Laurie Penny was charged with antisemitism by some people in the German Left for supporting the boycott against Israel. She replied with “A letter to the German left”, https://www.facebook.com/lauriepenny/posts/541720199343009
Laurie Penny is angry. Hardly anyone likes to be called an antisemite – but what do you do when you are called out? It might sound naive, but maybe it's worth listening to what people have to say and see whether it is just moralistic slander or whether they might have an argument. After all, she claims to have hers for boycotting Israel straight – it might not hurt to see if someone can make a point to convince me.
That's not what Laurie Penny does. Laurie Penny simply hits back. She does so in a few ways: in the opening sequence, she simply assumes that when you call someone “antisemitic”, you compare them to Hitler. (Never call anyone vegetarian again!) She secondly invokes her partly Jewish background. I find that to be evidence of incapacity: she asks the reader to relativise her arguments according to her identity – because they don't stand on their own. It makes a huge difference for her that she has a Jewish identity – and that the critics are German.
Next, she takes the worst of an anti-German position in order to build up her defence: she assumes that those people calling her antisemitic for boycotting Israel are pro-Zionist and are “supporting the military actions of the Israeli state no matter what”. No doubt, there are people with that position, but it was something widespread on the radical Left in Germany and Austria about 15 years ago – now such a position is marginal, quite a few of the people with that position have moved on to more liberal adventures. By building up a cardboard character she avoids confronting what are good points against boycotting Israel.
Fourthly, she brings forward the classical accusation of Germany being “haunted” by its past. Which explains nothing, but psychologises the position she is confronted with as something specific to some crude way of dealing with some crude national past. This is the second time she bases her arguments on an assumed identity, now it is the one of her opponents. (Her allowing the German Left to be pro-Israeli is very fitting in this context: she is annoyed by the charge of being antisemitic and her reaction is to grant people the moralistic right to hold the position she despises. I think people have that (and many other positions) whether Laurie Penny likes it or not and whether she finds it an ok stand to take or not.) And again: if Laurie Penny was German, she assures the reader, she'd also feel uncomfortable boycotting Israeli avocados. Third malus for identity politics.
But the reader should not be mistaken: she stresses that she admires Germans for engaging with their terrible past – and apparently has understood as little as most Germans have about how that came about: her whole point is to imply that Germans confront the terrible past because that past was so terrible. But there was a real effort to confront Auschwitz in recent decades not because suddenly most people understood that killing everyone considered to be Jewish (and millions others, whether racially defined or not) is not something anyone should be doing. That wasn't the motivation and that can easily be shown by the persisting reluctance to provide financial compensation to survivors (though no money can compensate anyone for Auschwitz). The whole idea of 'dealing with the German past' was to show the world that Germany really can be a modern country that makes just enough amends to be a fully moralistically restored part of the world community. – Laurie Penny compares that to Britain's educational system where kids are taught “to think uncritically about our imperial past”. She does not inquire why. Speaking the language of the current imperialist world order: Britain does not need to be sorry – it did not go rogue on the “wrong” countries.
In a neat transition from all her bowing in front of the good Germans dealing with their horrible past, she drops the c-bomb: it's “culturally imperialist” for the German left to make everyone else worry about antisemitism, too! She must feel so much being stepped on her righteous toes that she can't see how so culturally relativising she is: “I deeply resent the implication that simply because my books are published in Germany I should be required to behave as if my ancestors might have been implicated in anti-Semitic genocide.” She does not even once think there might be a possibility for an argument about this – she completely reduces the fact that people consider boycotting Israeli products as antisemitic something that 'good Germans' do – as if it was a national thing, not a rational thing to at least consider the arguments. This sentence is followed by referring to her family having been victim to the “anti-Semitic genocide” (and she later points out instances where she herself was the object of today's antisemitic harassment). While this is clearly horrible, this is not how you get granted any rights to be more wrong with such a history. It's as if she is not only saying: “I can't be antisemitic because my best friends are Jews”, but also, moralistically even better: “I can't possibly be antisemitic because my family fell victim to the Nazis”.
And the identity politics goes on: she refers to the Israeli government ordering Gaza to be bombed in the name of all Jews. (Mind you, every state claims that when it bombs something, just like Germany does not restrict itself when referring to act for all Germans, not just those on its territory, when it bombed Belgrade. Neither time.) Laurie Penny makes the point of boycotting Israeli products (also) as an act against that claim, as a sign against the Israeli government claiming to wage war in her name. She therefore implies to accept the charge of being part of that claimed community – otherwise she would protest that exact usurpation of a government to speak for her. But she accepts the nationalistic offer she could indeed refuse.
She is paying lip-service to the assessment that antisemitism exists also in the boycott movement: it's lip-service because at the end, according to her, it is a right-wing phenomenon – on the left, it is either just the “use [of] anti-Semitic language”, ie. not antisemitism as such, or it comes from people who are not really for Palestinians, but only against Jews, ie. who hijack the Palestinian solidarity movement.
At the end, she asks everyone to stand together against increasing racism – after all those claims of how the German Left is just a bunch of people being caught in their national past. She also wants to fight against “Israeli militarism” and for a ceasefire – as if that stood in opposition to fighting antisemitism. She finishes off with a) some more generously granting others to hold positions she dislikes, but wanting a free pass for demands – demands that clearly need to be critiqued: “I don't condemn those on the German left who hold the opposite opinion, as long as they show the rest of us the same understanding.” I like to differ: I think her positioning for the boycott has no good reasons and I think by boycotting she helps to take Israelis hostage of their government's position. Secondly, she refers again, in the spirit of the whole letter, to people's assumed identity: “But it is not the job of the German left to tell Jews around the world what political opinions they should hold – and it never will be.” I for once would like to have a discussion where the arguments aren't based on which passports I was forced to carry, where whatever bloody national collective I was thrown into is not the parameter for whether I have a good point to make against antisemitism in general and antisemitism in the boycott movement in particular.
The whole letter is a prime example of not engaging with an accusation, but to avoid a debate by deflecting. Laurie Penny does not explain how boycotting Israel is not antisemitic, for how it is ok to support one nationalist programme – this is what the vast majority of boycott calls boil down to – against another nationalist programme, the state of Israel, by simply trying to economically harm everyone as effectively as possible on one side. On top of that, the letter is a good example for the ignorance – to say the least – of antisemitism that is, next to the Palestinian nationalism, a driving factor in the boycott movement. She rather pretends critiquing antisemitism equals supporting Israel unequivocally – and then she claims that her identity makes her want to choose 'the other side'. It's definitely the other side of a politically sound argument.
Ugh. Israel was not forged
Ugh. Israel was not forged out and given security and maintenance in a hostile, different world by Jews, but by the capitalistic world powers imposing their will on a foreign nation. That actions of world capitalism had to take the form of imposition is already suspect.
Israel was not in substance Judaic. Moving on.
Anti-Semitism is also likely to exist in the left when it took the form of a movement, as it has a lot of themes in common and is critical of several aspects of the capitalist system. Anti-Semitism being present in a movement is not an inherent critique of that movement, obviously.
Obviously, much of the condemnation of Anti-Semitism is by conflation with the Holocaust, which segregates it from other forms of racism. This is a significant part of the emotional impact or significance of accusations of anti-Semitism, and unless such offence is declaimed, it would seem reasonable to deal with this. Of course, Hitler is somebody who everybody, whatever their political stand-point, found bad, apparently, so there's probably worse people to be compared to. Amusingly, the Palestine of the 2000s was in some ways akin to the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s, but obviously the people 'in favour' of it in the West would have issues with its putting up any significant resistance, as in love as they were with its status as oppressed and marginal.
That said, the 19th Century's 'anti-Semitic' socialists were generally better and more interesting than the post-WWII 'anti-anti-Semitic' socialists, so in that sense the presence of anti-Semitism needn't be identified as debilitating to a movement, at the least.
I think you'll find that most opposition to Israel and views on such conflicts were not based on anti-Semitism. It might be said that Israel was only a clearer example and rallying call for issues present in more subtle form elsewhere, but the unsophistication of the Israeli government was not in any case to be mourned. That said, though, it's also to be noted that Israel's relation to the USA and such eventually became highly parasitic - a 'special relationship' to Britain might make sense, but to Israel was mostly just service, certainly explicitly - and in that sense this held up similar themes being brought up in terms of immigration, etc., such that the widespread popularity of that would seem to imply that Israel is in any case regarded as a bit of a dead letter or irrelevant.
Israel, historically and over the course of the 2000s and onwards, offered plenty of reasons for opposition to it which were not reducible to its religious posturing. Opposition to Israel was generally accompanied with anti-Americanism, and in this sense you might just as well assume a general assault against Judeo-Christian religions, which past a certain point becomes incoherent - and, of course, Israel was an ally of the US, which was taken as a rebuke whether or not they historically killed the US' Messiah due to their religious beliefs. It also tended towards political posturing and otherwise - which presumably you wouldn't want to reduce to Judaism - and tended to represent and encourage the neo-conservative elements of Western democracy, often at a level of abstraction officially that would not be found even in the West. Obviously, though, and this was actually a limitation to any 'hatred' for Israel rather than an encouragement, the movement against Israel was generally in response to a specific action or series of actions, rather than to the state itself. That Israel continuing this same kind of thing would lead to it being identified with Israel, and prolong the movement against them in the West, would seem to make sense.
That Germans would reject statements against Israel because of more local oppressions was mere localism, and reactionary. To leave the Israeli case unmarked and let it go on without comment and statements against, at least, would be problematic for the left, and would have at some point been a retreat, so in a sense this is just base-line. To do so on the behalf of opposition to anti-Semitism is merely Israeli propaganda reproduced in an unfamiliar setting.
Wow. Countering the
Wow. Countering the allegation of antisemitism by using antisemitic discourse and then dismissing the presence of antisemitism... That's some fancy dialectics!
Oh, right, because I was
Oh, right, because I was being accused of anti-Semitism (and also someone brought up dialectics), or trying to defend myself from such a charge. I was talking about someone else, who might not be anti-Semitic, although such claims have a certain historical precedent for being tenacious. Not sure that defending condemnation - so to speak - of movements against Israel for anti-Semitism generally got too far even in the moderate left.
Perhaps it may be noticed that it's mostly the parts of the left with a seemingly high opinion of Peter Singer.
Quote: Anti-Semitism being
and
Why not? Antisemitism is a form of European racism, and I was pretty sure when I signed up for this anarchist stuff that racism was inherently not a part of it.
"Amusingly"? You find the use of spurious analogy meant to cause deliberate harm to people (and their families) who were exterminated by the Nazis "amusing"? The fucked up policies and practices of the Israeli state toward Palestinians (and other Others) are bad enough on their own without the facile invocation of Germany in the Nazi years.
Yeah, I'm just imagining it...
http://libcom.org/library/wor
http://libcom.org/library/worldwide-intifada-issue-1-summer-1992-price-50-pence
Laurie Penny is indeed
Laurie Penny is indeed confused. However, German "leftists" who relentlessly seek to associate solidarity with the Palestinians with anti-semitism are indeed best assessed in psychological terms. And then ignored.
Laurie Penny is confused
Laurie Penny is confused because she's a journalist defending her fundamentally ideological career and joined the Labour Party in 2010 or 2011 (whether she left since then, I don't know) - both of which inevitably are both products and producers of confusion. Just to point out one confusion, she declares " I have come to understand that the German left is unique in Europe for its pro-Zionist stance, for its insistence on supporting the military actions of the Israeli state no matter what." This is only true of the anti-deutsch phenomena, which is by no means the whole of the German Left. Besides, obsession with, and identification with, "the Left" is hardly a basis for opposition to this society, since the Left has, over the last 100 years or so, been part of the problem and a false solution. But then Laurie Penny considers herself part of this obnoxious Left so she invariably tries to defend her corner in it.
Leftist anti-semitism and Leftist pro-Zionism, like anti-semitism and Zionism in general, are 2 sides of the same ideological coin that supports various forms of nationalism and have a symbiotic relation to each other - both needing each other to give themselves some credence of "coherence", and both being very selective in their ideological lie-by-omission arguments. In Germany this takes excessively idiotic forms (eg the "leftist" Revolutionary Cells of the 70s choosing to select Jews to kill in their hijacking of an Air France plane; or the sick anti-deutsch dumbos retrospectively supporting the bombing of Dresden).
For an interesting, though insufficiently developed, take on some aspects of this stupidity see "On German Guilt" - http://dialectical-delinquents.com/reflections-on-german-guilt/
IrrationallyAngry
IrrationallyAngry
Wow, well thanks for at least explicitly stating that assessing people in psychiatric terms is just another way of ignoring them. Good to have the silencing spelled out instead of just implied.
"assessed in psychological
"assessed in psychological terms, and then ignored."
Story of my life, LMFAO.