In 1984 Steve Cohen authored a book about antisemitism on the left titled, “That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Antisemitic.” In this newer text of his, “Writing as a Jewish traitor – An imagined disputation with my comrades on anti Semitism,” written shortly before he passed away, Cohen critiques what he calls “foolish anti-Zionism” from a position of “anti-Zionist Zionism.” Below are some selections from this provocative text that I found particularly of interest. You can read his essay in it’s entirety here.
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This post is a follow-up to “Leftists Learning History from Neo-Nazi Propaganda,” in which I reported on a young Israeli blogger who cited a neo-Nazi website for her source on the history of zionism. Afterwards, I noticed a comment to her post thanking her for the resource.
Despite having alerted her to the fact that the Institute for Historical Review is a neo-Nazi group, she decided to leave the original link up, but said to check out the “kosher” link at the Jews Against Zionism site which has a “legitimate” article on the “Zionist-Nazi connection”. I haven’t had a chance to go through that text yet, but I did notice that the first resource in it’s bibliography is the same neo-Nazi text that Tali originally cited. In addition to offering this new resource, she posted a new blog entry defending citing the text and defending the Nazi-Zionist accusation. I thought it was worthy of a reply.
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Over at ZNet, an Israeli blogger tells us that we should read up on the “Zionist dealings with [Hitler]” from the Institute for Historical Review.
Great that leftists are learning their history from neo-Nazis.
I replied to Shapiro on her blog with the following comment:
Dear Tali,
I am not sure if you know this but your recommended resource is from a prominent white supremacist, whose organization, The Institute for Historical Review, is a holocaust denial group, based in the far-Right scene. This is well documented by the Public Eye in many articles, of which I recommend this one: Encountering Holocaust Denial. (Chip Berlet, another Znet writer, has written a lot about them, and his writings are worth checking out.)
The author of your recommended text, Mark Weber, was formerly with the neo-Nazi organization, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/Aufbau- und Auslandsorganisation (Redok, 2009), as well as the National Alliance, (Beirich and Potok, 2003) which was at one time the largest neo-Nazi group in the U.S.
The IHR is an attempt to dress up Holocaust denial as critical scholarship. Weber recently concluded that “revisionism” was ineffective, and therefore he is returning to other methods in “fighting against ‘Jewish-Zionist power’,” therefore revealing his historical “research” to be a mere hoax and weapon to legitimize his antisemitic aims.
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Wise focuses on the way the current white christian conservative upsurge in the U.S. is related to anti-Black racism. Although I think Wise reduces the issue too much to Obama’s skin color, he is right on about it being a white reaction to the “dispossession of white hegemony, white entitlement, white expectation, and white power.” I would argue that the reactionary movement is much broader than a simple response to the color of Obama’s skin. It is part of a long nativist tradition, that sees itself as the good, harmonious, natural community (the “country”) being undermined by illegitimate “societies”, “East-coast elites,” “foreign” ideas, “Lobbies”, feminists, and the “wrong kind” of immigrants. This supposed “foreignness” is not reducible to Obama’s skin color. (I would even argue that it is not necessarily Obama’s skin color that makes him the target of the angry white mob, but rather his insistence to speak about race and racism in a “post-racial America” that was supposed to bring a soothing silence to the uncomfortable conversations about race, slavery, inequality, etc.) But if you check out editorials such as “Thank God America Isn’t Like Europe — Yet,” you’ll see that this anti-”socialism” pits itself also against an imaginary “Europe,” with its supposedly empty churches, terrible work ethic, meaningless family structure, and it’s lack of community. In this ridiculous text, guess who the main bogeyman is? Sweden, Scandinavia and Western Europe!
Aside from the limitations of Wise’s text, it is worth a read! Here are some selections:
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Originally published in German in ak – analyse & kritik – zeitung für linke Debatte und Praxis / Nr. 533 / 21.11.2008
The successful prevention of the “Anti-Islamification” Congress in Cologne last September was the result of one of the largest anti-fascist and anti-racist mobilizations of the last few years. The abortive congress can be regarded as an attempt by the European right to consolidate its forces by means of the theme of the “Islamification of Europe” and the promotion of a pan-European right-wing party. The counter-mobilization also raised questions concerning anti-racist positions and strategies against rising anti-Muslim racism in Europe, and brought these questions to the attention of a broader public.
Broad coalitions – such as that in Cologne – are important and necessary components of a struggle for hegemony. It is just as important to bring an anti-racist critique into these struggles, a critique that does not appeal to tolerance, cultural difference, or freedom of religion. These “values” do not break with the logic of culturalization, but rather strengthen it from the “left”. Strategies must be developed concerning how to push back against (local and everyday) mobilizations against immigrants as “Muslims” without falling into the trap of culturalization. Thus, the following two questions are of foremost importance for us:
The National Competitive State and Security Policies
1) Why is “Islam” such an attractive bogeyman for so many people? The right’s capacity for mobilization has to be considered within the context of capitalism’s upheavals and neoliberal and authoritarian strategies of the ruling block. 2) To what extent can we actually speak of an anti-Muslim racism (AMR for short) without therefore falling into the trap of overlooking right-wing elements within Islamic movements? Reactionary political-religious movements within Islam must be criticized along with the social conditions in which they emerge, taking into account the racism of the majority society and the economic, cultural, and political contradictions of globalized capitalism.
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From: Wolfgang Pohrt, Linksradikalismus und nationaler Befreiungskampf (1982) , collected in the book Kreisverkehr, Wendepunkt. Über die Wechseljahre der Nation und die Linke im Widerstreit der Gefühle. The first paragraph has been omitted from this translation, as it contains an ephemeral polemic of little interest to a contemporary English-speaking audience
The usual accusation made against Israel or Zionism is that this state was founded where other people were already living. But the founding acts of all hitherto existing polities were never acts of justice, but rather always acts of violence. Even the storybook peace of idyllic tribes and peoples cultivating the land of the fathers in concord and harmony with their neighbors is usually a peace resting upon an original act of land seizure and displacement. The right of nations, peoples and tribes to distinguish between themselves and foreigners and to regard these foreigners as intruders and chase them away when they wish to take up residence – a right as inseparable from the concept of the nation as it is logically imperative – this right is merely the original violent act of land seizure and expulsion made legal and continuous.
No people ever had its place on earth adjudicated by an extraterrestrial authority according to the stipulations of legal tenure. Rather, at some point in history every people took its place by force; not just for practical reasons – there is no righteous extraterrestrial authority granting such claims – but also because in an emphatic sense there can be no exclusive right of Germans, the French, or Israelis to possess any patch of land and because it is an injustice when people can‘t live on some patch of land merely because they are Turks, Vietnamese, Jews, or Palestinians. The right of national autonomy and state sovereignty is merely another name for the injustice of harassing, deporting, and expelling people on the grounds that they possess the wrong passport or birth certificate. And this injustice is not a corruption of the idea of the nation-state but rather its essence – admittedly rendered milder on occasion by the tolerance of reasonable people.
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From Matthias Küntzel´s Jew-Hatred and Jihad: The Nazi roots of the 9/11 attack.
Despite common misconceptions, Islamism was born not during the 1960s but during the 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasserism but by the rise of Nazism, and prior to 1951 all its campaigns were directed not against colonialism but against the Jews. It was the Organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, that established Islamism as a mass movement. The significance of the Brotherhood to Islamism is comparable to that of the Bolshevik party to communism: It was and remains to this day the ideological reference point and organizational core for all later Islamist groups, including al Qaeda and Hamas.
It is true that British colonial policy produced Islamism, insofar as Islamism viewed itself as a resistance movement against “cultural modernity.” The Islamists’ solution was the call for a new order based on sharia. But the Brotherhood’s jihad was not directed primarily against the British. Rather, it focused almost exclusively on Zionism and the Jews. Membership in the Brotherhood shot up from 800 to 200,000 between 1936 and 1938, according to the research of Abd Al-Fattah Muhammad El-Awaisi for his book The Muslim Brothers and the Palestine Question 1928-1947. In those two years the Brotherhood conducted only one major campaign in Egypt, and it was against Zionism and the Jews.
Read the whole article
From Louis Proyect
Apparently the new editorial position [of Monthly Review] has driven one board member to resign, as reported by Doug Henwood on his own mailing list:
I’ve just been informed (by someone who wants to remain anonymous) that Barbara Epstein resigned from the board of MR because of the nonsense that Yoshie has been posting to MRZine about Iran. When she made her complaints known to the board, they made it clear that they supported Yoshie’s work, so Epstein felt that she had no choice but to quit. She’s not interested in campaigning against what she still regards as a venerable institution, but she feels that Yoshie’s position on Iran has so discredited the organization that she couldn’t abide a formal association anymore.
Though I’m just the messenger on this, I completely agree with Epstein. Defending a regime that has jailed and killed thousands of socialists and Marxists is a disgraceful thing for a socialist/Marxist publication to do.
continue reading at Louis Proyekt…
