[lbo-talk] Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (was Radicalism of Morons)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Fri Aug 25 01:03:04 PDT 2006


On 8/24/06, Michael Givel <mgivel at earthlink.net> wrote:
> Yep, time to move on folks as anti-Semitism is now officially
> just propaganda or basically gone--particularly on the left and
> on the far right

Anti-Semitism is not totally gone: traditional anti-Semitism, rooted in a combination of racial supremacy and racial ressentiment, exists on the non-electoral far Right; and a spillover anti-Semitism, i.e., hatred of the colonialism of Israel spilling over into hatred of all whom the Jewish state claims to represent, among some Arabs and Muslims (I emphasize that it is a sentiment held by only a tiny minority among them).

But it cannot be denied that leftists have successfully made anti-Semitism anathema, a big no-no in public discourse, so much so that the Right -- even the electoral far Right -- has remade themselves into seeming philo-Semites (though pro-Zionist anti-Semitism is the kernel of Christian Zionism in the USA, Christian Zionists court Jewish Zionist allies, and even a number of liberal Zionist Jews have responded favorably to their overtures to make a tactical alliance to support Tel Aviv); whereas Islamophobia has grown dramatically in recent decades, due to an increase in Arab and Muslim immigrants (especially in Europe), the West's need to support Tel Aviv no matter what (which demands fundamental contempt for the rights and lives of Arabs and Muslims), the rise of international jihadists of an apocalyptic tendency and their terrorism (a blowback from the American jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and Washington's continuing support for its corrupt Arab allies in the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere), and the West's "war on terror" (which in reality is a war for terror, as it commits its own state terror while helping international jihadists recruit more angry Arabs and Muslims).

Arabs and Muslims today in the USA and the EU are not unlike the Japanese in the USA after Pearl Harbor. It's not fair to suspect all Arabs and Muslims of being terrorists just because a few of them committed terrorism, just as it was not fair to suspect the Japanese in the USA of espionage, sabotage, etc. just because the Japanese military made war on the United States, but many do now, just as many did then.

The Japanese and Jews were discriminated against, marginalized, and oppressed in the past, but our social position has amazingly improved since the end of WW2, so much so that we are on the average richer than generic whites and overrepresented among the cultural elite, so we are especially in a good position to defend Arabs and Muslims from what the state and bigoted citizens do to them: we can put our social identity to good use, speaking as ones who remember what happened to our peoples; and many of us have economic, cultural, and political resources that Arabs and Muslims, many of them new immigrants, lack, which we could use to help them survive this difficult time. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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