A COGNITIVE FAILURE?

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

These categories have been very helpful, but they lead me to another question. Is fighting antisemitism simply a matter of showing people how ridiculous their antisemitic theories are? If, as you so convincingly say, antisemitism is irrational and delusional, is there any way of educating the haters?

Abigail

Dear Abigail and Joe:

If only I had an easy answer to give you. Joe, you and I are both educators. Abigail, you are headed to a prestigious PhD program and hope to become an academic. We all reflexively fall back on education as an antidote. Education will certainly work in many instances. But, I must sadly acknowledge, education will be of limited value for committed antisemites. Their contempt for the Jew is not the result of a “cognitive error.”1 It’s not that we simply need to rationally show them that Jews do not in fact control the banks or the media, or shape the foreign policy of whichever country they live in. Their view of Jews is, unfortunately, refracted through a preestablished prism of hatred. That’s why these irrational and absurd charges make sense to them.

Consider, for example, the ridiculous claim that the night before the 9/11 attacks four thousand Israelis and/or Jews were called and told not to come to work at the World Trade Center the next morning. The notion that four thousand people could have received a phone call and that none of them ever, to this day, mentioned it to anyone else—family, friends, or coworkers—defies logic. Who are these four thousand people? Not one among them has ever been identified. Moreover, who would have had a telephone list of every Jew working in those huge buildings? Only the most delusional conspiracy theorists would believe there exists a central registry of all Jews working in a given location and that four thousand people were so well disciplined that they never spoke of this.

A French bestseller, L’Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud), contended that the 9/11 attacks were directed by American Jewish neoconservatives to get public support for military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Two hundred thousand copies of the book were sold in France in the space of a few months. The book was subsequently translated into more than two dozen languages. Even though virtually every French newspaper observed that reams of forensic and eyewitness evidence contradicted the book’s conclusions, French readers enthusiastically embraced it. But this kind of delusion was not limited to France. At one point, 20 percent of the American public believed that the attacks were an “inside” job.2

As I noted in a previous letter, at the heart of all conspiracy theories is the notion of a secret cabal of powerful people, a demonic elite who control crucial elements of a particular society. Conspiracy theorists rely on circuitous reasoning, contending that the fact that the conspirators cannot be precisely identified “proves” the conspiracy. Only an exceptionally powerful cabal could conceal its manipulative powers.3 In an effort to disprove the 9/11 Jewish/Israeli conspiracy theory, some media outlets combed the 9/11-related death notices and announcements of memorial services, and reviewed the names of the victims and their biographies to come up with an estimated Jewish death toll. They found that Jews constituted approximately 12 percent of the victims, a number that corresponds to the Jewish population in the New York City area.4 But such well-intentioned efforts rarely lay conspiracy theories to rest because they offer a rational answer to an irrational accusation. As it happens, we know the precise starting point for this particular accusation. Four days after the 9/11 attack, the Syrian government–controlled newspaper, Al-Thawra, reported, without any proof, that “four thousand Jews were absent from their work on the day of the explosions.”5 In an attempt to discredit this “report,” the United States State Department identified Al-Thawra as its unsourced creator. But, as is often the case regarding conspiracy theories, the debunkers’ attempt to disprove the conspiracy was simply seen as “proof” of their own involvement in it.6 Ironically, the claim that the Mossad was behind the 9/11 attacks was challenged by an unexpected source: Al Qaeda itself. Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, claimed that this false rumor started with Al-Manar, the Hezbollah-affiliated television station in Lebanon, and was quickly picked up and repeated by the Iranians. Zawahiri, noting that Hezbollah and Iran are Shiite while Al-Qaeda is Sunni, indignantly claimed that the purpose of this “lie” was to suggest “that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no one else did in history.”7

Despite both Al-Qaeda’s protestations and extensive evidence to the contrary, the notion that the Mossad and/or the American government was responsible for 9/11 continues to hold sway.8 In 2016, Joy Karega, at the time an assistant professor at Oberlin College, endorsed this assertion. On her blog, she quoted a speech by the avowed antisemitic minister Louis Farrakhan, in which he declared that this was all a Jewish and Zionist plot.

They say that the World Trade Center building [sic] were brought down by carefully placed explosives, not by planes. They say that all three buildings had to have been wired with explosive charges long before September the 11th and this is something that took tremendous sophistication to do, and that sophistication was not with Osama bin Laden or his followers. Listen. But if it was not Muslims then who? . . . It is now becoming apparent that there were many Israeli and Zionist Jews in key roles in the 9/11 attack.

Karega did not limit her accusations to 9/11. She insisted, without providing evidence to substantiate her claim, that “the same people behind the massacre in Gaza” were also complicit in the 2014 downing of a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine and the murders in Paris of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. In fact, she contended that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu went to Paris right after the massacre in order to “bend Hollande and French governmental officials over one more time in public just in case the message wasn’t received via Massod [sic] and the ‘attacks’ they orchestrated in Paris.” In November 2015, Karega claimed that “ISIS is not a jihadist, Islamic terrorist organization. It’s a CIA and Mossad operation, and there’s too much information out here for the public not to know that.”9 According to Karega, Israelis and, by extension, Jews could seamlessly compel the CIA to bend to their will, create ISIS, and lure thousands of Muslims to its ranks. When Israel brought down the Malaysian plane, it was acting, she charged, in cahoots with Jewish bankers. According to Karega, “the Rothschild-led banksters [sic] exposed and hated and out of economic options to stave off the coming global deflationary depression, are implementing the World War III option.” Karega “quoted” these Rothschild-led banksters: “We own nearly every central bank in the world. We financed both sides of every war since Napoleon. We own your news, the media, your oil and your government.” Reacting to a report that the Obama administration was about to assist Holocaust survivors living below the poverty line, Karega wrote: “One of these days some of My Peoples gonna [sic] learn who ALL American presidents work for and why they are chosen and placed in office.” She planned to try to look at some of these “[Jewish] Federations that handle the money and resources. We can probably look deep and try to trace it.”10

These are not the claims of someone who is simply “misinformed.” Karega was on the faculty of a prominent American academic institution. Although some of her colleagues at Oberlin condemned her remarks, there were others who fiercely defended her and condemned the “irresponsible hostility drummed up against her.”11 Claiming that she had been made a “scapegoat” who was “specifically targeted” because of her gender and race, her defenders argued that the attacks on her “reinforce[d] oppressive anti-Black” narratives and “anti-Black racism” on Oberlin’s campus.12

Even more troubling than Karega’s remarks was the fact that Oberlin had assigned her to teach Writing for Social Justice, a course in which students were to “develop, negotiate, and revise their own . . . ethics . . . on social justice issues.” As someone who has participated in numerous faculty searches, I find it baffling that Karega’s racist and antisemitic beliefs did not surface during Oberlin’s vetting and interview process. While she may have been fully qualified to teach many topics, social justice does not appear to be one of them.13

I return to the point that I made at the outset of this letter. Karega’s views are not the product of a cognitive error—in other words, that she is simply unaware that the world economic system is not controlled by “Rothschild-led banksters.” Karega and others who subscribe to these conspiratorial notions weaponize them and use them as a means of attacking their critics. I fear, Abigail, that there is little we can do to enlighten those who hold such repugnant beliefs. For the most part, they are not interested in hearing rational explanations. We can, however, try to reach those whom they might influence. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) acknowledged this when, in 2006, it issued a fact sheet to disprove the conspiracy theorists’ claims that the World Trade Center had been blown up by controlled demolition from within the buildings and not by the explosions caused by the airplanes that crashed into the Twin Towers. Four years earlier, a NIST 10,000-word report had reached a similar conclusion. Not surprisingly, it did not convince the conspiracy theorists. In light of the persistence of these unfounded and disproved claims, the NIST acknowledged that “this fact sheet won’t convince those who hold to the alternative theories that our findings are sound. In fact, the fact sheet was never intended for them. It is for the masses who have seen or heard the alternative theory claims.”14

I hate ending on such a pessimistic note. I’m reminded of the definition of a Jewish optimist as someone who thinks things cannot get any worse. I’m a historian and, as such, I am loath to predict what will happen in the future, though I am increasingly pessimistic. And so, I conclude this letter by contending that, even though we cannot convince the conspiracists, we must work to create firewalls between them and those whom they might influence. Those firewalls are the facts that conclusively demonstrate how delusional their perceptions of Jews are.

Be well,

DEL