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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Altogether attendance was rather pitiful and totaled 14 including the speaker and me. Attendees included
- Ruth Wisse, who seems to be aging rapidly,
- Benjamin Owen, who I thought identified himself as President of Harvard Students for Israel,
- Sarah Bayefsky-Anand, who seems to be president of HSI according to a search of the Harvard website, and
- Albert, whose last name I did not catch and who was a Boston-area Iranian Jew who wanted to make sure Small did not go off the deep end.
Owen introduced Small by summarizing his biography on the website of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism.
Small started off by acknowledging both Ruth Wisse, who was his former teacher at McGill, and Anne F. Bayefsky, who is a self-described pro-Israel human rights activist and possibly related to Sarah Bayefsky.
Next Small described a letter that was sent to him by a Jewish faculty member who accused Small of creating a perception of Jewish dual loyalty by banging the drum so strongly for action against Iran.
Small is extremely disappointed that US and Western intellectuals in general do not understand the threat of radical (not ordinary) Islam as he and other Zionists do.
Small argues radical Islam challenges fundamental Western values and assumptions whereas he and his colleagues follow the social democratic tradition of Charles Taylor and try to integrate the other into Western society according to human rights principles and in conformance with the Talmudic ethics of Emanuel Levinas.
Small rejects the assertion that modern society must accommodate all narratives and those practices and attitudes which like subordination of women and hostility toward homosexuals are an anathema to modern Western society.
According to Small, it is an abomination for Ahmadinejad to reject Israel's right to exist and to incite the extermination of Jews.
Small and Edward Kaplan coauthored a study that found a high degree of correlation of anti-Semitism (as they defined it) with opposition to Israel.
[According to Small the study used belief that Jews engage in unfair business practices as an indication of anti-Semitism. As an expert in Jewish political economy in the modern period, I object to the use of such an indicator because unfair business practices and corrupt social networking have constituted the essence of Jewish economic life in Europe at least since the 16th century.]
7-9% of Europeans that are anti-Semitic according to the Small-Kaplan criteria are also extremely anti-Israel.
In contrast 56% of anti-Israel Europeans are anti-Semitic according to the Small-Kaplan criteria.
Small then went on to explain that Iran has created a sense of urgency for Elie Wiesel in a way that he has not felt since 1945. Wiesel sees the possibility of another genocide against Jews and considers it an indignity to have to discuss genocide against the Jewish people in this day and age. He is bothered that nobody is doing anything.
Small contrasts the current situation with the efforts that he and other college students (including me) made on behalf of Soviet Jews in the 70s and 80s. He met with Anatoli Shcharanski in 19754-5. Shcharanski claimed to know Soviet Jews would become free because of the efforts of American college students.
[Note that I feel I was scammed in this movement because I later came to the conclusion that even up to the collapse of the Soviet Union the communist leadership remained disproportionately Jewish and that Soviet policy toward Jewish nationalism differed in no way from Soviet policy toward any other form of nationalism.]
After finishing with discussion of Shcharanski, Small listed the usual Zionist sins of the Iranian regime:
- It is anti-democratic.
- It consistently blames Jews for everything.
- It uses the narrative of The Protocols of the [Learned] Elders of Zion, which paved the way for pogroms and genocide.
According to Small, Ahmadinejad claimed in 2005 that Judaism was a stain of disgrace on the garment of the Islamic world and in 2008 that Israel was like a dried rotten stinking corpse hanging in a tree.
Small also asserts that Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust myth a swindle that is being used to squeeze money out of Western states.
As a consequence Gregory Gordon [Voices on Antisemitism: Gregory S. Gordon (Director, Center for Human Rights & Genocide Studies and Assistant Professor, School of Law, University of North Dakota] and Alan Dershowitz have teamed up in order to bring an indictment against Ahmadinejad for inciting genocide.
According to Small the Iranian regime is clearly out to create nuclear weapons as everyone agreed at the 2008 Pugwash Conference. The conferees only debated when Iran would finally complete development. He then complained that no one has been particularly upset even though Iran has been caught in a lie about its newest research facility.
Small went on to propose the refusal to act was connected with anti-nationalist post-modernism and with a developing Red-Green alliance such as seen at York University (where Anne Bayefsky is a professor of political science).
Small pointed out that the attacks no longer focus on Israel but also on anyone that supports Israel.
Small asserts that American Jews are becoming embarrassed by any association with Israel even as Israeli Jews are becoming aware that anti-Israelism is just the old anti-Semitism reborn.
Small analogizes the current situation with the 30s when American Jews embarrassed by the primitiveness of Shtetl Jews refused to speak up when they could have hindered or stopped Hitler's murderous plans.
Then Small opened up the talk for questions.
Owen explained that he was experiencing something like the email Small received. Members of the Harvard Darfur activist organization often treated him as if they suspected him of an ulterior Zionist agenda. Wisse told him he should quit the group.
The rest of the discussion related mostly to Palestinian terrorism and to the Hamas Charter's anti-Semitism, which is supposed to be clear in the internal reference to The Protocols of the [Learned] Elders of Zion.
I pointed out the the actual text only indicates the Charter writer's total ignorance of the actual content of The Protocols and added that I had confirmed my impression with Hamas supporters that remembered the history of the Charter's creation. Small somewhat indignantly asked me if I would research American racism by consulting someone like David Duke. I said, "Damn right, I would, and when I was researching the Holocaust in the Ukraine, I spoke with people that I suspected of being Hilfswillige [local non-German shooters for the German Nazis]. It is important to get direct testimony on their perspective if possible."
Small claimed that repeated references to Freemasons indicated the indebtedness to The Protocols. I argued that references to Freemasons in ME conspiracy theories is generally the way one describes fellow travelers. The Charter's repeated references to the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like is probably an early attempt to describe the Israel Lobby with vocabulary understood by members of Hamas.
Small asserted that Hamas leaders had an obligation to learn enough about European anti-Semitism to avoid the Freemasonry terminology associated with bigotry against the Jews.
I pointed out
- that I was not sure the Freemasonry terminology was specifically anti-Jewish,
- that Small showed a similar problem in his discussion of Iran because he confused the 12th Imam, the Mahdi and the Masih, and
- that Hamas leaders probably had bigger issues on their mind than learning intricate details of the history of European anti-Semitism.
I said, "Dealing with the theft of their country by E. European invaders."
Small responded, "Aha, Anti-Semitism."
I replied, "It's their experience and perspective. What do you expect? Gratitude toward Jews."
Albert the Iranian Jew concluded the open forum by calling the Iranian threat a paranoid fantasy because he could safely state as a frequent visitor that Iran was too militarily weak, too backward industrially and too much of an economic mess to represent a danger either to Israel or to the USA.
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