Philo-Semitic Marxists

 

Since I have previously written about Marxist anti-Semitism, I should acknowledge an example of an exception that I have encountered. At the city council meeting, I encountered Laura Garza, who is running for the Senate as part of the Socialist Worker’s Party (SWP). They are Trotskyites, who reject the Soviet Union. They do, though, uphold Cuba as a model.

The SWP platform includes the following:

Defend Israel’s Right to Exist. Condemn the Jew-Hating Pogrom Organized by Hamas and the Iranian Government.

The capitalist regime in Iran and the reactionary forces it backs in Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad are enemies not only of the Jews, but of working people of all nationalities. So long as capitalism exists, in times of crisis the rulers will turn to scapegoating Jews to smash the working class as they did in Nazi Germany. The fight for workers power and socialism is the only solution to end the anti-working-class poison of Jew hatred.  

What I find interesting here is that the traditional Rousseauian leftist revolutionary logic of the People and those who are not still applies. Jews are now an embodiment of the People. Even if you are not Jewish, you can join the struggle against anti-Semitism and, by doing so, become part of the People.

By contrast, Iran is not part of the People but is a “capitalist regime.” On the surface, this sounds strange as there is nothing particularly free market about Iran beyond their willingness to tolerate the selling of organs. What should be understood is that capitalism, from a leftist revolutionary perspective, only incidentally has something to do with the philosophy of Adam Smith. The primary meaning of capitalism is simply any “reactionary” ideology that stands in the way of leftist revolutionaries.

In Search of the People (Part I)

We have previously discussed the role of Motte and Bailey tactics in leftist revolutionary thought. Words like critical thinking, education, racism, oppression, and genocide do not mean what most people think they mean. Specifically, they have nothing to do with physical violence, teaching people to read and think for themselves. Instead, these words are simply reduced to matters of whether you support the leftist revolutionary agenda. If you do not, then you are guilty of racism, oppression, and genocide. If you are a parent or teacher, you are guilty of failing to educate children and teach them critical thinking skills. Because of this, leftist revolutionaries are justified in using violence against you.

Here, I would like to turn to the word “people.” Within classical liberal thought, people are important in the sense that everyone should have equal rights and be equal before the law regardless of their birth or personal wealth. For leftist revolutionaries, while they pretend to support the masses, in actuality the People are those who support leftist revolutionaries as opposed to the vast majority of individuals who live in a country who are alienated from themselves and suffer from false consciousness. This has important implications for democracy. Democracy, for leftist revolutionaries, is about not elections and rule by the majority of voters. On the contrary, a country like North Korea is a true people’s democracy as Kim Jong Un represents the true consciousness of the People. This notion of the people goes back to Rousseau, who had even greater contempt for the masses than even Plato.   

Much of the story of leftist revolutionary movements can be seen as a search for the People. Leftist revolutionary intellectuals can never be more than a small percentage of any society. In order to seize power, they have needed to hold up some larger group and pretend to rule in their name. This has meant finding a group that not only is physically oppressed and demands reforms but is so alienated from the rest of society that their needs can only be satisfied through a complete revolution.

Consider the example of the French Revolution. The French political system in 1789 was in need of reform such as the elimination of feudal privileges and that the monarch should share power with a national assembly. These were things for which there was widespread support throughout French society. The problem for the French Revolution was what to do after the low-hanging fruit was dealt with in the summer of 1789. There was no national consensus for any truly revolutionary changes. As such, the radicals of the revolution ran into stiff opposition not just from aristocrats who fled abroad and supported foreign invasion to restore the ancient regime, but also from peasants. 

This challenge to the Revolution helped bring about the Reign of Terror. Robespierre was faced with the problem that for all his talk about the People, the majority of actual people in France were quite counter-revolutionary. As a Rousseauian, Robespierre’s solution was simply to define the People as those who supported the Jacobins, with himself then as the embodiment of the will of the People. He could then commit mass murder against Frenchmen in the name of the People and turn himself into a dictator. As the majority of Frenchmen lacked a revolutionary consciousness, they did not count as the People. As such, they needed to be reeducated or killed in order for the real people to come into themselves.

One of the main ways that the French Revolution influenced classical Marxism is that it taught Marxists to distinguish between peasants and urban workers and assume that only rural workers counted as the People. Peasants lacked a revolutionary consciousness. They still clung to Christian beliefs and the land that they worked on. Allow for some basic land reform to turn peasants into small landowners and peasants would turn into the staunchest defenders of the establishment. By contrast, Marxists assumed that urban workers could be turned into a properly revolutionary class. By moving to the city, workers could be assumed to have dropped their Christianity and their dreams of owning some land or a small business. Trapped under the heel of a capitalist boss, the worker would have no choice but to embrace a total revolution of society.

The main threat to urban workers developing a revolutionary consciousness was nationalism. Workers, having abandoned their precocial identity as living in a village or province, might, upon moving to large cities, choose to identify with the nation and believe that they could improve their lot by engaging in national politics instead of a global revolution. As such, nationalism needed to be denounced. Those who believed in their nation could not be the People. 

The classical Marxist opposition to the bourgeoise, religion, and nationalism helps explain the deeply seeded anti-Semitism within Marxism and the wider left. Historically, Jews have functioned as an economic class, a religion, and as an ethnicity. All three of these manifestations of Judaism were problematic from a Marxist perspective. Obviously, Marxists could not accept the role that Jews have historically played as merchants and moneylenders. Jews also needed to abandon their beliefs in being chosen by God. Finally, Jews could no longer think of themselves as a people but instead should assimilate into the wider human family. Take away Judaism as an economic class, a religion, and an ethnicity and there is nothing left. As such, for Marxists, Jews did not exist as a people and Judaism needed to disappear. Only by abandoning Jewish peoplehood could Judaism join the People. 

One of the ironies of Marxist anti-Semitism is that it was not lessened by the large numbers of Jewish Marxists. On the contrary, Jewish Marxists promoted anti-Semitism. To be accepted as a Marxist, a Jew needed to demonstrate that they rejected everything about Judaism. At most a non-particularist version of Judaism (Tikkun Olam) could be allowed to survive. Such a Judaism is not any kind of Judaism at all but it is useful for covering the fact that the goal is the elimination of Judaism. Following this logic, Jewish identity could be allowed as long as a Jew used their position as a Jew to denounce Judaism and argue that they were not being anti-Semitic in doing so on the grounds that they were Jewish and were fulfilling the true Jewish spirit of humanistic universalism.     

Critical Anti-Semitism Theory: The 33 Project

 

Growing up with one foot in the Haredi world, I was surrounded by a particular narrative about Jews and gentiles. The non-Jews around us might appear, at first glance, to be decent people but, in reality, they are all vicious anti-Semites ready to murder us at the first opportunity. "Esau hates Jacob" was a historical metaphysical fact much the same as the notion that Jacob and Esau were twins. To be clear, it is not as if we ever had a hate non-Jews class that demanded that we recite some catechism about the diabolical nature of gentiles. What we had was something subtler and more pernicious. We were surrounded by songs and stories that took this assumption as a fact. You can never argue with a story because stories do not make arguments to be responded to. Things are even trickier when we are not even dealing with things that are not even said but merely assumed. For example, Father Schmutz is a scumbag by virtue of his name in much the same way as the Malfoys in Harry Potter are literally people of bad faith.  

This negative view of the outside world was an essential part of keeping us within the fold. If we were going to be hated no matter what then assimilation could never be an option. We were fed a diet of stories where assimilated Jews were rounded up by the Nazis while attempting to deny that they were Jews. The fact that Jews have managed to survive living among such dangerous enemies was an argument for the Truth of Judaism; it could only have been through divine providence. We have a deal with God, going back to the Bible; follow his commandments or he will allow the nations of the world to murder us as they are naturally predisposed to do. Therefore, our only chance of survival was by being as religious as we could while reaching out to irreligious Jews to make sure they learned to carry their weight and not get us all killed.

It is worth noting that this narrative flipped the script on anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism was not caused because Jews made themselves stand out with their strange clothes and customs. Being like gentiles and even intermarrying with them would not cause them to like us. On the contrary, it was the secular Jews, who caused anti-Semitism. While gentiles cannot help themselves but hate Jews, it is the secular Jews who truly rouse them into a murderous rage as such Jews violate the natural order of things.    

My academic training in history has served to tone down and add some nuance to how I view non-Jews. This is particularly the case for how I relate to Christianity. At the time time, it has also made me more dangerous as I can better monologue on the particular details of crimes against the Jews if I so choose. Alternatively, this can all be used for some ridiculous fun. In this cause, a new weapon in my arsenal is critical race theory with its assumption of structural racism and privilege. This allows for the condemnation of Western Civilization as a whole as being fundamentally racist as opposed to merely containing racist elements to be purged. At a practical level, critical race theory allows us to convict individuals of racism even without being consciously motivated by any hostility toward people of color. Merely not actively trying to tear down established culture makes you complicit in racism. As Kendi argues, it is not enough to not be racist, you have to be an anti-racist.

In order to help my readers become anti anti-Semites, I should write a history of anti-Semitism that uses the logic of CRT against Christianity, Islam, modern secularism, and ultimately the contemporary left. We could call it the 33 Project. The essential points of the book would be as follows. 

Anti-Semitism is the foundation of both Christianity and Islam and by extension all of Western Civilization. The true foundation of Christianity may be the year 33 C.E. but it is not the Cross but the accusation of deicide where Jews were supposed to have forced Pilate to crucify Jesus, claiming that his blood would be on their hands and that of their children. In truth, it has been Christians who have been the crucifiers of Jews. The Jews are the Christian Other, who are to be implicated and ultimately even murdered for Christian vices in order to allow Christians to claim to be virtuous. 

At a fundamental level, Christianity is an act of cultural appropriation. The vast majority of Christians today have no ethnic connection to Judaism and yet they have no objection to taking Jewish scriptures as well as the narrative of choseness reinterpreting it not only to make themselves God's chosen but to cast Jews as the ultimate other, the people who God rejected. 

In a similar fashion, Islam was founded not only upon Mohammed's mass murder of Jewish tribes in Arabia but also his appropriation of Jewish choseness, replacing Isaac with Ishmael as the chosen son of Abraham. Today Muslims have the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. Here we are going beyond cultural appropriation to outright cultural eradication. The idea here is to eliminate Jewish history by denying the existence of the two Temples. 

What this means is that anyone raised within a Christian or Muslim environment is, by definition, an anti-Semite. Christians and Muslims simply cannot help themselves, it is who they are. In fact, anti-Semitism is so infectious that anyone who believes there is anything valuable about Western civilization becomes tainted with anti-Semitism. Considering the ubiquity of Western Civilization today, even seeming non-Christians and Muslims (such as Indians, Chinese, and the Japanese) should assumed to be anti-Semites as well. 

As a Christian or a Muslim (and therefore an anti-Semite), you have an obligation to educate yourself about the history of anti-Semitism. This does not simply mean that you should acknowledge the existence of the Almohads or the Inquisition but that you should actively declare that all Christians and Muslims are inherently guilty of structural anti-Semitism by the mere fact that they are Christians or Muslims. (Obviously, when pressed, I will pretend, using Motte and Bailey tactics, that all that I am trying to do is teach about the Almohads and the Inquisition and I will accuse my opponents of trying to cover up these historical facts.)  

Even people who try to help Jews are really anti-Semites. Such anti-Semites believe that it is possible for Jews to improve themselves by reading anti-Semitic works like Aristotle and Kant or even the Old Testament. This implies that Jews are not perfect and that any seeming imperfections are not the fault of non-Jews. As we know from the doctrine of converging interests, whenever non-Jews look like they are helping Jews, it is only to better serve their own interests. For example, non-Jews might wish to pretend to not be anti-Semites and therefore avoid having to reckon with the anti-Semitism inherent within themselves and their civilization.  

Secular people might wish to congratulate themselves on not being anti-Semites on the assumption that they have distanced themselves from the anti-Semitism of their ancestors but this is not so. As we can see from Shakespeare and Dickens, Western literature is inherently anti-Semitic. If you have ever read Shakespeare or Dickens you become an anti-Semite much as you would from watching a passion play. It does not help if you try to censor any offending material. Doing that simply proves that you know that they are anti-Semitic but simply want to cover it up. This makes you not only an anti-Semite but a dishonest one at that.  

Obviously, Christians and Muslims who do not abandon their faiths are guilty of anti-Semitism. That being said, if you abandon your religion, you are still an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is so ingrained in Christianity and Islam that not even apostasy will be able to cure Christians and Muslims of its taint. In truth, a true gentile anti-anti-Semite would recognize that they can never be cured of anti-Semitism and would not desire that his Jewish allies should have to demean themselves by pretending he is not an anti-Semite. (It is psychological violence enough that Jews should even have to be in the same room as an anti-Semite so gentile anti-anti-Semites should do their best not to spend any time with Jews.)

Since Jewish victimhood is the foundation of Western Civilization, only Jews can ever be victims of bigotry. Anti-Semites (a category that includes all non-Jews) can never be victims. If they appear to be victims, it is merely their anti-Semitism coming back to harm them. In a world in which anti-Semitism did not exist, there would be no oppression. Because of this, any discussion of oppression, say, for example, the Trail of Tears, outside of anti-Semitism is anti-Semitic. Obviously, the reason why the Cherokee were forced off their land was because they failed to make an intersectional alliance with Jews to fight against the anti-Semitic United States government. Clearly, the reason anti-Semites would wish to cover up this anti-Semitic facet of Native American history is that, as anti-Semities, they wish to pretend that anti-Semitism is not the foundation of all oppression. 

Because Jews (assuming that they are not anti-Semites) are inherently victims, it is not possible for them to ever be oppressors. This applies even when Jews do things like use the N-word. When Jews use that word they are simply reacting to being oppressed and are bravely standing up to anti-Semitism. Anyone who objects to Jews using the N-word is really an anti-Semite as they are implying that there can be a type of oppression besides anti-Semitism and are trying to rob Jews of their moral high ground as inherent victims.  

It should be noted that most Jews are anti-Semites. This is hardly surprising considering that Jews have lived for more than a thousand years within the structural anti-Semitism of the West and have imbibed its hatred for Jews. When we think of Jewish anti-Semites, it is not enough to point out Jewish Voices for Peace or If Not Now. Any Jew who refuses to recognize that Western Civilization is inherently anti-Semitic and believes that it is possible to interact productively with Western Culture without becoming tainted with anti-Semitism is an anti-Semite. Even for Jews, it is not enough to refrain from active anti-Semitism. One must be an anti anti-Semite by working to tear down all structures of non anti anti-Semitism. 

As one of the world's only true anti anti-Semites, it is a lonely task. I bear the weight of so much oppression and it is the fault of all you anti-Semites. Maybe corporations can hire me to offer seminars to help cure their workers of anti-Semitism (or at least to make them feel really guilty about it). This will include classes on why you are an anti-Semite for thinking that I am a greedy Jew taking money from anti-Semites in exchange for moral cover or why you are an anti-Semite if you found this piece funny. (Since anti-Semites have no sense of humor, if you did not laugh at this piece, you are also an anti-Semite.) 

Racism and the Fundamental Attribution Error

I recently started listening to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfiction series Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality on Audible. There is an episode where Harry explains the fundamental attribution error. Living in our own heads, we are inclined to recognize the role that circumstances play in our behavior. I got angry and shouted not because I am a bad person who hates other people but because I just received some really distressing news. If did something good, it is likely because I did not find it so difficult to do so I felt it was my responsibility to offer a hand. When it comes to other people, though, we are less inclined to acknowledge such complexity. Other people act the way that they do because it is fundamentally who they are. Either they are wicked satanic sinners who act out of a conscious hatred of the good or they are heroic saints deserving of veneration. The practical implication of this mistake is that, if you believe that people act according to their fixed nature, then what people do is who they are. A person who does bad things is a bad person. 

It occurred to me that racism can be seen as an extreme version of this fundamental attribution error. Not only is Aleksis, in all of his complexity, going to be reduced to a liar, instead of someone who might shade the truth depending on the circumstances but now we are going to say that Latvians, an entity that is millions of times more complicated, are liars. It should be noted that the claim that Latvians are liars is an indisputable truth. It may also be true that Jews, Hungarians, and transgender Manhattanites are liars as well, along with the entire human race. Let us not get sidetracked here; I am talking about Latvians.  

What is really interesting is that it is not just racists that make this fundamental attribution. To be an anti-racist also requires making the fundamental attribution error. In reading someone like Ibram X. Kendi, one cannot escape the Manichean logic of either you are a racist or an anti-racist. This follows the larger critical tradition as we have seen with Paulo Freire. There is no sense that people say or do things based on particular circumstances. 

It is not practical to truly escape racist or otherwise prejudiced thinking. Everyone has a narrative about why the world is not a better place. This usually implies some sort of villain. Since the problems of this world clearly go beyond the lifespan of any individual person, it is inevitable that people will place some group or institution as their villain such as Latvian Hungarian Jews. If you are Richard Weaver, the big bad is William of Occam and 13th-century nominalism along with minor bads such as 20th-century jazz. One can hope that, with the help of a classical liberal education, a person can come to construct ever more intelligent narratives with factually more plausible groups of villains and gain a degree of skepticism even over their own narratives. That being said, just as every person shades the truth from time to time, everyone will make reductive statements about other groups that are less than charitable and demonstrate a lack of awareness or empathy for that group's historical circumstances. 

To make things even more difficult, any attempt to make a pro-tolerance statement about a particular group means that you are not making statements about other groups and, as such those groups are of lesser importance. For example, to put up a "Black Lives Matter" sign in your yard is not just to say that black lives matter but to say that, in some sense, black lives matter more than Uighur lives. To be clear, it may be ultimately defensible to argue that black lives may be more relevant to your situation as an American and therefore you have constructed a narrative in which blacks are the victims even as you lack a similar narrative to wrap your head around Uighur history. That being said, this is hardly an innocent claim. 

The anti-racist needs to take all of these very real human foibles and label people as either racists or anti-racists. It is the same temptation as racism to wish to simplify the world into either good or bad people. Clearly, people are not one thing or another. As with every other virtue and vice, people exist along a spectrum and do better or worse depending on the particular circumstance. 

Obviously, the anti-racist cannot denounce say the Trump voter as racist without making themselves vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In the case of Kendi, he holds up Angela Davis as a model anti-racist. This is a person who defended jailing Jewish Soviet dissidents. In a sane world, Kendi could be forgiven for being a non-Jew who never internalized the history of Jewish suffering into his psyche. If we are to play by Kendi's rules, both Kendi and Davis must be rejected as anti-Semites. 

The traditional leftist solution to this problem is to engage in special pleading. Firstly, only certain kinds of blanket statements regarding racial groups really count as racism. It is not racist to declare white gun owners responsible for a Hispanic teenager going on a shooting spree because white people are responsible for most of the evil in this world as all true anti-racists know. Second, the anti-racist redeems himself through leftist politics.   

My purpose is not to say that, since everyone is a racist to some degree, it is ok to be racist. The fact that everyone lies and that society requires the grease of some judicious "manipulating of the truth" does not make lying ok. Whether we always know precisely where to draw the line, we can still recognize, at least in theory, a difference between the person who makes the honest attempt to be truthful and the person who no longer holds that they have a moral responsibility to society to tell the truth. Similarly, even if the wheels of society need to be greased with some prejudice, there is a difference between a person who imperfectly tries to still expand their circle of moral responsibility and the person who does not believe that they have moral obligations to members of the "wrong" groups. Can I tell you, in every case, who belongs in what category? I have no wish to fall into the fundamental attribution error any more than I have to. People exist along a spectrum. I will stand up for my imperfect sense of what is right and I will leave it to everyone else to judge their own hearts. 

Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism? My Response to Mehdi Hasan

Here is a recent Intelligence Squared debate about Israel in which the pro-Israel side loses badly. The problem here is that the motion on the floor is whether anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. Clearly, it is at least hypothetically possible to sincerely oppose Israel without being an anti-Semite. The pro-Israel speakers, Melanie Phillips and Einat Wilf, never adequately address this issue. What they try to do is argue that anti-Zionism itself, as an ideology, is anti-Semitic even if not all anti-Zionists are themselves anti-Semites; such people simply fail to fully understand their own beliefs.

To make things worse, we have Mehdi Hasan in the opposition. Hassan’s chief strength is that he is a Muslim who is clearly not an Anti-Semite despite being opposed to Israel. He understands that there are lines not to cross and he acknowledges that many people on his side cross this line. Paired with Ilan Pappe, whose Jewish identity allows him to be the rabid one, Hasan gets to sit back and be the "moderate," assuring the audience that opposing the Israeli government and even wanting to replace it with a secular Jewish-Palestinian State does not make someone an anti-Semite. Perhaps I am too easy on Hasan due to my dismally low expectations for Muslims when it comes to anti-Semitism. The fact that he does not foam at the mouth is so surprising as to make him a model of reasonableness.

And this leads to one of the reasons why anti-Zionism, in practice, is anti-Semitism. What I never cease to find so shocking about the anti-Zionist movement is the extent that they do not even bother to seriously pretend that they are about anything other than killing Jews. This is different from the contemporary liberal discourse on hate speech where anything said by anyone who is not part of the "woke" set will be interpreted as hateful through a series of increasingly arcane hermeneutics even if it was perfectly acceptable even for Democratic politicians to say the exact same thing just a few years ago.

I am not asking anyone to be on board with Netanyahu or like Zionism. You do not even have to be an expert on Jewish thought or what bothers Jewish activists. All I am asking is that you do not say things that used to be obvious, only a few years ago, that you should not say. I am reminded of the Simpson's episode in which Sideshow Bob is able to be released from prison despite having tattooed "Die Bart Die" onto his chest.

 

This also is a reason to focus on leftist anti-Semitism, which tends to operate under the banner of anti-Zionism, as opposed to right-wing anti-Semitism even though both are legitimate threats. I expect people on the left to have absorbed political correctness and with it a certain caution with how their words might be interpreted by others. With conservatives, there is much more room to interpret them charitably as speaking in anger. If someone from the left says something that implies murder, they should be taken with complete literalness.

Let us acknowledge two non-contradictory truths. Palestinians have good reasons to not be happy with Israel and even have plausible justifications to use violence. That being said, anti-Zionism, despite its theoretical merits, has come to serve as cover for killing Jews. To be clear, our concern is not people who dislike Jews or say politically incorrect things but people who are actively trying to get Jews killed.

One might argue that when we are dealing with plots to kill Jews we should only focus on those who are literally firing rockets at us or trying to stab us. The reality is that the justification for mass murder is part of the action itself. For this reason, not even J. S. Mill thought speakers egging on angry mobs were protected by free speech. We have the example of Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi tabloid Der Sturmer. He was hanged at Nuremberg as a conspirator in Nazi crimes despite the fact that he never was in a position to order anyone killed. The Holocaust required the propaganda efforts of people like Streicher. Thus, he was not a martyr to free speech but a mass murderer as guilty as the people who ran concentration camps.

By this logic, we should not treat apologists for Palestinian terrorism as morally any different from the terrorists themselves. If you call for "Zionists" to be murdered and people kill Jews, you have entered into a conspiracy to murder Jews. It does not matter if you are not a Hamas officer and have never been in contact with them. You have helped to create an environment in which terrorists have reason to believe that their actions will not harm their cause. This makes it more likely that attacks will happen. Thus, you are an enabler of terrorism. If we allow either the enabler or the terrorist to operate freely Jews will die.

So what about the honest anti-Zionists out there like Mahdi Hasan? Ideas do not exist in a vacuum. There can be ideas tainted by their historical associations and the people who use them. For example, I believe that making voters pass a civics test could be a positive reform and would support it in any country besides the United States. In this country, literacy tests for voting played an important role in segregation. That history cannot be pushed under the rug. This thinking extends to conservatives and libertarians who wish to talk about state rights. It can be done but you have to be careful.

Let us be clear, this is not the genetic fallacy. I am not saying that tests for voting are bad because of their racist past nor am I suggesting that all people who support them are racists. (Again, I think, in theory, they might be a good idea.) That being said, it is reasonable for blacks to be on the lookout for people who wish to kill them. If the only way you can think to reform elections is through voter tests then it is a signal that you are not a friend of the black community. It does not matter if this is true or not. Blacks would still be justified, as a practical matter of self-defense, in treating you as if you had entered into a plot to lynch them.

Similarly, I would argue that, once we admit that there are anti-Zionists who wish to kill Jews and that these people are more than just a fringe element of the movement, at a certain point the whole concept of anti-Zionism becomes tainted. It reaches the point where, even though a person accepts the essential argument of anti-Zionism as a theory, operating a non anti-Semitic anti-Zionist movement becomes almost impossible.

Every movement, whether libertarianism or anti-Zionism, had its share of deplorables. The key issue is whether it is possible to disassociate oneself from them. This means that you do not praise them, you do not share a platform and do not act in a way that benefits them. For example, as a libertarian, I have disassociated myself from Ron Paul and the Rothbardian wing of the movement because they are tainted by racism and anti-Semitism. This is the case even though I mostly agree with them in terms of policies. It is not even that I think such people are necessarily bigots. Defending them, even though intellectually doable, simply distracts from the legitimate libertarian message of transcending the right and left partisan divide to open our borders and cut government spending on the drug war at home and nation-building abroad.

We might imagine our non anti-Semitic anti-Zionist spending months organizing a rally to denounce Israel’s blockade of Gaza. You better screen the speakers. It is ok if some of them have made inappropriate remarks in the past as long as no one has been party to murder either directly or rhetorically. You want to memorialize Palestinians killed by Israel; fine, just as long as you make sure those people were not members of terrorist organizations. And if Hamas or Islamic Jihad start launching rockets the day before the rally, you need to cancel it. Anything less and you can no longer Pontius Pilate yourself. You are a party to a conspiracy to kill Jews.

In a similar fashion, terms that may be innocuous by themselves can become tainted. Take the terms, for example, "intifada," "jihad," and "from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free."

While it is possible to use these terms in ways that do not imply violence. Since they have become code words for violence, you do not get to claim your own particular understanding of the term. You use these terms and I have the right to assume, as a matter of self-defense, that you are plotting to kill Jews. 

In this matter, it is important to bend over backward to demonstrate non-hostile intent. Remember that it is your enemies judging you. As a Jew and the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I am not obligated to wait until I am completely sure that you are plotting to kill me. If you choose to call me a Nazi and cooperate with people who are trying to kill me I will assume that you are trying to kill me and wash my hands of any responsibility for your blood.

We the Few Who Never Accepted the Sexual Revolution: Treading the Line Between a Conservative Sexual Ethic and Hating Homosexuals (Part I)

As Rod Dreher has argued, we live in a difficult time for social conservatives. The rise of the LGBTQ community as a political force has finally eliminated any pretense, in the wake of the Sexual Revolution, that we are still dealing with a Judeo-Christian society. The previous generation could pretend that even if society was sinful and full of people who had strayed from traditional values, they could be brought in line with a slight nudge. For example, if you voted Republicans into office, they could take over the Supreme Court, allow prayer back in public schools, ban abortion and the country would eventually turn itself around. Regardless of the fate of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, this will not happen.

One might have hoped to live in a world in which we social conservatives, even if we had no influence, were left alone. This is increasingly not the case as the Overton Window has moved from a libertarian neutral or even oppositional tolerance regarding homosexuality where I might have utter contempt for your personal life choices, but believe that you should be allowed to pursue them in the privacy of your own home to a demand for active tolerance that declares the LGBTQ lifestyle to be an active good. Social conservatives are quickly finding themselves treated in the same fashion as white supremacists, chased out of universities and unable to hold down jobs in mainstream professions. It only remains to be seen if the government will one day come for our children. 

To further complicate matters, our opponents in the LGBTQ community are not entirely wrong. As a historically oppressed group that has often been denied even libertarian tolerance and subject to violence, it should come as no surprise that, now that the tables are turned, they show little in the way of tolerance in return. Also, let us be honest, many people use social conservatism as cover for genuine hatred of LGBTQ people as opposed to ideological opposition to that lifestyle. In that spirit, here are my guidelines for those trying to walk a narrow line between maintaining their credibility as social conservatives without giving our opponents plausible cause to accuse us of hatred.

The first point is to avoid active conflict. One should not directly attack members of the LGBTQ community as such even to make the point that they are sinners. The fact that LGBTQs are likely to become casualties of a conservative sexual ethic may not be avoidable but it should never be an end in itself. This position is necessary even as it means giving up any chance of winning the larger social conflict.

To understand why this is the case, it may be useful to consider the example of opponents of Israel. Clearly, one can be opposed to the State of Israel without being an anti-Semite. There are valid criticisms of Israel to be made. As an anarcho-capitalist, who opposes all governments as the products of violence, I am hardly unsympathetic to those who would consider Israel to be illegitimate. The problem with opponents of Israel, even when they are right on the facts, is that they are trapped by the existence of people using the anti-Israel cause as a Trojan Horse for anti-Semitism. This means that anyone attacking Israel is obligated to demonstrate clear daylight between themselves and anti-Semites. 

This is the case even when that means that, under certain circumstances, one is forced into silence. For example, one might object to Israel's handling of Gaza but it is rather difficult to articulate those criticisms without sounding like an apologist for Hamas. This may mean that the people in Gaza will not receive Justice but there are many other causes not blatantly tainted by terrorism worthy of attention. When Hamas is no longer a factor, then we could revisit the Israeli Occupation. You can consider yourself exempt from standing up for the Palestinians because of Hamas. It is their fault that there is no independent Palestinian State in Gaza.

The problem with attacking the gay rights movement is simply the existence of opponents of gay rights. For example, we live in a world in which the Westboro Baptist Church exists and is not simply a Poe Law begging satire of religious fundamentalists. You have people like Scott Lively, who are clearly motivated by a pathological hatred of gays and wish them physical harm. This limits one's ability to oppose the gay rights movement without implicitly being an apologist for them. This does not change the fact that there is no such thing as gay rights and that the term is simply a trap to discredit opponents. One has to conclude that there are many sins out there that are damaging society. Focus on one that is not gay sex. If that means that promotors of homosexuality win, the WBC and Scott Lively can answer to God for how they sacrificed traditional marriage in this country for the sake of being on television.

There is a lesson my father has tried to teach me. Sometimes, it is not enough to be right. There are certain battles that are not worth the cost even when you are right. The very act of trying to defend certain things, even when you are right, indicates that there is a larger lesson you have failed to learn. For example, anti-BDS legislation may technically be defendable on free-speech grounds. That being said, a true defender of civil liberties should not want to be stuck having to defend themselves, allowing the free speech debate to distract from the fact that BDS is part of a conspiracy to kill Jews. Similarly, if leftist opponents of Trump were serious about fighting racism, they would not have allowed anti-Semitism to become an issue. For social conservatives to willingly initiate an exchange that requires them to explain how they are not homophobic indicates something skewered in their priorities.

A good example of this is the recent Jewish Press article on homosexuality. I have no particular love for the Jewish "De-Pressed." That being said, I find nothing objectionable in the article's argument per se. The fact that there was a controversy indicates something about the state of affairs and how little the Left is willing to tolerate deviation from their established line. That being said, this is a battle I do not wish to fight even if I suspect that many of the people who criticized the article would not recognize any difference between the author and myself. At the end of the day, Irwin Benjamin shows little empathy for why people march in pride parades. His article could have made the same point while avoiding the implication that homosexuals are animals and ending with something along the lines of "I wish those marching well and understand why they are doing so even as I am constrained from joining in." The fact that he did not do so indicates that what motivates him is not a love of God's Torah but that he honestly sees homosexuals as animals and is offended that they could take pride in themselves as human beings. (See Rabbi Yakov Horowitz's pitch-perfect letter to the editor.) If this means that gays will be able to blaspheme the Torah to their heart's content well that is on Benjamin. 

(To be continued ...)

The Secret of Ankh-Morpork: A Tale of British Liberalism

In the Constitution of Liberty (I:4), F. A. Hayek distinguishes between what may be called the British evolutionary empiricist and French rationalist schools of liberty. The French tradition, as exemplified by thinkers like Jean Jacques Rousseau (yes, he was born in Geneva), sees liberty in terms of specific policies and political structures that can be known through reason. Its primary goal is the creation of a utopian ideal government with the right laws and the right people in charge. The British tradition, as exemplified by Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, sees liberty as emerging out of systems of human interaction that transcend the design of any particular person. These can be seen in economic markets and traditional social orders. As with biological evolution, these systems are rational in the sense that they follow clear rules and are not random even as they have no rational designer. The goal of such liberty is not any utopian ideal but to limit physical coercion in people's lives.

It strikes me that one of the finest modern examples of this British approach to liberty can be found in Terry Pratchett's comic fantasy series Discworld. In particular, I would like to focus on his use of the city of Ankh-Morpork, which relies less on any of its visible institutions than on a certain subconscious sensibility embedded within its citizens. On the surface, one would be hard-pressed to think of Ankh-Morpork as any kind of Utopia. The city is filthy, crime-ridden, corrupt and under the boot of the tyrannical Patrician Lord Vetinari. And yet there is something about the city that allows it to, if not necessarily function well, at least avoid collapsing on a day to day basis. Furthermore, there is something about Ankh-Morpork that draws people from all over Discworld, whether barbarian raiders, tourists or immigrants. As paradoxical as it might sound, if you find yourself alienated by the place you grew up in, Ankh-Morpork is precisely the place that you can count on to feel at home.

What is Ankh-Morpork's secret of success? It is not the place has some particularly brilliant form of government. There is not much of a government doing anything and the little government that there is seems totally outmatched by the challenges it faces. Is there something special about Ankh-Morporkians themselves? There is no race of Ankh-Morporkians. On the contrary, Ankh-Morpork is a collection of every race and species on Discworld. Furthermore, the people themselves are not particularly wise nor virtuous. What makes Ankh-Morpork special is something about the deep-seated institutions of the city itself that transcend its politics and its racial makeup. One might even think of it as magic, something that is not too far fetched considering how the wizards of Ankh-Morpork's Unseen University mess with the fabric of reality.

In this sense, Ankh-Morpork is the perfect British classical liberal counter-Utopia. The place is far from perfect but is still a place that real people might want to live in. This only makes sense in a world that rejects Utopias. In fact, constantly hanging over Ankh-Morpork is the prospect of a path to Utopia that is never taken in the form of the messianic Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson. He is the true heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork (the last king having been killed off centuries ago). He even has a sword and a birthmark to prove it. It has been foretold that he will bring truth and justice to Ankh-Morpork. (See Guards, Guards.) One of the running jokes of the series is that despite all the people who know of Carrot's heritage, there is no grand push to make him king because no one actually wants truth and justice. It is not that anyone actually likes Lord Vetinari, but his style of management, corruption and all, suits people just fine.  

Carrot does well as an honest watchman and as a human raised by dwarfs and whose love interest, Angua, is a werewolf, he is well positioned to negotiate between different races. That being said, it is obvious that Carrot would be a dreadful ruler if he ever got around to fulfilling his destiny. He has principles that he will not compromise on, while politics is the art of compromise. It is unfortunate that Pratchett never got around to completing Carrot's story arc. I imagine something along the lines of Vetinari being killed off, chaos threatens the city, and the people are demanding that Carrot agree to become their king. Carrot should then give some version of Life of Brian's "you can all think for yourselves" speech before riding off into the sunset. The city falls into chaos and it is exactly the kind of chaos that afflicted Ankh-Morpork every day under Vetinari. Perhaps Nobby Nobbs becomes patrician; regardless, it does not matter who officially rules as it is the city itself that actually is in charge.

Part of Discworld's use of an emerging order is its lack of clear ideological heroes. For example, Vetinari is not any kind of liberal. He is a dictator, who clearly does not believe in civil liberties. That being said, what great evil does Vetinari actually do? He seems to sit in his office, call people in and suggest that certain courses of action might be good for their continued health. For all that it is taken as a given that Vetinari is ruthless enough to have people tortured to death on a whim, he does not seem to do much of that. This does not mean that Vetinari is a good guy; his love of power precludes that. Nevertheless, there is something about the culture of Ankh-Morpork that resists blatant authoritarian force. Vetinari is smart enough to understand that the best way to hold on to power in Ankh-Morpork is to avoid directly giving orders. Instead, everything, including theft and murder, is legalized though regulated by guilds. These institutions gain their authority through the perpetual motion of tradition that transcends any attempt by individuals to control them. In essence, Vetinari allows the city to run itself while he devotes himself to politics, staying in power by positioning himself as the known quantity that people can live with.  

We see a similar thing with Sam Vimes, the head of the city watch. While Vimes is certainly more likable than Vetinari, his values are quite conservative. Unlike his ancestor who killed the last king of Ankh-Morpork, Vimes is not a revolutionary. What Vimes believes in is the law. It is not that Vimes believes that the law is perfect. On the contrary, he is quite aware of its limitations. That being said, it is precisely because Vimes sees how little good the law can do in the face of real problems in the world that he believes that the law, for whatever it is worth, should apply to everyone, rich and poor, humans and every other race. (See Night Watch and Snuff.) Vimes is the kind of common man just doing his job around whom heroic things seem to happen.

This sensibility seeps down into the rest of Ankh-Morpork. It is a cosmopolitan place in which even dwarfs and trolls learn to if not exactly tolerate each other than at least to not murder each other too often. (See Thud.) Ankh-Morpork has legal prostitution in the form of the Seamstress' Guild. It even allows for explorations of gender identity in the case of Cherry Littlebottom, who comes out as a female dwarf. For all of this tolerance, it is not as if there are many actual liberals in the city crusading for people's rights. (There are zombie activists promoting the rights of the undead.) Most of the residents are highly parochial, interested in their mothers or some other hobby. But it is precisely such narrow mindedness that makes Ankh-Morpork's type of tolerance possible. The residents are too focused on their own private business to mind anyone else's. When the occasional mob does form, they are usually dispersed not by appeals to any noble ideals but by reminding the mob that there are more important things in their lives that they should care about.  

In Discworld, the arc of history does bend toward justice. A running theme through the series is the expansion of personhood to include an ever wider circle of beings such as golems or goblins, who were previously seen as either lacking feelings or so depraved as to be outside of personhood. (See Feet of Clay and Snuff.) What makes this possible is not that particular individuals become "woke" to oppression. Rather, it is that the underlying social system evolves as to include new groups. Once that happens, no conscious tolerance is needed. You can hate the group, but even the very fact that you hate them serves to embed them within the fabric of society, making their elimination inconceivable. (This is an important theme in understanding anti-Semitism. Jews were never in danger from people who believed that Jews killed their Lord as long as Jews were considered part of the existing order of society. Mass violence against Jews only became possible when Jews came to be thought of as something other.) 

On the other side of this coin, minority groups themselves, such as the dwarfs, change as they move to Ankh-Morpork. They might not intend to assimilate and might not realize what is happening until they are raising the next generation but by then it is too late. It is the power of Ankh-Morpork that it is able to assimilate outsiders and turn them into Ankh-Morporkians who embody Ankh-Morpork values even as such people claim to hate Ankh-Morpork and desire to return to the "old country."

Much as Ankh-Morpork attracts outsiders, the city finds itself host to a wide variety of religions. Most Ankh-Morporkians seem indifferent to religion in their personal lives even as religious institutions seem to thrive. There is even a Temple of Small Gods devoted to cast off religions that services people who might not be particularly religious but who like religion as a general idea. The only people who seem interested in forcing their beliefs on others are the Omnians. Even they find themselves caught in the web of Ankh-Morpork sensibilities and are reduced to "aggressively" handing out pamphlets to unbelievers.  

This brings us to the question of markets. As Ankh-Morpork is not a Utopia, it should come as no surprise that Ankh-Morpork is not a free-market Utopia along the lines of Galt's Gulch populated by libertarian ideologues prepared to explain the evils of government planning. That being said, what is interesting about Ankh-Morpork is that it is precisely the kind of place in which innovation either happens or which innovators quickly make their way to in order to market their ideas. It is not that Vetinari loves innovation. On the contrary, he understands more than most people how innovations can make tidal waves in society and he knows that the entire basis of his power lies in his ability to offer people more of the same. It is not that Ankh-Morporkians themselves love innovation either, at least as a principle. That being said, Ankh-Morporkians can be seduced by the magic of a new invention. This allows for innovations to make a rapid jump from a prototype that someone is fooling around with to a part of the social fabric, moving through the stage of dangerous innovation too fast for an effective opposition to build up and stop it. 

Like Charles Dickens, Pratchett's depiction of businessmen was a mixed bag. I do love Harry King whose fortune literally is founded on human excrement. (See Raising Steam.) For a city in which so much is privatized, it is a mystery as to why Ankh-Morpork would need a government-run post-office or mint. (See Going Postal and Making Money.) Even in those cases, Vetinari takes a very hands-off approach and simply lets the conman Moist von Lipwig take charge. In both cases, it is the Ankh-Morpork spirit and not government planning that quickly takes over and cause these institutions to serve purposes beyond anyone's design. 

Ultimately, Pratchett also possessed Dickens' appreciation for the common unheroic virtues. People might be cowards and hypocrites (otherwise known as being self-interested), but they are redeemed by their petty loves and kindnesses. As with Dickens, this goes a long way to redeeming Pratchett. He is a defender of the common man with his bourgeois dreams of doing even the most humble job well and getting ahead as opposed to waging revolution. This is in contrast to the Marxist pretend support for the working class; no one despises the common man like a Marxist. 

The truth about Ankh-Morpork is that it is actually very well run; it is just that it is not being run by any person, not even Lord Vetinari. Ankh-Morpork is a liberal and even revolutionary city that is completely lacking in liberal revolutionaries. It is the deep-seated embed institutions of the city itself that transcend any politician, system of government or particular race that guard the city's liberty and allow it to thrive.  

Israel as a Nation-State

To continue with the discussion of Yoram Hazony's Virtue of Nationalism, I would also like to say something about Hazony's understanding of Israel as a nation-state. I agree with Hazony that the chief source of opposition to Israel from the modern left is the fact that Israel is a self-conscious and unapologetic nation-state. So Israel, from the perspective of the hard left, is automatically racist. A soldier who shoots a Palestinian terrorist is not morally different from a Nazi. It is irrelevant that one is engaging in self-defense. In both cases, they are defending racism. A world in which Jews were driven to the sea would be a world with a little less racism.

The backflow from this venom even influences mainstream journalism and fuels the habit of disingenuous headlines in which Palestinian terror attacks are described in passive terms while Israel's response is active and terrorists are placed in the same category as civilians. So for example, you can have a headline of "Israel Kills Palestinian in Response to the Death of Two People in an Attack." Now, the article, itself, will go on to explain that Israel killed the Palestinian who carried out the attack. Technically, the headline is accurate, but it is clearly designed to give the impression that Israel kills random Palestinians as revenge for "misfortunes" that occur to Israelis that are not the fault of the Palestinians.

If this was simply an anti-Semitic conspiracy on the part of journalists to defame Israel, we might have an easier time combating it. The reality is that such headlines are the product of a particular narrative and a desire, at all costs, to avoid an alternative one. If Palestinian nationalism is itself an Arab supremacist ideology that exists simply as cover to murder Jews then there is really nothing Israel can do to bring peace. Israel is left with simply trying to maintain the status quo or to pursue some kind of mass expulsion of Palestinians. Until some radical reform happens within Palestinian society, something outside of Israel's control, Israel cannot be expected to make any concessions. Once we rule out that possibility even from consideration by denouncing it as racist, then we are forced into the anti-Israel narrative. Palestinian terror attacks can only be the product of misguided individuals and not of any organized ideology. Since it is "unthinkable" that the Palestinian leadership would teach people to murder, if Israelis are killed it must be because of anger over the "occupation." In the end, mainstream Western public opinion needs to believe that there is some concession that Israel can be pushed to make that can bring peace. The alternative is simply too uncomfortable for them to consider.

To be fair to Israel's critics, ultimately, Israel is a racist state in the sense that any nation-state is racist. Israel was created to solve a particular Jewish problem and not to help humanity as a whole. Much as a person's love for their family means that their children matter more than random children on the other side of the planet or down the block, a nationalist values his people more than foreigners. Now, this does not mean that you are a Nazi and believe that your people are better than everyone else and that it is morally acceptable to abuse or even murder people outside of your group. The fact that I love my children more than yours does not mean that I think my children are better. On the contrary, if my love for my children was because they were ubermenchen, it would not be parental love. I love my children for no other reason than they are my children. I intend no harm to anyone else's children and I expect other people to love their children more than mine. In fact, I would be terrified of any stranger who claimed to love my children equal to theirs.

Similarly, I love Judaism because I identify myself with Jews. By extension, I identify with Israel as the nation-state of the Jews, even though I do not live actually live there. Perhaps Jews have some special divine mission. This still does not make Jews better than anyone else, something the Bible is quite clear about. I am sure there is much to love about Korean culture and it is right that Koreans should cherish being Korean to the extent of building a nation-state of Korea by having agreeable property owners coming together to form a social contract. Both Israelis and Koreans could then live in peace together in perfect respect as they would have no true disagreements.

Ultimately, Israel's enemies are able to cynically make the jump from Israel is a nation-state to Israel is a Nazi state as a means of promoting violence against Israelis as part of precisely the kind of ethno-religious supremacism that Israel is wrongly accused of. This thinking seeps into mainstream opinion because most people today have not been taught to distinguish between liberal nationalism and xenophobia.

Now, this raises a question; if Israeli nationalism is racist, what about Palestinian nationalism. I think that Hazony is being simplistic with his claim that the West ignores Arab nationalism because it believes that non-Europeans are developmentally behind and so lack the enlightenment to abandon nationalism. On the contrary, non-Europeans are taking a step forward from petty tribalism when they embrace nationalism. What Hazony misses is that the left does not believe that non-Westerners can be racists as they are perceived as lacking power. On the contrary, racist seeming actions by non-whites are attempts to seek empowerment in the face of white racism. From this perspective, Palestinian statehood is not really a nation-state and cannot be racist. On the contrary, the vilest expressions of anti-Semitism are simply products of Zionist racism.

For Israel to win its public relations struggle to justify its own existence, it is going to need the West to rediscover the virtues of nationalism. For that to happen, we are going to need actual nation-states. For example, instead of a European Union, we need an England, a France, and a Germany. For that matter, we need an independent Scotland and Catalonia. Similarly, the United States is not a nation-state and should be broken down into units that can serve as such. Feel free to suggest your own alternative maps.

Finding Something Good to Say About Louis Farrakhan

In this past week's Jewish Journal, Rabbi Robin Podolsky has an article "Why I Will Walk With the Women's March." Podolsky comes across as someone with very different values from me and with whom I disagree with. I can still respect her, though, recognizing that she comes to her conclusions by applying her non-satanic principles consistently. I oppose the Women's March because I believe that it is not serious about opposing Trump. If it were, then it would have focused on reaching out to anti-Trump people on the right in a bid to build a broad coalition capable of bringing the president down. Instead, it is a Trojan Horse designed to offer moral cover for black nationalists and Islamists. Despite the growing evidence in support of this view, I recognize that I am not in a position to lecture supporters of the March. Beyond the fact that I identify as a man, I am outside of the value system of even the more moderate marchers. Hence, any criticism I might offer, regardless of its factual correctness, would be seen, and rightfully so, as an attempt to bring in my own Trojan Horse. 

The author acknowledges that March leaders like Linda Sarsour support BDS but accepts that one can do so without being an anti-Semite. I agree with her up to a point. It is possible to hold views and support policies that are seen as harmful to particular groups without being guilty of bigotry. That being said, I find it useful to employ a two-strike rule. You are allowed the one issue but then you have to be really cautious. 

For example, you can support legal discrimination without being a racist as long as you make a point of acknowledging that blacks have good grounds to be suspicious of you and therefore you make an effort to find ways to be helpful in other areas, say police brutality. A person who does not go through such a mental process, whether or not they actually are racist, demonstrates that black concerns are not a high priority to the extent that he does not care whether he is thought of as a racist. As such, the black community is justified in treating that person as a racist. (This is distinct from calling out someone as a racist, which is usually counter-productive when it comes to actually combating racists as opposed to virtue-signaling.)

Similarly, I am willing to grant anti-Zionists the benefit of the doubt as long as they bend over backward to make sure they are not associated with those who make the jump from anti-Zionism to blatant classical anti-Semitism. One thinks of the example of Alice Walker and her "discovery" that the source of Israel's crimes is the Talmud. Of greater concern than, whatever bone-headed comments might have been made behind closed doors, is the fact that the Women's March leadership does not see it as a priority that Jews do not see them as anti-Semitic despite being willing to wade into "controversial" territory such as BDS. They believe that they will not pay a price for such inattention and the terrifying thing is that they might be right.  

This brings us to the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, who has provided security for Women's March events despite being a rabid anti-Semite. One might think that it would be a simple thing to cut ties with the man. (It is not like he even identifies as a woman.) The fact that the Women's March leadership has been willing to hold on to Farrakhan, despite paying a heavy price for it to the point of putting the entire movement at risk, indicates that black nationalism, even when it turns to anti-Semitism, is not simply an allied movement but a critical aspect of the Woman's March's real purpose.

Podolsky attempts to empathize with those sympathetic to Farrakhan. She quotes Adam Serwer:

[Blacks have] seen the Fruit of Islam patrol rough neighborhoods and run off drug dealers, or they have a family member who went to prison and came out reformed, preaching a kind of pride, self-sufficiency, and entrepreneurship that, with a few adjustments, wouldn’t sound out of place coming from a conservative Republican.

Having acknowledged the good that the Nation of Islam does in black communities (in essence the old "but they are nice to their mothers"), Podolsky attempts to Pontius Pilate the left from any responsibility for Farrakhan arguing that he is really a conservative with a "touching faith in unregulated capitalism despite what it never did for his people."

To be clear, I am skeptical as to how pro-market Farrakhan really is. In my experience, what liberals mean by "unregulated markets" is anything to the right of Elizabeth Warren. If you think that banks and hospitals are capitalism run amok, you are either incredibly ignorant or mendacious. What I find interesting here is how Podolsky is unable to appreciate the relationship between the Farrakhan she likes, who helps lower crime in black neighborhoods, and the Farrakhan who might not actually be a sworn enemy of capitalism. So instead of relying on government police, with a record of violence against blacks that is not ancient history, Farrakhan has the Fruit of Islam operate as a private security force that helps clean up neighborhoods as well as helping out the Women's March. Even most libertarians struggle with the idea of private police. If Farrakhan has already gotten over that hump, should it surprise anyone that he is open to private enterprise in a wide variety of spheres of life?

Somehow capitalism is supposed to be to blame for what is wrong in black society. Ignoring the issue of police brutality and how the government repeatably fails the black community, the whole point of the Women's March was supposed to be about opposing a government problem. If we can turn Trump once again into a crooked sexist real-estate developer and reality-tv host that would be a victory. Trump only became a problem when he entered the government. 

Should this convince anyone to not participate in the March? Podolsky has clearly made her bed and is willing to lie in it. She assumes that intersectional politics rooted in a desire to keep capitalism in check will help the unfortunate. She, therefore, is willing to give the benefit of the doubt to opponents of Israel and anti-Semites. Maybe she is right. Hopefully, she will at least march with a guilty conscience. 

The Anti-Judaism of the New Doctor Who

I am a long-running fan of Doctor Who. One of the things I respected about the show has been its ability to be liberal in ways that were subtle and did not get in the way of smart storytelling for people of different ages and across the political spectrum. This was possible because the writers knew how to pick their shots and let their values flow from the narrative. Doctor Who, at a fundamental level, is a show about tolerance founded on curiosity about the other. The hero is a time-traveling alien, who takes people on journies across time and space. From this perspective, human concerns about race, religion, sexuality, and gender are going to seem rather provincial. There is no need to preach tolerance. On the contrary, the show's valuing of tolerance should emanate naturally from its very premise. This brings me to my problem with the newest season. While I was excited for Jodie Whittaker becoming the first female Doctor, as she was excellent in Broadchurch, the show has gotten into the habit of wearing its politics on its sleeve which is not only boring, it is also counter-productive for getting its message across.

This embrace of liberal polemics goes beyond giving the Doctor his usual humanist speeches in keeping with a character who is a talker. Furthermore, the show regularly used to turn its liberalism on the Doctor. From his own perspective, the Doctor is the liberal humanist that he is because he has seen the dark side alternative within himself when he became the War Doctor during the Time War and was willing to destroy his own people, the Time Lords, in order to rid the universe of the Daleks. This sense of guilt, most notable in Christopher Eccleston and more recently with Peter Capaldi, often allows the Doctor to empathize and try to reason with the villains. I cannot think of a show in which the "big scary monster" is more likely to not simply be a bad guy in need of being destroyed. This willingness to avoid easy answers was part of what made Doctor Who's lessons in tolerance so effective; it habituated viewers, in ways like no other show, to question the Manichean good versus evil framework that comes so naturally to us that ultimately is the root of intolerance.

This hard-earned embrace of tolerance is discarded in this new season in an effort to engage in virtue-signaling. Just in case anyone doubted where the show stood on race and gender, not only is the Doctor now a woman but she now has, as companions, a black guy, a Pakistani woman plus a middle-aged white man to provide some diversity. There are episodes dealing with Rosa Parks and seventeenth-century witch trials in England. The show "bravely" teaches us that racism and sexist witch-dunkings are bad. A useful contrast here is the last Capaldi episode which gets much of its humor from confronting the highly patronizing attitude toward women in the early incarnations of the show back in the 1960s.

I would like to focus on one particular incident from the Witchfinders episode, which, for all of its flaws, is partially redeemed by Alan Cummings' portrayal of King James I. The Doctor confronts a witch-hunter, who quotes from the King James Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18).  The Doctor responds: "In the Old Testament. There is a twist in the sequel, 'love thy neighbor.'" First, on a basic factual level, the Doctor is mistaken. "Love thy neighbor" comes from the Old Testament in Leviticus 19:18. The New Testament simply quotes the Old. The second but more disturbing issue here is that the show is playing into the stereotype of the Old Testament as the book of judgment in contrast to the New Testament with its love and tolerance. This is the true foundation for Christian anti-Judaism, far more pernicious than the notion that the Jews killed Jesus.

While Jews have been convenient scapegoats, Christianity has never truly needed to blame Jews for killing Jesus, particularly those Jews who were not alive during the first century CE. The real Jewish challenge for Christianity has always been that Christianity could never escape the fact that the New Testament serves to modify an already present scripture. Unless there was something wrong with Judaism that Christianity could realistically improve on (obviously, neither religion has ever lacked for pious hypocrites), Christianity makes no sense. For traditional Orthodox Christianity, the solution has been that the Old Testament lacked the Son of God dying to atone for the sins of the world. This, though, raises the question of what was the point of the Old Testament if it could not save. The answer is that the Old Testament teaches us about sin by showing us how we utterly fail to keep the Law (Romans 7:7-25). As such, Christians need to read the Old Testament as the law that condemns despite everything the Old Testament has to say to the contrary. If the God of the Old Testament knows that we are imperfect sinners but will forgive us if only we truly want it then there is no need for Jesus. On the contrary, Jesus becomes a denial of God's perfect forgiveness.

To be fair to traditional Christians, their anti-Judaism can be kept in check with an Augustinian embrace of man's total depravity. From this perspective, Jews, even as Christ-killers, can never be worse than depraved humanity as a whole. Any other group of human sinners would have failed God's test just as badly. At least the Jews have the advantage that God chose them despite their utter depravity.

With modern liberal Christianity, this problem of anti-Judaism actually gets worse. As Amy-Jill Levine argues in The Misunderstood Jew: the Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, liberal Christianity's desire to escape from traditional dogma easily turns into a backdoor for precisely the kind of negative stereotypes of Jews that it was supposed to have transcended. If the point of Jesus was not that he was the Son of God sent to atone for sin then it must be that Jesus taught a new value system. This means that the old system must have been really backward and in need of replacement. For example, if Jesus came to liberate women then Judaism must be some oppressive Taliban-like religion. If Jesus helped the poor then Judaism must be the religion of the greedy rich. If human beings are not all depraved then there was something wrong specifically with the Jews that caused them to reject Jesus' message of peace and love. 

If you think that attacking the Jewish scriptures is not an attack on members of the Jewish religion then consider what it means to attack the Koran. If the Old Testament (or the Koran) does not simply have problematic texts that believers have to struggle with but teaches hatred then that religion is tainted and its practitioners must be condemned as haters as long as they do not formally abandon their religion. We would not accept "moderate" Nazis with their "liberal" reading of Mein Kampf as anything other than a sick joke and a cynical attempt to make anti-Semitism acceptable in polite society. By contrast, we can easily ignore those Jews in the past who might have killed Jesus as not real Jews as they failed to live up to the "true" teachings of Judaism, which is peace.

The fact that Christians believe in the Old Testament as opposed to the Koran only adds to the problem. The Muslim reading his Koran is outside of the Christian framework and can, therefore, be ignored. The Old Testament practicing Jew as an opponent who is also part of the Christian framework all too easily becomes the embodiment of Christianity's failures, allowing Christians to pass off whatever they secretly hate about themselves as really being the fault of the Jews. Since this Jew is a Christian construct without any real connection to actual Jews, it can flourish even in the absence of Jews. Hatred of this theological Jewish construct could fester unconnected to people who actually practice Judaism until it manifests itself in the actual murder of Jews.  For example, the medieval unbelieving Christian, who could not accept that Jesus really was present in the Eucharist was transformed into a Jew in spirit. This, in turn, got actual Jews killed as host desecrators.

This same formula helps explain witch hunts. You start with the construct of the witch as a servant of Satan. Since this fantasy has no connection to real people, it can evolve into something ever more sinister, capable of literally committing any depravity no matter how heinous, until someone is made to wear that label and die for it. In the hands of Doctor Who, witch-hunters in seventeenth-century England (which officially had expelled its Jews in 1290) become people in funny hats who quote the Old Testament without seeming to realize that there exists a New Testament; in essence, they are Jews. This is dangerous because, despite the fact that Jews were not responsible for European witch trials, viewers are being primed to associate Jews, as followers of a "harsh" Old Testament law, with witch-hunting and ultimately with the forces of intolerance.   

To be clear, I do not think the writers of a certain British science-fiction show actively hate Jews or consciously meant any harm. Furthermore, I do not believe that I am some paragon of tolerance who never makes harmful prejudiced comments. I beg the indulgence of members of the practically limitless groups that I am not part of for my ignorance. You are human beings (or perhaps aliens) and my failure to treat you as such is simply an oversight on my part. If you are a member of such a group, feel free to point out where I have treated you unfairly. Since I am not claiming to be a tolerant person, just someone who tries to be, I have no reason to reject your criticism and might just take it to heart. Likewise, I should forgive the writers for not being on top of the history of anti-Semitism and its role in Christian biblical exegesis. There is plenty of evil out there in the world and I should not take it personally if writers wish to focus on other issues besides anti-Semitism.

Here is the problem though. The show has now made a point of its great tolerance, allowing itself the moral authority to treat those possessing the various failings of very real historical prejudices as caricatures. We are no longer dealing with a show in which tolerance is a tool for self-examination but a weapon to castigate others. If the writers believe that they are some model of enlightened tolerance for others to look up to then any demonstration of prejudice, even a small one, ceases to be innocent. We now have no reason to assume that they would accept that, even through oversight, they are guilty of prejudice as this would undermine the very moral authority that saves them from being Puritan Pharisee Jews, whose obsession with the prejudices of others has blinded them to their own prejudices.   

Just so we are clear, I have no objection to Doctor Who criticizing the Old Testament. It has many problematic passages. My problem is that the show did so in a way that is factually incorrect. Worse, it used this falsehood as a means of propping up the New Testament, making the central argument of Christian anti-Jewish biblical exegesis. This is not an innocent issue but one with real blood attached to it. The writers owe the Jewish community an apology and a commitment to educating themselves about anti-Semitism. Perhaps this can be the basis for an episode next season. Might I suggest that the Doctor team up with the Golem of Prague to stop a blood libel?

Camp Chimerical Anti-Christianity: Facing the Consequences

A few years ago, for the fast day of Tisha B'Av, I wrote a hard-hitting post, raising some uncomfortable questions about the Jewish community. As that is one of my personal favorites, I decided to follow it up for this Tisha B'Av. My purpose is not to attack anyone and, for that reason, I have avoided names. I hope that my ambiguous feelings about my camping experience rather than hatred should be clear. As is often the case with me, I am more interested in asking questions that I find myself struggling with than in offering solutions.    

When I attended Haredi summer camps, I once played a villainous Spanish Inquisitor in a play. While waving a torch, I gave a speech about Judas Iscariot as the model traitorous Jew, which included a joke reference to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as well. I remember watching another play in which a priest murders the prince, who started asking difficult theological questions regarding Judaism, in order to set the Jews up for a blood libel. Both performances can be seen as anti-Christian. The difference between them is that while I expressed a "rational" opposition to Christianity, the other person made a chimerical assertion. Spanish inquisitors are historical facts. The figure of Judas did play an important role in medieval Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric. Even Christians would agree with me on this. By contrast, there is no evidence of Christian priests murdering Christian children in order to frame Jews just as there is no evidence of Jews murdering Christians for their blood. Christians can hope to negotiate with someone possessing a legitimate negative impression of historical Christians. Such a person can be convinced that modern-day Christians are different and not a threat. A person with a chimerical opposition to Christianity will never be convinced that Christians are not a threat even by the evidence of his own eyes as he already believes things about them that he never had any evidence to begin with. Such a person will inevitably sink into the black hole of conspiracy theories to the point where the lack of evidence for his beliefs will simply prove to him that there is a vast cover-up.

In regards to this story of a priest murdering a Christian to cover up the fact that Christianity is false, I am reminded of Israel Yuval's argument that Christians came to believe in the blood libel because they saw Jews kill their own children during the Crusades. If Jews would kill their own children so that they do not fall into the hands of Christians, might Jewish mothers poison their children's kugel if they thought they were attracted to Christianity? If Jews hated Christianity this much, surely Jews would gladly murder Christian children. Thus, Christians had "no choice" but to kill Jews in self-defense. Similarly, it would be reasonable for impressionable Jewish children in the audience, like myself, to conclude that if priests would kill Christian children to stop them from converting to Judaism, they would gladly kill Jewish children. The logical conclusion from this would be that, if we ever found ourselves in a position of power, we should kill Christians.

Let me be clear, this play about a murderous priest was in no way exceptional in how Christianity was portrayed at this Haredi camp. One of my favorite rebbes used to tell stories with his stock villain, "Father Schmutz" (dirt). When priests were not trying to start blood libels, they kidnapped Jewish children and held them in secret monasteries to try to convert them. In case you were wondering if this was just a matter of some overzealous teachers, the head counselor of this camp used to have a radio show, "Children's Stories of Inspiration." In addition to blatantly idolatrous stories that endorsed human sacrifices to angels and a Satan capable of acting independently of God, one of his stories involved a Father Francois murdering a Christian child in order to start a blood libel. His plan was thwarted when he was forced to take hold of the hand of the dead victim, who then refused to let go.

Installing the campers with a visceral hatred of Christianity as a religion and a fear of Christians as people were part of a conscious top-down effort. I doubt the camp administration wanted us to actually go out and harm any Christians. That being said, their jobs depended on demonstrating to parents that their children were being protected from outside "negative" influences. In an exercise of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, the fact that these administrators were, ever so slightly, putting every Jew on the planet in danger clearly took a back seat.

What are the consequences of this kind of education? When the Passion movie came out, I told my father that I could not call it anti-Semitic for the simple reason that its portrayal of Jews was not worse than the portrayal of Christians that I was regularly fed in camp. My father, the assistant-head counselor of that camp, agreed with me. On a more serious note, consider the role played by Islamist schools in installing a pathological hatred of Jews, directly leading to Jews dying in terrorist attacks.


      


It is clear to me that not considering the children in this video and certainly their teachers as legitimate military targets (the kids are even in uniform and practicing military maneuvers) will lead to dead Jews. The problem is that any non-Jew can respond that Jews also indoctrinate their kids to hate and I have simply too much personal experience to point-blank deny that fact. So the administrators of my camp have real Jewish blood on their hands. Their actions have made it harder to form the necessary alliances needed to fight Islamic terrorism and save Jewish lives.

Now it needs to be said, that the people I am talking about are warm wonderful people that I gained much from. These are not anyone's stereotypes of hate mongers. I loved camp and many of my fondest memories come from there.  Coincidently, the staff member who played the murderous priest later became my tenth grade English teacher at Yeshiva Torah Vodaas and taught me Julius Caesar (he was even good at his job). At the time, I did not see myself as being indoctrinated to hate and I still have my doubts as to calling this hate. Everything was framed in such a positive and loving way, which may have made it all the more insidious. There was much good to my camp; that being said, beyond the fun times and spiritual growth lay a dark side that needs to be faced.