Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  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 id
eal 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.

  Chapter Ten

  Confronting Conspiracism

  The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstanding, or slight discrepancy to defeat 20 pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible than 10 normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumors, even questions, as the equivalent of proof; leaps from the most minuscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusions; and insists, as the late lawyer Louis Nizer once observed, that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained.