Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Holocaust denial is therefore central to Arab anti-Semitism, the prejudice which such historical falsehood has helped to forge a strategic alliance with Europe. For it absolves Europe of its guilt over the Jews, and replaces it with European guilt towards Arabs displaced as a result of the Holocaust.

  Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, Europeans have eagerly embraced the Nazification of the Jews, a process which really got under way with Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This marked the beginning of the media’s systematic inversion of Israeli self-defense as aggression, along with double-standards and malicious fabrications, which have nothing to do with legitimate (and necessary) criticism of Israel and everything to do with delegitimizing the Jewish state altogether in readiness for its dismantling.

  So the conference heard about German accusations that Israel was using Nazi methods and (repeating a claim by Hamas) that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Jewish conspiracy against Bill Clinton. It heard of the Nazification of Israel in Sweden, where there were charges that the Israelis were exterminating the Palestinians, that the media were controlled by Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel, and that influential Jewish lobby groups were “spraying journalists with poison.”

  It heard that in France Jews were vilified and excluded from public debate if they challenged the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding)—which has been playing to packed houses in Paris— about the obsessive malevolence toward Israel displayed by the French media. It was told about the way the British media described Israel’s “death squads,” “killing fields,” and “executioners” while sanitizing Palestinian human bombs as “gentle,” “religious,” and “kind.” It heard about the cartoon in the Italian newspaper La Stampa during the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, depicting an Israeli tank pointing a gun at the baby Jesus who is saying, “Surely they are not going to kill me again.”

  And of course there was Jenin, the so-called “massacre” or “genocide” reported as such by virtually the entire media, where in fact 52 Palestinians died, of whom more than half were terrorists, while Israel sustained (for it) the huge loss of 45 of its soldiers. This astonishing media distortion was conceded at the conference by the (extraordinarily brave) Palestinian politics professor Mohammad Dajani, who also observed that a distraught Palestinian public was—on this and other occasions—whipped up by biased and emotional Palestinian reporting which showed little concern for the truth. But the big lie of the Jenin massacre is now believed as fact, contributing to the belief that Israel is a criminal state.

  Europeans have thus made themselves accomplices to an explicitly genocidal program. But an even more striking feature is that, while the old anti-Semitism still festers away among neo-Nazis, the new anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of their sworn enemies on the political Left. So, as the Canadian law professor Irwin Cotler observed, we now have the mind-twisting situation where anti-Jewish hatred is harnessed to the cause of anti-racism and human rights, with Israel being compared to both Nazism and apartheid by those who define themselves against these ideologies. Such a travesty of the facts involves, of course, the implicit denial of the truth of those terrible regimes, quite apart from the prelude to annihilation created by such a lethal defamation of Israel. And even more counterintuitively, many Jews and Israelis on the Left also subscribe to this analysis— and even to the demonology of Israeli Nazism and apartheid— handing an effective weapon to those who dismiss the claim of a new anti-Semitism as Jewish paranoia or Islamophobia.

  So what is the explanation for the Left’s position? Partly, it’s the old anti-imperialist and anti-West prejudice. Partly, it’s the view that only the powerless can be victims; so Third World people can never be murderers, and any self-defense by Western societies such as Israel must instead be aggression. Partly, it’s the postmodern destruction of objectivity and truth, which has ushered in the hegemony of lies. And partly, as the Left takes an axe to morality and self-restraint, it’s a golden opportunity to pulverize the very people who invented the damn rules in the first place.

  A left-wing Polish journalist at the conference, Konstanty Gebert, got the real point. The Left, he said, could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy. This was founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view. It would also give credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonization is absolutely vital to the Left as a protection against the implosion of its whole ideological position.

  So the evidence is being denied, and truth is being stood on its head. The result is the defamation of a people, the greater prospect of its destruction, and the disastrous failure of the populations of Britain and Europe to understand properly the threat that all free peoples now face.

  DR. LAURIE ZOLOTH

  Fear and Loathing at San Francisco State

  [This was orginally sent out as an e-mail to friends of the author, but rapidly circulated and became an iconic eyewitness description of anti-Semitismon American campuses.]

  TODAY, ALL DAY, I have been listening to the reactions of students, parents, and community members who were on campus yesterday. I have received e-mail from around the country, and phone calls, worried for both my personal safety on the campus, and for the entire intellectual project of having a Jewish Studies program, and recruiting students to a campus that in the last month has become a venue for hate speech and anti-Semitism.

  After nearly seven years as director of Jewish Studies, and after nearly two decades of life here as a student, faculty member, and wife of the Hillel rabbi, after years of patient work and difficult civic discourse, I am saddened to see SFSU (San Francisco State University) return to its notoriety as a place that teaches anti-Semitism, hatred for America, and hatred, above all else, for the Jewish State of Israel, a state that I cherish.

  I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled “canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,” past poster after poster calling out “Zionism = racism” and “Jews = Nazis.”

  This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech; this is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control. This is the casual introduction of the medieval blood libel and virulent hatred smeared around our campus in a manner so ordinary that it hardly excites concern—except if you are a Jew, and you understand that hateful words have always led to hateful deeds.

  SHOVED AGAINST THE WALL

  Yesterday, the hatred coalesced in a hate mob. Yesterday’s “Peace in the Middle East Rally” was completely organized by the Hillel students, mostly eighteen and nineteen years old. They spoke about their lives at SFSU and of their support for Israel, and they sang of peace. They wore new Hillel T-shirts that said “peace” in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.

  A Russian immigrant, in his new English, spoke of loving his new country, a haven from anti-Semitism. A sophomore spoke about being here only one year, and about the support and community she found at the Hillel House. Both spoke of how hard it was to live as a Jew on this campus, how isolating, how terrifying. A surfer guy spoke of his love of Jesus, and his support for Israel, and a young freshman earnestly asked for a moment of silence.

  And all the Jews stood still, listening as the shouted hate of the counter-demonstrators filled the air with abuse.

  As soon as the community supporters left, the fifty students who remained—praying in a minyan for the traditional afternoon prayers, or chatti
ng, or cleaning up after the rally, talking—were surrounded by a large, angry crowd of Palestinians and their supporters. But they were not calling for peace. They screamed at us to “go back to Russia” and they screamed that they would kill us all, and other terrible things. They surrounded the praying students, and the elderly women who are our elder college participants, who survived the Holocaust, who helped shape the Bay Area peace movement, only to watch as a threatening crowd shoved the Hillel students against the wall of the plaza.

  I had invited members of my Orthodox community to join us, members of my Board of Visitors, and we stood there in despair. Let me remind you that in building the SFSU Jewish Studies program, we asked the same people for their support, and that our Jewish community, who pay for the program once as taxpayers and again as Jews, generously supports our program. Let me remind you that ours is arguably one of the Jewish Studies programs in the country most devoted to peace, justice, and diversity since our inception.

  As the counter-demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews “Get out or we will kill you” and “Hitler did not finish the job,” I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter-demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised.

  The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and that if they did, “it would start a riot.” I told them that it already was a riot.

  Finally, Fred Astren, the Northern California Hillel director, and I went up directly to speak with Dean Saffold, who was watching from her post a flight above us. She told us she would call in the SF police. But the police could do nothing more than surround the Jewish students and community members who were now trapped in a corner of the plaza, grouped under the flags of Israel, while an angry, out of control mob, literally chanting for our deaths, surrounded us.

  Dr. Astren and I went to stand with our students. This was neither free speech nor discourse, but raw, physical assault.

  DOUBLE STANDARD

  Was I afraid? No, really more sad that I could not protect my students. Not one administrator came to stand with us. I knew that if a crowd of Palestinian or Black students had been there, surrounded by a crowd of white racists screaming racist threats, shielded by police, the faculty and staff would have no trouble deciding which side to stand on.

  In fact, the scene recalled for me many moments in the Civil Rights movement, or the United Farm Workers movement, when, as a student, I stood with Black and Latino colleagues, surrounded by hateful mobs. Then, as now, I sang peace songs, and then, as now, the hateful crowd screamed at me, “Go back to Russia, Jew.” How ironic that it all took place under the picture of Cesar Chavez, who led the very demonstrations that I took part in as a student.

  There was no safe way out of the Plaza. We had to be marched back to the Hillel House under armed SF police guard, and we had to have a police guard remain outside Hillel. I was very proud of the students, who did not flinch and who did not, even one time, resort to violence or anger in retaliation. Several community members who were swept up in the situation simply could not believe what they saw.

  One young student told me, “I have read about antiSemitism in books, but this is the first time I have seen real anti-Semites, people who just hate me without knowing me, just because I am a Jew.” She lives in the dorms. Her mother calls and urges her to transfer to a safer campus.

  Today is advising day. For me, the question is an open one: What do I advise the Jewish students to do?

  POSTSCRIPT

  The incident described here is, unfortunately, not in isolation. In the first few months of 2002, there have been over fifty documented cases of anti-Semitic acts in and around the Bay Area. These include an attempted arson at a synagogue in Berkeley, and a synagogue in San Francisco that was fire-bombed.

  The campus scene has been violent as well. In recent weeks at UC Berkeley, a brick was thrown through the Hillel windows, Hillel property was spray-painted with “Hate Jews,” and a rabbi’s son was beaten up, requiring stitches to his head.

  TODD GITLIN

  The Rough Beast Returns

  THE EMAIL SENT OUT last month by Laurie Zoloth, director of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, was chilling on its face.

  “I cannot fully express what it feels like to have to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled ‘canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,’ past poster after poster calling out ‘Zionism = racism’ and ‘Jews = Nazis,’ ” she wrote—and the details only became more shattering from then on.

  I read Zoloth’s words with horror but not, alas, complete amazement. Eleven years ago, during the Gulf War, across San Francisco Bay, the head of a student splinter group at Berkeley addressed a room full of faculty and students opposed to the war, spitting out venomously, “You Jews, I know your names, I know where you live.”

  The faculty and students in attendance sat stiffly and said nothing. Embarrassed? Frightened? Or worse—thinking that it wasn’t time to tackle this issue, that it was off the agenda, an inconvenience.

  Far more recently, two students of mine at NYU wondered aloud whether it was actually true, as they had heard, that four thousand Jews didn’t show up for work at the World Trade Center on September 11. They clearly thought this astoundingly crazy charge was plausible enough to warrant careful investigation, but it didn’t occur to them to look at the names of the dead.

  Wicked anti-Semitism is back. The worst crackpot notions that circulate through the violent Middle East are also roaming around America, and if that wasn’t bad enough, students are spreading the gibberish. Students! As if the bloc to which we have long looked for intelligent dissent has decided to junk any pretense of standards.

  A student movement is not just a student movement. It’s a student movement. Students, whether they are progressive or not, have the responsibility of knowing things, of thinking and discerning, of studying. A student movement should maintain the highest of standards, not ape the formulas of its elders or outdo them in virulence.

  It should therefore trouble progressives everywhere that the students at San Francisco State are neither curious nor revolted by the anti-Semitic drivel they are regurgitating. The simple fact that a student movement—even a small one—has been reduced to reflecting the hatred spewed by others should profoundly trouble anyone whose moral principles aim higher than simple nationalism—as should be the case for anyone on the left.

  It isn’t hard to discover the sources of the drivel being parroted by the students at San Francisco State. In the blood-soaked Middle East of Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon, in the increasingly polarized Europe of Jean-Marie Le Pen, raw antiSemitism has increasingly taken the place of intelligent criticism of Israel and its policies.

  Even as Laurie Zoloth’s message flew around the world, even as several prominent European papers published scathing but warranted attacks on Israel’s stonewalling of an inquiry into the Jenin fighting, the great Portuguese novelist José Saramago was describing Israel’s invasion of Ramallah as “a crime comparable to Auschwitz.”

  In one of his long, lapping sentences, Saramago wrote in Madrid’s El País (as translated by Paul Berman in The Forward, May 24):

  Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted “certitude” that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the
Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. . . .

  Note well: the deliciously deferred subject of this sentence is: “the Jews.” Not the right-wing Jews, the militarist Israelis, but “the Jews.” Suddenly the Jews are reduced to a single stickfigure (or shall we say hook-nosed?) caricature and we are plunged into the brainless, ruinous, abysmal iconography that should make every last reasonable person shudder.

  The German socialist August Bebel once said that antiSemitism was “the socialism of fools.” What we witness now is the progressivism of fools. It is a recrudescence of everything that costs the left its moral edge. And, appallingly, it is this contemptible message the anti-Semitic students at San Francisco State chose to parrot.

  We are not on the brink of “another Auschwitz,” and to think so, in fact, falsifies the danger. The danger is clear and present, though not apocalyptic. It’s no remote nightmare that synagogues are bombed, including the one on the Tunisian island of Djerba, famous for tolerance, an apparent al-Qaeda truck bomb attack. This happened. It is no remote nightmare that hundreds of Palestinian civilians died during Israeli incursions into the West Bank. This, too, happened. The nightmare is that the second is being allowed to excuse and justify the first.

  Laurie Zoloth wrote: “Let me remind you that ours is arguably one of the Jewish Studies programs in the country most devoted to peace, justice, and diversity since our inception.”

  But anti-Semitism doesn’t care. Like every other lunacy that diminished human brains are capable of, anti-Semitism already knows what it hates.

  This is no incidental issue, no negligible distraction. A Left that cares for the rights of humanity cannot cavalierly tolerate the systematic abuse of any people—whatever you think of Israel’s or any other country’s foreign policy. Any student movement worthy of the name must face the ugly history that long made anti-Semitism the acceptable racism, face it and break from it.