Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  In their war against globalization, the browns on the far right have also found common cause with the greens of the new left. Matt Hale, the leader of the U.S. white supremacist World Church of the Creator, praised the 1999 antiglobalization protests in Seattle as “incredibly successful from the point of view of the rioters as well as our Church. They helped shut down talks of the Jew World Order WTO and helped make a mockery of the Jewish Occupational Government around the world. Bravo.” To lure in activists planning to protest the 2002 G-8 summit in Calgary, the National Alliance—the largest neo-Nazi organization in the United States that maintains ties with white supremacist groups worldwide—set up a Web site called the Anti-Globalism Action Network, dedicated to “broadening the anti-globalism movement to include divergent and marginalized voices.”

  Antiglobalization activists find themselves fighting a two-front battle, simultaneously protesting the World Trade Organization (WTO), IMF, and World Bank, while organizing impromptu counter-protests against far-right extremists who gate-crash their rallies. A bizarre ideological turf war has broken out. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) voice alarm about neo-Nazis “masquerading” as antiglobalization activists. On the Web site of the white supremacist Church of True Israel, an aggrieved Walter Nowotny retorts: “This accusation implies that we are late-comers to this movement and only associate with it to jump on a bandwagon that already has considerable momentum. But who are the real infiltrators and trespassers?”

  History is repeating itself. As in the nineteenth century, the far right is plagiarizing left-wing dogma and imbuing it with racist overtones, transforming the campaign against the capitalist “New World Order” into a struggle against the “Jew World Order.” The antiglobalization movement is, however, somewhat culpable. It isn’t inherently anti-Semitic, yet it helps enable anti-Semitism by peddling conspiracy theories. In its eyes, globalization is less a process than a plot hatched behind closed doors by a handful of unaccountable bureaucrats and corporations. Underlying the movement’s humanistic goals of universal social justice is a current of fear mongering—the IMF, the WTO, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) are portrayed not just as exploiters of the developing world but as supranational instruments to undermine our sovereignty. Pick up a copy of the 1998 book MAI and the Threat to American Freedom(wrapped in a patriotic red, white, and blue cover), written by antiglobalization activists Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, and you’ll read how “[o]ver the past twenty-five years, corporations and the state seem to have forged a new political alliance that allows corporations to gain more and more control over governance. This new ‘corporate rule’ poses a fundamental threat to the rights and democratic freedoms of all people.” At an even more extreme end of the spectrum, the Web site of the Canadian-based Centre for Research on Globalization sells books and videos that “expose” how the September 11 terrorist attacks were “most likely a special covert action” to “further the goals of corporate globalization.”

  Unfortunately, conspiracy theories must always have a conspirator, and all too often, the conspirators are perceived to be Jews. It takes but a small step to cross the line dividing the two worldviews. “If I told you I thought the world was controlled by a handful of capitalists and corporate bosses, you would say I was a left-winger,” an anarchist demonstrator told the online Russian publication Pravda. “But if I told you who I thought the capitalists and corporate bosses were, you’d say I was far right.”

  The browns and greens are not simply plagiarizing one another’s ideas. They’re frequently reading from the same page. In Canada, a lecture by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist David Icke was advertised in lefty magazines such as Shared Vision and Common Ground. (“Canadians voted down free trade and we got it anyway,” said one woman who saw the ads and attended the event. “So there has to be something to that.”) Farright nationalists, such as former skinhead Jaroslaw Tomasiewicz, have infiltrated the Polish branch of the international antiglobalization organization ATTAC. The British Fascist Party includes among its list of recommended readings the works of left-wing anti-globalists George Monbiot and Noam Chomsky. A Web site warning of the dangers of “Jewish Plutocracy, Jewish Power” includes links to antiglobalization NGOs such as Corpwatch and Reclaim Democracy. The Dutch NGO De Fabel van de illegaal withdrew in disgust from the anti-MAI movement when it learned that the campaign’s activities were attracting the attention of far-right, anti-Semitic student groups. “By pointing to this so-called globalisation as our main problem, the anti-MAI activists prepare our thinking for the corresponding logical consequence—the struggle for ‘our own’ local economy, and as a consequence also for ‘our own’ state and culture,” the director of De Fabel warned. “Left-wing groups are spreading an ideology that offers the New Right, rather than the left, bright opportunities for future growth.”

  ANTI-GLOBALIZIONISM

  The greens and the browns share another common cause: opposition to Israel. Given the antiglobalization movement’s sympathy for Third World causes, it’s not surprising that French activist José Bové took a break from trashing McDonald’s restaurants to show his solidarity with the Palestinian movement by visiting a besieged Yasir Arafat in Ramallah last year.

  But, in the case of the new left, the salient question is not: What do antiglobalization activists have against Israel? Rather, it is important to ask: Why only Israel? Why didn’t Bové travel to Russia to demonstrate his solidarity with Muslim Chechen separatists fighting their own war of liberation? Why are campus petitions demanding that universities divest funds from companies with ties to Israel but not China? Why do the same antiglobalization rallies that denounce Israel’s tactics against the Palestinians remain silent on the thousands of Muslims killed in pogroms in Gujarat, India?

  Israel enjoys a unique pariah status among the antiglobalization movement because it is viewed as the world’s sole remaining colonialist state—an exploitative, capitalist enclave created by Western powers in the heart of the developing world. “They’re trying to impose an apartheid system on both the occupied territories and the Arab population in the rest of Israel,” says Bové. “They are also putting in place—with the support of the World Bank—a series of neoliberal measures intended to integrate the Middle East into globalized production circuits, through the exploitation of cheap Palestinian labor.”

  Opposing the policies of the Israeli government does not make the new left anti-Semitic. But a movement campaigning for global social justice makes a mockery of itself by singling out just the Jewish state for condemnation. And when the conspiratorial mindset of the antiglobalization movement mingles with anti-Israeli rhetoric, the results can get ugly. Bové, for instance, told a reporter that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was responsible for anti-Semitic attacks in France in order to distract attention from its government’s actions in the occupied territories.

  The consequences of embracing a double standard toward Israel are all too apparent at antiglobalization rallies. In Italy, a member of Milan’s Jewish community carrying an Israeli flag at a protest march was beaten by a mob of antiglobalization activists. At Davos, a group of protesters wearing masks of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld (wearing a yellow star) carried a golden calf laden with money. Worldwide, protesters carry signs that compare Sharon to Hitler, while waving Israeli flags where the Star of David has been replaced with the swastika. Such displays portray Israel as the sole perpetrator of violence, ignoring the hundreds of Israelis who have died in suicide bombings and the role of the Palestinian Authority in fomenting the conflict. And equating Israel with the Third Reich is the basest form of Holocaust revisionism, sending the message that the only “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nothing less than the complete destruction of the Jewish state. Antiglobalization activist and author Naomi Klein has spoken out against such displays, but she is in the minority. The very same antiglobalizat
ion movement that prides itself on staging counter-protests against neo-Nazis who crash their rallies links arms with protesters who wave the swastika in the name of Palestinian rights.

  Like the antiglobalist left, far-right activists have also embraced their own form of anticolonialism. For them, globalization is synonymous with “mongrelization,” an attempt to mix races and cultures and destroy unique heritages. When the greens preach the virtues of “localization,” a hearty “amen” echoes among the browns, who seek to insulate their countries against the twin evils of human migration and foreign capital. The far right sees nationalist movements and indigenous rights groups as allies in the assault against the multiculturalism of the new world order. And it sees the Palestinians, in particular, as a resistance movement against the modern-day Elders of Zion. American neo-Nazi David Duke summed up this worldview in an essay on his Web site: “These Jewish supremacists have a master plan that should be obvious for anyone to see. They consistently attempt to undermine the culture, racial identity and solidarity, economy, political independence of every nation. . . . [They] really think they have some divine right to rule over not only Palestine but over the rest of the world as well.”

  IS ANOTHER WORLD POSSIBLE?

  Commenting on the resurgence of anti-Semitic imagery in the Egyptian press, BBC correspondent Kate Clark noted that “if and when real peace comes, the Egyptian media are likely to forget their anti-Semitic line.”

  But, even if and when real peace comes, the conditions conducive to anti-Semitism aren’t going away. The very existence of Israel offends those who view it as a colonialist aberration. Arab governments remain averse to serious economic and political reforms that would open their societies and lift their citizens out of poverty. War, terrorism, and recession may periodically slow the pace of globalization, but the movement of people and money around the world continues unabated. The anxieties that accompany global integration—the fear that nations are surrendering their cultural, political, and economic sovereignty to shadowy outside forces—will not simply disappear.

  It is paradoxical that Jews should find themselves swept up in the backlash against globalization, since Jews were the first truly globalized people. The survival of Jewish civilization— despite two thousand years without a state and the scattering of its diaspora to nearly every nation on earth—undermines the claim that globalization creates a homogenized world that destroys local cultures. Jews accommodated, and at times embraced, the foreign cultures they lived in without sacrificing their identity. The golden age of Jewish learning was not in ancient Israel but in medieval Spain, where Jewish religious study, literature, and poetry flourished under the influence of Muslim scholars.

  Given its long experience adapting to new contingencies, the Jewish community is confronting global anti-Semitism with global solutions. For the first time in its history, the state of Israel convened an international conference of Jewish leaders from around the world with the explicit objective of coordinating a strategy to confront the resurgence of anti-Semitism. Jewish NGOs, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) and the Anti-Defamation League, tirelessly publicize incidents of anti-Semitism and lobby governments worldwide. Responding to evidence that the problem had reached crisis proportions, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe last June convened an unprecedented conference on antiSemitism attended by representatives of fifty-five governments. Protests from the Israeli government and Jewish organizations compelled the United Arab Emirates to shut down a think tank, the Zayed International Centre for Coordination and Follow-Up, which had hosted a Saudi professor who alleged Jews used human blood to prepare “holiday pastries” and had issued a press release declaring “The Zionists are the ones who killed the Jews of Europe.”

  Jewish organizations are also becoming more of a presence in the antiglobalization movement. Last year, there were fears that the Johannesburg-hosted World Summit on Sustainable Development would turn into a replay of the ill-fated 2001 U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, where anti-Semitic rhetoric culminated in a draft resolution adopted by the NGO forum singling out Israel as guilty of “genocide.” The SWC urged 180 ecological organizations planning to attend Johannesburg to ensure the conference stayed on message. The responses were largely positive, reflecting the frustration of many Third World NGOs who felt that the controversy at Durban had overshadowed vital issues on their agendas.

  And then there are the Jews within the antiglobalization movement itself. Many are drawn to the movement for the same reason that Jews have always been disproportionately represented in campaigns for social justice: the principle of tikkun olam (repairing the world). It imparts a commitment to care not only for the Jewish community but for all of society. The antiglobalization activists who are Jewish carry a unique burden in that they are made to feel like strangers even though they are passionately devoted to safeguarding the environment, advocating human rights, and promoting economic equality. But rather than abandoning the movement, they seek to wrest the agenda from the extremists who would exclude them. A measure of their success could be seen in the final day of the 2003 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. While street protesters waved their swastikas, a small group of Jewish and Palestinian peace activists organized a series of workshops, funded by local Jewish and Palestinian communities in Brazil. The result was a joint statement, read to 20,000 cheering activists, calling for “peace, justice, and sovereignty for our peoples,” and a Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel.

  Some Jewish groups sympathetic to many of the antiglobalization movement’s goals have mistakenly chosen to remain on the outside. Jewish voices need to be raised when the shouting of the militants threatens to drown out other issues. And tikkun olam imparts a mandate to counter demagogues in the developing world who scapegoat Jews and Israel as an excuse to perpetuate systems that keep their nations mired in poverty. In that spirit, Rabbi Joseph Klein told his congregation at a synagogue in Michigan last June, “We will have to develop a strategy that allows us to participate in the effort to bring social equity and economic justice to all people, while at the same time distancing ourselves from these newest purveyors of the ‘Protocols.’ ” He concluded his sermon by quoting from Pirkei Avot, the Jewish book of ethics: “It is not for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to withdraw from it.”

  BARRY ORINGER

  Terrorism Chic

  A CURRENT LAMENT: You can’t even blow up Jews these days without being labeled an anti-Semite.

  That isn’t funny, is it? But maybe a touch of the noir is in order, given the twisted state of discourse on the Arab-Israeli tragedy.

  “Of course, the suicide bombings are terrible,” one hears, “but the Palestinians are in despair over the occupation.” Except . . . except so much. Except it is the peace camp in Israel, not the occupation, that has been destroyed by the insane Intifada. Except that the suicide bombings are not intended to end the occupation. They are intended to end Israel.

  Some of my fellow liberals don’t want to know that. In a state of denial that would alarm their therapists, they tune out the words of the terrorists themselves: no peace until the last Jew is driven out, not just from the West Bank, but from all of the land. Writing in The Guardian, Naomi Klein apparently hasn’t processed this message. “The primary, and familiar, fear that [Israeli Prime Minister] Sharon draws on . . . is the fear that Israel’s neighbors want to drive the Jews into the sea.” As if that fear has no rational foundation.

  For others on the left, in the romantic thrall of terrorist chic, the long and complex history of the Jews and the Arabs is displaced by theater—a fictionally constructed drama in which the Jews are the assigned villains, the Palestinians the assigned heroes. No need to learn history, ancient or recent, or to look closely at current events. Sufficient to cheer on the good guys, the Palestinians, whose every crime is explained and forgiven, and hiss at the bad ones, the Jews, whose every claim is negated and despised.
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br />   Amid all this, the anti-Semitic beast stirs, an unpleasant surprise to Klein. She is shocked—shocked!—to find Jew-haters among her colleagues of the left. The silence of her comrades in the face of synagogue and cemetery attacks, the revival of mad Jewish-conspiracy theories—aren’t we all in the same struggle? Whence this unseemly visitation of the old hatred?

  She thinks she knows: contemplating the burned façade of her own synagogue, she disapproves of the sign the Jews have erected there: “Support Israel: now more than ever.” She thinks the sign should read, “Thanks for nothing, Sharon.”

  I think Klein’s fellow congregants had it right.

  Klein is concerned that Jews be approved of. Sharon is concerned that Jews live. The message of the Israeli counteroffensive: You won’t terrorize us out of our state, you won’t kill Jews without paying a price. I’m with Sharon on that one.

  I was in Israel some decades ago, when all the Arab states were declaring the Three No’s: No Peace, No Compromise, No Recognition of Israel. The first Jewish settlers, taking advantage of their enemies’ rejectionism, established themselves— I believed unwisely—at Hebron. The Palestinians have suffered, partly because of their own awful leaders, partly because of my own people’s failings. Yasser Arafat drove the Israeli peacemakers out of office, first Peres, then Barak. He wanted a violent uprising. He got it—and he got Sharon.

  As to anti-Semitism, whether fueled by anti-Israel hatred, covered up by it, or standing on its own, here’s my take: AntiSemitism isn’t the Jews’ problem. Anti-Semitism is the anti-Semite’s problem. If you don’t like Jews, fine with me. It’s a free country—like and dislike whom you please. Stay away from me, though, because I’m a Jew. If you become a menace to me or my fellows, I’ll defend myself against you, by whatever means necessary. Otherwise, feel free to enjoy your ignorance and your stupidity in peace.