Much is being said, and correctly so, about the right’s subtle and not-so-subtle enabling of armed wackos like James von Brunn. But may I repeat something I noted the other day? Cynthia McKinney, the 2008 presidential candidate of the Green Party, recently appeared on a racist radio program called The Information Underground, and she did not blink when her interviewer referred to people with “Jew nationality” and “Jew loyalties.” Indeed, she joined in with some blather about “monied interests.”
Think about it: This is the person the Green Party chose as its standard-bearer against Barack Obama.
As someone who hit the street gathering signatures on behalf of the Greens in the mid-’90s, I can’t tell you how much that disturbs me.
If you think that giving succor to conspiracy-mongering and Jew-hatred is the sole province of the right, you really ought to have a look at the fringe left. The key factor here, of course, is blind, bilious anti-Zionism.
Cynthia McKinney ran for President in 2008 on the Green Party ticket, supposedly as a more progressive alternative to Barack Obama. She received endorsements from such radical left heroes as Noam Chomsky, Mumia Abu-Jamal and the rap group dead prez. Her running mate was hip-hop activist Rosa Clemente, who, like McKinney, is supposedly a promoter of justice for people of color.
The irony is that McKinney is a fellow traveler of the racist right. Adam Holland has a detailed account of McKinney’s congenial appearance on “The Information Underground,” an unabashedly racist internet radio show. McKinney did not blink at her interviewer’s references to people with “Jew nationality” and “Jew loyalties.”
Holland has also covered McKinney’s recycling of the antisemitic theories of Matthias Chang and her ties to other far-right crackpots and bottom-feeders. (Hat tip: Harry’s Place.)
I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: People on the radical left take it for granted that President Obama needs to live up to the principles of their movement. It’s the other way around. The radical left needs to live up to Obama’s principles. And with the elevation of Cynthia McKinney as a standard-bearer of third-party politics, it is failing miserably.
An anonymous reader has suggested parodic verses along the lines of Caryl Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish Children:
don’t tell them we sent a salami to our boy in the army
no – don’t tell them that
don’t tell them we gave their trust fund to bernie
- no; don’t tell them that
I love it, and I hope this inspired work will see completion in the near future. See also Norm Geras’s more serious version.
I’m laughing to keep sane because I’ve just heard the podcast of Sunday’s Beyond the Pale broadcast, and it’s as I feared — Seven Jewish Children received rapt, fawning treatment from the show’s hosts, my erstwhile colleagues from Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ).
Under a post at the NYT blog The Lede some weeks ago, a commenter named Jumanne Langston scribbled: “Given the amount of Jewish money behind many of the non-profit arts organizations in New York City I doubt [Churchill's] piece will ever see the light of day this side of the Atlantic.” What a laugh. Seven Jewish Children is breaking out all over. It’s being staged by Ari Roth of Washington’s Theater J; Jeffrey Goldberg, a friend of Roth’s, has published their heated argument on the topic. Goldberg: “[Churchill is] trying to close a circle. ‘Once the Jews were oppressed, now they are the oppressors.’ That’s her story of Jewish people. Oh, what a tragedy. It’s easy, it’s smug, it’s fetid.”
I agree. To those who would accuse me of trying to stifle criticism of Israel, or shield the Israeli military from charges of war crimes: Nice try.
No, that’s not the issue. The issue is Churchill’s standard-issue anti-Zionist propaganda dressed up as literary exploration, deep thought. The Jews in Churchill’s play are moral idiots at best, brutes at worst, and the Palestinians are — well, absent from the narrative, except as passive victims, certainly not as militants in organizations that slaughter Israeli teenagers at dance clubs, or fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli towns and refer to the people in those towns, well within Israel’s ’67 borders, as “settlers.” Again, this does not excuse the Israeli occupation, or the brutality of Israel’s latest Gaza incursion, or the horrendous toll all of it has had on Palestinian civilians. But Churchill’s account, supposedly searing and complex, sidesteps every complexity. It does nothing but play to the Chomskyite left.
Progressive Jews, legitimately angry over Israeli human rights abuses, and dissenting from the pro-Israel line of mainstream Jewish organizations, are misguidedly lapping up Churchill’s work as a tonic and a pushback, now more than ever with an emerging Netanyahu-Lieberman government. But if the hosts of Beyond the Pale hear the play a certain way, as a devastating inquiry into injustice and communal denial, how does someone like our Jumanne Langston, quoted above on the subject of “Jewish money,” hear it? Why is it that a play like Churchill’s attracts a person of such views, and what might that say about the politics guiding the work? This is the kind of scrutiny that Seven Jewish Children deserves, and did not even remotely get, on Beyond the Pale.
Actor Una Ayo Osato speaks up toward the end of the broadcast, saying: “So often, Jews — I’m Jewish — I see Jewish people around me don’t want to talk about Israel, or the history, or look at what our role is as Jews — I don’t even live in Israel, but what my role in that occupation is. And I think that this play brings about discussions and conversations that need to be happening.” Striving to make the right moral calls in politics is a good thing. Wallowing in guilt is not so good; falling for Caryl Churchill’s guilt trip is the least good, and painful to listen to.
We mustn’t forget what Mahmoud Zahar of Hamas said during Operation Cast Lead: “The Zionists have legitimised the killing of their children by killing our children. They have legitimised the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people.” Maybe Ms. Osato wants to believe that he really means “Zionists.” But as for her role in the occupation — even though she doesn’t live in Israel — it would be instructive to hear Mr. Zahar’s view on the matter.
This Sunday, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), the New York-based activist group, will dedicate part of its weekly WBAI radio program Beyond the Pale to a live reading of Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children, to be followed by a discussion with the actors.
Novelist Howard Jacobson has denounced the play as antisemitic. Churchill has defended it. Jacobson’s case strikes me as compelling, and Churchill’s haughty dismissal of it as “the usual tactic” does not speak well of her. But I’ll be in a better position to discuss the play after I listen on Sunday.
I was active with JFREJ during the mid 1990s. For one year I served on the board of directors. I appeared on Beyond the Pale twice, moderating discussions on Jews and music. I know the show’s hosts, and I know they’re good people. But I’m sorry to see that JFREJ might give a Jewish seal of approval to what seems, at the very least, to be a dubious piece of agitprop. (I’ve read the script.)
Via a sidebar link, JFREJ prompts us to “Support the Free Gaza Movement,” which is backing George Galloway’s ridiculous Viva Palestina convoy. So it’s clear enough that JFREJ’s politics, at least on the Middle East, are no longer mine. In the ’90s, JFREJ took no official position on Israel, preferring to stick to a domestic political agenda. I will admit that my own position on Israel/Palestine 15 years ago was well to the left of what it is now.
That said, I’ve stated my opposition to the Gaza siege, and am now sick over the ascendancy of Bibi Netanyahu and even more sick over the appointment of the vicious Avigdor Lieberman as Israel’s foreign minister. Still, JFREJ’s alliance with a rather crude anti-Zionism hits me where I live — well, where I used to live.
An after-the-fact summary of Beyond the Pale’s March 1 program reads: “Waltz with Bashir, is it a soul searching effort to face up to Israeli responsibility for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Lebanon invasion? Or a propaganda coup for Israel?” Here we have an Israeli cultural product greeted with tough, withering skepticism from the start, as the very basis for discussion. So the question I’d pose is this: Will the hosts bring the same skepticism to their treatment of Seven Jewish Children? Or will JFREJ’s March 22 program be a propaganda coup for Caryl Churchill?
1. Torture is justified, or can be called something other than torture. Read Mark Danner’s essential NYT op-ed.
2. Antisemitism is “understandable.” So says British moviemaker Ken Loach. Does he believe that going out and harassing Muslims after a terror attack is “understandable”? I very much doubt it.
3. One-party dictatorships have rights; civilians who raise grievances against them do not. That is the implicit view of Charles Freeman, who has withdrawn his name as nominee to head Obama’s National Intelligence Council.
The contretemps over Freeman centered around his statements on Israel, which I won’t go into, except to say that denunciations of the Israel lobby ring a bit hollow from a paid representative of the Saudi lobby. No, far more chilling are Freeman’s statements on China. Freeman’s defenders maintain that people who raise the China issue do so opportunistically, having never protested Chinese human rights abuses before. For the record, Lerterland has denounced Chinese autocracy here, here and here, for starters.
The Peking Duck attempts to put the most favorable gloss on Freeman’s Tiananmen Square comments but can do so only by validating some highly dubious assumptions.
In Freeman’s words, China should have known better than to “tolerate escalating self-expression by exuberantly rebellious kids.” Escalating self-expression, my goodness. Cock those the machine guns. Freeman again: “No government, including our own, is or should be asked to be prepared to tolerate efforts to overthrow it and the constitutional order it administers.” So it’s as I said above: for Freeman, the Chinese one-party state has the right to preserve itself in power; the Chinese people have the right to shut up or be jailed and/or shot.
“I like the way [Freeman] challenges the dominant paradigm and his willingness to question sacred cows,” writes The Peking Duck. But Freeman’s thinking on China unfortunately is the dominant paradigm. And the sacred cow in question is nothing less than democracy itself, something Freeman openly mocks.
Yet who linked with a thumbs-up to the Peking Duck post? Andrew Sullivan, one of Freeman’s most ardent defenders, yet also the blogosphere’s go-to voice for opposing torture, a person who valiantly led the charge for accountability in government during the high Bush era and the recent election. Freeman’s contempt for human rights should set off alarms for Sullivan, yet he describes Freeman’s pronouncements ever so politely, as “a little too brutal for my taste.”
From another adulatory interview, this one by Martin Gibson in New Zealand’s Gisborne Herald (via Harry’s):
There have been numerous attempts to silence Mr Atzmon, including inevitable charges that he is anti-Semitic, although he is Jewish himself.
(Gibson fails to document one single such attempt to silence Atzmon.)
Here is Atzmon, from the same interview:
“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.”
“I think Jewish ideology is driving our planet into a catastrophe and we must stop.”
Gee, I can’t imagine why anyone would call Atzmon an antisemite.
Can you imagine a journalist for a liberal newspaper referring in neutral, even vaguely congratulatory terms to an artist’s “provocatively anti-gay rhetoric,” or “provocatively anti-black rhetoric,” or “provocatively anti-Arab rhetoric”?
Well, have a look at John Lewis’s profile of Gilad Atzmon for the Guardian, in which we read about the saxophonist’s “provocatively anti-Jewish rhetoric,” his “firebrand political outbursts,” his “furious attacks on Israel,” his “blunt anti-Zionism.” Sounds like laudable stuff, a challenge to the status quo, hooray!
Lewis, to be fair, does mention the fact that some Palestinian activists want nothing to do with Atzmon. But he refuses to see Atzmon’s message for what it is: hatemongering. And Lewis is hardly the only one.
To remind readers: Atzmon is an apologist for the Third Reich; he’s endorsed the antisemitic writings of Wagner. In this viciously racist screed, published just this day, Atzmon’s line of attack against Nick Cohen is to call him a Jew (Cohen is not Jewish). He also declares: “Without justifying any violent act whatsoever, the reasoning behind resentment towards Israel and Jews is rational.”
It’s become a truism on much of the left that Jews who make charges of antisemitism are simply blowing smoke on behalf of Israel. I think the opposite dynamic is evident: On much of the left, you can’t call an antisemite an antisemite. That would make you an evil Zionist.
The NY Times reports that Caryl Churchill’s short play “Seven Jewish Children” might be headed from London to New York, thanks to the New York Theater Workshop — all but assuring a repeat of the “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” controversy. I haven’t seen Churchill’s play, but apparently Howard Jacobson has:
Quite simply, in this wantonly inflammatory piece, the Jews drop in on somewhere they have no right to be, despise, conquer, and at last revel in the spilling of Palestinian blood. There is a one-line equivocal mention of a suicide bomber, and ditto of rockets, both compromised by the “Tell her” device, otherwise no Arab lifts a finger against a Jew. “Tell her about Jerusalem,” but no one tells her, for example, that the Jewish population of East Jersusalem was expelled at about the time our survivors turn up, that it was cleansed from the city and its sacred places desecrated or destroyed. Only in the crazed brains of Israelis can the motives for any of their subsequent actions be found.
Thus lie follows lie, omission follows omission, until, in the tenth and final minute, we have a stage populated by monsters who kill babies by design – “Tell her we killed the babies by mistake,” one says, meaning don’t tell her what we really did – who laugh when they see a dead Palestinian policeman (“Tell her they’re animals… Tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out”), who consider themselves the “chosen people”, and who admit to feeling happy when they see Palestinian “children covered in blood”.
Anti-Semitic? No, no. Just criticism of Israel.
[...]
Caryl Churchill will argue that her play is about Israelis not Jews, but once you venture on to “chosen people” territory – feeding all the ancient prejudice against that miscomprehended phrase – once you repeat in another form the medieval blood-libel of Jews rejoicing in the murder of little children, you have crossed over. This is the old stuff. Jew-hating pure and simple – Jew-hating which the haters don’t even recognise in themselves, so acculturated is it – the Jew-hating which many of us have always suspected was the only explanation for the disgust that contorts and disfigures faces when the mere word Israel crops up in conversation. So for that we are grateful. At last that mystery is solved and that lie finally nailed. No, you don’t have to be an anti-Semite to criticise Israel. It just so happens that you are.
The NYT’s Lede blog carries a post about the already brewing controversy. In the comments, one Jumanne Langston writes: “Given the amount of Jewish money behind many of the non-profit arts organizations in New York City I doubt this piece will ever see the light of day this side of the Atlantic.” A sentence that any neo-Nazi or Klansman could have written.
Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial, infinitely more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney sizes. Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians. Thus, here and there throughout the world this year, Holocaust day was temporarily annulled or boycotted on account of Gaza, dead Jews being found guilty of the sins of live ones.]
— From the NY Times, it has come to light that the hunted Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim was living under an alias in Cairo until his death in 1992. The piece of scum died slowly and painfully, thank goodness. He was “accused of performing operations on prisoners without anesthesia; removing organs from healthy inmates, then leaving them to die on the operating table; injecting poison, including gasoline, into the hearts of others; and taking the skull of at least one victim as a souvenir.” Also, from 1946 testimony by Mauthausen inmate Joseph Kohl: “Dr. Heim had a habit of looking into inmates’ mouths to determine whether their teeth were in impeccable condition. If this were the case, he would kill the prisoner with an injection, cut his head off, leave it to cook in the crematorium for hours, until all the flesh was stripped from the naked skull, and prepare the skull for himself and his friends as a decoration for their desks.”
To those who routinely equate Israel with Nazi Germany, not just on the left but also the fringe right (e.g., Pat Buchanan): It is true that terrible things have befallen the Palestinians of Gaza in recent weeks, but nothing remotely resembling the above.
What’s amazing is that despite Heim’s fastidious and successful effort to evade capture, he was such a virulent racist that he just couldn’t keep silent. In his own name he wrote a letter in 1979 (perhaps unsent) blasting “the Jewish, Khazar Zionist lobby of the U.S.” Under a pseudonym he wrote a crackpot paper on the Jewish race that he proudly showed his new Egyptian friends and even planned to send around to various world leaders.
— Sheikh Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi, the Islamist cleric famously deported from Britain, yet embraced by Ken Livingstone and others on the radical left for his “criticism of Israel,” said this the other day: “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.” Yes, putting the Jews in their place is one way to describe what Aribert Heim did, putting the cooked skulls of Jews on his desk. This is what Qaradhawi, a fascist and neo-Nazi cut from the same cloth, is applauding.
Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey has lashed out at Israel’s Shimon Peres on a panel at Davos. During his tirade, Erdogan cited the supposedly authoritative views of Gilad Atzmon, a UK-based jazz saxophonist and political loudmouth, whose foul antisemitic writings I’ve noted on this blog many times. And to think that Turkey was jealously guarding its role as a possible mediator of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Goodbye to all that.
The very smart Nicholas Kristof blogs about it here, but clearly doesn’t know who Atzmon is. He missed Erdogan’s reference, and thereby missed the real import of this incident — the growing normalization of antisemitism in discourse around Israel-Palestine.
The standard line on the radical left is, “How dare Jewish organizations talk about antisemitism! They’re trying to silence criticism of Israel!” This view is well-represented by the commenters on Kristof’s blog, who attack Kristof for calling Erdogan “childish” (he’s that and worse), who praise Erdogan’s putative bravery, and jump all over the moderator David Ignatius for “disrespecting” a head of state. (I see, so now journalists are supposed to be deferential to heads of state.)
Incidentally, Erdogan heads the government of a republic that continues to deny the Armenian genocide, that has brutally suppressed its Kurdish population both legislatively and with bullets and bombs, that has recently initiated aerial bombardment of rebel positions in Iraqi Kurdistan, that has occupied northern Cyprus for over 30 years, and so on. Glass houses, Mr. Erdogan. You had little standing to attack Israel even before you opened your mouth.
[Update: Initial news reports are also missing the Atzmon reference, thus missing the real story altogether.]
[Update: My good friend, the experienced Turkey-watcher Yigal Schleifer, has posted on this matter as well.]
