In defence of 'anti-Semites'.

The charge of anti-Semitism is regularly levelled against anyone with the clarity of moral conscience to criticise Israel in its rejectionism of international law and aggression against the Palestinians and neighbour-states. Ken Livingstone was routinely labelled an ‘anti-Semite’ for his support of the Palestinian rights and putting a Jewish journalist on the spot for writing for a paper owned by The Daily Mail, formerly pro-Mosley and pro-Hitler now just a sour proto-fascist rag. Incidentally The Daily Mail has stuck to the line that the Frankfurt School are behind the triumphs of gay rights, dependency culture, mass-immigration and multiculturalism. In other words, all the faults of modern society (as they see it) are down to a left-wing Jewish cabal. The bogeyman of cultural Bolshevism has been replaced by cultural Marxism. This is no different to the Hitlerian claim that the source of all the world’s problems is Judeo-Bolshevism. The Daily Mail gets away with it because it is ‘pro-Israel’ and Ken Livingstone is put on the spot for reviewing books on Press TV. It was more important for much of the press to slander Livingstone as a Judeophobe for his position on Palestine. 

The elementary standards of morality and human decency go out of the window in such cases. This is most evident in extreme instances of vilification. For example, Masada2000 have produced the Jewish SHIT list which amounts to a list of 7,000 Jews who are Self-Hating Israel Threating complete with black-and-white sinister photographs. The ambulance chaser Alan Dershowitz – a good lawyer for guilty clients – went as far as to accuse Norman Finkelstein’s late mother of being a Nazi collaborator while she was in Auschwitz. He then went on to conjure up a campaign against Finkelstein that culminated in him being denied tenure at DePaul University. No doubt the Catholic university would’ve been labelled ‘anti-Semitic’ if it had done otherwise. The most recent shocker was when a poem by Günter Grass was banned by the Israeli government, simply because it points out (what we all know) that the Israeli political-military class wants a fight with Iran. Even Mossad and Shin Bet have confirmed that Netanyahu is a dangerous figure, but it’s still too much to say so in the West where criticism of Israel is still unwelcome.

As Gore Vidal notes it was Irving Kristol, the fairy godfather of neoconservatism, who wrote “If one had informed American Jews fifteen years ago that there was to be a powerful revival of Protestant fundamentalism as a political as well as religious force, they would surely have been alarmed, since they would have assumed that any such revival might tend to be anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. But the Moral Majority is neither.” This conveniently ignores the anti-Semitism rife on the Christian Right. The evangelicals are supportive of Israel only to bring on the Rapture and see to it that the Jews (except for 140,000 who are automatically ‘saved’) along with the Muslims and other assorted heretics are sent straight to hell. It was Herzl who had foreseen that the anti-Semitic nations would become the political allies of Zionism. Today the anti-Semites who are ‘pro-Israeli’ can be let-off, while any opposition to Israeli policy from gentiles is a sign of a Brownshirt and from Jews it’s a symptom of neurotic self-loathing.

It was Ronald Reagan who said “Israel is the only stable democracy we can rely on as a spot where Armageddon could come.” The subject of Vidal’s scorn was another leading neoconservative Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter. The neoconservative ‘democratic revolutionaries’ are typically ex-leftist apologists for American military might and the cause of a Greater Israel. Irving Kristol remarked that a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality. It could well be said that these mugged liberals discovered the useful side of the politics of hate: whether it be feminists, blacks, fags or quiche-eating liberals the dice have to be rolled if you’re a betting man. And betting men like Kristol and Podhoretz have no problem taking the side of some of the most rancid anti-Semites on the planet. Gore Vidal pointed out that the Israel lobby has had to keep in line with American foreign policy for the sake of military aid to Israel. This has meant that the old liberal positions simply won’t do and the American Jewish Committee had to shift further rightwards.

The scathing ink of Gore Vidal’s pen never shirked away from controversy. He was not one of the politically correct minded liberals. This fearlessness came across in his provocative insinuation of ‘dual loyalties’ among the ex-leftist Jewish intellectuals who comprised neoconservatism at the time. It is the political-military establishment of the US and Israel to which the neoconservatives are most loyal, not the love of any country in particular. He stands with Israeli peaceniks, the very people that the neoconservatives despise.He describes the Israeli settlers as ‘predatory’ in the same way that the white people who settled and cleansed the Americas were ‘predators’. This isn’t ‘moral equivalence’ as Gore Vidal knows full well that the founding of America involved the deaths of millions of Native Americans. He merely acknowledges Israel is in the same line in its state-founding violence. Nearly 1 million Palestinians were dispossessed to found Israel and now constant violence is used to further expand the nation-state.

There’s a line that you cannot cross when it comes to criticism of Israel, then you instantly become an anti-Semitic defender of radical Islamism.In the attack on Gaza in late 2008 over 1,400 Palestinian civilians, one-third of them children, were killed by Israeli bombs and bullets. There was no target out of bounds, hospitals, mental health centres and ambulances were attacked. Even schools were doused in white phosphorus and the illegality of such an action does not rouse the conscience of the apologists for barbarism. In the words of George Orwell "The nationalist does not only disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." It all falls under the umbrella of ‘self-defence’, but if the use of white phosphorous is justified in these terms in ‘defence’ of Israel then would it follow that the suicide-bombers of Palestine are justified by their claim to ‘defence’? It should be noted that the Palestinian claim to self-defence is surely stronger than the Israeli claim, for the reason that the Israeli government is the primary aggressor.

Chaim Weizmann used to say that the danger to Israel was not the ‘extremists’, it was the ‘moderates’ who posed the real threat. It is the case that the Israeli establishment prefers anti-Semites to moderate reformers, it can dismiss the opposition if they are salivating at the prospect of slaughtering Jewish children. This is precisely the reason that the Israeli government protected Sheikh Yassin for a long time. Yet he was a major proponent of Islamic nutdom as well as anti-Semitic delusions. In the early days of the first intifada the Israeli government actually sponsored Islamism to undermine Arab nationalists and the secular Left. Strikes at universities on the West Bank were broken up by busing in Islamists. It went as far as to actually fund Hamas in order to undermine Arafat’s base of support. The PLO had to be destroyed because it proposed a pragmatic solution in 1976: a return to the borders before the 1967 war, 22% of the land goes to the Palestinians and 78% to the Israelis complete with recognition of Israel. The US blocked the settlement even though it had the support of virtually the entire world including the Arab states and the PLO.