Less Blatant Thought Control

Zionists do not always use the sorts of intimidation and coercion that characterizes the cases of Rashid Khalidi, Juan Cole, Norman Finkelstein, Joseph Massad, Hamid Dabashi, Georges Saliba, Nadia Abu el Haj, Debbi Almontaser, et al. ad infinitum. 

 

Influencing Academic Discourse outside Jewish and Middle East Studies
Joachim Martillo - thorsprovoni@aol.com
December 13, 2006 (Repost to EAAZI blog because of current relevance)

I have attended many Israel advocacy sessions at Boston-area colleges, synagogues, Jewish community centers, a few churches and the Combined Jewish Philanthropies building on High St.  I have also joined the audiences at media update sessions that the Jewish Community Relations Council, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, Jewish student groups and other Jewish organizations hold throughout the area.  Like most Americans I am constantly bombarded by almost subliminal pro-Israel, Jewish nostalgic, and anti-Arab anti-Muslim propaganda or indoctrination in the movies or on TV.
 
I have a fairly good understanding how the organized Jewish community keeps individual American Jews on one page with Israel solidarity.  I also see how media gate-keeping works, and the influence of Hollywood over pop culture provides a straightforward explanation of longstanding pro-Israel anti-Arab anti-Muslim sentiments among the American population.
 
But how does this bias make its strength felt in academic disciplines subjected to rigorous scholarship where there are not so many biased Jewish scholars?  How does it get to countries less subject to Hollywood influence or where there are fewer Jews and whose media is not owned by large Jewish-dominated media companies.
 
The conference described at the end of this email suggests a mechanism.  Here is the short description.

A major international interdisciplinary conference on the histories and cultures of antisemitism in England, from the Middle Ages to the presentday. To be held at Birkbeck College, University of London, Bloomsbury, London: 9-11 July 2007.

At Harvard, I have heard talks sponsored by Jewish groups that implicitly or even explicitly have called for genocide against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, but when the issue of criticizing Israel or the behavior of such Jewish groups is raised, ethnic Ashkenazim at Harvard fling accusations of anti-Semitism in order to silence discussion.  I am extremely disgusted.  Such behavior is a synchronic attempt to control discourse.  Now we can watch an attempt to create a diachronic English narrative of anti-Semitism to manipulate whole academic disciplines, which relate to the history and culture of England but which normally would be rather distant from the conflict over Palestine.
 
The conference covers such an extremely broad period that one has to worry about some very illegitimate essentialist assumptions simply in the choice of topic.  If we focus on Shakespeare, whose play Shylock or The Merchant of Venice has been subjected to extensive analysis for anti-Semitism, we can get a sense of the reasonableness of the conference topic.

 

While there are various forms of Judeophobia throughout history, there simply is not a common intellectual current among them, and when I and most experts in the field use the term anti-Semitism, we mean the modern biological determinist, social Darwinist form of Judeophobia, which develops in the specific region of historic Poland in the context of modernization and economic competition and which spreads to Central Europe.

 

Wilhelm Marr, who was himself half-Jewish (German Jewish not ethnic Ashkenazi), created the term Antisemitismus in the 1870s to describe this form of obsession. Despite his anti-Jewish writings, it is not even clear whether he is anti-Semitic according to his own definition, for he only married Jewish women.  As sort of a counterpoint the eminent Zionist leader Nordau carried on a long-term affair with the infamous anti-Semite, Olga von Novikoff.  Nordau's writings on racial degeneracy, racial revival and eugenics were at least as influential among German Nazis as they were among Zionists. (If one lays Nordau's Entartung [Degeneracy] down beside Mein Kampf or Hitler's Table Talk, the similarity of ideas and phraseology is often quite striking.)
 
In any case, as complex as this phenomenon of anti-Semitism was, it certainly does not exist to any measurable extent today, and when people express hatred of Zionist colonizers and racist ethnic Ashkenazim that support the crimes of Zionist colonizers, such hate is not anti-Semitism despite the claims of a bigot like former Harvard President Lawrence Summers.  All decent Americans should hate Zionist colonizers and their Ashkenazi American supporters because the atrocities of Zionism are heinous, and they are carried out in the name of Israeli American alliance with the support of US tax dollars.

 

The accusation of anti-Semitism certainly does not apply the Merchant of Venice, which is at least as much a lambasting as it is a presentation of stereotypes.  It is an extremely complex work, and the attempt to control the discourse about the Merchant of Venice by certain groups of ethnic Ashkenazim reminds me somewhat of the reaction that the very same people tried to orchestrate against The Heartbreak Kid (original version directed by Elaine May), which was a movie written by Neil Simon, who is an ethnic Ashkenazi American stage, screen and TV writer sometimes described as the Shakespeare of modern America. The movie told the story of a Jewish newly wed, who while on his honeymoon falls in love with the beautiful daughter of a Midwestern non-Jewish banker. The director, producer, the actors and the production crew of The Heartbreak Kid were almost entirely ethnic Ashkenazi Americans, who wanted to explore certain stereotypes in Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi American society.  It was called the most anti-Semitic movie ever made, and it certainly was not.
 
Neil Simon's sin lies in rejecting the traditional ethnic Ashkenazi anti-Christian anti-Gentile and anti-Catholic polemic while the assault on Shakespeare is a transparent attempt to incorporate Shakespeare into the Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazi pogrom and persecution version of Jewish history. The accusations of anti-Semitism against Shakespeare are a sort of preventive strike to indict the greatest of all writers for anti-Semitism so that all non-Jews can be held suspect  and so that all criticism of Israel and its ethnic Ashkenazi supporters can be categorized as anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.  I am as tired of this nonsense as I am of Lawrence Summers, Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse and Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz. The academic discourse about anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice is infra dig. and sub-scholarly.
 
Academic specialists are often so focused on their field that a program like this Birkbeck College conference, which provides a multidisciplinary approach to numerous fields that no single scholar can encompass within his research, can just indoctrinate a very large number scholars outside of Jewish and Middle East studies what to think about anti-Semitism, relations between Jews and non-Jews, and the debt that non-Jews owe Jews for the Holocaust.  It will generate numerous questionable scholarly papers that will then be cited in numerously scholarly works and become part of the general Western academic discourse heavily influenced or controlled by ethnic Ashkenazi racism or Zionist fanaticism.
 
If the reader doubts my take on this conference, just consider the lack of attention that Shakespeare scholars have paid to racial and religious stereotyping in Othello or The Moor of Venice in comparison with Shylock.  Throughout English history relations and interactions with Moors (the Elizabethan term for Arab) and Muslims have been far more consequential and generally far more violent or prejudiced than those with Jews of any ethnicity.  Othello shows nothing comparable to Shylock in terms of the lambasting of stereotypes that have pervaded English culture since Shakespeare's time to the present day.  Wouldn't it make a great deal more sense for Birbeck College to host a conference on Anti-Arabism and Anti-Islamism in English Culture -- especially when the Blair government has been so willing to fall into lockstep with the fanatic anti-Arab anti-Muslim (very often Jewish/ethnic Ashkenazi) racists that dominate the US government?

Here is the original announcement.

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0982  Sunday, 5 November 2006

 

From:         Carol Barton <cbartonphd@earthlink.net>
Date:         Saturday, 4 Nov 2006 17:10:47 -0500
Subject:     Call for Papers: Antisemitism and English Culture

 

This is a cross-posting from H-Albion, in case anyone is interested in
participating in behalf of Will and Kit: if so, please answer Dr. Bale
(a.bale@bbk.ac.uk), not me.

 

Best to all,
Carol Barton

 

Call for Papers: Antisemitism and English Culture
Location: United Kingdom
Conference Date: 2007-07-09
Date Submitted: 2006-10-27
Announcement ID: 153477

 

Website: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/conf/antisemitism/

 

A major international interdisciplinary conference on the histories and
cultures of antisemitism in England, from the Middle Ages to the present
day. To be held at Birkbeck College, University of London, Bloomsbury,
London: 9-11 July 2007.

 

Plenary speakers:
Anthony Julius (Birkbeck College/London Consortium, University of London)
Miri Rubin (Queen Mary, University of London)
Ira Katznelson (Columbia University)

 

Key questions to be addressed include:

 

Can we talk of a distinctly English kind of antisemitism?

 

Is antisemitism inherent in Englishness?

 

What is, or has been, the relationship between 'high' or intellectual
English culture and antisemitism?

 

How far can specific English contexts be seen to have engendered
antisemitism?

 

Is there a meaningful history of English philosemitism, and what is its
relationship to antisemitism?

 

In what ways is England's antisemitic past reflected in the present?

 

What is the relationship between English antisemitism and communism,
socialism, fascism, Zionism, Islamism, secularism, liberalism, and other
ideologies?

 

How is antisemitism mediated in English art, literature and other
cultural forms?

 

What are the contours of continuity and transformation in English
antisemitism?

 

To what extent have the terms 'antisemitism' and 'Englishness' become
redundant? How much use do they retain?

 

Papers from all disciplines, or interdisciplinary submissions, are
welcomed; panel proposals of 3 speakers are also welcomed. Papers will
be of 20 minutes duration. Paper proposals of no more than 150 words
should be sent as soon as possible and by 15 December 2006 to Dr Anthony
Bale (a.bale@bbk.ac.uk), School of English & Humanities, Birkbeck
College, University of London, Malet Street, LONDON, WC1E 7HX, England.

 

Website: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/conf/antisemitism/

 

The Conference is organised in association with the Jewish Museum,
Camden Town, London.

 

Dr Anthony Bale
School of English
Birkbeck College
Malet Street
Bloomsbury
LONDON WC1E 7HX
United Kingdom
Email: a.bale @ bbk.ac.uk

Sphere: Related Content