Showdown in the Bowery
There’s an old joke about a lone Jewish sailor marooned on a tiny desert island in the middle of the South Pacific. After years of solitude, the castaway’s signal fire is spotted by the captain of a passing freighter, who wades ashore to rescue the man. Thereupon, the captain is astonished to find that the Jew has built himself not one, but two small mud-and-straw synagogues side by side.
“Why two?” asks the captain.
“That one is where I pray,” replies the Jew, gesturing solemnly to the synagogue on the left.
“ . . . But as for that one,” he adds, raising a rueful finger at the other building, “I wouldn’t set foot in the place if you paid me.”
That punch line neatly sums up the schismatic conspiracism on display over the weekend of September 11–13, 2009—the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks—when lower Manhattan played host to not one, but two rival Truther conferences, just a few blocks from one another. Both events attracted hundreds of attendees, all convinced that the 9/11 attacks had been an inside job. Aside from that, the two groups had little in common.
The first group—call them the right-wing New World Order faction—was young, loud, and libertarian. Under the banner of “We Are Change,” they staged “street actions” outside Madison Square Garden, the Council on Foreign Relations (where they screamed “We won’t be your New World Order slave puppets” to CFR president Richard Haass) and at Ground Zero itself. Their leader was Luke Rudkowski, a brooding twenty-three-year-old bullhorn activist (profiled in Chapter 5) who specializes in ambushing public figures on video with questions about 9/11. The most revered name on their lips was radio host Alex Jones; the most despised, the Bilderbergers (“scumbags trying to destroy humanity” was how one activist described them in a speech at Cooper Union). Everyone, it seemed, was carrying some form of digital camera, endlessly filming everyone else filming everyone else. Populism and patriotism were the binding ideological agents. Some of the speakers, in fact, were actual 9/11 first responders, former soldiers, and other uniformed types. Their speeches often were interrupted by chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!”
Meanwhile, at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, an entirely different conference was unfolding, this one under the banner of “We Demand Transparency: The Conference for Peace, Truth, and a New Economics.” Here, the attendees were older, grayer, quieter—tweedy academics and activists in sportjackets and tennis shoes, with one foot still planted in Cold War–era pacifism. There were few cameras. Unlike at We Are Change’s all-electronic right-wing jamboree, the people here were actually holding, reading, selling, and discussing old-fashioned books. These fathers and grandfathers did not go in for “street actions” or other noisy events. Instead, they sat in their pews and listened to a succession of wonky middle-aged men (they were all men) give Amerikan-themed history lessons about false flags, Vietnam, and the Bay of Pigs. The room was hot, and many of the attendees were clustered around the fans arrayed along the side walls. At a few points, I felt myself nodding off.
Then, Kevin Barrett took the podium, and everyone woke up.
Barrett is a balding, bespectacled man in his early fifties—the sort of fellow whose thumbnail photo might appear alongside the Yiddish-dictionary entry for nebbish. But from his base in Madison, Wisconsin, he’s made a name for himself in Truther circles as one of the movement’s say-anything bad boys. Born into a conventional midwestern Lutheran family (his father was Olympic gold-medal sailor Peter Barrett), Barrett converted to Islam in 1992, after marrying a Moroccan-born Muslim woman. Five years later, he earned a PhD in African languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin, where he remained employed as a lecturer until he created an uproar by publicly insisting that Muslims weren’t involved in the World Trade Center attacks. (“Every single Muslim I know in Madison knew it was an inside job.”) Since then, he’s been arrested for alleged domestic abuse, run a fringe campaign for Congress, hosted conspiracist radio programs, launched a series of ugly feuds with competing conspiracists, and started up a creepy website that publishes the home addresses of police officers and other government officials “who are alleged to have seriously abused their power over others.”
Barrett began his presentation at St. Mark’s by arguing that the involvement of Muslims in the 9/11 operation would be an impossibility, since the tenets of Islam are incompatible with any sort of unprovoked violence. Instead, he said, the obvious villain is Israel—or, as he called it, the “genocidal settler colonial state in Palestine.” But making this case to the American people is difficult, he said, because Jews are “wildly overrepresented in the American media,” and all the major media companies are led by “Zionist Jewish CEOs.” Nor can we trust the official 9/11 commission, Barrett says, since its executive director, Philip Zelikow, is an “ethnic Jew.”
None of these claims would have been particularly surprising for anyone who’d studied Barrett’s comments about Jews and Israel, in which he often recycles traditional anti-Semitic propaganda themes, as in this mass emailing addressing the Lebanese government’s discrimination against Palestinians: “The hundreds of thousands of [Palestinian] refugees living in poverty in Lebanon, among other places, should be treated as honored guests; while the economic losses that ordinary Lebanese will suffer when the Palestinians compete with them in the work force, and all other losses suffered by the victims of Zionism, should be compensated ASAP by the seizure of Zionist money, starting with the Rothschild fortune along with those of the other 50% of American billionaires who are Zionist war criminals.”
And it gets worse. Since leaving the University of Wisconsin, Barrett has become that rare breed: a left-wing Holocaust skeptic. Back in 2006, he described his views on the subject this way: “Whatever the facts about WWII, it seems tragic that systematic Zionist Big Lies [about the Middle East] have cast legitimate doubt upon ANYTHING Jews say about Jews and their recent history, including the Holocaust. As a rational person who is not a specialist in the subject of WWII, but who has studied the history of Zionist Big Lies vis-à-vis Palestine, I cannot possibly dismiss the arguments of people like [Mark] Green, [David] Irving, and even [Ernst] Zündel. And even if the 6-million-deliberately-murdered-for-purely-ethnic-reasons figure is correct—which it very well may be; I have grown agnostic on that after studying the Big Lies of Zionism—I would still have to characterize the Holocaust as it is taught in the U.S. as a hideously destructive myth.”
As Barrett spoke, there was an uncomfortable stir in the crowd. One particular fellow—a middle-aged Truther with a boyish face and a shaggy 1970s-style mop of brown hair, seated about twenty feet to my right—could barely contain his exasperation. Later on, he identified himself to me as Steve Alten, a science-fiction author best known for his Meg action novels about a family of giant prehistoric sharks (the megalodon) that eat boats, helicopters, whales, and (in historical flashback) a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
When the Q&A began, Alten rose from his seat. “I consider you a friend, and I’ve been on your [Internet radio] show many times,” he told Barrett. “But you start off with the idea that we shouldn’t use racial profiling against Muslims, which I agree with, as a Jew. And then you completely become a hypocrite, and blame the Jews. You put up a list of Jewish people in the media, and immediately label them Zionist, and [suggest] that they have motivations for covering up 9/11, without any shred of evidence, without ever having met any of those people . . . You’re actually hurting the 9/11 Truth movement by doing these things!” Then Alten sat down, to scattered applause.
A few minutes later, as the audience dispersed for lunch, Barrett came over to make peace with Alten. But their conversation degenerated into another argument. As I listened in, alongside a few others, I found myself in the odd position of cheering on one conspiracy theorist in what seemed to me a principled attack on a bigoted counterpart. (At one especially surreal point, Barrett—whom I’d interviewed previously—actually ushered me into the conversation to adjudicate some tangential point or other about Middle Eastern history.)
Later on, when I caught up with Alten, he told me that the whole episode symbolized what’s wrong with the 9/11 Truth movement—an opinion shared by others I interviewed at St. Mark’s. “I was shocked that they allowed Barrett to speak,” he told me. “He’s become so radical . . . I’ve basically cornered him into admitting his desire to see Israel wiped off the face of the map. Who would ever want to be associated with someone like that? He used to speak out about the facts of 9/11. But he now uses the 9/11 Truth podium to tie everything into the Jews.”
Conspiracism’s Hateful Sidekick
Not all conspiracy theorists are anti-Semitic. But all conspiracy movements—all of them—attract anti-Semites. Even UFO conspiracists manage, somehow, to project Jewish stereotypes on imagined visitors from other galaxies: A recurring theme in their literature is that outer-space visitors are divided into at least two categories—tall, virtuous, Aryan-seeming aliens (sometimes traced to the star Procyon, in the constellation Canis Minor); and malignant, gnomelike, big-nosed “Grays” (sometimes traced to the star Rigel, in the Orion constellation).
The roots of this ancient bigotry extend to the very moment when Jesus died on the Cross. “Most Christians did not want to be enemies of the Roman Empire and they soon sought to play down the role of the Romans in the [Biblical] story,” Diarmaid MacCulloch explains in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. “So the Passion narratives shifted the blame on to the Jewish authorities”—a propaganda effort epitomized in the Gospel of Matthew, wherein the Jewish crowds are made to roar out “His blood be on us, and on our children!” (As MacCulloch archly notes, “It would have been better for the moral health of Christianity if the blame had stayed with Pilate.”) In the superstitious medieval anti-Semitic tradition that eventually emerged—as described earlier in this book—the Jew was a sort of wandering demon, poisoning drinking water and murdering Christian babies to satisfy his inborn bloodlust.
Many centuries later—after the French Revolution and the wave of frenzied anti-Semitic conspiracism that accompanied it—the Jew became a symbol of the political, technological, and industrial forces threatening to overturn Europe’s sleepy pastoral monarchies. Capitalism, in particular, along with the wrenching creative destruction that inevitably accompanied it, was imagined to be the creation of rootless Jewish financiers—Luftmenschen, or “people of the air,” as German anti-Semites called them—who leeched their income off society’s farmers, laborers, and artisans. In French society, this attitude came into full bloom during the Dreyfus affair; and, before it, the 1890s-era scandal surrounding the collapse of the Panama Canal Company, which the Libre Parole newspaper described as “a flagrant instance of the Jewish peril,” and evidence that “all of Jewry, high and low” lay “congregated beneath the udder of this milch cow.”
As discussed in Chapter 2, anti-Semitic conspiracists of this period played to the nostalgic, reactionary, backward-looking attitude that inevitably takes hold of insecure people in tumultuous times. Poisonous anti-Semitism penetrated all strata of European society in the decades leading up to World War II. But it found its most enthusiastic audience among romantic nationalists who fetishized their country’s fading pastoral identity and aristocratic traditions, which the “rootless” urban Jew was seen to be undermining. This made the doctrine useful to Russia’s czars, and Europe’s other besieged monarchs, who pushed the idea that political liberalism was a Jewish plot to destroy Europe’s Christian character.
As the influence of the Protocols swept west, Germany, afflicted with a particularly feverish strain of nationalism, showed itself to be especially vulnerable. “When [German anti-Semites of the völkisch variety] looked to the past, to the ideal state which they supposed to have preceded the modern age, they looked far beyond throne and altar, back to an infinitely remote and almost entirely mythical world,” wrote Norman Cohn in Warrant for Genocide. “For them, ‘the Jew’ was not only, or mainly, the destroyer of kings and the enemy of the Church—he was above all the age-old antagonist of the Germanic peasant, he was the force which for two thousand years had been undermining the true, original German way of life.”
Adolf Hitler put a pseudoscientific gloss on such dark superstitions by tethering them to the germ theory of medicine and associated notions of “racial hygiene.” As early as 1919, when Hitler was still employed as an education officer with the German Army in Munich, he described Jewry as “the racial tuberculosis of the peoples.” With the newly available tools of industrial slaughter, the Jew now could be scientifically eradicated in the same way that a hospital room could be sterilized. In pursuing this project, Hitler created a genocide so horribly systematic that it has become the standard of evil against which all other crimes against humanity have been measured ever since.
Hitler destroyed six million Jews. But he also destroyed anti-Semitism as a semirespectable Western creed: In the shadow of the Holocaust, theories about Jews that had circulated for centuries suddenly seemed sinister and even lunatic. The presence of journalists among Europe’s liberators (including Edward R. Murrow, whose April, 1945, report from Buchenwald concentration camp was one of the most memorable of his career) ensured that the effect on popular attitudes would be permanently etched in photographs and film—a reminder for future generations that could be summoned up whenever the language of murderous anti-Semitism fills the mouths of dictators (as, in fact, is now the case in Iran).
Soft anti-Semitism would stagger on for decades in Europe and North America—the sort that kept Jews out of certain country clubs and law firms till the 1970s and 1980s. But it would never again be permissible in the mainstream West to speak of Jews disparagingly as a race, or even to begin a dinner-party monologue with the words “The Jew.” Overt anti-Semitism became dispersed to the fringes of intellectual life—the militant black ghetto and the Nation of Islam; neo-Nazi- and skinhead groups (which are largely extinct in North America, but still occasionally assert themselves in chants emanating from the cheap seats at European soccer games); and—as discussed at greater length in this chapter—militant, left-wing anti-Israeli obsessives, such as Kevin Barrett, who have made common cause with hatemongers in the Muslim Middle East.
Even most “mainstream” (if that word can be used) conspiracy theorists, I was surprised to discover, now go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the taint of Jew hatred. This is especially apparent among right-wing New World Order types, such as Alex Jones—despite the fact that their central narrative, the existence of a moneyed cabal of all-controlling globalists who oppress ordinary hard-working Americans, is precisely congruent with old-school anti-Semitism in just about every other aspect. Michael Ruppert, perhaps the most influential 9/11 Truther there was in the movement’s early years, began his epic conspiracist tome Crossing the Rubicon with “special thanks” to “all of the American Jews who took to this book and my work in full recognition that we all worship the same God.” Robert Bowman—the one-time head of the Star Wars missile defense program under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, now a peace activist and 9/11 Truther—defends himself against allegations of consorting with Holocaust deniers by averring, “My father was an ethnic Jew.” Even Barrett felt compelled to start up an odd organization called “Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth” to give ecumenical cover for his conspiracy theories.
Perhaps my favorite example in the but-some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jewish conspiracist niche is Victor Fletcher, the editor and publisher of the Toronto Street News, a bizarre fortnightly newspaper sold for two dollars a copy by homeless people. While the publication was conceived as a way to provide dignity to beggars who otherwise would simply be asking passersby for a handout, its crackpot contents have instead reinforced the worst stereotype of homeless people as paranoid, hate-addled lunatics. One 2010 edition, for instance, contained an article titled “The Kaballah: The NWO’s Satanic Bible,” claiming that “the ‘god’ of the Kabbalah is not god at all. It is Lucifer. Freemasonry is based on the Kabbalah. Illuminati Jews and their Freemasonic allies are stealthily erecting a New World Order dedicated to Lucifer. That’s why the ubiquitous logo of the City of Ottawa, where I am currently visiting, is an O with three tails. 666.” Yet on the newspaper’s masthead page, Fletcher—who once was forced to apologize for running an article calling for the murder of “Jew bankers”—proudly declares the Street News to be a “Jewish Newspaper, 60% written by Jews.”
Of course, some conspiracy theorists do cross the line into out-and-out unapologetic anti-Semitism (and its inevitable cousin, Holocaust denial). But when that happens, they typically become radioactive to less radicalized conspiracists such as Jones, Alten, and most of the other leading conspiracy theorists whom I have profiled in this book. At this point, the typical pattern is for the anti-Semite to schism publicly from the movement—a melodramatic blog posting is now the usual medium for this maneuver—and set out down his own hateful, idiosyncratic path, adding his erstwhile conspiracists-in-arms to the long tally of Jewish and semitophilic conspirators he keeps tacked to the virtual bulletin board at the back of his mind.
The process can take years. By all appearances, Kevin Barrett is well on his way.
A New Home on the Left
Since the French Revolution, anti-Semitism typically had been a creature of the Right, in the European sense of the word—which is to say, the reactionary defenders of the established social, religious, and economic order: As already noted, the Jew was a stand-in for capitalism, mobility (physical and otherwise), new ideologies, and the marginalization of the sturdy gentile rural folk who plowed the fields, threshed the grain, and embodied the romantic pastoral core of the nation’s collective identity.
This began to change in 1948, when the creation of the state of Israel, simultaneous with the extinction in the West of traditional anti-Semitism. Gradually, Jews would be spoken of less as social pollutants or passive victims within larger Western societies—and more as protagonists in the geopolitics of a once-obscure corner of the British Empire. After the Jews established their own state, it became impossible to typecast them as mere parasites contaminating foreign hosts. The Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel scored a crushing military victory against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, furthered this transformation. Writing in that same year, one scholarly expert on the Protocols declared: “Today, the story is already almost forgotten—so much so that it is quite rare, at least in Europe, to meet anyone under the age of 40 who has even heard of these strange ideas.”
Yet at the same time that an old breed of Jewish-focused conspiracism was dying, a new one was blooming on Israeli soil. As Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi wrote in The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, the Jews who arrived in Israel from Europe were mostly white, well educated, and politically sophisticated—alien beings amongst the largely rural, uneducated, and illiterate Arabs who populated the area. Far from the likes of David Ben Gurion, the Palestinian leaders of the British Mandate period were fez-wearing grandees held over from another age—feuding, risk-averse patriarchs who were far more concerned with preserving their traditional status than agitating for Arab rights, much less organizing a modern state. And so when civil war broke out between the two sides in 1947, the result was decisive.
Seen from North American shores, the Jews’ transformation of Israel from an Ottoman backwater into a thriving, powerful Western nation continues to inspire: Here was an ancient people returning to their homeland following two millennia of statelessness and a European dictator’s effort at extermination. But to the Arab peasants whose sleepy, agrarian society was being transformed into an alien landscape by immigrants speaking another language and embracing another religion, the Jews looked as much like colonialists as the British officials they replaced.
In the 1960s, Yasser Arafat would popularize this colonial narrative in the West by presenting himself as a sort of Arab Che Guevara. Equally influential was Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, whose books helped convince the Western intelligentsia that every corner of Western society—from the novels of Jane Austen to U.S. foreign policy—was soaked in bigotry and exploitation; and that the Western media, in particular, was poisonously disposed toward Eastern cultures. From the Palestinian point of view, the genius of this approach was that it cut through the complex history of Jews and Arabs, casting the Palestinian struggle as a simple microcosm of the Orient’s larger battle against imperialism.
In the emerging propaganda against the Jewish state—which, in the West, now takes its most common form on websites and campus posters announcing Israel Apartheid Week and other anti-Zionist events—the old anti-Semitic stereotypes have been revamped. In the centuries leading up to the Holocaust, the Jew often was seen as rich, but also physically flaccid, diseased, and somewhat wretched. Fagin, from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, for instance, was described as “disgusting.” In Ivanhoe, the Jew Isaac is introduced as “a tall thin old man, who . . . had lost by the habit of stooping much of his actual height.” By the 1970s, this stereotype was thrown into reverse: In the emerging propaganda, the Jew now was shown in the cockpit of a helicopter or fighter jet—an omnipotent, teched-up superman murdering defenseless Palestinian children from the sky. As in the Nazi era, the Jew isn’t fully human—but now he’s an all-powerful Nazgûl instead of a pitiful Gollum.
In the common usage of child victims to communicate the extent of the Jew’s evil, the anti-Israeli propaganda of today is similar to the posters and textbooks of the Nazi era, which often showed shadowy Hebrews menacing German families. But the Nazis took care to personalize the Jew as a craggy, hook-nosed ghoul—an image meant to further the idea that Jews were so genetically inferior as to be literally inhuman. Aside from editorial cartoonists in the Arab world (many of whom continue to faithfully copy Nazi-era stereotypes to this day), anti-Semitic propagandists of our own age typically omit the Jew’s features in favour of a faceless, Star-of-Zion-emblazoned machine of war. During the second Intifada, for instance, a photo genre much favored by newspapers was the image of a small boy throwing a rock at a monstrous chunk of moving steel—an Israeli tank or bulldozer.
In keeping with our society’s obsession with victimhood, the propaganda strategy against Israel now is entirely passive-aggressive. While the Nazis dwelled on the virility and superhuman indomitability of Aryans, the Jews’ enemies now are represented in propaganda by five-year-olds carrying teddy bears. In 2009, for instance, the worldwide organizers of Israel Apartheid Week circulated a slick sixty-second promotional movie on apartheidweek.org, in which they depicted a cartoon mock-up of Gaza’s population containing no men of military age, just a group of sorrowful children, mothers, and grandparents. The complex moral dimension of the conflict has been replaced by a sentimental Marxist-inspired tale of the virtuous oppressed rising up against an evil oppressor. Slogans of racial purity have been replaced with the mantras of “social justice.”
As a result, anti-Israel activism has drawn in the whole hodgepodge of leftist activists—and even world leaders—who know little about the Middle East, but who identify in a broad sense with the Marxist-inspired struggle of worker against capitalist, black against white, colonized against colonizer. During the 2008–2009 Gaza War, for instance, Hugo Chavez’s “bolivarian” government in Venezuela declared its “unrestricted solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people” and denounced Israel’s “criminal atrocities.” A few months later, Chavez’s deposed Honduran ally, Manuel Zelaya, told the world he was under siege from “Israeli mercenaries” armed with what a Miami Herald interviewer described as “high-frequency radiation” and “toxic gases” that “alter [Zelaya’s] physical and mental state.”
Back in North America, this merging of shrill anti-Zionism and traditional left-wing activism has produced bizarre juxtapositions—such as lesbian feminists who defend the niqab as a form of resistance against Western capitalism, and “peace activists” marching alongside kafiyeh-clad protesters who chant for Jewish blood in Arabic. Perhaps the most bizarre example I have witnessed is Toronto’s annual Gay Pride parade, a popular tourist-friendly spectacle whose out-and-proud homoeroticism would constitute a death sentence for participants were the event held in the Arab world. Yet these parades have contained a contingent of “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” who shout slogans against one of the most gay-friendly nations in the entire world. (Gays serve openly in the Israeli army, and there are gay pride parades in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.)
What makes such poisonous attacks on Israel especially notable is the fact that community activists in Toronto’s gay community otherwise have shown themselves obsessively committed to the principles of nondiscrimination. The mission statement of the Pride committee, for instance, is a lengthy catalog of pledges to “value diversity” in regard to every imaginable sexual subniche. Yet, like many other left-wing activists, they often exhibit a single-minded hatred of Israel no less obsessive than the hateful campaigns once commonly launched by reactionary xenophobes. The same is true of the ultraliberal United Church of Canada, whose activists rarely raise a peep when Christians are slaughtered in Pakistan or Iraq, but militate for sanctions against one of the only nations in the Middle East where Christians can worship without fear. Then there is Adbusters, an ultra-bien-pensant Vancouver-based anticorporate magazine whose parent foundation earnestly describes itself as “a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators, and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age.” In late 2010, Adbusters ran a photo spread (Truthbombs on Israeli TV) comparing the situation in Gaza to that of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War—a feature so vile that Canada’s largest drug-store chain pulled all copies of it off its shelves. Equally offensive was a 2004 Adbusters feature—“Why won’t anyone say they are Jewish?”—ticking off all the powerful Jews who had pushed for the invasion of Iraq. After decades of political correctness, it has become clear that the hypertolerant mantras of modern leftism supply no defense against the mind-warping effects of conspiracism: They simply deflect the conspiracist impulse to more fashionable targets such as Israel and the Jews that support it.
Even Jews themselves sometime have been seduced by this phenomenon. Noam Chomsky is an example. So is leftist icon Naomi Klein, who, as noted earlier, believes that Israeli elites are somehow secretly complicit in the terrorist attacks against their country.
Another example is Toronto-based Jewish anti-Israel activist Diana Ralph, who co-founded a group called Independent Jewish Voices. Among the group’s causes: a total economic boycott of Israel, defense of the UN’s original anti-Semitic Durban conference, and promotion of the blood libel that Israel deliberately targets Palestinian “children playing on roofs.” In a 2006 essay, Ralph argued that the Sept. 11 attacks were not perpetrated by al-Qaeda, but rather by American and Israeli conservatives seeking to implement “a secret, strategic plan to position the U.S. as a permanent unilateral super-power poised to seize control of Eurasia, and thereby the entire world”—a plan rooted in a 1979 Zionist conference organized by none other than future Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Another member of Independent Jewish Voices is a twenty-nine-year-old University of Toronto sociology student named Jennifer Peto. In 2010, she submitted a master’s degree thesis titled The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education. Peto’s thesis—which can best be described as a confessional essay with footnotes—tells the story of her gradual transformation from religious Jewish Zionist to self-described “Palestine solidarity activist.” In her thesis, she makes the astonishing argument that Holocaust education can have undesirable effects, because it reinforces Jews’ sense of victimization, and thereby serves to indirectly strengthen their support for “the Israeli nation-state” (which she also refers to in the thesis as an “Apartheid State”).
All of these figures represent minority opinions within the broader North American Jewish community. But they have attained outsized importance because their writings are promoted by anti-Zionist groups eager to escape the charge of anti-Semitism.
On this score, critics of Israel are perfectly correct that not all criticism of the Jewish state rises to the level of true anti-Semitism. But the boundary line is blurry and subjective. With Protocols-style anti-Semitism, things were simpler: The bell was rung whenever someone described Jews as a class of creatures, as fundamentally malignant or biologically deficient. But the left-wing variety nominally focuses on the actions of a state, not a people. And so the observer must instead rely on indirect (and therefore less conclusive) evidence of anti-Semitism, such as the anti-Zionists’ obsessive focus on the victims of Israeli counterterrorist operations, while ignoring the terrorist provocations that led to them, not to mention the many other, far greater, human-rights abuses that occur regularly in other countries around the world.
The 9/11 Effect
If the Holocaust and the creation of the Jewish state jointly marked the first great turning point in the modern history of anti-Semitism, 9/11 marked the second. Following the attacks, supporters of Israel spoke of a silver lining: The war against militant Islam suddenly was a global one. Now, the whole world would see and understand the sort of nihilistic hatred that Israelis confronted every day.
But in Europe, this was not to be. Terrorism is effective because it causes people to choose sides—sending a tremor along the political fence, so that those sitting on it are cast on to one side or the other. Tens of millions of ordinary Europeans, the type who once might have thought themselves vaguely pro-Palestinian in their outlook, committed themselves to the belief that Israeli violence toward Palestinians—along with U.S. neoimperialism, globalization, and the like—was one of the “root causes” of not only 9/11, but also the Muslim militancy on display in the dilapidated immigrant ghettoes of Paris and other European cities.
Indeed, the period around 9/11—which also roughly coincided with the high point of the Second Intifada, and with the infamously anti-Semitic World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa—featured a brief spasm of old-fashioned blood-libel anti-Semitism in Europe. During the April 2002 battle in the West Bank town of Jenin, in particular, European newspapers credulously reported false Palestinian claims that Israel was perpetrating a “massacre” of the town’s civilians. In 2003, Dave Brown was named Britain’s political cartoonist of the year for an image, published in the Independent, showing Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian babies in the style of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son. Much of the hysteria died down in the middle of decade, as the Intifada gradually lost steam, and European attention turned toward George W. Bush and the Iraq War. But it was rekindled in 2006, during Israel’s brief campaign against Hezbollah—and again in late 2008, during the Gaza conflict. Even as recently as 2009, a leading left-wing Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, published a lurid two-page spread alleging (falsely) that the Israeli army kills Palestinians to harvest their organs, a modern gloss on the age-old claim that Jews harvest the blood of gentile babies for their Passover matzo.
But in the United States (and Canada), where most observers previously had tilted to the other side of the fence, 9/11 had the opposite effect: America’s fight became Israel’s fight. Over the last decade, a period during which Republicans and Democrats have fought over every other subject imaginable, support for Israel has remained one of the few issues to attract virtually unanimous bipartisan support.
Among war-hawks on the Right, in particular, the sudden identification of militant Islam as America’s greatest enemy capped a startling transformation in the perception of the American Jewish community. Whereas Jews might once have threatened the American Right in their roles as communists, anarchists, trade unionists, civil rights leaders, and Ivy League intellectuals, no Jew could ever be an Islamist. Just the opposite: The Jew was the perfect anti-Islamist, whose zeal and reliability in the war on terrorism was hard-wired into his political DNA thanks to six decades of Israeli warfare against Islamic terrorists in the Middle East. For the first time in the history of Western civilization, the Jew’s “foreignness” and mixed loyalties—to the United States, Israel, world Jewry—became a source of respect and trust rather than suspicion.
A related phenomenon I have noticed through my interaction with National Post letter-writers since 9/11—and this also must rank as another unprecedented phenomenon—is that North American Jews now seem just as likely to embrace conspiracy theories as to be targeted by them. Birther mythology, in particular (along with its associated allegations that Barack Obama is Muslim, and is secretly conspiring to destroy Israel) has become a bonding agent between blue-state Jewish Zionists and red-state Evangelicals—a conspiracist alliance that would have been unimaginable in the days of the John Birch Society. Much has been made of the premillennial beliefs of Christian Zionists, according to which Evangelicals stand by Israel because they believe an ingathering of Jews in the Levant is required to fulfill the prophecy of Jesus’ Second Coming. But few have noticed that Jewish Zionists have returned the favor—embracing Barack Obama conspiracy theories infused with all manner of decidedly Christian eschatological influences.
As anti-Zionist conspiracy theorists have been only too happy to remind us, many of the leading intellectuals and political figures who championed America’s aggressive post–9/11 war against terror were Jewish “neoconservatives” (to use the much-abused shorthand)—a list that includes Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Charles Krauthammer, Norman Podhoretz, Elliot Abrams, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes, and Bill and Irving Kristol. Once reviled as counterfeit Americans by prewar conservative nativists, Jews now found themselves at the very center of the intellectual firmament that surrounded the U.S. commander in chief and his twenty-first-century war machine.
The post-9/11 alliance between Christian populists and Jews has carried over into areas that have nothing to do with war or terrorism. On paper, for instance, the Tea Party movement—with its suspicion of urban elites, social liberals, the Ivy League, the mainstream media, and much of America’s corporate establishment—would appear to provide the ideal ideological incubator for a revival of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. The same goes for the period in late 2009 and 2010 when the Tea Party movement took off, an era shot through with the sort of large-scale financial busts that, throughout history, typically have sparked the West’s great anti-Semitic spasms. Yet even the disgrace of Bernie Madoff, a crooked Jewish financier plucked straight out of classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, failed to produce even the slightest hint of a mainstream revival in Jew hatred.
Or consider the case of George Soros, a billionaire Jewish Hungarian American financier who has earned the ire of conservatives by bankrolling a long list of liberal activist groups, including MoveOn.org. In November, 2010, FOX News host Glenn Beck profiled Soros on a segment he called The Puppet Master, which the network aired with ominous black-and-white newsreel-style graphics. Beck warned viewers of a shadowy “structure” being installed in America by saboteurs seeking to transform the country. “All the paths, time after time, really led to one man,” Beck declared, pointing to a flowchart. “George Soros, one guy.”
Soros’ fingerprints, Beck declared, were on the “crisis collapsing our economy,” as well as a plot to create a “One World Government.” The FOX News hosts also claimed that “Not only does [Soros] want to bring America to her knees, financially, he wants to reap obscene profits off us as well.”
As discussed in detail in this book, the idea that a secret cabal of all-powerful financiers and “puppet masters” is deliberately seeking to crash the world’s economies and thereby create a “one-world government” has been kicking around right-wing conspiracist circles at least since the publication of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—in which the fictional Jewish “Elders” are shown as plotting to render “all the goy States to bankruptcy” and to create a “Super-Government Administration.” This similitude helps explains why the Anti-Defamation League described Beck’s rants against Soros as “offensive” and “horrific.”
Yet, Beck’s claim against Soros wasn’t built around the financier’s status as a Jew—but rather the claim that Soros isn’t Jewish enough: At one point in his Puppet Master feature, Beck claimed that he is “probably more supportive of Israel and the Jews than George Soros is.” He also declared that Soros is “an atheist who doesn’t embrace his Jewish identity, and rarely supports Jewish causes.”
These words bespeak an amazing transformation in right-wing American attitudes toward Jews. For centuries, Jewish bankers and financiers labored under the conspiracist accusation that they were fifth columnists—agents of a foreign Hebrew power that sought to control and oppress the gentiles. Now, decades later, Jews’ fealty to their kind is presented as a saving grace (albeit one that, according to Beck, George Soros cannot claim).
Many American conservatives have internalized the idea that protection of Jews and Israel from the threat of a new, Iranian-sparked holocaust has become a sacred national duty on a par with protection of America’s own homeland. At the February 2010 Tea Party National Convention in Nashville, for instance, I was shocked to hear a presiding minister bless Israel in the same breath as the United States during a prayer before Sarah Palin’s speech. A few months later, when Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu had a public spat over the construction of new Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, conservative pundits such as Charles Krauthammer (who denounced Obama’s “kowtowing” to foreign leaders in just about every other context) openly took Israel’s side. During this period, Joseph Farah’s website, WorldNetDaily, even sent out an email asking readers for the “symbolic” amount of $19.48 to buy flowers for Israel’s prime minister: “Obama treated our best friend in the Middle East, Israel, with disdain when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington. Now America is speaking up by sending the prime minister a tangible message of support that cannot be missed—yellow roses, the symbol of friendship! Stand against this terrible treatment!”
Farah and his followers, I have had to keep reminding myself, are part of a hyperpatriotic, even nativist, political movement animated by fears of Muslims and illegal Mexican immigrants taking over their Christian nation. Yet somehow, in the process, they have decided that a tiny Hebrew-speaking country six thousand miles from Washington is more apple-pie than their own president.
Jews Drift Right
The subject of this chapter has been anti-Semitism, and its evolving role within the larger framework of Western conspiracism. Before abandoning the subject, it is worth dwelling briefly on the way this evolution has affected the Jewish community itself.
For most of the twentieth century, North American Jews have identified with society’s underdogs. On race issues in particular, many community leaders remain faithful to a political alliance struck between blacks and Jews a century ago. The affinity between the two groups had a cultural aspect: Both Jewish immigrants and religious blacks saw parallels between the story of Exodus and the end of modern slavery. Being disproportionately drawn to left-wing politics in the early part of the twentieth century, many Jews also tended to view blacks and other disadvantaged minorities through the prism of class struggle—an attitude comically epitomized by Alvy Singer’s father in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, who defended his black cleaning lady against accusations of theft by famously insisting, “She’s a colored woman, from Harlem! She has no money! She’s got a right to steal from us! After all, who is she gonna steal from if not us?”
In the postwar years, all minorities—including not only Jews and blacks, but Muslims, gays, Hispanics, and Asians—were bound together by the fight for a meritocratic society in which people were judged not on the basis of their faith or skin color but by the content of their character. The fight against anti-Jewish quotas in universities and the fight to end Southern segregation were, in this respect, one and the same. As many other authors have noted, Jews were greatly overrepresented in the fight for civil rights in the United States. In Canada, Jewish community leaders led the charge for the network of human rights commissions set up in the 1970s.
Once the great battles of the civil-rights era had been won, however, things changed. Jews now truly were mingling at the best country clubs and checking into corner offices at white-shoe law firms, not to mention bestriding the inner circles of power in Washington and on Wall Street. The pretense that they were still bound up in the same struggles as other groups began to break down—even if many Jews, still playing the underdog role out of habit, refused to notice.
The 9/11 attacks forced them to notice. Virtually every major Jewish group in the United States lined up foursquare behind the war in Iraq—thereby estranging many Jews from the wider peace movement in which they’d once taken such an active part. The messy wars in Lebanon in 2006, and in Gaza in 2008–2009, during which many Jews were appalled to see Western leftists effectively take the side of terrorist groups as if they were legitimate “resistance movements,” widened the fissure. As noted above, some Jews did follow the Chomskyite path, and continue to do so. But amid the carnage of 9/11 and the rise of suicide bombings as an everyday tool of Palestinian terrorists—tactics bespeaking existential hatred of Jews and Western society more generally—these dissenters no longer were met with the forbearance that formerly had greeted them by fellow Jews. That stock figure of left-wing synagogue life, the middle-aged peacenik holding bake sales for Gaza, was now regarded by some as a sinister dupe, not just a heterodox oddball.
In the years following 9/11, the group playing the civil-rights card was no longer blacks or Hispanics. Instead, it was America’s Muslims and Arabs, whose community leaders typically have been strident critics of Israel, and—as author Daniel Pipes has documented in great detail—sometimes even apologists for terrorism. Among leftists, Jews once were understood to speak with moral authority on the subject of persecution. But no more. To quote Sheila Wilmot, my instructor in the Thinking About Whiteness and Doing Anti-Racism course I described in the last chapter, “Jewish people of European origin have a relationship to racism that is much closer to that of white non-Jews than to that of people of color.”
The September 11 attacks changed America in a thousand different ways. Perhaps the most ironic, given the terrorists’ intensely anti-Semitic ideology, was that it cemented the long process leading to Jews’ full-fledged ascension into the American establishment.