suspended<\/a> by Labour when he exposed the efforts of Ruth Smeeth, then a Labour MP and a former Jewish official in the Israel lobby group BICOM, to recruit the media to her campaign smearing political opponents on the left as antisemites.<\/p>\nIn keeping with the rapid erosion of critical thinking in civil society organisations designed to uphold basic freedoms, Smeeth was recently appointed director of the prestigious free speech organisation Index on Censorship. There she can now work on suppressing criticism of Israel \u2013 and attack \u201cbad Jews\u201d \u2013 under cover of fighting censorship. In the new, inverted reality, censorship refers not to the smearing and silencing of a \u201cbad Jew\u201d like Wimborne-Idrissi, but to criticism of Israel over its human rights abuses, which supposedly \u201ccensors\u201d the identification of \u201cgood Jews\u201d with Israel \u2013 now often seen as the crime of \u201ccausing offence\u201d.<\/p>\n
Boy who cried wolf<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Haaretz article helps to contextualise Europe\u2019s current antisemitism \u201cwitch-hunt\u201d, which targets anyone who criticises Israel or stands in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians, or associates with such people. It is an expansion of the earlier campaign by the Jewish establishment against \u201cthe wrong kind of Jew\u201d, as identified by Finkelstein in The Holocaust Industry. But this time Jewish organisations are playing a much higher-stakes, and more dangerous, political game.<\/p>\n
Haaretz rightly fears that the Jewish leadership in Europe is not only silencing ordinary Jews but degrading the meaning \u2013 the shock value \u2013 of antisemitism through the very act of politicising it. Jewish organisations risk alienating the European left, which has historically stood with them against Jew hatred from the right. European anti-racists suddenly find themselves equated with, and smeared as, fledgling neo-Nazis.<\/p>\n
If those who support human rights and demand an end to the oppression of Palestinians find themselves labelled antisemitic, it will become ever harder to distinguish between bogus (weaponised) \u201cantisemitism\u201d on the left and real Jew hatred from the right. The antisemitism smearers \u2013 and their fellow travellers like Keir Starmer \u2013 are likely to end up suffering their very own \u201cboy who cried wolf\u201d syndrome.<\/p>\n
Or as Haaretz notes:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThe issue that is bothering the critics of the Bundestag [German parliament] resolution is whether the extension of the concept of antisemitism to encompass criticism of Israel is not actually adversely affecting the battle against antisemitism. The argument is that the ease with which the accusation is leveled could have the effect of eroding the concept itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The Antisemitism Industry<\/strong><\/p>\nIt is worth noting the shared features of the new Antisemitism Industry and Finkelstein\u2019s earlier discussions of the Holocaust Industry.<\/p>\n
In his book, Finkelstein identifies the \u201cwrong Jews\u201d as people like his mother, who survived a Nazi death camp as the rest of her family perished. These surviving Jews, Finkelstein argues, were valued by the Holocaust Industry only in so far as they served as a promotional tool for the Jewish establishment to accumulate more wealth and cultural and political status. Otherwise, the victims were ignored because the actual Holocaust\u2019s message \u2013 in contrast to the Jewish leadership\u2019s representation of it \u2013 was universal: that we must oppose and fight all forms of racism because they lead to persecution and genocide.<\/p>\n
Instead the Holocaust Industry promoted a particularist, self-interested lesson that the Holocaust proves Jews are uniquely oppressed and that they therefore deserve a unique solution: a state, Israel, that must be given unique leeway by western states to commit crimes in violation of international law. The Holocaust Industry \u2013 very much to be distinguished from the real events of the Holocaust \u2013 is deeply entwined in, and rationalised by, the perpetuation of the racialist, colonial project of Israel.<\/p>\n
In the case of the Antisemitism Industry, the \u201cwrong Jew\u201d surfaces again. This time the witch-hunt targets Jewish leftwingers, Jews critical of Israel, Jews opposed to the occupation, and Jews who support a boycott of the illegal settlements or of Israel itself. Again, the problem with these \u201cbad Jews\u201d is that they allude to a universal lesson, one that says Palestinians have at least as much right to self-determination, to dignity and security, in their historic homeland as Jewish immigrants who fled European persecution.<\/p>\n
In contrast to the \u201cbad Jews\u201d, the Antisemitism Industry demands that a particularist conclusion be drawn about Israel \u2013 just as a particularist conclusion was earlier drawn by the Holocaust Industry. It says that to deny Jews a state is to leave them defenceless against the eternal virus of antisemitism. In this conception, the Holocaust may be uniquely abhorrent but it is far from unique. Non-Jews, given the right circumstances, are only too capable of carrying out another Holocaust. Jews must therefore always be protected, always on guard, always have their weapons (or in Israel\u2019s case, its nuclear bombs) to hand.<\/p>\n
\u2018Get out of jail\u2019 card<\/strong><\/p>\nThis view, of course, seeks to ignore, or marginalise, other victims of the Holocaust \u2013 Romanies, communists, gays \u2013 and other kinds of racism. It needs to create a hierarchy of racisms, a competition between them, in which hatred of Jews is at the pinnacle. This is how we arrived at an absurdity: that anti-Zionism \u2013 misrepresented as the rejection of a refuge for Jews, rather than the reality that it rejects an ethnic, colonial state oppressing Palestinians \u2013 is the same as antisemitism.<\/p>\n
Extraordinarily, as the Haaretz article clarifies, German officials are oppressing \u201cbad Jews\u201d, at the instigation of Jewish organisations, to prevent, as they see it, the re-emergence of the far-right and neo-Nazis. The criticisms of Israel made by the \u201cbad Jew\u201d are thereby not just dismissed as ideologically unsound or delusions but become proof that these Jews are colluding with, or at least nourishing, the Jew haters.<\/p>\n
In this way, Germany, the UK and much of Europe have come to justify the exclusion of the \u201cwrong Jew\u201d \u2013 those who uphold universal principles for the benefit of all \u2013 from the public space. Which, of course, is exactly what Israel wants, because, rooted as it is in an ideology of ethnic exclusivity as a \u201cJewish state\u201d, it necessarily rejects universal ethics.<\/p>\n
What we see here is an illustration of a principle at the heart of Israel\u2019s state ideology of Zionism: Israel needs antisemitism. Israel would quite literally have to invent antisemitism if it did not exist.<\/p>\n
This is not hyperbole. The idea that the \u201cvirus of antisemitism\u201d lies semi-dormant in every non-Jew waiting for a chance to overwhelm its host is the essential rationale for Israel. If the Holocaust was an exceptional historical event, if antisemitism was an ancient racism that in its modern incarnation followed the patterns of prejudice and hatred familiar in all racisms, from anti-black bigotry to Islamophobia, Israel would be not only redundant but an abomination \u2013 because it has been set up to dispossess and abuse another group, the Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Antisemitism is Israel\u2019s \u201cget out of jail\u201d card. Antisemitism serves to absolve Israel of the racism it structurally embodies and that would be impossible to overlook were Israel deprived of the misdirection weaponised<\/em> antisemitism provides.<\/p>\nAn empty space<\/strong><\/p>\nThe Haaretz article provides a genuine service by not only reminding us that \u201cbad Jews\u201d exist but in coming to their defence \u2013 something that European media is no longer willing to do. To defend \u201cbad Jews\u201d like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi is to be contaminated with the same taint of antisemitism that justified the ejection of these Jews from the public space.<\/p>\n
Haaretz records the effort of a few brave cultural institutions in Germany to protest, to hold the line, against this new McCarthyism. Their stand may fail. If it does, you may never become aware of it.<\/p>\n
Once, the \u201cbad Jews\u201d have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an antisemite because these \u201cantisemites\u201d have been disappeared; when the Jewish \u201ccommunity\u201d speaks with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the censorship is complete, you will not know it.<\/p>\n
There will be no record of what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where discussions of Israel\u2019s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your ignorance will be blissfully complete.<\/p>\n\n
This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photograph Source: Kate Ausburn \u2013 CC BY 2.0 The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating\u00a0long report\u00a0this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2474,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2473\/revisions\/2474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}