Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumAnti-Semitism links boycott of Israel to quenelle
6. More food for thought...
About five years ago, I participated in a head-to-head debate about contemporary anti-Semitism that was published in the Congressional Quarterly. Facing off against a particularly tiresome Jewish anti-Zionist, I tried to shed some light on the issue by drawing a distinction between what I called Bierkeller and Bistro anti-Semitism.
Bierkeller anti-Semitismnamed for the drinking establishments in Germany where the Nazis chugged down beer while shouting themselves hoarse about the Jewish menaceis, I said, pretty transparent. You wear a uniform, you yell about Jews (not Zionists, mind you, but Jews), and you burn down a synagogue. By contrast, Bistro anti-Semitismnamed for the trendy eateries adored by bien-pensant metropolitan leftistsis an altogether more refined affair. It does not demonize Jews as Jews. It regards any talk of anti-Semitism as a reprehensible technique to divert attention away from Israels crimes. And it insists that there is no common ground between todays calls to destroy the Jewish state and Hitlers obsession with destroying the Jewish people; the former is grounded upon principles of justice, while the latter refers to a regrettable historical event that is, whatever the paranoid fantasies conjured up by Jewish leaders, over and done with.
As I observed the furor around two separate but related events in recent weeksthe mushrooming of a movement in American universities in favor of an academic boycott of Israel, and the disturbing trend in France for performing the quenelle, an inverted Nazi salute, in public spacesI thought once more of that distinction. What, I asked myself, connects the worldview of Dieudonné Mbala Mbalathe anti-Semitic French comedian who invented the quenelle, and who heads a party called the anti-Zionist List while admitting that the voice of a Jewish journalist makes him nostalgic for the gas chamberswith the worldview of the Israel-haters in the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and similar academic bodies? Put another way: Is there now an inviting bistro in some corner of the loud, intimidating bierkeller?
Its likely that many, though not all, American advocates of the academic boycott of Israel would be horrified by any association with Dieudonné. In their minds, a huge expanse separates their opposition to what they call Israels apartheid system of government from the young man who gave the quenelle while standing outside the Jewish school in Toulouse where, during a March 2012 terrorist atrocity, a rabbi and three small children were murdered. That fellow, they would say, is motivated by hatred of Jews; we, on the other hand, are motivated by justice for the Palestinians.
The truth is that its nowhere near that simple. Heres why: In the post-Holocaust era, there isnt a single example of something defined as anti-Zionism that hasnt been contaminated by anti-Semitism. When the Arab League launched its anti-Zionist boycott in 1945, three years before Israels creation, its target was the besieged Jewish community in British Mandate Palestine. When the Soviet Union threw in its lot with the Arab regimes during the Cold War in the name of anti-Zionism, the primary victims were Soviet Jews. When Polands ruling communists launched an anti-Zionist campaign in the late 1960s, the people whom they purged were Jewish. And when left-wing German terrorists hijacked an Air France plane in 1976, they demonstrated their anti-Zionism by separating the Jewish passengers from the non-Jewish ones.
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(BtA's post in the Jewish group)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1223841