Uppity Rodent?

I've just revisited the blog of "racism expert" Ben Gidley, aka Bob from Brockley where Flying Rodent is on cracking form exposing and denouncing the racism implicit and certainly the bullying inherent in such terminology as "as-a-Jew" etc.

The Rodent copies and pastes the bits he is commenting on so he reads BfB so you don't have to:

flyingrodent said...

...there is the way that the Western anti-Israel left, both its "as a Jew" strain and its gentile majority...

I've tried and failed to see any difference between this whole "As a Jew" thing and either "Uncle Tom" or "House Negro".

All seem to imply shameful subservience at best, and certainly some kind of fucked-up ethnoreligious treason. The entire "As a Jew" idea appears to dictate precisely what Jewish people should and shouldn't think or behave, implying that people who think otherwise to you are somehow traitorous or otherwise disgusting. The historical echoes here are crystal clear.

Quite why this usage has caught on uncritically among certain foreign policy enthusiasts is mystifying to me, since it appears to be a rehabilitation of a particularly nasty ethnic slur that had thankfully fallen from common usage.

(By the way, I've seen this defended by folk saying things like "Oh, but these awful fucking AsaJews actually exist and blah blah blah", apparently in the belief that this renders the insult harmless fun. I'll anticipate this by pointing out that it doesn't).

25 January, 2014 16:04

Again you don't need to see the whole of Gidley's response though I should point out it's actually more slippery than Flying Rodent seems to notice:

flyingrodent said...

First, I am not 100% sure that the terms "Uncle Tom" and "House Negro" are necessarily racist

Neither am I, but it should be entirely obvious that they're fucking horrible slurs to be chucking at people, for reasons that are surely too obvious to require demonstration.

The terms "self-hating Jew" and the appalling "kapo" carry something of the same meaning as those terms, and I guess I find them very offensive but not necessarily racist.

These terms all mean the same thing, and it's not a coincidence that the people most fond of using them tend also to be horrendous human beings who have exceptionally nasty opinions on all manner of issues.

Rather, the term is used of those who make a big deal of their Jewishness in prefacing their anti-Zionism.

This isn't right. It seems to me that some Jewish people who think the Israelis generally look like a bunch of hard-right belligerent mentalists determined to thwart a Palestinian state at all costs believe that, if they preface their acknowledgement of this obvious and undeniable reality by noting their shared religious background, they might immunise themselves against utterly fraudulent accusations of racism.

As demonstrated here however, they're wrong about that, because of some bizarre coalescing consensus among gung-ho bombs-away Israel fans that Jews generally should all be Decent war enthusiasts like you are, and that those who disagree are basically immoral.

I suggest that this newfound habit of labelling these people as Uncle Toms for disagreeing with your Likud Are Boiling-With-Hate Mental But Hey-Ho, Shit Kind Of Happens And That mentality is unjust, unfair and suspiciously convenient.

There's also an issue of positioning themselves as the Good Jews, the Exceptional Jews, as Arendt put it

I'm surprised you raise Arendt in this context. She had some very, very harsh words for the Commie Israel enthusiasts of the fifties and sixties, so God knows what she'd make of the extreme rightists that run the place these days.

I half-share those issues with "certain foreign policy enthusiasts" (nice euphemism).

There's no need for the "nice euphemism". I'm all over the internet under this name basically telling everyone how much I dislike your* politics, which I constantly describe as hopelessly insane sectarian horseshit mingled with wowserist magical thinking, allied with a very alarming form of extreme militarism and wearing a very unconvincing cloak of humanitarianism.

This has squarely nothing to do with anyone's ethnoreligious background and everything to do with the fact that I think you're a bunch of lunatics who push highly toxic politics in the service of an extremely belligerent ideology that has had significant and hideous real-world effects.

None of which is nice to say to strangers, but you know, I didn't call you fascist apologists for psychotic violence or any of the terms that you tend to dole out to your political enemies, even though most of your political enemies are entirely imaginary and your own attitude to creative violence is significantly more enthusiastic than mine.

*You collectively as bullshitting war-fans, not you individually.

26 January, 2014 03:16

 Now Rodent deserves some bonus points for the Hannah Arendt stuff.  Gidley is very fond of describing her as one of his intellectual heroes and I never know why.  Certainly she has been accused of intellectual dishonesty and pretentiousness which certainly gives her Venn diagram an overlap with Bob's but she has also exposed zionist collaboration with the nazis and been accused of self-hatred for her trouble.  But she did self-describe as a zionist though I'm not sure she ever defined it and she did hold that it was only right and proper to try Eichmann in Jerusalem in spite of his crimes being against humanity not just Jews and certainly not just zionists with whom he collaborated.

But I digress.

At this point Sarah Annes Brown of Harry's Place pops up with a largely irrelevant comment. Is Tom Hickey Jewish?  But the Rodent addresses the first part of her comment all the same:

flyingrodent said...

You refer to people who think "the Israelis generally look like a bunch of hard-right belligerent mentalists determined to thwart a Palestinian state at all costs" as though this was a reasonable summary of the situation.

Not only is this "a reasonable summary of the situation", it is the situation. Many will say "Well, it's more complicated than that" but at the brass tacks of practicality, taking all of the partisan blah out of it, it is not more complicated than that.

this seems to me the mirror image of those who assert that the Palestinians are all antisemitic brutes who ought to go and live in Jordan.

And how many divisions have they? None, is the answer - twats of that type have nothing but internet waffle backing them up, numerous as they are.

For real, the current situation is that the Israelis are going to intentionally steal as much shit as they can in a deliberate policy of fucking over the Palestinians with the quiet yet total support of the world's only superpower, and folk who don't like it are going to make some sad faces and whinge, but nothing more.

This is the whole issue in a nutshell, and all the woe-is-us nonsense that fills the web to bursting point is just that - woe-is-us nonsense, existing for no other purpose than to muddy a perfectly straightforward and easily-comprehensible scenario.

Given that's my opinion on the matter, you can imagine why I'm not keen on slurs like the one we're discussing here. People should be able to describe bald facts without having to fend off insults that wouldn't look out of place in a Tarantino movie about slaves.

(Although if I'm being honest, I actually think this one is tame by comparison with Professor Norm's old habit of referring to "Pet Azzajews", which he used to chuck at Jewish people who addressed simple undeniable facts of this type. The fact that nobody smelt a rat there tells me that a lot of people who make a very big noise about rat-smelling wouldn't smell a rat if a rat was sitting on thier upper lip slapping on rat-scented aftershave).

26 January, 2014 12:54

Actually when I started this, that last comment wasn't there and I'm not sure I agree with or follow all of it but that Blackadderesque last bit was worth a copy.

Anyway, Flying Rodent tweets here and blogs here.

UPDATE (14:55) : The thread continues with a false allegation of antisemitism against Flying Rodent by one nutty Contentious Centrist who claims the rat allusion is a metaphor for Jew.  And now FR has responded by calling her (for it is she) a conman not woman.  Now let's look forward to accusations of sexism instead of the usual antisemitism....

Academics for Israel Part 2 - Robert Fine and the EUMC working definition

This is part II in what I am trying to make a weekly series on Israel advocates in academia.  I intend to post a link to the previous Academics for Israel post at the bottom of the latest one, but I might forget. 

I think the series is an interesting thing to do in itself because here we have people whose career commitment is to the "disinterested pursuit of truth" (or something like that) who often appear to have to bend the truth, ignore it or flagrantly misrepresent it in order to support a worldview based on prejudice rather than reality.  But also, it is quite rare for critical comments to be accepted by Israel advocacy blogs so this is a chance to make sure that comments are not wasted.

Having said that, Robert Fine is not actually a blogger himself or I am sure he would have a Normblog profile and he doesn't.

Robert Fine is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick.  He has a long standing relationship with the Engage site and like all zionist academics lately he is willing to jump through hoops for the EUMC working definition of antisemitism which has been formulated to make criticism of the State of Israel nigh on impossible. He often comes across as a nice chap but the smears he is willing to hurl at critics of Israel are as unpleasant and disingenuous as any emanating from the zionist camp.

Here he is on the Engage website "On doing the sociology of antisemitism".  The piece first appeared in the newsletter of the European Sociological Association.  It is largely a self-indulgent resumé of his academic career but I noticed his mention of the EUMC working definition of antisemitism and the way he misrepresented it. I stopped reading after that and left a comment that never made it past the moderator.

Anyway, here he is on the EUMC working definition:

The working definition on antisemitism put forward by the European Union Monitoring Commission is one attempt to deal with this issue.  According to this definition the following cases of ‘criticism’ of Israel may, depending on context, be examples of antisemitism: the nazification of Israel (e.g. when it is said that Jews treat Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews), the pathologisation of Jews (e.g. when it is said that as a result of the Holocaust Jews have become indifferent to the suffering of other peoples), the use of old antisemitic tropes (e.g. when it is said that Zionists engage in a world conspiracy to protect Israel or that Israeli forces steal the body parts of Arabs), or more simply the erasure of any distinction between state and civil society (e.g. when it is said that all Jews in Israel are responsible for the policies pursued by the government).

We may or may not agree on particular cases, but what is clear is that some forms of ‘criticism’ lean toward antisemitism more than others.  The systematic treatment of Israel as culpable by standards that are not applied equally to other states is another case in point. 

There were already two comments when I posted mine.  Here's the first from SarahAB from Harry's Place:

Sarah AB Says:
December 21, 2012 at 1:10 pm

An excellent post. Just one example of the way in which antisemitism is sometimes shown to be ‘replaced’ by Islamophobia is that UCU Holocaust wall chart.

I critiqued her own promotion of the working definition here. Most of her comment refers to something in the article that I didn't even read but her description of the piece as "excellent" says it all about both him and her. I would guess that she could and would have described the piece as excellent even if she hadn't read it.

Anyway, knowing that Engage tends to restrict comments to its own zionist faithful I didn't want to get in too deep but here goes:

levi9909 Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation. [It has now been deleted altogether]
December 22, 2012 at 1:29 pm

Robert Fine’s section on the EUMC working definition is misleading and contentious.

He claims that the working definition was “put forward by the European Union Monitoring Commission”. It was actually put to them not by them. It was put to them by the American Jewish Committee who tacked on the “context” proviso as an afterthought because without it the working definition was an obvious case of preventing criticism of Israel by the bad faith allegation of antisemitism. This site shows the genealogy of this AJC document.

He rewords the “examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel” to validate the “context” proviso and yet the working definition itself lists examples which are unambiguously antisemitic regardless of context together with examples which are not so. For example, which context makes the denial of the right of Jews to self-determination and statehood antisemitic? And which context makes “holding the Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel” not antisemitic? Clearly, a state specially for Jews is a racist endeavour as surely as holding all Jews responsible for it is antisemitic.

The working definition is itself antisemitic in that it essentialises Jews as zionists, ie, people who support the idea that Jews are a case for self-determination and statehood.

You simply cannot establish a principle whereby Jews qualify for self-determination and statehood which is consistent with the right of nations to self-determination. Just consider the case of, say, France and the French state and people. The French are the people of France. The French state is their state. You can be French if you are Jewish and French if you are not Jewish. The Jews are not the people of a specific country. Israel is the state of the Jewish people, You cannot be Jewish if you are not Jewish. Ergo, a Jewish state is inherently discriminatory, ie, racist.

Robert Fine also seems to have ignored the fact that the working definition asserts that Israel is a “democratic nation” and seeks to forbid specialist campaigning against Israel even by its victims. And yet Israel is unique in that it defines itself as the state of an entire ethno-religious non-territorial identity group most of whom don’t live there and it has displaced most of the people who come from there. It also receives more aid from abroad than any other country. Demands made of Israel tend to focus on where it differs from other states, not where it is similar. I know of no other “democratic nation” whose state exist on the basis of a recent, current and on-going campaign of colonial settlement and ethnic cleansing facilitated by an array of discriminatory laws and underpinned by a self-definition as the state for an ethno-religious community.

I find it profoundly disturbing that there are so many academics putting so much energy into defending such a bogus document as the EUMC working definition.

Fine has been an advisory editor of Engage before it dispensed with the need for such advisers or editors so I don't know if he saw my comment and I don't know of any forum where the piece has appeared where I could be sure he would read it.

Robert Fine is one of many academics for Israel who are willing to cast logic and truth aside for the sake of zionism and studiously avoid any situation where they might have to answer for themselves. He is a member of the board of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA), whose page on the JSA website reads like a who's who of islamophobia.  They are the people who organised the conference which witnessed the contrived walkout and non-walkout by various UK zionists which I wrote about just recently.

I'm not suggesting that Fine is an islamophobe but for one with such a cultivated sense of outrage over antisemitism he is none too sensitive about the islamophobic company he keeps.

Academics for Israel Part 1 - Martin Robb

I've tried commenting on a few zionist blogs lately but with no success at all so I decided that rather than waste my comments, which after all do take a bit of work, checking, etc, I'd post them here in a series of posts on Israel advocating academics.

The Bob from Brockley blog is quite a useful one-stop shop for Israel advocacy sites and I'm fairly certain that's where I found the blog of an academic called Martin Robb.  The blog is called Martin in the Margins.  I don't know what the "in the margins" bit is a reference to because, in common with most Israel advocates, the blog is pretty much an appendage to the pro-Israel mainstream media.  A sure way of knowing that a blogger is an Israel advocate and probably (though not always) a supporter of western wars abroad is when they get profiled by former leftist, Norman Geras in Normblog.

I tried commenting at Martin in the Margins recently on a post condemning the condemnation of Israel's latest assault on Gaza back in November.  The condemnation which Martin Robb was condemning was from a bunch of academics and published in the Irish Left Review.  My comment was disallowed and yet I have commented there before and the comment was allowed. I can't remember what the allowed comment was but I think it was in the clear realm of opinion rather than fact.  If you express and opinion a blogger can simply counter-opine with no loss of integrity or honour. If we're countering facts then at least one person's facts are falsehoods, ie, not facts at all.

So what did the academics against Israel say which so troubled this academic for Israel?  And what did he say back?

We the undersigned watch with horror yet another ruthless and criminal Israeli assault on the defenceless people of the Gaza Strip.

You would never know from this that Israel’s ‘assault’ came after a week in which hundreds of rockets were launched indiscriminately from Gaza towards residential areas in Israel. Surely, if anything was ‘ruthless’ or ‘criminal’, it was this series of unprovoked terrorist attacks on innocent civilians. This lack of informing context is, to say the least, surprising from a list comprising so many expert social scientists. And in what way was Israel’s response, carefully targeting terrorist leaders, arms dumps, communication centres, and going out of its way to avoid civilian casualties, ‘criminal’: do states not have a right to protect their people against terrorist attack? ‘Ruthless’ and ‘criminal’ might better describe Hamas’ strategy of siting their military hardware among civilians, using their own people cruelly and cynically as human shields. And ‘defenceless’? What about all that firepower aimed at Israel in the past few weeks, including sophisticated weaponry supplied by Hamas’ paymasters in Tehran? 

Moving on:

The assassination of the Hamas’ military commander, Ahmad al-Jabari, by Israel was intended to disrupt any chance for a permanent cease fire between the two sides and caused the current cycle of violence.

This is quite breathtaking. Remember: before Israel targeted al-Jabiri, there was no two-sided conflict requiring a 'ceasefire', just a one-sided campaign by Hamas and its proxies.

I quoted a little chunk and made my own points thus:

just a one-sided campaign by Hamas and its proxies?

From the start of the new year, one Israeli had been killed as a result of the Gazan attacks, while 78 Gazans had been killed by Israeli strikes. You might want to check that Martin but I think you know it's accurate without checking.

using their own people cruelly and cynically as human shields.

Your own source exposes the fallacy of this statement.

His source was Examiner.com whose headline supported Martin's bogus thesis but whose article did not:

"On Sunday, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) hit a high-rise building occupied by several European media outlets, but the actual target of the missile strike were the offices of Al Aqsa, the television station of Hamas, as well as those of Al Quds, a Lebanese-based broadcaster, sympathetic to the Muslim terror group."

"Well, where my bureau is, there are residential accommodation around, and there are rockets going off — I think the thing about Gaza, to be honest with you is, it’s an incredibly small place and there’s a lot of people in it. So pretty much everywhere in Gaza is a residential area unless you’re going right up to the kind of "no man’s land" area between Israel and where Gaza kind of properly starts. So there certainly are things being fired off from residential areas but it’s almost, probably, impossible to get entirely away from a residential area if you want to fire something off."

Martin was effectively saying that Palestinians have no right to any kind of resistance, certainly not armed but not even broadcasting.

He then gets into some basic and crude zionist apologetics in response to this:

We call upon our governments, which have stood aloof and indifferent, in the face of Palestine’s  dispossession and colonization since 1948 to take immediate and effective action. No other people in the world has been subjected, for more than sixty years, to such relentless acts of collective punishment and military brutality as have the Palestinian people.

Martin loses it at this point:

‘Dispossession and colonization’ – these are not the words of people seeking a two-state solution, one in which Israelis and Palestinians live peacefully side-by-side in two legitimate nations. No, this is precisely the language of rejectionists who deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, who seek to deny the Jewish people, alone in the world, a right to a homeland of their own. 

Actually acknowledging that Israel has done nasty things to establish itself with a Jewish majority does not negate that the idea Israel can continue to exist though many, including me, think that it shouldn't exist.  But Martin clearly thinks that the truth is an enemy of Israel and he's probably right. Anyway, here are chunks of him and my responses:

‘Dispossession and colonization’ – these are not the words of people seeking a two-state solution

But they're true whichever solution is sought.

this is precisely the language of rejectionists who deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, who seek to deny the Jewish people, alone in the world, a right to a homeland of their own.

This is meaningless. Most Jews have "a homeland of their own" outside of Israel and the occupied territories. If you mean Jews as a collective identity group then you need to consider the many identity groups - Sikhs, Roma, Sinti and many many more - who are not the titular community of a "homeland of their own".

Actually, under a combination of international law and Israel's racist Law of Return, Jews as individuals are different from the rest of humanity in that we generally have an automatic right not to a homeland but to a spare homeland and, of course, because we have a spare homeland the Palestinians have no homeland.  So whether you look at Jews as individuals or collectively, Martin is talking tosh.

There was other stuff in the post. Apparently the Jerusalem Post rushed in where others feared to tread when it pointed out that Palestinians had been killed by the Assad regime in Syria.  Here's Martin:

I don't recall seeing any letters to the left-wing press protesting this particular massacre of Palestinians. 

Well you can't know what people have written to the press because they don't publish all that they receive but I'm guessing Martin doesn't read the Socialist Worker which reported on the Assad regime's repression, including killing, of Palestinians back in March this year.  The Jerusalem Post saw a hole in the market for such news in September and it took Martin two months to notice that.

But it's on the issue of collective punishment that Martin gets totally weird.  See this:

 it’s a downright, ugly lie. Even if Israel’s admittedly imperfect treatment of the Palestinians could be accurately described using terms such as 'collective punishment' and military brutality' (terms with, one suspects, deliberate and offensive overtones of Nazism and fascism - and by the way, did you see the actual collective punishment meted out by Hamas to suspected collaborators this week? - there's real fascism for you) - how can any sensible person say this is worse than (say) the treatment of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs by Saddam, or the Tibetans by the Chinese, or the East Timorese by the Indonesians? The list could go on indefinitely, and the more examples are adduced, the more absurd and offensive this letter's claim becomes. To accept that Israel's treatment of Palestinians could be compared to these brutal, genocidal campaigns would be to acknowledge that words have lost their meaning - again, surprising for a group of academics whose writings are often concerned with the precise nuances of language.

Wow! I always admit to skim-reading and so I missed that load of nonsense first time I read the piece. Israel is taking actions in Gaza which are calculated to hurt the whole population. Even the zionist Judge Goldstone said so in statements which he didn't retract. Many observers have noticed this and Israel has admitted as much.  Remember "putting the Palestinians on a diet"? Remember Sharon on the disengagement being a "punishment and not a reward" for the Palestinians? No one is saying that it's worse than the treatment of other people who have suffered collective punishment and no one likened the practice to nazi behaviour but if the cap fits etc....

And how does Hamas killing individuals accused of collaboration amount to collective punishment? And he lectures others on the "precise nuances of language". He got five comments praising his ludicrous post and he won't even allow one counter-comment.

This is a typical case of an academic for Israel. Funnily enough in his Normblog profile he claims to have once upon a time been a supporter of the Palestinian cause.  A lot of rightists claim to have been leftists when they were young. I wonder what happens to them along the way.

UPDATE 18/12/2012: My comment has now been allowed through...twice.