Here’s an opinion piece by the two NYU students who accosted Chelsea Clinton at that Christchurch massacre vigil and denounced her as part of the hate that had spurred the attack. This is because she tweeted criticism of Ilhan Omar during the original “benjamins” controversy more than a month ago. (Here’s what I wrote in response to that original flare-up. A month later I wrote this.)
Many Jews who are not supporters of the Israel right or the occupation or AIPAC thought that Omar’s remarks used charged words or anti-Semitic stereotypes to make her argument, even if it were unintentional and even if Omar’s isn’t herself an anti-Semite. I know this because I’m one of them.
As I said in a different context, I don’t think Omar is an anti-Semite. I think she has too frequently been indifferent to or reckless in dipping into anti-Semite phrases or stereotypes to make her points. There’s no binary you are or you’re not. There is overt bias and hatred and then all kinds of implicit bias that people are genuinely not aware of. Indeed, these phrases and ideas and stereotypes have a life of their own, almost like viruses, quite apart from the intentions of whatever person happens to speak them at a given moment. That applies to racism and every other kind of socially embedded bigotry and discrimination.
I agree with Michelle Goldberg’s argument that Omar’s words were bad and the reaction to them worse. This is largely because that reaction, the loudest voices were those bandwagoning the controversy to score partisan political points. This is closely tied to the fact that the American right has in recent years weaponized anti-Semitism not just as a cudgel against any criticism of Israel but as a tool to promote the vision which unites the American right and the Israeli right, which is really to American evangelicals and the Israeli right. It is a grotesque act of bad faith especially compounded in recent years by the GOP’s open invitation to Benjamin Netanyahu to intervene in domestic US politics and enroll himself as a member of the GOP.
The trend was nowhere more clearly embodied than in Ron Dermer, a onetime Newt Gingrich aide who emigrated to Israel and became a top advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu. Dermer was a literal and figurative connection between the Israeli government and the GOP. In 2013 Netanyahu made him Ambassador to the United States. This was part of Netanyahu’s strategy of leveraging Republican support to block and undermine Barack Obama’s policies in the Middle East, all building toward the unprecedented GOP invitation for Netanyahu to address Congress in 2015 to attack Obama’s signature foreign policy goal of a nuclear deal with Iran and continued into Netanyahu’s more or less open support and endorsement of Donald Trump.
The alliance between Trump GOP and Netanyahu and the US and Israeli right more generally has shown what every serious student of anti-Semitism knows: that philo-Semitism is often just a flip away from anti-Semitism. In the wake of last year’s synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh President Trump’s main response was that he’d moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. When he and the First Lady visited the synagogue a few days later, the White House handlers arranged for Ron Dermer to greet the President when he arrived at the synagogue, a bizarre spectacle suggesting that the Tree of Life synagogue and Pittsburgh Jewish community which predates the existence of Israel by more than a century is some kind of Israeli expat outpost of diplomatic compound.
This all creates a bizarre situation in which “anti-Semitism” is simultaneously tossed around willy-nilly as the one form of discrimination everybody can agree to oppose and yet, simultaneously, widely ignored when inconvenient.
That muddies the waters but does not erase the validity of these arguments about anti-Semitic words or ideas. Indeed, as this NYU episode illustrated, it leads to a framework in which any criticism of someone who is a Muslim on these grounds becomes ipso facto Islamophobic or a subset of white supremacy – with anti-Semitism simply a ruse to disguise other motivations. (I had a lengthy exchange with one reader who was incredulous when I disagreed with his belief that any criticism of Omar’s language was prima facie evidence of racial bias against her.)
This is not only wrong on the merits. It also creates a framework in which Jews and anti-Semitism are simply written out of the mix – indeed, become part of the problem – whenever their concerns about bigotry and prejudice against their community appear to complicate the received storyline about Islamophobia or anti-racism.
Many argue that this means there’s somehow as much problem with anti-Semitism on the left as on the right. That is obviously not the case. We’re in the midst of a surge of anti-Semitic hate crimes across the country. They are overwhelmingly tied to people with rightist politics. Last year’s massacre in Pittsburgh is just the most horrific example. As has always been the case, ethno-nationalism and xenophobia – the calling card of the American right today – almost always come for Jews, even if they don’t begin with that focus. The President of the country routinely traffics in anti-Semitism, just as he does in Islamophobia. What we see here is something more general. Too many on the left are too quick to write anti-Semitism out of the picture, or relegate it to a secondary footnote, when it gets in the way of their accustomed storylines about good guys and bad guys in our domestic politics.
This is all less complicated when it’s a Kevin McCarthy simultaneously decrying anti-Semitism and tweeting out George Soros conspiracy theories or writing Jews names with dollar signs. This is just bad faith and bigotry, easily identified. It’s more complicated when it comes from people who agree on many things and gets between groups who need to be allies since they are mainly targeted by the same people. As I argued here, it behooves Jews to take the first and second and even third steps to try to educate people who may not know enough about the history and present Jews are reacting to, who may slip into charged languages without knowing their full context or the dark history Jews connect them to. But they should speak up regardless.
