By Keren Toledano and Karys Rhea
Monday, March 23, 2020
A strange notion has found purchase in progressive
circles. It holds that nominally marginalized and oppressed groups, most notably
Muslims and African Americans, cannot themselves espouse hateful views.
According to this thinking, white people maintain a monopoly on hate, and every
expression of hate by someone who is nonwhite is linked to some form of white
or Western influence, whether colonialist, capitalist, or Christian.
This idea is also frequently embraced by those doing the
hating. Consider the strain of anti-Semitism endemic to Palestinian society,
where government-run television, media, textbooks, and mosques encourage violence
against Jews, praise Hitler, characterize Jews as “apes and pigs,” and deny the
Holocaust. Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas’s Fatah movement, widely taken to be the most moderate wing of
Palestinian politics and the best chance for a partner in peace with Israel,
recently released a video claiming that Jews “led the project to enslave
humanity” and that Jewish behavior is responsible for anti-Semitism.
***
To many on the hard left, this moral inversion fits
comfortably with Marxist theories about class struggle and power. When a class
of people is deemed to lack power, their misdeeds are recast as noble efforts
to obtain that power—even when those misdeeds might include terrorist acts
against innocent civilians.
Never mind that the historical record is wholly at odds
with Fatah’s explanation for Jew-hatred. Islamic anti-Semitism has been a
fundamental part of Middle East culture for more than a millennium. Long before
capitalism and Western colonialism, Jews were treated as second-class citizens,
or “dhimmis,” under Islamic law, and they endured frequent pogroms,
humiliation, and brutal oppression. Thus, denying the historical record is a
necessity if one is set on absolving the wicked.
The lengths to which some will go in their denial is
exemplified by a New York–based progressive organization called Jews for Racial
& Economic Justice (JFREJ). Founded in 1990 by the academic and activist
Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark and the activist Donna Nevel, JFREJ claims it is
inspired by Jewish tradition to dismantle racism and economic exploitation. On
its website, the organization highlights its work with Black Lives Matter and
its efforts to fight Islamophobia and dismantle ICE, among other things. JFREJ
has published a guide called “Understanding Anti-Semitism” that takes readers
through the leftist looking glass into a world where oppressor and oppressed
bear little resemblance to their real-life counterparts. It is worth looking at
this organization’s rhetoric as it helps shine a light on the current pathways
of anti-racist activism and how it acts as a cover for Jew-hatred.
***
The authors of “Understanding Anti-Semitism” blame
Christian dogma and hierarchies for the creation of Jew-hatred while writing
off centuries of anti-Semitism in the Arab-Muslim world. They even reframe the
dhimmi status imposed on Jews, casting it as a “protection” of the sultan. And
while they acknowledge that this protection was bought through heavy taxation
and that it facilitated “sporadic attacks, forced conversions and mass killings
of Jews,” they claim that no specific “anti-Jewish ideology” persisted in the
Arab-Muslim world because, after all, other non-Muslims were also oppressed.
How the presence of additional prejudices makes anti-Semitism less bigoted is
unclear. What is clear, however, is that Muslim anti-Semitism culminated in
nearly 1 million Jews of Araby ethnically cleansed, forcibly dispossessed, and
expelled from their homes in the 20th century alone.
It is telling that the JFREJ guide discusses
“Islamophobia” but omits mention of the persecution of Christians currently
rampant in the Arab-Muslim world. It misleadingly blames “white Christian
nationalism” for the vast majority of domestic terrorist attacks in the United
States, conveniently ignoring that 2019 saw roughly an even number of
casualties at the hands of white-nationalist terrorists and jihadists. JFREJ
also doesn’t mention that in 2017 alone, groups such as al-Shabab and the
Taliban carried out nearly 11,000 Islamist attacks worldwide, resulting in 26,000
casualties.
***
Just as JFREJ exonerates Muslims wholesale for
anti-Semitism, the group exempts racial minorities for it as well. In an
interview with the Democracy Now radio show in late December, JFREJ executive
director Audrey Sasson referred to New York City’s recent onslaught of
anti-Semitic attacks as a manifestation of white nationalism—despite the fact
that the majority of incidents were perpetrated by African Americans. In the
December 28th stabbing attack on five Hasidic Jews at a Hanukkah party in
Monsey, New York, for example, the assailant was a 37-year-old black male who
reportedly Googled topics such as “Why did Hitler hate Jews,” “Zionist Temples
in Staten Island,” and “Prominent companies founded by Jews in America.”
Some leftist Democratic politicians have dabbled in
similar scapegoating. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, claimed
that the rash of hate crimes in New York City was a “right-wing” problem. On
Twitter, Representative Rashida Tlaib blamed “white supremacy” for the Jersey
City shooting at a kosher supermarket that took the lives of three Jews and a
non-Jewish police officer, even though both perpetrators were African Americans
and one was affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelites—a black supremacist and
anti-Semitic hate group.
***
De Blasio later backtracked on his comments, and Tlaib
deleted her tweet. But JFREJ has upheld the notion that there is no
anti-Semitism apart from white supremacy, including retweeting an article from
the socialist magazine Jacobin that claimed the best way to fight
anti-Semitism “is to reject the centrist idea that anti-Semitism transcends
politics,” and declared it was “pernicious” to point out that Jew-haters exist
on the left and the right.
Yet every week, it seems, another video appears on social
media, or in the news, showing a black American verbally or physically
attacking a visibly Jewish victim. The attacks range from anti-Semitic tirades
to throwing objects, spitting, beating, stabbing, and shooting. Indeed, one
could rightly describe these frequent and vicious assaults on Jews as a
slow-motion pogrom.
What is JFREJ’s solution to this problem? Apparently, the
first step is to deny that it is happening at all. The group’s website claims
that the real issue is “white Jews’ preoccupation with black anti-Semitism,”
stoked by “a false narrative…that focuses on conflict between white Jews and
black non-Jews.” And who does the organization see as the true “architects of
this conflict”? Get ready for it: “Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South forcing
African-Americans to flee to northern cities”—Ku Klux Klan terrorists, that is,
who were last active a century ago.
The second part of the solution is no less confounding.
In Sasson’s recent interview, she said: “Our focus is to build solidarity with
other groups targeted by anti-Semitism.” Other groups targeted by
anti-Semitism? The very formulation defies intelligibility.
But it is revealing nonetheless. Sasson’s true intention
is to deny that anti-Semitism—understood as a specific hatred against Jews—even
exists. JFREJ subordinates the uniqueness of the Jewish plight to a larger
narrative about racism—one that ironically excludes the Jews. This explains
why, at New York City’s January 5th “March Against Anti-Semitism,” JFREJ chose
to publicize the event as a generalized rally against “hate.” In their
promotional material, they even mentioned Islamophobia before saying a word
about anti-Semitism.
***
What we see here are leftist Jews leveraging their
“Jewishness” to perpetuate a logical and moral perversion. In a similar
fashion, the November 2019 issue of Jewish Currents featured Vermont
senator and Democratic candidate for president Bernie Sanders conflating the
fight against anti-Semitism with Palestinian liberation: “The forces fomenting
anti-Semitism are the forces arrayed against oppressed people around the world,
including Palestinians.…The struggle against anti-Semitism is also the struggle
for Palestinian freedom.”
Once anti-Semitism is grouped with bigotry in general, it
can be ignored in favor of more fashionable concerns: namely, systemic racism
in the United States. In her interview, Sasson asserted that attacks on Jews,
if committed by minorities, arise from “rightful anger about real problems.”
Since black Americans are perceived to be a marginalized group, their hate
crimes must be rationalized as an understandable, if misguided, rebellion
against oppression—as opposed to the manifestation of anti-Semitism that they
are.
By this reasoning, Nation of Islam leader Louis
Farrakhan—who famously compared Jews to “termites,” called Jews “bloodsuckers,”
“great and master deceivers,” and the “enemy of God and the enemy of the
righteous”—hates Jews because of some misplaced grudge against the system. And
so when Farrakhan refers to Hitler as “a very great man” and attributes gay
marriage, abortion, and anal sex to the “Satanic influence of the Talmudic
Jews,” he is merely reacting to the evil of the white, Christian West.
In actuality, what we know about the Nation of Islam and
groups such as the Black Hebrew Israelites is that their members have been
actively enlisting people of color for decades, setting up shop and drumming up
hatred in local communities. They preach that Jews are to blame for the plight
of African Americans and draw an equivalence between black suffering in the
U.S. and Palestinian suffering in the Middle East. This line of anti-Semitism
gained particular strength after the assassination of Martin Luther King, a
Zionist and friend of the Jews. King’s tragic departure from the national
conversation paved the way for his views to be overtaken by those in the
tradition of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, who wedded his ideas on
black power to a sci-fi version of Islam and made anti-Semitism an enduring
feature of the Nation of Islam.
***
JFREJ has actually aligned itself with Farrakhan
supporters. On its website, the group proudly states that it lets the
priorities of the marginalized groups with which it partners “guide [its]
actions.” Thus JFREJ has partnered with two former leaders of the Women’s
March: Tamika Mallory, an African American, and Linda Sarsour, a Muslim
American. Both women have voiced admiration for Louis Farrakhan. And Sarsour’s
record of anti-Semitic statements in the name of Palestinian activism is
well-known. She has said, for example, that Israel is “built on supremacy” and
“on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else.” She also tweeted:
“Nothing is creepier than Zionism.” Sarsour earned an approving retweet from
former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke when she tweeted: “Israel
should give free citizenship to US politicians. They are more loyal to Israel
than they are to the American people.” But, as one headline on JFREJ’s website
says, “JFREJ Stands with Linda Sarsour (Again, Always, with Love).” If people
like Sarsour guide JFREJ’s actions, it’s no wonder that the group whitewashes
hate crimes against Jews.
Above all, JFREJ prizes its “alliances” and readily
dismisses the sins of its allies—even when those sins run counter to the
group’s stated beliefs. In her interview, Sasson rightly described
anti-Semitism as a “tool that punches up against Jews, in that it portrays Jews
as powerful.” But this is precisely the conspiracist brand of anti-Semitism
espoused by anti-Israel groups such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace,
with whom JFREJ partners. These outfits rely on an anti-capitalist,
anti-colonialist framework that sees the Jewish collective (i.e., Israel) as
the oppressive power and that equates Zionism with Palestinian suffering.
Either Sasson is displaying willful blindness or she has
been corrupted by the very suggestion she claims to condemn: that Jews are the
oppressor class, and Palestinians their hapless victims. The latter stance
seems more convincing given the activist left’s penchant for pitting the
powerful against the weak. As John-Paul Pagano has written, if Jews are
perceived as the oppressor class, then overt anti-Semitism becomes “easy to
disguise as a politics of emancipation,” and punching up at Jews becomes “a
form of speaking truth to power.”
While it is true that abusers are often themselves the
victims of abuse, and that a person’s experience of oppression may contribute
to the ways in which he oppresses other people, it is intellectually dishonest
to claim that this is somehow exculpatory. And while it is laudable to condemn
all forms of bigotry, there is something obscene about automatically holding up
the perpetrator of a hate crime as a victim and subsequently elevating his
grievances above the violence done to the actual injured party. Regarding such
violence, Sasson’s vigilance is wanting. On Democracy Now, she argued against greater
security measures for Jews and claimed that the “answer to what is happening is
not more policing.”
Anti-Semitism has long been a feature of extreme
left-wing and Islamist ideologies—from Soviet Communism to Hezbollah’s
exterminationist creed. As everyone knows, it has also been a feature of
fascism and Nazism. It is incumbent on both the left and right to root out the
Jew-haters in their midst. But some progressive groups have instead embraced
them—as a display of progressive virtue, no less. As is often the case when
bigotry is given the gloss of victimhood, it is the Jews who will bear the
brunt of the abuse.
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