Michelle Goldberg manages to blame the Right for anti-Semitism

May 1, 2022 • 1:17 pm

The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, an excellent writer who describes herself as a secular Jew, is in a bind. She clearly has sympathy for the victims of anti-Semitism, but she’s also a Leftist, or at least a liberal. Since anti-Semitism in America is clearly more associated with the mainstream Left than the mainstream Right (I’m leaving out nutcases and white supremacists here), this makes it impossible for her to indict  (or even mention) her own part of the political spectrum when discussing anti-Semitism. Get a load of Goldberg’s tap-dancing in her latest column:

Here’s where she pins the blame on people.  Nothing is mentioned about the Left, but plenty about the Right. Bolding is mine:

The Anti-Defamation League this week released a report showing that in 2021, there were more antisemitic incidents in America than in any other year since the group started keeping track over 40 years ago. “We’ve never seen data like this before, ever,” Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the A.D.L., told me.

. . . Conservatives might be tempted to blame strident anti-Zionism, and that’s part of the story. Both the A.D.L. and researchers in Tel Aviv use a definition of antisemitism that can conflate it with anti-Zionism, concepts I think should be kept separate. It’s clearly antisemitic, however, when Israel’s enemies blame all Jews for the country’s treatment of the Palestinians. According to the A.D.L. report, of 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year, 345 involved references to Israel and Zionism. The examples detailed in the report aren’t ambiguous; they include Palestinian supporters pushing a man in a yarmulke into a glass window and yelling, “Die, Zionist!”

It’s a mistake to associate all of these 345 incidents with the left; 68 were “propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups to foment anti-Israel and antisemitic beliefs.” More broadly, right-wing extremism was behind 484 of all antisemitic incidents in the U.S. last year, 18 percent of the total.

Well, Ms. Goldberg, how many anti-semitic incidents were associated with the Left? She leaves us with no answer. Or rather, her answer is simply to ignore increasing anti-Semitism associated with the “progressive” Left, and natter on instead about Republicans, Trump, QAnon, and, in the end, on the fact that we’re a “sick society” (the election of Trump proves that) and that, combined with the pandemic, made people turn to social media. From there things went haywire, and—voilà—hatred of Jews escalated:

The radicalization of the Republican Party has helped white nationalism flourish. Antisemitism started increasing in 2015, when Donald Trump came on the political scene and electrified the far right, then spiked during his administration. Trump is now gone, but the Republican Party has grown more hospitable than ever to cranks and zealots. Two Republican members of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, spoke at a white nationalist conference this year.

The antisemitism of the QAnon conspiracy theory — always latent in its fantasies of elite blood-drinking cabals — has also become much more open. As the A.D.L. has reported, one of the most popular QAnon influencers, GhostEzra, “is an open Nazi who praises Hitler, admires the Third Reich and decries the supposedly treacherous nature of Jews.”

But for a huge number of antisemitic episodes, the political motive, if there is one, is illegible. According to Greenblatt, more than 80 percent of the incidents documented in the A.D.L. report “cannot be attributed to any specific extremist group or movement.” Much of the threat to Jews in America seems to come less from a distinct, particular ideology than from the broader cultural breakdown that’s leading to an increase in all manner of antisocial behavior, including shootings, airplane altercations, reckless driving and fights in school.

. . .So for Durkheim, wrote Goldberg, “antisemitism serves as a useful index of the health of society.”

Our society, clearly, is not healthy. It was unwell before the pandemic — a country that could elect Donald Trump is sick by definition — and is in much worse shape now. The pandemic and the accompanying changes in the way people live, work and go to school were wrenching and destabilizing. Isolated people turned to social media, which, as the Tel Aviv University report pointed out, abounded with conspiracy theories blaming Jews for spreading the coronavirus so they could profit from vaccines.

These conspiracy theories helped erode people’s faith in their leaders, which was already weakened by governments’ inevitable difficulties balancing shifting public health guidance with people’s need for autonomy and pleasure. Hate spread even as the unspoken restraints governing people’s conduct fell away. Besides being a crisis, escalating antisemitism is a warning: Things are falling apart.

Where, Ms. Goldberg, is the palpable fact that the progressive and vocal moiety of the Left has decided to see Palestinians as “people of color” and Jews as “white adjacent” colonist and oppressors? Yes, things are falling apart, and Jews are having a rougher time of it now than any time I remember, but it doesn’t help when Goldberg spends her whole time tiptoeing around the elephant in the room: her own side.

Of course conservatives and nativists play a role; and of course Jews are traditional scapegoats. But Ms. Goldberg seems to have forgotten the beam in her own eye—or her own party. This column is biased, superficial, and woefully incomplete.

37 thoughts on “Michelle Goldberg manages to blame the Right for anti-Semitism

  1. This is a sharp essay by Caitlin Flanigan….It’s paywalled in The Atlantic, where it was first published. It’s about Alice Walker’s relentless and rank anti-semitism and how a New Yorker article from this week essentially excuses and mostly ignores it.

    But there is also this version that looks like it was copied….but has some unusual phrasing, so maybe pasted in somehow?

    https://rulegrabs.com/index.php/2022/04/29/what-the-new-yorker-didnt-say-about-alice-walkers-anti-semitism/

  2. “It’s clearly antisemitic, however, when Israel’s enemies blame all Jews for the country’s treatment of the Palestinians.” Enemies like Illan Omar for example?

  3. Ms. Goldberg needs to spend some time at college campuses.
    She should start at Tufts and go from there.

  4. I sent PCC a link to The Atlantic article a couple of days ago; maybe he’ll have a chance to read and comment in the near future (as he’s told us how busy his days are at present). I doubt I’ll check this link (from dd) to see if anything was changed. I find it worthwhile to subscribe to The Atlantic, as it seems to present some wider points of view.

  5. Surely the problem of where on the political spectrum antisemitism comes from and has increased recently must have been studied.

    1. I think the problem is that there’s no obvious reason why anti-semitism – in fact any kind of bigotry – necessarily comes from one part of the political spectrum.

  6. I have to agree with her in that outright hate crimes and good old-fashioned Nazi-esque, Jews-run-the-world antisemitism are almost exclusively the domain of the right. The left’s is mostly directed at “Zionism” and claims of Palestinian oppression, with the worst implicitly questioning Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. That’s a simplification, but seems to be a useful generalization.

    1. I have to be careful about going off hunches, but my gut tells me you’re right. I feel like most anti-semitism on the left is functional, rather than intentional. That is, lefties are advocating things like BDS that have the function of being anti-semitic, but if you asked them many would honestly believe they don’t have any problem with Jews. This likely doesn’t apply to the leadership of these movements (e.g. Omar, Sarsour, et al), but I believe most progressives who bridle at “Israel’s apartheid” simply haven’t thought through the implications of what they support. Most of them simply go along with things like BDS because it seems like the thing well-meaning progressives ought to do.

      The hardcore anti-semitism that prompts vandalism, violence, and slurs/harassment often requires religion, and with the left increasingly secular it seems much more likely that this would come from the Christian right and Muslim communities.

      1. So when Palestinians murder Jews in the name of anti-Zionism, the crickets from the Left (to avoid antagonizing the allies) is only “functional” anti-Semitism and the dead Jews shouldn’t take it personally as Jews or as human beings. Progressive Leftists must be idiots, or they fancy themselves to be indoctrinated soldiers at war, to go along with a thing like that.

        I believe this functional anti-Semitism is tribal. If your tribe, which you rely on for shelter, companionship and sexual mating, subscribes as do most tribes to a gamut of not fully coherent or internally consistent beliefs, you have to be all in…or be cast out to find a new tribe if one of those beliefs is a deal-breaker. But it rarely is. If “Death to Israel!” (or maybe just, “Divest!”) is one of the slogans you have to shout, along with “Defund the police!” and “Cancel student debt!” and “Transwomen are women!”, you can regard the anti-Israel slogan as just the membership dues to belong to the tribe. Your core progressive beliefs are still safe. And deep down you might be just as happy to have your own vague primal anti-Jewish animus validated by those close to you.

        If the light in your heart is a Black Muslim anti-Semite with charisma, beautiful eyes and a handsome physique, then you will be anti-Semitic too. Why you would pick these people to be your allies, instead of some other tribe, is a deeper question that goes to hidden agendas but the main driver of your attitudes toward Jews will be the tribal proximity of the opinion leaders you are trying to ingratiate yourself with.

        (Note: “You” and “your” don’t refer to you Dean Reimer but to the general indefinite “you-all”. British people might say “one” but I have never been able to pull this off without sounding stilted. I’m not meaning to impute my thoughts to your head.)

      2. So when Palestinians murder Jews in the name of anti-Zionism, the crickets from the Left (to avoid antagonizing the allies) is only “functional” anti-Semitism and the dead Jews shouldn’t take it personally as Jews or as human beings. Progressive Leftists must be idiots, or they fancy themselves to be indoctrinated soldiers at war, to go along with a thing like that.

        I believe this functional anti-Semitism is tribal. If your tribe, which you rely on for shelter, companionship and sexual mating, subscribes to a gamut of not fully coherent or internally consistent beliefs, you have to be all in…or be cast out to find a new tribe if one of those beliefs is a deal-breaker. But it rarely is. If “Death to Israel!” (or maybe just, “Divest!”) is one of the slogans you have to shout, along with “Defund the police!” and “Cancel student debt!” and “Transwomen are women!”, you can regard the anti-Israel slogan as just the membership dues to belong to the tribe. Your core progressive beliefs are still safe. And deep down you might be just as happy to have your own vague primal anti-Jewish animus validated by those close to you.

        If the light in your heart is a Black Muslim anti-Semite with charisma, beautiful eyes and a handsome physique, then you will be anti-Semitic too. Why you would pick these people to be your allies, instead of some other tribe, is a deeper question that goes to hidden agendas but the main driver of your attitudes toward Jews will be the tribal proximity of the opinion leaders you are trying to ingratiate yourself with.

        (Note: “You” and “your” don’t refer to you Dean Reimer but to the general indefinite “you-all”. British people might say “one” but I have never been able to pull this off without sounding stilted. I’m not meaning to impute my thoughts to your head.)

        1. I don’t know why this post appeared twice, several hours apart. I didn’t mean for it to.

    2. To that I’ll add that I’ve encountered people who in all seriousness have told me that simply putting the word ‘Israeli’ in front of the word ‘Jew’ instantly transforms any statement, no matter how vile into a ‘legitimate statement in support of the Palestinian people’.

    3. I had the impression that many violent hate crimes (in contrast to online antisemitic rants) in the US come from black people randomly attacking orthodox Jews in the New York/New Jersey area, motivated by classic antisemitism mixed with motives of turf conflict in neighborhoods where both groups live together. I’d call that “from the right”, as the group identification motivation is paramount here, but the perpetrators are not Republican voters and belong to groups the Democratic part panders to.
      Back here in Germany, there is a stark contrast between police data (which says the large majority of antisemitic hate crimes come from the right and from “indigenous” Germans) and data from polls/surveys of Jews, who report that a majority of antisemitic incidents they personally experience come from people with an ME background. The contrast is probably due to the fact that most German Jews live in high-immigrant cities, where plurality of young people has an ME background, so the actual antisemitism experienced by most Jew comes from them, while most of the far right indigenous German antisemitic incidents occur in areas where few Jews live and most of these incidents aren’t witnessed by Jews.
      In my high immigrant city neighborhood, “Free Falastine” graffiti and the like abound.

  7. Trump’s 2016 win wasn’t a symptom of the U.S. being a sick country; it was a symptom of the Electoral College being a sick system for choosing a POTUS.

    And I agree that Ms. Goldberg’s failure to shine some light on the Left’s anti-Semitism is pathetic. I wonder what her readers’ comments (assuming people can write them) have to say about this bias.

  8. Your flippant (to my ears) statement that anti-Semitism is “clearly” from the left, not the right, leaves me feeling very stupid, or at least out of touch. Although Jewish friends sometimes accuse me of anti-Semitism when I complain about policies of the country of Israel (NOT of Jews – I don’t care about their ethnicity or religion), it strikes me as knee-jerk nonsense.
    I’ve never seen what I consider anti-Semitism on the left. But I see plenty of it on the right. Nazis are ultra-right by definition. Nixon is on tape complaining about Jews (to Henry Kissinger!). Trump clearly hates Jews (and apparently doesn’t consider his eldest daughter and her husband “real” Jews).
    Can someone educate this poor hillbilly, please?

    1. Trump clearly hates Jews

      Is this really the case? My impression is that Trump hates everybody whose life is not dedicated to making him richer or stroking his ego. It’s not clear to me at all that he especially hates Jews.

  9. Not knowing Ms. Goldberg, it is hard to tell exactly what motivates her to write such things.

    Uncharitably, she might be functioning as a Yevsektsiya of sorts.

    Charitably, she might be unable or unwilling to accept the fact that the way she perceives her political allies and opponents does not conform to present reality.

  10. Goldberg isn’t a serious person, really. She’s freshman creative writing 101 at a mediocre school, if that.
    And again, like Bari Weiss, don’t trust or bother with people who “lead” with their race/religion. They’re usually intellectual midgets with little to say.
    Left wing anti-Semitism is a much bigger problem in this country than right wing, or mythical “White Supremacy.”
    A plug: my column this week is ALL about leftist anti-Semitism.
    I’ll post the link here when it comes out soon. Stay tuned my friends. 🙂
    D.A.
    NYC

  11. The below linked article discusses a YouGov poll published in 2021. The finding of the poll is this: “… the survey data as a whole shows that left-wing anti-Semitism is much less prevalent overall than anti-Semitism on the right.”

    Other conclusions are:

    “Less than 5% of very liberal young adults believe Jews have too much power, versus approximately 35% of very conservative young adults. Similarly, around 9% of very liberal young adults said Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US, as opposed to about 36% of very conservative young adults. In general, the more conservative one was, the more likely they were to hold an anti-Semitic belief.”

    And:

    “Younger conservatives were also more likely than older conservatives to believe anti-Semitic stereotypes. Younger conservatives were twice as likely to say Jews have too much power and to support boycotting Jewish-owned businesses in protest of Israel. They are also more likely to say American Jews are more loyal to Israel.”

    These conclusions seem to indicate that the rise of anti-Semitism in the U.S. is due to a rise in these attitudes among young conservatives. This is not good.

    Another interesting find of the survey is this:

    “The survey also found that across the political spectrum, Black and Latino respondents were more likely to believe anti-Semitic stereotypes than white respondents. About 15% of self-identified white liberals believed in one of the three stereotypes included in the survey, compared to 26% of Latino liberals and 42% of Black liberals. Likewise, about 30% of white conservatives believed one of the stereotypes, compared to more than 50% of Black or Latino conservatives.”

    Thus, it seems that anti-Semitism among Blacks is a real problem, but is not based on political ideology. In terms of political ideology, anti-Semitism is much more prevalent among conservatives than liberals.

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-stats-of-us-anti-semitism-a-new-survey-has-some-clear-and-dismal-data/

    1. Perhaps these attitudes are the correct data, in which case my generalization about such attitudes is wrong, but I want to know why Goldberg leaves out a. all mention of the Left, b. no data on anti-Semitic hate crimes on the Left when she gives it for the Right.

    2. There are at least two problems with studies in which respondents are asked whether they agree or disagree with classical anti-Semitic stereotypes. First is the viral nature of antisemitism, second is that many people (especially better educated and on the left) know which answers are “wrong”.
      Most of today’s antisemites on the left know that they should not agree with a statement that “Jews have too much power” or “too much money” or that “Jews control media”. But they also know that “Zionist have too much power” etc. are OK. They also know that Israel is a “racist, settler-colonial, genocidal state of apartheid”.
      So what we have today is a mutated antisemitism – “Israel as a hated collective Jew” – and more sophisticated respondents on the left who know they can’t be antisemites because their fight against “Zionists” and “Israel” has powerful Jewish allies: Chomsky, Finkelstein, Pappe, Sand, Beinart and many more.
      https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/are-educated-people-more-anti-semitic-jay-greene-albert-cheng-ian-kingsbury
      This study was repeated recently with the same results: https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2022/04/new-study-higher-education-is.html

      1. Finkelstein is a bit of an odd character, and his version of a “Holocaust Industry” is far out there. He is a Jew born to holocaust-surviving parents, who argues for a solution with Israel. Is that really an “anti-semite”? That sounds not right. He totally demolished the fraud Alan Dershowitz, but Dershowitz was more influential through his Harvard connections (it’s the same Dershowitz who brought Steven Pinker into hot water, as readers might remember, for giving advice for Dershowitz-friend Jeffrey Epstein). We’ll see where this leads to. As you can tell from his manners (vs Dershowitz), Finkelstein is more a contrarian perhaps, or a nitpicking pedant, not an anti-semite.

        I do not know everything he said, or wrote, but in a speech [1] that appeared to summarise his position, he argued that Israel should follow through with the agreements it gave, and in the next step would have to figure out how to do it in a way that works for everyone in practice, having noted the pitfalls and conundrums before. That doesn’t sound like an extremist position.

        Chomky is another Jewish thinker. He’s a hero of mine, and yet I know where I disagree with him. In everything I read or seen, he argues for a two-state solution, but says it did not come to pass because the US and Israel blocked it, since expansion and settlement works out for them, to the impotent protest of the UN and the international community. That appears to be the case. The US and Israel are in fact internationally isolated on this matter, as the voting records show. You can check who vetoed and blocked solutions, snd why it somehow never worked out. The records are clear.

        Chomsky always cites his data. I doubled checked a few claims, and they were correct. To the US, Israel is the glove for its bloated military-industrial complex. This is a main hand in US politics (740BN dollars, constantly increasing). The US needs Israel and it’s bbf arab friend Saudi Arabia, noted bastion of human rights, democracy and freedom of the press, in the region to control vital resources, and to sell off its weapons.

        Neither Finkelstein, nor Chomsky question the existence of Israel, both clearly argue politics. On the contrary, both say how a Jewish state might peacefully coexist in the region. Both of them are in the position, through their work, and maybe because they are jewish to have an interest in the subject. In sum, they aren’t random people who don’t care about politics at all and yet have a strange obsession with Israel, which is said to give away their true anti-semitic thoughts. They are jewish thinkers with an area of expertise and interest, who are well informed and aren’t afraid to show their data. This is not the case, generally, with critics who behave like Creationists. They have no data, only smears and quote-mines.

        Lastly, I note that the US far-right does have a large pro Israel wing, which extends to similar New Right movements in Europe, like the quasi-fascist party AFD in Germany. That’s the Bari Weiss corner again. The kind of people who try to rebrand the very far right as concerned about the future of the white race the “judeo-christian” West (contra arab hordes, and the “cuck” soy-latte-drinking manbabies, and “neo-marxist” pink-haired termites). Unsurprisingly, Dershowitz is a “a long-time, vocal supporter of Israel and is a close ally of former President Donald Trump” [3], and that’s from where the wind is blowing, the US political far right.

        This particular direction, which is tickling at Jerry’s ear for a while, wants to hide the deep-rooted anti-semitisn on the right among the brown shirts (or Proud Boys), because it jeopardises their far right wing “Unite the Right” project (here you find also Dave Rubin, a role model of this movement — also a secular Jew — who rose to fame by mainstreaming white supremacists under the “intellectual dark web” banner, the one Bari Weiss popularised).

        [1] Israel and Palestine: Roots of Conflict, Prospects for Peace Speaker- Norman Finkelstein Recorded in the Ford Auditorium, 2008 _youtube.com/watch?v=MON2HL02mec
        [2] Noam Chomsky, on Israel _ youtu.be/5AJlfW0g2rk
        [3] _thecrimson.com/article/2021/2/2/dershowitz-kushner-nobel/
        [Bonus] Finkelstein vs Dershowitz, a “lively” debate, or how Dershowitz reputation was destroyed, and then Finkelstein’s. _youtu.be/GzqTWpPI5Qw

        1. There are many very well documented analysis where both Finkelstein and Chomsky went wrong in the case of Israel. They are not difficult to find and I don’t have time (nor space) to relate it all. Just one remark:
          Both of them blame Israel (and US) for the lack of the “two-states solution”. It really should be enough to read documents (either original which are online or historians who report on them) and see who and how many times rejected “two state solution” starting from Peel Commission proposal from 1937, through UN resolution 1947 and all consecutive peace proposals to Arafat and later Abbas from Israel. If you don’t know – it was invariably the Arab side which said emphatically “NO”. It’s enough to read Hamas and Fatah’s Chartas to know that the aim of both these movements is not building a Palestinian state alongside Israel but destruction of the Jewish state. This is repeated daily in Palestinian schools, universities, mosques and by Palestinian representatives. Blaming Jews for all this is a sign of willful blindness. And a very good weapon given to antisemites.
          Nobody sane denies that there is growing neo-Nazism and that far right antisemitism is a danger. However, the far right doesn’t have such sway in the media or universities or even Republican Party. However anti-Zionists and Israel haters are shaping the minds of the next generation in the West and generally public opinion. That’s why they are more dangerous.

          1. The Arab League and then-Palestine Authority embraced the “Arab Peace Initiative” for example, based off UN Resolution 242, which itself is cited as “one of the most widely affirmed resolutions on the Arab–Israeli conflict and formed the basis for later negotiations between the parties”.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Peace_Initiative

            This shows me that the claim the Arab side saying “emphatically No” cannot be correct. I recall there were repeated attempts in a similar vein, each vetoed by Israel and USA, sometimes with few odd other countries on their side vs all other nations. The Israel-US position looks factually like a fringe position, if the USA wasn’t the premiere superpower.

          2. Arab Peace Initiative demanded of Israel return to every inch of pre-1967 armistice lines. Which meant retreating from Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem and the Western Wall, as well as to 15 km “waist”, and return of all “Palestinian refugees” to Israel. Resolution 242 didn’t demand any of that. And it would be suicidal for Israel to agree to it. Moreover, it was a proposal of Saudi Arabia, not Palestinians.

          3. That is, you concede they did not say No categorically. Here is another window into the past:

            “In 1993 Israel, led by Rabin’s foreign minister Shimon Peres, held a series of negotiations with the PLO in Oslo, Norway. In early September Yasser Arafat sent a letter to Rabin saying that the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist, accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338 (which called for lasting peace with Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders), and renounced terrorism and violence. Days later they signed a Declaration of Principles (known as the Oslo Accords), agreeing to set up Palestinian self-government over five years’ time in exchange for Palestinian partnership in matters of Israeli security. The most contentious issues (including Jerusalem, final borders and Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the return of Palestinian refugees) were set to be discussed after that five-year period. […] Negotiations continued as Israel and the PLO worked to implement a two-state solution on the ground.”

            I don’t recognise your assertion “invariably the Arab side which said emphatically “NO”” in this, either.

            The process was derailed by “religious nationalists” from both sides.

            From the start, some Israelis and Palestinians sought to disrupt a two-state solution. Religious nationalists on both sides believed their respective governments did not have the right to cede any part of the land. In 1994, during the overlap of the Jewish festival of Purim and the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers in the Sanctuary of Abraham above the Cave of Machpelah (also called the Tomb of the Patriarchs) in Hebron, a holy site frequented by both Jews and Muslims. The same year, Hamas, a militant Palestinian organization that likewise rejected a two-state solution, began a campaign of suicide bombings.

            Source:
            https://www.britannica.com/topic/two-state-solution#ref1261844

          4. We could exchange quotations to the Judgment Day (when Muslim will fight Jews and rocks and trees will shout: Oh Muslim, oh servasnt of Allah, there is a Jew behing me, come and kill him – this from a hadis repeated almost daily in Palestinian Authority’s mosques). If the II Intifada instigated and planned by Arafat after signing Oslo Accords is for you “nationalists on both side” it’s better do agree to disagree and leave it here.

          5. “…Yasser Arafat sent a letter to Rabin saying that the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist, accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338 (which called for lasting peace with Israel in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders), and renounced terrorism and violence.”

            That’s what Arafat. whose official governmental policy up to that moment was the 1sr Intifada and the terrorist murder of Israelis, said in English to the Western world. Meanwhile, he was saying the opposite in Arabic to the Arabic world:

            https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-07-oe-reich07-story.html

            Indeed, the 2nd Intifada came after he signed Oslo. The fact is that the so-called Palestinians have never had a legal case to claim territory which is inside the still legal 1948 borders of Israel, borders which probably have a uniquely robust legal provenance. Their only strategy has been to coerce concessions through the use of chaos and terror, and have never changed to this day their underlying conviction that Israel has no right to exist. How one can make the case that Israel should negotiate with actors of consistent bad faith, no valid claim to sovereign Israeli territory, and behavior which is incompatible with civilized nations is mind-boggling. Especially since there already is a Palestinian Arab state in Palestine – Jordan.

  12. Poster #10 has never seen what he considers anti-semitism on the Left. If he were to study back-issues of Pravda, he might find the following from 1953: “The majority of the participants of the terrorist group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a branch-office of American intelligence – the international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization called “Joint.” The filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed…Unmasking the gang of poisoner-doctors struck a blow against the international Jewish Zionist organization.” Other issues of Pravda might remind readers of the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of numerous Soviet Yiddish writers between 1948 and 1952, all charged with rootless cosmopolitan, bourgeois nationalist, counter-revolutionary offences.

  13. If you promoting the Palestinian cause, you can be accused of being an anti-Semite, simply because Palestinians use violence against Jews, and many still hope to drive out the Jews some day. The anger about the conflict leads to violence against Jews. So, if you look at it this way, the argument is easily made. It is however a different kind of anti-Semitism than exists among white supremacists. In the end, both groups may agree on issues like Jews having too much power or Jews conspiring behind the scenes. But then again, the cancel culture we see now has been practised by the Jewish lobbies for decades, so it is understandable that people have such beliefs. That makes it a very tricky subject.

  14. David Baddiel’s short book, “Jews Don’t Count,” is a good assessment of antisemitism on the Left. It deliberately ignores Israel (for the most part), instead focusing on the Left’s apparent belief that Jews are white (forgetting or ignoring the fact that there are plenty of Jews who are not white by any definition) and therefore don’t belong in the Left’s protected circle of the oppressed. I recommend it.

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