A guest post by P. Naberrie
There was an antisemitic arson attack in Midwood, Brooklyn a few days ago, with three cars torched to the ground and swastika/SS and KKK graffiti on surrounding benches, right in the middle of an Orthodox neighbourhood. A “Daily News” article the following day quoted a local resident tying the attacks to OWS, because of the antisemitic signs that could be observed there.
The OWS General Assembly agreed upon following statement against antisemitism on the 12th
http://blog.occupyjudaism.org/post/12738875603/ows-official-statement-against-anti-semitism
and called for people to go down to a community rally today.
When I came down there it was mostly around 70 Orthodox/visibly religious Jews from the neighbourhood, lots of media, one Israeli flag, and some speeches by local politicians and NY state senator Eric Adams (focusing on a general “hate is bad” line), some attempts at Black-Jewish joint efforts against AS and racism, and then ending in a law-and-order tone stressing the need to track down the perpetrators and lock them up. One person held a sign saying “Orthodox Jews welcome OWS”, and got verbally attacked by somebody else, who said he didn’t want to have anything to do with antisemitic OWS.
After an hour or so around 30 people from OWS came down and joined the little march, handing out the flyer above and talking to people. There was a bit of interaction here and there, until 3 folks from Neturei Karta showed up with a sign saying “Judaism is not Zionism” and a swastika=Star of David drawing. They shouted fairly loudly, until one of them got beaten up and thrown to the floor. The attacker – apparently some Jewish man – got stopped or even arrested by the police, the Neturei Karta people got walked away.
So – one could argue that OWS has only come up with this kind of rally support because they have been under attack from the media/the right and want to get their public image straight. Most likely, without these attacks OWS would not have called for this kind of action (which wouldn’t be a sign of worry in itself – OWS endorses mostly stuff having to do with economic inequality, and sometimes police brutality, but not necessarily issues beyond that). Nevertheless, it seems to me from talking to people who came down there that there was a genuine concern about the arson attacks, and about making clear that antisemitism is not accepted. Also, no weird mixing-in of Israel-Palestine issues at all.
Apparently, the General Assembly made a pretty clear decision about this statement as well. To me, this just strengthens my perspective that antisemitism is not really an issue among the large part of the OWS crowd – at least not in any kind of open form, as the right would want to suggest. But I’d be curious to hear if other people have a different experience or analysis.
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November 14th, 2011 | admin
From Occupy Judaism:
The following statement was approved by the NYC General Assembly November 12, 2011.
Friday’s anti-Semitic, racist acts that occurred on Ocean Parkway in the Midwood Section of Brooklyn and the attempt by the Daily News to link Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to these heinous acts have compelled us to release this statement. When an act of violence and bigotry occurs in our community, we, as a group, need to take a leadership role and stand with other community leaders and fellow New Yorkers to speak out in opposition to these acts. History teaches us that silence can be interpreted as approving or condoning the bigotry.
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On this day in 1938 was the so-called “Kristallnacht,” the mass pogroms in Germany and German occupied Austria.
“Across the land: The map shows places in the Greater German Reich and in the Free State of Danzig, where in November 1938 Synagogues and Jewish shops were destroyed. It includes 1,283 entries; because of the still unfinished research the full amount of the destruction is still not completely known today. Names of places appear according to their current names.”
This map was published by the newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany in 2008.
*The term “Kristallnacht” was coined by the Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebels. It dresses up the systematic attacks against the Jews as mere broken windows. The map shows how widespread the attacks were, which were organized by the state, and involved the murder of hundreds of Jews throughout the week, tens of thousands who were deported to concentration camps, plus the irretrievable damage done to Synagogues, businesses, and other property. The appropriate term for the events is “Reichspogromnacht”, which roughly translates into “state organized night of pogroms.” The events mark the switch from discrimination to systematic persecution and eventually extermination of the Jewish population.
by Spencer Sunshine, published online November 2011 in Shift
All progressive social movements have dark sides, but some are more prone to them than others. Occupy Wall Street and its spin-offs, with their populist, anti-elitist discourse (“We Are the 99%”) and focus on finance capital, have already attracted all kinds of unsavory friends: antisemites, David Duke and White Nationalists, Oath Keepers, Tea Partiers, and followers of David Icke, Lyndon Larouche, and the Zeitgeist movement (see glossary below).
On one hand, there is nothing particularly new about this. The anti-globalization movement was plagued with these problems as well.(1) This was sometimes confusing to radicals who saw that movement as essentially Left-wing and anti-capitalist; when the radicals said “globalization,” they really meant something like the “highest stage of capitalism,” and so from their perspective, by opposing one they were opposing the other. The radicals often saw the progressives in the movement as sharing this same vision, only in an “incomplete way”—and that they only needed a little push (usually by a cop’s baton) to see that capitalism could not be reformed, and instead had to be abolished.
But for numerous others, “globalization” did not mean capitalism. Just as for the radicals, it functioned as a codeword: for some it meant finance capital (as opposed to industrial capital), while for others it meant the regime of a global elite constructing their “New World Order.” And either or both might also have meant the traditional Jewish conspiracy’s supposed global domination and control of the banking system. Whether they realized it or not, the many anti-authoritarians who praised this “movement of movements” as being based solely on organizational structure, with no litmus test for political inclusion, put out a big welcome sign for these dodgy folks. And in that door came all kinds of things, from Pat Buchanan to Troy Southgate. [READ THE REST]
I also recommend Occupy Wall Street and the perils of the big tent by Adam Holland.
