I tweeted on this the other day but let me recap here: This NYT piece reported that the ships in the Free Gaza Movement flotilla were funded by something called the Perdana Global Peace Organization. Greta Berlin, a founder of the Free Gaza Movement, herself acknowledged this link to Perdana. Look around Perdana’s website and you’ll find the organization is chaired by Mahathir Mohamed, former prime minister of Malaysia and one of the world’s most notoriously outspoken antisemites — a man who said this at a January conference:
The Jews had always been a problem in European countries. They had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole Governments to ransom. Even after their massacre by the Nazis of Germany, they survived to continue to be a source of even greater problems for the world. The Holocaust failed as a final solution.
And people accuse Jews of fabricating the issue of antisemitism as a smokescreen.
There’s been very little reporting on Mahathir’s ties to the Free Gaza Movement as far as I’ve seen. Lots and lots of discussion about “what Israel has become” and such. Very little discussion of what the Palestine solidarity movement has become.
As for IHH, the Turkish organization involved in the melee on the flotilla’s biggest ship, my friend Yigal Schleifer, in his must-read posts on the Turkey-Israel diplomatic crisis, describes IHH as an organization of the Islamist far right. Yigal’s coverage is some of the fairest, most non-ideological and rigorous you’ll come across anywhere.
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In last week’s New Yorker, Pankaj Mishra reviewed Paul Berman’s new book The Flight of the Intellectuals, about the widespread liberal-left acceptance of Swiss Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, and what this phenomenon says about intellectual culture in our time. Mishra, in short, offers a fine example of what Berman was trying to diagnose. He subjects Berman to a relentless drubbing over his liberal-hawk support of the Iraq war, thus shooting the messenger, while giving Ramadan a pass on his uncritical support of the extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
First of all, Qaradawi doesn’t simply justify suicide attacks against Israel, as Mishra notes, although this would be bad enough. Qaradawi says things like this:
Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place.
Mishra further tries to undermine Berman’s case:
[Berman] says that Ramadan not just “admires” but “worships” Qaradawi, although the citations of Ramadan that he produces to illustrate this claim reveal nothing more fervent than the standard lexicon of scholarly attribution: “Yusuf al-Qaradawi aptly notes that…”; “For details, see Yusuf al-Qaradawi….”
I very much doubt that Mishra would agree it’s benign for Ramadan to cite, whether calmly or fervently, the work of a man who believes Hitler put the Jews in their place.
And yet wait. Here is Paul Berman himself, responding to another negative review, in which he notes that
…Ramadan, who has contributed prefaces to two of Sheikh Qaradawi’s collections of fatwas[my emphasis - DA], has revered and applauded Qaradawi in every one of his major books, beginning with the book about [Hassan] al-Banna. Anyone who takes the trouble to read through Ramadan’s work will discover that Qaradawi has been the most important of his mentors—a distinguished and learned sheikh with his own history of ties to the Ramadan family, by the way (which I mention … because Ramadan himself, in his book on al-Banna, chooses to boast of it).
Mishra, it seems, is misrepresenting facts in order to burnish his conclusion: that Ramadan “may not be ideal, but the impulse to engage with him seems to exemplify the best kind of liberalism….”
By all means, engage Ramadan, but do it in the way that George Packer did in this exchange, in which he pressed Ramadan repeatedly on the issue of antisemitism. “[H]e couldn’t give me a direct answer,” writes Packer. “He hedged, he spoke about context, he suggested that the quotes were mistranslated, that they didn’t actually exist. But he refused to acknowledge that his grandfather and the Muslim Brotherhood in its origins were characterized by anti-Semitic or totalitarian views. It seemed clear that there was a limit to what he would allow himself to say or think, and that I had found it.”
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Last but not least, the fact that racists such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are blasting veteran White House reporter turned pundit Helen Thomas does not mean that Thomas’s remarks were anything less than disgusting. And racist.
Having begun to read David Aaronovitch’s engaging Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, I am prompted once again to mention the UK-based saxophonist and political agitator Gilad Atzmon. To be clear, Atzmon does not appear in Aaronovitch’s first chapter, about TheProtocols of the Elders of Zion. However, Aaronovitch does reveal something that underlines the toxicity of Atzmon’s rantings against the Jews — oh, excuse me, his pro-Palestinian advocacy and “constant debate with different Jewish lobbies.”
As Oliver Kamm recently reminded us, Atzmon wrote the following on his website in 2005:
American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the elder of Zion’ [sic] are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy. [...]
Now, compare that sentiment to the following, quoted by Aaronovitch in Voodoo Histories:
The Frankfurter Zeitung is forever moaning to the people that [the Protocols] are supposed to be a forgery; which is the surest proof that they are genuine. What many Jews do perhaps unconsciously is here consciously exposed. But that is not what matters… What matters is that they uncover, with really horrifying reliability, the nature and activity of the Jewish people, and expose them in their inner logic and their final aims. But reality provides the best commentary. [...]
This passage is from Mein Kampf, by one Adolf Hitler.
Let’s be clear on this. In stating that the Protocols‘ inauthenticity does not matter, that Jewish behavior tells all, Atzmon is cribbing arguments from Adolf Hitler.
Kamm goes on to cite a more recent piece by Atzmon, in which he writes:
It took me years to grasp that my great-grandmother wasn’t made into a ‘soap’ or a ‘lampshade’*. She probably perished out of exhaustion, typhus or maybe even by mass shooting. [...] The fate of my great-grandmother was not any different from hundreds of thousands of German civilians who died in an orchestrated indiscriminate bombing, because they were Germans. Similarly, people in Hiroshima died just because they were Japanese. 1 million Vietnamese died just because they were Vietnamese and 1.3 million Iraqis died because they were Iraqis. In short the tragic circumstances of my great grandmother wasn’t that special after all.
Apart from the pseudo-leftist flourishes, this also happens to be Mel Gibson’s view of the Holocaust. Here is what Gibson, or “sugar tits,” said to Peggy Noonan in 2004:
Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century 20 million people died in the Soviet Union.
In other words, “wasn’t that special after all.” The subtext is clear, and Atzmon could have uttered it. But given that Atzmon is on record parroting the views of Hitler himself, his brand of Holocaust minimization is especially ghoulish.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that no leftist of any stripe would want to be caught dead praising Hitler. Or Mel Gibson for that matter. But Atzmon? That’s different.
Anil Prasad has an interview up with drummer Asaf Sirkis, whose recent recordings The Song Within and The Monk I can vouch for as unique and well worth hearing. Sirkis also happens to be a musical associate of Gilad Atzmon, a saxophonist and political blowhard with a straightforwardly antisemitic paper trail that has come up frequently on this blog. In defense of his colleague, Sirkis offers:
… [I]n Israeli/Jewish culture, you can be a lefty, right wing, orthodox, or whatever you like, but there are a few things that you’re not supposed to question, so to speak, and that could make things difficult for people like Gilad Atzmon with whom I worked. Gilad, who is very outspoken about his pro-Palestinian views, had to deal with situations when at his gigs members of the audience—mostly Jewish/Israeli, of course—left the hall because of something he said. As far as I know he is in constant debate with different Jewish lobbies.
Let’s be clear about Atzmon’s political record, for he is not merely outspoken about his pro-Palestinian views. He is equally outspoken about his anti-Jewish views, which are in many respects indistinguishable from the views of the racist far right. “One of the things that happened to us was that stupidly we interpreted the Nazi defeat as a vindication of the Jewish ideology and the Jewish people,” Atzmon wrote recently, leaving one to wonder about the meaning of “us” and “we” in the sentence. The notion that only “Jewish/Israeli” audience members would find such a statement disgusting is almost as offensive as the statement itself.
Also consider Atzmon’s record of Holocaust denial and apologetics for the Third Reich. It’s not for nothing that Atzmon’s work is greeted warmly on David Duke’s website, Stormfront chat boards and other white supremacist outlets.
Asaf Sirkis might have noted that even many of the UK’s most outspoken anti-Zionist activists will have nothing to do with Atzmon. One can be sure there are Palestinians who feel the same way and have no use for Atzmon’s “pro-Palestinian” advocacy. But all one has to do these days is invoke the dreaded “Jewish lobbies” and the discussion is over. After all, anyone “in constant debate with different Jewish lobbies” must be a pretty good guy.
I’ve just delved into Michael Bérubé’s book The Left At War, and it’s reminding me how deeply influenced I am by the late Ellen Willis, in particular her 2003 essay “Is There Still a Jewish Question? Why I’m an Anti-Anti Zionist.” I should have linked to it much sooner.
Let me be clearer about why I raise the issue of antisemitism on the left as frequently as I do. It’s not because I think people need to feel our Jewish pain and be sensitive. It’s because, as Willis states, “Anti-Semitism remains the wild card of world politics and the lightning rod of political crisis, however constantly it is downplayed or denied.” Therefore, the left’s failure to deal with the issue — or worse, actually to aid and abet the phenomenon itself — is not just any failure. It has happened before in history and it is happening again.
Louis Farrakhan is not of the left, of course, but people on the left — most notably Jeremiah Wright in the recent past — have mistaken his championing of the black struggle for progressivism. And yet Farrakhan continues to say things like this, just yesterday:
“[You] can’t even engage in constructive argument over the veracity of the figures of the Holocaust. We know something happened, sure, but you can’t talk about [it]. In certain cities in Europe they arrest you and put you in prison for denying such.”
I think we can conclude that Farrakhan is less interested in “constructive argument” than in “denying such.”
Citing Cynthia McKinney as a victim of the all-powerful Zionist lobby, Farrkhan also said: “You can’t criticize, you can’t say nothing because if you do, you’re branded as an anti-Semite.”
Actually, this is what antisemites say to draw attention away from the fact that they’re promoting antisemitism. And it’s an attempt to stifle those who would oppose them.
A quick follow-up to my previous post: in the comments, a friend has reminded me about this lovely photo (scroll down) of Cynthia McKinney posing with her new pal, the raving antisemite and borderline sociopath Israel Shamir, who is arguably worse than Gilad Atzmon. In addition to falsifying his name and his background, “Shamir” has advocated coalition-building between Palestine activists and the neo-Nazi National Alliance:
The world is full of bad guys, and things are good only if and when the bad guys balance each other. Saddam would balance Sharon, while the White supremacists would balance the Jewish supremacists. If indeed these men are not supremacists, but cultural separatists, as they claim, we certainly can do things together with them, and with another group of cultural separatists, the Black Muslims, too.
This is close to McKinney’s view as well, if we can judge from her recent friendly appearances on radio programs of the racist far right. Let that sink in for a moment: an African-American former member of Congress, the standard-bearer for the Green Party in the 2008 presidential election, is all but a declared ally of the white supremacist fringe. Noam Chomsky, a near-deity to many on the radical left, endorsed McKinney’s presidential run.
It’s not news that some sectors of the radical left are in the antisemitism business. And then there are those who are more offended by justified accusations of antisemitism than by the antisemitism itself. So it remains the responsibility of the left’s more intelligent voices, people like Glenn Greenwald, to raise the red flag on this issue. McKinney, by the way, is another person who gets a free pass when she’s interviewed by Greenwald’s pal Amy Goodman.
To quote Greenwald again: “[C]heapening the charge of anti-semitism through frivolous and politically manipulative uses weakens the ability to combat actual, real anti-semitism, which does still exist.”
If he’s so very concerned about the ability to combat antisemitism, let him act on it, instead of recycling the tired claim that it’s all a neocon witch hunt.
To find journalist-ideologue John Pilger ranting about “the criminality of the Israeli state” and “the murderous, racist toll of Zionism” is all too routine. (Hat tip Oliver Kamm.) What’s new is this: Pilger trots out “the expatriate Israeli musician Gilad Atzmon” as a representative good Jew, emblematic of “the heroes of Israel” and “the moral courage of Israeli dissidents.” Either Pilger is fool enough to be unaware of Atzmon’s vicious anti-Jewish bigotry, or he has consciously praised an apologist for the Third Reich, who has declared:
“One of the things that happened to us was that stupidly we interpreted the Nazi defeat as a vindication of the Jewish ideology and the Jewish people.”
And:
“Carpet bombing and total erasure of populated areas that is so trendy amongst Israeli military and politicians (as well as Anglo-Americans) has never been a Nazi tactic or strategy.”
For more on Atzmon’s record of Holocaust revisionism, here. I won’t waste further time documenting Atzmon’s hate, because he continues to document it for us time and again.
As for John Pilger’s excuse, I’d love to hear it. And if Amy Goodman, who frequently greets Pilger as an eminence on her program Democracy Now!, weren’t a hack posing as a toughminded media critic, she would ask Pilger about his high regard for Atzmon next time she has him on.
I’ve said it often and I’ll do it again: the familiar complaint that critics of Israel are being silenced or cowed by charges of antisemitism is in some ways the reverse of the truth. It’s people who call attention to antisemitism, and the enabling or papering over of antisemitism so vividly illustrated by Pilger’s rant, who are being dismissed as Zionist agents, Arab haters, people who can’t possibly be arguing in good faith. We’re not opposing bigotry, the logic goes; we’re employing “the usual tactic,” as Caryl Churchill said of Howard Jacobson when he condemned her ugly play Seven Jewish Children.
The “tactic” charge has a long history. In 1972, Huey Newton, sounding very much like the communist functionary he aspired to be, wrote:
We realize that some people who happen to be Jewish and who support Israel will use the Black Panther Party’s position that is against imperialism and against the agents of the imperialist as an attack of anti-Semitism. We think that is a backbiting racist underhanded tactic and we will treat it as such.
In other words, we categorically refuse to discuss or acknowledge antisemitism, and we will greet anyone who attempts to do so with unthinking hostility. This attitude dies hard.
Today, in a very different political context, the debate has flared up in an epic, nasty and long-brewing exchange between Leon Wieseltier and Andrew Sullivan, which is way too labyrinthine to deal with here. But one thing that struck me was Glenn Greenwald’s reaction, which included the argument — also familiar — that reckless accusations of antisemitism pose an “obvious danger.” “[C]heapening the charge of anti-semitism through frivolous and politically manipulative uses,” wrote Greenwald, “weakens the ability to combat actual, real anti-semitism, which does still exist.”
Well, Mr. Greenwald, here’s your chance to combat actual, real antisemitism, which does still exist. Will you call out John Pilger, your fellow frequent guest on Democracy Now!, for praising an avowed antisemite? Imagine if John Pilger, in the pages of the New Statesman, praised someone who had said: “Stupidly we interpreted the defeat of slavery as a vindication of black ideology and black people.” Greenwald would have piped up immediately, no?
That’s one of many quotes from survivors featured in “Terror in Mumbai,” a new HBO documentary narrated by Fareed Zakaria. It’s solidly in the running for the most profoundly disturbing hour of television I’ve ever seen.
Now, a year having passed since the attacks, and with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh currently visiting Washington, it’s a good time to reflect anew on the Mumbai atrocities. My readers know that I remain suspicious of attempts to “understand” terrorism, which is all too often a euphemism for excusing, explaining away, minimizing. And yet understanding, in the true sense of the word, is possible and desirable. “Terror in Mumbai” is helpful to say the least.
Along with gut-wrenching surveillance footage of the attackers, “Terror in Mumbai” features actual audio of cell phone conversations between the terrorists and their dispatchers from Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET, “army of the righteous” or “pure”) in Pakistan. At some point in the past, covert Indian operatives had funneled SIM cards to LET in the hope they’d eventually be activated and serve as tracking devices. Three of those cards were in fact used during the Mumbai attacks. So now we know exactly what was said and how it was said. There isn’t a single “dramatization” in the film.
The LET controllers come across as stern taskmasters, ordering the young shooters at every stage. In contrast, the attackers themselves sound diffident, hollowed out, damaged. The immediate parallel that came to mind was child soldiers in Africa. Even if the LET attackers were a good deal older than that, they seemed to lack a developed conscience, as if they’d been grabbed as kids and had their souls expertly removed. This is not to deny that they’re responsible for their actions. But the men on the other end of the phone — these are the true monsters. It couldn’t be clearer.
Kasab, the sole attacker to be captured alive, is interrogated shortly after his arrest, and we see the footage. He’s singing like a canary to the authorities — naming his organization, his commanders, every detail of the operation. The conversation seems easy, unhurried. Kasab is wounded from his arrest but as far as we know there’s been no torture. (Further proof that life is not an episode of “24″.) At one point Kasab even shows remorse. He ended up an LET foot soldier after being sold — sold — to the group by his own father.
One couple from Turkey reports that they were spared on account of being Muslim, but this was an off-the-cuff decision by the nearest gunman, not a directive from LET. Here is a list of the Muslims killed and injured in the attacks. Let no one believe for a second that groups like LET care about the human rights of Muslims.
In two of the taxi cabs they rode in, the terrorists left behind bombs to explode later at random, which they did, killing the drivers, their passengers and bystanders.
“Progressive” commentators like Richard Silverstein actually had the gall to argue that the attack on Nariman House, the Chabad Jewish center, was not antisemitic but merely anti-Israel. David T had the appropriate reaction at the time. Suffice it to say that in the film, we hear “Brother Wasi,” the main LET dispatcher, say to one of the gunmen at Nariman House: “As I told you, every person you kill where you are [Nariman House] is worth 50 of the ones killed elsewhere.”
Even more sickening is the fact that Brother Wasi enlisted one of the Nariman House hostages, Norma Rabinovich of Mexico, to help negotiate a swap for Kasab, the terrorist who’d been arrested. Rabinovich was instructed to phone the Israeli consulate in Delhi and have them broker a deal with the Indian government. In a particularly painful moment in the film, we hear Rabinovitch speak to Wasi and desperately try to placate him. Wasi responds calmly, in very good English:
“Don’t worry then, ah? Just sit back and relax and don’t worry and just wait for them [the Israeli consulate] to contact. Ok?”
Rabinovitch responds, “Yes, sir,” her voice turning upward in a pitiable, fear-choked cry.
Wasi says: “And save your energy for good days.” And then: “If they contact right now, maybe you’re gonna celebrate your Sabbath with your family.”
The skin crawls. Wasi is not being compassionate — he is twisting the knife by mocking Rabinovich’s suffering with a reference to her Jewish identity. Not 12 hours later, he orders the gunman to execute her and her fellow hostage, Yoheved Orpaz. Interestingly, the shooter attempts to buy time for about an hour, reluctant to carry out the command. But he finally does it, and we hear the gunfire.
It’s not clear that Silverstein buys his own bullshit. Consider this final remark:
Even the Chabad movement should taken [sic] to task for not providing greater security for its facility. In a city already beset by past terror attacks, any target perceived as Jewish or Israeli (not just Israeli government buildings) should have had serious surveillance (ie security cameras) and the ability to lock itself down quickly. [My emphasis.]
Put aside the victim-blaming here and simply mark Silverstein’s words: “Any target perceived as Jewish or Israeli.” He just got through telling us that LET had no antisemitic agenda. So why should the mere perception of Jewishness matter? Because for all his sophistic rambling, Silverstein knows full well that it does.
A friend just sent me this authoritative denunciation of Farrakhanism and black antisemitism from 1992. It’s by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. You may have heard of him.
A friend prompted me to remark on Michael Jackson’s apparentantisemitism. Nothing to say, except it’s deeply disturbing, and something to remember at a time when people like Sean Combs are lecturing TV networks that they mustn’t say anything bad about the departed legend.
