Anti Semitism....

Written by movie zombie » March 30th, 2012, 8:36 am:this remains true:

"In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."

-- by Martin Niemöller


as you noted, missy, other groups were also persecuted along with the jews throughout history. during WWII the gypsy peoples were equally hard hit.... and once again in europe they are being hard hit, some would argue that their treatment right now would be a whisper to the future re attitudes towards jews.

did you see the movie Sarah's Key? in some ways i think there are those in france trying to deal with their collaboration with the nazi occupation and contribution to the french jewish round ups and transport to camps for extermination. see this movie if you can.

there is a reason why the jewish community engaged in the struggle for civil rights.....because it was understood that the civil rights denied to one group could be easily denied to another.

Airbrushing anti-Semitism out of the Toulouse attack
Analysts and political pundits attempting to establish a motive for the murder of a rabbi and three children outside a Jewish school in Toulouse somehow omit anti-Semitism as a possible cause.
By Joel Braunold / Jewish World blogger Tags: Jewish World anti-Semitism Toulouse shootings


Like Jews across the world, I was shocked, sickened and frightened by the senseless murder of a rabbi and three small children in France last week. With the end of Mohammed Merah’s life came the start of an operation on the psychosis that drove him to murder with such callousness. Analysts and political pundits attempting to establish cause and motive have come up with a range of options. Yet, absent from such analysis of many was the cause of anti-Semitism.

As a British Jew who has moved to the United States, my media diet has somewhat shifted to this new geographical location. Now that I do not read the European press daily, I was first made aware of the issue of the air-brushing of anti-Semitism from Merah’s causes by an excellent article in the Tablet by Michael Moynihan, where he picked through various accounts of peoples explanations of the killings and saw that hatred against the Jews did not feature.

Perhaps the most shocking piece written on the murders came from Oxford Professor and Islamic thinker Tariq Ramadan, who declared that Merah was a young man, “imbued neither with the values of Islam, or driven by racism and anti-Semitism.” He was merely attacking symbols, “the army and Jews.”

His analysis was joined by a piece on France 24 that his trigger was due to the loss of a job or a political act. The Guardian in their editorial worries about the politicization of the incident and the general threats to society of violent extremisms, but never mentions the term anti-Semitism.

The reduction of the French Jewish community to a mere symbol of a Western European society demonstrates a dehumanization of Merah’s victims. How does the slaughter of a religious leader and three small children of a particular minority community merely become a symbol of attacking society in general? Do the victims’ identities mean nothing to these analysts except to demonstrate this was another disaffected immigrant angry at the West and demonstrating that anger in just any way he knew how?

As someone who was once the convener anti-racist, anti-fascist campaign for the National Student Movement in the U.K., I understand the tinder box of inter community violence all too well. The desire for the far-right to have been the perpetrator, the boogie man that we can all agree to hate, is overwhelmingly strong. The last thing we want to do is exacerbate Jewish-Muslim tensions.

Yet this noble desire cannot mask the fact that this man’s victims were not random. They were Jews. His lip service to the Palestinian cause as justification makes him no more a symbol of their movement, as his victims were symbols of Western Society. Merah got it into his head that one should kill Jews; it was something that was correct in his eyes to do. His brother is proud of what he did. Is that also because he lost his job or is disaffected? When will it be allowed to say that these two people hated Jews?

The post-mortem of this terrible act needs to focus on how this understanding - that it was a good idea to gun down Jews - occurred. Mohammad Merah, and his brother it seems, have both been infected by eleminationist anti-Semitism. What is needed alongside the rest of the psychological analysis is finding the cause of the infection and callousing it from Western society. It must be burnt out.

The inabilities of some to even mention anti-Semitism as a cause terrifies me. Call a spade a spade; the victims deserve labeling this an act of anti-Semitism far more than the analysis of rightist politics in France's political discourse.

Perhaps the only positive thing of note has been the reaction of the French Jewish community. After a rabbi and three small children were murdered in France, and declared by the persecutor as an act in the name of the Middle East conflict, there were no riots, nor firebombs lobbed at mosques. During the 2009 War in Gaza there were riots in London, shops smashed and firebombs thrown at synagogues.

The French Jewish community’s silent and powerful protest in arms with other communities in response to such violent provocation demonstrates that even at the pinnacle of rage rioting in the streets of Europe is not justified. So as we think about what lead a man to target Jewish children, let us also recognize the control of a community, a control that we could only hope to emulate if we found ourselves in such circumstances.

Peter Beinart, Racism vs. Anti-Semitism
There are critics of Israel and the Jews I respect and those I do not. Peter Beinart, who has just published The Crisis of Zionism, is an example of one I do not. He is jumping onto a band wagon that is careening down a dangerous slope. I doubt his motives. Not for his criticism of Israel, much of which I share, even though I do believe far more evil has been thrust onto Israel than it itself has been guilty of. But for his support of a qualified boycott of Israel, when I have not seen him quoted in support of a boycott of other far worse and dangerous regimes. There are others I respect because I believe their motives are purer. One was Peter Novick, who died recently, a significant American academic known primarily for his analysis of the objectivity of professional historians. But in the Jewish world he is known for his fierce critique of the way the Holocaust has been used and misused for political purposes in his The Holocaust in American Life and then in The Holocaust and Collective Memory.

For many years after the obliteration of the Nazi evil, neither Jew nor non-Jew wanted to speak about the horrors of what happened. Even Anne Frank’s diary was initially rejected by publishing houses. Some argue that it was the Eichmann Trial in the early sixties that caused the floodgates of memory to gush forth. Some believe it was the warming of the Cold War, which had been the excuse for integrating former Nazis into the fabric of German and American societies, ignoring their past and using them to combat the USSR. For others it was the palpable fear of Israeli extinction we who lived through it all experienced just before the Six Day Way and the sense of its miraculous victory that led to the focus on the fact that a second Holocaust almost happened. Maybe it was all of these that suddenly led to the establishment of Holocaust museums and Holocaust Days and the solemn promises that this would never happen again.

Novick saw much of this as an abuse, a misuse, and an excuse. He argued that the Holocaust was being used to prop up declining communities, as a surrogate for religious values, and an excuse for misbehavior elsewhere. He distanced himself from Norman Finkelstein’s neurotic antagonism towards Zionism and his thesis that Israel’s only reason for emphasizing the Holocaust was as a cover for its imperialist domination of the Palestinians.

I agreed with much of what Novick wrote. I did feel there was “no business like Shoah business” and that it was being milked for all it was worth. What became a generally accepted slogan–never again–was a sham, because the fact was that other genocides have taken place since then, as the world stood by. Part of me recoiled from those who made a living out of the Holocaust, all those prizewinning books and the requirement to bring the Holocaust into almost every piece of literary writing, however banal. Yet another part of me recognized that the lessons have not been learnt and that the very people who ought to be visiting the museums, seeing the films, and reading the books were not. It was the converted preaching once again to the converted.

The worst intellectual pornography, however, came from left-wing Westerners bereft of a political cause to rally round, except against anything associated with the USA, who have tried to equate Israel’s reluctant and accidental occupation of the West Bank and Gaza with Nazi extermination, which is now virtually the default position of Western academe.

It was not until my wife introduced me to Jean Amery that I heard a voice that really moved me. In her course at the New School, Amery’s work was presented alongside Frantz Fanon, the great left-wing black writer who highlighted the immorality of slavery and the oppression of blacks around the world. There is no doubt that this prejudice continues, but nowadays no one would dare champion it in public. The Trayvon Martin scandal, where it seems at this moment that a completely innocent black youngster was shot dead by a racist of a different color, shows how much prejudice against blacks still exists. The equivalence is the problem once again. In order to get the idea of a Holocaust Day accepted by Muslims in the West (much of the East still claims it was a myth) and by others who had a brief against Jews, the idea was extended, as in the UK, to cover other genocides and racisms. I recall a heated debate with a black academic in London who argued that the horrors inflicted on black slaves were the same as the Holocaust. I argued that I was not aware of any gas chambers built for any other people or race. To suggest the situations are identical would have depressed Amery enormously.

Jean Amery was born Hans Chaim Mayer in 1912 in Austria. His mother was not Jewish and he was brought up as a Catholic. Amery studied philosophy and literature in Vienna. He found himself categorized as a Jew by Hitler, married a Jewish woman and joined the resistance against the Nazi occupation of Belgium. He was captured and tortured by the Gestapo and survived internments in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He was liberated at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. His main work was At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. His theme was that humanity itself becomes complicit in the crime by ignoring it, by feeling guiltless and by pretending it did not happen. He felt his task was not to explain the inexplicable, but simply to keep the memory alive as an abstraction. “For nothing is resolved, nothing is settled, no, remembering has become mere memory. I do not understand today, and I hope that I never will. Clarification would amount to disposal, settlement of the case, which can then be placed in the files of history.” He adopted his name Amery both because it was an anagram for his name Mayer and a play on the French for “bitter.” He identified as a Jew, but not in any religious sense. He lived a bitter life with the burden of the evil and hatred he had seen. He committed suicide 1978.

Quite prophetically, when he reissued At the Mind’s Limits in 1977, he added an introduction in which he said:

“Germany’s young leftist democrats have now reached the point where they not only regard their own state as an already halfway fascist social structure but in a wholesale way they also view and correspondingly treat all those countries they designate as ‘formal’ democracies–and amongst them, above all, the tiny endangered State of Israel–as Fascist, imperialist, colonial. For this reason the time has come when every contemporary of the Nazi horror must take action. The political as well as Jewish Nazi victim which I was and am, cannot be silent when under the banner of the anti-Zionism, the old wretched anti-Semitism ventures forth.”

Intellectual fashions rise and fall, come and go. Over the past two thousand years only one hatred has remained constant throughout. Equivalence is the issue. No one dares fly the flag openly of racism or male chauvinism in the West. But anti-Semitism will not die.

Amery’s point is that the Holocaust was like no other hatred, an intentional attempt at the destruction of every single Jew regardless of age, sex or creed. To compare, to try to fit it into a category is a dangerous heresy. There has been nothing like it in human history. This does not excuse crimes committed by Jews or Israelis. The obligation to protest, to demonstrate, to try to change must be constant. But the one thing that is unacceptable is to diminish the horror of what humans did by comparing lesser crimes to it. That was why Amery said that he could not bear to live in the same world that the perpetrators or supporters of Nazism, or indeed anti-Semites, continued to inhabit.

When we give intellectual support to those who argue that Israel is a Fascist State, regardless of whether we believe, as I do, that individuals of that state have made gross and sometimes murderous errors of judgment and action, we are helping those who seek our destruction and elimination and we are betraying the memory of men like Amery, who could not bear to live while such intellectual deceit was still being perpetuated. Nothing surprises me about Jews, for better or for worse. It saddens me that even holocaust survivors themselves have become tools of those who really do seek Israel’s destruction. But this must make the rest of us fight all the harder, both for Israel’s survival and its moral health.

Written by movie zombie » March 30th, 2012, 8:56 pm:yes, i saw Incendies.

i would also argue politics within The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo speak to neo-nazi existence as well.......

please try and see Sarah's Key soon. i'd love to discuss it with you.

we were in belgium about 10 years ago and as is my tendancy i get into conversations....or i should say people end feeling comfortable with me and talking. there was a young man at the hotel we were staying at who had married an immigrant woman from south american. it was enlightening as to how far the country had moved to the right at that time.

more later.

Written by missy » April 1st, 2012, 6:37 pm:Thanks for another recommendation. I will put it on my TIVO list.

I highly recommend Schindler's List. I was only planning on seeing that movie once and saw it with my parents and my sister in 1993. When my dh and I became a couple he had never seen it so I ended up seeing it again. Not a movie I really wanted to see twice but it is an excellent movie. Worth seeing for sure.

My favorite Holocaust movie is Sophie's Choice. I'm not sure if it is because of Meryl Streep (love her!) or the fact that is was so deeply moving and profound. I really love this movie and have seen it a few times which is unlike me.

Written by innerkitten » April 24th, 2012, 5:59 pm:I'm ethnically Jewish on my mothers side. We never celebrated any Jewish holidays or anything because my mother is a spiritual mother earth loving hippie type of woman. We always had Christmas. But my mother was raised Jewish. She's from New York and her parents were from Belarus. Anyway I was really surprised at my mother in laws feelings towards Jewish people when I met her. " all jews are republicans" etc... and my MIL is from England. And she only knows two jewish people ( me and my mother). BTW my mother and my MIL have actually become pretty good friends.

Written by Haven » April 29th, 2012, 5:47 pm:Oh, goodness--anti-semitism is certainly alive and well where I live. I've experienced anti-semitism in all of the secular jobs I've held, from colleagues and students alike. In fact, I can no longer count the anti-semitic things I've heard my students say.

Written by slg47 » April 29th, 2012, 10:21 pm:

Written by Haven » April 29th, 2012, 5:47 pm:Oh, goodness--anti-semitism is certainly alive and well where I live. I've experienced anti-semitism in all of the secular jobs I've held, from colleagues and students alike. In fact, I can no longer count the anti-semitic things I've heard my students say.

wow, I am really sorry to hear this. I am happy to say that I have never seen anti-semitism.

Written by missy » April 30th, 2012, 5:18 am:

Written by slg47 » April 29th, 2012, 10:21 pm:

Written by Haven » April 29th, 2012, 5:47 pm:Oh, goodness--anti-semitism is certainly alive and well where I live. I've experienced anti-semitism in all of the secular jobs I've held, from colleagues and students alike. In fact, I can no longer count the anti-semitic things I've heard my students say.

wow, I am really sorry to hear this. I am happy to say that I have never seen anti-semitism.

I have to say that if you are not tuned to it you may not notice it. It can be subtle and insidious. I was pretty sheltered regarding this until I became more aware. In the news we are made more aware of racism of other kinds whereas anti semitism is rarely brought up. But it still exists very strongly in many areas and countries.

Written by Haven » May 1st, 2012, 10:14 am:

Written by missy » April 30th, 2012, 5:18 am:

Written by slg47 » April 29th, 2012, 10:21 pm:

Written by Haven » April 29th, 2012, 5:47 pm:Oh, goodness--anti-semitism is certainly alive and well where I live. I've experienced anti-semitism in all of the secular jobs I've held, from colleagues and students alike. In fact, I can no longer count the anti-semitic things I've heard my students say.

wow, I am really sorry to hear this. I am happy to say that I have never seen anti-semitism.

I have to say that if you are not tuned to it you may not notice it. It can be subtle and insidious. I was pretty sheltered regarding this until I became more aware. In the news we are made more aware of racism of other kinds whereas anti semitism is rarely brought up. But it still exists very strongly in many areas and countries.

I agree with you, Missy. It's also difficult to spot such things when you aren't a member of the targeted group.

Written by Haven » June 25th, 2012, 6:41 pm:Sarahbear--Did you happen to go on a Shorashim trip to Poland? I went to Poland and Israel with Shorashim back in 1996, and our experience in Poland was very similar. (We spent one week in Poland and seven weeks in Israel.)