, North America, and also South America (Lombroso, 1894, 104-106).

Lombrosos Zionist thesis, like his theses about women, colored people, Southern Italians or Jews, is inconsistent. His position toward Zionism did change with time, particularly after the Dreyfus trial, the pogroms in Eastern Europe, and his meetings with Russian Zionist leaders during the Criminology Conference in Moscow (Frigessi, 2003, 323). In the revised version of his Zionist thesis, Lombroso still did not believe that Zionism offered a solution for Western Jewry, which had already begun the desirable process of assimilation. But at the same time he said (and here again he contradicted himself) that the Land of Israel was the cradle of eastern European Jewry (Frigessi, 324), and on at least one occasion he said, I believe in the renascence of the Jewish nation and in what could occur on the land on which the light spread to all the world (quoted in Frigessi, 326). At the end of his life, Lambroso favored the possibility of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, although he refused to play an active part in the movement, for reasons of age.

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DISCUSSION This essay contradicts a long-standing criminological tradition that considers methodology and internal logic the primary deficiencies of the father of criminology. An analysis of texts in the original, to which Englishspeaking scientistsin particular criminologists, who have dominated academic discourse since the 1930did not have access, sheds new light on very objectionable content in Lombrosos arguments. A study of Lombrosos case constitutes a further example of an enlightened, assimilated Jew who adopts distorted exercises in logic to alienate himself at all costs from his roots and his people by means of supposedly scientific justifications. Rafter and Gibson say (in Lombroso and Ferrero, 2004, 6) that in recent years scholars have been more cognizant of the intellectual and political context in which Lombroso operated. His internal contradictions reflect not only his personality, but also the Zeitgeist and the scientific knowledge available in the nineteenth century, and the attitude of assimilated Jews to their people. As previously noted, Lombroso grew up at a time of political and intellectual upheaval, of the emancipation of the Jews, and in a period of yearning for the revival, unification, and independence of a divided Italy (Lombroso and Ferrero, 2004, 15). The issue, however, is not only time but also place. Turin, Lombrosos adopted city, was the catalyst of this unification. It was first capital of the Savoy reign and Italy, and also the city that was the most open to European secular culture in that era. At this time, Italy, as symbolized by its first capital, went from being one of the most backward countries in Europe, with its Jews confined to ghettoes until 1870, to one of the most enlightened, in which Jews were able to aspire to the highest levels of society (Stille, 2005, 22). To cite Cecil Roth (1946, 504):
. . . the impact of emancipation upon the internal life of Italian Jewry was immediate; in most respects, it was deleterious. It had withstood, cramped but unshaken the onslaught of the long generations of oppression; but as elsewhere, it proved unable to resist the insidious blandishment of the new world of opportunity and equality. Within a generation of the great edict of Carlo Alberto, assimilation had made appalling progress. Synagogues that were formerly open for service twice a day now had difficulty in assembling the necessary quorum once a week; and most of those who attended were graybeards, whose sons considered such things to savor of separatism and superstition.

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During the Risorgimento, Jews were highly involved in the political revival; many died as patriots. In Italy, the struggle for the creation of a united modern state and the struggle for emancipation of Italian Jews were virtually synonymous (Stille, 2005, 25). As Molinari stressed (1991, 26):
This was the necessary premise to understanding the route taken by the Italian Jews in the united State of Italy: their national integration prompted them to cross the threshold of assimilation . . . and see their presence in the life of the country as proof that Judaism had a universal message.

Whereas before the unification of Italy identification with the Jewish community in all its complexity prevailed, Italian heritage gradually superceded ethnic ties. Italian Jews were Italian with a Mosaic faith/belief/ background (Molinari, 32). They felt, for a variety of reasons, that they were the most respected Jews in the world (Milano, 1963, 370). Even at its inception, the advent of fascism did not lead to any deterioration in the position of Italian Jewry. On the contrary, twelve years after the March on Rome (1934), relations between Jews and Gentiles in Italy were more harmonious that ever before (Michaelis, 1978, 6). During this period, before the 1938 Leggi Razzialithe commitment to the Italian nationcaused many Jews to reject Judaism, as if being a Jew meant not being completely Italian (De Felice, 1961, 15), considering that identifying with tradition meant being contaminated by the diseases of the ghetto (Milano, 1963, 372). The same attitude helps explain anti-Zionism among Italian Jews. It is no accident that no Italian representative took part in the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Identifying with a new national movement meant betraying any form of being Italian. After the unification, three Jews were elected to the first Italian parliament in 1861. In 1874, there were eleven Jewish deputies and in 1894, their number reached fifteenthe highest level in Italian history (Stille, 2005, 25). This process highlights the perceived difference between the Jews of the past, with their stupid rites, and the opportunity to climb the social ladder. The fathers, like Cesares father, were seen as forced to live a life of fear and harassment; they remained enclosed in their inner ghetto of bigotry and superstition. The new generation, in particular in Turin, became civilized, more attuned and open to modernity, progress, science, nationalism, and socialism (A. Cavaglion, 2009). This mounting drive for emancipation and civil rights helps account for Lombrosos fear of Jewish degeneration and his excoriation of tradition, which he depicted as representing physical,

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mental, and moral evils. More generally, it may clarify his professional ambitions and his calls for assimilation.

*Gabriel Cavaglion is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Work and Department of Criminology, Ashkelon Academic College, Ashkelon, Israel.

REFERENCES
Adler, Freda, Gerhard Mueller, and William Laufer. 1991. Criminology. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc. Akers, Ronald. 2000. Criminological Theories. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company. Baima Bollone, Pier Luigi. 1992. Cesare Lombroso, Ovvero il Principio dellIirresponsabilita. Torino: Societ` Editrice Internazionale. ` a Beirne, Piers, and James Messerschmidt. 1995. Criminology. Fort Worth: Harcourt. Biale, David. 1992. Eros and the Jews. New York: Basic Books. Brennan, Patricia, Sarnoff Mednick, and Jan Volavka. 1995. Biomedical Factors in Crime. In Crime, edited by James Wilson and Joan Petersilia, 65-90. San Francisco: ICS Press. Carrabine, Eamonn, Paul Iganski, Maggy Lee, Ken Plummer, and Nigel South. 2004. Criminology: A Sociological Introduction. London: Routledge. Cavaglion, Alberto. 2009. Notizie su Argon: Gli antenati di Primo Levi, Francesco Petrarca e Cesare Lombroso. Torino: Instar Libri. Cavaglion, Gabriel. 2009. The Rise and Fall of Sex Education in Hashomer Hatzair Kibbutzim. Cathedra, 113, 53-82 (in Hebrew). Darwin, Charles. 1902. The Descent of Man. New York: Collier. De Felice, Renzo. 1961. Storia degli Ebrei sotto il Fascismo. Torino: Giulio Einaudi. Dolza, Delfina. 1990. Essere figlie di Lombroso: Due Donne Intellettuali tra 800 e 900. Milano: Franco Angeli. Drapkin, Israel. 1977. Cesare Lombroso: El Creador de la Moderna Criminologia Cientifica. Buenos Aires: Congreso Judio Latinoamericano. Frigessi, Delia. 2003. Cesare Lombroso. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore. Garland, David. 1997. The Emergence of a Positive Science of the Criminal. In The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, edited by Michael Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner, 30-45. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gibson, Mary. 1998. Biology or Environment? Race and Southern Deviancy in the Writings of Italian Criminologists, 1880-1920. In Italys Southern Question, edited by Jane Schneider, 99-116. Oxford, UK: Berg. _______. 2002. Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology. Westport, CT: Praeger. Gilman, Sandor. 1986. Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.

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Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Harrowitz, Nancy. 1994. Antisemitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Hooton, Earnest. 1939. Crime and Man. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Horn, David. 2003. The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance. New York: Routledge. Jones, Delores. 1986. History of Criminology: A Philosophical Perspective. New York: Greenwood Press. Lombroso, Cesare. 1878. LUomo Delinquente in Rapporto allAntropologia, Giurisprudenza e Discipline Carcerarie. Torino: Bocca. _______. 1894. Antisemitismo e le Scienze Moderne. Torino-Roma: L. Roux e C. Editori. _______. 1902. Delitti Vecchi e Nuovi. Torino: Bocca. _______. 1911. Introduction. In G. Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. New York and London: Putnams. Lombroso, Cesare, and Guglielmo Ferrero. 2004. Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman. Translated and with an introduction by Nicole Rafter and Mary Gibson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lombroso, Gina. 1915. Vita di Lombroso. Milano: Giuseppe Morreale Editore. Lombroso-Ferrero, Gina. 1972. Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. Melossi, Dario. 2008. Controlling Crime, Controlling Society: Thinking about Crime in Europe and America. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Michaelis, Meir. 1978. Mussolini and the Jews. London: The Institute of Jewish Affairs. Milano, Attilio. 1963. Storia degli Ebrei in Italia. Torino: Giulio Einaudi. Molinari, Maurizio. 1991. Ebrei in Italia: Un Problema dIdentita (1870-1938). ` Firenze: Giuntina. Mosse, George. 1978. Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism. London: J.M. Dent and Sons. Nordau, Max. 1965. Zionist Writings. Jerusalem: Magnes (in Hebrew). Rafter, Nicole. 1992. Criminal Anthropology in the United States. Criminology, 30: 525-545. Rondini, Andrea. 2001. Cose da Pazzi: Cesare Lombroso e la Letteratura. PisaRoma: Istituti Poligrafici Nazionali. Roth, Cecil. 1946. The History of the Jews of Italy. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Sellin, Thorsten. 1937. The Lombrosian Myth in Criminology. American Journal of Sociology, 42: 653-671. Shoham, Schlomo G., Giora Rahav, and Moshe Addad. 1987. Criminology. Tel Aviv: Shoken (in Hebrew). Smart, Carol. 1977. Women, Crime and Criminology: A Feminist Critique. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Stille, Alexander. 2005. The Double Bind of Italian Jews: Acceptance and Assimilation. In Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945, edited by Joshua Zimmerman, 19-34. Cambridge University Press. Wolfgang, Marvin. 1973. Cesare Lombroso. In Pioneers in Criminology, edited by Hermann Mannheim, 232-291. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith. Zedner, Lucia. 1994. Women, Crime and Penal Responses: A Historical Account. In History of Criminology, edited by Paul Rock. Aldershot: Dartmouth.

Jews in Afghan Eyes


Mark Silinsky*
Neither Israel nor world Jewry looms large in Afghanistan or the Afghan mind. Afghan and Israeli soldiers do not face each other as enemies or allies on any battlefield, and there are no ancient feuds or prominent current grievances that grate. Commercial activity is very limited, and ethnic connections are very thin. There are some Afghan emigrants in Tel Aviv, remnants of the Jewish-Afghan diaspora of the late 20th century. But there are no Jews left in Afghanistan. Several empty, usually dilapidated synagogues and gravestones are the last markers of a 2,700-year Jewish civilization that never shone warmly, never brightly, in Afghanistan. But unlike some countries in which there are few or almost no Jews, Afghans, by and large, have no argument with Jews or Israel. Afghan politicians, opinion makers, and clerics do not express the type or level of hate and anger found in some neighboring states. They dont seem to care much about Jewish or Israeli issues. Why, then, is there such passionate hatred in two of Afghanistans neighbors, Iran and Pakistan, when Afghans have little interest in Israel or Jews? In neither of these states is there a sizable Jewish community. But, unlike Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan are consumed by Israel and world Jewry. Few countries, perhaps no country since the defeat of Hitlers Germany, has so passionately, ostentatiously, and repeatedly threatened to exterminate Jews as has Iran. Teheran is nakedly ambitious about its intent to build a nuclear arsenal to, in its words, wipe Israel off the map. Pakistan, too, attacks Israel, if only rhetorically. As in Iran, Pakistani political and religious leaders, opinion makers, university students, and firebrands preach unadulterated contempt for Israel and Jews. Afghan leadership and its non-insurgent population, however, are generally quiet on issues surrounding Israel. There is no easy explanation for this.

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ISRAEL

AND

JEWS

THROUGH AN

IRANIAN PRISM

Jews have a storied, mercurial, and biblically celebrated civilization in Persia/Iran. Some Iranian Jews living in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles speak with warm nostalgia of the Jewish Golden Age during the rule of the shah, a relatively secular leader, so hated by the theocrats in control of Teheran today. But there are only an estimated 25,000-30,000 Jews living among Irans Muslims, and these Jews live in fear of their lives. Jews remaining in Iran are officially allowed to leave, but many obstacles prevent their exit.1 There are still synagogues and Jewish schools in the capital,2 and some Western commentators underscore what they see as the steady harmony in which many Iranians and their Jewish countrymen live. For example, Roger Cohen of The New York Times wrote in 2009, Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iranits sophistication and culturethan all the inflammatory rhetoric.3 Other observers are not as sanguine and describe the Jewish community as one of hostages and Western journalists who downplay the always-present threat to Iranian Jews as naive or collaborative. What is not open to speculation is the abiding hatred toward international Jewry as expressed in Holocaust denial and vast conspiracy theories, as well as the repeated threats to attack Israel with nuclear weapons. Atomic bombs are to be tools to create, in Iranian president Mamoud Ahmadinejads words, a world without Zionism. If the Muslim world is today free of large Jewish communities, Ahmadinejads future world would be rid of the only Jewish state. On the popular-culture front, Iran sponsored an international Holocaust-denial cartoon carnival in response to the now-famous Danish cartoon contest that depicted Mohammad in a sarcastic light.4 Appealing to a sense of humor perhaps not widely shared outside of Teheran, the quasi-pornographic cartoon (figure 1) lampooning an improbable sexual tryst between Anne Frank and Adolf Hitler won first prize. This is an accurate representation and not an aberration of the official Iranian views on Jews and Israel.

1. Shelomo Alfasa, What of the Jews of Iran?, The Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2009. 2. I Was Scared in Iran as a Jew, Chicago Sun-Times, December 26, 2007. 3. Roger Cohen, What Irans Jews Say, Globalist, International Herald Tribune, February 23, 2009. 4. Sharon Ashley, From the Editor, The Jerusalem Report, March 6, 2006.

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Figure 1: Humor of the Mullahs Winner of Irans Cartoon Contest of 20065 This hatred in Iran is vast and consuming. According to a 2006 Zogby International poll on behalf of Readers Digest, 67% agreed that the state of Israel is illegitimate and should not exist, and 9% disagreed.6 In a poll conducted in May 2009 by KA Europe SPRL, a privately owned research company, the most frequently cited threat to Irans security was Israel. Forty-four percent of Iranians polled ranked Israel as the highest threat to their countrys security. The United States was given 38 percent.7 But Irans hatred extends well beyond snickering antisemitism. Teheran boasts a missile capability of reaching Israel, which is the Shihad-3 missile, and displayed a mockup of the 85-ton Simorgh, which can hit Israel and parts of the United States, according to the former director of Israels Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.8 ISRAEL
AND

JEWS

THROUGH THE

PAKISTANI PRISM

As with Iran, Pakistan is contiguous to Afghanistan. It has a long border that flanks Afghanistans south and east. The borders themselves were born of controversy and boundary disputes that still bedevil relations.
5. http://www.hyscience.com/archives/2006/02/dutch_islamists.php or http:// www.tomgrossmedia.com/MohammedCartoons.html. 6. Jim Lobe, Iran: Poll Suggests Strong Nationalism, Anti-US Sentiment, Inter Press Service English News Wire, July 14, 2006. 7. Alan Fram, Poll: Few Iranians Have Favorable Opinion of US, Charleston Daily Mail, June 9, 2009. 8. Aron Ben David, Nuclear Boost, Aviation Week & Space Technology 172 (February 15, 2010): 33-34.

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Unlike in the dominant Farsi-speaking population in Iran, Pakistans ethnicity is often indistinguishable from most Afghans, who are largely Pashtun. Pakistan was born of British India, at about the same time Israel won its independence. If Israel was created as a haven for Jews in a hostile, postHolocaust world, Pakistan came to statehood with Islam as its raison dEtat. Both states were relatively small compared to their neighbors, which they saw as existential threats. India, adjacent to East and West Pakistan, was always seen as the main enemy, and Israel was and is surrounded by enemies. Beyond this, Pakistan and Israel had little in common. Israel had no Pakistanis and Pakistan had no Jews. Many Pakistanis hate Israel and Jews, though it is not likely that many have ever met a Jew. According to a summer 2005 Pew Memorial Research public opinion poll on three religionsChristianity, Islam, and Judaism only 5% of Pakistanis have a positive opinion of Jews, while 74% have negative views.9 This same poll also revealed that of the majority of those polled, 51% saw Judaism as the most violent of the three religions. Those who thought that Islam was the most violent were 4% of the polled; Christianity also took 4%. As in Iran, the current fever-pitch-level hatred of Jews and Israel grew in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Radicalization began from a number of factors, not least of which was the large subsidy of Pakistani madrassas (religious schools) under the patronage of Saudi Arabia and other oilwealthy Gulf benefactors. As in all countries, leaders help to shape public opinion. The highly respected former head of Pakistani intelligence, General Hamid Gul, declared openly on al Jazeera that Israel is our main enemy. It is either them or us.10 In June 2010, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the former leader of the major Pakistani religious-political party Jamaat-e-Islami, agreed: Israel is an illegitimate state . . . Muslims neither have accepted Israel, nor will they ever do so.11 This Manichaean view is shared by many Pakistani intellectuals, who also despise Christians and Hindus. Elaborate conspiracy theories are common in many parts of the Islamic world, and they flourish in Pakistan. Sometimes, Pakistans religious leaders portray Israel and world Jewry as intractable malefactors in Pakistans affairs. India, Israel, and often America are rhetorically melded into an abstract enemy. There are many examples of this conspiratorial prism.
9. Islamic Extremism: Common Concern for Muslim and Western Publics, Pew Research Center, July 14, 2005, http://pewglobal.org. 10. General Hamud Gul, Israel Is Our Main Enemy. It Is Either Us or Them, Al-JazeeraTV (Qatar), August 8, 2006. 11. Roznama Express, Pakistan, June 3, 2010.

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Some of theories are built on vast collusions involving the intelligence and security services from India, the United States, and Israel. A leading Pakistani television personality, Zaid Hamid, claims that these countries use the Blackwater security firm to destroy Pakistan.12 When the Twin Towers were attacked, many Pakistanis blamed Israel and world Jewry.13 Pakistani public figures speak often and loudly about meting out punishment against Israel and other enemies. It is difficult for Westerners to follow the logic of some of the theories and proposed punishments. For example, Majeed Nizami, owner of the Roznama Nawa-i-Waqt media group and a leading figure in journalism, said, We should unite to combat the excesses by Jews and Christians. We cannot teach a lesson to Israel or to India without Jihad. Jihad is the only way to fight injustice at the international level.14 Maulana Chinioti, a prominent Pakistani cleric from the international Khatm-e-Nabuwat movement, appealed to the worlds Muslims to boycott all products marketed or made by Jewish-owned companies. He said that Jews regularly and deviously conspire to smear the image of Islam. I appeal to all the Muslims to stop buying products made by Jews. They earn from us and spend the money on heretic activities against our religion.15

Figure 2: Israel Harming Palestine A Common Theme in the Pakistani Media16


12. Sabrina Tavernese, Talk of Conspiracies Drives Political Dialogue in Pakistan, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 26, 2010. 13. Mark McDonald, Pakistanis Believe Israel Is Behind Attacks on America, Knight/Ridder Tribune Business News, September 22, 2001. 14. Roznama Nawa-i-Waqt, Pakistan, June 3, 2010. 15. Roznama Islam, Pakistan, May 27, 2010. 16. The News, Pakistan, June 2, 2010.

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Some prominent Pakistani intellectuals are convinced that many international organizationsthe World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, international charitiesare infected with un-Islamic, particularly Jewish, contaminants. For example, Mian Mehboob Ahmed, retired chief justice of Pakistans Sharia Court, said: Muslim countries should quit the United Nations Organization (UNO) and strengthen the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) [sic] to contest the conspiracies by the Jews and the Christians. Given the block voting power of Muslim states and the constant condemnations of Israel that emanate from their halls in the UN, it is not clear why any Muslim state would leave that international body. But, as Ahmed explained, the UN is an extension of the power of Jews and nothing else.17 AFGHANISTAN, ISRAEL,
AND

JEWS

In contrast to Iran and Pakistan, there is a much lower level of hatred in Afghanistan for Jews and Israel, as judged by popular, religious, journalistic, and political rhetoric. The Jews of Afghanistan had an ancient, if small and now extinct, civilization in Afghanistan. According to still-existing Afghan lore, todays Afghans are related to the lost tribes of Israel; more specifically, some of the Afghan ethnicities see themselves as being descended from some of the lost tribes of Israel. Partly legend, partly documented history, the Jews of Afghanistan traced their roots to the Assyrian and Babylonian empires of 720 BCE and 560 BCE. By the middle of the 20th century, there were fewer than 5,000 Jews in Afghanistan, and most of these immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, only several hundred Jews remained, most of whom left for Israel and the United States after the Soviet invasion of 1979. By the time the Taliban consolidated its power, in 1996, only ten Jews remained in Afghanistan. Almost all lived in Kabul, where there were not enough male adult Jews to hold a Sabbath prayer service. Life was miserable for most Afghans under the Taliban, who enforced many totalitarian elements similar to those in Stalins Soviet Union. Afghans were encouraged to report on their neighbors behavior; political, artistic, and intellectual activities were heavily monitored by state authorities. The Talibans Caligula-like sadism shocked much of the world, but there is no evidence that the handful of remaining Jews lived under worse conditions than did the small Hindu community. In fact, the Hindus may have received more contempt and scorn from the Taliban than did the Jews, who had some nominal protection in being considered people of the book.
17. Roznama Nawa-i-Waqt, Pakistan, June 3, 2010.

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Figure 3: Zablon SimintovThe Last Jew of Afghanistan The Taliban were driven from Afghanistan in late 2001, if only temporarily. If life can imitate humor, the story of the desert-island Jew fits into the Afghan drama. On their march across the Pacific in 1944, U.S. sailors came across a lone Jewish castaway who had spent 20 years on a forgotten Pacific atoll. When a sailor asked him why he built two synagogues when he was the only person on the island, he said, This one I pray in, and this one I wont step foot in. This old yarn captured the spirit of the only two remaining Jews in post-Taliban Afghanistan, Zablon Simintov and Ishaq Levin, who loathed each other and were loud about it. Simintov, known to his neighbors by the moniker the Jew, became the only Jew in Afghanistan after Levin died in 2005. The long-standing feud between the two became a scrap of humor in a land about which there was little to joke. Each had accused the other of crimes that included theft, espionage, and attempted murder. Not least of the spats had to do with possession of the one remaining torah in Afghanistan.18 But the rivalry died with Levin; when Simintov died, he took to his grave the last spark of Jewish Afghanistan, which had had endured for 2,700 years. The memories arent all bad. There remains some warm nostalgia in pockets of the Jewish-Afghan diaspora; some Jews remember periods of calm and warm relations with their Muslim neighbors. During the Taliban, many Muslims, who earlier were friendly with the few remaining Jews, became reluctant to be seen socializing with non-Muslims. Under the Taliban, fear was widespread and victimized all but the most observant and
18. Judy Mandelbaum, Would Afghanistans Last Jew Please Turn Out the Lights?, Salon Magazine, May 10, 2010, salon.com.

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conformist Sunni Muslims. In 2001, one middle-aged emigr said: I have e mixed emotions about the apparently upcoming attack [the impending U.S. attack against the Taliban]. On the one hand, like many Afghani expatriates, I have sympathy for those Afghani Muslims with whom I was friendly.19 GENERAL CALM
AND

OCCASIONAL ANGER

There are far fewer regular and visceral anti-Israel and antisemitic protests in Afghanistan. Polls, which are generally respected and conducted by credible sources, reflect a disinterest in Israel or Jews. But there are criticisms, such as occasional diplomatic notes of protest against Israel military actions. For example, in December 2008, the Afghan Foreign Ministry condemned Israels retaliation against Palestinian terrorist attacks. In this d marche, the Afghan government demanded that both parties cease hostilie ties.20 There are also periodic student and popular protestsmost small and transitoryover controversial, exaggerated, or fabricated charges. In the spring of 2010, students in Mazar el Sharif protested against Jews and Christians for proselytizing in Afghanistan;21in fact, there is no evidence that either Jews or Christians were trying to convert Afghans. These protests differ from many in Iran and Pakistan in that they are infrequent, have limited conspiracy elements, and are often tied to specific international events. Protests in which Jews or Israel are referred to as a cancer or a parasite, commonly made in Iran and Pakistan, are much rarer in Afghanistan. The most recent object of protest was the Israeli response to the Gaza-bound flotilla. When incident passed, so did the protestswhich themselves were limited. Results from different pollsters over many years confirm that Israel and Jews are not large issues in Afghanistan.22 Polls do not list Israel as a priority, a danger, or a source of violence or instability, as they do in Iran and Pakistan. It could be that those polled were not given the option of selecting Israel, but they had the option of placing Israel in the category of something else, which took 0%. The three polls shown below indicate that Afghans do not focus on external issues and do not see Israel or Jews as players in their countrys
19. Jews in Afghanistan under the Taliban, IsraelNationalNews.com, September 25, 2001. 20. Afghanistan Condemns Israels Air Strikes on Gaza, Xinhua News Agency, December 28, 2008. 21. Wazpanra Weesa, Afghanistan, June 9, 2010. 22. It is necessary to so assess Afghan opinion, because pollsters have not asked directly about positive or negative feelings toward Israel and Jews.

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affairs. The poll results in figure 4 demonstrate that Afghan priorities focus on stabilizing the country and bettering the lives of the people. Figure 5 does not list Israel or Jews as dangers to Afghanistan.
Which one of the following in your opinion should be the single most important priority for our country? Which is second most important? Creating jobs and economic opportunities Improving roads, water, and electricity supply Security from crime and violence Establishing a stable national government Rebuilding the schools Improving medical care Getting U.S. troops out of Afghanistan

First 31 14 40 5 6 1 2

Second 18 32 5 19 15 6 4

Third 49 45 45 24 21 7 6

Figure 4: What Should the National Priorities Be? October 2005

Which of the following do you think poses the biggest danger in our country? Taliban Drug traffickers Local commanders United States Current Afghan government Suicide attacks Neighboring countries Criminals Corruption in the government Poppy cultivation Al-Qaeda High prices/Lack of jobs Bombardment from foreign forces Lack of security Drought Illiteracy Something else No opinion

First 58 13 7 8 1 4 1 1 2 1 * * * 1 * * 0 3

Second 11 21 10 15 4 4 1 2 4 2 1 * * * * 0 * 25

Total 69 34 17 23 5 8 2 3 6 3 1 1 1 * * * 28

Figure 5: What Are the Greatest Dangers to Afghanistan? January 2009

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A 2010 poll does not name Israel or Jews as a cause of the violence in Afghanistan.23 Non-Afghan forcesAl Qaeda/foreign jihadis, U.S. forces, the U.S. government and NATO forcestake 76% of the blame. But Israel is not included, and could not have placed any higher than 3% if it were placed in the other category.
Whom do you blame the most for the violence that is occurring in the country? Taliban Al Qaeda/Foreign jihadis U.S./American forces Obama/Bush/U.S. government/America Local commanders/warlords Drug traffickers Afghan government/Karzai Afghan forces NATO/ISAF forces Other No opinion

2010 % 42 24 5 2 7 6 6 1 3 3 1

2009 % 27 22 12 6 6 5 12 3 3 3 1

2007 % 36 22 9 7 6 6 5 2 3 2

Figure 6: Whom Do Afghans Blame Most for Their Problems?24

DIPLOMATIC

AND

MILITARY TIES

Despite perennial rumors of Afghanistans pending recognition of Israel, it is not likely that that diplomatic relations will be formalized soon. There are several reasons for this: the current government in Kabul is sensitive to international and local opinion on important Islamic topics; the recent negative press coming from the Turkish flotilla; and the attacks on terrorist bases in Gaza years before has stirred Muslim anti-Israel hate. These and other sources of resurgent anti-Israel sentiment will make it difficult for Kabul to break from the ranks of Muslim countries. Another reason Kabul is hesitant to appear to close to Jerusalem is because Teheran, which already gives significant aid to insurgents, will become even more alienated. Teheran is developing nuclear weapons, expanding its regional influence, and supporting Farsi-speaking insurgent bands.
23. Afghans More Optimistic for Future, Survey Shows, http:// abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/1083alAfghanistan2009.pdf. 24. The survey was conducted for ABC News, the BBC, and ARD by the Afghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research, December 2009.

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But Israels military technology has a place in Afghanistan, if only in its atmosphere. Israeli military engineering soars in the skies over insurgent areas, helping to locate enemy forces. The Israeli Heron drone is used by several Coalition Force armies in Afghanistan.25 This aircraft serves as the eyes of the counterinsurgent forces. The much smaller, Israeli-made pilotless Skylark is a pocket-size intelligence-gathering aircraft, which is also in use in Afghanistan.26 Israel, with its high technology, could play a stronger role in Afghanistans agricultural and military development. LESS LIKELY REASONS
FOR

TOLERANCE

There are no clear reasons that the level of hatred toward Israel and Jews seems so much lower in Afghanistan than it does in Iran or Pakistan. There are several hypotheses that are probably not likely: Israel is distant, and there are no Jews in Afghanistan. There are simply no Jews to hate. If geographic distance from Israel and the low number of resident Jews explain Afghan disinterest, Iran and Pakistan could be expected to show similar low levels; they are very far from Tel Aviv. In addition, antisemitism and anti-Zionism have long existed in countries largely void of Jews. In 1933, Germany had no more than a 2% Jewish population, and anti-Zionism flourishes in a contemporary Europe in which few countries have more than small pockets of Jewish communities. So, the presence or lack of presence of Jews does not and historically has not been a valuable indicator in understanding antisemitism or anti-Zionism. Afghans are too occupied with their own concerns, particularly low living standards and security concerns, to focus on external targets. Afghans have burdens associated with insurgent violence, but life in Pakistan and Iran is often brutish and miserable. The teeming poverty, poor schooling, lack of gainful employment, and generalized fatalism does not prevent Iranians and Pakistan from blaming Jews for many of their problems. But Afghans do not make this argument. Israel and world Jewry are scapegoated by clerics and political leaders in Pakistan and Iran to draw attention away from their failing social policies and continuing low standards of living. But if Iranians and Pakistanis scapegoat Israel and Jews to divert attention from domestic failures, why wouldnt Afghan leaders do the same?
25. Israel Drones to Be Used by Germany in Afghanistan, AP Online, October 28, 2009. 26. Elbit Systems: Israeli-Made Drones in Action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haaretz, March 20, 2007, http://www.haaretz.com/.

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Afghanistan is wracked by insurgency, political instability, and corruption. Why not blame Israel, as well? Pashtuns see themselves as tied to the Jewish tribes. There are some elements of ethnic solidarity between the dominant Pashtun tribe and the Jews, but this is not likely. Pakistan is heavily Pashtun, and many of its citizens embrace wild, antisemitic conspiracy theories. Some Pashtuns believe they are descended from the lost tribes of Israel, and some anthropologists agree. But, Pashtun racial connections to Israelis or Jews are not common themes in Afghan popular literature.27 MORE LIKELY REASONS
FOR

TOLERANCE

There are several reasons that likely explain, if only partially, Afghanistans lack of interest in Israel or Jews: Isolation from antisemitism. Afghanistan has been more isolated from trends of antisemitism. Antisemitism has ebbed and flowed in Iran. The Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates the salvation of the Persias Jewish community in biblical times. In the 20th century, many, but not all, Iranian intellectuals were partial to Hitler. From the late 20th century, Saudi-funded madrassas in Pakistan indoctrinated scores of students with anti-Christian and antisemitic ideas. Afghanistan, in many ways in this sense, is more part of Central Asia, and this area of the world has relatively low historic levels of antisemitism. Non-hostile leaders in Kabul. Leaders in Afghanistan depend upon international aid and NATO funding, and these donors would be very reluctant to support hate speech. Western powers simply do not want to associate themselves with the blood libel, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the other grandiose and chuckleheaded conspiracy theories common in parts of the Islamic world. As it is, many NATO partners are leaving the Coalition Force and associating with the Karzai regime with hate speech might accelerate the exodus. Education. The current and constantly evolving Afghan educational system, primitive as it is by Western standards, is inclined to downplay hatred and focus on tolerant elements of Islam, secular subjects, or nation-building issues. Texts and schools, which are funded by international donors, are monitored.
27. Link between Israels Lost Tribes and Pashtuns of Af-Pak to Be Genetically Analyzed, The Hindustani Times, January 22, 2010.

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Ideological distancing from al Qaeda and Taliban. Neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban are popular in Afghanistan. Most of the influence they exert comes from fear. Much of the hatred they espouse is not shared by other Afghans, and Afghans do not seem inclined to take up many of their hate-based causes. Israel and the United States are often cast together in Islamic dramas. Pakistanis, Iranians, Afghans, and many others in the Islamic world see Israel and the United States as partners in world affairs. Muslims who distrust and dislike the United States share similar feelings about Israel. Many Pakistanis and Iranians hate the United States,28 but Afghans are more positive. Afghans were very proAmerican in an April 2007 poll, and most are still very pro-American.29 There could be a connection between the relatively positive feelings toward the United States and the apparently low level of hatred of Jews. AFGHAN-ISRAELI RELATIONS
AND THE

FUTURE

Afghan-Israeli relations may change for either better or worse; the case of Turkey illustrates how things can turn for the worse. For years, Turkey was one NATOs most loyal allies, a model of progressive Islam, and a practitioner of sustainable human development. A generation ago, few could have predicted the Turkish hatred of Israel that haunts relations today. Well through the 1990s, Israeli-Turkish relations were solid and warm; Jerusalem and Ankara shared common concerns about subversion coming from Syria, Iran, and Iraq.30 But new leadership in Turkey froze these warm relations. It does not have to happen this way in Afghanistan, however, and it has not happened that way with Caucasian and Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union, particularly Azerbaijan. Jerusalem enjoys warm and profitable relations with Azerbaijan, which is Israels largest supplier of
28. Muslim Public Opinion on US Policy, Attacks on Civilians and al-Qaeda, World Public Opinion Organization, April 24, 2007, http://www.worldpublicopinion.org./. 29. Afghan Public Overwhelmingly Rejects al-Qaeda, Taliban, World Public Opinion poll, January 30, 2006. Eighty-one percent said that they have a favorable view of the United States (40% very favorable), with just 16% giving an unfavorable rating. In the war zone, one in four (26%) had an unfavorable view of the United States, but 73% were favorable. 30. Barry Rubin, Israel and Turkey Share Interests, Jerusalem Post, December 9, 1997.

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oil.31 Israel also enjoys cordial relations with the key Central Asian countries Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan has boasted relatively high economic growth rates and has availed itself of Israeli technology to build its agricultural and communications sectors.32 In Kazakhstan, Israeli telecommunications, mineral extraction, and construction companies have partnered with domestic companies.33 Israel began as an agricultural state and became a start-up, hightechnology nation within two generations. Afghanistan is not likely to have the level of human capital or the educationally driven cultural base to make this transition to the highest levels of the industrial information spectrum but it can enjoy sustained human development if it can beat back the insurgency. Israeli expertise can help Afghanistan improve livestock, design modern farms, and boost nutrition.34 Israel stands to gain much from a robust economic relationship with Afghanistan, if reports of a yet-to-be-tapped, extractive mineral treasure trove in Afghanistan are true. In June 2010, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey determined that there are minerals valued at over $1 trillion in Afghanistan. These minerals include gold, copper, and lithium, critical to Israels high-technology sector.35 In addition, Afghanistan includes Israel in where it exports its world-acclaimed textiles.36 It could be that poisoned opinions will begin to flourish in Afghanistan as they now do in Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey. But this is not predetermined, and hate does not have to fester. For many centuries, the Muslims of Afghanistan lived warmly and respectfully with their Jewish neighbors; in Afghan eyes, Jews were of a different, but not hostile, tribe. Afghanistan could follow the models of its northern Central Asian neighbors. The contagion of hate that flourishes in Iran and Pakistan may not flow to Afghanistan.

31. Israel, Azerbaijan Enjoy Excellent Relations, Panarmenian.net, February 16, 2010. 32. Central Asia Should Be a Priority from the Point of View of Israel Foreign Policy, UzReport, April 30, 2009. 33. Galym Orazbakov, Kazakhstan and Israel: Good Friends and Reliable Partners, Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2009. 34. Central Asia Should Be a Priority, April 30, 2009. 35. Rahim Faiez, Huge Mineral Discovery Could Alter Afghan War, Associated Press, June 15, 2010. 36. Central Asia Should Be a Priority, April 30, 2009.

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*Mark Silinsky is a 26-year veteran of the defense intelligence community. He has served as a senior analyst in U.S. Army intelligence; as a Russian-language Army civilian foreign area officer for Eurasia; as an Africa analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency; as a J5 action officer for the Joint Staff; and as a research fellow at the National Defense Intelligence College, as part of the Exceptional Analyst Program. Silinsky, who holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California, a MPhil from Oxford University, and an MS from Tulane University, is currently completing his doctoral studies at Tulane. He graduated from the Naval War College, intermediate level, and the National Defense University, senior level, where he earned the prize for the outstanding research paper. He is also a 2008 graduate of the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy, located near Kabul.

Saint Chesterton
Simon Mayers*
In the early 1970s, David Lodge stated that following Vatican II, the Chesterbelloc brand of Catholicism, which he characterized as triumphalist, proselytizing, and theologically conservative, is no longer congenial to the mood of the Church.1 This mood may be changing. A recent address by the Vatican prefect in charge of The Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples announced that the world today needs Christian apologists, not apologisers. The address named Chesterton and Belloc as worthy examples who brilliantly expose the beauty of the Christian faith without blushing or compromise.2 In the past ten years there has been a resurgence in Chestertons popularity. This renewed interest has been marked by a recent flurry of books examining Chestertons life, literature, theology, prophetic insight, and holiness.3 Sensing this change in mood, a small following of Chestertons
1. David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 145. 2. Address of his Eminence Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, on the Occasion of the Anglican Conference of Lambeth, July 22, 2008: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ cevang/documents/rc_con_cevang_doc_20080722_dias-lambeth_en.html (downloaded July 9, 2011). 3. The following are just some examples: Dale Ahlquists G. K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense (2003), Aidan Mackeys G. K. Chesterton: A Prophet for the 21st Century (2009), Aidan Nichols G. K. Chesterton, Theologian (2009), William Oddies Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy (2008), William Oddies The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton (2010), and Ian Kers G. K. Chesterton: A Biography (2011).

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most fervent admirers have raised the question of his beatification.4 A conference at Oxford to discuss the holiness of Chesterton proceeded in July 2009. Prayer cards with a prayer for the intercession of Chesterton have been created in multiple languages. These were distributed and well received at a one-day symposium at Beaconsfield in October 2010. The main focus of the symposium was Chesterton and Cardinal Newman. Newman was recently beatified by the pope, and one purpose of the symposium was to suggest that Chesterton was the natural successor of the cardinal. A number of apologetics have been formulated by Chestertons admirers concerning his discourse about Jews; their general intent is to refute the charge that he engaged in antisemitism. This short essay is intended as a critique of just a few of these apologetics.5 In a recent volume on the holiness of Chesterton, William Oddie did not merely defend Chesterton from the accusation of antisemitism; he argued that he was in fact a philosemite.6 Oddie predominantly relies on material that dates back to the early 1890s. He quotes an entry from Chestertons diary, dated 1891, in which Chesterton wrote that he felt so strongly about an incident in Russia where a Jewish girl was treated with great cruelty that he wanted to knock some-body down.7 He also quotes a number of passages from Chestertons school magazine, The Debator, also from 1891, in which Chesterton fantasized about traveling to Russia to fight on behalf of the Hebrews suffering in pogroms.8 Oddie cites a poem, To a Certain Nation, published in 1900, to demonstrate that Chesterton was also appalled at the persecution of Dreyfus.9 These do indeed reflect Chestertons early attitude toward the persecution of Jews, thereby demonstrat4. Chesterton has already been appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great (by Pius XI in 1934) and Defender of the Catholic Faith (in 1936). 5. In this essay I examine only those aspects of Chestertons discourse that relate to the apologetics examined. This represents a tiny selection of his anti-Jewish discourse. For a scholarly introduction to Chestertons literary discourse about Jews, I recommend Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of The Jew in English Literature and Society: Racial Representation, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 6. William Oddie, The Philosemitism of G. K. Chesterton. In The Holiness of G. .K. Chesterton, ed. William Oddie (Leominster: Gracewing, 2010), 124-137. This volume contains papers presented by scholars at the 2009 Oxford conference. 7. Diary entry, January 5, 1891, cited by Oddie, The Philosemitism of G. K. Chesterton, 127. 8. The Debater, III, 1891, 11, 29, 71, cited by Oddie, The Philosemitism of G. K. Chesterton, 128. 9. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Wild Knight, 4th ed. (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1914), 92-93.

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ing that Chesterton was by no means consistently antisemitic throughout his life. Early into the 20th century, however, largely as a result of his friendship with Hilaire Belloc, Chestertons attitude toward Dreyfus and Jews became increasingly unsympathetic. By the time of the second edition of The Wild Knight, published in 1905, he expressed suspicion at the acquittal of Dreyfus in a new preface for the volume. The preface stated that he was no longer convinced about the innocence of Dreyfus and that while there may have been a fog of injustice in the French courts; I know that there was a fog of injustice in the English newspapers. According to the preface, Chesterton was unable to reach a final verdict on the individual, which he came largely to attribute to the acrid and irrational unanimity of the English Press.10 In letters sent to a periodical in March and April 1911, he denounced the type of Jew who is a traitor in France and a tyrant in England,11 and stated that in the case of Dreyfus he was quite certain that the British public was systematically and despotically duped by some powerand I naturally wonder, what power.12 The following passage by the narrator of Manalive (1912) would seem to suggest that Chestertons belief in the innocence of Jews suffering in Russian pogroms had also become somewhat ambivalent. The narrator stated: Wherever there is conflict . . . any soul, personal or racial, unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of its hundred faces. In the case of Moses Gould, the Jew in the novel, it was that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin for many a cruel riot in Russian villages or mediaeval towns.13 Another popular defense has been that Chesterton and Israel Zangwill were friends.14 Michael Coren stated that Zangwill was a friend of Chesterton, describing them as a noted literary combination of the time.15 Joseph Pearce likewise stated that Israel Zangwill, that most quintessential of Jewish writers, was someone with whom Chesterton had remained good
10. The British press almost universally condemned the Dreyfus trial. The second edition is difficult to locate, but the 1905 preface can be found in the fourth edition. Chesterton, The Wild Knight, 4th ed., xii. 11. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Letter to the Editor: The Jews in Modern Life, The Nation, March 18, 1911, 1004. 12. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Letter to the Editor: The Jew in Modern Life, The Nation, April 8, 1911, 58. 13. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Manalive (1912; London: House of Stratus, 2001), 137-138. 14. Israel Zangwill was a prominent Anglo-Jewish author and playwright. 15. Michael Coren, Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989), 209.

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friends from the early years of the century until Zangwills death in 1926.16 Neither Coren nor Pearce provided sources with which to verify this friendship. This has not prevented the alleged friendship being used by many other admirers of Chesterton, including Ian Boyd from the Chesterton Institute, Aidan Mackey, and Stratford Caldecott, who cite Corens book as if it were evidence.17 The strongest evidence of a friendship, circumstantial at best, is a photo of Chesterton and Zangwill walking side by side after leaving a meeting about government plans for the censorship of stage plays in 1909. As they both wrote plays, this is not a shocking revelation. This photo was reproduced in an issue of the Chesterton Review with a caption to suggest two friends together.18 The photo probably demonstrates little beyond their sharing an interest in government censorship. In 2008, a special issue of Gilbert Magazine, the periodical of the American Chesterton Society, devoted sixty pages to Chesterton & the Jews. Its aim was to refute the mean and wretched lie19 that Chesterton was an antisemite. It claimed that Zangwill and Chesterton admired each other; the same photo can be found on the front cover.20 Prior to 1915, Chesterton had on occasion referred to Zangwill in positive terms, describing him as a very earnest thinker and the nobler sort of Jew.21 During the first world war, however, he accused Zangwill of being Pro-German; or at any rate very insufficiently Pro-Ally, though he probably means at most to be Pro-Jew.22 Whatever the nature of their relationship, it did not prevent Zangwill from describing Chesterton as an antisemite. In The War for the World (1916), Zangwill referred to The New
16. Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 446. 17. For examples, see: http://www.secondspring.co.uk/spring/semitism11.htm (downloaded July 9, 2011); Aidan Mackey, Chesterton: Case for the Defence, The Jewish Chronicle, December 19, 1997, 23; Ian Boyd, Chesterton Review, Vol. XXXII/3&4 (2006), 276. Ironically, Gerald Kaufmann, an Anglo-Jewish politician, wrote a hostile critique of Chesterton but accepted the claim that Zangwill and Chesterton were friends. Gerald Kaufmann, Chestertons Final Solution, The Times Higher Education, January 2, 1998, 14. 18. Chesterton Review, vol. XIII/2 (1987), 144-145. 19. Dale Ahlquist, Gilbert Magazine, Vol. 12/2&3 (November/December 2008), 20. 20. Sean P. Dailey, Tremendous Trifles, Gilbert Magazine, Vol. 12/2&3 (November/December 2008), 4. 21. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1911), x-xi; and Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Our Notebook, Illustrated London News, February 28, 1914, 322. 22. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Mr Zangwill on Patriotism, The New Witness, October 18, 1917, 586-587.

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Witness as the organ of a band of Jew-baiters, whose antisemitism is rooted in ignorance, envy and mediaeval prejudice. He stated that G. K. Chesterton provided the intellectual side of the paper, which was, he concluded, not strong except in names. He suggested that the conductors of The New Witness would do better to call it The False Witness.23 In 1920, Zangwill stated: In Mr. Chestertons own organ, The New Witnessthe change of whose name to The False Witness I have already recommendedthe most paradoxical accusations against the Jew find Christian hospitality.24 If Zangwill believed Chesterton was guiltless of antisemitism, then he had a strange way of showing it. Another resilient but mendacious defense has been that Chesterton could not have been an antisemite because the Wiener Library, the UKs key institute dedicated to researching antisemitism, has defended him from the charge. This defense has been recycled in a number of books, newspapers, and periodicals.25 The resilience of this myth is demonstrated by the fact that at last count there were nineteen Web sites26 that refer to it, despite the Wiener Librarys efforts to have these false attributions removed.27 The exploitation of the Wiener Librarys name is discussed in the institutes Winter 2010 newsletter.28 This short essay presents just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to apologetics written to rehabilitate Chestertons reputation. They share in
23. Israel Zangwill, The War for the World (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 58-59. At this point, the paper was edited by Cecil Chesterton. G. K. Chesterton was a regular contributor who became editor in October 1916, when Cecil joined the army, and continued to run the paper when Cecil died in 1918. 24. Israel Zangwill, The Jewish Bogey (July 1920), in Speeches, Articles and Letters of Israel Zangwill, ed. Maurice Simon (London: The Soncino Press, 1937), 103. 25. For examples, see Coren, Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton, 209-210; Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence, 448; Oddie, The Philosemitism of G. K. Chesterton, 130; Ian Boyd, Chesterton Review, Vol. XXXII/3&4 (2006):276. 26. A few examples include knowledge Web sites Wikipedia and Answers.com, the antisemitic Web site Metapedia, and the Roman Catholic Web site Secondspring: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_K._Chesterton http://www.answers.com/topic/g-k-chesterton http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/GK_Chesterton http://www.secondspring.co.uk/economy/chesterton-anti-semitism.html 27. Ben Barkow, Directors Letter, Wiener Library News, 61 (Winter 2010):2. Ben Barkow is the director of the Wiener Library. 28. Simon Mayers, G. K. Chesterton and the Wiener Library Defence, Wiener Library News, 61 (Winter 2010):10.

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common a problematic use of sources. In some cases, such as the Zangwill and Wiener Library defenses, they cite little or no discernable evidence. Considering Chestertons discourse about Jews, which was often offensive and mendacious, the wisdom of considering him a saint and a philosemite is, from the perspective of promoting understanding rather than misunderstanding between Catholics and Jews, at the very least questionable.
*Simon Mayers is a final-year PhD candidate at the Centre for Jewish Studies in the University of Manchester. His PhD project, funded by the AHRC, examines English Catholic constructions of the Jew during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his main interest is how the Jews were represented in newspapers, periodicals, novels and short stories, sermons and pastoral letters. Mayers also has an interest in Jewish novels and Jewish philosophy.

Nicholas Kristof, Israel, and Double Standards


Jeffrey Grossman*
Over the years, Nicholas Kristof has written several New York Times op-eds that have demonstrated an appalling nescience regarding their subject matter. For example, in one less than remarkable 2010 opinion piece, New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer, Kristof declared: The Presidents Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies. (http:// www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/opinion/06kristof.html). In that same op-ed, Kristof went on to advise: Avoid meats that are cooked well-done. Apparently, Kristof was blithely unaware that our bodies consist of chemicals and that well-done meat (as opposed to charred meat, which can be carcinogenic) ensures that dangerous bacteria have been killed. Ignorance, however, has never prevented Kristof from foisting twaddle upon the Timess readership, particularly with respect to Israel. In an August 2011 op-ed, Seeking Balance on the Mideast (http://www.nytimes .com/2011/08/04/opinion/seeking-balance-on-the-mideast.html?_r=1&hp), Kristof lambasted Israel at a time when Assads tanks were massacring the inhabitants of the Syrian city of Hama. Kristof sought to excuse himself by observing:
Whenever I write about Israel, I get accused of double standards because I dont spill as much ink denouncing worse abuses by, say, Syria. I plead guilty. I demand more of Israel partly because my tax dollars supply arms and aid to Israel. I hold democratic allies like Israel to a higher standardjust as I do the U.S.

True, Syria has not been a recipient of U.S. aid. But whereas Egypt has received billions of dollars of American aid, Kristof doesnt write about the persecution and murder of its Coptic Christian minority (see, for example,

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http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2011/03/story-nicholas-kristof-isnt-covering -11.html). And while Pakistan, a democracy of sorts, has also benefited from billions of dollars of U.S. aid while abetting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Kristof has been seeking a reduction of tariffs on Pakistani garment exports to the United States. purportedly in order to fight extremism (see http:// www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/opinion/13kristof.html?hp). Kristof used Seeking Balance on the Mideast to smear Israels Operation Cast Lead:
Similarly, when Israel stormed into Gaza in 2008 to halt rocket attacks, more than 1,300 Gazans were killed, according to BTselem, a respected Israeli human rights group. As Gazan blood flowed, the House, by a vote of 390 to 5, hailed the invasion as Israels right to defend itself.

Kristof failed to state the number of mortar shells, rockets, and missiles fired from Gaza at civilian targets in southern Israel prior to Operation Cast Leadover 8,600i.e., a hailstorm that would surely be regarded by the United States or any other Western nation as an act of war, requiring that it defend itself. Hypothetically, if Cuba were periodically to shell Key West and its environs over the course of some eight years, I doubt that any American government could or would adopt the restraint demonstrated by Israel prior to Cast Lead. More odious, however, was how Kristof failed to mention that the accuracy of BTselems casualty figures and its impartiality are hotly disputed (see, for example, http://maurice-ostroff.tripod.com/id328.html). The Israel Defense Forces painstakingly determined that 1,166 Palestinians died, of whom only 295 were non-combatants (http://www.jpost.com/Israel/ Article.aspx?id=137286), and these numbers were subsequently confirmed in large part by Hamas (http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id= 193521). Was this a further manifestation of ignorance on the part of Kristof, or was there some other determinant in play? Kristof followed up on this August 2011 op-ed with another myopic New York Times opinion piece that appeared in October 2011, Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy? (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/kristofis-israel-its-own-worst-enemy.html?_r=1&hp). Kristof wrote:
These days, the world has been turned upside down. Now it is Israel that is endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy.

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Netanyahu stands in the way of peace? Lets have a look at his maximalist stance in his September 2011 speech to the UN:
The settlements have to beits an issue that has to be addressed and resolved in the course of negotiations. President Abbas, stop walking around this issue. Recognize the Jewish state, and make peace with us. In such a genuine peace, Israel is prepared to make painful compromises. Ladies and gentlemen, I continue to hope that President Abbas will be my partner in peace. Ive worked hard to advance that peace. The day I came into office, I called for direct negotiations without preconditions. President Abbas didnt respond. I outlined a vision of peace of two states for two peoples. He still didnt respond. I removed hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints to ease freedom of movement in the Palestinian areas; this facilitated a fantastic growth in the Palestinian economy. But againno response. I took the unprecedented step of freezing new buildings in the settlements for 10 months. No prime minister did that before, ever. Once againyou applaud, but there was no response.

Netanyahu offered to meet with Abbas at the UN, but again, there was no response from Abbas. Kristof attacks further. He would have us believe that future Israeli construction of 1,100 housing units in the Jersualem neighborhood of Gilo means that Israel now demands sovereignty over all of Jersualem:
With that diplomatic fight at the United Nations under way, Israel last week announced plans for 1,100 new housing units in a part of Jerusalem outside its pre-1967 borders. Instead of showing appreciation to President Obama, Mr. Netanyahu thumbed him in the eye. O.K., I foresee a torrent of angry responses. I realize that many insist that Jerusalem must all belong to Israel in any peace deal anyway, so new settlements there dont count. But, if thats your position, then you can kiss any peace deal goodbye. Every negotiator knows the framework of a peace agreement1967 borders with land swaps, Jerusalem as the capital of both Israeli and Palestinian states, only a token right of returnand insistence on a completely Israeli Jerusalem simply means no peace agreement ever.

This was pure sophistry on Kristofs part. Every peace proposal proffered by former Israeli prime ministers Barak and Olmert to their counterparts Arafat and Abbas in 2000, 2001, and 2008 was premised upon the 1967 lines with land swaps and a division of Jerusalem. In the case of Olmerts proposal, it involved sharing of Jerusalems holy places. Although they scorned these peace proposals, Arafat and Abbas never contested that the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo would remain with Israel.

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Kristof continued:
The Israel Defense Forces can deal with suicide bombers and rockets fired by Hezbollah. Im not sure that they can defeat Palestinian women blocking roads to illegal settlements and willing to endure tear gas and clubbingwith videos promptly posted on YouTube.

Was Kristof referring to those same Palestinian women who are repeatedly subjected to honor killings by their Palestinian male kin? Though Kristof has avoided writing about this horrifying phenomenon, his attempt at conjuring up a picture of IDF soldiers clubbing Palestinian women bordered on a blood libel. Kristof also blamed Israel for a deterioration of relations with Turkey: Mr. Netanyahu has also undermined Israeli security by burning bridges with Israels most important friend in the region, Turkey. What about democratic Turkey? There was no mention by Kristof of the increasingly radical Islamic stance adopted by Turkeys ruling AKP party, its efforts to curry favor with Iran, and its attempts to offer succor to the Hamas regime in Gaza. There has been no Kristof story about Turkeys oppression of its Kurdish minority; there has been no Kristof op-ed concerning Turkeys imprisonment of journalists. Kristof never bothered to tell the story of how Turkeys Prime Minister Erdogan accepted the Qaddafi 2011 Human Rights Prize and then refused to participate in NATOs operation to dislodge the Libyan tyrant. And I have yet to see a Kristof piece about child brides (37%) in Turkey or the spiraling murder rate of women under the current AKP government. Kristof further declared in this op-ed: If Jews in the West Bank can vote, then Palestinians there should be able to as well. But it is Abbas who has refused to allow West Bank Palestinians to vote. Elected to serve as the president of the Palestinian Authority until January 2009, Abbas continues in his current position without a mandate. It is also peculiar how Kristof failed to mention that Abbas insists that the future Palestinian state must be free of Jews and that Abbas will not accept Israel as a Jewish state. Kristof concluded:
Some of my Israeli friends will think Im unfair and harsh, applying double standards by focusing on Israeli shortcomings while paying less attention to those of other countries in the region. Fair enough: I plead guilty. I apply higher standards to a close American ally like Israel that is a huge recipient of American aid. Friends dont let friends drive drunkor drive a diplomatic course that leaves their nation veering away from any hope of peace. Today,

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Israels leaders sometimes seem to be that countrys worst enemies, and its an act of friendship to point that out.

Kristof is a friend of Israel, again fearful of being accused of applying a double standard? Ridiculous. The former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, has stated that he has no hesitation in calling Kristof by his rightful name: an enemy of Israel (http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/49982/). But from where does Kristofs enmity toward Israel derive? Is his hostility the product of navet (akin to Avoid meats that are cooked well-done), e or is he merely toeing the line with respect to the institutionalized antiZionism of the left? Lets get straight to the point: Is Kristof an unwitting antisemite? He would undoubtedly deny this accusation and provide a laundry list of Jewish friends and colleagues, but ultimately any such determination would depend upon your definition of the term. According to the working definition of antisemitism of the European Forum on Antisemitism (http://www.european-forum-on-antisemitism.org/ working-definition-of-antisemitism/english/): Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel taking into account the overall context could include: . . . Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation. If Kristof indeed holds democratic allies like Israel to a higher standardjust as I do the United States, where are his recent opinion pieces decrying civilian casualties in Afghanistan, which have exceeded those resulting from Israels Operation Cast Lead by a multiple of almost a hundred, according to some estimates? Back in 2002, Kristof wrote a New York Times op-ed, A Merciful War (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/01/opinion/01KRIS.html?todays headlines), justifying civilian casualties resulting from Americas involvement in Afghanistan, in which he concluded: All this underscores a simple truth, and enough time has passed since Vietnam that we should be able to acknowledge it: Military intervention, even if it means lost innocent lives on both sides, can serve the most humanitarian of goals. For 2001-2011, there are estimates that between some 10,000 and 30,000 civilians have died in Afghanistan as the result of military activity undertaken by the United States and its allies. Compare this number with the 295 noncombatants estimated by the IDF to have died in Israels Operation Cast Lead, some of whom were murdered by Hamas as Israeli collaborators. Whereas Kristof is quick to repeatedly skewer Israel, he has largely ignored the issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

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Kristof plainly has no problem ignoring the persecution of 30 million stateless Kurds, the oppression of Irans Bahais, and the despair of Egypts Copts. He clearly holds Israel to rules unlike those that he would set for any other country, democratic or otherwise, be it Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, or the United States. Kristof worries over whether he will be accused of applying a double standard to Israel, to which concern I would observe that there is an old Jewish maxim applicable to Kristofs angst: The hat burns on the head of the thief. In the best-case scenario, Kristof is guilty of applying double standards to Israel, notwithstanding his protestations to the contrary. In the worst-case scenario, Kristof is guilty of something far more insidious.
*Jeffrey Grossman, who holds degrees in law and philosophy, is the CEO of Bear and Bird Ltd., a boutique international business advisory firm. He has appeared on television throughout Europe, supplying real-time, on-the-scene commentary during crises and wartime. Grossman lives in Caesarea, Israel.

The CST: A Vital Partnership


Michael Whine*
The Community Security Trust (CST) provides security and security advice for the Jewish community in the United Kingdom. In addition, it monitors and analyzes antisemitic incidents and political and physical threats to the community. The CST has been carrying out these tasks for over twenty years, through its growth and under different names, but keeping its organizational core. Recent political, legal, and cultural developments in Britain have allowed the CST to expand its role, both within the Jewish and the wider community, in keeping with the aspirations of its lay and professional leadership and the responsibilities that successive governments wish faith communities to adopt. As the oldest non-Christian faith community, with a developed organizational and communal capacity dating back over three hundred years, Jews play a disproportionate role in British society, and governments appreciate any assistance that the CST may give to newer migrant communities, especially in combating racism and hate crime. Indeed, the constant stream of requests from central government has caused several organizations, most notably the Board of Deputies of British Jews (the representative body) and the CST (the Community Defence Agency), to reconfigure their professional structure to meet these calls. HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS Jewish ex-servicemen returning to Britain at the end of World War II were confronted by renewed antisemitism on the streets of London, organized by supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley, who had been released from prison in 1943 after being interned for three years for his Nazi sympathies. Having spent six years fighting against Nazism, the ex-servicemen were unwilling to accept renewed incitement against their community. A small group therefore established the 43 Group, which successfully beat Mosleys thugs off the streets. Concurrently, the official body of Jewish war

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veteransthe Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen (AJEX)developed a policy of seizing the street pitches before the fascists could do so (Beckman, 1993; Sugarman, 2010). Twenty years later, when supporters of Colin Jordans National Socialist Movement and of Spearhead, its paramilitary offshoot, began to attack Britains synagogues and its growing Afro-Caribbean community, activists within the Jewish community developed a similar response, creating the 62 Committee (Copsey, 2000; Williams, 1967). Although their activities were marginal to Britains overall political life, the far right was not marginal to the life of Britains Jews, who believed, with some justification, that the governments of the time were not interested in confronting the intimidation and violence that Jews were experiencing and cared only for the maintenance of public order. English law has always regarded racial incitement as a public-order concern, rather than as an offense against the rights or dignity of minorities. When the Public Order Act was passed, in 1936, as a direct response to pro-Nazi provocation, the most important provision, Section 5, made it an offense to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior at a public meeting, with intent to provoke a breach of the peace or whereby a breach of the peace was likely to be occasioned. It did not address the consequences of intimidation for the Jewish community (Brownlie, 1968; Malik, 2009). The Jewish communitys representative body, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, composed of elected representatives of all synagogues and communal institutions but largely led in those days by long-established families rather than more recent immigrants, who were experiencing antisemitism on the streets, was also active in lobbying government to crack down on the extremists violence (Langham, 2010; Tilles, 2010). Despite differences over strategy and tactics, the Board, the 43 Group, the 62 Committee, and the AJEX all shared information on the neo-Nazis with each other, and on occasion with the police (Thayer, 1965). They were also willing to share their information and experiences with others who were prepared to combat racism and hate. These distinct streams within the community, and the differing tactical approaches they adopted, were merged in the late 1980s as a consequence of new strategic thinking and of changes in legislation. The Jewish groups felt that the far right, which had been the primary historic source of antisemitism, was unlikely to fade altogether, but that it was being replaced by threats from new and different directions. The political and social antisemitism that had, for example, limited Jews membership in the higher professions or in the commercial institutions of the City of London and

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certain golf clubs, were slowly fading as a consequence of the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel, and a more self-assured and assertive Jewish community, which had played a disproportionate part in defeating Nazism and fascism. Now, a resurgent anti-Zionist left, the overspill of Middle East tensions, and Islamism provided new directions from which Jew-hatred was flowing. Not every criticism of Israel and Zionism was viewed as antisemitic, but on many occasions such comment served to mask antisemitism. Moreover, from the late 1960s until the mid 1980s, terrorism posed actual dangers to Jewish communities around the world. Terror attacks were perpetrated by Palestinian secular groups, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, and far-left groups. Iranian proxiesHizbollah in particularalso targeted Jewish communities, as demonstrated by the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. Although terrorism from these sources peaked in the mid-1980s, at least in numerical terms, it was replaced after 2000 by the threat of terrorism from Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and supporters in the global jihad movement (CST, 2011a). The Jewish community also wanted to demonstrate a commitment to aiding newer immigrant communities and fighting racism generally. The Board of Deputies had successfully campaigned during the 1960s for legislation that guaranteed equality on the one hand, and criminalized incitement to hate on the other. The legislative outcome of this political campaign had been the 1964 Race Relations Act, which, inter alia, made it a crime to discriminate on racial grounds, and the 1986 Public Order Act, which criminalized incitement to racial hatred. Of course, the Board was not the only champion in these areas, but it did play a major part in drawing public attention to the malign consequences of discrimination and racism (Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1969). As part of its commitment, the Board established the Community Security Organisation (CSO) in 1986. With its creation, the CSO absorbed and adopted the activism of the 62 Committee and the AJEX, along with the political defense work of the Boards Defence Department. In 1994, after changes in charities legislation facilitated the establishment of a standalone, not-for-profit body focused on security and defense for the Jewish community, the CSO became the Community Security Trust (CST). In granting the CST charitable status, the Charities Commission had insisted that it incorporate in its instruments a reference to aiding other communities. The CST did precisely this, thereby formalizing its belief that, while antisemitism is a singular and unique hate form, the fight against antisemitism must be carried out in partnership with others, and that the experiences and techniques gained in doing so should be shared with other victim groups (CST, 1994).

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LEGAL

AND

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS

Along with these internal developments, the British government and its criminal justice agencies were also forced to make substantial changes to their response to hate crime, from the mid 1990s onward, that benefited the Jewish community. The spark for this process was the lamentable failure of the Metropolitan Police Service to properly investigate the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in April 1993, which had set in motion a series of investigations and attitudinal changes that led to a radical revision in policing and the manner in which it responds to hate crime. The case was reported in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report by Sir William MacPherson (Macpherson, 1999); it is still working its way through the criminal justice system. The 1936 Public Order Act, which had been passed to counter the rise in prewar pro-Nazi activities, and the 1964 Race Relations Act, which outlawed racial discrimination, were not designed to address the growth of institutional racism, which the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report defined as:
the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people (Macpherson, 1999, 28).

The inquiry made 70 separate recommendations, which went to the heart of police responses to hate crime and were designed to increase trust and confidence in policing amongst minority ethnic communities. Among them was an agreed definition of a racist incident as: A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person; this is now known as the Stephen Lawrence test. Other recommendations included: a code of practice for police and criminal justice agencies that would allow the reporting of racist incidents 24 hours a day at locations other than police stations; sharing of information on racist incidents among the relevant agencies; the creation of a practical guide for responding to racial incidents; improved liaison with victims and their families; a rebuttable presumption that the public interest test be in favor of prosecution for hate crimes; and training reviews for all police officers and scenes of crime officers, including racism and cultural diversity training (Macpherson, 1969, 327-335).

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In 2001, the Crown Prosecution Service commissioned a Diversity Monitoring Project, under the leadership of Professor Gus John, to investigate its own institutional practices and to ensure that these were not contributing in any respect to the denial of justice or to a lack of public confidence in prosecution systems on the part of black and other minority communities. The investigation found no evidence of racial discrimination in prosecution decision-making, but it did point to some worrying trends about the way in which racist crimes were prosecuted, and formulated ten recommendations to address shortcomings. Among them were the establishment of a common standard for casework management, a competency framework for prosecution advocates, the creation and nurturing of an improved management culture, the appointment of specialist prosecutors for racist and religious crimes, and the adoption of a holistic approach across the criminal justice system (Crown Prosecution Service, 2003). The recommendation for a holistic approach persuaded the attorney general to establish a task force to analyze the context in which racial crimes occur, to consider improvements in training, and to devise strategies for good practice. Such strategies include the development of common reporting methods for the police, to include the use of same categories and definitions, common protocols, and online reporting of hate crimes; more effective police training; systematic victim and defendant monitoring by ethnicity; and training for prosecutors and judiciary. To oversee the recommendations, the Office for Criminal Justice Reform established the Race for Justice Delivery Board, composed of senior representatives from the criminal justice agencies, to be advised by a small committee of civil society representatives, guided by an independent chairman. Following the formation of the Coalition Government in 2010, the committee names were changed to the Hate Crime Advisory Board and Advisory Group, on which the CST plays an active role representing all faith groups. These bodies had already moved their affiliation from the Home Office to the Ministry of Justice, from where both continue to meet quarterly (Attorney Generals Office, 2006). The second substantive development affecting Jewish communal concerns was the Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism in 2006. The initiative for the inquiry came from the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism (PCAA), John Mann, MP, who realized that the nature of antisemitism was changing in the wake of Middle East developments, as was the direction from which it was now coming. This inquiry was chaired by the former minister for Europe, the Rt. Hon. Dr. Denis MacShane, MP, and its membership was drawn from all parliamentary parties; to avoid charges of bias, none of the members was Jewish or represented any significant Jewish constituency.

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Over the course of twelve months, the PCAA heard evidence from government, police, Jewish organizations, Muslim groups, Jewish day school principals, journalists, and others. The inquiry made thirty-five recommendations across a range of issues, which included: adoption of the EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism; greater government support for the Jewish communitys security needs; an investigation into the low number of prosecutions for antisemitic criminal acts; intensified cooperation between the police and CST; commissioned academic research on the correlation between conflict in the Middle East and antisemitic attacks; government action on Internet sites that promote antisemitism; the establishment of an academic working party to investigate and take action against antisemitism on British campuses; increased inter-communal dialogue; and the appointment of a special high-level envoy on antisemitism (Report, 2007). Two particular recommendations concerned the Crown Prosecution Service, which was asked to investigate the low level of prosecutions for crimes motivated by antisemitism, and to review cases that had been brought before the courts in order to see what lessons could be learned. Again, an inquiry was established to which the CST, along with other Jewish organizations, gave evidence. The inquiry established that 69 percent of cases from the small sample investigated did not progress because of the failure to identify suspects. In 58 percent of cases that could have been prosecuted, however, it was the reluctance of witnesses or victims to support a prosecution by, for example, not wishing to give evidence in court, which resulted in cases being dropped. This clearly had implications for the prosecution service and the police, who were failing to pursue cases; both needed the assistance of the CST to encourage victims of crime to report the offenses and to provide counseling where necessary. In this area, the CST is well placed, having earned the trust of members of the Jewish community over many years (Crown Prosecution Service, 2008). The parliamentary inquiry also required action by government, and that progress be reported. The governments responses have therefore been published annually for three years, and reflect the progress made in combating antisemitism across a wide spectrum of public life (All-Party Inquiry, 2008; All-Party Inquiry, 2010). The CST played a substantial part in the antisemitism inquiry, both in the evidence that its staff gave and in assisting other witnesses, such as the representatives of the Board of Deputies and the Union of Jewish Students, to frame their evidence. It continues to play a major role in its participation in the Cross-Governmental Working Group to Tackle Antisemitism, which reviews the progress being made.

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THE CST FRAMEWORK CSTs work is carried out by approximately 3000 volunteers, managed by a professional team that is based in offices in London, Manchester, and Leeds and is overseen by a management board. Entirely self-financing, the CST raises the funds it needs from within the community, although it has received three government grants in the past two years. Its work covers the entire community, from secular to strictly orthodox. In this respect, it is almost unique among Anglo-Jewish institutions, which engage only to a minimal extent with other Jews in the community. The CST also makes no charge for its services so that no part of the community should be excluded (CST, 2010). Security work is concentrated into two areas. The first is the provision of security advice and training for community members and institutions. Threat assessments, based on the expected participants, guest speakers, and local environment, are made for major communal events, and, where necessary, teams of trained volunteers provide security. In this capacity, they often work closely with the police and venue management, establishing joint command and control infrastructures where appropriate. The second area of security work is the provision of advice to Jewish community institutions and the staff who work in them. This includes technical advice for community buildings, and particularly for new buildings, on the basis that security hardening is more effective, and cheaper, at the design stage rather than adding it on retroactively. Three years ago, after analyzing the nature of terror attacks on synagogues in other countries, and finding that the majority of injuries and fatalities were caused by bomb blast from terrorist attacks, the CST embarked on a multimillion-pound project to shatterproof the windows of all synagogues and Jewish day schools. At CST urging, at the end of 2010 the UK government agreed to provide substantial funding for Jewish schools security needs, having accepted that the Jewish community faces particular terrorist and violence threats (Gove, 2010). A third area, and one that has grown in response to growing needs, is that of advocacy, public affairs, and communications. Among its many areas of engagement, the CST is the primary author of communal submissions to government inquiries on the related matters of hate crime, counterterrorism, and legislation; participation in police, central government, and municipal authority advisory groups; and advice to minority faith groups. Two years ago, the CST began to publish an annual report on antisemitic discourse, and more recently has developed a blog, on which staff members comment on current issues of concern to the Jewish community.

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The provision of information on political and physical threats to the community is a substantial part of CST work. Its base for information is the community leadership itself, law enforcement, and government, and it has developed longstanding relationships with many of these municipal leaders, who have come to rely on the quality and timeliness of CST analyses. On its own initiative, or in response to requests for advice and assistance, the CST has provided training on security and responses to hate crimes to National Churchwatch, a similar but much smaller body than the CST that serves the Anglican Communion, various Hindu temples, Sikh gurdwaras, and, as of 2010, a number of Muslim communities and their mosques that have been victims of hate crime attacks either by anti-immigrant groups or from radical Islamists. In fact, the CSTs relationship with Hindu and Sikh national and local bodies has developed in recent years to form a close, mutually supportive relationship. This is not just a consequence of the growing diplomatic and commercial ties between Israel and India, but primarily because the three ethnic-religious groups frequently adopt common public positions and share a common outlook on many social or political issues. As a consequence, occasional meetings are held between the communities professional and lay leaderships, and the CST has provided developmental and infrastructure advice to the Hindu community, in particular, for over fifteen years. REPORTING HATE CRIME The CST began to record antisemitic incidents in the UK in 1984; this reporting system was changed in 1990 to ensure consistency and greater accuracy, and to bring it into line with UK criminal justice system classifications and international moves to regularize the gathering of data by Jewish communities. Incident reports are gathered from the victims themselves, from press reports, and from the police. The CST has an investigative capacity that has worked with the police on occasion, and regular meetings are held with national and local police agencies to facilitate information exchange and consistency of reporting. The CSTs annual Antisemitic Incidents Report has been cited by the British government as the definitive source of information on the subject for a number of years, although the police began to collect their own data, and published the first set of official figures in November 2010. As a result of its experience, the CST has long urged Jewish and other communities to standardize data collection and analysis, and it plays an active role within international agencies to educate law enforcement agencies and NGOs (CST, 2011b; Whine, 2009).

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In September 2009, the Home Office awarded the CST a substantial grant from the hate crime section of its Victims Fund to assist its work with victims of antisemitic hate crimethe first time that the CST had received any government funding. The award was one of ten made by the fund to help support a range of organizations working on behalf of hate crime victims. This is a core element of CST work, and the money helped staff and volunteers to support victims, as well as advertise its services more widely through, for example, public advertising on bus stops in Jewish areas. At the end of 2010, the CST received a second, smaller grant from the same fund. On this occasion, the money has also been used to fund a booklet for other communities on reporting and responding to hate crime. It provides a range of practical suggestions based on CST experience (CST, 2010). In 2011, the Ministry of Justice gave the CST a grant to develop the means to report antisemitic incidents on Internet-enabled mobile phones. This is similar to an app, and the QR code can be scanned into a phone from the CST Web site. In early 2011, UK police services launched a national online hate crime reporting system known as True Vision (see http://www.reportit.org.uk/home). This enables victims to report hate crimes without having to visit police stations, recognizing that some may be fearful or unable to visit themselves. In doing so, it meets one of the recommendations urged by the Macpherson Report. True Vision also facilitates third-party reporting to enable them to report on behalf of victims, a system pioneered by the CST in conjunction with some police forces. The online system provides safeguards to protect information, automatically refers reports to local police forces, and guarantees a 24-hour initial response. Web site sidebar icons enable victims to access CST reporting mechanisms, and the CST will in turn facilitate referrals to True Vision. INTERNATIONAL WORK In early 2011, the CST received a substantial grant payable over two years from the European Commission for the Facing Facts project to be carried out in partnership with the Brussels-based European Jewish Information Centre (CEJI) and the Netherlands-based Centre for Documentation and Information Israel (CIDI). The project aims to distill the analytical and pedagogical knowledge gained by three experienced Jewish bodies, and extend it to smaller Jewish and other minority communities across Europe. It will focus on establishing national non-governmental infrastructures and methodologies for collecting data on antisemitic and other hate crimes.

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This is not a new venture for the CST, though the scale of its involvement is certainly a change. The CST has maintained relations with Jewish community monitoring bodies for a number of years and routinely exchanges data with them. Indeed, a glance at the product of some European and Commonwealth equivalent bodies illustrates strong similarities in their names, organizational logos, and presentation styles (see, for example, Frances Service de Protection de la Communaute Juive, http://www.spcj. org). The dearth of reliable data on hate crimes, including antisemitism, is regularly criticized by the two main monitoring bodies, the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA, the successor body to the EUMC), and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). For example, the ODIHR noted in its 2009 Annual Report on Hate Crimes in the OSCE Region that:
The full extent of hate crime in the OSCE region continues to be obscured by a lack of adequate or reliable data. Although data collection by both governments and NGOs improved in 2009, it is clear from the information provided to ODIHR that significant gaps in data collection remain a major obstacle to understanding the scope and nature of hate crime within most participating States and across the OSCE as a region (ODIHR, 2010, 7).

The CST has sought to involve itself in the process of collecting and analyzing data at the international level, and, in fact, aside from its liaison with and support for other Jewish community agencies, plays an active role within international agencies. The EUMC commissioned a report on antisemitism in 2004 that drew heavily on CST data, and it continues to provide data and analysis through the University of Warwick, which acts as the FRA National Focal Point on hate crime data (FRA, 2009). The CST also participated in the drafting of the EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism, a specific outcome of the 2004 report, which had noted that:
The basic premise for a valid monitoring and analysis of a phenomenon is an adequate definition; and the basic premise for comparability is the common use of such an adequate definition within a country, or even better, within the EU. The country-by-country evaluation has shown explicitly that neither is the case. . . . future data collection and assessment should be commonly based on the proposed definition of antisemitism. (EUMC, 2004, 24)

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Both the U.S. State Department and the ODIHR now recommend the Working Definition, which can be found at http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/ attachments/AS-Main-report.pdf. An indirect outcome of the PCAAs work was the establishment of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). In February 2009, the British government hosted its first conference and summit for parliamentarians from around the world, which produced the London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism (ICCA, 2009). With this document, parliamentarians agreed to press their governments to honor international agreements such as the OSCE Berlin Declaration that focus on combating antisemitism. In November 2010, the ICCA held its second conference, in Ottawa. The result of this occasion was the Ottawa Protocol, which noted the alarming resurgence in anti-Jewish libels, such as blood libels and the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and affirmed the calls from the London conference for governments and international agencies to take effective action to combat antisemitism (ICCA, 2010). In both conferences, the CST played a substantial role, providing administrative support and direction, as well as expert presentations for the participants. For the first conference, in London, the CST organized the Experts Forum, and in 2011 became a member of the ICCA Task Force on Internet Hate, which works separately but in parallel to the main ICCA to combat the promotion of hate online. In October, the task force held its first hearing in the British parliament, attended by parliamentarians from diverse countries and Internet experts, at which the CST made a presentation. Within the Jewish world, the CST was involved in the early discussions that led to the formation of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, the primary agency for the collection and analysis of data on antisemitism. CST staff draft the UK contributions to the annual Antisemitism Worldwide Report and participate in the biannual meetings of the contributors to the Reports. CST analyses also inform the reports of the Monitoring Forum, as well as the annual report delivered by the Israel government (see http:// www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/). CST staff provides advice and assessments for the World Jewish Congress, the representative body for Jewish communities, and its European affiliate, the European Jewish Congress. The staff has also participated in all the meetings organized by the Israeli government-sponsored Global Forum against Antisemitism (www.gfantisemitism.org), again providing expert presentations and advice.

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ASSESSMENT The CST provides much-needed security advice and training to a community whose members continue to suffer from physical and political attacks (CST, 2005). The nature of these threats has changed since the postwar years, but they continue to undermine the communitys self-confidence. The chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, has spoken of the continuing concern of many British Jews, namely, feeling the need to look over their shoulder while at the same time participating fully and successfully in political, social, and cultural life in Britain (Sacks, 2011). Neither Sacks, nor the CST and its leadership, see any inconsistency in this. Indeed, Jews have come to play a not inconsiderable part in civic life, while recognizing that they must remain vigilant in safeguarding their position. The terror threat to the UK, and indeed to other Western states, will require a continuing high level of security, and CST expertise in confronting such threats is not only in demand by the Jewish community, but is also given high recognition by government and the police. CST expertise in training civil society to provide its own security as an adjunct to that provided by the state and its agencies meets the needs of these communities, as well as the state itself. Occasional testimony from senior police officers confirms this. In 2005, the then commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, Sir John Stevens (later Lord Stevens), expressed the opinion that The Community Security Trust is one of the finest examples in the world of an effective crime prevention partnership that really works hard to make the community safer. Assistant Commissioner David Veness (later Sir Veness) noted, If the Community Security Trust didnt exist, we would have to invent something very much like it (CST, 2005). The Board of Deputies and the CST have taken a lead in lobbying for legislation that guarantees freedom from discrimination on the one hand, and freedom from incitement on the other. It has used its historical experience to inform and propel its substantial contribution. Of course, changes that have been made in British laws in these related fields would not have been possible were it not for a wider concern, and the general review and changes brought about by Britains acceptance of international conventions and legal instruments that came about as a consequence of the Second World War and the universal acceptance of human rights norms. The Jewish community has seized the opportunities that events have provided to campaign for improvements that strengthened both its security, and that of others. It could not have taken these initiatives without changes in British society, and in particular changes in legislation that recognize the social harm that incitement to hatred brings; recognition that racism must be

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confronted; and, more recently, encouragement by government of a culture that consults and involves civil society to a greater extent than in the past. The CST is very much an events- and client-driven organization that responds to the needs of the Jewish and increasingly some other minority communities. It draws on the strengths of its predecessor organizations, but it is also clear that it could not have achieved what it has achieved without the parallel political and cultural initiatives that have persuaded successive recent governments to reform and modernize legislation and involve civil society in the criminal justice system and in combating hate crime.

*Michael Whine is government and international affairs director at the Community Security Trust, defense and group relations director at the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and security consultant to the European Jewish Congress, which he also represents at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He has been professionally engaged in researching antisemitism and religious and political extremism for twenty-five years, and has published and lectured widely. Portions of this essay were delivered at the Second International Conference on Hate Studies, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, April 6, 2011, and partly published in Journal of Hate Studies, 9 (http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/ information/authors).

REFERENCES
All-Party Inquiry into Antisemitism: Government Response, One Year On Progress Report. 2008. Cm 7381. London: The Stationery Office. All-Party Inquiry into Antisemitism: Government Response, Three Years On Progress Report. 2010. Cm 7991. London: The Stationery Office. Attorney Generals Office. 2006. Report of the Race for Justice Taskforce. London: Author. Beckman, Morris. 1993. The 43 Group, 2nd ed. London: Centreprise. Board of Deputies of British Jews. 1969. Improving Race RelationsA Jewish Contribution. A report and recommendations by the Working Party on Race Relations. London: Author. Brownlie, Ian. 1968. The Law Relating to Public Order. London: Butterworth. Community Security Trust (CST). (n.d.). Annual Review 2010. London: Author. Available at http://thecst.org.uk/docs/Annual%20Review. . 1994. Declaration of Charitable Trust. London: Author. . 2005. Working with the Police to Protect the Jewish Community (video and leaflet). London, Spring 2005. . 2010. Grant payment. Letter from Home Office to CST, May 14, 2010. . 2011a. London, UK: Author. Available from http://www.thecst.org.uk/ downloads/Terrorist_Incidents_Report.pdf.

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. 2011b. Antisemitic Incidents Report 2010. Available at http:// www.thecst.org.uk/docs/Incidents%20Report%202010.pdf. Copsey, Nigel. 2000. Anti-Fascism in Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Crown Prosecution Service. 2003. Race for Justice: A Review of CPS Decision Making for Possible Racial Bias at Each Stage of the Prosecution Process. London: Author. Available at http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/equality/ racejustice.html. 2008. The Crown Prosecution Service Response to the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism. Available at http://www.cps.gov.uk/ publications/research/antisemitism.html. EUMC (European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia). 2004. Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002-2003. Available from http:// fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/attachments/AS-Main-report.pdf. FRA (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights). 2009. Antisemitism: Summary Overview of the Situation in the European Union, 2001-2008. [Working paper]. Available at http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/attachments/ Antisemitism_Update_2009.pdf. Gove, Michael, MP, personal communication to author, December 8, 2010. ICCA (Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism). 2009. The London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism. February 17, 2009. Available at http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/corporate/pdf/ 1151284.pdf. . 2010. Ottawa Protocol on Combating Antisemitism. Available at http:// www.antisemitism.org/archive/Ottawa-protocol-on-combating-antisemitism. Langham, Raphael. 2010. 250 Years of Convention and Contention: A History of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1760-2010. London: Vallentine Mitchell. MacPherson, William. 1999. Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny. London: The Stationery Office. Malik, Maleiha. 2009. Extreme Speech and Liberalism. In Extreme Speech and Democracy, Ivan Hare and James Weinstein (Eds.), (chap. 6). London: Oxford University Press. ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights). 2010. Hate Crimes in the OSCE RegionIncidents and Responses: Annual Report for 2009. Available at http://www.osce.org/odihr/73636. Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism: Government Response. (2007). Cm 7059. London: The Stationery Office. Sacks, Jonathan. 2011. Having Pride in Britain Protects All Cultures. The Times, February 7, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.thetimes.co.uk. Sugarman, Martin. 2010. Fighting Back: British Jewrys Military Contribution in the Second World War. London: Vallentine Mitchell. Thayer, George. 1965. The Yellow Star Movement. In George Thayer, The British Political Fringe (82-95). London: Anthony Blond. Tilles, Daniel. 2010. Some Lesser Known AspectsThe Anti-Fascist Campaign of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1936-1940. In New Directions in

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Anglo-Jewish History, Geoffrey Alderman (Ed.), (135-162). Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press. U.S. Department of State. 2008. Contemporary Global Antisemitism: A Report Provided to the United States Congress. Washington DC: Author. Available at http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/102301.pdf. Whine, Michael. 2009. Devising Unified Criteria and Methods of Monitoring Antisemitism. Jewish Political Studies Review, 21: 1-2. Williams, David. 1967. Keeping the PeaceThe Police and Public Order. London: Hutchinson.

Economic Crisis and Blaming You Know Who: Antisemitism and Nationalism in Austria
Karin Stoegner*
In the autumn of 2008, the Anti-Defamation League expressed concern for the number of Internet and print media articles being openly antisemitic.1 The extent of these antisemitic indictments was quite broad, ranging from traditional antisemitic stereotypes, e.g., the greedy Jew, to Jewish world conspiracy. Nationalism and antisemitism are interrelated, as this essay will demonstrate via samples from two research projects.2 The first part of the article provides a brief historical and sociological overview of the nationalism and antisemitism connection. Examples from Austrian print media regarding the economic crisis will demonstrate how this connection infuses the public discourse. ANTISEMITISM
AND

NATIONALISM

In European history, times of economic crisis and social transition have shown a particular tendency to produce antisemitism as a strategy.
1. http://www.adl.org/. 2. Karin Stoegner, Nationalism and Antisemitism. A Study on their Relations, continuities and discontinuities from a sociological, political and historical perspective, Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship carried out at Central European University, Budapest, 2009-2011; Antisemitismus und Finanzkrise: Eine Untersuchung osterreichischer Printmedien, research project funded by the Jubil ums a fonds der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank, carried out at the Institute of Conflict Research, Vienna, 2009-2011. I would like to thank my colleagues Karin Bischof and Elke Rajal in Vienna for the fruitful collaboration in the latter project.

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Both individual and collective domains cope with the demands of modernization and the uncertainty and insecurity that come with with social change. The persistence of antisemitic stereotypes and their constant reoccurrence in ever-adapting shapes can be read as an exemplification of the dialectic of static and dynamic characteristics for modern society and sociation: static presupposes dynamic, while at the same time dynamic results in static (Adorno 1997a; 1997b). It has been a major insight of critical theory that in modern society continuity cannot be thought without discontinuity. Thus, the status quo on the level of social structures can be maintained only through discontinuity on the level of social interaction. While life worlds seem to change, power and domination as the underlying principles of sociation are reproduced throughout all transformation. In late modern society, real social change that would result in a society beyond domination is systematically banned by integrating those very moments that would have the potential to transcend the universe of domination (Marcuse 1966). Each economic crisis fundamentally challenges society and bears the potential to destroy the economic and social system. It is interesting to analyze how the phenomenon of crisis is itself integrates into the very structures it threatens. With Marcuse and Habermas, we can say that social change is being transformed into a moment of system enhancement (Habermas 1969). The role of antisemitism in this dialectical process has been broadly analyzed in historical studies on antisemitism, e.g., Germanys 1870s Grunderkrise (Massing 1949) the financial crisis of the 1920s and 1930s (Hanloser 2003), and National Socialism (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002; Horkheimer et al. 1981; Lepsius 1990). Antisemitism has to be viewed not only as an outlet for the individuals deprived of their traditional certainties and bonding, but also as a structural moment effective straight through the individuals. Furthermore, antisemitism is a phenomenon that incorporates the dialectic of static and dynamic. It serves the function of system enhancement and for this very task occasionally has to take on different shapes. This is why in spite of all continuity and persistence we cannot assume an eternal antisemitism. It depends on the social constellation in which antisemitism appears, and this constellation can only be detected and understood when taking into account the necessary differences and changes (cf. Claussen 2000, 66). The assumption of an eternal antisemitism runs the risk of essentialization, and in the end can be seen as a corresponding part of the myth of the eternal Jewwhat Walter Benjamin, citing Nietzsche, called the Eternal Return of the Same (Benjamin 2002; 2003). It is the task of critical antisemitism theory to permeate the foreclosed ideology by accurately analyzing the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity of antisemitisms function within society and its manifestations. This is particularly

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demanded with regard to analyzing and historically situating contemporary forms of antisemitism that, especially in Germany and Austria, cannot be understood without the National Socialist past and the effort of not working through it. The modern (19th century) nation stateitself an answer to capitalist transformation (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm 1992)implicated antisemitism as a strategy for national social transformation. These two ideologies provided modernizations anxiety reduction. The intertwining of nationalism and antisemitism reinforced the social structures and became the basis of the whole problem: a structural antagonism ideologically covered by national antisemitism (Holz 2001; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002; Massing 1949; Rensmann 1998; 2004). Thus, antisemitism evolved into a nationalist and voelkisch stance. That the relation between antisemitism and nationalism is so close, especially in the German and Austrian historical context, leads us to the assumption that there must be common features in terms of their structures and the functions they serve in modern society. A core element in antisemitisms 19th-century rhetoric was the image of the anti-national Jew (Holz 2001; Rensmann 2004). It implied that Jews were incapable of building their own nation; instead, they would live as parasites and eternal aliens. The anti-national Jew emerges as a figure that threatens the nation from within and without. The stereotype serves as a national projection for unarticulated discomfort. The nation state produced this anxiety due to its intrinsic contradictions of inclusivity and exclusivity. The idea of the nation suggests that all members would be equal, the nation itself passed off as homogeneous. But this hypostatized homogeneity clashed with the reality of inequality and social antagonism. So the nation as an ideology had the function of repressively covering a class antagonism. National antisemitism became an effective device to project heterogeneity outside the nations inward and outward borders. The concept of the nation could be preserved, reflecting a common universal interesteven if it was at a cost of antisemitism (Adorno 1997b; Horkheimer 1988). The basis of this ideology can be found in class inequality and nonidentity. It is also the basis of an antagonist relationship of the individual and society. Non-identical is also the bourgeois subject (Adorno 1997c), as it unifies two contradictory and competing moments: the bourgeois and the citoyen. As bourgeois, the individual has to act selfishly and rationally in the sense of purposive-rational action (Max Weber) and has to act according to motives that are in opposition to the norms of the citoyennet , which e claim to act for the good of the nation. Now the chimerical unity of the system is maintained throughout this antagonism via collectivizing ideologies, among which antisemitism and nationalism are the most appropriate ones. Both bear mythologizing tendencies that make them even more suita-

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ble to fill the void the loss of religion has left (Klinger 2008). They bridge the unbroken need for collective hold in a modern secularized world (Horkheimer 1988). Antisemitism and nationalism both suggest unity and identity even when there is inequality and antagonism: unity of the in group against an out group. By superficially addressing capitalist class inequities, they serve the ideological function of obscuring social structures. Both antisemitism and nationalism give the appearance of anti-capitalist revolt. This pereception focuses on a wrong perception, viz., capitalist economy and exploitation expressed as industrial and financial domains. The mediation between the two spheres is blinded out and ideology does not recognize that both spheres constitute the capital relationship. The industrial and financial distinction as two movements independent of each other are used to serve as a basis of antisemitism, e.g., two books by National Socialist Gottfried FederBrechung der Zinsknechtschaft/Abolition of Slavery and Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz/Battle Against High Financewere key ideological devices of Nazi propaganda. The corresponding division offered competing stereotypes in the respective spheres: the unproductive Jew and the productive Aryan; Jews as exploiters, Aryans as exploited. The ideological reduction is at least twofold: irrespective of reality, Jews are identified with the financial sphere; and in the financial sphere Jews are made responsible for the evils of capitalism (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 142f.). All capital is seen as exploitive. That exploitation is the nature of capitalism is thereby willfully concealed. Instead, the exploitive character is projected onto the financial sector. Financial capital is thought to erode the national community. By contrast, industrial capital is seen as productive and rooted in national community. In modern antisemitism, this division identified financial capital with alienated Jewishness, while industrial capital was aligned with the nation, authenticity, and the Aryan. There was also the abstract and concrete distinction. Jews were to be regarded as abstract, compared to Christians as the concrete industrial capital of the nation (see Postone 1988, fetishing character). The function of this ideology was again twofold: to demonize the Jew as international in character while rescuing capitalist production processes from criticism. Furthermore, the hypostatization of the nation and industrial capital as the concrete successfully obscured that in reality the nation was an abstract form of domination and a repression of peculiarities, especially with regard to language (Habermas 1998, 25; Hobsbawm 1992; Volkov 2001, 42). The fact that it was about hiding class antagonisms in the name of the nation can be observed in the ideology of industrial capital being rooted in national community.

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Invariably, a whole archive of antisemitic and nationalist imaginations developed in the course of the second part of the 19th century. The imagination of a racially pure Aryan nationas the corresponding part to the anti-national Jewstands for a yearning for wholeness and unity within a modern world characterized by cleavages and non-identity. So the concept of the pure nation clearly shows its origin in the fear of insecurities and uncertainties. The reasons for these uncertainties are not sought in antagonist social structures but projected onto the Jew, who would threaten the unity and pollute the pure nation. This imaginary Jew was very influential in the 20th century. It is interesting to note that many of those images were used to inculcate nationalism. This was the case until National Socialism. After the murder of European Jews, a change in both the emphasis and the direction of the antisemitism and nationalism link can be observed. While open and aggressive antisemitism became tabooed and even outlawed in some circles, this was not nearly the case for nationalism. The members of Frankfurts Institute of Social Research noted the development of a single anti-democratic attitudinal syndrome in which the components of antisemitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and sexism reinforced and stood for each other (Adorno et al. 1967). Thus, while overt antisemitism is tabooed to a certain degree, a functionally equivalent ideology was able to come to the fore. Horkheimer named nationalism as a catalyst of antisemitism after 1945, recognizing a national we (Horkheimer 1985, 139) that covered the need for collective and exclusionary identification so characteristic of Nazi antisemitism. After the Shoah, nationalism could be expressed more openly than antisemitism and without arousing suspicion. Thus, behind a nationalist discourse of patriotism, old antisemitic ideas could be preserved. Given the long history of antisemitism and nationalism in Europe, the close historical connection and mixing of these two movements became part of the cultural and linguistic archive of whole generations. This socalled cultural and ideological heritage is bequeathed to the next generation and can be easily activated (Fine 2010; Habermas 1998). The need to unambiguously identify oneself to a nation is unbroken because society is still deeply antagonistic. Yet the question of identity itself implies a need for and a lack of identity. Invariably, both nationalism and antisemitism enable people to overcome the socially induced ambiguity. Both permit the chimeric identification.

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PRINT MEDIA DISCOURSE How can one transmit antisemitism without an open allusion to the Jews? Due to the taboo on manifest antisemitism (Reisigl and Wodak 2001), new ways of articulating antisemitic resentments have developed what Dan Diner calls cleavage products. Except for neo-Nazi circles, we will probably not observe a coherent antisemitic ideology anymore today but rather particles of resentment (Diner 2004, 310) that can be connected even to allegedly emancipatory narratives.3 The taboo on open antisemitism makes for creative antisemitism and leads to a dissolution of the traditional borders while broadening antisemitisms spectrum (Knothe 2009, 142). We can observe this in certain discourses of the left, e.g., an anti-imperialist touch. Hence, the discourses based on latent antisemitism can do without references to Jews. Still, they operate with codes that can be understood by the recipients to be antisemitic. The specificity of tabooed antisemitism raises the question of intentionality being brought forward in antisemitism research. For example, Siegfried J ger (2005, 121) suggests that an utterance is to be interpreted as a antisemitic if intentionality on the part of the speaker can be presumed. Apart from the difficulty to detect intentionality on the basis of a single utterance, this position poses problems. First, we have to decide which analytical level we want to investigate: implicating the speaker or the utterance, and then analyzing it hermeneutically? The corresponding question is whether antisemitism takes place only within the communicative interaction, but the subjects do not understand their speech. Is antisemitism to be located at the structural level of society that has its effect within communicative interaction, be it conscious or not? Rather than exclusively focusing on one of these levels, it is recommended adapting a perspective that considers the constant mediation of structure and interaction, society and individual. The complex phenomenon of antisemitism is neither to be located uniquely on the structural level, nor uniquely in a subjective sphere of intentional attitude and understanding. One cannot think of an individual understanding that would not reflect social structures, as they are being analyzed by looking at how they assert themselves. If we overemphasize the structural level at the expense of the subjective one, we fail to recognize social structures as ontological givens that exist separate from the individuals. Even when social structures take on a reality independent from and against the individuals, they are still consolidated and petrified social relations that are constantly reproduced through the communicative interaction of the subjects.
3. In Islamic countries or communities, this may be different indeed.

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With regard to antisemitism, neglecting the subjective level would also essentialize it as an structural given. But then we still need to explain why some individuals are not antisemitic. Considering only the subjective level would imply absolutization of the individual toward the objective conditions of sociation. Antisemitism would be moved into a purportedly autonomous subjective sphere of individual meaning and in the end would become a question of individual opinion. The individual, hypostatized as absolute, would become an anthropological constant. We see that the two opposed modes of excluding the dialectics of individual and society lead to similar results. Given the tabooed form of Austrian antisemitism, the major task becomes to decipher those discursive strands of latent antisemitism. When Austrian print media was investigated, several thematic categories emergeda foreshortened capitalism critique, nationalist discourse, globalization, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, post-Holocaust discourse, and gendering. These thematic lines are not necessarily antisemitic, depending on the context; in addition, such themes are rarely isolated from each other but occur in different combinations. The various combinations legitimize the interpretation that antisemitism is actually under the surface of manifest argumentation. The results of the study on the current Austrian print media discourse bear a confirmation of Horkheimers and Adornos assumption that after the Shoah, antisemitism is very likely to be covered by nationalist discourse fragments. This can be shown by reference to a reductionist view on capitalist economy. The financial sphere is seen as solely accountable for the evil of crisis in capitalism. An example of this is the common way of discussing the American housing bubble as the starter of the crisis. Here we can observe that the financial sector is being made responsible for the hype that led into the financial disaster of millions of people. But many public debates on this issue strikingly disregard the actual profit from this hype. Such one-sided attribution of guilt and responsibility for the crisis in particular, and for exploitation in general, can be observed throughout the whole media corpus that we have looked at closer. But there are of course major differences to an open antisemitic discourse. While in modern antisemitism greediness and exploitation used to be explicitly identified with the Jews, this is different here: Jews are rarely mentioned directly; instead, the discourse operates with group constructions like international high finance, greedy speculators who had worked out a conspiracy against the nations, American finance capitalists, and so on. These group constructions are specific in that they intend to construct clearcut groups to be made responsible for the crisis, thereby ignoring that capi-

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tal is a social relationship. This serves the function of personification. At the same time, these groups are very cryptic and thus often resemble empty shells. Hence, they may be filled with any, also antisemitic, meaning on the part of the readers. The discourse centrally operates with asymmetric counter concepts (Reinhard Koselleck) that are an intrinsic part of structural binarities and exclusions characteristic for everyday understanding. Such devices are universally understood and it is only necessary to name one side of these binary constructions; the corresponding second part will be understood by the readers automatically. Thus, if we read about schmarotzende internationale Hochfinanz (parasitic international high finance), this implies a counterpart, i.e., national productive capital, even if it is not expressly mentioned. Sometimes the media writers jog the readers understanding by explicitly naming the Volk (the nation) as the counterpart to the high finance. Mentioning the Volk alone would not be nationalist or volkisch from the outset. This way, several metaphors linking high finance and the Volk are constructed with the aim to mark an opposition of self and other. The other/alien becomes identified with high finance and represented as unproductive, greedy, cunning, grasping, international, artificial, unauthentic, and rootless, while the Volk stands for the exact opposite characteristics. The Volk as the in group are deemed honest, authentic, rooted, productive, and laboring, though exploited and betrayed by the other. Subsequently, exploitation is regarded as alien, as coming from outside the nations borders, and not as belonging to its own people, while the Volk is represented as universally victimized by international high finance. Consider the rhymes of Wolf Martin, writer for the popular Austrian daily paper Neue Kronen Zeitung.4
Konzerne, Banken, Hochfinanz schmarotzen an der Volkssubstanz und schadigen sie materiell nicht weniger als ideell. Politiker sind ihnen horig, korrupt und drum total willfahrig. In der EU ists konzentriert, was Volker in den Abgrund fuhrt.5

4. Extremely influential in Austria, this paper prints about three million copies a day. In 2005, it ranked 45 of the 100 biggest newspapers worldwide, which is quite remarkable for such a small country as Austria. Wolf Martin is one of the papers most important columnists, whose daily column has the form of short rhymes on current political, economic, or social topics. His orientation is rightwing, nationalist, and anti-democratic. 5. Trusts, banks, high finance batten on the substance of the nation (Volk) and damage it materially no less than spiritually. Politicians are slaves to them, corrupt and thus totally compliant. The EU incorporates all that brings ruin on the nations. (author translation)

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This classic example of nationalist and volkisch ideology operates with codes of world conspiracy: international high finance is represented as omnipotent and ubiquitous, while non-rooted and non-transparent as mingling into the good national economy and thereby damaging the very heart of the Volkits substancein a material as well as spiritual sense. While here, what is deciphered as bad and ruinous to the nations is not identified with Jewishness, the codes the author operates with show particular characteristics of modern antisemitism: the word schmarotzen directly points to parasites that live on the expense of those they exploit. In this scenery, high finance is represented as parasitic, international, and rootlessthe total other, the anti-national element whose aim is to destroy national community and national wealth. The national element is clearly opposed to an international or cosmopolitical one. Who are the Volk whose substance is threatened by the realm of high finance? In nationalist discourse, this is neither the working or bourgeoisie class, but the petty bourgeoisie. Nationalism and antisemitism have a tendency to hide their extremism behind an ideal of mediocrity, as Sartre showed in R flexions sur la question Juive (1946). A particular imagination e of instinctiveness and simpleness as authenticity is in the center of this idealization of mediocrity. It locates itself halfway between the extremes. As Kurt Lenk (1994) has pointed out, the ideal of mediocrity asserts its own extremism by seemingly neutralizing the extremes. Neither high finance nor the proletariat belong to the idealized mediocrity; instead, they are both regarded as exaggerated, unnatural, unauthentic, uncertain, and unsettling. In nationalist and antisemitic ideology, it is very much about establishing security and certainty, a feeling that can be provided by belonging to the average (cf. Tajfel and Turner 1979). This is a reason that in antisemitism totally contradictory and opposed moments can be combined into one ideology: the Jew being identified both with capitalism in the first place finance capitalism and bolshevism. Both incorporate evil; both would try to establish the abstract against the concrete Volk. We see evidence that the need for unambiguous national identification remains unbroken in periods of crisis. The question of national identity, however, always seems to come up when it is actually a problem of social development. The corresponding anxiety that national identity could be undermined or eroded by conspiratorial international evil powers is central to nationalist ideology. This is a way of dealing with insecurities and uncertainties quite familiar from antisemitismthe Jew being imagined as the international conspirator who aims at polluting and undermining the pure and authentic Aryan Volk. This seems to support Adornos and Horkheimers assumption that the need for collective and exclusionary identification becomes virulent, espe-

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cially when individuals become anxious (Adorno 1997b; Horkheimer 1988). In modern society, the individual is hypostatized as an autonomous being, while in reality the individuial suffers from constant denigration. The conditions for individual autonomye.g., economic securityare given but insufficiently, making the whole concept of the autonomous subject highly ambiguous. Nationalism, as with antisemitism, finds a remedy by duplicating and exaggerating the demand of society for identity. The constraint to unambiguous identification with a national group to which one belongs is the very heart of nationalism circles. While nationalism purports to solve the problem of the individual in modern society, it actually deepens it. This becomes evident in that nationalism always needs the other, which can be marked as non-identity. Non-identity and abstractness are in the end a container for all that cannot be filled by unambiguous and exclusive identification. So in times of crisis, identity can only be reassured through an eradication of ambiguity, ambivalence, or uncertainty. In antisemitism, these characteristics were traditionally ascribed to Jews, who were seen as international and cosmopolitan and thus denying the rootedness within the nation. Jews were seen as an anti-nation that endangered the collective hold of nationalist identity (Holz 2001; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002; Rensmann 1998). This habit expresses a deep discomfort with mediation and intermediacy. Economic hatred toward any form of mediation is central to antisemitism, and Jews are perceived as representatives of the sphere of circulation. This hatred is also expressed in the resentment against other groups, such as intellectuals, who also inhabit an intermediary position in society and are not part of the immediate production sphere, seemingly do not produce, and therefore remain suspect. The intermediary position in society contradicts the compulsion to artificial unity and unambiguousness in modern antagonist society, and this is why it is feared and loathed. This complex problem of identity formation in times of crisis is also evident in Austrian print media discourse. The following passage is taken from a letter to the editor entitled Weltgeldbetrug! (world money fraud), published in the Neue Kronen Zeitung.6 This letter operates with rather open antisemitic allusions.
Die Hochfinanz hat fur sich vorgesorgt und hat die USA und die gesamte Welt dank der Federal Reserve (Fed), des privaten Bankenkartells unter Fuhrung der beiden Grossfinanzgruppen Rothschild und Rockefeller, 6. The letters to the editor in the Neue Kronen Zeitung are said to be sometimes inauthentic, i.e., written by the editorial staff.

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noch im Griff. Reibach in Krisen und Kriegen. John F. Kennedy wollte die Fed verstaatlichendoch vor Erbringung des Gesetzes wurde er ermordet. [ . . . ] Die Finanzkrise (war) von langer Hand geplant und seit Jahren vorbereitet, um tief in die Taschen der Volker zu greifen [ . . . ]. Das Volk muss die Politikermarionetten zwingen, dass Schluss gemacht wird mit Globalisierung und Privatisierungswahn [ . . . ]. Ruckbesinnung auf Ethik und Moral, Werte wie Ehre, Familie etc. und weg von der identitatslosen Masse, die sich willenlos gangeln und ausplundern lasst. (Neue Kronen Zeitung, May 5, 2009)7

Consistent with volkisch ideology, the people shall be rescued by means of a return to traditional values; the Volk has to be brought to its senses, otherwise its unity would become eroded. Due to globalization, the Volk is at risk of losing its honor and identity. Crisis and globalization are argumentatively interwoven in the text and represented as a planned conspiracy. Interestingly, Rothschild is named, and even though Rockefeller was not Jewish, he is Jew-like and so the association of conspiracy and Jewishness continues. The text goes so far as to insinuate that the financial trusts Rothschild and Rockefeller were behind the murder of Kennedy. The rhetoric around conspiracy is clear in the representation of the financial crisis as a planned and well-prepared plot on a global level. There is a further manifestation of antisemitic discourse in this text as it strategically makes use of the term Reibach, which etymologically stems from Hebrew. This term is commonly used in Viennese German, but while the Hebrew word Rewach,8 from which it stems, simply means profit, the term Reibach in Viennese German also has the connotation of very high profit made by means of unfair business practices. Reibach is commonly understood as a Jewish word,9 and thus it reinforces the identification of an
7. High finance has provided for itself and keeps the USA and the whole world under control, thanks to the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the private cartel of banks under the leadership of the two big financial trusts, Rothschild and RockefellerReibach in crises and wars. John F. Kennedy wanted to socialize the Fed but before the law was brought in, he had been murdered. [ . . . ] The financial crisis (was) planned and prepared well in advance in order to break into the pockets of the nations [ . . . ]. The people have to force the puppets of politicians to put an end to globalization and privatization mania [ . . . ]. What is needed is a return to ethics and morals, to values like honour, family, etc., and a departure from the mass that lacks identity and submissively lets itself be kept on puppet strings and preyed on. (author translation) 8. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_W%C3%B6rter_aus_dem_ Hebr%C3%A4ische. 9. The word Reibach is also used in another article in the Neue Kronen Zeitung on Bernard Madoff (August 19, 2009), entitled Der bose Geist der Wall Street (The evil spirit of Wall Street). There, Madoff is described as a typical

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evil financial sphere with Jewishness; an identification that was anticipated by explicitly naming Rothschild and defining a semantic area around international high finance. The lament over an alleged loss of identity, caused by an international (Jewish) conspiracy of high finance, corresponds to the demand to return to purportedly traditional values. National belonging is set in opposition to internationalism and loss of identity. The direction of impact is an opposition against cosmopolitanism as well as against transnationalism. The scenario of metaphors around an authentic Volk in opposition to a spoon-fed mass without identity addresses the threats coming from globalization. In the overall constellation the latter is again identified with Jews, yet with Jewish conspiracy, as names connoted with Jewishness (Rothschild) are put in central position. The threat is internationalismcosmopolitism associated with rootlessness and non-authenticity. Against these outward and alien threats the Volk has to defend itself by means of a return to traditional values. Here it becomes evident that the Volk is exactly the committed and sworn-in community that in nationalism and antisemitism is projected on the Jews. The demonization of the financial sphere as an alien and outward power that would live at the expense of the Volk and damage its substance like a parasite is an explicit manifestation of the antisemitic rhetoricVolksfremde Elementeelements alien to the racially pure nation. Among the print media texts we looked at, it was found only in articles and letters to the editor in the Neue Kronen Zeitung. But the corresponding pattern of argumentation, the central demand for a return to traditional norms and values, are more widespread and occur also in quality Austrian papers, thereby implying that traditional values in terms of economics sometimes emerge divided between an evil financial sphere and good and real entrepreneurial values. So in an article in Der Standard (November 14, 2008), greediness is exclusively attributed to the financial sector, while real entrepreneurship is portrayed as devoid of the base motives attributed to the industrial sector. The two examples from the Austrian media discussed here, however, show in the first place an open and aggressive anti-Americanism. Meanwhile, the interconnection of antisemitism and anti-Americanism is a wellknown phenomenon common not only today, but in the fin de si` cle (Diner e 2004; Gilman 1993; Hahn 2003; Marcovits 2007). But while a hundred years ago antisemitism was in the foreground, this relation has reversed in
money Jew: bose, gierig, verschlagen, durchtrieben (evil, greedy, sly, cun ning), who only through the belief of others in Rendite und Reibach (yield and Reibach) could become a Finanzgott (financial god), but who in reality would only be the evil spirit of Wall Street.

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the second half of 20th century. Now antisemitism is paralleled to antiAmericanism. ANTISEMITISM
AS

ANTI-AMERICANISM

It is remarkable how close the dual resentments actually are in their structures and contents. America is often viewed as a stronghold of alienation, money, and violence that is driven by greediness, and furthermore as undermining all traditions that encourage unity and the feeling of belonging (Diner 2004, 326). In times of crisis, American investors and speculators are the favorite images of the enemy on the part of nationalist actors in Europe. In the current situation, anti-American resentments come readily to hand, just as the American housing bubble is commonly viewed as the major cause of the global crisis. It often happens that on actual occasions anti-American stereotypes are applied without recoursestereotypes that recur to threaten a purported essence of America (cf. Rensmann 2008, 409). The figures and cryptic group constructions of the American speculator or the American high financier are drawn with similar if not the same characteristics, as was the case in antisemitic discourses with regard to Jews. Just as in antisemitism, anti-Americanism also operates with a sharply honed capitalism critique, locating the evil of capitalism solely in uncontrolled financial transaction.10 Today, anti-Americanism is one of the most common manifestations of European nationalism and the need for exclusive identification. The stereotyped image of the American as the mastermind behind globalization and modernization has a long tradition in Europe, and America today is often made responsible for social indifference. The heart of such denunciation, however, is often not an accusation of real neoliberal cutback of social security measures in Europe, but rather a lament of the loss of an actual or imagined shared identity and community. Without well-defined hierarchies, the individual today seems to feel adrift and disoriented. With good reason, social isolation is felt as depressing, but in public discourse it is too often not viewed as a structural and economically mediated problem of late modern sociation, but rather a situation projected on one single responsible elementthe American. Due to their purported lack of tradition, Americans would be to blame for the loss of social relations and hierarchies.
10. There are further similarities between antisemitism and anti-Americanism: e.g., both are predominantly expressed by persons who know neither Americans nor Jews. Thus, the resentment is based on mere images that are largely unconnected to reality.

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Anti-Americanism as one major contemporary manifestation of European nationalism gets further input from the Austrian and German Nazi past and the widespread unwillingness to take over responsibility for the crimes of national socialism. Thus, anti-Americanism has become a central issue in secondary antisemitism: beneath the resentment against America the hatred against the nation that had defeated national socialism can often easily be deciphered (cf. Rensmann 2004, 243). CONCLUSION Conspiracy theories, nationalism, and Manichean worldviews are widespread today. They each intermingle with the protest against world imperialism and exploitation. The perspective that exploitation was founded in financial capital often outweighs a more universal and analytical view that sees the reason for the crisis in capital relations. Simple patterns of explaining the world, thereby operating with nationalist and conspiratorial discourse elements, can be observed plainly in the debates on the current economic crisis in the Austrian print media, especially in the Neue Kronen Zeitung. For an analysis regarding the intersection of nationalism and antisemitism, it was necessary to look beneath the surface of nationalist argumentation in order to find out whether antisemitic argumentation, consciously or not, was at stake. In the Austrian media, antisemitic intent is brought forward, largely indirectly, by using specific exclusionary semantics, or self and other. The self is thereby often marked as the Volk, who are perceived as pure and innocentvictims of international powers. The crucial point was to find out where these semantics rely on an essentialization of the self and the other. Major junctions to antisemitism were observed along the thematic lines of nationalist identification. It can be said that in a number of texts we sampled it is about the creation of unity, wholeness, and unambiguousness against those imagined actors and spheres that are considered as not belonging, non-productive, unauthentic, artificial, and rootless. This is a specific framing that personalizes social structures and attributes guilt by using dichotomies of in group and out group, national and antinational, self and other. Intermediaries are seen as threatening national belonging and certainty, as the evil par excellence. All this strikingly reminds us of traditional modern antisemitism. Especially in times of crisis, patterns of antisemitism and nationalism are reactivated and interwoven into simplistic explanations. The world they want fixes guilt and responsibility for socially induced problems on precast figures. The intertwining of an exclusionary nationalist form of identification with antisemitism in whatever latent form proves to be very effective

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todayit quietly satisfies the need for certainty, stability, and unambiguous identity in a crisis-ridden society.

*Karin Stoegner, PhD, studied sociology and history in Vienna and Paris and wrote her doctoral thesis on antisemitism and sexism. From 2009-2011 she held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Central European University in Budapest. Currently, she is lecturer on social theory at the University of Vienna, researcher at the Institute of Conflict Research and co-editor of the Austrian Journal of Political Science. She can be reached at Karin.Stoegner@univie.ac.at.

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Adorno, Theodor W. 1997a. Uber Statik und Dynamik als soziologische Kategorien. In Gesammelte Schriften 8, 217-237. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag . 1997b. Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie. In Gesammelte Schriften 8, 373391. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag . 1997c. Negative Dialektik. In Gesammelte Schriften 6. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. 1967. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper and Brothers. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard. . 2003. On the Concept of History. In Selected Writings, 4 1938-1940, 389-400. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard. Claussen, Detlev. 2000. Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus. In Aspekte der Alltagsreligion. Ideologiekritik unter veranderten gesellschaftlichen Verhaltnissen, 65-105. Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik. Diner, Dan. 2004. Der Sarkophag zeigt Risse. Uber Israel, Palastina und die Frage eines neuen Antisemitismus. In Neuer Antisemitismus? Eine globale Debatte, edited by Doron Rabinovici, Ulrich Speck, and Natan Sznaider, 310329. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag Fine, Robert. 2010. Nationalism, Postnationalism, Antisemitism: Thoughts on the Politics of Jurgen Habermas. In Antisemitismus und die Transformation des Nationalen. Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Politikwissenschaft 4/2010, edited by Karin Stogner and Thomas Schmidinger, 409-420. Vienna: Facultas. Gilman, Sander L. 1993. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1969. Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. . 1998. Die postnationale Konstellation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. Hahn, Michael. 2003. Vom Keulenschlag zum Schulterklopfen. Einige Erklarungen und Verklarungen von Antiamerikanismus in der Linken. In

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Nichts gegen Amerika. Linker Antiamerikanismus und seine lange Geschichte, edited by Michael Hahn, 14-24. Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag. Hanloser, Gerhard. 2003. Krise und Antisemitismus. Eine Geschichte in drei Stationen von der Grunderzeit uber die Weltwirtschaftskrise bis heute. Munster: Unrast. Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1992. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Holz, K. 2001. Nationaler Antisemitismus. Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Horkheimer, Max. 1985. Die Aktualitat Schopenhauers. In Gesammelte Schriften 7, 122-142. Frankfurt: a. M., Fischer Verlag. . 1988. Nachgelassene Schriften. In Gesammelte Schriften 14. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Horkheimer, Max, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, Arcadius Gurland, Herbert Marcuse, Helmut Dubiel, and Alfons Sollner. 1981. Wirtschaft, Recht und Staat im Nationalsozialismus. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag. J ger, Siegfried. 2005. Zur diskursiven Dynamik des Redens uber Antisemitismus a Uberlegungen zu den EUMC-Berichten 2003 und 2004 zum Thema Antisemitismus. In AntisemitismusAntizionismusIsraelkritik. Tel Aviver Jahrbuch fur deutsche Geschichte XXXIII, edited by Moishe Zuckermann, 110-139. Gottingen: Wallenstein. Klinger, Cornelia. 2008. Uberkreuzende IdentitatenIneinandergreifende Strukturen. Pladoyer fur einen Kurswechsel in der Intersektionalitatsdebatte. In UberKreuzungen. Fremdheit, Ungleichheit, Differenz, edited by Cornelia Klinger and Gudrun-Axeli Knapp, 38-67. Munster: Fischer Verlag. Knothe, Holger. 2009. Eine andere Welt ist moglich, ohne Antisemitismus? Antisemitismus und Globalisierungskritik bei Attac. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Lenk, Kurt. 1994. Rechts, wo die Mitte ist. Studien zur Ideologie: Rechtsextremismus, Nationalsozialismus, Konservatismus. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag. Lepsius, M. Rainer. 1990. Interessen, Ideen, Institutionen. Opladen. Westdeutcher Verlag. Marcuse, Herbert. 1966. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon. Markovits, Andrei. 2007. Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Massing, Paul W. 1949. Rehearsal for Destruction. A Study of Political AntiSemitism in Imperial Germany. New York: Harper. Postone, Moishe. 1988. Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus. Ein theoretischer Versuch. In Zivilisationsbruch. Denken nach Auschwitz, edited by Dan Diner, 242-254. Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag. Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2001) Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London/New York: Routledge.

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Rensmann, Lars. 1998. Kritische Theorie uber den Antisemitismus. Studien zu Struktur, Erklarungspotential und Aktualitat. Berlin/Hamburg:Argument Verlag. . 2004. Demokratie und Judenbild. Antisemitismus in der politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag fur Sozilawissenschaften. . 2008. Rechtsextreme Parteien in der Europaischen Union: Welche Rolle spielen Globalisierung und Antisemitismus? In Feindbild Judentum. Antisemitismus in Europa, edited by Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps, 399-454. Berlin: Verlag fur Berlin-Brandenburg. Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner. 1979. An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, 33-47. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. Volkov, Shulamit (2001). Das judische Projekt der Moderne. Zehn Essays. Munich: Verlag CH Beck.

The Inane Politics of Tony Cliff


Camila Bassi*
No one is obliged to become a Marxist; no one is obliged to swear by Lenins name. But the whole of the politics . . . was directed towards this, that the fetishism of two camps would give way to a third, independent, sovereign camp of the proletariat, that camp upon which, in point of fact, the future of humanity depends. Leon Trotsky (1938-1939, 996) On the question of our labor movements position on international conflicts, the British University and College Union (UCU) has seemingly been fixated with an academic boycott of Israel. Yet in actual fact it is a small bureaucratic layer within this union, the UCU left, that has driven this obsession over and above the heads of the mass rank and file. This is not to say that there is not a progressive proportion of the rank and file, who with good instinct want their union to do something in response to the Palestinian plight. The UCU left is a group set up by members of the British-based Socialist Workers Party (SWP) along with a number of independent-left union activists. Rather than a grassroots democratic collective, the UCU left reflects a bureaucratic stratum that organizes as a block against those to its political right and, more generally, unites in its opposition to the neoliberalization of education and Israels oppression of Palestineoften a code for the end of occupation dated from 1948 rather than 1967, thus for the dissolution of the nation-state of Israel proper. In the years that I have attended the UCU Annual Congress, UCU left motions and speeches deliver, at best, a passionate identification with the Palestinian-Arab oppressed, and, at worst, a conflation of the wrongdoings of the Israeli-Jewish state with Israeli-Jewish workers. Israeli-Jewish workers are singled out like no other

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group of the working class worldwide now or in recent history, as either in need of proving themselves politically worthy or in need of penalization for being politically depraved. It is an antisemitic anti-Zionism that ought, more than it does, to shame the union. As a revolutionary socialist intervening into this perennially hostile exchange, my modest efforts fall short in steering this debate away from a boycott and toward what kind of political solidarity we can forge with our Arab and Jewish labor movement comrades in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank and in Israelin particular, political solidarity based on a collective struggle against the Israeli and Palestinian reactionary ruling classes, against Jewish fundamentalism and Islamism, and for a two nations, two states settlement on pre-1967 borders. YGAEL GLUKSTEIN,
AKA

TONY CLIFF

The founder and key theoretician of the SWP, whose politics infuse the UCU left, is Tony Cliff. Cliff was born in 1917 in what was then commonly regarded as a southern region of SyriaPalestine. The son of a Jewish family who supported Zionism, his birth name was Ygael Gluckstein. In 1947, he moved to Britain, where he remained until his death in 2000. During the 1930s and 1940s, Cliff wrote a series of articles under the pseudonym L. Rock and later (1945) as Tony Cliff, calling for an anti-imperialist, independent Arab and Jewish labor movement. These early writings of Cliff are notably different from his later writings from 1967 onward: on the one hand, this discontinuity is glossed over by an amnesia or a distortion of Cliffs own historical analyses and conclusions to fit into a neat picture of the contemporary; on the other hand, this deterioration is made possible by some early kernels that later grew into a more recognizable inane politics. EARLY CLIFF Not without their shortcomings, Cliffs writings in the period before the formation of the nation-state of Israel are nevertheless an effort toward an independent class-based assessment of concrete conditions. He observed that the imperialist government of the British Mandate of Palestine systematically prevented all attempts at effecting reconciliation of the two peoples while a labour movement as an independent factor exercising influence in political affairs does not yet exist (Rock 1938a). As an old policy in new clothing, he pointed out that, first, British imperialist oppression was directed against the Arab masses, and later (even if less brutality) against the Jews, evident in the British fostering of the clerical-

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fascists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the services-in-hand of the German fascist collaborator, the mufti of Jerusalem (Cliff 1946b). On the relationship between imperialism and Zionism, Cliff (1945, 1946b) was keen to spell out its common and antagonistic tendencies and to draw a class differentiation. Although British imperialism supported a Jewish capitalist state, enveloped by the hatred of colonial masses, he argued that they did not want this state to become too strong (Cliff 1945). British imperialist policy on Jewish immigration and colonization was thus duplicitous. By opening the door on immigration, the British stoked Arab chauvinism and gained Jewish sympathy, and by closing the door they stoked Jewish chauvinism through the perception of Arab domination over the British (Rock 1938a). The Balfour Declaration strengthened anti-Jewish tendencies among the Arabs and the position of both Zionism and imperialism (Rock 1938a). The leaders of Zionism, who align with British imperialism, are not, Cliff (1945) saw, one and the same as the rank and file of Zionism, who are misled by their leaders into believing that they are not simply puppets motivated by imperialism for its benefit and their harm: British imperialism tries its best to keep the Jewish and Arab toilers in different compartments of the same train speeding toward destruction. The Zionists act in this as the tools of imperialism (Cliff 1946c). Zionism was defined as a nationalist reactionary conception, because it diverted from the international class struggle and consolidated itself on world reaction (Rock 1938b, 1939). Its solution was short lived, with the only genuine answer lying in the Jewish rank and files renouncing the Zionist ambition for domination (Cliff 1945). On anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, one of the major tasks Cliff identified for an international socialist leadership was to resolve the contradiction within the Arab nationalist movement: While the opposition of the Arab upper classes to the Jews is reactionary, the struggle of the Arab masses against Zionism is absolutely progressive (Rock 1938b). Cliff expounded that the Arab feudal and semi-capitalist leaders desired a partnership with British imperialism in an effort to block the objective capitalist development of a working class which threatened their own destruction (Rock 1938b, 1945, 1947). Put plainly: The majority of the Arab exploitersthe feudal lords, the compradore bourgeoisie, the merchants and usurersidentify themselves in this matter completely with imperialism (Cliff 1945); thus, The Arab feudal lords are no more interested in the real independence of Palestine by the action of the masses, than are the Zionists (Cliff 1946c). By fueling anti-Jewish chauvinism, fascism, and terror, the Arab leaders prevented the growth of Arab anti-imperialism while reinforcing their own position (Rock 1938a). Cliff referred to a period of prosperity between

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1932 and 1935, during which time the anti-Jewish economic arguments of the Arab leaders weakened their appeal among the Arab masses as income and living standards rose in consequence of Jewish immigration (Rock 1938b). In this same period, however, the Zionist chauvinist tendencies among the Jewish masses grew as the international working class movement declined (Rock 1938b). Instead of the original slogan, Palestine, a binational state, the Zionists rallied for The Jewish state. Concurrently, the Arab leaders were afraid that the nationalist movement would develop along independent and consistently anti-imperialist lines (Rock 1938b); as such, The present Arab nationalist movement, permeated with an exclusivist spirit in the struggle against the Jews, is fertile soil for chauvinist fascist and particularly anti-Jewish ideas (Rock 1938b). Connecting British (and later American) imperialism with a classbased understanding of Zionism and the Arab nationalist movement, Cliff concluded:
Palestine cannot emancipate itself from the imperialist yoke unless a unification of the Arab arid Jewish masses takes place [ . . . ]. The Jewish toiling masses will not, however, support the anti-imperialist movement if no class differentiation takes place in the Arabian national movement. (Rock 1939)

In light of a weakening international labor movement and a strengthening anti-Jewish chauvinism, Cliff was highly critical of the Cominterns turn to the Stalinist right; in particular, he was scathing of their analogy of the situation in the British Mandate of Palestine with South Africa (Rock 1938b): it is especially dangerous that such a perverted analogy should take root (Rock 1939). The Jews, he explicated, do not depend on their existence by exploiting the Arab masses (Rock 1938b) and, as part of the working class, are not offered preference by the British imperialists (Rock 1939). Moreover, although exclusivist and pro-imperialist propensities exist among the Jews, he makes clear that it is false to see Jewish immigration as conquest and the Jews as an integral part of the imperialist camp, and consequently the Arab nationalist struggle as simply a defensive one (Rock 1939). The ultimate bankruptcy of the Stalinists was, in Cliffs mind, expressed during the 1936-1939 protests. Here, the real, progressive antiimperialist and anti-Zionist aims of the Arab masses were diverted by the Arab feudal leaderswho were agents either of British imperialism or of Germany and Italy, and sometimes the two togetherinto anti-Jewish communal terror, which the Palestine Communist Party, in their opposition to Zionism, blindly supported (Cliff 1945).

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For Cliff, the correct Marxist perspective on the conflict derived from a correct assessment of Arab nationalism on the one hand, and Jewish immigration and settlement on the other hand (Rock 1938a, 1939). On the latter, Jewish immigration accelerated capitalist development and objectively developed a Jewish and Arab working class and anti-imperialist forces (Rock 1938a, 1939). Together, Cliff framed the conflict as a twofold struggle between Arab and Jewish exclusive nationalist movements and between the Arab masses and Zionism (Rock 1938b), and saw its solution in the formation of a republic of workers and peasants of the Arab East, with minority autonomous rights for the Jews and others (Cliff 1946b). The Jews were effectively a cushion between the Arab masses and imperialism, and powerless against the world leaders (Cliff 1947). Cliff reasoned that no significant anti-Zionist movement developed for two reasons:
First of all, the Jewish masses in Palestine do not yet see in the Arab proletariat a strong ally, which will protect them from all the intrigues and provocations of imperialism, feudalism and Zionism, as till now the Arab working class of the whole east has not come to maturity. Secondly, the international working class has not yet appeared as a power struggling for the right of asylum in their countries. (Cliff 1947)

That said, Cliff took hope from the largest strike in Palestines history, in April 1946, which proved that while there are not a dozen Arabs who support Zionism, there are tens of thousands of Arab workers who are ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with their Jewish class fellows for the defence of their common class interests (Cliff 1946a). The quandary nevertheless was that since only an internationalist labour movement can be the leading force in the consistent anti-imperialist struggle, and that such a force does not yet play an important role, the Jewish masses and the Arab national movement will remain in a difficult and distressed position (Rock 1939). LATER CLIFF

Looking back on my own experience in Palestine I can see how todays horror grew from small beginnings. [ . . . ] I grew up a Zionist, but Zionism didnt have the ugly face we see today. However, there was always a fundamental crack between the Zionists and the Arabs. (Cliff 1982)

Absent in Cliffs writings after 1967 is any endeavor toward an independent, class-based evaluation of actual conditions of existence. What he presents is a remarkably one-sided picture of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:

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a dual camp struggle between the persecuted underdog and the fascist and imperialist Chosen One. The conflict has its origins in Zionist terror, Cliff (1982) asserts, with the barbarous wars of 1947, 1967, and 1982 increasingly exposing the true ugliness of this terror, including Zionisms long-term complicity with fascism (Zionist leaders repeatedly told German rulers it would be in their interests if Zionism flourished in Palestine [Cliff 1982]) and imperialism (Israel is not a colony suppressed by imperialism, but a colony, a settlers citadel, a launching pad of imperialism [Cliff 1967/1990]). The 1967 war marked above all a victory for Western imperialism (Cliff 1967/1990). Cliff stresses an irony that those persecuted by Nazi barbarism now subject this barbarism on the Palestinians (Cliff 1982, 1967/1990, 1998). In brief, he constructs a simple truth that these monstrosities are the logic of Zionism (1982) that will continue to escalate. Cliff (1998) regards the conflict as analogous to apartheid South Africa, except that the black workers were numerically stronger and central to the economy so could win reforms for themselves. He reasons that, given the Palestinians have not the strength to liberate themselves, Trotskys theory of permanent revolution is applicable (Cliff 1998). Therefore, it is for the wider Arab working classes to rise up and liberate the Palestinians and to stop Zionism and smash imperialism (Cliff 1982). The only solution is once again a socialist republic, with full rights for Jews, Kurds and all national minorities (Cliff 1967/1990), in which, he qualifies, it is simple hypocrisy to claim that this will menace the Jews of the area (Cliff 1998). REFLECTIONS Consideration of the basic role of global and regional imperialist forces in dividing and ruling over the working classes evaporates from Cliffs later work on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. So too does the class distinction of all nationalism between the bourgeoisie (whose political economies dominate) and the proletariat masses. Cliff dramatically ups the wrongdoings of the Zionist leadership as pure and innate to its history and conflates this leadership with the Jewish people, and downplays or erases the historical wrongdoings of the Arab nationalist leadership in stoking anti-Jewish chauvinism, fascism, and terror, and in courting imperialism. Also expunged are Cliffs early criticisms of the Stalinists: in fueling antiJewish tendencies, in naively analogizing the conflict with South Africa, and in wrongly seeing the Jews in general as integral to the imperialist camp. Whats more, these Stalinist shortcomings are ones that a later Cliff develops without musing or qualm. In sum, a third camp, Marxismto

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develop the independent political agency of workers internationally, as a class capable of self-government in their struggles against capitalism and its reactionary products (Bassi 2010, 114)is thoroughly lost from an early to a late Cliff. This said, Cliff only ever clumsily attempted third-camp Marxism, with some early flaws offering a clue to where his analysis would end up. While recognizing the conflict as one between two exclusivist and chauvinist nationalisms, the leadership of both tailing imperialism, Cliff always placed ultimate emphasis on the struggle of the Arab masses against Zionism and on the Jewish masses denouncing Zionism. The question of liberation was always one of the Arab masses winning Arab liberation and independence, for which the Jews as a minority would, at best, be accommodated. From early on there were hints within Cliffs assessment that, en masse, Jewish workers might be conflated with their ruling class and, as a consequence, would be singled out as undeserving of their existence in this territory:
From the negation of Zionism does not yet follow the negation of the right to existence and extension of the Jewish population in Palestine. This would only be justified if an objectively necessary identity existed between this population and Zionism, and if the Jewish population were necessarily an outpost of British imperialism and nothing more (Rock, 1939).

And so emerged Cliffs later positionwhich, not incidentally, was immediately after the 1967 war:
The Jewish population in Israel is divided into classes and a class struggle rends the country. But this in itself does not mean that any significant number of Israeli workers are ready to join forces, or will be ready to join forces, with the Arab anti-imperialist struggle. [ . . . ] While the Jews were the underdogs of Europe, in the Middle East the Arabs are the underdogs, and the Israelis the privileged and oppressors, the allies of imperialism (Cliff 1967/1990).

Here lies the decline of Cliffs politics into the SWPs antisemitic antiZionist push of an academic boycott of Israel through the UCU left, specifically, an internationally and historically unprecedented writing-off of an entire body of the working class. To understand the final slippage into an unparalleled demand to undo a nation-state already formed and several decades old (and accordingly to repudiate a two nations, two states settlement on pre-1967 borders), one must identify the absence of democracy in Cliffs politics. Though Cliff references democratisation (Rock 1938b,

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1939, 1946c) more in his early than later writings, throughout these references he does not grasp the meaning of consistent democracy on the national question. For Lenin (1913c, 87), not Cliff, the conclusion of Marx is clear:
The working class should be the last to make a fetish of the national question, since the development of capitalism does not necessarily awaken all nations to independent life. But to brush aside the mass national movements once they have started, and to refuse to support what is progressive in them means, in effect, pandering to nationalistic prejudices, that is, recognising ones own nation as a model nation (or, we would add, one possessing the exclusive privilege of forming a state).

Lenin (1913b) recognizes nations as a historically inevitable product and feature of capitalist society, and thus for him mass national movements are historically legitimate. Furthermore, he applies a principle of consistent democracy to the national question: There is one case in which the Marxists are duty bound, if they do not want to betray democracy and the proletariat, to defend one special demand in the national question; that is, the right of nations to self-determination (clause 9 of the R.S.D.L.P. Programme), i.e., the right to political secession (Lenin 1913a, 7-8). Lenin continues that the consistent democratic defense of the right of all nations to self-determination is a negative task: beyond this border-line [ . . . ] which is often very slight lies positive work that effectively strengthens bourgeois nationalism (1913b, 28). In other words, the recognition and defense of workers right to national self-determination does not impede the task of exposing bourgeois nationalism or agitating against secession in favor of the international unity of workers in their class struggle against the bourgeoisie (Lenin 1913-1922). Against critics who (in line with Rosa Luxembourgs The National Question and Autonomy [19081909]) argue that such an approach is contradictory and concedes a maximum to nationalism, Lenin (1913c, 84) points out, In reality, the recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination implies the maximum of democracy and the minimum of nationalism. On 1948, then, as the U.S.based revolutionary socialist Hal Draper (1948) clarifies, regardless of what socialists might have wished possible in the early years:
A new state has been set up. A people have declared that they want to live under their own government and determine their own national destiny. They have taken a blank cheque made out to the Right of SelfDetermination and have signed their name to it: Israel. And they have sought to cash it in.

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To deny the legitimacy of the nation-state of Israel proper, under the guise of justice for the Palestinianswhich effectively means taking away the right of one group of the working class and handing it over to another group of the working class by way of redressis to betray the most fundamental quality of socialism: consistent democracy.
*Camila Bassi (DPhil, University of Sheffield, 2003) teaches at Sheffield Hallam University with research interests in the relationship of minority culture to urban political economy, the competing historical narratives of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and, more generally, the return to and reinvigoration of Marx and Marxism. She is the author of several papers and book chapters, including the 2010 paper The Anti-Imperialism of Fools: A Cautionary Story of the Revolutionary Left Vanguard of Englands Post-9/11 Anti-War Movement and the forthcoming book chapter Shanghai Goes West: Reflections on the Citys Gay Political Economy. Bassi has been an active socialist for over sixteen years.

REFERENCES
Bassi, Camila. 2010. The Anti-Imperialism of Fools: A Cautionary Story on the Revolutionary Socialist Vanguard of Englands Post-9/11 Anti-War Movement, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 9(2): 113-137. Cliff, Tony. 1945. The Middle East at the Crossroads, Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/me/index.htm. . 1946a. Palestine Strike: Arabs and Jews Unite, Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/05/strike.html. . 1946b. A New British Provocation in Palestine, Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/07/provocation .htm. . 1946c. Terrorism in Palestine: Are the Terrorists Anti-Imperialist?, Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/ 12/terrorists.html. . 1947. On the Irresponsible Handling of the Palestine Question, Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1947/xx/ palestine.htm. . 1982. Roots of Israels Violence, Marxists Internet Archive, http:// www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1982/04/isrviol.htm. . 1967/1990. The Struggle in the Middle East. Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1990/10/struggleme.htm. . 1998. The Jews, Israel and the Holocaust, Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1998/05/israel.htm. Draper, Hal. 1948. How to Defend Israel: A Political Program for Israeli Socialists, Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/ draper/1948/07/israel.htm.

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Lenin, Vladimir. 1913-1922. Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers). . 1913a. The National Programme of the R.S.D.L.P., in Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism, 5-11. . 1913b. Critical Remarks on the National Question, in Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism, 12-44. . 1913c. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, in Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism, 45-104. Rock, L. 1938a. British Policy in Palestine, Marxists Internet Archive, http:// www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1938/10/britpol.htm. . 1938b, The Jewish-Arab Conflict, Marxists Internet Archive, http:// www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1938/11/jew-arab.htm. . 1939, Class Politics in Palestine, Marxists Internet Archive, http:// www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1939/06/classpol.htm. Trotsky, Leon. 1938-1939. Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement (1934-1940) (New York: Pathfinder).

Sayeeda Warsi: A Trifle Confused


Melanie Phillips*
The co-chairman of Britains Conservative Party, Sayeeda Warsi, has delivered a speech about antisemitism to the European Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. I am sure that Baroness Warsi means well. I am sure that she is personally genuinely opposed to bigotry and prejudice in any form. I would therefore like to be able to say it was a fine speech. I cannot do so. Despite much in it that was worthy and unexceptionable, in one vital respect it was a travestymade no more palatable by the fact that many Jews subscribe to precisely the same lethally misguided misapprehension. This revolves around the comforting but mistaken notion that Jews and Muslims stand shoulder to shoulder against the same threat by racists and bigots. Its the argument that says antisemitism = Islamophobia. And its the claim that there is nothing intrinsically threatening to Jews within Islam. All threenotion, argument, claimare false. Yet, all three are promoted by many Jews; all three were to be found in Baroness Warsis speech. She said: The ugly strain of antisemitism found in some parts of the Muslim community arose in the late 20th century. The point is that theres nothing in our history which suggests that hatred between Muslim and Jews is inevitable. This is total rubbish. Muslim persecution of the Jews started in the 7th century with the birth of Islam and has continued ever since. It is true that down through the decades persecution of the Jews by Christians was more savage and barbaric than persecution by Muslims. It is also true that there were periods when Jews prospered under Muslim rule. But the so-called golden age for Jews in Muslim lands was very short indeed. The true history is a story of humiliation, persecution, and pogroms. The great medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides was forced to flee his native Cordoba in Spain (after it was conquered in 1148 by the

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Muslim Almohads, who gave the Jews a choice of conversion, death, or exile). In his Epistle to the Jews of Yemen, written about 1172, Maimonides related news of compulsory conversion for the Jews in Yemen, having broken our backs . . . astounded and dumbfounded the whole of our community. . . . The Arabs, he said, persecuted us severely and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us . . . Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much as they. . . . Is there really nothing that suggests that hatred between Muslim and Jews is inevitable? From my book, The World Turned Upside Down:
The Quran says Islam came before Judaism and Christianity, and was the faith practised by Abraham who was a Muslim. (3:67-68). It refers to Islam as the religion of Abraham many times (2:130, 135; 3:95; 4:125; 6:161). It teaches that Jews and Christians corrupted their Scriptures so Allah sent a fresh revelation through Mohammed. This cancelled out Judaism and Christianity and brought people back to the one true religion of Islam that Abraham had practiced. After the Jews rejected Mohammed, the Quran says the Jews were cursed by Allah (5:78) who transformed them into monkeys and pigs as punishment (2:65, 5:60, 7:166). It accuses the Jews of corrupting their holy books and removing the parts that spoke of Mohammed (2:75, cf. verses 76-79, 5:13). It says the Jews were the greatest enemies of Islam (5:82), that both they and the Christians want Muslims to convert (2:120), that the Jews start wars and cause trouble throughout the earth (5:64, cf. verse 67) and even that they claim to have killed the Messiah (4:157).

As religion historian Paul Merkley observes:


. . . the Quran declares that the whole of Jewish scripture from Genesis 15 onwards is full of lies. . . . When the Jews refused to accept Islam, Mohammed denounced them as not people of faith. The outcome was the eradication of the Jewish-Arab tribe called the Banu Qurayza. Unable at first to break them, Mohammed entered into a truce with them which he broke, following which he slaughtered the entire Jewish population. Unlike the wars between tribes in the Hebrew Bible, which remain merely a historical account with no practical application today, the eradication of the Banu Qurayza is constantly alluded to by the Islamists, for whom it remains an exemplary and timeless call to arms against precisely the same enemy and with similar tactics.

Baroness Warsi said that Jews were currently targeted by the far left and the far right. So they are. But she omitted to say that they are also targeted by Muslims well beyond the groups she singled outMuslims Against Crusades, Islam 4 UK, and Al Muhajiroun. She refers to Muslim Judeophobes as religious fanatics. The people who claim faith drives them

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to acts of hatred . . . but who in reality are nothing more than bigots, who hijack their faith to justify their acts. But as author Andrew Bostom (Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, Prometheus, 2008) notes, Muslim hatred of Jews is rooted in mainstream Koranic exegesis (perhaps someone should give the Baroness Bostoms book). Nothing suggesting that hatred between Muslim and Jews is inevitable? The late Sheikh Tantawi, the grand mufti of Al Ahzar University in Cairo and the most prominent and influential cleric in the Sunni Muslim world, used passages from the Koran to depict Jews as enemies of God, his prophets, and of Islam itself. The U.S. media monitoring group CAMERA quotes Tantawi:
Quran describes people of the Book in general terms, with negative attributes like their fanaticism in religion, following a false path. It describes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics, i.e., killing the prophets of God, corrupting his words by putting them in the wrong places, consuming the peoples wealth frivolously, refusal to distance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristics caused by their [ . . . ] deep rooted lasciviousness.

After quoting from the Koran, Tantawi writes, This means that not all Jews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims; the bad ones do not (Bostom, Legacy, 394). Matthias Kuntzel, author of Jihad and Jew Hatred (Telos, 2007) pro vides some other detail about Tantawi. He notes that Tantawi, the highest Sunni Muslim theologian, quotes Hitlers Mein Kampf: In resisting the Jew, I am doing the work of the Lord. Kuntzel continues: He praises The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, noting without the slightest trace of sympathy that after the publication of the Protocols in Russia, some 10,000 Jews were killed. Tantawi has made a number of other troubling statements. For example, in 2002, he claimed that Jews are the enemies of Allah, descendents of apes and pigs. The following year, however, Tantawi issued an edict declaring that Jews should no longer be described in such a manner, apparently under pressure from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While Tantawi condemned the September 11, 2001, attacks, he later affirmed terrorism against Israelis. In 2002, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported that Tantawi declared that martyrdom (suicide) operations and the killing of civilians are permitted acts and that more such attacks should be carried out. Tantawis positions were posted on a Web site associated with Al-Azhar (see http://www.lailatalqadr.com/).

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To repeat: Sheikh Tantawi was the most prominent religious authority in Sunni Islam. Does Baroness Warsi also class him as a bigot who hijacked Islam to justify his hatred? Jews cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with Muslims against attacks by bigots because a disproportionate number of Muslims reportedly harbor or even act upon prejudice against Jews. Reports by the Community Security Trust over the years persistently suggest that, while most attacks on Jews are carried out by white people, between a quarter and a third of such attacks where the perpetrators appearance has been noted are carried out by people described as Asians or Arabs. Opinion polls have also shown that nearly two-fifths of Britains Muslims believe that the Jewish community in Britain are a legitimate target as part of the ongoing struggle for justice in the Middle East; that more than half believe that British Jews have too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy; and that some 46 percent think that the Jewish community is in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics. There are Muslims who truly abhor this hatred of Jews among their communitygroups like Muslims for Israel, for example, who are true fighters against bigotry, and truly brave. But in order to genuinely condemn something, you have to call it out for what it isas do Muslims for Israel openly and honestly. Those who condemn anti-Jewish hatred while refusing to identify its perpetrators properly are not in the business of fighting bigotry. They are doing something quite differentto put it most charitably, trying to build bridges between communities in order to defeat hatred. Of course, such bridge-building is in itself a noble aim. But if in the cause of building bridges between one community and another such people deny or sanitize the hatred of one of those communities for the other, they will inevitably, if inadvertently, end up strengthening that hatredespecially if at the same time they damn those who do tell the truth about this as bigots whose voices must therefore be silenced. Which is what, believe it or not, elements within the Jewish community are shamefully doingand which is why it is perhaps not so surprising that Baroness Warsi is, shall we say, a trifle confused.
*Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author, now a political and social issues columnist in the Daily Mail. She is the author of All Must Have Prizes, an acclaimed study of Britains educational and moral crisis; her latest book is The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power (Encounter, April 2010.) Phillips is a strong voice for conservatism, which she believes is essential in defending traditional liberal values and culture.

Captain Basto, the Portuguese Dreyfus


Isabel Ferreira Lopes*
An antisemitic act committed by the Portuguese dictatorship continues 74 years later to maintain an effect, as that democratic state has not corrected the injustice. The victim was my grandfather, Artur Carlos de Barros Basto, a Portuguese army captain and a practicing Jew who was banned from the army for performing acts of the Jewish religion. My grandfather came from a family of descendants of Jews whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Catholicism in the 15th century. The great work of my grandfathers life was to rescue the descendants of those forcibly converted to escape the expulsions decreed by King D. Manuel I in 1496, and the persecutions that followed during the Inquisition. My grandfather toured the country identifying the descendants of the crypto-Jewish underground, bringing them to light and guarding them from feeling diminished as they publicly professed the religion they believed. Donning his military uniform and medals, he traveled among Portugals interior, giving rousing speeches, conducting Jewish services, and seeking to inspire others to follow his example. After centuries of hiding, thousands of Catholic converted Jewish descendants answered his call and tentatively agreed to join his movement. But my grandfathers love for Judaism and the many hundreds of people whom he touched did not sit well with the government or with Church authorities. They sought to quell his nascent movement by bringing him up on charges connected to the practice of the Jewish religion. At a time, 1937, when antisemitism reigned throughout Europe and millions of human beings were murdered, my grandfather was on trial for being a Jew and practicing the Jewish religion.

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The military council alleged that my grandfather had performed circumcisions on several students of Portos Israeli Theological Institute. Following a precept of his religion, he professed and stated that he was excessively affectionate toward his pupils. In light of these facts, the Superior Disciplinary Council of the Army found that my grandfather lacked the capacity for moral prestige of his official duty and decorum of the uniform, punishing him with separation from service. For my grandfather, separation from service constituted a civil death penalty. He was summarily suspended from performing his duties, impeded in pursuing his career, banned from wearing his uniform, badges, and military insignia, and forced to forever remain subject to disciplinary action of the Army. In other words, he had to maintain his civilian life and religious practice under penalty of being retried and reconvicted. The real crime of Captain Barros Basto, notes Portuguese Bar Association president Antonio M. Pinto, was in fact the work of rescue of the Marranos. Pinto then compared my grandfather to Alfred Dreyfus, except that my grandfather had no Zola, who had fought for justice against Dreyfuss accusers. My grandfather never recovered from his public humiliation. After years of emotional and financial difficulties, he died in 1961, almost completely forgotten by the public. His movement collapsed, with many Jewish descendants fearful that the authorities would not tolerate their return to Judaism. One day I will be vindicated! said my grandfather on his deathbed. We have reached the year 2012. The Portuguese state has not corrected the decision that destroyed my grandfather. I do not forget that my grandmother fought hard for the rehabilitation of my grandfather. My mother continued this fight. Now I am to fight. Tomorrow, if necessary, it will be my daughters.
*Isabel Lopes was born in Oporto, Portugal, in 1953. Married with three daughters, Lopes has a background in economics. She is a Board member of the Oporto Jewish community, and can be reached at http://ladina.blogspot.com. The author and editor are appreciative of the contribution of attorney Francisco Garrett, who assisted with the research for this article.

Last Week, They Defaced My Temple


Barbara Silver*
I was born and grew up in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, a small industrial city located across from Detroit. The population is 200,000and the Jews number less than 800. There is a small orthodox and medium-size conservative synagogue. The Reformed (liberal) Jews attend the temple. An incident happened at that templemy templethat I thought never would. Spray painted on the temples outside walls, doors, and roof were swastikas, and the phrase Free Palestine. Last week, they defaced my temple. My background is typical of the Canadian Midwest. In a largely Catholic and, of late a Muslim working-class area, I attended Hebrew school three days a week. I was a minority at my public school. Those years were spent starting the day with the Lords Prayer and Christian holidays as part of the curriculum. My earliest recollection of antisemitism directed at me by my friends was the timeless indictment of Youre Jewish, you killed Jesus! Last week, they defaced my temple. Even so, my love for Judaism and my Jewish identity flourished. Three factors accounted for this. First, my innate sense of self and the friendships formed at Hebrew school and Jewish day camp; second, the commitment both parents made as presidents of Bnai Brith Men and Jewish Women International of Canada; and, most deeply, the life-changing experience of my student trip to Israel. Not only did this trip solidify my Jewishness, but it also began a lifelong passion for Zionism. In addition, the trip opened my eyes to the fact that I was living in a small city with few Jewish influences and culture. Windsor does have an inclusive Jewish community where individuals join together to celebrate holidays and Israel Independence Day, but

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it is always kept private lest the neighbors get angry at us. Last week, they defaced my temple. Windsor still experiences antisemitism, although in comparison to larger cities it is on a small scale. While my daughters friend attended high school, a swastika was spray painted on her locker with a letter was written to her about the Nazis coming for her. References were made about the car she drove and the big home she lived in. Canada has always prided itself as being a nation of immigrants, but now the hate has been imported. The formula is always the samejealousy and ignorance and the reliance on what others say to ignite primal fear and anger. I guess thats what they wantto make us as afraid and angry as they are. I wont go down that road. My hope is for it to stopbut this has not been the history of the Jews. Last week, they defaced my temple.
*Barbara Silver is a retired childcare educator in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She can be contacted at blsilver@cogeco.ca.

Fighting Back Against Campus Antisemitism

Kenneth L. Marcuss Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America


(Cambridge University Press, 2010). xi + 211 pp. paperback, 52/$29 Lesley D. Klaff*
This review is dedicated to the memory of my father, Bernard D. Blank 1927-2011, who fought for Machals 7th Brigade in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

I was delighted when JSA editor Steven Baum asked me to review Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America for this special issue on campus antisemitism. This is because Jewish Identity is a seminal and comprehensive text on the new campus antisemitism, and it was written by this special issues guest editor, Kenneth L. Marcus. Marcuss credentials make him arguably Americas foremost expert on the resurgence of antisemitism in American higher education. He is the executive vice president and director of the Antisemitism Initiative in Higher Education at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research (IJCR) and was formerly staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, where he served as the agencys chief executive officer. Prior to that, he was delegated authority as assistant secretary of education for civil rights, and served simultaneously as deputy assistant secretary of education for enforcement in the Office for Civil Rights. He also served in an academic position in 2008 as the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Visiting Profes-

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sor of Equality and Justice in America at Baruch College, City University of New York. His experience as civil rights lawyer, policy maker, activist, and academic inform and illuminate his writing in Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America, resulting in a book that addresses and deconstructs all the issues pertinent to the reemergence of antisemitism on American college campuses. Since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, and exacerbated by the events of 9/11, a pernicious movement to defame Israel, Zionism, and the Jews has gathered speed and is trying to flood into America through the classroom door.1 University-sponsored events involving extremist political activities openly vilify Israel and its supporters. Moreover, anti-Israel and even antisemitic professors have acquired a disproportionate influence in some American universities. These professors conflate academic freedom with political indoctrination and openly express hostility to Israel and its supporters in the classroom. This is not only apparent in academic treatments of the Middle East but is also, unfortunately, a feature of several Jewish Studies departments, which have provided a welcome home to Jewish antiZionist professors. All this has resulted in the creation of a hostile campus environment for Jewish students, wherein they feel harassed and intimidated. Significantly, it denies them equality of educational opportunity, an interest that has been preeminent since the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. This situation on campus is the context for Ken Marcuss book. The author takes as his central theme the failure of the federal government to intervene to protect Jewish students from discrimination, in particular hostile environment harassment on campus. Drawing on his experiences with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the United States Department of Education, Americas primary enforcement agency in cases involving education and civil rights, Marcus offers the reader invaluable insights into the conceptual, legal, and political obstacles that have prevented Jewish students from receiving civil rights protections in American higher education. The book has several interrelated topics as its focus. These are the oncampus campaign to delegitimize Israel and why this is antisemitic; the failure of the universities themselves to address the problem of antisemitism on campus; the traditional reluctance of the OCR to investigate allegations of antisemitism on campus; the legal and moral basis for interpreting and extending the civil rights legislation to protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus; and the nature of Jewish identity, including what it
1. Jonathan S. Tobin, The Reality of Campus Antisemitism, Commentary, April 22, 2011.

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means to be Jewish, to be the subject of Jew-hatred, and even to be an antisemite. Logically structured and lucidly written, Marcuss study offers a wealth of information and insight in a way that makes its currency transcend recent events even as it delves into the core issue of how antisemitism impacts on the dilemma of Jewish difference. Early in the book, Marcus exposes the reader to the realities of the oncampus delegitimization campaign, which he calls the new campus antisemitism, with a description of a spate of incidents at the University of California Irvine, San Francisco State, and Columbia University. In the case of UC Irvine, and during Marcuss tenure as staff director at the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) filed a complaint against the university with the OCRs Department of Education. The complaint alleged specific incidents of anti-Israel speech polluted by the blood libel, conspiracy theory, Holocaust inversion, and ethnic stereotypes. In some instances, the speech was accompanied by physical intimidation and threats, violence, and vandalism directed at Jewish students and property. The San Francisco campus sported flyers advertising a pro-Palestinian rally that . . . featured a picture of a dead baby, with the words, Canned Palestinian Children MeatSlaughtered according to Jewish rites under American License . . . (37). At Columbia, professors teaching in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures program allegedly used their lectures to demonize Israel and to advance antisemitic stereotypes. For instance, one Professor Hamid Dabashi allegedly wrote that Israelis have a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of [their] culture (39). Marcus uses each of these university case studies to illustrate the nature and extent of the on-campus antisemitic abuse. He makes it clear that what has been happening on the American campus goes well beyond the free exchange of ideas about the Israel/Palestine conflict and instead amounts to the unlawful harassment of Jewish students and the creation of a hostile university environment. Marcus notes the paradox that in a golden age for American Jewish students, when there is a proliferation of Hillel Houses, Jewish Studies departments, Israel Studies classes, and Jewish students and faculty, growing anti-Israel extremism on campus is putting Jewish students at risk of physical harm. Marcus juxtaposes this unacceptable campus situation with the disappointing response of the university officials and administrators who overwhelmingly fail to take seriously student complaints of antisemitism. Only the president of San Francisco State, Robert A. Corrigan, denounced the blood libel flyers as hate speech that offended the entire university community. In sharp contrast, the UC Irvine officials reacted with silence and passivity. For example, when in 2002 one Jewish student expressed her

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fears to the chancellor and other campus administrators that she was afraid of being physically attacked if she identified herself as a Jew or as a supporter of Israel, the chancellor failed to respond to her letter. Instead, an administrator advised the student to seek psychological counseling from student services. Even worse, the vice chancellor for student affairs, Miguel Gomez, sought to challenge the existence of antisemitic hate speech by claiming that one persons hate speech is another persons education.2 Drawing on the work of Deborah Lipstadt, the late Gary Tobin, and former Commentary editor Gabriel Schoenfeld, Marcus offers several theories on why academia has become so instrumental in the propagation of antisemitic anti-Zionism. The reader learns that the politics of many American college faculties has become overwhelmingly liberal, and contemporary anti-Zionism tends to concentrate on the left. This is because it is an ideology that fits in well with anti-Western, anti-American, antiwar, and other ideologies that are common on college campuses. For this reason, antiZionist groups have actually targeted campuses as an arena for expressing their anti-Israel agenda. The situation is made worse by the fact that extremist voices are disproportionately influential on college campuses and are frequently able to capture organizational apparatuses even when they do not command majority support (51). To compound the problem, as seen in the reaction at UC Irvine and Columbia, many universities have failed to take appropriate action to prevent the spread of antisemitism, largely as a result of bureaucratic inertia. Also, university administrators, officials, and faculty have failed to stand up to the perpetrators of antisemitic incidents for fear of inviting confrontation, appearing overzealous or interfering with academic freedom, or because they do not want to oppose Muslim/progressive bias on campus, or because, since the Oslo accords, Israel has been depicted as the oppressor. Especially helpful for the understanding of how anti-Zionism has become polluted by antisemitism is an entire chapter, The New Campus Antisemitism, which gives an exhaustive overview of extant scholarship on the phenomenon. Included are official definitions of the New antisemitism, such as the working definition of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights and other sources, including the United Kingdoms All Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism. Essential criteria are provided, enabling the reader to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitismand to see how, thanks to Marcuss rigorous analysis, campus antisemitism has evolved from a sophisticated prejudice to a fully developed ideology fueled by the warped criteria of the anti-racist left.
2. http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=23112_Irvine_One_Persons_ Hate_Speech_is_Another_Persons_Education&only.

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With respect to the books central theme, which is the long-time failure of the federal government to intervene to protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus, we learn that beginning with the administration of President Jimmy Carter, the OCR had traditionally operated a hands-off policy with respect to anti-Jewish bias on campus. This is because of its determination that antisemitism does not constitute discrimination on the basis of race or national origin for the purposes of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI is a U.S. federal civil rights statute that prohibits discrimination in federally assisted programs and activities in (virtually all) public and private universities and colleges on the basis of race, color, or national origin. The OCR has conventionally taken the view that Judaism is merely a religion, placing Jewish students beyond the reach of Title VIs statutory civil rights protection. This act has deprived Jews of any legal means of redress with respect to the outbreaks of campus antisemitism so vividly described in the book a serious civil rights issue, particularly in the absence of any legislation to address religious discrimination in the educational setting. As Marcus notes, constitutional rights have little worth if they are not backed by effective enforcement schemes (9). While it is true that other religious minority students, such as Muslims and Sikhs, are in the same invidious position whenever they experience discrimination or harassment in public and private universities, for Jewish students the [problem] is easily solvable because it is well established that antisemitism may take several forms, including not only religious, but also ethnic and racial animus (9). This has even been recognized by the U.S. State Department, which has defined antisemitism as hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as an ethnic, racial, or religious group (9). Indeed, it is in his subsequent exposition on the nature of the antisemitic animus as racial and ethnic, as well as religious, that Marcuss book is at its most illuminating. Marcus explains the OCR failure to recognize Jews as a race for the purposes of Title VI in terms of what the legal scholar Kenneth Karst has referred to as the dilemma of difference (24). This occurs where an agency like the OCR is faced with an unpalatable choice: either use a racial category and reinforce socially constructed differences and stereotypes, or deny the racial category and deprive the group protection from discrimination (29). Marcus notes the views of critical feminist scholar and dean of Harvard Law School Martha Minow, who has argued that the latter optiondepriving the minority group of the classification needed to afford it legal protection from discriminationis not an option because it ironically allows bigots to reinforce the very difference that the agency is unwilling to invoke (24). Certainly, from the perspective of someone like

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myself, who is trained in the English legal systemwhere the question of whether or not Jews should be regarded as a race for the purposes of the anti-discrimination law has never been doubtedI found the OCR attitude to be somewhat short-sighted. Whether Jews constitute a race in biological terms is surely not the issue; what counts is their legal status as a race in order to give them civil rights protection from discrimination. Indeed, Marcus draws on both English and American case law to demonstrate that judicial recognition of Jews as a race for purposes of anti-discrimination law does not require judicial recognition of the concept of biological race. Nevertheless, the fear of conceptualizing Jews as a race because of the genocidal ramifications of the last centuryotherwise known as Karsts Conundrumis perhaps an understandable, if somewhat myopic, reason for the OCRs reluctance to investigate claims of antisemitism on campus. This evidently remained the case until 2004. Then, Marcus, as the OCR staff director, issued a series of policy statements announcing that henceforth OCR would have jurisdiction under certain circumstances to investigate whether discrimination against [ ] a Jewish student [is] in fact prohibited by the Title VI ban on national origin discrimination (31). This was an interpretation of federal policy that would extend Title VI protection to Jewish students, as well as to Muslim and Sikh students. Known as the Marcus Policy, or the 2004 Policy, it announced that discrimination on the basis of ancestral or ethnic characteristics is no less permissible against groups that also have religious attributes than against those who do not. The 2004 Policy amounted to OCR recognition that antisemitism can take several forms, including not only religious but also ethnic and racial animus. Marcus was careful, however, to use the term national origin discrimination rather than race discrimination in his policy statement because of concern for peoples sensitivities to the term race. Marcus issued his groundbreaking 2004 Policy just prior to the filing of the ZOAs Irvine complaint described above. It permitted the OCR to investigate the allegations, which described an extraordinary pattern of antisemitic intimidation, harassment, threats, and vandalism (17) on the UC Irvine campus. Soon after the investigation opened, Marcus left the OCR to take up his position as staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and his successor, one Stefanie Monroe (somewhat disingenuously, it seems), pulled back from the 2004 Policy because she believed that antisemitism is nothing more than religious discrimination, over which the OCR lacks subject-matter jurisdiction. Her position, apparently endorsed by others in her office, led to the OCRs dismissal of the complaint in November 2007, mostly on technical grounds, even though the career officials who conducted the investigation concluded that a hostile environment for Jewish

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students had been formed at UC Irvine. Moreover, Monroes misguided understanding of the nature of antisemitism also meant that between 2005 and 2010, for the duration of her tenure, the 2004 Policy had no impact whatever. This is despite its endorsement in 2006 by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which noted that [M]any college campuses throughout the united states continue to experience incidents of antisemitism and agreed with the 2004 Policys conclusion that antisemitic incidents on college campuses when severe, persistent or pervasive . . . may constitute a hostile environment for students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act 1964 (44-45). OCR resistance to the 2004 Policy remained, however, despite prodding from various members of Congress. As Marcus notes, Monroes failure to understand what historian Edward S. Shapiro referred to as the perplexing nature of what it means to be Jewish meant that she predetermined the outcome of all cases alleging discrimination against Jews (12, 47). But this was not the only reason for the OCRs disinclination to conclude that certain on-campus activity amounted to antisemitic abuse: the OCR also dismissed the Irvine complaint because its political leadership failed to grasp the extent to which anti-Zionist rhetoric is antisemitic and not merely anti-Israel. Accordingly, Marcus uses the Irvine complaint and the OCR dismissal of the evidence as an effective vehicle to pursue two significant topics in his book: the nature of Jewish identity and the extent to which anti-Zionist conduct and speech are also antisemitic. Marcuss discussion and analysis of the OCRs approach to the investigation of the Irvine complaint is noteworthy for another reason: the reader is treated to a thoroughly interesting and most satisfying, never-beforerevealed-to-the-public expose of internal wrangles, dissension, accusations, recriminations, personality clashes, and even seemingly justifiable allegations of antisemitism made by those who conducted the investigation against their OCR superiors. Marcus presents this gripping expose by drawing on his own experience, as well as on official witness interviews conducted for the purposes of subsequent litigation, which had been obtained by the IJCR under the Freedom of Information Act. We also learn of the OCR leaderships attempts at obfuscation and the disingenuous way in which it conducted the Irvine investigation. The reader is left with the impression of an office that was wholly ill equipped to extend Title VI to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment on campus. Shortly after the books publication, however, on October 26, 2010, the U.S. Justice Department stated definitively in an Opinion Letter that the OCR should henceforth intervene to protect Jewish students from a hostile environment on campus. At the same time, Assistant Secretary Russlynn Ali affirmed the 2004 Marcus Policy in a guidance letter to recipients of

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federal funding. Known as the Ali Policy, the new policy not only adopts the 2004 policy but also contains some important embellishments that are essential in the fightback against campus antisemitism. This change in the governments policy to campus antisemitism is a result of a lengthy IJCR campaign headed by Marcus and followed by other organizations such as the ZOA. Marcus has since stated that the question is now whether the Obama administration will enforce the Ali Policy even in cases where the perpetrators are associated more with the left than the right.3 Perhaps unexpectedly, the Ali Policy was challenged in April 2011 by Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and Kenneth Stern, a specialist on antisemitism and extremism at the American Jewish Committee (AJC). In a joint AJC-AAUP statement, both contended that recent events on American university campuses, such as those seen at Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Rutgers, in addition to those previously witnessed at UC Irvine, do not rise to the level of the EUMCs working definition of antisemitism. This definition includes as evidence of antisemitism any criticism of Israel that is not legitimate, such as comparing contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, or claiming Israel is a racist endeavor, or using symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism to characterize Israel or Israelis. Nelson and Stern stated that the Ali Policy amounts to a censorship of anti-Israel remarks, which stifles on-campus political debate. They claimed that the best way to respond is for the supporters of Israel to argue against these views. Marcus presumably anticipated this criticism, because Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America includes a compelling response to his critics. In his chapter Criticism, he argues convincingly that the on-campus delegitimization campaign does not allow for a free exchange of ideas about Israeli policies, but rather creates a spirit of intolerance and an atmosphere of hatred that chills free speech and open debate. The fact is that because of the hostile atmosphere on campus, because of the threats and intimidation, Jewish students and other supporters of Israel are afraid to speak out. Indeed, drawing on the work of notable scholars like Catherine Mackinnon and Stanley Fish, Marcus acknowledges that Title VI does not permit universities to regulate or censor speech that is protected under the First Amendment. If such speech creates a hostile environment, then it must be dealt with in some other way, other than by penalizing the harasser. In fact, the OCR itself announced prior to the issuance of the 2004 Policy guidance that its policies should never be interpreted in a manner that conflicts with constitutional protections for speech and expressive conduct. In August
3. Kenneth L. Marcus, Fighting Back Against Campus Antisemitism, Minding the Campus, March 28, 2011.

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2011, the AJCs executive director, David Harris, renounced the organizations joint AJCAAUP statement as ill advised. This brings us to the key question in the book: whether there is a moral and legal basis for interpreting and extending the Title VI Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect Jewish students. Marcus presents cogent arguments for answering both affirmatively. The moral rationale is that Jew-hatredor, indeed, hatred of Sikhs and Muslims, for whom the case is equally made, if less explicitlymust be treated no differently from bigotry against any other minority group. Moreover, in the absence of federal legislation to prohibit religious discrimination in education, the failure to extend Title VI to ethno-religious groups leaves them without any protection from discrimination or harassment in federally funded higher education programs. For Jews, this is particularly problematic in an age in which no other group [ ] on campus has been subjected to such hostile and demonizing criticism.4 In terms of the legal justification for the 2004 Policy, Marcus asks pointedly whether it is plausible that in the United States, Congress would choose to exclude Jews from one of its most important civil rights acts when, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, they have been the most vilified and persecuted minority in history (29). Marcus believes that the answer is no, and provides cogent legal support for his conclusion with a brief review of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence; in particular, he discusses the 1987 cases of Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb and Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji. In both, the court found that based on the intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, race could include ethnic and ancestral groups, including Jews and Arabs, who are not understood today to constitute distinct racial categories. In other words, in interpreting racial and ethnic categories, the question is not whether Jews are a distinct racial and ethnic category in contemporary terms, but whether they bear the characteristics that the Equal Protection Clause was established to protect from discrimination. As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Marcus reasons that this was passed as a mechanism to enforce those rights enshrined in 1866. Accordingly, antisemitic harassment may be considered to be racial discrimination for the purposes of affording statutory civil rights protections, and the OCRs decision to abandon the 2004 Policy between 2005 and 2010 was based on a misunderstanding of the applicable law. The Obama administrations October 26, 2010, Opinion Letter confirmed the legal correctness of Marcuss original intent analysis. Further, on January 3, 2012, in a case involving allegations of antisemitism on the UC Berkeley campus, a U.S. District trial judge ruled that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does extend its protections to Jewish students.
4. Alana Goodman, Commentary, March 15, 2011.

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Marcus, however, is not content to rely on a purely legal determination that Jews are a race for the purposes of Congressional intent when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also considers the historically and emotionally fraught question (13) of Jewish identity from two other perspectivesnamely, whether Jews are a race according to modern scientific notions, and whether Jews are a race as that term is properly understood or used in common parlance. It is in this part of the book that he delves most deeply into the nature of Jewish identity. In so doing, he discusses several recent fields of scholarship, among them anthropology, biology, population genetic demography, race theory, including Critical Jewish Studies, and cultural theory. This part of the book is highly illuminating and extends its appeal way beyond the question of legal intervention against campus antisemitism; it, in fact, makes Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America a must-read for anyone who has ever questioned the dilemma of Jewish difference (17). Although population genetics are now providing an interesting if controversial insight into the question of Jewish identity, Marcus regards scientific approaches as ultimately unsatisfactory. Jurists therefore turn to the public understanding of race as the default position, and here Marcus demonstrates that public attitudes overwhelmingly suggest that notions of racial distinctiveness are deeply held by Jews and non-Jews alike. While for Jews themselves the racially distinct self-identity appears to be merely an expression of group bond, for non-Jews it informs the antisemitic animus. I was reminded of a comment made by a member of the Cambridge University Appointments Board about a Jewish undergraduate in the 1950s, when he recorded in his interview notes: I fear an unattractive chapif only because one is instinctively drawn to feel this about the chosen race from which he must surely stem. Small, sallow, raven hair and fleshy nose.5 Marcuss discussion of the social perception of Jews is equally fascinating for the fact that they have variously been perceived as black, Asian, or white, depending on the nature of the perceivers bias. This emphasizes the precarious position that Jews have been subjected to in a culture based on the black/white paradigm. It is useful to contrast the social perception of Jews with the scientific material presented. Marcus discusses the controversial research of David B. Goldstein and his team of molecular geneticists and microbiologists at Duke University, who have discovered a genomewide genetic signature of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Jews may well be a biological race after all, but their designation as an objectionable, inferior race is a socially constructed sentiment that is peculiar to the antisemite.
5. Stephen Aris, The Jews in Business (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970).

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Marcus then discusses what it means to be an antisemite. He does this by suggesting that instead of bias victims having to prove that they are members of the group that Congress intended to protect, which places an unfair burden on the victim and is frequently analytically difficult as in the case of Jews, that the courts and agencies like the OCR should take a subjective approach and ask whether the perpetrator of the bias is racially motivated. In discussing the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, Marcus offers a thorough exposition of the racial character of antisemitic conduct. Again, this is fascinating material, which highlights the extent to which the racial character of antisemitic conduct is not always readily apparent, especially in the context of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism. Finally, Marcus discusses what it means to be the victim of Jew-hatred by suggesting a novel approach to the question of whether antisemitism is discrimination on the basis of race. He suggests that, instead of focusing on whether Jews are a race or whether the perpetrators are racist, we can ask whether Jewish students suffer a distinctly racial harm as a result of the climate of antisemitism that exists on some university campuses. He draws on recent work in the fields of cultural studies, race theory, and Critical Jewish Studies to explain the possible range of such harms. These include the injurious aspects of racial formation and re-racialization that occur when groups are subjected to racial stereotypes, group defamations, and resulting forms of racial misperception. This material is not only interesting from an academic point of view but also has a strong resonance for any reader who has experienced antisemitism, whether traditional or contemporary. With respect to the latter and much more prevalent manifestation of antisemitism in todays post-racist world, Marcus deconstructs the new antisemitism as a technology of dehumanization (180). A victim of the new antisemitism myself, and having researched and written about it in the context of the UK campus, I believe that this is an accurate and perceptive characterization, which breaks new ground. One of the most useful aspects of Marcuss analysis is that it provides a clear and comprehensive answer to the question of whether antisemitism is discrimination on the ground of race for the purposes of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He convinces the reader that the answer is yes, whether one approaches the question from a legislative history perspective, a biological perspective, a public perception perspective, or a racial harm perspective. One has to agree with the books major finding that the OCR has been paralyzed in its ability to enforce equal opportunity by its inability to resolve a problem that is entirely conceptual: that is, the meaning of the phrase discrimination on the ground of race as that term is used in a particular statutory context and as it is applied in a particular social context (16). By the end of the book, one has to wonder whether this paralysis was

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informed, as Marcus insightfully suggests, by the unarticulated fact that some officials may [have been] reluctant to extend civil rights protections to the socially and economically successful Jewish community. After all, many view civil rights as compensation for disadvantages that other Americans groups have experienced to a far greater degree (11). As for the practical impact of Marcuss pioneering work, the OCR agreed to open an investigation into antisemitism at UC Santa Cruz on March 7, 2011, following a complaint alleging that the university has violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile environment on campus with respect to Jewish students. The OCR also opened an investigation into allegations of antisemitic harassment at Rutgers University in December 2011. These are the first major cases to follow the new OCR antisemitism policy, and, as Marcus has noted, they will test the federal governments commitment to addressing hate and bias in federally funded higher education programs. Because of doubts that it may not be properly enforced, Marcus has taken action in an attempt to provide stability to the new antisemitism policy. On May 13, 2011, he testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and recommended that it urge Congress to pass legislation banning religious harassment in federally funded education programs and activities. This would close the statutory loophole in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He is also engaged in important academic work to reestablish the boundary between academic freedom and political indoctrination. In the UK, we have a clearly written statute, which unequivocally affords protection to Jewish students from hostile environment harassment on campus. This is because Jews are recognized as a protected racial group for the purposes of affording them civil rights protections. Despite the prevalence of the new antisemitism on several UK university campuses, however, the statute has never been used to bring a lawsuit against an offending university. This is because we have no one like Ken Marcus, who is prepared to initiate and lead the fightback against campus antisemitism.
*Lesley D. Klaff is a senior lecturer in law at Sheffield Hallam University, where she researches and publishes on campus antisemitism in the UK. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, and serves on the Advisory Boards of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Law. She is also a member of United Kingdom Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) Legal Task Force.

Degradation and Dehumanization: The Limits of Toleration

Martin Gilbert In Ishmaels House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands


(Cornwall: Yale University Press, 2010). XXIII + 424 pp. (20 maps; 29 illustrations). 25 hard cover Stephen Riley*
Martin Gilberts book is a painstaking narrative of marginalization, oppression, and, happily, diversity. The history of Jews in predominantly Muslim countries is undoubtedly a history of fortitude in the face of cruelty and degradation. But it is also a history of solidarity between peoples, of cultural fruition, of the ability of leaders to resist popular sentiment, and, conversely, the potential for popular sentiment to resist malign political opportunism. It is peppered with stories of communities and individuals that are as different as the Mountain Jews of Daghestan (an isolated warrior tribe descended from sixth-century Persian-Jewish soldiers [124])1 and David Ben-Gurion. The latter is quoted as saying, in 1937, that there is no conflict of interest between the Jewish people as a whole and the Arab people as a whole [. . .]. We need each other. We can benefit each other (172-3). Gilberts book is an explanation of why this harmony of interests is
1. Page numbers throughout refer to Gilberts book.

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realboth the Jewish people and the Arab people have become victims of tyranny and violence, and both are composed of rich traditions and internal differencesand an explanation of why their present relationship makes this less likely to be realized now than at any time in the last 1,400 years. It is an excellent book, valuable to specialist and non-specialist alike. The text itself is detailed, spanning an enormous historical field. It is measured, resisting generalizations, giving no single face to Islam and many faces to Judaism. And it is readable, with Gilbert bearing his formidable learning lightly. As I will seek to illustrate, the book is continually summoning forth contemporary questions on the politics of identity, ideology, and force. For instance, a number of todays geopolitical assumptions are invoked, and destabilized, by the fact that [t]he Jewish community in Libya had seen nine hundred years of religious and economic freedom under Muslim rule, but was cast into danger in 1510 with the occupation of the Mediterranean port city of Tripoli by Christians from Spain (79). In this review, I will outline some important themes around Jewish marginalization and the cultural fruits of Jewish communities in Muslim lands, and then return to the contemporary issues and resonances found in the text. Moshe Kahtan is quoted with a telling phrase: When there was a lull in the persecutionbless themthey called it the golden age. It was not a golden age. It was an age when the Jews were persecuted less (92). A good proportion of Gilberts book describes such periods of toleration, punctuated by persecution. While there is much that gives shades of gray to this simple picture, the Jewish experience prior to the existence of Israel was more or less uniformly a life suspended between mere degradation and outright dehumanization. At a doctrinal level, early Islam, like any other new religion, was not well equipped to make sense of difference and dissent. And a combination of religion and politics conspired to give rise to the dhimmi status for non-Muslims, a state of subjection and fealty [. . .] (21). This state was a suspension of outright hostility in favor of an instrumental toleration: [in Egypt] the new rulers allowed existing Jewish mint masters to continue in their roles, minting the new Islamic coinage. Yet their decision was a calculated one, since working with hot metals in the heat of Egypt was unpleasant labour that Muslims avoided (42). The Jews of Khaibar have the dubious privilege of being the first to have their dhimmi status conjoined, as became common, with the jizya poll tax. This additional, punitive tax was by definition a means of discrimination and humiliation (22). Jews marginal and exploited status was partially codified and dignified as the Covenant of Omar. Originating around 700 CE under Omar Abd al-Azziz, the covenant formalized the status of ahl al-dhimma (People

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of the Pact) as a non-Muslim caste (31). A semblance of security and autonomy for non-Muslims was granted on the basis of payment of the jizya tax, along with a range of additional regulations: on color of clothing, on building places of worship, on choice of names, and on how (and what) animals could be ridden (32). This imposition of the jizya was a reaction to a perceived internal threat to the political and social development of Islamic states. And it was both inclusion and exclusion: difference maintained through the threat of violence, a quasi-legal structure that sustained co-existence for mutual (if uneven) benefit. According to Mark R. Cohen, quoted by Gilbert, Jews were given a definite slot in Islamic societya low rank, nevertheless (35). Crudely, this rank characterized most Jewish communities, in most Islamic states, until the twentieth century, when dramatic forces reshaped the Jewish and Islamic landscapes. In fact, even after the Second World War we find, in Yemen, a revival of the worst excesses of the Covenant of Omar, down to the obligation for Jews to ride sidesaddle on donkeys (231). Again, crudely, while a situation of toleration is a perilous one, it is not outand-out dehumanization. And there is much that can be said about the individual opportunities, and cultural treasures, that were created in these circumstances. There is, however, a very clear instrumentality underpinning this toleration: It is the acceptance of a community until such time as they cease to be useful. So Jews made themselves useful. Caliph al-Muqtadir, who came to the throne in 908, promulgated an edict to allow Jews and Christians to serve in two official functions: physicians and bankers. Later Caliphs showed a similar concern for safeguarding Jewish expertise [. . .] (37). We find, time and again, Jews welcomed as those who will accept the most undesirable jobs: Ibn Killis served as Kafurs [the ruler of Egypt] collector of government taxes from agricultural districts, and quickly became an expert in agriculture (44). Even utility has its limits, however. The dhimmi did not have a contract, social or otherwise, with the majority population or its leaders. The whims and idiosyncrasies of these leaders are well represented here: the deliberate enflaming of resentful mobs; arbitrary rule and oppression following, without warning, from periods of stability. Quoting Moshe Kahtan again: At the time of the Ottoman Empire the Jews fate depended on the Governors mood and whim and the amount of corruption that he exacted (92). At the same time, without, or in spite of, the will of leaders, localized pockets of exploitation emerge, along with spontaneous waves of popular aggression directed at Jewish communities. Gilbert clearly distinguishes these two forms of oppression, and demonstrates repeatedly how violence from above and violence from below were common but not coterminous. Both were certainly forms of irrational violence and exploitation, but

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they did not spring from common wells. This is true even in recent history. Consider, says Gilbert, the formation of a Muslim SS Division in Bosnia, at the same time that individual Muslims in Bosnia and Albania were saving Jews from deportation (186). Gilberts text suggests that it is only very recently that something more homogenous and insidious has emerged: an ideology of antisemitism shared and fueled by leaders and populace alike (293-296). The response to oppression was sometimes conversion or pseudo-conversion. In fact, conversion to Islam became a feature of Jewish life under Muslim rule for many generations, whether it was encouraged by Muslim rulers, forced upon dhimmi populations, or undertaken willingly (43). No less than Maimonides justified this formal conversion to Islam as an acceptable alternative to torture and death under the fanatical rule of Muslim rulers. He advised his fellow Jews: Utter the formulaof conversionand live (56). Conversely, other communities, under less pressure or with more resources, were able to not only survive but enrich their lives and religion in these circumstances. The fruits of oppression were distinctive intellectual trends and innovations: The Jews who reached the Ottoman Empire in this period [expulsion from Spain in 1492] brought a form of religious discourse, Kabbalah, which found its new and revitalised centre in the Galilee hill town of Safed (77). Cultural and linguistic plurality was a resource to be drawn upon: Jewish and Muslim intellectual life remained closely interlinked, so that both Hebrew and Arabic were used as the languages of scholarship and study (72)for example, Rabbi Judah ibn Quraysh [was a] pioneer linguist, [who] advocated the usefulness of nonHebrew languages in Jewish life, and penned a treatise that mentioned how other languages, especially Aramaic and Arabic, were essential for an understanding of the Hebrew Bible (43). Illustrating the potential for a distillation of the culture, skills, and humanity of Jews within Muslim lands, Gilbert gives this example:Rabbi Yihya ben Shalom Abyad, a [Yemini] biblical scholar, astronomer and physician, provided medical treatment to Jews and Muslims alike, treating free of charge those who could not pay. He also earned his livelihood as a silversmith and goldsmith (162). Because of this range of characters, cultures, and responses to pressure, there is no single picture of Jews or Judaism drawn in Gilberts book. A range of Jewish identities and ideas of Judaism emerge over time and sometimes co-exist simultaneously. Jews in Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, and elsewhere maintained distinctive cultures, and experienced very different relationships with Islamic states: The varied nature of Jewish life under Islam allowed Jews to prosper in some places, while their brethren elsewhere suffered (71). One repeated theme is the particular hardship faced by the Jews of Jerusalem, a special target of all contempt. (103). Gilbert

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cites a letter by William Tanner Young to Palmerston illustrating the persistence of such degradation: Brought up from infancy to look upon his civil disabilities everywhere as a mark of degradation, his heart becomes the cradle of fear and suspicionhe finds he is trusted by noneand therefore himself lives without confidence in any (107). This is only separated by one hundred years from the statement that the life of Jews in some Muslim countries was never better than in the 1920s. The Middle East seemed on the verge of a new openness (149). Moreover, if the identity of Jews inside Muslim lands is a heterogeneous one, by the same token their relationship with Jews outside North Africa and the Arab world is a conflicted one: Ashkenazi Jews in Europe did not always understand the extent to which Oriental Jews had urgent needs. For them, the Jews of the Muslim world remained an unknown element: remote, backward, provincial, even strangenot an integral part of the intellectual struggles and national aspirations of western Jews (137). This difference in identity and culture remained a problem for Israel itself long after its establishment (314-318). The foundation, in 1860, of the Alliance Isra lite Universelle (the Alliance) e provided a backbone for a more international conception of Jewish identity (as well as playing a specific role in saving Jewish lives in the latter half of the last century). At the same time, newer groups have lobbied for, and defended the distinctiveness of, Oriental Jews (326, 328). But again there is no simple story of Jewish or national identity here. Even after the creation of Israel and the considerable heightening of danger for Jews in the Islamic world, many still strongly identify with the state and culture to which their own personal history is inexorably tied. Zhi Yehezkeli: I am an Arab [. . .]. My language is Arabic, Im a Jew but Im Arabic (320). And these are states to which the Jewish religion is tied. They are, after all, states that were themselves formed by Jewish communities predating Islamic rule. Nouri Farhi: So we left Egypt [in 1956]. We also left our past, our history, our grandparents graves, our synagogues (259). The close relationship between the Jewish and Islamic communities of the states considered hereAfghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and othersis illustrated not only through instances of instrumental toleration but also fraternity. In 1453, the Ottomans captured Constantinople and the Jews of Constantinople welcomed their liberation from the long night of Christian overlordship; the first breach in Constantinoples walls was made into one of the Jewish quarters of the city (78). This breach in the wall has been echoed by many other Muslims seeking to minimize or neutralize the degradation of Jews. One celebrated instance of leadership is the Sultans decree of 1840 decrying mistreatment of Jews (including use of the blood libel) and ending dhimmi status: The Jewish nation [. . .] shall possess the same advantages and shall enjoy the same privilege as are granted to the numer-

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ous other nations who submit to our authority. The Jewish nation shall be protected and defended (109). Later, Jews also benefitted from similar support in Tunisia. The Muslim ruler, Ahmed Pasha, the Bey of Tunis, showed his contempt for Vichys anti-Jewish laws by granting exemptions to several leading Jews (181). In Syria, a different kind of pressure was being applied in defense of Jewish communities: a more discriminating discrimination in the face of officially sanctioned antisemitism: Some Arabs, however, railed only against the activities and ideas of Zionism, feeling that it was wrong to oppose the Jews as a people (170); and, [a]lthough anti-Jewish sentiment rose significantly in French North Africa under Vichy rule, there were many Muslims there who stood by and assisted their Jewish neighbours (180). Gilbert offers a number of powerful vignettes illustrating cross-cultural allegiances and acts of kindness. For example: [When] her mothers office boy, a Muslim, collected her from school, he would carry me on his shoulders and face the angry crowds yelling at them that I was his daughter (213). These are snapshots of solidarity within a shared history of oppression, and as presented here they amount to little more than fragments in a wider narrative of internecine violence. Within the momentum of Gilberts text, however, they demonstrate not only a parallel history but also an indissoluble part of a common history. Returning to the contemporary resonances and themes of the text, the center of gravity in the book is the statehood of Israel and its aftershocks for those Jews still living in Muslim lands. The causal relationship between the existence of Israel and intensified oppression of Jews outside Israel is complex. Gilbert avoids any single explanation of this relationship. It is partly a case of national (and military) self-perception being punctured: The realisation that the State of Israel might survive led to an intensification of antiIsrael and anti-Jewish feeling throughout the Arab world. There was a genuine disbelief and indignation at the Jews ability to defend themselves (223). And, it gave leaders an opportunity to appeal to the lowest common denominator. For instance, after the Six-Day War [n]ew anti-Jewish measures were introduced by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (286) involving the arrest of all Jewish men, confiscation of property, and the destruction of twenty-one cemeteries and sixty-four synagogues. At the same time, Gilbert provides evidence of dangerously galvanized popular sentiment following the creation of Israel. Jews left Iraq in 1950 because of hostility at a popular level to the new State of Israelnot due to any official Iraqi discrimination or expulsion (243). Tellingly, this does not remain for long a case of popular sentiment alone: [I]n a decree reminiscent of the harshest days of the dhimmi status, Jews were made to carry special yellow identity cards [. . .] (267). Straddling the political and the cultural, Zionism was per-

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ceived widely as a common threat, both internal and external. Discussing a pogrom in Libya, Gilbert says: The British Report [of 1945] was also correct in noting that Zionism had been the cause of the riots (205). Whether this is correct at the level of popular perception of Zionism, or of organized political opposition to Zionism, is unclear. State-sanctioned policy and popular sentiment had, it would seem, coalesced in a single unholy alliance. Suffice it to say that virulent ideological opposition to Israel in Islamic countries has many of the same wellsprings as European antisemistism among other things, Nazi radio broadcasts into the Middle East (175)and is perpetuated by common ideological tropes at the level of both national leadership and popular culture. If our understanding of the relationship between Judaism, nationality, and statehood can now no longer be separated from the existence of Israel and the Holocaust, how we perceive the toleration afforded to Jews in the past is similarly colored by the events of the last one hundred years. It is chilling, for example, to read of the toleration afforded by Spain in 1220, which allowed the Jews to return to normal robes and turbans, with yellow as their distinguishing mark (68). Equally, Gilberts text sensitizes us to the horror underlying the absurd: As part of a bizarre Libyan exercise in public relations, in April 2004, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, said that all 30,000 Libyan Jews who had earlier fled the country were entitled to be compensated by the State for property confiscated (329). Gilbert adds, perhaps redundantly, Nothing came of this. In the most general terms, Gilberts book leaves the reader with a strong sense of the poverty of instrumental toleration where other cultures are welcome on the basis that they can prove their obedience and economic utility. The final word on this goes to Baghdadi exile Naim Kattan: So many civilizations blossomed in the country [Iraq]! The traces they left are richer and more meaningful than all the oil wells. And I think to myself: what a waste! A country that cannot hold on to all its citizens! (300). In sum, there is much in this book that is all too familiar. Consider one of many possible examples, Morocco in 1912: Only two weeks after the French flag was flown above Fez, the local Muslims sought to wreak vengeance against their new rulers, but, unable to challenge them militarily, they looked for a scapegoat and turned against the Jews (133). While some of general historical threads may well be familiar, however, the quantity of material presented here does not have the numbing effect that a history of degradation might be expected to have. The quality of the scholarship, and the writing, are too good for the narrative to become wearisome, and the questions and conclusions it provokes are far from simple. Martin Gilberts book is an exhaustive and powerful piece of historical research that will be a rewarding study to anyone interested in Jewish or Islamic society.

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*Dr. Stephen Riley is a senior lecturer in law at Sheffield Hallam University, where his work centers on the legal, philosophical, and political significance of human dignity. He can be reached at s.riley@shu.ac.uk/0114 225 5749.

Assimilation and Its Discontents

Howard Jacobsons The Finkler Question


(Bloomsbury 2010), 312 pp. 18.99/$18 Sue Vice*
In Todd Solondzs 2001 film Storytelling, Jewish wife and mother Fern Livingston calls an acquaintance to see if she will make a donation to the local hospital. What it really boils down to, Fern says in her sales pitch, is . . . what does it mean to be a Jew? The bathetic answer to Ferns question, in Solondzs acid satire on Jewish bourgeois life in the USA today, seems to be: to give money, and lots of it. Howard Jacobsons Booker-prize-winning novel The Finkler Question offers a similarly sharp and funny view of current British-Jewish priorities. Indeed, so closely does Jacobsons novel adhere to recent events that one can imagine it being reissued, in years to come, with the kind of footnotes that accompany such works as Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels, identifying the topical detail. In The Finkler Question, Finkler is Julian Tresloves unlovely synonym for Jew, borrowing the surname of his friend Sam Finkler. Sam is, as Tresloves girlfriend Hephzibah has it, arrogant, heartless, self-centred, ambitious, and convinced his intelligence makes him irresistibleand a Jew. Treslove is by profession a celebrity double who can be asked to impersonate almost anyone because he is himself so lacking in personal distinction. Yet Treslove also wishes to be a Finkler. He is, by his own admission, the real McGoy, a non-Jewish Finklerphile who is just as

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strongly attracted by the inwrought despondency of Jewish history as he has been in the past by the erotic sorrow of his depressive lovers. Some reviewers have suggested that Jacobsons narrative conceit in using this aspirationally Jewish but clearly gentile central character has made The Finkler Question particularly acceptable to a non-Jewish readership. This notion, however, seems to have backfired, if the verdict of readers who recommended The Finkler Question to me is anything to go by. They observed, quaintly, that you have to be Jewish to understand it. (I dont agree: the popularity of Black Beauty among non-equine readers seems to be just one of many counter-examples of fictions ability to place you in anothers shoes.) Instead, it seems to me that the figure of Treslove accomplishes two different functions. First, as a naif outsider, he can translate Jewish life and language in a way that may reassure those unfamiliar with words such as mamzer and feygele, not to mention what the ceremonial food items at a seder symbolize. I am not a fan of this kind of translation of foreign Jewish detail, even though it occurs in texts ranging from Mike Leighs Two Thousand Years, the script of which features an elaborate glossary, to Naomi Aldermans Disobedience. Rather, a dramatic context should be able to convey meaning instead. In any event, the second of Tresloves fictional functions is more significant: he is an onlooker at the recent furors that have, in Jacobsons view, beset British Jewryor, to be more precise, in this novel London Jewry. Hephzibah revealingly wishes she could find a reference in the Bible to Gods covenant with English Jews, promising them St Johns Wood High Street. As an onlooker, Treslove is able to act as a non-judgmental filter for the varieties of response he sees around him to the question from Storytelling, What does it mean to be a Jew? These responses range from a fondness for eating tongue, to enjoying a deep-rooted, ancient knowledge about themselves, and, most crucially in this novel, to Jews particular attitudes to Israel. The critic Bryan Cheyette has argued that British-Jewish writers are held in thrall to a diasporic mode of thinking and writing about Israel in a way that American Jewish writers are not, and The Finkler Question is no exception. Sam Finkler is a philosopher turned television personality making programs showing how Schopenhauer could help people with their love lives, Hegel with their holiday arrangements, Wittgenstein with memorizing pin numbers. He sets up a pressure group named ASHamed Jews in order to protest against Israeli actions against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and is for a while a vociferousand fame-seekingadvocate of this cause. Yet the novels plot, as much as Sams personality or the actual detail of debate about the Israeli occupation, contrives to show that Sam,

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that Finkler incarnate, cannot stomach the very group he has begun. From the start, its members act farcically. Merton Kugle seeks out Israeli racist merchandise in shops in pursuit of his own one-man boycott, and injures his back removing it from the shelves. The effete Liberal rabbi Reuben Tuckman, who wore expensive summer suits in all seasons and suffered from a soft stuttering lisp, produces a grotesquely lisped defense of a protest against an Israeli quartet at Wigmore Hall: I love m-music as much as anyone, but I cannot allow my thoul to thoar on the back of innothent blood. Quite quickly, the narrator tells us that Sams heart was not in it, because the pressure groups arguments about Israels disproportionate retaliations on Gaza could easily be shown to be nonsense when applied elsewhere. Finally, it is the temerity of a gentile who speaks in support of the ASHamed agenda that sends Sam off in the opposite direction:
By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make highminded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare?

Such satire is at once highly energetic and engaging, and uncomfortable to read for a whole host of reasons, not least its distanced and abstract view of the conflict in the Middle Eastbut, of course, its real subject is Anglo-Jewry. Embedded within Jacobsons novel are fictionalized portraits of such real-life occurrences as Miriam Margolyess description of herself, broadcast on Desert Island Discs, as ashamed to be a Jew on account of Israeli actions; Caryl Churchills anti-Israeli play Seven Jewish Children, re-named here Sons of Abraham; protests by the group Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods during the Jerusalem Quartets concert at Wigmore Hall; the efforts of Jews for Justice for Palestinians to characterize their exact stance in relation to Zionism and Judaism; and the proposed academic boycott of Israel. Jacqueline Rose comes off particularly badly in fictional guise as Tamara Krausz, a character who is an at once businesslike and softly feminine proponent of the theory that Sent mad in the Holocaust, not least by their own impotence and passivity, Jews were spilling what was left of their brains over the Palestinians and calling it self-defence. Literary critics are accustomed nowadays to agreeing with Roland Barthes that there has been a death of author, where the interpretation of fiction as the straightforward expression of its authors intentions is concerned. But it is hard to forget that Jacobson has made his views on these events known, and it is equally hard not to detect a matching polemic against them in their sometimes reductive appearance in his novel.

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Yet, the saving grace of The Finkler Question is its great inventiveness and humor. We read that Sam Finklers wife, Tyler, converted to Judaism in order to ensure she had Jewish children who would do better at school. Treslove likes walking down the street arm in arm with his old Czech friend Libor because it makes him also feel like a clever little wizened old Jew; when asked to describe what a Jewish tea is, Libor says its like an English tea, only theres twice as much of it. At his most successful, Jacobson represents a crowd of idiosyncratic and dissonant voices uttering a range of opinions about Jewish life in Britain today, none of which is likely to draw the readers allegiance. Even Treslove, the wannabe Finkler, is only attracted to the kind of avid reaching after setback and frustration of Jewishness that characterizes the supporters of Tottenham Hotspur (what a shame that David Baddiels campaign to get Spurs fans to stop using chants about Yids began after Jacobsons book was already out; I would very much have liked to see what the author could have done with that). As in so much Jewish fiction today, anything to do with spirituality or religion itself is shunned, or implicitly likened to some kind of suspect fundamentalism. On the other hand, Man Booker Prize winning The Finkler Question is welcome in a literary climate where such novels as Natasha Solomons Mr. Rosenblums List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman are feted for producing a backward-looking narrative of comic assimilation, in this case about a Jewish man whose rejection by English golf clubs inspires him to build his own. There is nothing modishly nostalgic about Jacobsons novel.
*Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her most recent books are Jack Rosenthal (2009) and Shoah (2011).

The Unfortunate British Legal System

Didi Hermans An Unfortunate Coincidence: Jews, Jewishness and English Law


(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011). 193 pp. 34.95/$70 David Fraser*
In his recent study of Anglo-Jewry, Tony Kushner argues: By acknowledging and accepting that all places . . . are amongst other things, virtually Jewish, we can at least start to challenge the ethnic and racial certainties that are continuing and intensifying in the twenty-first century.1 One of those places that has always been virtually Jewish, as Didi Herman reminds us in An Unfortunate Coincidence, is English law. From leading legal textbooks to judicial consciousness, this Jewish fact has been ignored, obfuscated, and elidedor else deployed in normatively questionable ways. The publication of An Unfortunate Coincidence means that the reality of a Jewish presence in English law, however complicated and subtle our understandings must now become, can never again be avoided. The narrative of English law has become more difficult to grasp, but is more exciting and forever enriched by Hermans masterful work.
1. Tony Kushner, Anglo-Jewry Since 1066: Place, Locality and Memory (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009).

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Didi Herman has written a brilliant, insightful, and extremely nuanced book, as its subtitle indicates, on Jews, Jewishness and English law. In this physically slim but intellectually jam-packed volume, she details, in a careful, contextually sensitive fashion, the twisted and often complex paths followed by English courts in their various encounters with Jews. Her analysis highlights, underlines, and deconstructs the ways in which the cases she studies, in a variety of fieldsfrom trusts, to criminal law, from family and child welfare cases, to anti-discrimination claimshave created, defined, and often essentialized Jews and Jewishness throughout the twentieth century and into our current epoch. Herman also elucidates the mirror images of such emplotments and their key place in English law: For every Jew, there is a Christian; for each foreign Jew, there is England and Englishness; and for every uncomprehending foreign Jewish party to a case, there is the certainty and the civilization of English law. This relationship is constructed not only just, or even primarily, through express and explicit pronouncements, but also by a complex semiotics of legal discourse that this work unmasks in a painstakingly elaborated and sensitive fashion. Herman gives voice to the unspoken normativities of these Jewish cases and in doing so opens up English law to exciting analytical possibilities. The underlying strength of Hermans study is not just to be found in this unsilencing of previously unarticulated English legal normative structures; its importance lies at least as significantly in the care with which she conducts her own deconstructive readings. Judicial decisions are not presented as an unremitting, one-dimensional construction of Jews and Jewishness but are periodized and distinguished. Subtle changes are detected and in turn subjected to careful scrutiny in the search for potential continuities and ruptures. This is a multidimensional and intellectually rigorous study of a complex and evolving socio-legal phenomenon by a scholar who has no fear of complexity and the messy indeterminacies of social and legal life. Hermans goal is an analysis of English case law. She is aware of the difficult sociological, political, and historical contexts in which these cases have been decided and of the vast literature dealing with cognate areas of interest, but she insists on offering a socio-legal reading of legal texts. Each instance is dealt with in the context of how courts have articulated and created Jews and Jewishness, without resorting to rhetorical, facile, or misplaced assertions about what some might see as crude judicial antisemitism. Likewise, while she addresses, for example, the ways in which the term Holocaust has been invoked in English case law (chapter 5), she

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does not offer an analysis of Nazi law, nor does she seek to explore continuities within law more broadly considered.2 Nonetheless, I believe an important aspect of Nazi law can illustrate the strength and depth of Hermans analysis generally and more broadly than a literal study of her own focus might allow. It also highlights a key insight from her work about the legal incoherence of the most recent attempt in English law to engage in a rigid, decontextualized, taxonomical emplotment of Jews and Jewishness. Drawing on Hermans innovative reading (chapters 6 and 7) of the Supreme Court and the lower courts in the Jewish Free Schools (JFS) case, I want to highlight and re-emphasize the underlying assumptions and confused (and confusing) thinking that have always informed the position of the Jews in English legal discourse.3 More particularly, the conflicted constructions of Jews and Jewishness within the categories of race and ethnicity on the one hand, and religion on the other, within Nazi discourse and practice underline and broaden the applicability of some of Hermans central modes of argument. Judicially, Jews have been compared and contrasted variously and often unfavorably with Christians on the one hand and England and the English on the other, often in a confused amalgam of the two categories of religion and national identity. Herman highlights and unmasks the normative paradigms and incoherence behind these characterizations and classifications within English legal discourse. She also establishes, beyond reasonable doubt, that there has never been a careful and specific consideration within English legal discourse of the place of Jews within current anti-discrimination law categories (chapters 6 and 7). We find assertion and assumption, but there has never been analysis, study, or argument about how the limited and self-referential taxonomies of anti-discrimination law should be applied to the sociological complexities of Jews and Jewishness. The collision in JFS between religion and race was and is the culmination for Herman of this failure to articulate a careful and considered legal discussion of the complexities and nuances of Jews and Jewishness in English life. What emerges from Hermans thoughtful, contextualized situating of English law and its confrontations with Jews and Jewishness generally, and from her demolition of the reasoning in the JFS case in particular, are clear conceptual similarities, continuities, and connections between Nazi legal
2. David M. Seymour, Law, Antisemitism and the Holocaust (New York and Oxford: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007). 3. R (on the application of E) (Respondent) v. Governing Body of JFS and the Admissions Appeal Panel of JFS (Appellants) and others. UKSC 15 (December 16, 2009).

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practice under the Nuremberg laws and the categorical confusions of English law. I am suggesting that what Herman unmasks in English law and the normative, taxonomical legal structures of the Nuremberg Law regime share a common theme of factual, classificatory, and thence normative ambiguity common to the European and English legal traditions. Both are instances of legal systems attempting to define Jews though a juridified practice of externally characterizing their essential characteristics. Both systems share a factual and juridical point of departure that there are onedimensional Jews who exist simply as a scientific and legal fact in the world. Both seek to place these existing Jews into the most appropriate and relevant legal category, a category that has historically been either not Aryan or not English. Both such systems should and do logically founder on the rocks of epistemological, sociological, historical, and legal uncertainty. But because they are legal systems, they cannot, by their very nature, recognize the fact of this positivistic failure, which goes to the heart of the two normatively vital socio-legal values, Aryanness and Englishness, at stake in each instance. In essence, precisely the same process of judicial classification is at work in these apparently different contexts. The shifting and sliding normative distinctions between oversimplified understandings of the religion and race or ethnicity evident in both the Nazi and United Kingdom legal systems do nothing to clarify the taxonomical, sociological, political, and juridical dilemmas that undermine the troubling and troubled exercise of confronting Jews and Jewishness so clearly set out by Herman. For the Nazis, the elimination of the Jew from the body of the nation, to preserve the Volksgemeinschaft, was the central concern of the racial state.4 The structure of the Nuremberg Laws was created to permit the identification of these Jews so that, once placed in the proper category, they could be efficiently removed. The legal structure of United Kingdom antidiscrimination law at stake in the JFS apparently has the opposite normative goals and objectives. It aims to eliminate racial discrimination from British society, but it can do this only by first identifying the categories of persons likely to be the victims/subjects of such discrimination. Thus, the legislation establishes prohibitions in relation to acts aimed, directly or indirectly, at groups that can be identified as racial or ethnic, while at the same time seeking to eliminate acts based on the same identifications. Both systems of
4. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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judicial classification must necessarily share a methodology behind which normative assumptions about the undifferentiated group under examination are hidden. Unmasking these facile and unsophisticated normative assumptions is the task at the heart of Hermans book. Let me turn first and briefly to the Nazi legal world in order to trace the epistemological or at least taxonomical continuities on the road from Nuremberg to London, a path that twists its way, bizarrely, through New Zealand via National Socialism. The Nazis came to power in a world informed historically by religious antisemitism, but they brought to their legislative process the worldview that was clearly centered in the ideal of the Master Race, in terms of racial science: Jews were racially inferior, posing a biological threat to the body politic by their very presence. Despite the self-defined clarity of the Nazi vision when it came to the proper racial hierarchy and the task at hand in ensuring the propagation and safeguarding of their Aryan nation, their legal vision was always clouded by the pragmatic difficulties associated with presenting a normative system of race that was both coherent (a task that was then, as now, impossible) and translatable into enforceable legal norms. All these difficulties occurred in a realworld situation in which, practically speaking, most actors, despite their adherence to the Nazi worldview, to a greater or lesser extent still saw Jews in religious terms. The legal definitional system of Nazi anti-Jewish racism that operated under the Nuremberg Laws was as a consequence a confused conflation of race and religion. Article 5 of the First Supplementary Decree to the Nuremberg Laws offered the lasting and operative legal definition of the legal subject, the Jew who would be targeted henceforth for exclusion and then for eradication, in the terms that fused religious practice and race. Mischlinge, those who had two Jewish grandparents, became Jews if they belonged to a Jewish religious community. The racial status of the three Jewish grandparents required under section 1 (as well as those ancestors and spouses, and so on, described in the other sections) was to be determined essentially by reference to their membership in a Jewish religious community. An extensive bureaucratic apparatus to determine the genealogy of included specialized administrative sections and was supported by records obtained from Protestant and Catholic churches. A new private industry in racial genealogical research was created as individuals sought to qualify as Aryans, which in practice meant being defined as non-Jews.5 In fact, most of the proof offered by candidates in search of an Aryan certificate related to the issue of showing that none of the ancestors of specified
5. Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007).

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degree had been part of a Jewish religious community.6 Ehrenreich details the ways in which contradictory attitudes about racial Jews and religious Jews were central to the Nazi state enterprise of identifying Jews and nonJews alike.7 This brief outline in the circumstances must be sufficient to demonstrate the Nazis taxonomical conflation between race or ethnicity today, and religion in relation to Jews. The most anti-Jewish state apparatus in history could not, in the juridified process of identification for exclusion and ultimately extermination, completely apply purely racial criteria, as they themselves understood them, to the question of Jewish identity. In twenty-first-century England, the same classification question arose in the JFS and the same impossibilities confronted laws drive for certainty. The sociological, theological, and historical complexity of Jewish identity confronted the legal drive to simplicity and uniformity; Jews must be either a religious or an ethnic group.8 An Unfortunate Coincidence highlights the normative impossibility of such a taxonomical exercise. Herman details the judicial construction of Jews and Jewishness in which the contingency of identity, whether racial/ethnic or religious, confronts the judicial drive to certainty. The constructive element of English law demands that this contingency be combatted through the precise and ultimately reductive process of adjudication. Nowhere are these tensions and contradictions clearer than in the decision of the Supreme Court in JFS. Identities need to be fixed so that the overarching taxonomical structures of anti-discrimination law, of ethnic groups and religion, can be affixed. The key case for an understanding of the construction of race in anti-discrimination law and the consequences of that construction, as Herman highlights, is the decision of the House of Lords in Mandla (Sewa Singh) v. Dowell Lee et al.9 Mandla, a case where there were no Jews, has been used to construct Jews as an ethnic group. Lord Fraser famously concluded that among the essential and non-essential characteristics of an identifiable ethnic group in English anti-discrimination law were family and social customs and manners, often but not necessarily associated with religious observance, and a common religion different from that of neighboring groups or from the general community surrounding it.10 Lord Fraser also clearly stated that his definition would, because it
6. Ehrenreich, Ancestral Proof, 63. 7. Ehrenreich, Ancestral Proof, 108-20. 8. P. Y. Medding, Segmented Ethnicity and the New Jewish Politics, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 3 (Oxford University Press, 1987), 26-48. 9. Mandla (Sewa Singh) v. Dowell Lee et al., A.C. 54 (1983). 10. Mandla, 562.

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distinguishes race in the narrow sense from the broader terminology of ethnicity, clearly include converts and exclude apostates.11 One might most obviously question Lord Frasers statement on this particular issue, as Herman points out, of some moment in the JFS. It can be argued that the concepts conversion and apostasy carry with them, in their ordinary meaning, elements of religion and theology much more naturally than any understanding we might intuitively associate with ethnicity. How does one convert from an Italian ethnic identity, for example? What exactly does an individual have to do to become a German apostate (assuming German to be an ethnic identity)? Herman delineates the bizarre nature of many of the assertions by the various members of the Supreme Court in the JFS about ethnicity in this problematic context, and we are in her debt for the clarity and unflinching nature of her demonstration of the patent absurdity of some judicial statements and assumptions in that case. More significantly, as Hermans detailed reading of English anti-discrimination law amply demonstrates, we need to understand the evolution of the ethnic/religion nexus in English law from a realistic, socio-legal perspective. The reasoning in Mandla is not beyond the realm of a legal irony. The House of Lords in Mandla relied to a great extent on the decision of the New Zealand courts in King-Ansell v. The Police,12 in which, as Herman highlights, Jews were constructed as an ethnic group largely on the basis of expert testimony from an anthropologist whose professional life had been spent studying Pacific Islander cultures (144-45). King-Ansell involved the prosecution under the New Zealand Race Relations Act of a leading figure in the miniscule National Socialist Party of New Zealand for the distribution of antisemitic pamphlets. The accused raised a somewhat surprising defense for a self-avowed Nazi. He claimed that the pamphlet targeted Jews as a religious group and not as a race. Therefore, he asserted, the legislation, which like that in the United Kingdom at the time of Mandla did not protect religion, did not apply to his actions. King-Ansell and its destiny as the post-Mandla source of the unexamined basis for the legal assertion that Jews constitute for English law an ethnic group underline the ways in which apparently fixed legal categories are in fact socially, historically, and temporally constructed within the judicial realm. As Herman amply demonstrates in chapter 6, there is no binding legal authority, pre-JFS, that Jews constitute an ethnic group. In the bestknown authority on Jews as an ethnic group, Seide v. Gillette Industries, we find consensus and not legal argument:
11. Mandla, 562. 12. King-Ansell v. The Police, 2 N.Z.L.R. 53 (1979),

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Both sides accept and the Tribunal accepted that Jewish could mean that one was a member of a race or a particular origin as well as being a member of a particular religious faith. The Tribunal, on that basis, found that what happened here was not because Mr. Seide was of the Jewish faith but because he was of the Jewish race or of Jewish ethnic origin.13 The history of the encounters between English law and Jews and Jewishness, as set out by Herman in a detailed and carefully articulated fashion, comes to a head in the JFS. The Court invokes paradigms of an open and welcoming Christianity to be juxtaposed with the closed and racial character of Jewish religious law. An idea of blood within Judaism is deployed by the Court in a manner that reflects an apparently un-English Jewish obsession with race. A literalist, Protestant-tinged reading of Jewish law on the question of matrilineal descent is imposed by the Court instead of a more subtle, contextually aware interpretive strategy, such as that invoked by Herman throughout her insightful text, that might have led to the conclusion that Jewish blood must always be understood as physical and visceral on the one hand and symbolic and metaphorical on the other.14 It comes as no surprise to the reader of An Unfortunate Coincidence that such subtlety is as lacking in the JFS as it is in other areas of English law studied by Herman. Tropes and normative structures of orientalizing, racialized, and Christianizing discourses have always informed judicial confrontations with Jews and Jewishness. The circumstances in which these complementary normativities have been deployed have been varied and changing throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. The uses to which these different norms are put are not univocal. They do, however, follow a trajectory that occurs within dominant paradigms of race, religion, and ethnicity where white Christian Englishness is uninterrogated and serves as the template into which all else must fit or, more usually, from which the Jew is to be excluded. An Unfortunate Coincidence offers nuanced ways of reading complexities of race, ethnicity, and religion in a socio-legal context informed by subtlety and indeterminacy. Didi Herman establishes a new hermeneutic framework for the study of race, religion, and ethnicity within a legal system that remains unquestionably English.

13. Seide v. Gillette Industries, I.R.L.R. 427, 434 (1980). 14. Mitchell B. Hart, Jewish Blood: An Introduction, in Jewish Blood: Reality and Metaphor in History, Religion, and Culture, ed. Mitchell B. Hart (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2009), 1-13, at 3.

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*David Fraser teaches law at University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England, david.fraser@nottingham.ac.uk. Permission to reprint granted from the original Blackwell Journal of Law and Society by the author and John Wiley and Sons.

Some Blood, and a Lot More Ink

Darren OBriens The Pinnacle of Hatred: The Blood Libel and the Jews
(Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2011). 468 pp. 33.50 Anthony Bale*
The blood libel, according to which Jews use Christian blood in their rites, has been responsible for the spilling of some Jewish blood and a lot more ink. What more needs to be added to the historical account and the rich scholarly debate surrounding this allegation, which has appeared, erratically, in many forms over the last millennium? Darren OBriens recent volume, published by the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is really two books in one. The first half is an energetic and sincere but rather swift overview of the blood libel in Christian culture, starting with Julius Streichers revival of the blood libel in Nazi propaganda, especially Der Stuermer. The second half of the book is a collection of dozens of the five hundred examples of the blood libel allegation collected by the author. The first impression one takes from OBriens book is that it tends to bludgeon the reader with a wealth of details: graphs, tables, and lists abound. In this way, OBriens book is presented as a kind of indictment of Christian culture, showing how frequently the blood libel has been repeated; less important to OBrien is the analysis of individual, local, or specific instances of the blood libel or a profound explanation of why the

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blood libel has, apparently, been such a durable fiction. This is a libel that has had real victimsthat is, the Jews who have sometimes been persecuted when the blood libel has been alleged; a more fitting subtitle for this book, however, might have been The Blood Libel and the Christians, for ritual murder allegations, blood libels, performative pantomimes of gory crucifixion, and highly aesthetic martyrdom are more the stuff of medieval Christian culture than of Judaism. Throughout, OBriens emphasis is on the taxonomy and repeated patterns of the blood libel, while he shows how the blood libel is endlessly replayed in Western culture (and, as an unexplored aside, apparently in radical Islamic versions, 268). OBrien, a founding member of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, allies himself with a school of Jewish history, made popular by Robert Wistrich (himself another scholar associated with the Vidal Sassoon Center) that is configured around subjective superlatives: the longest hatred, a lethal obsession, the pinnacle of hatred. All too often, such extreme language appears in place of critical inquiry. Similarly, the rhetoric of angry blame appears in the authors voice here; for example, The vicious nature of the polemic is unmistakable (83) is a proxy for sensitive interpretation or nuanced analysis. As such, it is no surprise that anachronistic terms are deployed throughout OBriens study: anti-Jewism (157), never a medieval term, is suggested as a way to understand anti-heretical statutes of twelfth-century popes; theo-biological motives are suggested for the blood libel at Pforzheim in 1267 (209); more generally, a model of antisemitism that starts with Streicher and works backward is unlikely to be sensitive to the ancient contexts that engendered it. A useful and instructive history of antisemitism needs to be more than a list, and it needs to move beyond blame and outrage to analysis and interpretation. The first half of OBriens book is made up of pithy chapters, moving quickly through the Middle Ages. Throughout, older scholarship is largely unquestioned, and OBrien does not take on, or much refer to, much more recent scholarship, such as that of Anna Abulafia, Sara Lipton, Robin Mundill, Miri Rubin, Patricia Skinner, or Israel Yuval, which could have helped him probe his examples more deeply. The second half of the book gives English translations of a wide range of sources. These are often removed from context: an egregious example is the very brief extract provided from Geoffrey Chaucers The Prioresss Tale (324-5). OBrien selects three stanzas from the poem: the first mentions the prioress-narrators description of how the Jews conspired to hire a homicide to murder a Christian boy; the second stanza describes how they discarded the body in a privy; and the third stanza refers us to Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1255), the English boy-saint of ritual murder, who, as the prioress points out, was

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slayn also/With cursed Jewes. The problem with this approach is that it does not consider the context in which the story was toldthat is, by a frivolous and hypocritical prioress within Chaucers arch and whimsical Canterbury Tales. By excerpting only these three stanzas, OBrien violently rewrites Chaucers story and offers almost no interpretation, here or elsewhere in the book, of Chaucers brilliantly complicated weaving of fantasy violence and its transference onto Jews. OBriens conclusion, though written with fluency and energy, is problematic:
The only reason the blood libel accusation has persisted against Jews is because Jews continue to exist. Witches, heretical Christians, and other groups accused in the past have all but disappeared from view. The only scapegoat remaining on which to hang the allegation is the Jew. (264)

It may be true that a particularly narrow view of the blood libel might bear this out. Allegations against witches and heretics were similar, but were they the same? And were they similar at all points in history? It seems to me that other groupshomosexuals, immigrants, pedophiles, Satanic sex abusersare, to some extent, today represented along similar terms to those found in OBriens dossier of allegations, but this is a similarity, not an incidence of the same thing. It is not the historian of antisemitisms job to judge the people of the distant past as guilty or innocent or, in OBriens terms, to expose the perpetrators and perpetuators (268): it is axiomatic that people lie and slander and do terrible things to each other, and have done so for a very long time. What we need to explore now is how in specific times and places lies can be taken as truths, and why sometimes such lies can be spurs to real action. Unfortunately, OBriens book seeks refuge in the general over the specific, and, as such, misses an opportunity to say something truly thought-provoking about blood libels as fascinating instances of imaginative violence.
*Anthony Bale is a reader in medieval studies, director of graduate studies, and assistant dean at Birkbeck University of London. The author of several papers, chapters, and books, including Feeling Persecuted (Reaktion, 2010), he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2011 for his research in medieval history. He can be contacted at a.bale@bbk.ac.ak.

The Oldest HatredOn Campus

Eunice G. Pollacks (ed.) Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present


(Academic Studies Press, 2011). 450 pp. $65.00 Richard L. Cravatts*
The sheltered walls of academe, one would think, might well have been immune from the peculiar disease of antisemitism, given how a dedication to progressive thought and reasoned scholarship is, at least as commonly proclaimed, one of the fundamental virtues of higher education. But just as antisemitism metastasizes randomly in all strata of society in that conspiratorial netherworld where both reason and morality are abandoned, campuses, too, have a history of harboring their own strains of Jew-hatred, and of providing a safe haven for those who either foster or accommodate antisemitic attitudes. That antisemitism changed in form and intent from the post-World War I era, when prejudice against Jews was principally defined by attempts by the academic mandarins to block access by Jewish students and faculty to slots in elite educational institutions, to the current day, when antipathy toward Jews is more covertly expressed in a new form of antisemitism that targets the Jew of nations, Israel. What both instances have in common, of course, is an irrational fear of and obsessive regard for the perceived shortcomings, undue influence, and moral defects of Jews, and the sometimes puzzling lapses in reason that seem to characterize some university administrators, entrenched faculty, and professionals in educational associations.

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In eras before the Holocaust, a strain of polite, somewhat invisible, antisemitism was an integral part of Western societies, and that included the insular, clubby societies that defined elite campuses such as Harvard, for example, where growing numbers of high-achieving, aggressive Jewish applicants threatened to displace Yankee scions. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvards president in the 1920s, had a peculiar animosity toward Jews and instituted quotas by which to restrict the sheer numbers of Jewish students admitted under his watch. Pressed by an influential Harvard graduate to defend his bias against Jews, Lowell told him that it was because Jews cheat. When the alum pointed out that students from all faiths and backgrounds cheat, too, Lowell is alleged to have replied, Dont change the subject. Im talking about Jews. That obsession with the presumed and projected defects of Jews is eerily similar to the obsessive, even irrational, antipathy expressed toward Israeland, by extension, to Jewson campuses in the current day, and the same poisonous stream that tainted campuses in the early twentieth century still flows unabated in the 21st. That unfortunate historical phenomenon is the subject of a new collection of 21 essays, Anti-Semitism on the Campus: Past and Present, edited by Eunice G. Pollack, professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of North Texas. What becomes clear in the books broad coverage of several generations of campus antisemitism is that the current form, the new antisemitism, is much more slippery, and that while overt Jew-hatred is no longer generally accepted among the Western intelligentsia, the conflation on campus today of the many perceived ills of Zionism and Israel has given actual antisemites a convenient cover for their otherwise unacceptable prejudices. Organized into six sections, Antisemitism on Campus begins with an overview of how campuses have dealt with, and continue to deal with and respond to, the presence of antisemitism on campus and the frequent failure of administrators to adequately ameliorate conditions that would be morally or emotionally oppressive to Jewish students and faculty. Andrew S. Winston writes a troubling piece with the title Objectionable Traits, examining how Jews from the 1920s to the 1950s were tacitly, though determinedly, thwarted from academic training in psychology due to their perceived inability to enter this profession because they were covetous, criminal, dishonest . . ., ill-mannered, self-defensive . . ., and unwilling to assimilate. Moreover, because it was believed that Jewish interest in education merely reflected acquisitiveness, and that the questionable moral character and foreign ethnic background of Jewish students rendered them unworthy of professional standing, department chairs and faculty exhibited a shared understanding of the dangers in admitting Jews to the socioculturally homogeneous professoriate. The polite campus antisemites of the

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past here could conveniently justify antisemitism as a logical reaction to the perfidy and unpleasantness of Jews themselves; that is, antisemitism is the fault of Jews for their actions, just as current antisemitism is justified by pointing to the oppressive and unlawful behavior of Israel, and Jews complicity in it. The same ethnic and cultural diversity that excluded Jews from certain schools and professions in earlier times, of course, today has elevated other minority groups to special status on campuses. Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University, for instance, describes how university administrators now, in their zeal to make campuses inclusive, diverse, and multicultural, regularly protect the rights and sensibilities of favored campus victim groups (African Americans, gays, Muslim students, and Latinos, for instance), but have been either unwilling or unable to make strong moral stands when Jewish students have been emotionally, verbally, or physically assaulted for their actual or perceived support of Israel or opposition to the Palestinian cause. Wellesley Colleges Jerold S. Auerbach writes a more specific tale of his own institution, revealing how Wellesley, like many of the other elite campuses during the early 20th century, maintained an uneasy relationship with its Jewish students, consigning them to dank corners of dorms, screening them for traits of their Jewishness during the application process, and treating them as somehow different and inferior to the children from gentile society who comprised the largest part of student bodies at the Ivies and sister schools. Those attitudes, and their dark legacy, persisted at Wellesley until the current day, Auerbach points out, as evidenced by the colleges reaction to the incendiary writing and publishing of African-American Tony Martin, an unrepentantly antisemitic Wellesley professor who used The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, a spurious bit of scholarship purporting that Jews were key players in the slave trade, in his teaching, and who, after many Jews reacted to his outrageous theories, wrote his own screed, The Jewish Onslaught, in which he castigated a malevolent Jewish lobby for trying to suppress the truths he had attempted to reveal to his students. As regularly occurs on other campuses where Jews, Zionists, or Israel are the target of demonization, at Wellesley the administration circled its wagons around Martin under the protective shield of academic free speech and ignored the inconvenient details of whether what he taught was true, scholarly, or even morally appropriate. The thorny American topic of racism has inserted itself into discussions about Jews on campuses, particularly in relation to Israel and the promiscuous way it is referred to as an apartheid state by its campus defamers. Professor Pollack, in fact, includes an essay of her own, African Americans and the Legitimization of Antisemitism on Campus, which

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explores the troubling friction between blacks and Jews since the civil rights era; a second essay in the book also investigates the promotion of antisemitism through the music of rap artists, although the incidence of African-American antisemitism on campus, while part of the larger attack on Israel and Zionism, has not in itself been a significant issue. But the charge of racism also enables leftist faculty, administrators, and students to excuse the moral transgressions of the oppressed Palestinians, and, as an extension of that thinking, to single out Israel and America for particular and harsh scrutiny owing to their perceived institutionalized racism and greater relative power. The self-righteousness the left feels in pointing out Zionisms essential defect of being a racist ideology insulates it from having to also reflect on Arab transgressions, since, as suggested by earlier antisemiteswho blame Jews themselves for the fact they are dislikedliberals (many of them Jews themselves) can excuse their own betrayal of Israel by holding it fully responsible for the very hatreds it inspires. This unholy alliance between the Arab world and leftists, which might seem initially incompatible, serves both sides well: Arab nations, who wish to deflect the pathologies of their own societies, savor being able to assign the Wests worst appellation of racist to Israel, and campus liberals at the same time fulfill their Marxist dreams of trying to envision and help create what Harvards Ruth Wisse has called the ideal of the egalitarian state. That ideology has meant that the current occurrences of antisemitism on campus, as discussed in a series of essays at the end of this book, have to be examined through a prism that includes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, since on most campuses the accusation against Israel is that it is essentially a racist regimeone that, as the wry Professor Edward Alexander observes in one of his two essays here, Because [liberals] usually pride themselves on the rejection of anything smacking of racism and prejudice, they must cast the Israelis themselves as the new Nazis in order to make antisemitism, which had (so to speak) been given a bad name by the Holocaust, again respectable, but under the new name of anti-Zionism. The present-day campus is rife with anti-Zionists, of course, all of whom are quick to deny they harbor any antisemitic sentiment but who leap to their collective feet to virulently denounce what they perceive to be Israels apartheid, racism, occupation, oppression, militarism, and Nazi-like behavior. But those collective libels and slurs against the Jewish state are precisely what have come to define the new campus antisemitism, observes Kenneth L. Marcus in his contribution in this book, Hostile Environment: Campus Antisemitism as a Civil Rights Violation. As the State Department observed in 2008, Marcus writes, a distinguishing feature of

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the new antisemitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that whether intentionally or unintentionallyhas the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israels perceived faults to its Jewish character. Marcus should know well whereof he speaks, since he and the four other contributors to the final section of this book, Combatting AntisemitismTammi Rossman-Benjamin, Evelyn Avery, Rachel Fish, and Alvin Rosenfeldhave all been in the trenches in the battle against campus extremism aimed at Israel and Jews. Marcus, executive vice president and director of the Anti-Semitism Initiative at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research and former director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, also accuses universities of using what he calls First Amendment opportunism when they provide moral cover for extremist speech on campus with which they seemingly agree, but seek to criminalize other speech on the same campus when it is deemed hate speech by those who disagree with its point of viewits content. UC Santa Cruzs Rossman-Benjamin, whose essay surveys the academic deligitimization of anti-Zionism, filed a 2009 civil rights action with the U.S. Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights, arguing that UCSC had created a hostile environment for Jewish students. On her campus, Rossman-Benjamin had observed an odious pattern of bias and radicalism against Israel and Jews, under the guise of a scholarly critique of Israeli policies, a process in which, she said, Professors, academic departments and residential colleges at UCSC promote and encourage anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish views and behavior, much of which is based on either misleading information or outright falsehoods. More to the point, it was not only the presence of this virulently anti-Israel, antisemitic speech and action that was of significance, but the fact that it was singularly directed, unceasingly, at one group of students: Jews. And what was more, Rossman-Benjamin added, no other . . . group on campus has been subjected . . . to such hostile and demonizing criticism. Campus antisemitism, as chronicled in Antisemitism on the Campus both in the classic, earlier forms as a logical outgrowth of European and Christian strains, and now in its new, more covert form as purported criticism of Israel and Zionismis a grim reminder that the worlds oldest hatred has not yet vanished; in fact, either because of the widespread negative attitudes toward Israel, or simply due to a lingering, poisonous Jewhatred in the Arab world and increasingly in the West as well, Jews once again are witness to libels, denunciation, demonization, and slurs against Judaism, against Zionism, and against Israel itself, the Jew of nations. The campus war against Israel, which is the most salient form of contemporary antisemitism, is also indicative of the devolution of higher education, where scholarship has been degraded by bias and extremism on the

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part of a leftist professoriate with a clear political agenda that enlists Israel as the new villain in a world yearning for social justice. University leaders and other stakeholders have been noticeably feckless in moderating this radicalism, either because they are unaware of how whole fields of study have been hijacked by academic frauds and morally incoherent scholars, or because they sympathize with the intellectual approach of their faculties and have become complicit with the production of pseudo-scholarship, academic agitprop, and disingenuous learning experiences that have a onesided, biased approach to understanding the Middle East, and particularly the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. That a collection of twenty-one essays was necessary to write in order to examine campus antisemitism would be unfortunate, especially if those articles revealed only a troubling era in academias cloudy past. But, as suggested by the title of one of the books other essays, New Wine in Old Bottles, the way in which Jews are marginalized, demonized, libeled, intimidated, and slandered on campus may have changed and been dressed in new clothing to obscure actual intent, but the worlds longest hatred, unfortunately, shows no sign of disappearing, along with other human pathologies, into the dustbin of history.
*Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, is a professor of practice and director of the Masters Program in Communications Management at the Simmons College School of Management, and the author of the forthcoming Genocidal Liberalism: The Universitys Jihad Against Israel and Jews.

From Russia with Hate

Leonid Livaks The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 498 pp. $60. Harriet Murav*
The focus of Leonid Livaks new volume is the image of the Jew in the Russian literary canon. Although The Jewish Persona refers to Western European literature, specifically, Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice and Prousts Remembrance of Things Pastamong othersno Western work receives the close, detailed, and sustained readings that the author provides for Russian literature. Christian theology, to which Livak devotes his first chapter, is the common basis for both the European imagination referred to in the title and the specific works of Russian fiction that receive lengthy discussion in the subsequent chapters. This is a book about the image of the Jew as Other in Russian literature. Livaks analysis rests on a complex paradigm, or, as he puts it, a generative model that is derived from a number of sources (1-2). The theoretical point of departure weaves together Algirdas Greimass view of the structure of narrative, Jungian archetypes, and Jean-Fran ois Lyotards use c of the term the jew. Greimas, relying on the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, isolates the following key functions of narrative: the subject/ object, the sender/receiver, and the helper/opponent. Livak argues that Greimas helps reveal the basic structure of Christian narrative as one in which Jesus is the subject, sent by God to redeem humankind, who is both helped and

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hindered by the jews (29). Livaks appropriation of Lyotards use of the lower case helps distinguish actual, historical Jews, living in a concrete time and place, from the imaginary negative construct of the jews, who are literal-minded, fleshly, parasitic, greedy, physically weak, effeminate, clannish, both over- and undersexed, both obsolete and hyper-modern, moneyobsessed, incapable of cultural creativity, and yet also linguistically polyglot. The first part of the book establishes the basic building blocks of the analysis, including Christian narrative and theology, Russian and Slavic folklore, and a brief section on the jewish body. Part II focuses on Gogols Taras Bulba, which, as Livak argues, provides the basic template for the image of the Jew for Russian literature as a whole. According to Livak, the jews play the role of both helper and opponent in this key story. Part III turns to the nineteenth-century liberal period, and discusses Turgenev and Chekhov in light of Gogols fundamental text; Part IV addresses two twentieth-century figures, Isaac Babel and Iurii Felzen, the emigr writer about whom Livak also wrote in a previous work, How It e Was Done in Paris: Russian Emigre Literature and French Modernism (2003). The argument about the generative model is key to the book as a whole, and it would be misleading to suggest that Livaks approach is purely narratological. Psychoanalysis also plays a role. The way authors use the generative model of the jews depends on their personal and professional dilemmas (164). For example, Livak maintains that the real-life failure of courage Turgenev experienced during an emergency (the event took place in 1838) was projected onto the collective figure of the jews in the story Zhid (Yid) that Turgenev published in 1847. This story and the subsequent work, Neschastnaia, help the author resolve in fantasy form his anxiety about Pauline Viardots alleged Jewish background. Livak argues that a fleeting remark Turgenev made about wanting to flog the French-Jewish actress Sarah Bernhardt for the crime of cheapening her talent suggests a fantasy shared by liberal Russian writers who proclaim their pity for the suffering of the Jews of the Russian Empire, and yet would also make them the target of their sadomasochistic fantasy. Livak writes: Sadomasochistic indulgence, with the jews as its sexualized object, becomes a compensatory mechanism for and a reflection of the violence Russian writers inflict on their art and their beliefs when they bow to the ideological and moral pressure of the liberal opinion (221). This characterization of Russian writers of the second half of the nineteenth century could benefit from more historical evidence. Livak seems to be saying that Russian writers such as Turgenev and Chekhov were actually deeply committed to antisemitism, but distorted their hatred of Jews under the pressure of the dominant liberal opinion of the time. He does not, how-

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ever, offer support for the claim that liberalism controlled the press in late19th- and early 20th-century Russia. This is the time period that brought the 1881 and 1903 pogroms and a series of blood libel trials. The argument leads to a further question: if there were no weight of liberal opinion, and therefore no need for compensatory mechanisms, would Jews fulfill a different role in the Russian literary imagination? Livaks own argument suggests that the image of the jews remains a constant, even through the 1920s, when Babel was writing and publishing his works. Were Soviet cultural politics regarding Jews the same as the prevalent liberal opinions of late-19th-century Russia? Again, historical evidence could be useful here. Livaks framework consists of few invariable factors: the legacy of Christianity, the Jews unchanging role in Christian narrative, and the individual writers psychosocial history. The problem with semiotic/archetypal models is that they tend to reduce both diachronic change and synchronic variation. Figures as diverse as Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and even Vasilii Rozanov, who actually argued that Jews commit ritual murderwould all seem more or less the same when it comes to Jews. There is another limitation to this sort of approach: the Jews themselves remain out of the discussion. This is a book about the construction and operation of Jewish difference in Russian literature, not a book about the Jews in Russia. The argument about the unchanging features of the image of the Jew would have been strengthened, however, if readers could learn at least the broad outlines of Russian-Jewish history and culture. If Livak had showed how Jews attained to the level of subjects, to use Greimass terminology, the ways in which they were reduced to objects would have emerged even more starkly. This time period saw the flowering of Yiddish literature, the rise of Zionism and the Bund, the development of the Russian-Jewish press, and waves of immigration. It is impossible to ask that a single volume cover every aspect of the topic under discussion; I wonder, however, whether the use of the archetypal paradigm leads to certain blind spots. One example concerns Livaks discussion of the Jewish reaction to the civil war pogroms. He mentions that Simon Petliura was the victim of vigilante justice for his role in the civil war pogroms (218). Readers might have been interested to know that Petliura was assassinated in Paris by a Ukrainian Jew, Shlomo Shvartsbard, and that a French jury acquitted the murderer. When the historical account is limited to the generative model of the jews, Jewsreal-life, actual individuals enmeshed in particular, and in this case rather extraordinary, historical circumstancesget left out of the narrative. Livak asserts that migr artistsRussian and Russian-Jewe e ishfail to address civil war pogroms (294). Viktor Shklovsky wrote about anti-Jewish violence in Sentimental Journey, published in Berlin in

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1923. Russian Jewish emigr s who wrote in Yiddish, of course, produced e numerous works about the violence; among the key figures are Perets Markish and David Bergelson. Bergelsons story Among Immigrants, for example, provides a fascinating portrait of a would-be Jewish terrorist who planned to kill Petliura. Whether Bergelson was referring to Shvartsbard is unclear. Livaks discussion of Petliuras death reveals the shortcomings of the exclusive focus on the jews. Livaks interpretation of Babels need to overcome the jews as part of his formation as a writer is a fascinating argument (319). His characterization, however, of Babel as a classic without a literature or a soloist without an orchestra requires further discussion (364-365). Livaks argument is that Babel had no audience; he worked without the benefit of a RussianJewish literary process (364). Not only did Babel fly solo, he could not have done otherwise, because there was no Russian-Jewish interpretative community, and therefore no Russian-Jewish literature. The argument can be made, however, that Babel, Shklovsky, Semen Gekht, Eduard Bagritskii, Ilia Ilf, and others were part of the same artistic milieu and part of a larger Russian-Jewish literary process that did not end in 1940. Consider the question of Babels influence. Babel directly influenced Gekht, who directly refers to Babel in memoiristic writings and in a story published in 1963, in a cycle called Dolgi serdtsa (Duties of the Heart). Gekht quotes a few lines from Babels Red Cavalry story The Road to Brody. Gekhts friendship with Babel and his staunch defense of him were among the reasons for Gekhts incarceration in the Gulag. The articulation of the generative model of the jews and the discovery of its persistence from early Christianity through Gogol, Mandelshtam, and Babel are the major contributions of this volume. The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature offers a provocative analysis of the Russian-Jewish encounter in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a welcome addition to the growing field of Russian-Jewish studies.

*Harriet Murav is professor of Slavic languages and literatures and comparative and world literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Holy Foolishness: Dostoevskys Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (1992), Russias Legal Fictions (1998), Identity Theft: The Jew in Imperial Russia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (2003), and Music from a Speeding Train: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (2011), and is currently working on a study of David Bergelson.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Caron, Vicki. Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin-deSi` cle France: The Case of the Union Nationale, Journal of Modern History e 81 (2009): 294-347. Klier, John. Russia lacked the popular identification of the Jews with the Devil. John Klier, Traditional Russian Religious Anti-Semitism, Jewish Quarterly 174 (1999): 29-34. Revel-Neher, Elizabeth. The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992: 107-108.

Resenting The Jews

Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoeps (Eds.) Politics and Resentment: Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union
(Brill: Leiden/Boston, 2011). 504 pp. $199.00 Steven K. Baum*
According to philosopher Robert C. Solomon, resentment is often directed toward higher status people, with contempt reserved for those of lower status; for equals, the resentment becomes anger. The problem with definitions, though, is that as comprehensive as they are, they at times fall short when it comes to application. Or maybe its just that Jews have the dubious distinction of being the recipients of all three forms of resentment. Lars Rensmann (University of Michigan), along with co-editor Julius Schoeps (University of Potsdam), have it right when they focus on resentment as key to understanding the nature of contemporary antisemitism. The book begins with a seventy-six-page introduction by both editors that is comprehensive and thorough. It closes with Rensmanns thirty-three-page epilogue, giving what may be the best explanation of contemporary antisemitism yet written. In between the first and last are analyses by some of Europes key authorities of a myriad of topics that do not leave the reader wanting. First, a word about the Brill series. This is the fourteenth volume of Jewish Identities in a Changing WorldEliezer Ben-Raphael, Yosef Gorny, and Judit Bosker Liwerant, editorsa series of volumes that encap-

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sulates key scholarly aspects regarding antisemitism. To my knowledge and with kudos to Brill, I know of no other publisher willing to take chance on this important topic. Perhaps it is because Brill is located in Holland, and the Dutchand for that matter Europeansknow first hand all too well the consequences of antisemitism. Volume 14 keeps to a European theme. It begins with European comparisons with well-placed poll research from top antisemitism and violence scholar Werner Bergmann. The new antisemitism is very similar to the old, says Bergmann, and this makes sense in that it is something we all suspected. The following chapters in this section, by Rensmann, Andrei Markovits, and Paul Iganski with Abe Sweiry, offer explanations on why. The readers appetite is whet with themes of Nazism and anti-Americanism, but what is most impressive is Rensmanns prediction that the anti-globalism movement and its robber barons and banks is creating a new generation of antisemitism. There is evidence, he notes, that modernized counter-cosmopolitanism and coded, seemingly more legitimate forms of antisemitism are increasingly employed by extreme right parties . . . [and] even left wingpopulist actors (143). The next section is dedicated to exploring Eastern European and Western European similarities and differences. The appeal of antisemitism to the Russians, Hungarians, and Poles, written by Stella Rock with Alex Verkhovsky, Andras Kovacs, and Ireneusz Krzeminski, is somewhat different from its Western counterpart. The Eastern European variety of antisemitism appears more traditionally based on religious and right-wing politics. The Western European variety, described in chapters on France by Jean-Yves Camus, the UK by CSTs Michael Whine, Italy by Emanuele Ottolenghi, Germany by Sam Salzborn, Switzerland by Christina Spati, and Scandinavia by Henrik Bachner, appears more social and leftist. Each one of the nations has differences in antisemitism, but almost all authors agree that the levels have risen enough in the past decade to merit concern. The genius of Politics and Resentment lies in Rensmanns focus on the modern and globally gouged Les Miserables or, as philosopher K. W. Appiah called them, the counter-cosmopolitans. Rensmann reminds us of Horkheimer and Adornos (1969, 165) searing indictment of the cosmopolitan Jew: No matter what the makeup of the Jews may be in reality, their image . . . has characteristics which must make totalitarian rule their enemy: Happiness without power, reward without work, a homeland without frontiers, religion without myth. Jew is now a curse word for many European young adults, and can now be understood as a bulwarka speaking truth to imagined Jewish power. In an increasingly alienating world, antisemitism offers a simplistic causal explanation (480).

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Alienation does offer a causal explanation, but it is not the only explanation. No study has been performed regarding the impact of Arab propaganda, Muslim militancy, traditional Christian teachings and identification with Palestinian disempowerment, and the role the Internet and social media have in advancing non-economic sources of antisemitism. But for the most part, Larsmann and Schoeps are correct in that there is considerable resentment powering contemporary antisemitism, and such resentment is based on social fantasy and social perceptions. Politics and Resentment is laudable for this belief and their presentation of it. This is a large, no-fluff, bare-bones book that challenges even the most adept researcher to not discover new lines of research and things they didnt know. It is a clich , but if you were to read one scholarly book on antisemite ism that provides readers with everything they need to know about antisemitismRensmann and Schoeps Politics and Resentment would be that book.
*Steven K. Baum is an Albuquerque-based psychologist and editor of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.

REFERENCES
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodore W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969/2002).

A Conversation Worth Having?

Jonathan Sacks The Great Partnership: God, Science, and the Search for Meaning
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011). 370 pp. 18/$27 Steven Leonard Jacobs*
Though exceedingly well written but not without problemsas Theo Hobson correctly notes in his Times Literary Supplement review of October 7, 2011The Great Partnership: God, Science, and the Search for Meaning, by Britains chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, may appeal, unsurprisingly, to a limited audienceand even more so in England than in the United States or other English-speaking venues where the arguments of the new atheists, e.g., Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, have perhaps even more currency. Sacks argument is simple though not simplistic: Science is the search for explanation. Religion is the search for meaning (37)a nice rewrite of the older phrasing: science answers the question of how; religion the question of why. Understandably, Sacks chooses to focus on the Abrahamic traditionsJudaism primarily, Christianity secondarily, and Islam far too little; his arguments would have been even further strengthened by some address to the so-called Eastern traditions of Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Early oneven before laying out his texts agenda, Sacks asserts his pro-religious bias: Science speaks with expertise about the future, religion with the authority of the past. Science invokes the power of reason, religion the higher power of revelation (1; emphasis added). Pushed to conclusion, it would seem, therefore, that reason holds second position to that of revela-

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tion from the singular deity of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims and confirmed throughout. How the aforementioned Eastern traditions would weigh in on this argument might well carry the day with those that have little to no understanding of these traditions as well. Sacks goes on:
In the first part of the book I give an analysis I have not seen elsewhere about why it is that people have thought religion and science are incompatible [chapters 1-4] . . . In the second part of the book I explain why religion matters and what we stand to lose if we lose it [chapters 5-10] . . . In the third part of the book I confront the major challenges to faith [chapters 11-14]. (3-5)

With regard to the first section, it seems to this reviewer that only those with a somewhat superficial and simplistic understanding of both venuesthose whose comprehension of scriptural texts (the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran) is literarily and literally constrained would benefit the most from Sacks writing that religion and science are not mutually exclusive entities, but in truth a great partnership to the benefit of humankind. This then raises the question of the audience for whom Sacks has written this book: Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians, some of whose own narrowness would preclude the very reading of his book? Or is it more liberal Jews and Christians, who already accept the partnership and are thus not in need of such argument? With regard to the second section, this time the equation is reversed: Those who perhaps could most benefit from these six chapters would be those whose education in colleges and universities outside the very parochiality of their specific faith communities far too readily lets them dismiss the role and value of the various religious traditions in the long uneven march of humanity. These, for Sacks, are individuals who too easily succumb to the dichotomy of either/or rather than the unity of and. With regard to the third section, part of which is particularly relevant to the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, Sacks addresses (1) Darwinism, (2) evil, (3) religions behaving badly, and (4) the question of God. The first and fourth are issues of debate and contention within and without religious communities; the second and third bring into the conversation both scholars of religious studies and practitioners of religion to address questions of hatred, antisemitism, Holocaust, and genocide. It must be noted, however, that the question of evil remains a tortuous one for persons of faith as well as some philosophers; as Hobson notes, Sacks does not address that community. The reality is that the bad behaviors of various religions over the generations have supplied much of the evidence for those who would dismiss them out of hand.

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In Chapter 12, The Problem of Evil, Sacks begins his discussion by suggesting that there have been historically three responses: (1) This life is not all there is. There is another world, after death. There is heaven. There is peace and eternal life (237); (2) We suffer so that we can grow. Others suffer so that we can practice charity or kindness. The bad in our lives is an invitation to the good (238); (3) There is evil, therefore there is no God. There is no justice, therefore there is no judge. The world is as it is (239). Arguing most Judaically, Sacks finds little merit in the first two positions, and categorically rejects the third: If we give up belief in the God of justice, we relinquish belief in the objective reality and categorical imperative of justice also (240). Not surprisingly, he turns to the greatest figure in all of Jewish intellectual historyMaimonides (Moshe ben Maimon), who posited three kinds of evil:
First is the evil that follows from the fact that we are physical beings in a physical world [e.g., tsunamis, earthquakes] . . . The second kind of evil is that which humans commit against other humans. The thirdby far the largest, says Maimonidesis the evil we commit against ourselves . . . These last two evils exist because of human free will . . . So evil exists because we exist as free beings in a physical world with all the accidents of matter and the pain of mortality. (244-245)

In so writing and agreeing, Sacks has resolved the historical and rabbinic debate of divine omniscience and free will in favor of free will. In so doing, he does not, however, take up the further question that, by extension, there must of necessity be a realm where the Divine exercises no controls and has no foreknowledge, a realm where human beings are free to practice their evil craft to their own satisfaction, and a realm where justice, while attributed to God, remains a human construction to guarantee the safety and survival of human communities. Such arguments as Sachs presents them will appeal to those already religiously committed, but are ones that will find little to no relevance and resonance to others. In Chapter 13, When Religion Goes Wrong, Sacks presents five responses: (1) that which he calls hard textsthe literal sacred words as they are presented to their appropriate communities of faith in their holy texts (Hebrew Bible/Torah, New Testament, Quran)must be subjected to an interpretative critique given the ever-changing historical realities of our world; (2) the aforementioned dualism, which looks at the world as an either/or experience (us versus them, God versus Satan, good versus evil, etc.) and finds no middle ground whatsoever: There is a straight line from dualism to demonization to dehumanization to genocide (256); (3) messianic politicsthe way of the one (e.g., Marxism, National Socialism, Communism) will solve all of the worlds problems, and all other ways are

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decidedly and, by definition, inferior; (4) the lure of powerLord Actons famous aphorism, Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; (5) a single vision a variation of his third response and applicable to both religious traditions and secular responses. Add to these concepts that of the increasing secularization of the world as Sacks sees it, which leads him to posit four further hypotheses:
First, no religion relinquishes power voluntarily. Second, the combination of religion and power leads to international factionalism, the splitting of the faith into multiple strands, movements, denominations and sects. Third, at some point the adherents of a faith find themselves murdering their own fellow believers. Fourth, it is only this that leads the wise to realize that this cannot be the will of God. (262)

While one would find little if anything to argue against his five points, what is glaringly omitted from Sacks discussion is the present-day tension within the State of Israel itself regarding those within the most devoutly conservative Orthodox Jewish communities (in Hebrew, hareidim) and the so-called settler movement, which justifies its expansion with governmental support and basing itself on biblical texts and those other Jewish Israelis outside their communities, tensions that continue to encompass Jewish communities worldwide. Again, the gnawing question: For whom is this text, specifically these two chapters, written: Those who already agree with him? Or those who would find themselves the object of his critique, and who, in all likelihood, would never read his book? One would, therefore, be most interested in tracking reviews of The Great Partnership in not only in Orthodox Jewish publications, both in Great Britain and abroad, but also in fundamentalist Christian publications as well. It is, however, far too early to tell if this book will merit such responses. On balance, though the book that Jonathan Sacks has produced is interesting and well written, it is not one that will advance the conversation between religionists and scientists, as this reviewer presumes he intended. The omissionsthe Eastern religious traditions, the discipline of philosophy, cursory attention to Quranic sources and Islamic traditions, and the divide in the State of Israel between fundamentalist Jewish Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxydetract from what could have been an important contribution to the conversation and worthy of a wide reading audience. That book remains to be written.
*Steven Leonard Jacobs is the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; he is also the associate editor of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism. Contact him at sjacobs@bama.ua.edu.

In the Straitjacket of Anti-Zionism

Gilbert Achcars The Arabs and the Holocaust


(New York: Picador 2011), 286 pp. $15 Matthias Kuntzel and Colin Meade*
In almost every part of the world, since the end of the Second World War, Nazi has been a synonym for criminal. Not so, however, in the Arab world, where positive references to Hitler and the destruction of the Jews have been an accepted part of public discourse for decades. For this reason alonebut also in the light of the current upheavals in the region Gilbert Achcars recent book, The Arabs and the Holocaust, is of great importance. In the first part of his book, Achcar tackles the issue of Arab reactions to Nazism and antisemitism, from 1933-1947. A good half of this part is devoted to an account of the origins of the Islamist movement, described as the reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists, in the Arab world. Further chapters deal with the attitude of the other political currents in existence in this period: the liberal Westernizers, the Marxists, and the Nationalists. In the second part, the author deals with Arab attitudes to the Jews and the Holocaust from 1948 to the present, divided into three successive epochs: the Nasser years (1948-67), the PLO years (1967-88), and the years of Islamic resistances (1988 to the present). A straightforward and logical structure, the reader is likely to think upon opening the book with eager anticipation. Alas, the experience of

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actually reading it is likely to confirm the verdict of two history professors, Jeffrey Herf and Stephen Howe, that Achcar is a man at war with what he has written in his own book1 and a combatant, and even victim, in such a war within his own pages.2 Another way of putting it would be: this is a book in which an author from the political left seeks to protect the dogmas of Western anti-Zionism from the reality of Arab antisemitism. NAZISM
AND

PAN-ISLAMISM

Achcar is probably the first anti-Zionist author to describe and criticize the ideological affinity between National Socialism and pan-Islamism in the 1930s and 40s. He emphasizes the sympathy . . . that Islamic fundamentalists generally felt for Nazism, both in the Nazi period and later, and confirms what others have written before him: that the most important spiritual mentor of the Islamist movement was a pro-Nazi Egyptian religious scholar, Rashid Rida.3 Rida legitimized his sympathy for Nazism by treating it as the instrument of Gods will, sweeping aside heresies and false beliefs, corrupt versions of Islam among them, and thus clearing a path for the ultimate triumph of the Muhammadan revelation.4 The rationale for the affinity between an-Islamism and national socialism is plain, Achcar writes; the common enemy was not Britain, as is too often believed, but the Jews.5 Achcar then moves on to a critical examination of three of Ridas most prominent pupils. The first of these is Amin el-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who espoused the Nazis anti-Semitic doctrine. His position, states Achcar, is, down to Husseinis eulogy of the Final Solution, perfectly consistent with Nazi anti-Semitism.6 El-Husseini maintained this position until his
1. Jeffrey Herf, Not in Moderation, The New Republic, November 1, 2010. 2. Stephen Howe, The Arabs and the Holocaust, The Independent, May 14, 2010. 3. The rather embarrassing fact is that Kuntzels analysis of al-Banna, Hus seini, the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb and Islamism in general runs along the same main lines as Achcars own account of the Pan-Islamist reactionaries from Rashid Rida onward, states Herf in Not in Moderation, in reference to Matthias Kuntzels Jihad and Jew-Hatred. Nazism, Islamism and the Roots of 9/11 (New York: Telos Press, 2007), translated by Colin Meade, http://tnr.com/print/book/ review/not-in-moderation. 4. Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009; London: Saqi, 2010). NY, 119; L, 117. Throughout these references, the first page number (NY) refers to the New York edition and the second (L) to the London edition. 5. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 127; L, 124. 6. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 156; L, 151.

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death in 1974. As Achcar points out, he never concealed his enthusiasm for Hitler or his belief in the Nazi notions of a world Jewish conspiracy.7 Second comes Hassan al-Banna, founder and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Here Achcar informs his readers about the convergence of views and the close collaboration between the Muslim Brotherhood and the mufti.8 On the one hand, the Brotherhood operated with the muftis blessing and benefited from his popularity, while on the other, [the Brotherhood] supported the mufti during his lifetime, treating him as the legitimate leader of the anti-Zionist struggle.9 Quite correctly, Achcar also notes that the Brotherhoods antisemitism survived the end of the Nazi regime: On November 2, 1945, . . . Young Egypt and the Muslim Brothers organized attacks on Jewish stores and institutionsthe first of their kind.10 The third is Iz-al-Din al-Qassam, the first Palestinian jihadist who had ties to the Saudi Wahhabites and remains to this day the idol of Hamas. Again, regarding Qassam and his supporters, Achcar points out the antiSemitic affinities between Wahhabi-type fundamentalism and Nazism. He describes the action by the Qassamites on April 15, 1936, that ushered in the so-called Arab Revolt.
It was 8:30 p.m. Cars were being stopped at a barrier made of barrels on a mountain road in the Nablus region. The barrier was under the surveillance of three armed men: one kept an eye on the road, another held the passengers of stopped vehicles in his gun sights, and the third relieved them of their cash. Then they asked their victims if there were Englishmen or Jews among them. The driver of a truck and his passenger, both Jews, were shot on the spot. Also present was a man who proved to the band that he was German, a Hitlerite, and a Christian, swearing on Hitlers honor that he was telling the truth. The three men released him . . . for Hitlers sake . . . with thirty-five pounds sterling in his pockets.11

In the second part of his book, Achcar returns to the issue of the current role of the Islamist movement: The banners of preceding struggles, on which the adjectives national, popular, and socialist were inscribed, have vanished almost without trace; their place has been taken by the standards of Islamic fundamentalist movements. At the same time, anti-Semitism, in both its traditional and Islamized variants as well as its Holocaustdenying corollary, has grown spectacularly in Arab political statements and
7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Achcar, Achcar, Achcar, Achcar, Achcar, The The The The The Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, NY, NY, NY, NY, NY, 157; L, 152. 326; L, 310 fn 226. 163; L, 157. 80; L, 82. 136; L, 133.

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Arab media.12 He provides the specific example of the Hamas Charter: Articles 7 and 22 in particular represent a condensed version of the Islamized anti-Semitic ravings cultivated by Rashid Rida, in the years just before his death in 1935.13 Thus, Achcar first explains to his readers that a Nazi-like antisemitism appeared in the region well before the foundation of the State of Israel and, second, that the links between Islamism and National Socialism were not just tactical but reflected shared beliefs, in particular invoving antisemitism. And, finally, he makes it clear that the contemporary struggle against Israel is now being led by precisely those same Islamist currents that espoused and continue to espouse a Nazi-like hatred of Jews. For the enemies of Philistinism, in a word all thinking and feeling people14 an obvious conclusion flows from the facts Achcar provides: Israel, the Jewish state, not only has a right to exist, but also a right to defend itself against the antisemitically motivated aggression emanating from the region. It is precisely here, however, that Achcar goes to war with what he has written in his own book. As if responding to an order from some inner Central Committee, in the second part of his book Achcar repudiates the evidence he has himself presented in the first part of the same book and turns to political agitation, the essential purpose of which is to justify an anti-Zionist alliance with the antisemites and Holocaust deniers of Hezbollah and Hamas. At one level, the absurdity of the effort is laughable, but it is also shocking in its intellectual irresponsibility. ISRAEL
AS THE

ENEMY

Seventy years after the Holocaust, it is extremely odd to find a professed anti-fascist such as Achcar denying the Jews of all peoples the right to their own state. Even so, Achcar neither gives reasons for nor even explains the strange anti-Zionist imperative that underpins his book. It appears to be written for a specific audience, whose assent to this imperative he takes for granted: that the Jewish state has no right to exist and must be fought. He dogmatically asserts that Israel is the only European colonial settler state and the last major burning issue of European colonialism.15 The Jewish state, he insists, is not only exclusively responsible for the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 but strives to destroy Muslim and Chris12. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 248; L, 236. 13. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 250; L, 237. 14. Karl Marx, Briefe aus den Deutsch-Franzosischen Jahrbuchern, Marx Engelswerke, Bd. 1, 342. 15. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 26; L, 32.

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tian holy places, tries to impoverish the Palestinians and destroy their agriculture and economy, maltreats its own Palestinian citizens, etc.16 At the same time, Achcar rejects the two-state solution; he takes it as self-evident that there should never have been a Jewish state at all. He writes that acceptance of the 1947 UN partition plan by the Palestinians would have been a dishonorable surrender,17 and treats the half-hearted Palestinian supporters of such a solution, such as the PLO politician Abu Iyad, either as opportunists or traitors. He thus derides the present head of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, as the best Palestinian friend of Israel and the United States.18 Of course, even a politically biased author can write a good book, as long as he sticks to the facts. Here, however, the anti-Zionist framework provides the overarching structure into which the factual material is ruthlessly forced. Whatever does not fit is discarded. The anti-Zionist framework operates through a simplistic black/white model: while the Israelis are deemed responsible for everything that goes wrong in the region, the Palestinians and their Islamist vanguard are merely victims, for whom Achcar tirelessly seeks excuses. EXAMPLE NO 1: ARAB ANTISEMITISM Can anyone imagine an author from the political left criticizing Nazi antisemitism primarily because it discredited and complicated the necessary struggle against Jewish intrigues? Not us. Regretfully, we must note that Achcar uses precisely this argument when it comes to contemporary Arab antisemitism. Achcar criticizes Arab antisemitism not because it envisages the murder of Jews and renders the Middle East conflict insoluble, but because it impedes the necessary struggle against Israel: These anti-Semitic ravings or mindless denials of the Holocaust, far from undermining the Israeli cause as their authors intend, in fact help Israel produce anti-Arab propaganda.19 While in the first part of his book Achcar set himself the task of describing and criticizing the historical antisemitism of the Islamists, in the second part, he derides those who describe and criticize contemporary Islamist antisemitism as conscious or unconscious agents of Israel. He thus characterizes the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which
16. All this, unfortunately, is literally true, writes Achcar about this list of crimes drawn from his sources. See Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 248; L, 235. 17. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 142; L, 138. 18. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 160, 285; L, 154, 270. 19. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 182; L, 176.

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documents these ravings as a function of the Arab-Israeli conflict, acting like a subdepartment of the Israeli propaganda services, and Professor Robert Wistrich, possibly the worlds most renowned expert on antisemitism, as another professional of the anti-Arab propaganda war.20 Achcar does not criticize MEMRI or Professor Wistrich for any mistranslation or misinterpretation, but because Israel allegedly benefits from their work. Within his mindset, this propaganda trap can only be avoided by ignoring Arab antisemitism or by excusing it. Achcar has decided in favor of excusing rather than ignoring it. He does not deny the existence of ugly expressions of Arab antisemitism but instead makes Israel responsible for them. Thus, he sees in Arab antisemitism . . . fantasy-laden expressions . . . of an intense national frustration and oppression for which the Jews of Palestine in their majority, as well as Israel, the Jewish state they founded, must, in fact, be held responsible.21 Were Achcar to examine these expressions more closely, however an activity he would consider propagandisthe would soon see that they are violent fantasies directed at the destruction of the Jews or Israel. Such fantasies cannot be excused as merely a response to anything that may or may not have happened in the real world. Achcar, who only a few pages previously had been describing the Nazi-influenced history of this antisemitism, now wants to hear no more talk about possible connections between European and Arab antisemitism. The most important question facing us here concerns the real weight of antisemitism in todays Arab world, he writes. And this question brings another in its wake, which involves the very definition of antisemitism: How much aversion is imputable to antisemitism in the strict sense? Is the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists . . . the equivalent of the hatred felt by Arabs enraged by the occupation and/or destruction of Arab lands . . .?22 It is, of course, true that the context of Arab antisemitism is very different from the context of Nazi antisemitism. However, this makes the similarity between todays slogans, cartoons, and fantasies and those of the Nazis all the more striking. But it is precisely these similarities that Achcar is determined not to see. Or perhaps is unable to see? Is it because he himself demonizes Israel that he cannot recognize the Israel-related antisemit-

20. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 182, 213; L, 175, 204. 21. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 256; L, 248. 22. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 275; L, 261.

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ism of contemporary Islamists? As Sigmund Freud observed, A participant in a delusion will not of course recognize it as such.23 Achcar even manages to find excuses for the dissemination of Hitlers textbook for the Holocaust, the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There is a qualitative difference, he claims, between a delusive, antiSemitic approach that believes, or seeks to make others believe, that the leaders of the Jews or the Jewish race are conspiring against the rest of the world, and an equally delusive but not racist approach that seeks consolation by mobilizing a conspiracy theory to explain Zionist successes. And thats not all: he even deplores the failure of other authors to make the necessary distinction between the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist reading of the Russian forgery.24 Given that the Protocols constantly talks not about Zionists, but about Jewry, which, it claims, is seeking to take control of the world, Achcars attempt to defend Islamist propagators of the Protocols from the charge of antisemitism is truly bizarre. One might just as well recommend an antiZionist reading of Adolf Hitlers Mein Kampf, another book with a wide circulation in the Middle East, and one that has an explicitly anti-Zionist orientation: Zionism, wrote Hitler, does not intend to build a Jewish state in Palestine; it only wants an organizational centre for [its] international world-swindling, furnished with its own state rights.25 The whitewashing of the Protocols serves a political agenda: Achcar is intent on protecting the reputation of Gamal Abdul Nasser and the 1950s60s Arab nationalism, with its socialist, anti-imperialist bent. It is, however, a well-established factas Achcar admitsthat Nasser not only had the Protocols distributed by agencies of the state he controlled, but also explicitly recommended the Protocols to readers, claiming that three hundred Zionists . . . govern the fate of the European continent.26 Nevertheless, Achcar hastens to Nassers rescue: Nothing but ignorance is to blame here. For him, it is not the fact that, 15 years after the Holocaust, a worldfamous head of state praised Hitlers favorite book, but that Nasser could in 1958 have been so ignorant of the history of this text, which Achcar finds quite simply disgraceful.27
23. Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, Bd. IX, Fragen der Gesellschaft; Ursprunge der Religion (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer), 213. 24. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 208; L, 199. 25. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1934), 356. 26. As quoted by Achbar, The Arabs, NY, 205-206; L, 197-198. 27. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 206; L, 198.

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Achcars attempt to wave away Nassers antisemitism as a deficiency in his education, a kind of mistake, shows how little he understands about antisemitism. Antisemitic-conspiracy theories are not just confused fantasies but guides to action, theories that materially affect state policy. Our war against Israel, declared Nasser in 1965, is the continuation of our war against colonialism. Not only does Achcar refuse to relate this policy to Nassers promotion of the Protocols, but he even lauds this statement as demonstrating Nassers distance from Nazism and rejection of antiSemitism.28 EXAMPLE NO. 2: ARAB HOLOCAUST DENIAL Though the title of Achcars book is The Arabs and the Holocaust, he does not deal with what Arab Holocaust deniers actually say, but insults those who do so. I will let others savor the perverse satisfaction of cataloging . . . all the inanities about the Holocaust that have been uttered . . . in the Arab world.29 Such inanities about the Holocaust are, of course, really there in abundance. Achcar, however, believes they should only be described if doing so serves what he considers the right political ends. In this case, he considers reporting reality to be perverse, since it might serve the wrong political ends. His fundamental concern is thus not with the issues of antisemitism and Holocaust denial as such, but with promoting the notion that Israel is responsible for both of them; his anti-Nazism is subordinate to his antiZionism. Regarding Holocaust denial, Achcrs line of reasoning is this: he claims that Israel has constantly attempted to overcome crises of legitimacy through the political exploitation of the memory of the Holocaust. As evidence, he refers to 1982, when, he argues, Israels international image suffered severe damage in the wake of the invasion of Lebanon so that it resorted to invoking the Holocaust on a particularly massive scale in order to revive its reputation. It was, according to Achcar, this alleged propaganda offensive that first provoked Holocaust denial in the Arab world: The denial in the Arab world . . . began with the invasion of Lebanon in 1982.30
28. Achcar, The 29. Achcar, The 30. Achcar, The car, Arab Attitudes Arabs, NY, 215-216; L, 205-206. Arabs, NY, 181; L, 175. Arabs, NY, 256; L, 243. See also the interview Gilbert Achto the Holocaust, May 20, 2010, www.SocialistWorker.org.

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It is true that in 1982 Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Arafat, at that time based in Beirut, to Hitler. This discredited Begin, however, particularly in Israel itself. Many Israelis thought that Begins Holocaust obsession led to the unfortunate adventure [the Lebanese war], wrote Peter Novick, a favorite author of Achcars.31 This hardly amounts to an Israeli propaganda offensive. Still more ridiculous is Achcars claim that Arab Holocaust denial started in 1982. The available documents show that Holocaust denial was already present in the Nazis Arabic broadcasts as early as 1943, which raged against the Jews cursed lies, the lies . . . of the Jews who are trying to gain the sympathy of the world through their tears.32 In May 1945, the Jerusalem-based newspaper Filastin took up the theme: The Jews have grossly overstated the number of their victims in Europe in order to gain the worlds support for their imagined catastrophe [the Jewish state in Israel]. In September 1945, the Egyptian newspaper Akbhar al-Yawm declared: There was Nazi tyranny, but it did not harm the Jews any more than Germans.33 In their ground-breaking study, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust, Litvak and Webman go on to show that Holocaust denial has remained a part of public discourse in Egypt since that time. Achcar, however, subordinates reality to his political belief-system. He presents Holocaust denial as the desperate and therefore understandable reaction of an oppressed group to the onslaught of an all-powerful Israel. Are all forms of Holocaust denial the same? he asks rhetorically. Should such denial, when it comes from oppressors, not be distinguished from denial in the mouths of the oppressed, as the racism of ruling whites is distinguished from that of subjugated blacks?34 This argument encapsulates many of the problems of Achcars antiimperialist worldview. First, Achcar seeks to bury, rather than honestly consider, what he clearly finds a most unwelcome thought: that the crisis of the Arab world may not in fact be caused by the existence and actions of an external imperialism embodied in the Jewish state of Israel, but by the prevalence of irrational ideas, and in particular of rampant antisemitism, within that world.
31. Peter Novick, Nach dem Holocaust (Munich: Deutscher Tascenbuch Verlag, 2003), 215. 32. Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 177. 33. Meir Litvak and Esther Libman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (London: Hurst & Company, 2009), 52. 34. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 276; L, 261.

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Second, Achcar establishes a regime of double standards, under which words and deeds that would otherwise be outrageous become acceptable when said and done by the oppressed. Holocaust deniersinsofar as they belong to what he considers an oppressed groupare thus given a moral carte blanche. Here he is making the very same mistake for which he had strongly criticized the left in the first part of the book: To abandon critical thinking when dealing with the [alleged!CM/MK] victims of imperialism.35 Third, Achcar brands the Arabs as essentially stupid people who cannot be expected to know what they are doing. He has stated in an interview that when Arabs deny the Holocaust, It has nothing to do with any conviction. Its just a way of people venting their anger, venting their frustration, in the only means that they feel is available to them.36 Achcar permits himself to do what he would never do to a French or an English counterpart: refuse to treat them as human beings responsible for their own words and deeds. There is, however, more here than just another irresponsible expression of unconditional solidarity with the Islamist comrades who share Achcars fundamentalist criticism of Israel. Achcars statements express a cynical attitude to the Holocaust itself. Arab Holocaust denial, he writes, is . . . an expression of what I call the anti-Zionism of the fools. 37 This phrase recalls a dictum that is commonly attributed to the German socialist leader August Bebel, who, in 1893, described antisemitism as the socialism of foolsa far-reaching mistake that was perhaps understandable 50 years before the Holocaust but that cannot be acceptable 70 years after it, when we know that antisemitism is not a mere verbal excess, but a guide to murderous action. The very fact that Achcar dates the start of the Shoah to 1933 shows that he has as little idea about the Holocaust as he does about the antisemitism that drove it. Otherwise, his claim that Zionist Jews welcome antisemitism is inexplicable. Achcar asserts that Israel observed the spectacular rise in Arab antisemitism with great satisfaction, and that an Arab Holocaust denier such as the Jordanian Dr. Ibrahim Alloush is of course, much appre-

35. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 125; L, 123. 36. Israels Propaganda War: Blame the Grand Mufti. Interview of Gilbert Achcar by George Miller, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/achcar120510 p.html. 37. Gilbert Achcar, Arabs Have a Complex Relationship with the Holocaust, The Guardian, May 10, 2010.

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ciated38 by Israeli authors and institutes.39 Here we find Achcar playing a variation on the historical-revisionist fantasy that, in the 1930s, the Zionists welcomed the Nazis Jewish policiesa slander drawn from the arsenal of the Holocaust deniers and antisemities.40 Nonetheless, Achcar has declared in an interview with the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth that I have the necessary sensitivity to address the [Holocaust] subject.41 He feels able to assert this despite the fact that he is the first academic to compare the Holocaust survivors who settled in Palestine after 1945 to the radioactive waste exported by industrialized countries to the third world: Certain states sought to resolve the problem of the Holocaust survivors at the Palestinians costas some states nowadays seek to rid themselves of their radioactive waste by exporting it to poor countries.42 Achcar compounds this nasty attitude to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust by his use of his own half-hearted critique of Holocaust denial to support his anti-Zionism: Holocaust denial in the Arab world is wrong, misleading and damaging to the Arab and Palestinian cause.43 Does he think that the denial of this crime has absolutely no significance for its victims? FALSIFIED QUOTATIONS It is really not so easy to distort the reality of Arab antisemitism to the extent necessary to make it compatible with a progressive anti-Zionist front. When standard academic practices fail him, Achcar resorts to other means, selecting and underlining whatever supports his prejudices and leaving out or dismissing the importance of everything else. A random examination of his use of quotations has brought to light several significant distortions. In the first example, Achcar writes, Arab opposition [to the Peel Commissions partition plan of 1937the first proposal for a two-state
38. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 2; L, 10: I have constructed the Shoah . . . broadly in the following pages by including the entire period of Jewish persecution . . . that began with Hitlers assumption of power in 1933. 39. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 248, 266; L, 236, 252. 40. See Meir Litvak and Esther Libman, The Alleged Nazi-Zionist Cooperation, in Meir Litvak and Esther Libman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust, 243-270 (London: Hurst and Company, 2009). 41. The interview, with Eldad Beck, was published on April 27, 2010, in Yedioth Ahronoth. An English translation is available at http://www.zcommunications. org/the-league-against-denial-by-gilbert-achcar. 42. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 21; L, 27. 43. Arab Attitudes to the Holocaust. Interview with Gilbert Achcar, http:// socialistworker.org/print/2010/05/20/arab-attitudes-to-the-holocaust.

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solution], in both Palestine and elsewhere, was virtually unanimous. Even Raghib al-Nashashibi . . . expressed his opposition.44 This is sourced to a standard work that appeared in 1977, Yehoshua Poraths The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 1929-1939, 228-30. What Porath actually wrote, however, was: Since the winter of 1937 strong rumours were afoot that partition would be recommended. At that stage the [Nashashibis] National Defence Party did not conceal their support for the principle of partition, and they even organized meetings and used other propaganda means to win public support for this principle. This positive attitude prevailed also immediately upon the publication of the Commissions report. In private, two leaders of the Party, Raghib alNashashibi and Yaqub Farraj, told the HC [High Commissioner] that they were in favour of the principle of partition. Rather quickly, Porath continues, a volte-face took place and the National Defence Party sent an official memorandum to the HC, condemning partition in very strong language. Various factors had led to this. First of all strong pressure was exerted on the Nashashibis to identify themselves with the HACs [High Arab Committee] reaction. Threats were made on their lives, and indeed during the summer of 1937 various moderates and Nashashibi-supporting notables were assaulted or murdered. Secondly, they were surprised when allies or friends of Britain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, came out against Partition.45 The distortion introduced by Achcar is not a minor detail, especially given that he himself is a committed opponent of a two-state solution, the subject of the quotation. He describes Palestinian opposition to the Peel Commissions partition plan as virtually unanimous, but omits to mention that, according to his source, this unanimity was enforced by murder and intimidation, since at the outset his star witness, Raghib al-Nashashibi, took precisely the opposite position from the one Achcar presents to his readers. In the second example: Achcar quotes Tom Segev to support his point about Israels political exploitation of the Eichmann affairthe Eichmann trial of 1961: Tom Segev offers an admirable description of the uses to which the trial was put: Ben Gurion had two goals: One was to remind the countries of the world that the Holocaust obligated them to support the only Jewish state on earth. The second was to impress the lessons of the Holocaust on the people of Israel, especially the younger generation. . . . The trial, he said, could unmask other Nazi criminals and perhaps, also, their links with several Arab rulers. 46 Here, Achcar creates the impres44. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 141; L, 137. 45. Yehoshua Porath, the Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to Rebellion, 1929-1939, vol. 2 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 229. 46. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 211; L, 201-202.

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sion that exposing the links between Arabs and the Nazis was one of Ben Gurions key lessons of the Holocaust and central goals of the trial. Reference to the original, however, reveals that the three dots Achcar has inserted distort Segevs account of Ben Gurions real aim. In the original, Segev describes Ben Gurions lessons of the Holocaust in the missing passage thus: In an interview with the New York Times, a draft of which he apparently approved before publication, BenGurion explained that the world must learn from the trial where hatred of the Jews had ledand then it must be made ashamed of itself. He called the extermination machine a soap factory. He also noted that not only Germany was guiltyBritains refusal to allow Jews to immigrate to Palestine had led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.47 Achcar must have known what he was doing and the effect he would create by directly linking the lessons of the Holocaust with several Arab rulers. Without the claim that Israel exploits the Holocaust, his argument that Arab Holocaust denial is only a reaction to this abuse disintegrates. Tom Segevs admirable description, however, does not support the charge of Holocaust abuse. Second, Achcar repeatedly attempts to show that the object of his hatredIsraelwelcomes antisemitism. Anti-Semitism, he writes, is, in general, Zionisms most powerful propelling force. 48 This thesis, however, also conflicts with Segevs description, which emphasizes Ben Gurions opposition to antisemitism. So Achcar cuts and pastes. Third, Ben Gurions reference to the clash between Zionism and the British fits badly into Achcars notion that Israel is the only European colonial settler state, so out that reference goes. Falsification of sources for propaganda purposes: is this the notion of scholarship promoted by the London School of Oriental and African Studies, where Achcar teaches? This is not the only occasion when Achcar misuses a quotation from Segev to demonstrate an alleged Israeli obsession with links between the Nazis and the Arabsin this case in relation to the historical role of Amin el-Husseini. According to Tom Segev, the wall devoted to Husseinis relations with the Nazis in the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem leaves the impression that there is much in common between the Nazis plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs enmity to Israel. 49 This quotation comes from a 1991 text. A few pages later Achcar quotes another article by Segev, this time from September 200817 years laterthat
47. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 327. 48. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 137; L, 134. 49. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 165; L, 159.

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appeared in The New York Times. Here, Segev wrote the following about the placement of the photo of Hitler and el-Husseini in the Yad Vashem Museum: In recent years the photo . . . has been reduced in scale and removed to its proper historical context (a section in the museum that deals with volunteers from several nations who enlisted in Hitlers Waffen SS).50 It goes without saying that Achcar does not mention this later remark by Segev, although he must know about it, since he quotes other material from the article in which it appears. The older quotation, of course, serves his purpose much better. ACHCARS SUCCESS Despite all this, Achcars book has appeared in several languages and been widely praised. On the back of the book, we find glowing endorsements from Professors Avi Shlaim (University of Oxford), Michael R. Marrus (University of Toronto), Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University), and Francis R. Nicosia (University of Vermont), and the author and historian Peter Novick. Indeed, in May 2010 Achcar was invited to give a publicly sponsored lecture at the Berlin-based Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), at which his book was hailed as ground-breaking. ZMO director Ulrike Freitag declared that the book was a factual and solid piece of research of major significance.51 In November 2010 Achar was invited to the respected Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust in Florida; the theme of his talk was An Assessment of Holocaust Denial in the Arab World since the 1980s. In May 2011, he spoke on the topic Perceptions of the Eichmann Trial in the Arab States at a conference in Berlin organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museums Center of Advanced Holocaust Studies and the Berlin-based Topographie des Terrors organization. How can the success of this book and its author be explained? Leaving aside the gullibility of an academic milieu in which historical truth has increasingly been replaced by narratives and the transmission of facts by post-modern relativism,52 this book clearly meets an urgent need: it helps a
50. Tom Segev, Courting Hitler, The New York Times, September 28, 2008. 51. Samir Grees, Kreig der Narrative, July 5, 2010, www.Qantara.de. 52. Achcar has explained the subtitle of his book: I refer here to the notion of narrative as the recitation of history as developed by post-modernism. http:// www.iiire.org/en/home-main-menu-1/15-fellows/185-gilbert-achcar-why-holocaust -denial-is-on-the-rise-in-the-arab-world.html.

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particular group of academics to rationalize their own intellectual selfdeception. Declaring solidarity with movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah, despite the fact that they deny the Holocaust and base their policies on Nazi-like antisemitism, exposes the left-wing anti-Zionists whom Achcar represents and for whom he writes not only to external criticism, but also to inner tensions. Achcars book is intended to enable his political allies to overcome those tensions and so ensure the smooth continuation of the antiIsrael alliance between anti-fascists and anti-racists on the one hand and Islamist antisemites and Holocaust deniers on the other. Evidently, since this alliance is essentially problematic, Achcar cannot achieve his goal of preserving it by honestly addressing reality. Instead, he attributes the problems within the alliance to external causes. We have identified Achcars central pseudo-explanation: Israeli propaganda. He also resorts, however, to a second such explanation, also with far-reaching implications: Islamophobia. True, the author describes the unprecedented expansion of religiosity, expressed in rising support among the Palestinians for movements such as Hamas as a regression.53 For anti-Zionist reasons, however, he is ready to praise the local engines of that regression for their supposed evolutionary potential: Thanks to the indispensable dose of pragmatism without which organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah could not have attained their present size and played the roles they now play, they can learn to leave their Islamized anti-Semitism behind.54 To cast doubt on this scenario, Achcar suggests, is to fall prey to the huge increase in Islamophobia, which he deemsin place of antisemitismto be the true European racism of our day and which has found a means of large-scale sublimation in hostility to what has come to be called Islamism or even Islamofascism. 55 In other words, according to Achcar, anyone who pays overly critical attention to the regression embodied in the Islamist movements is not sincerely concerned about that regression, but is merely sublimating racist sentiments. If one accepts this argument, it is, incidentally, hard to see why Achcars harsh critique of pan-Islamism in the first part of his book does not qualify as equally racist. At the same time, Achcar wants to stifle any serious engagement with the many new studies that throw light on the nature of Islamistically motivated antisemitism and its relationship with National Socialism. Even friendly critics have noted how aggressively and summarily he dismisses
53. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 245; L, 233. 54. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 253-255; L, 242. 55. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 282-283; L, 268.

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these studies as a flood of hate-filled anti-Arab and anti-Muslim texts . . . in the context of a new Islamophobia.56 On top of being agents of Zionism, Achcar here smears critics of Arab antisemitism a second time as being motivated by Islamophobia, in the face of which it would be petty and sectarian for the left to break the alliance with the Islamists. Were anyone within his political milieu to start seriously studying and considering the implications of the work of these critics, they would, Achcar implies, be giving in to racist Islamophobia. Such amalgams are rhetorically effective, but they have this disadvantage: in using them Achcar places himself firmly on the side of Islamist regression in the Arab world. And this at a time when uprisings are shaking the Arab-Islamic world, from Tunis to Teheran! The driving force behind these upheavals is not a bugbear called Israel nor a fantasized Western imperialismnor, indeed, an absence of true Islambut real problems such as a lack of freedom and democracy, arbitrary rule, unemployment, sexual oppression, and discrimination against women. If there is to be lasting and substantial change, however, these movements will have to take a critical look at aspects of their own societies, including rampant antisemitism and a fondness for conspiracy theories. This process is likely to involve criticism of at least some aspects of Islamic tradition. There is some hope that the revolutionary experience will strengthen the self-awareness and sense of responsibility of individuals so that the demand for a Jewish scapegoat recedes. On the other hand, antisemitic Islamist actors such as the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood are eyeing their chance. It is precisely at such a timea time of change and a new beginningthat it becomes more important than ever to raise the issues of the roots and potential consequences of Arab antisemitism and Holocaust denial in a responsible and scholarly way. Achcars book does not help with this urgent task. It is part of the problem.
*Matthias Kuntzel is a political scientist and author of Jihad and Jews. He resides in Hamburg. Colin Meade teaches at the Faculty of Law, London Metropolitan University. Earlier this year, he left the UCU in protest of the antisemitism inherent in their anti-Zionist stance. This essay, first published on engageonline.wordpress.com/about-engage/ September 24, has been edited and formatted for publication in this issue of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.

56. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 168; L, 162.

Just How Mad Was He?

Delin Colons Rasputin and the Jews: A Reversal of History


(Charleston, SC: Createspace 2011). 110 pp. $15 Israel Drazin*
Grigory Rasputin (born 1870, died 1916 by assassination) was a nearly illiterate, highly intelligent, religious man who was philosemitic. He was unfairly vilified by the fanatically conservative and antisemitic Russian societyhe advocated equal rights for poverty-stricken Jews and the peasantry, he was a pacifist, an anti-death penalty advocate, and made trips to Israel. The distorted history portrays Rasputin as the herbalist spiritual advisor who hypnotized the Russian tzar Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra, forcing them to obey his wishes. In reality, the tzar frequently ignored Rasputins political advice. In Rasputin and the Jews: A Reversal of History, written by Delin Colon, the great-great-niece of Rasputins Jewish secretary Aron Sima novitch, the author states that Rasputin received up to 200 people a day, often taking up causes of the oppressed. He frequently prayed with his followers, offering spiritual advice without a fee. His pacifist stance (Russia lost four million lives during World War I) coincided with strongly held views about equal rights for all people. He believed that all religions were valuable and were just different ways of understanding God and opposed the death penalty because he was convinced that many condemned people were innocent. Peter the Great spread the fear and paranoia about Jews during his rule from 1696 to 1725. Suffocating restrictions were placed on Jews, including

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expulsions and pogromsstate-sponsored murders of Jewish communities, where lives were lost and property confiscated. Rasputin criticized these practices, stating at one point, Instead of organizing pogroms and accusing Jews of all evils, we would do better to criticize ourselves. In 1910, he sided with 307 Jewish dentists and saved them from certain death when charged with entering the profession to avoid residence in the Pale, the segregated Jewish region. In 1913, he stood up for Mendel Bellis, a Jew accused of killing Christians and using their blood for Passover matzoh. He helped Jewish children enter schools despite restrictive quotas. Some pogroms may have been averted through his warnings individual lives clearly were. During World War I, a Jewish doctor was freed from a German prison based on Rasputins interventions. These are only some of the many humanitarian acts that Colon describes in her book. Tsar Nicholas, a superstitious man, brought Rasputin into his court in 1905 upon hearing of Rasputins reputation as a healer. Though Rasputin went on to treat Nicholass hemophiliac son. the tsar dismissed Jewish equal rights, restricting vodka and the distribution of food for the poor.

When Tzar Nicholas heard that his relatives had murdered Rasputin, he said, I am filled with shame that the hands of my kinsmen are stained with the blood of a simple peasant . . . Hes simply a Russian, good, religious, with a simple spirit; when in pain or doubt, I like to talk with him and invariably, I feel at peace with myself. Scholars have concluded that had Rasputins programs been adopted, the 1917 revolution may have been averted. It is tragic that a person should be vilified because he sought to aid people, and it is even more heartrending that all too many people accepted these lies as true.
*Israel Drazin, PhD, is a retired Army brigadier general, rabbi, attorney, and the author of seventeen books. His Web site is http://booksnthoughts.com.

Film Reviews

John Maddens The Debt (subtitled).


Miramax 2011. In theaters and DVD. $29 Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose*
John Maddens film The Debt, unintentionally farcical, incorporates themes involving antisemitism. The moviewhich narrates the fictional Mossad capture of a Joseph Mengele-like war criminalcommunicates no insight into either Nazis or the Mossad. With this glitzy do-over of the 2007 Israeli film The Debt, furthermore, Tinseltown conspicuously was not aiming for enhanced authenticity; the Israeli actors were replaced by far better known international ones. The preposterousness of The Debts premise often is matched by absurdities in its realization as a movie. Three Mossad agents capture the Mengele figureDieter Vogelin East Berlin; he later escapes through cunning and force. Fearing that if they reported Vogels escape, they would be disgraced in front of Israeli society, the Mossad agents agree among themselves to allege killing Vogel. Let us immediately blow a whistle on this premise. When did the Israeli public ever make Mossad agents feel ashamed over not having brought a Nazi to justice? Bear in mind that former Mossad Chief Isser Harels social standing was not the least harmed

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through his admission of having missed Mengele by a hair in South America. After lying about killing Vogel, the three fictional Mossad agents are frequently feted in Israel; the movie audience is given to believe that maintaining this charade is a burden frazzling to their nerves. Indeed, in The Debt, the Mossad agents anxiety over eventually getting caught out in their fabrication carries far greater weight than does whatever Vogel may feel about his war crimes. If it were not that this films core conceptthat of the agents big fibis indispensable to the tedious structure of the thriller, you might infer an intent to discredit Israel through the portrayal of Mossad agents deliberately lying about their history for selfish ends. Moreover, the films treatment of its premise tends toward ludicrously implying some degree of moral equivalency between the Nazi doctor and the Mossad agents. Yet the film in truth says nothing of political import, possibly because if it did, its money-making potential as an international entertainment would be diminished. A sleek Hollywood production, it includes many letsmake-a-commercial-thriller checklist items. Critical consensus neither condemns the movie outright qua thriller nor lauds it as an especially fine specimen of its type. There is, be it noted, much carelessness in historical detail. For example, in the film, an East Berlin mail truck has DDR Post written on its side, but there simply was no DDR Post; the mail service that operated in East Berlin in the 1960s was called Deutsche Post. (The West German mail service, by contrast, was the Deutsche Bundespost.) You will find DDR written on some East German stamps, but never, ever DDR Post. Any number of similar bloopers surface in the film. The object here is not to nitpick for the sake of nitpicking, but rather to point out that the inauthenticity of the films central concept infects many tangential production details. Particularly false notes are sounded in the scenes showing Vogel held captive in an East Berlin safe house. According to the movies style of reasoning, a captured and bound Nazi would taunt his Mossad guards by spewing antisemitic contempt at themdespite the evident peril to him in doing soand they would then become so unhinged by his spewing of antisemitic contempt that he would succeed in escaping from them, despite their world-class Mossad intelligence training. The films makers have inaccurately imagined character as egregiously as Hannah Arendt did in asserting that Adolph Eichmann at his trial was the embodiment of the banality of evil because he seemed an average person, evidencing neither hatred nor guilt. Arendt, for whatever reason, did not consider in her statement that Eichmann was trying to escape the death penalty through an I was only following orders defense; openly display-

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ing hatred or guilt would have undermined that attempted defense. Arendts concept of the Banality of Evil remains a respectable springboard to thought, but plainly, Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem did not look and feel as he did when architecting and carrying out the notorious Endlosung der Judenfrage. For reasons similar to why Eichmann at trial, hoping to avoid the death penalty, did not state I think all Jews must die, a Vogel typebound to a radiator while a Mossad agent is shaving his exposed Nazi neck with a straight razorwould not likely say, You Jews, you dont know how to kill. You only know how to die. Toward the narratives conclusion, Vogel resurfaces in a hospital in Kiev. One of the Mossad agents commits suicide rather than to face up to his lie and a second agent has been confined to a wheelchair. Thus it is left to the female agent, Rachel, to go redeem their honor, or something, by bringing the Nazi to justice. The way the assassination is presented visually could hardly be more ridiculous. Throughout the film, the agents are seen alternately in the 1960s and the 1990s, with two sets of actors portraying their younger and older selves. When first we behold Vogel in his Kiev hospital room, he looks about 90, and frail. But after Rachel enters his room to begin her struggle with him, he is shown as his younger, robust self, as he appeared at the time of his Mossad captivity in East Berlin. Unable to make a frail 90-year-old hospital patient fit the action sequence of their script, those responsible for the film grasped at a supernatural, miracuously rejuvenating straw. The height of this muddled nonsense has Vogel stabbed in the back, lurching out of his room and through the halls like Frankensteins monster and then collapsing flat on his Nazi punum. Disparate stimulating fictions have grappled meaningfully with bringing Nazis to justice, among them Friedrich Durrenmatts novel Der Verdacht (Suspicion) and Eytan Foxs film ``eu o` ae (Walk on Water). We ` might now ask whether shallow, half-baked, Holocaust-themed entertainments like The Debt risk giving international audiences Nazi-theme fatigue, leaving them less receptive to more worthwhile and thought-provoking treatments.

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Gilles Paquet-Brenners Sarahs Key.


Weinstein Company 2011. DVD. $29 Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose*
The considerable international success of Sarahs Key makes for a good springboard to a consideration of some of the vagaries of Holocaust remembrance. Tatiana de Rosnays noveland Gilles Paquet-Brenners eponymous film adaptation of ittreats of French complicity in the Holocaust, and specifically, of the July 1942 roundup of more than 13,000 Jews in Paris, carried out by French police under orders from the Gestapo. Most of the victims ultimately met their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. The stark facts of mass murder stemming from racial profiling in a metropolitan center long proud of its modern, liberal traditions are almost incomprehensible. Be that as it may, the complexity of local Parisian reactions to those events rapidly became subsumed in national and international politics. In the aftermath of World War II, the rigorous practical demands of social recovery facilitated a whitewashing of recent national history, through which French identity became synonymous with resistance to the Nazi occupiers, while the realities pertaining to those among the French who collaborated with the Nazis largely went undiscussed. Not until 1969, with Marcel Ophuls film The Sorrow and the Pity, did the society finally start to take a more open, honest look at the Vichy period. Without specifi-

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cally examining the death-camp deportations, the movie did consider antisemitism in French society of the WWII era, and famously caused young French people to ask their parents What did you know? Ironically, French politician Simone Veil, though a concentration camp survivor, led criticism of the movie for what she said was its overemphasis of French collaboration with the Nazis. Little wonder, then, that so few popular French novels and films have dealt with French complicity in the Holocaust. Roger Boussinots memoir Les Guichets du Louvre (The Gates of the Louvre), published in France in 1960, served as the basis of Michel Mitranis 1974 film Les Guichets du Louvre, known in English as Black Thursday. The protagonist is a Sorbonne student who attempts to warn individual Jews that they must hide. The movie romanticizes the book, which, though valuable, apparently has never been published in English translation. Alain Delon starred in Monsieur Klein, the Joseph Losey film of 1976. It is intriguing that this rather metaphysical movie unites the destinies of two Robert Kleins in Paris, one Jewish, one not, in the roundup at the V lodrome dHiver. A respected French e TV director, Maurice Frydland, made several filmslittle known to the non-French worlddealing with the Occupation, among them 1992s Les Enfants du V l dHiv (The Children of the V lodrome dHiver). e e Charles de Gaulle had set the tone of the postwar attitude toward WWII-era events in France by asserting that the Vichy government had never been legitimate and therefore nothing that happened under it was the responsibility of the French Republic, which was restored after the war. This official French government line only changed on July 16, 1995, on the 42nd anniversary of the beginning of the V l dHiv roundup, when Presie dent Jacques Chirac declared it was time for the state to acknowledge French complicity in the Holocaust. A French national holiday marking the date of the roundup strikes a balance by commemorating the crimes while also remembering the victims, along with those French of good conscience who managed to save neighbors from abrupt tragic fates. Rose Boschs La Rafle (The Round Up) of 2010, a historical drama based entirely on real figures, provoked within France widespread discussion and argument about the history itself, as well as of the film qua film. Many of the persons depicted in the movie are children; touchingly, there are anecdotes of French youngsters contacting Bosch through Facebook to say they had no idea of that part of French history. Tatiana de Rosnayhalf French, half English, and raised largely in the United Statesin a video interview told the Jewish Book Council what had led to her writing Sarahs Key. She said that as a French citizen, she knew next to nothing about the V l dHiv roundup when Chirac spoke of it in e 1995. Then, the more she learned about how French police had rounded up

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French-Jewish children, the more horrified and disgusted she became and the more strongly compelled she felt to base a novel on the theme. Completed in 2002, the manuscript accumulated over twenty rejections from publishers, who deemed it too dark a work to encounter likely success. Discouraged, de Rosnay abandoned hope for the book, yet went on to write and publish two additional novels. Rachel Dodess July 2011 report in The Wall Street Journal, The Hit No One Wanted, tells how de Rosnay finally got Rachels Key published in 2007. And nearly equal difficulties were encountered before the book could be adapted into the 2010 film directed by Paquet-Brenner. The New York Times, for instance, never even published a review of the novel, but in July 2009 reported on how it had been propelled onto best-sellers lists through book selection and marketing programs at Target department stores. Actress Kristin Scott Thomass attachment to the film magnetized international attention to it. Scott Thomas plays Julia Jarmond, an American journalist who once was assigned to write a magazine article about the V l e dHiv events. Married to a Frenchman who inherits a Paris apartment from his grandparents, Julia reckons that her husbands family took possession of the property very shortly after the V l dHiv roundup. From her father-ine law, she manages to learn disturbing details of the history of the apartment, which at the time of the roundup had been inhabited by the Jewish Starzynski family. The ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, immediately prior to being arrested, hid her younger brother Michel in a lockable cupboard, promising she would return to save him. However, by the time Sarah escaped from a detention camp in Beaune-la-Rolande and then returned to Paris with the assistance of a sympathetic elderly French couple, Michel had perished inside the cupboard. Julia persists with multicontinental investigations of Sarahs life and fate. Both book and film alternate scenes between Occupation-era France and the early 21st century. While reaction to the film has generally been very favorable, most critics agree that the scenes involving the young Sarah, played by the prodigiously talented M lusine Mayance, are stronger than e the contemporary scenes. Strange as it may be, Sarah, though a fictional character, has done more than the true-life characters portrayed in Boschs The Round Up to call international attention to the history of the arrests of French Jews by French police for deportation to Nazi extermination centers. Though some of the more exactingly intellectual critics reproach Sarahs Key for being sentimental, it is probable that both the books and films capacity for making todays young readers and viewers truly feel for Sarah will turn them into adults with interests in Holocaust history later in their lives.

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Gloria Greenfields Unmasked: Judeophobia and the Threat to Civilization. Emet, 2011.
Jewish Film Festivals. DVD $15. ggreenfield@docemetproductions.com Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose*
As with her previous film, The Case for Israel, Gloria Z. Greenfield serves up essential food for thought with Unmasked: Judeophobia and the Threat to Civilization. To be sure, some criticisms can be offered, starting with the movies title. Those familiar with this topic likely are aware of mostif not allof the matters discussed and therefore might ask what the movie purports to be unmasking. In addition, the film employs a talking heads format (numerous leading authorities, among them Alan Dershowitz, Caroline Glick, and Emanuele Ottolenghi, are included in the mix). While consistently interesting, such a format does not necessarily in its aggregate make a convincing case that Judeophobiairrational fear of Judaism and Jewsis behind absolutely all animosity toward and disinformation about Israel today. Nonetheless, Unmasked provides a compelling springboard to thinking about how better to protect the safety of Jews and Israel in the contemporary world. The film opens with Elie Wiesel ominously stating that in 1945, he was convinced antisemitism had died with the last victims in Auschwitz, butthat never since then has he been as afraid as he is now of antisemitism. His intensely personal statement merits respect, yet, alas, we can question whether the direct evidence in 1945 signified the end of all antisemitism. In Wiesels native Hungary alone, for example, there were anti-Jewish pogroms immediately following the end of the Second World War. And, no small measure of hate-fueled, anti-Jewish bigotry was involved in the Arab rejection of the UN Partition plan of 1947, to say nothing of the Arab attacks on Jews in the Middle East before and after the establishment of modern Israel.

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Of the many themes taken up in Unmasked, the one that perhaps most readily may be perceived as constituting a threat to civilization is the smug and fatuous lunacy of the Iranian theocracy as projected to the world, mainly through its figurehead president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While notoriously anti-Israel, the Iranian theocracy also is heavily invested in Shiite versus Sunni power struggles among Islamic nations in the Middle East. Moreover, blatant religious mumbo-jumbo factors heavily into the Iranian leaderships weltanschauung and strategic planning, irredeemably complicating efforts at rational international diplomacy with it. Here is not the place to rehash contrasting information and allegations pertaining to Irans nuclear programs and to Ahmadinejads obnoxious tirades against Israel. Yet, Ahmadinejad personally intersects with another of Unmaskeds main themes, that of fraudulent academicswherever in the world they may bepromulgating fact-challenged anti-Israel and/or antiJewish hate speech. With his aggressive Holocaust denial, Ahmadinejad represents one of the nadirs of the bastardization of scholarship to antisemitic endsa specific, focused bastardization of scholarship frequently and appropriately decried in Greenfields movie. Regarding antisemitism on university campuses, Unmasked visits, in particular, antisemitic incitements at the University of California Irvine. Because UCI is a public school, there had been much justifiable consternation over the governments failure to hold school administrators accountable for creating and maintaining a safe campus. Unmasked, however, does not show viewers that subsequent, indispensable civil rights advocacy has, hearteningly, led to an amelioration of conditions. An October 26, 2010, guidance letter from the Obama administrations Department of Education, Civil Rights Division, for instance, clarifies that Jews are protected under Title IX. The existence of these protections alone, of course, does not guarantee compliance and enforcement, yet ongoing community education about how to invoke the protections, if and when needed, should prove beneficial. Whereas UC Irvine presents a cautionary tale of what can happen in a publicly funded school, we might in Princeton professor Robert Georges behavior see a cautionary tale of what can happen at a private university. George is a conspicuous example of a figure being allowed to pervert academic associations to unsavory political ends. Unapologetically in favor of having Catholic dogma influence civil law in the United States, George has written that people only criticize Pope Pius XIIwho, when a cardinal, infamously signed the Reichskonkordat treaty between the Vatican and the Nazisto discredit the Catholic Church and to weaken its moral influence in the present day. We must, however, never forget that Jews in Germany had already been banned from the professions at the time Cardinal

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Pacelli signed that treaty, and that the treaty pledged German bishops loyalty to the Nazi government. Professor George, furthermore, as head of the American Principles Project, sent his communications director Thomas Peters to a conference hosted in Poland by the viciously antisemitic Father Tadeusz Rydsyk. Kyle Mantylas published article, Professor George Has Some Explaining to Do, is a reply to this action. An e-mail we sent to Professor George requesting comment has gone unanswered. The importance of maintaining vigilance over academic standards is seen in many instances, including in the counter-factual, antisemitic dissertation of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas in book form, used frequently even today in PA schools, under the title The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism. Unmasked reminds us of many of the most outrageous of anti-Israel defamation campaignsthat it is the Fourth Reich, that it is apartheid, that it is racistand in the face of these propagandistic calumnies, we suggest steadfastly reminding the world that the UN Partition Plan of 1947 offered a reasonable two-state solution, which was rejected by, and responded to with violence by, Arabs. Certainly it bears repeating that the Israeli Declaration of Independence invites the Arab inhabitants of the land to participate in the democracy as full citizens. The ongoing lack of reciprocity of that good will is not at all difficult to confirm; today, for example, an Arab of means of whatever nationality may purchase private property in Israel, but in Gaza and the PA-controlled West Bank, the penalty for selling property to a Jew ischillinglydeath.
*Joanne Intrator, MD, is in private practice and is assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Scott Rose writes frequently on culture and the arts. They live in New York.

Where Norman Finkelstein and the ADL Meet

Yoav Shamirs Defamation


Dogwoof Productions, 2009. Nathan Abrams*
This documentary is an attempt by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir to understand something he has heard much about but has never directly experienced as a sabraantisemitism. In so doing, he travels to various countries, including Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. His journey intertwines two interlinked narratives: (a) how young Israelis are raised in the shadow of the Holocaust and (b) the activities of the AntiDefamation League (ADL), which is the largest organization in the world combatting antisemitism. Thus, he follows a group of Israeli high school children, as they prepare for a trip to Poland and then take that journey. Meanwhile, he visits the offices of the ADL in the United States to assess its influence. This might well be the final installment in a trilogy of Shamirs films that includes Checkpoint (2003), about Israeli soldiers who man the checkpoints, and Flipping Out (2008), about what happens to these soldiers after they leave the army. Defamation concludes by exploring Israeli youth before they begin their military service. Shamir first had the idea to make a film about antisemitism when Checkpoint was released. In one of that films many reviews, he was called the Israeli Mel Gibson because the views he had expressed, critical of Israels policies toward the Palestinians, suggested that he was a self-hater, even antisemitic. At first he was amused: Being called an antisemite by an American Jewish reporter seemed completely farfetched. How could someone who chooses to live outside of

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Israel, who did not do military service like me, who did not lose a grandfather in the war like me, have the nerve to call me an antisemite? Until then I had never considered the central role that antisemitism plays in our lives. However, upon reflection he realized that it is a constant buzz, always in the background, always annoying. After a while, you simply get used to it. How often are we really disturbed by the hum of an electric fixture or the drone of passing cars? Antisemitism may follow us like a shadow, but then again, who really notices his shadow on a daily basis?
Once I did start noticing it, I realized that antisemitism is actually a very popular topic in the Israeli discourse. Not a day goes by without at least one article in the newspaper mentioning Nazis, the Holocaust, or antisemitism (Yoav Shamir, http://www.defamation-thefilm.com/html/ director.html, accessed December 2011).

In the first narrative, the young Israelis are prepared and counseled before their trip to visit the death camps. They watch Holocaust documentaries. They visit Yad Vashem. They are briefed about the secret service agents who will accompany them to prevent interaction with the local population. Along the way, they are told, with no deviation, that they are hated and that they must be vigilant and protected at all times. When asked why they are not leaving the hotel in the evening, one schoolgirl responds, There are neo-Nazis in Poland. They are a threat. Were in danger. They could knock on our doors and throw things through our windows. They were briefed at dinner that they are not in a friendly country but in a relatively hostile environment. As another high school student recounted, There are demonstrations out there. They could throw stones at us. Two weeks ago drunken neo-Nazis came in and started banging on the doors, searching for Jews. For their safety, the students are not allowed out of the hotel at night because they hate us. Another tells Shamir that At the airport, the soldiers walk like Nazis, rigidly. They have an angry look on their faces. The ones who stamped our passports looked like SS officers. Naturally, the high school children receive a very blinkered view of Poland. Their interactions with the locals are kept to a minimum, either by lack of linguistic knowledge, or because their guides keep them apart. Yet, two girls approach a group of three old men. Their communication is stilted and both groups are left bewildered by the other because of their lack of a common language. Later, the girls conclude the old men were antisemites, and seem genuinely surprised when Shamir informs them that what the men had said was harmless. Following their first visit to a death camp, the Israeli schoolchildren feel bad for not immediately experiencing an emotional affective response.

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We feel guilt for not having any feelings or emotions, they said. They clearly felt that they should be feeling much more strongly than they did. I feel bad because I dont feel emotional, responded another. Shamir presents the children as conditioned into a response they do not feel when confronted by the physical remains of the Shoah right at the site, in situ. Finally, at the museum at Auschwitz I, the children are able to cry, and Shamir produces lingering shots of their emotional reactions. In the second narrative, Shamir travels to New York City to explore the Anti-Defamamation League. He meets with its director, Abraham Foxman, and other senior staff, accompanying them on their various trips abroad. Shamir attempts to balance Foxmans voice with those who oppose the ADL, including Professor Norman Finkelstein, and John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of the controversial book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Shamir takes a very skeptical view of the need for the ADL, continually questioning its role, concluding that Foxman has to create a problem because he needs a job. The ADL is represented as inflaming situations as much as they help. Shamir wonders why so many powerful people, such as ambassadors and heads of state, want to take the time to meet Foxman. Its like a poker game in which Foxman bluffs the other side into thinking the Jews have more influence and power in Washington than they really have, he says. Furthermore, he avers, antisemitism does not really exist in the United States anymorebut it does in the minds of Israeli government and the Jewish big shots that make a living fighting it. Shamirs personal essay ultimately concludes that so much emphasis is put on the past, as horrific as it has been, that it is holding us back. Maybe, he feels, it is time to live in the present and to look to the future. Funded by Israel, as well as various European countries (it is an IsraelAustria-US-Denmark co-production), the documentary is a very simple affair, lacking in the gimmicks that mar, for instance, the work of Michael Moore. Though it features Shamir in doing the voiceover narrative, he is rarely seen and does not become the subject of the documentary itself. As befitting a personal journey that begins with an interview of the directors own elderly grandmother, the documentary is an opinion piece. It is not claiming to be objective but rather wants to add its voice to the debate on antisemitism. While the opinions expressed will not be shared by all, it is worth watching this documentary as part of the overall discussion on this important topic.
*Nathan Abrams is a senior lecturer in film studies and director of graduate studies at Prifysgol Bangor University, Wales. He writes on Jews, Jewish diasporas, and U.S. public intellectuals and is a frequent contributor to the JSA. He can be contacted at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk.

Antisemitica College Campus Activity Since 2002


AUSTRALIA Daniel Wyner of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students says that the vilification we feel as students on campus . . . [is] coming almost entirely from the left. Grahame Leonard, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, says July 2006 had the most antisemitic incidents since records began in 1945, and that many of the incidents were on campus. In Sydney, some Jewish students have started to wear hats over their kippahs. Deon Kamien, former president of the Union of Jewish Students, told The Age: Its not something I can put in words. A lot of students who would feel very comfortable wearing a kippah or T-shirt with Hebrew words on it now feel they are being targeted as Jewsnot supporters of Israel, but Jews. When they walk past socialist stalls [on campus] they are called f ing Jews.

CANADA In September 2002, former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu was prevented from delivering a speech at Concordia University in Montreal after a student protest turned violent. Some protesters harassed the predominantly Jewish audience that had arrived for the speech, and there were reports of Holocaust survivors being assaulted. Figures such as World Jewish Congress secretary Avi Beker described the incident as indicative of an antisemitic campaign on North American campuses, while journalist Lysiane Gagnon accused the universitys pro-Palestinian students union of refus[ing] to blame those who broke windows, threw chairs around, spat at and shoved the Jewish students who wanted to hear Mr. Netanyahu. The student unions vice president of communications refuted Gagnons charge, saying that his organization had on many occasions publicly condemned any acts of physical violence [ . . . ] especially those acts that were antisemitic or anti-Arab in nature. A representative of Concordias Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights organization said that only a small

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minority of protesters had engaged in violent acts, and argued that the protest itself was justified. An advertisement in the Globe and Mail on December 17, 2002, signed by 100 people, said that Canadian Jewish students are traumatized by on-campus antisemitism and dare not speak out in support of Israel or Judaism. Signatories included Irving Abella, David Bercuson, Ramsay Cook, Michael Bliss, Margaret Atwood, Peter C. Newman, Neil Bissoondath, Francine Pelletier, and June Callwood.

In 2009, some members of the Hillel organization at York University in Toronto were pursued and allegedly threatened by pro-Palestinian students at a protest. The Hillel students were allegedly barricaded into their center, while protesters allegedly shouted what the Jerusalem Post described as anti-Jewish and anti-Israel slurs. The claims of the antisemitic slurs were not reported by the media present at the time, and some have suggested that this accusation lacks credibility. Two pro-Palestinian students, Krisna Saravanamuttu and Jesse Zimmerman, were fined for violating the university code of conduct. Generally, York University faculty have largely rejected claims of increased antisemitism on their campus. On April 5, 2010, two students, one of whom is Jewish, were assaulted by a group of men outside a local bar for connections with an Israeli advocacy group, the Israel Awareness Committee, at Carleton University. The students, who both attend Carleton, were approached by a group of assailants, who yelled at them for being Jews and Zionists. The assailants, who were identified by one of the victims as fellow Carleton students, proceeded to assault the two students, and one of the perpetrators wielded a machete and began swinging at one of the victims. The two students escaped their attackers on foot with only minor injuries. Investigation into this incident was ongoing, and no suspects were apprehended.

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Bernie Farber, the leader of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said that he had never before seen such a bad atmosphere on Toronto streets and university campuses. Some have objected to this assertion. The author Rick Salutin argues that accusations of a new antisemitism in contemporary Canada are usually unspecific, and do not include verifiable names or quotations. He has also written that incidents of name calling and group hate at protests are not indicative of a new wave of antisemitism, which is universally regarded as unacceptable within mainstream Canadian discourse. FRANCE Patrick Klugman, president of the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF), wrote in Le Figaro: On some university campuses like Nanterre, Villetaneuse and Jussieu, the climate has become very difficult for Jews. In the name of the Palestinian cause, they are castigated as if they were Israeli soldiers! We hear death to the Jews during demonstrations that are supposed to defend the Palestinian cause. Last April, our office was the target of a Molotov cocktail. As a condition for condemning this attack, the lecturers demanded that the UEJF declare a principled position against Israel! UNITED KINGDOM

The Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism stated that when left wing or pro-Palestinian discourse is manipulated and used as a vehicle for anti-Jewish language and themes, the anti-Semitism is harder to recognize and define . . . The inquiry heard that University College, London, invited members of the Islamist party Hizb-ut-Tahrir to give presentations, although it has been banned from several countries because of its antisemitism. Hizb-ut-Tahrir has also been active at Queen Mary, University of London; Kingston University; and Birmingham City University.

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The report describes how tensions and incidents on campus often peak around students union votes concerning Israel and Zionism, listing as examples several incidents precipitated by a University of Manchester student union motion to declare that anti-Zionism was not antisemitism and that Israeli goods should be boycotted. During the voting phase, according to the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, a leaflet from the General Union of Palestinian Students quoting a neo-Nazi forgery entitled Prophecy of Benjamin Franklin in Regard of the Jewish Race, was handed out to students lining up to vote. The leaflet described Jews as vampires, claiming that if they were not expelled from the United States, they would enslave the country and destroy its economy. When the motion was defeated, a brick was thrown through the window of one Jewish student residence while a poster with the words Slaughter the Jews was stuck to its front door, and a knife was stuck in the door of another. UNITED STATES The Anti-Defamation Leagues audit of antisemitic/anti-Israel events on college campuses across the United States included accounts of violent incidents. A rally held by the Muslim Student Association at San Francisco State University (SFSU) displayed posters bearing a picture of soup cans reading Made in Israel on the label, listing the contents as Palestinian Children Meat, with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as the manufacturer, and the words slaughtered according to Jewish Rites under American license. A group of pro-Israel demonstrators at SFSU were confronted by pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators after a rally. Both sides were described as exchang[ing] taunts that descended into slurs; the pro-Israel students were escorted back to the Hillel building under police protection. The university president subsequently remarked that a small but terribly destructive num-

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ber of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, many of whom were not SFSU students, abandoned themselves to intimidating behavior and statements too hate-filled to repeat. Members of this group were reported to have yelled, Hitler didnt finish the job. This was adamantly denied by Palestinian activists present at the rally, who accused the pro-Israel demonstrators of calling the Arab students sand niggers and terrorists. According to Leila Qutami of SFSUs General Union of Palestine Students, We were called Arab losers and told to stick flags up our asses. And those are the things that are mentionable. One Jewish member of the pro-Palestinian counter-demonstration was quoted as saying that she heard a couple of inappropriate, anti-Semitic things, but that these were not representative of her organizations opinion. She blamed the presence of antisemites in the pro-Palestinian cause on the confusion of Zionism with Judaism. There also were significant tensions between Jewish and Palestinian student groups at the University of California Berkeley. During Passover, a cinder block was thrown through the front windows of the universitys Hillel center and the words Fk the Jews were written on the centers recycling bins. The culprits were never found, and these acts were condemned by Palestinian student leaders. Palestinian students also argued that they were subject to harassment on campus, and were labeled as terrorists or antisemites for voicing their opposition to Israel. The tensions were especially strong on April 9, when two rival events took place at the same time: Jewish student groups held a vigil for Holocaust Remembrance Day, while Students for Justice in Palestine held a National Day of Action in conjunction with the anniversary of the Deir Yassin Massacre. Some Jewish students criticized the pro-Palestinian group for distributing pamphlets that drew parallels between the Holocaust and Israels military assault on Palestinian territories, while Palestinian students again complained that they were frequently slandered as antisemitic. A member of Jews for a Free Palestine who tried to recite a Hebrew prayer at the Palestinian event was drowned out by students from the Israel Action Committee, who repeatedly shouted shame. On February 16, 2006, members of the UC Berkeley Jewish fraternity chapter, Alpha Epsilon Pi, were victimized by a racial slur when a member woke up Monday morning and discovered the word kike painted in white on the deck of that members house the night before. The fraternity reported that although they had been targeted by racially charged comments before, Sundays incident was the worst instance of antisemitism they had experienced. Its just really sad, in this day and age, that antisemitism can still exist on such a progressive campus, said Joe Rothberg, president of the fraternity. Its just depressing.

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Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, has written how two students of his wondered whether it was true that 4,000 Jews had failed to show up for work at the World Trade Center on September 11. The worst crackpot notions that circulate around the Middle East are also roaming around America, Gitlin writes, and if that werent bad enough, students are spreading the gibberish. Students! In late October 2007, five swastikas were drawn on several buildings in the dormitories of George Washington University. One of these swastikas was found on the door of a Jewish student. University officials condemned the occurrences. A Hillel staff member at Brown University was attacked on March 15, 2008, when two Molotov cocktails were thrown at his apartment. The staff member was safe and continues to work at the Hillel Center at Brown, but moved out of his apartment. Law enforcement and university officials took the matter very seriously. Graffiti depicting a Star of David between the Twin Towers as an airplane flies toward them was found outside a classroom at UC Santa Cruz. Below the image of the towers was the number 666, a symbolic number representing the Antichrist. University faculty and administration quickly condemned the act as a hate crime. The Zionist Organization of America filed a complaint against UC Irvine in 2005, alleging that the university had failed to take action against Islamic student groups that had allegedly engaged in antisemitic activities. Federal investigators declined to lay charges, determining that the activities in question were based on political opposition to the policies of Israel rather than

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antisemitism. In May 2009, UC Irvine hosted a two-week event, Israel: The Politics of Genocide, sponsored by the schools Muslim Student Union. Scheduled speakers included Cynthia McKinney and George Galloway. Opponents of the event described it as antisemitic, and called for the university chancellor to condemn both the event and the sponsoring organization. A 2009 letter obtained from UC Irvine and addressed to the universitys chancellor from Jewish Federations of Orange County divulges that students on a university-sponsored trip to the Middle East met with a notable Hamas figure, Aziz Duwaik, in an unapproved meeting in September 2009. Another of the featured speakers at the 2009 event was Imam Amir Abdel Malik Ali, who delivered a speech entitled Silence Is Consent. According to the university newspaper, Malik Ali described Zionism as a racist ideology, and denounced what he described as U.S. imperialism. One student wrote an opinion piece that accused Malik Ali of promoting naked hate and of fomenting various antisemitic conspiracy theories against Zionist Jews, including the belief that Jews were responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, and quoted him as saying, [The] Zionist Jew is in the party of Shaytan [Islamic term for Satan] . . . they follow the Shaytans power . . . they like to operate behind closed doors.

Objets dart dantisemitisme

The Eternal Jew, Exhibition at the Wolfson Museum of Jewish Art, Jerusalem, January 5 December 2012. From the Peter Ehrenthal Collection, Moriah Galleries, New York.

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Excerpted Address to the Edinburgh University Student Association


Denis MacEoin*
It is because I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs that I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote. I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion; that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves. Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby. Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But Im not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel. Im speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a Nazi state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nuremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Bahais, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world center; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population). In Iran, the Bahais (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities; why arent your members boycotting Iran? Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jewssomething no blacks could do in South Africa. Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theaters . . . I do not object to well-documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations. We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and its clear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their own citizens. Israel citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the worlds freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Bahais . . . Need I go on? The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for this boycott. *August 17, 2011. Denis MacEoin is a lecturer in Islamic studies and a former senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly.

Im not well if you are sick; Im not rich if you are poor. I cant live if youre not free; I depend on you and you can depend on me. A brother is no botherwe all have the same Father. Hugh Mann

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