DISCUSSION OF ANTISEMITISM
israelshamir.net
By Israel Shamir
At the height of the Great Cultural Revolution, the Chinese had the temerity to embark upon a monumental, nature-changing enterprise: they decided to exterminate ALL flies. The spirit of their solidarity was so powerful that they succeeded. For a while, they enjoyed peaceful summer evenings without this great annoyance. No buzz, no fuss: life was great without flies!
But soon they discovered that mighty eagles weren't seen anymore in the welkin. Big noble salmon much favoured by connoisseurs died out in their rivers. And soon the opulent palace of Chinese nature began to collapse as a house of cards, for it had thrived on flies as much as on eagles. Every species is a precious cornerstone of the world. Remove it, and the consequences are unpredictable. The Chinese understood this, laid off the remaining flies, and soon they had salmon again for dinner and eagles to compare their helmsmen with.
This story comes to my mind when I note the vehemence of good and progressive folk confronted by ethically doubtful tendencies. One may doubt the inherent goodness of Traditionalists, Nationalists and Nativists. But should one exclude them from discourse? People often react to any reference to David Duke or Roger Garaudy or Abbe Pierre as our grandmothers to obscenity. This appears to be the good and correct approach to avoid causing undeserved distress to Jews. However, the equally extreme opinions of Jewish supremacists are being spread freely by the mainstream media. Thus, slanted discourse comes into being.
The problem is not only (not even mainly) in deflating the sacred freedom of speech. There are worse consequences. Joe Public, a silent participant in the discourse, is a sane, normal and good person. He does not choose one of the proposed extremes but seeks the middle ground on their spectrum. We all do it instinctively: when presented with differing tendencies, we try to capture the middle ground between the extremes. Good people slant discourse and pervert our judgment.
For instance, the media debates whether Iraq should be bombed right away, frisked first or left in peace. A good sane man, Joe Public, takes the middle ground and opts for the frisking. Our position - 'stay out of Iraq for good and even forget its name' - loses, for it is an extreme opinion, much like the 'bombing' one, and not the middle ground. In order for us to occupy the middle ground, discourse should include opinions as extreme as those of Muraviec and Perle, but together with their polar opposites.
It is very possible that these opinions will be as unpleasant to us as those of the Jewish chicken-hawks in the Pentagon. As an Israeli citizen, I wouldn't enjoy an appeal to nuke Israel or to remove all Jews from positions of influence in the US. However, these unpleasant opinions would provide a much needed balance to the present assault of philo-Semitism. Joe Public, while exposed to these opinions, will take his middle ground. This good man will say: 'Oh no, we should not nuke Israel! Maybe trade embargo and naval blockade will be sufficient'. Or: 'Oh no, not our wonderful Jewish mayor, but Perle and Wolfovitz can go'.
An extreme position will usually lose. The adversary knows it and ensures the presence of his own extreme voices in discourse. David Duke is forever barred from participation in discourse for he was a KKK leader, but Yossi Halevy, an ex-member of the Kahane Band (surely racist) writes for the New Republic, and torture-promoting Dershowitz writes for the NY Times. In order to ensure they are not extremists, they bring in Nathan Lewin and Amitai Etzioni. Etzioni is a tenured professor at George Washington University and a friend of Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal and Abe Foxman. Lewin is a candidate for a federal judgeship. They call for the execution of the family members of suicide bombers.[1] After their prime appearance, Dershowitz comes in as a moderate and says, 'the same level of deterrence could be achieved by levelling the villages of suicide bombers after the residents are given a chance to evacuate', and the extremist Lewin disparagingly likens this to "using aspirin to treat brain cancer"). David Duke never reached this level of bestiality, but he is excluded from discourse while they are not.
Consider Israel. The full spectre of opinions in our country stretches from Jihad extremists who would like to expel all Jews to Marzel extremists who would like to expel and kill all Gentiles. In this spectre, my own position is but the middle ground: no expulsions, no killings, but peaceful life together for all the communities. In normal discourse, my position would win, and united free Palestine would come into being. But the discourse is slanted: at first, extreme Arab opinions are blocked. Then, moderate Arabs find themselves 'extremists' and are effectively blocked. Eventually the softest non-Jews - Ahmad Tibi and Azmi Bashara - take the place of extremists and are excluded from discourse.
The exclusion of one extreme causes the drift of the middle ground when the other extreme is not in place to plug it. Thus, instead of being in the dead middle, the supporters of equality for Jews and Palestinians find themselves at an extreme end. As extremists they are excluded from discourse. Though 30% of Israelis and Palestinians support the idea of one state with equal rights for all, according to a pre-Intifada survey by Haaretz, their opinion gets zero representation in discourse.
On the other hand, leaders of Jewish terrorist organisations regularly write for Haaretz. Haggai Segal, who was sentenced (and later pardoned by the President) for the murder of Palestinians, is a frequent writer on its liberal pages. But the opposite opinion, that of Hamas and Jihad, is carefully excluded even from the Palestinian mainstream. Thus, the drift of the middle ground continues unchecked. Likud politicians are not extremists: they ensure they are not by including extremists of their kind in discourse. Ariel Sharon is not an extremist, for he promotes his right-wing opposition of Liberman and Landau. Now, these thugs do not want to be extremists either, and they promote a new voice, Baruch Marzel, a man-eating ogre from the Jewish settlement of Hebron. Next to Marzel, Jack the Ripper is a soft guy. Marzel's people have a tribune in the liberal Haaretz; they are included in discourse.
Their Western counterparts, the Jewish chauvinists Conrad Black and Mort Zuckerman, are active participants in discourse by virtue of their ownership of a large chunk of media. But their mirror opposites, Horst Mahler or Nick Griffin, are excluded. Without these extremists, the moderate voices of the anti-globalisation and anti-Zionism are excluded as well, for they find themselves on the extreme. The founding fathers of American democracy were ready to die for the right of their opponents to express their opinion publicly, for they intuited that in order to promote one's ideas one should ensure the presence of more radical voices on the spectrum.
In balanced Palestinian discourse, the opinions of Hammas and Jihad should be presented. We can productively argue about suicide bombings only if the voices of their fervent supporters are included and considered. Otherwise, a dynamite-loaded belt is their only way to express their opinion. What is worse, without them Edward Said is glossed as an extremist.
Germany is a classic case of the 'no flies, no eagles' policy. After its defeat in WWII, Nationalist opinion was excluded from discourse. Now, the meek spirit of Germany is crushed. Germany spends every extra pfennig it has on paying Zionists and arming the Jewish state. It imports every willing descendent of Jews from the former Soviet Union and allows the local Jewish leaders to brainwash these disoriented refugees into hatred of Germany and separatism. I have met these unfortunate people who arrived in Germany with a very weak Jewish identity, if any at all. Their children are pushed into separate Jewish schools protected by hard men with machineguns and paid for by the German taxpayer; they are taught that Israel is their home, while Germany is a hated place they should keep a wary eye on. It creates many psychological problems for the children who seek solidarity and identification with the country they live in but are brainwashed into rejecting it.
I wrote about the recent visit of Israeli President Katzav to Berlin: "the German Left betrayed its duty to demonstrate against the supplying of the apartheid state with nuclear-bearing submarines". My friend Ingrid K wrote from Berlin:
I did not want to stand with very few others, lost between the police-protected Neo-Nazis and the stupid fraction of anti-anti-Semites feeling eternal warm-solidarity-with-Israel even as a third and more desperate party a half-mile away chanted "weapons-for-Israel". In Germany, the Left has come to a sad level of powerlessness and disorientation. Its disorientation culminates in the growing praise of a group of 'Left' political writers (part of them connected with New Kach!) fighting the upcoming 'new anti-Semitism' in Germany. Young people who are engaged in anti-racism or against neo-Nazism are feverishly obsessed with discovering the hidden anti-Semitism in the Left and in their own souls. (It's like we Germans stop thinking when it comes to anti-Semitism.)
Haaretz published[2] an extensive interview with a German 'left-wing journalist, human rights activist and intellectual', Thomas von der Osten-Sacken, 'one of Germany's leading authorities on human rights in Iraq'. This 'left-winger' calls for war on Iraq, pledges his support for the Jewish state, for Globalisation, for America and for banks, while describing himself 'a Marxist'. Such freaks are a direct result of the slanted discourse that excludes the German nationalist tradition. If this tradition were included, Hans Publik would find his middle ground between calls to expel Jewish immigrants and calls to give them their present exalted status; he would integrate them into society and firmly stop the attempts of Jewish leaders to promote their alienation and create a fifth column inside Germany. Ingrid K concludes her report from the German scene:
To stand up for Palestinians is a kind of courage test and risks one's being cited an anti-Semite. Sad but true, the little political group I'm working with feared to post the ingenious essay of Michael Neumann 'What is Anti-Semitism' (that I translated into German) on our Homepage. No courage. But one must not give up.
Ingrid still does not understand the reason for German meekness. Otherwise she would call for true freedom of speech and full participation in discourse for the people she hates, the German extreme anti-Globalist right. The sheer presence of Horst Mahler in discourse would make the publication of my friend Michael Neumann's well-thought piece the non-controversial intellectual exercise it was meant to be.
In France, Roger Garaudy is excluded and ostracised. The French sainted Abbe Pierre, who dared to express some modicum of support for the old ex-Communist, found himself excluded as well. For sure, the opinions of Garaudy are not to everybody's liking; but his absence from discourse has turned very moderate people and friends of Palestine into extremists.
The post-WWII exclusion of the Nationalist Right was done for the best of reasons. But that was the case with the flies in China. The Jews always had strong influence in Europe, and in my opinion, not always a beneficial one. Still, before the war their influence was counteracted by the Church, by the non-elitist Left, by the Nationalist Right. The 'no flies' policy turned this strong Jewish influence into a decisive one, and the edifice of European and North American civilisation began to crumble like a house of cards. Globalisation, neo-liberalism and the withering of European culture are the results of lack of balance.
Christianity is one of the victims of bias, and it is the cornerstone of European art. A recent French film, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, demonises the Christian Church without much subtlety: a half-human monster wears a cross that flashes at us relentlessly, the gang of murderers is led by a priest, its lair is full of crosses and crucifixes, church devotees perpetrate a long chain of ritual murders of innocent women and children in order to bring France back to the faith.
A mirror image of the movie would substitute a Rabbi for the Priest, make the monster brandish the Star of David and have a bunch of observant Jews commit ritual murder for their nefarious needs. For sure, such a movie would never be screened in France after 1945. (Although this sounds similar to the book on ritual murders published in Syria to a chorus of universal condemnation.) But the French movie producer Samuel Hadad was not condemned or criticised. The French audience is so used to attacks on Church and Christianity that they did not even consciously notice its not-so-subliminal message; it sank directly into their unconscious.
This film did not horrify the French, as at the same time they were treated to The Body, produced by Rudy Cohen. My reader and friend Francois B. describes it:
The Israeli soldiers are like the cowboys, brave and immortal, and the Palestinian terrorists like the Indians, stupid and cowardly. The villain of the movie is a Catholic very high up in the Vatican hierarchy, like No2 or No3 after the Pope, and the very honest, pretty and unreligious Israeli archaeologist calls the Holy Shroud from Torino 'a vulgar fake'.
This film did not horrify the French either, as they are used to films like Amen, which attacked the late Pope Pius XXII. Suggestively, the Cross on the movie's posters turns into a Nazi swastika.
'One evil thing does not justify another one', good people usually say. 'Jewish racists are bad, and anti-Christian films are perhaps unpleasant, but it does not mean we should welcome anti-Jewish racists and support anti-Jewish movies. We shall speak against them all.'
The problem is, good people are quite unable to stop the anti-Christian and pro-Jewish tendency, for the Jewish supremacists today control a major chunk of world media and wealth. Besides, the tendencies are unstoppable: they can only be counterbalanced. What good people can do is stop the opposite thought, and they do that very efficiently. In my essays I have frequently noted the advantages of Christian and Muslim universalism over Jewish particularism. The editor of La Fabrique, the good Jewish leftist Eric Hazan, refused to publish my essays, for "despite their literary qualities they include some ideas which are difficult to promote in France, namely, the superiority of Christianity". I am sure Eric Hazan would not publish a treatise on the vast superiority of Judaism either, but it would be printed in millions of copies by the publishers of Goldhagen and Oriana Falacci. This has the look of job-sharing: Jewish supremacists promote Jewish supremacy, while the Leftists' job is just to stop the balancing attempt by appealing to universal values. Thus good people participate in slanting discourse as much as bad ones.
The attempts to find anti-Semitism in the gentle writings of the friends of Palestine are enabled by the lack of real and explicit enemies of the Jewish paradigm in all its aspects from Soros to Sharon, from Judas to Maimonides, from Freud to Popper, from Podhoretz to Gusinsky, from Lubawitscher Rebbe to Sulzberger. Such people exist but their voices are silenced. We do not have to love them, or agree with them, but we need them as active participants in our discourse, as otherwise the middle ground of the Western world will remain somewhere between Peres and Soros.
For as long as Richard Perle sits in the Pentagon, Elie Wiesel brandishes his Nobel Prize, Mort Zuckerman owns the USA Today, Gusinsky bosses over Russian TV, Soros commands multi-billions of funds and Dershowitz teaches at Harvard, we need the voices of Duke, Sobran, Raimondo, Buchanan, Mahler, Griffin and of other anti-bourgeois nationalists. If we accept their exclusion from discourse, Jewish bigotry will be tolerated while anti-Jewish bigotry is removed. Then, the middle ground for Joe Public will be 'a little bit of Jewish bigotry', or 'Zionism lite', in the words of my dear friend Bob Green.
Millennia before the Great Cultural Revolution, the Chinese knew the secret of harmony: the non-Manichean balance of opposing ideas, the principles of Ying and Yang. Properly balanced, Jewish ideas can be beneficial: anti-Christian zeal would limit Church excesses, just as materialism and egoism can keep the feet of Man on the ground while his head is in heaven, feminism can balance male chauvinism, and the sex obsession of Freud can balance the asceticism of spiritualists. Balanced, even Zionism will shrink to the humane proportions of Jewish love for Palestine. But balanced it should be |
