Article from Forward. The article argues that the Left's understanding of racism makes the ongoing erasure of antisemitism as a concern of the left inevitable because it is an underlying problem in theory, not an act of deliberate malice. To quote the heart of the argument:
"Anti-Semitism differs from most forms of racism in that it purports to “punch up” against a secret society of oppressors, which has the side effect of making it easy to disguise as a politics of emancipation. If Jews have power, then punching up at Jews is a form of speaking truth to power — a form of speech of which the left is currently enamored.
"In other words, it is because anti-Semitism pretends to strike at power that the left cannot see it, and is doomed to erase — and even reproduce — its tropes."
The article continues at length to describe the evolution of Antisemitism from the early days of Christianity as essentially a form of conspiracy theory. Originally, the theory was simple. Jews were in league with Satan. They had used their money and influence to kill Jesus. They had tried to oppress and stamp out the early Christian faith. Even now, they remained a small, sorcerous league scattered throughout the world corrupting men with their perverse sorcery.Over time, this evolved into more gruesome details, such as the myth of the desecration of the Host (ritualistic desecration of communion wafers) and, most famous of all, the blood libel.
After the European Enlightenment and subsequent emancipation of the Jews in Europe in the 19th Century (although not until the 20th Century in Russia), belief in witches and devil worship and sorcery waned. But the myth of Jews as members of a secret cabal with hidden powers allowing them to corrupt and manipulate society morphed with the times. It is these tropes, the author of the article argue, that exist today and make it structurally impossible for the Left to understand antisemitism as a systemic form of race hatred. All other forms of race hatred involve the idea of classifying the oppressed as subhuman. Antisemitism, while it has always contained a healthy dose of xenophobia, relies on the idea that Jews are somehow inhumanly powerful.
What is worse, in a world now ripe for conspiracy theories, we find these traditional antisemitic tropes falling neatly into the mindset of the Social Justice movement generally. The Social Justice movement is built on theories of power imbalance and on the need to attack those with disproportionate power. The central tenant is that systemic discrimination is about maintaining power, and that therefore equal distribution of power in society is a necessary requisite to social justice. This is certainly a reasonable theory. I tend to believe it myself. Or, as I like to say, incumbents do not welcome competition. But it has an unfortunate tendency to simplify things (as all theories do when they move from philosophy to ideology), especially when power dynamic moves from one element of a complex system to the sole explanation for all racial and economic injustice. Once everything is explainable by power dynamics, the world sorts itself naturally into the standard Manichean model of good v. evil. In this case, it is oppressors v. oppressed.
This is a system vulnerability, and antisemitism infects it like a virus. The author of the linked to article provides numerous examples in which Jews generally, or Israel specifically, are capable of supernatural acts of evil geared to oppress the helpless, largely people of color. Thus, for example, Jewish Voices for Peace pushes the idea that Israel trains American police in how to abuse black people. Buried in the Hamas charter is the description of how Jews "took control of the world media," and used this control to "stir revolutions to reap the fruit for their own ends." The Hamas Charter goes on to list supposed Jewish accomplishments of starting and running the French Revolution, founding the Freemasons, and using their powers to get Europeans to engage in imperialism and colonialism.
Despite this language still being in the Hamas central document, you will still find almost no one in the Social Justice movement who will accept that Hamas is not merely a Palestinian nationalist organization, but an an antisemitic organization. To the contrary, pointing this out is attacked as an attempt to suppress criticism of Israel, and a sign of loyalty to Israel over the cause of social justice and morality generally. Because as long as the power imbalance puts Jews at the top, the motives of the oppressed are beyond reproach and any effort to challenge them is simply an effort to preserve the underlying power structure.
Just as the Right has a systemic blind spot in identifying its own racism because it conceptualizes racism as being a direct statement of racial inferiority that all blacks are inferior to all whites, rather than a much more complicated phenomena involving things such as institutional and structural power imbalance, broad generalizations about character traits and culture, and other significant contributing factors that go well beyond the white supremacist ideology, the Left has a systemic blind spot in conceiving of antisemitism as anything other than direct threats of physical violence directed against Jews. For the right, if ain't Jim Crow, it ain't racist -- even if it is functionally equivalent. For the Left, if it ain't the Pittsburgh shooting or Nazi graffiti, it ain't antisemitism. Or, as Linda Sarsour has explained:
"I want to make the point that while antisemitism is something that impacts Jewish Americans, it's different from anti-black racism of Islamophobia because it is not systemic. Of course, you may experience vandalism or an attack on a synagogue, or even a personal attack. . . But it's not systemic and we need to make that distinction."
Let us set aside for a moment the reaction of the Left if some conservative movement leader were to make a video supposedly condemning Islamophobia but downplaying its impact because it is 'really just since 9/11 and not systemic.' I will also put aside how my own life experience demonstrates the contrary (or perhaps I am simply unlucky). Instead, let us focus on how this conceptualizes the idea of antisemitism.
Why should antisemitism be regarded as "not systemic." Virtually every study in recent years of resurgent white nationalism shows that antisemitism is a central tenet of white nationalism. Indeed, blacks and others who are targets are generally regarded as dupes manipulated by Jews. Robert Bowers wrote before going off to shoot up the Tree of Life synagogue cited as his primary motivation the idea that it was Jews who were bringing in caravans of refugees from Central America and thus destroying our country. But somehow, the Social Justice left views antisemitism as a series of inexplicable one offs, unlike the systemic discrimination experienced by other targeted populations.
The rational explanation for this approach is that the idea of systemic discrimination against Jews is simply incompatible with the underlying understanding of the universe inherent in the current ideology of the Social Justice Movement. If Jews are not systemically poor (although many of them are), and Jews are not systemically disempowered in obvious and visible ways, that it is not possible that discrimination against Jews is systemic. Q.E.D. Sure, it can be used as a one off weapon by conservatives (hence the amazing ability of progressives to call out general antisemitic tropes when used by conservatives and Republicans). But this is simply an application of the "bad apples" theory of antisemitism. i.e., There is no systemic antisemitism (because it can't be, Jews aren't on the wrong end of the power imbalance), only opportunistic demagogues and other "bad apples" perpetrating non-systemic violence.
If this sounds familiar, it is because that is exactly what conservatives say when confronted with irrefutable evidence of racial discrimination or Islamophobia. The conservative calculation works different in its specifics, but the general function is the same. If there is no de jure segregation, there can be no institutional racism, QED. As long as everyone is equal under the letter of the law, the conservative worldview goes, then there is no racism simply because the (foreseeable) impact is disproportionate on a particular racial group. Accordingly, any actual acts of racism are the result of "bad apples." (To the extent there are well documented broad disparities, the problem must lie with the impacted group, because the law is neutral.)
And, as the past two weeks have demonstrated, the same underlying structural blind spot in such simplistic world views creates a protective mechanism that further reenforces the ideology and resists any systemic action. So, for example, if you are conservative, then #BlackLivesMatter is racist because it seeks to create a visible awareness of a systemic racial divide where there is no systemic problem (since the law is written neutrally). So #AllLivesMatter (or, even more obnoxiously, #BlueLivesMatter) responds by regarding this demand for recognition of a systemic problem as itself racist and divisive. This makes total sense within the conservative worldview, however at odds with reality. If the system is neutral (the underlying ideological conservative base of belief) then any effort to demonstrate systemic bias is an effort to create systemic bias where none exists. This must, of course, be for the purpose of gaining preferential treatment at the expense of others (i.e., white people).
Whereas, as we have seen in the last two weeks, any effort to address antisemitism as systemic, rather than only when used by bad apples of the other side. We see the same identification of an attempt to describe a systemic issue, accusations of dual loyalty as an excuse to persecute Jews ( a charge going back to the Book of Esther) treated as a personal attack (granted, this is aggravated by a host of political opportunists -- most of whom are not Jewish and don't give a crap about antisemitism -- making the attack personal). We see the same circling of the wagons, that any attempt to raise concern about the systemic problem -- the consistent treatment of Jews as a secret cabal whose true loyalties lie with some foreign power (whether it's Satan in the middle ages, Communism or exploitive capitalism in the 19th and 20th Centuries, or the State of Israel today) -- as an effort to create a systemic accusation where none exists. We see accusations that even raising the matter is divisive, and that trying to discuss it serves the purposes of the "real" enemy/threat.
This also explains the resistance to understanding concern over accusations that sound in dual loyalty (a mere two weeks after accusations that echo the trope of using wealth to buy corrupt influence for the benefit of the Jewish cabal) do not arise in a vacuum. they come at a time when the American Jewish community has experienced a sudden, rapid rise in systemic antisemitism. But if it is impossible for antisemitism to be systemic, then this incident is an isolated incident and no greater context need apply. Again, if this sounds familiar, it is because this is exactly how conservatives deal with police shootings. There is no pattern, merely a series of one time incidents which are each debated and parsed on their specifics with the presumption against finding anything racist, trying to excuse it when found, and -- if all else fails -- dismissing it as a one off "bad apple."
Which brings us to the last similarity. The invariable "where was the outrage when X happened?" For conservatives, it is the supposed ignoring of police shootings of white people. After all, if police also shoot white people, it can't be systemic racism. Worse, your purported failure to care about police shooting of white people proves that you are only trying to promote your own agenda. Since if shooting people is bad it ought to be equally bad when white people are shot. But where were then, huh?
I will save for some other time my specific issues with the ridiculous levels of gaslighting I have seen from the social justice left in the last two weeks in this vein, ranging from the apparent amnesia that white christian male Republican Steven King got his committees stripped and was roundly called out by all Democrats and many Republicans to the fact that Democrats called out Rep. Jim Jordan's antisemitic tweet (in fact, with considerable overlap over who introduced the resolution -- which condemned all antisemitism without naming any names precisely BECAUSE they intended it to apply generically), and the same Democrats (and lots of the same Jews) did call out the awful 9/11 poster. None of this has stopped the endless insistence that no one did anything until it was a black Muslim woman attacking the powerful Israel lobby.
Indeed, it is impressive the extent to which the Left has resisted the efforts of the Democratic leadership to lead the conversation back to Republican antisemitism, which is supposedly an objective of the Left, was both astounding in its ferocity and amazing in its effectiveness. The resolution as introduced deliberately named no one, designed to allow for a pivot away from Omar to include folks like Jordan. But no, Progressives would have none of it. Rather than accepting the explanation of the Leadership that drafted the resolution that this was a strategy to draw focus on Republican antisemitism, they continued to insist that this explanation was a ruse to disguise that Omar was the real target. While this may seem enormously self-defeating as a strategy (since in theory the goal should be to draw attention back to Republican antisemitism), but it is entirely consistent with the ideology of power imbalance. Since it is impossible that antisemitism is systemic, the description of it in a resolution as systemic is an effort to silence Rep. Omar's brave speaking truth to power. It is the martyrdom of power dynamics that must be celebrated as the true, systemic institutional racism.
[And the dumb ass response on pointing this out that I am somehow equating Omar with King, allow me to elucidate for all you folks who cannot/will not follow logic, the statement wrt King was an example of a counter proof to the broad general statement that Ilhan Omar is unique in being criticized or receiving any sort of condemnation. It is not a comparison of their actions. Indeed, King's far more reprehensible action got a far more severe, and appropriate, measure of opprobrium. What Omar did was simply tone deaf, as the Speaker pointed out.]
[The "moral equivalent" fallacy is, in my observation, a peculiarly favorite fallacy of the Left to change the subject when confronted with a proof that undermines the logical structure of the ideology. But that is also a subject for another time.]
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