You may not have heard about the newest, most popular conspiracy theory in the U.S., or you may have ignored it as a fringe phenomenon. The “Birther” Conspiracy, which claims Obama was not born in the U.S. and is therefore not a legitimate President, has been gaining support from major TV news stations (not just FOX), right-wing radio, and from Republican Party politicians. It fits together with an attempt to paint Obama as a racist. Therefore, I offer these links on the “Birthers”, to look into the connection between conspiracy theory and racism.
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The responses to our article [United By Hate The uses of anti-Semitism in Chávez’s Venezuela] raise an important question: is it possible to criticize the most egregious failings of a so-called socialist regime without turning into patsies of corporate and imperial interests? In our view the current international environment presents distinct opportunities—and even the obligation—to provide a rigorous criticism of Chavismo from the left. The Chávez government has systematically targeted its internal opposition as abject and anti-national, and therefore deprived of any possible legitimacy. The political uses of anti-Semitism are part and parcel of that strategy.
Read more at Boston Review.
From Normblog, August 30, 2007
The claim has been made that Gaza is rather like the Warsaw ghetto. Now this claim is either a legitimate comparison, or it’s a peculiarly unpleasant smear, insinuating that Israel is akin to Nazi Germany. So let’s see if it’s a legitimate comparison. The two main features of the Warsaw ghetto were (1) that it was an unspeakable atrocity, leading to the deaths of nearly half a million Jews and others, and (2) that it was part of a genocidal plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Take the first point, and consider the comparison: on the one hand, the number of Palestinian refugees in the late 1940s was approximately 750,000, but it now stands between 4 and 6 million. It would be quite hard to regard this as even an attempted genocide – few genocides end up with an increase in the victim population of the order of several hundred per cent. By contrast, the size of the Jewish population in the Warsaw ghetto after the three years in which it existed was zero. The current life expectancy of a Palestinian woman is 75 years, according to the UN. What was the life expectancy of a Jewish woman in the Warsaw ghetto? Whatever age she was, she had at the very most three more years to live. Not a striking similarity, then.
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From Three Way Fight…
This July, David Irving, a British neo-fascist and fraudulent historian, goes on the road in the United States, planning to hold approximately one and a half dozen speaking engagements over the course of a month. As militant anti-racists and anti-fascists, we are making a public call for resistance at each stop along the way of this tour.
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By Werner Bonefeld
I
The Nazi ideologue Rosenberg (1938) formulated the modern essence of antisemitism succinctly when he portrayed it as an attack on Communism, Bolshevism, and Jewish capitalism, a capitalism not of productive labour and industry, but of parasites – money and finance, speculators and bankers.
There is of course a difference between the antisemitism that culminated in Auschwitz and the antisemitism of the post-1945 world. However, whether antisemitism persists because or despite of Auschwitz is, ultimately, an idle question. The notions ‘despite’ and ‘because’ give credence to Auschwitz as a factory of death that is assumed to have destroyed antisemitism. Furthermore, and connected, antisemitism is viewed as a phenomenon of the past, that merely casts its shadow on the present but has itself no real existence. In this way, overt expressions of antisemitism are deemed ugly merely as pathological aberrations of an otherwise civilized world. In this context the critique of antisemitism is either belittled as an expression of ‘European guilt’ or rejected as an expression of bad faith: a camouflage for insulating Israel from criticism (Keaney, 2007).
The paper argues that modern antisemitism is the ‘rumour about Jews’ as personification of hated forms of capitalism. I will first look at some contemporary expressions of antisemitism, and theses IV and V explore Adono’s and Horkeimer’s (1989) and Postone’s (1986) understanding of Nazi antisemitism.
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According to this report from Spiegel Online, a little mini-controversy has erupted between Renate Künast, chairwoman of the parliamentary fraction of the German Greens and former minister of Consumer Protection, Food, and Agriculture under the Red-Green government, and the Stop the Bomb campaign, which advocates the termination of all German and Austrian business relationships with Iran as a means of pressuring the Iranian government to abandon its nuclear program and which is supported by such luminaries as Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004.
According to campaign activist “Thomas H.”, who was attempting to collect signatures in front of an entrance to the Bundestag, Künast, who also heads the party’s electoral list going into the 2009 federal elections, refused to give her signature, saying “Your organization isn’t Kosher” and then, while stepping into her limousine, “you are in fact an organization of the Mossad!”
Künast vigorously denies the allegation, which was reported by the Jerusalem Post.
According to the Spiegel Online article, the question of whether or not to support the campaign is hotly contested within the party itself. According to Green Party parliamentarian Omid Nouripour, who opposes the campaign, “the alliance does not exclude the option of a military first strike. That has nothing to do with Green politics, and for that reason we can’t lend our signatures.”
So let me get this straight: a political party which was directly responsible for leading the first German war since WWII has suddenly rediscovered its pacifism?
Postscript: The SPON article also contains this delightful blast from the past from Green “left” fig leaf Hans-Christian Ströbele: “The Iraqi missle attacks [on Israel, during the 1990 Persian Gulf War -- translator's note] are the logical, almost compelling consequence of Israel’s policies.”
Anti-Jewish hostilities in Venezuela have been widely reported, but the article “United By Hate: The uses of anti-Semitism in Chávez’s Venezuela” shows the function of antisemitism in the legitimation struggle of Chavez and his regime, painting real and imagined opposition as Jewish and anti-national. The article also analyzes the language of machismo and homophobia in relation to nationalism, antisemitism and power. Absolutely worth a read!
