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.
Additional links Continue Reading »
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.
Jews for Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ) held a workshop at Occupy Wall Street on anti-Jewish oppression, responding to some of the talk about antisemitism at the occupation. Here are some observations from P. Naberrie:
The workshop was very much coming from a social justice perspective, where the term “anti-semitism” also includes “racism towards other ‘semitic peoples’”, i.e. “islamophobia” – hence in this workshop the use of the expression “anti-jewish oppression”. Apart from a little introduction to “anti-Jewish oppression” it was focused on an exchange of experiences of oppression on the intra-, inter-personal or institutional levels, in pairs. These were brought together and shared, followed by some talking. It had about 9 participants that stayed til the end, most of them Jewish.
It was acknowledged that antisemitism had been an issue here and there at OWS, but people had the perception that it was mostly a fringe phenomenon that gets criticisized when it pops up. Also, there was overall excitement about various Yom Kippur activities and JFREJ workshops that happened all over the week without any disturbances.
Meanwhile, a guy with a “Why do the Arabs hate the US?” sign was passing out leaflets on the Broadway side of Liberty Plaza with following passage:
“As long as the great majority of Americans remain totally ignorant and uninvolved in our Israeli policy, the US government will continue to be hostage to Israel, Zionist Christians and American Jews. I am not a Jew hater. In fact, I consider them the smartest people in the world. This small minority of Americans, less than 3% of our population, have enormous power in all segments of American economy and government. Unfortunately, when it comes to Israel, these gifted people turn off their brains and think only with their hearts.”
Argued with him for a while, seemed to be some US nationalist (“Pro-Palestinian? I am not an Arab lover!”) who said he wasn’t affiliated with any group. No other people seemed to take offense…Had another argument with a US-flag carrying whacko with no coherent political idea that sooner or later was talking about the 1% being the “rich Rothschilds and other such families” while he had no problem with capitalism or imperialism as such: “If you only work hard enough, you can be whatever you wanna be”.
Best sign of the day: “Shit is fucked up and bullshit”. Not antisemitic, and to the point 
I just posted a piece on Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London at my blog. Here is a brief extract, looking at antisemitism in the American movement. Below is an extract from History is Made at Night, which mentions some manifestations in the UK.
I hadn’t realised there is a whole #OccupyJudaism thing going on at the margins of #OWS and other US occupations (here’s Occupy Judaism’s official blog, Facebook page and Twitter account). See, e.g. this broadcast on the very interesting radio613 of from the Yom Kippur Services that took place at #OccupyWallStreet and #OccupyPhilly, or this useful article in The Forward, or this round-up of items from Kung Fu Jew at Jewschool. (Comical tangent: Jewish occupiers put up a “Sukkah”; the NYPD appeared to have better halachic knowledge, noting that you couldn’t see the stars through it therefore not a proper Sukkah – although more halachically trained folks say the NYDPD got it wrong.)
In contrast, the right (at times hysterically) has put a lot of attention into hunting down examples (or at least “hints”) of antisemitism in the Occupy movement. (For one of the more articulate litanies against the antisemitism, read David Brooks on milquetoast radicals; for a good round-up of the evidence see PJ Tatler; for another video see BreitbartTV.) It is undeniable that there is antisemitism in the movement, and it has manifested itself in several of the events. (I haven’t seen examples from the UK yet, but won’t be surprised when I do.) It is incumbent on the movement, and on anti-capitalists in general, not to ritually denounce it, but to be honest and aware about it, and to understand where it comes from. Where it comes from, in my view, is: a limited anti-capitalism that focuses on finance capital rather than on capital in general which segues easily into a “socialism of the fools” antisemitism. This, I think, is not an indictment of some inherent antisemitism in the left, but rather a consequence of the failure of the left, a failure to coherently argue for, and win people over to, a thorough anti-capitalist politics. This failure has left a vacuum, which is filled with conspiracy theory, vulgar materialism of the blood-for-oil/blame-the-Fed variety, a populist discourse of patriotic defence of the national economy being looted by the banks, and other extra-left forms of politics.
It is also the case that the scattered instances of antisemitism in the protest are no more prevalent than the scattered instances of racism and antisemitism in the tea party movement, which the right (correctly) argued were epiphenomenal and not central to tea partyism. And these scattered instances, involving handfuls of oddballs at the margins of the occupations, must be balanced against the thousands of people in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, DC and elsewhere turning up to Kol Nidre prayers and sukkot. Highlighting a few incidents of antisemitism in a large, disparate, weeks-long movement and claiming that renders the whole thing is to play the antisemitism card. I particularly recommend A Jay Adler on The Putrid Cynicism of the Emergency Committee for Israel for a good rebuttal of one example of this, promoted at CIFWatch.
Matt at Ignoblus has a nice, short post written after his attendance at a Kol Nidre service at Occupy Wall Street. His concern is not with the antisemitism as such, but the way the lens of Zionism/anti-Zionism distorts the movement’s understanding of the world. The Tent City protests in Israel were a major episode in the so-called “movement of the squares”, the wave emanating out of the Jasmine Revolution via Tahrir Square which the Occupy protests want to surf. But they air-brush it out of the account because it was not against the other occupation, the Israeli one of Palestine. Ignore the fact that pro-Hamas Islamists and pro-Israeli Coptic Christians, for example, were part of the Tahrir moment: Arabs can be as politically correct as they like but Israelis had better denounce their state if they want to enter our big tent.
From History is Made At Night:
There are some odd alternative economy models around in the occupations, notions of capitalism without finance capital (the ‘real economy’), of monetary reform, of a resource-based economy that is beyond capitalism and communism (this is the line of the new-agey Zeitgeist Movement who had a banner on steps of St Pauls). It is not just that some of these ideas seem to have very little understanding of what capitalism actually is and misrepresent it as a conspiracy by a few rich bankers rather than a global mode of production and exchange. It’s far worse than that, because some of these ideas have very murky antecedents and indeed dubious present-day associations.
A lot of ‘monetary reform’ notions just read like recycled ‘Social Credit’ ideas, as developed before the Second World War by CH Douglas. As Derek Wall pointed out in his article Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools (Capitalism Nature Socialism, September 2003), Douglas was not only an extreme right wing racist, but his monetery ideas are saturated with an anti-semitic world view. Likewise, the Zeitgeist Movement basically rehash the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, simply subsituting the word ‘bankers’ for ‘jews’ (see Zeitgeist Exposed at the Third Estate).
At the Bristol occupation at the weekend this racist conspiracy theory view of capitalism was openly articulated by someobody telling the occupation that ‘Zionists want a new world order’. What was disgraceful about this episode was that people dutifully repeated this poison and cheered him rather than kicking the guy out. And that whoever was responsible for ‘Occupy Bristol update’ on youtube thought this was uncontroversial enough to give the guy a platform.
The ‘human microphone’ thing in the occupations is in danger of becoming an absurd fetish. In Wall Street people repeated the phrases of speakers to make sure that people further back could hear speeches when a microphone was banned. In most cases where there is no ban it would be surely be better – and very simple – just to set up a PA or use a megaphone, like people have been for years. By the looks of the Bristol occupation, there was no need for anything as the crowd seemed small enough for everybody to hear. It did look like a religious ‘call and response’ exercise, and involved people in the bad faith exericse of speaking nonsense which on reflection I would hope many would prefer not to utter.
I know that there are plenty of good sound people camping out at St Pauls now, and I think it is very important to get involved and challenge reactionary ideas. To just walk away holding our noses could allow some of these dangerous ideas to get a foothold in the very high profile occupation movement.
I just published this guest post by Toby Green, on leaving the Green Party.
Two extracts:
Essentially, much of the membership of the party is therefore grounded in a sort of superior bad faith. And so of course, members of the Green Party can´t be prejudiced. If they accuse members called “Levy” of being Israeli academics in disguise defending Israel, they can´t be rehashing old Jewish conspiracy theories. If they circulate emails from David Duke, a key figure in the Klu Klux Klan, on how “Jewish Zionists” are shaping American policy in Israel in alliance with Obama (thereby rehashing not only anti-semitic myths but also an alliance of this with anti-Black racism), they can still work in Caroline Lucas´s office and be on the list for the European elections. If they circulate emails accusing Jewish members of parliament of double loyalty (to Israel and the UK), there´s no need to suppose that they are re-hashing the anti-Catholic discourse which surrounded JF Kennedy´s run for office in 1960. If they talk of the “squealing zionists”, there´s no reason for them not to be respected party figures.[...]
After four years of this charade, it has become clear that the Green Party is institutionally anti-semitic. Its institutions have not dealt with clear evidence of anti-semitism. They show no evidence of wanting to, and indeed now seem to have decided to target perceived “problem” members of the party who have raised this issue. This is fundamentally a political decision: the Green party has decided that it is increasingly a hard left party, allied with enemies of Western capitalism. Rightly, it thinks that Islamophobia is one of the more dangerous phenomena to have arisen since 9/11, and in reaction against this it turns a blind eye to discrimination against perceived enemies of Islamic peoples, Israel, and the Jews. This is a classic case of projection: horrified at their own government´s attitudes towards Islamic countries, and wanting no part in it, this mentality projects this violence onto a scapegoat – Israel and Jews.
Further information: Modernity, Greens Engage.
The Community Security Trust (CST), the body which monitors and combats antisemitism in the UK, has recently published its annual “antisemitic incidents report” for 2010 (full pdf here, summary here). It reports that:
639 antisemitic incidents were recorded by CST in 2010. This is the second-highest annual total since CST began recording antisemitic incidents in 1984.[...]
The only significant trigger event in 2010 occurred whenIsraeli forces boarded a flotillaof ships bearing pro-Palestinian activists who were tryingto break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza… Reactions to this episode led to a monthly total of 81 antisemitic incidents in the UK in June 2010, compared to 49 in June 2009, when there was no comparable trigger event.[...]
Of the 234 antisemitic incidents in 2010 showing political motivation as well as antisemitism, 149 showed far-right motivation; 53 showed anti-Zionist motivation; and 32 showed Islamist motivation.
CST received a physical description of the incident perpetrator in 214, or 33 per cent, of the 639 antisemitic incidents during 2010. Of these, 113 (53 per cent) were described as white; 16 (seven per cent) were described as black; 63 (29 per cent) were described as Asian; and 21 (10 per cent) were described as of Arab appearance.[...]
In other words, it is clear that white racism and far right politics remains key to antisemitism in the UK. A large percentage of perpetrators are involved in the far right, and more white people are perpetrators than Arabs and Asians combined.
CST has conducted analysis of antisemitic incident perpetrators by ethnic appearance since 2004. Since then, the only other year in which the proportion of incident perpetrators identified as white dropped below 50 per cent was 2006, which was also marked by a significant rise in incidents in response to events in the Middle East.
The paranoid image of a “tsunami” of Muslim antisemitism sweeping Britain, promoted by some right-wing figures within the Jewish community, is clearly inaccurate. As the CST director, Mark Gardner, puts it:
“There is much talk of a “new” antisemitism, although “contemporary” would be more accurate. This is important, but risks distracting us from the fact that, beneath the surface, the “old” antisemitism is still there – and growing.”
Further, Jews and Muslims together are the targets of some of the incidents, as in some neo-Nazi literature distributed in East London, which concluded: “JEWS AND MUSLIMS OUT OF REDBRIDGE”.
At the same time, it is clear that the so-called “new” antisemitism, divorced from that far right context, is a significant problem. Antisemitism linked to or in the guise of anti-Zionism is a growing force, and it has a significant purchase at the fringes of Britain’s Muslims population.
Also clear is the cross-pollination of anti-Zionist and “classical” fascist themes, as in the following graffiti repeatedly daubed on a Manchester social club with a large Jewish membership: “YID SCUM, GAZA BLEEDS”; “SHYLOCK SCUM, GAZA BLEEDS, HAMAS COMES”; “YID SCUM”, “SHYLOCKS”, “HAMAS”; and “HEZBOLLAH COMES”. Or in this message left by a hacker on the website of a Jewish-owned business: “F**k you Israel bitches. Forever Adolf Hitler, there will be a war between Muslim countries and f**king Israel if [sic] near future and Turkey gonna f**k all Jewish bitches like Hitler. I love you Hitler.” The CST summarise the confused situation:
One feature of contemporary antisemitism is that the use of far-right references is no longer the preserve of neo-Nazis; nor is mention of Israel and the Middle East the favoured expression solely of Muslim or Arab perpetrators of incidents. In 26 incidents in 2010, the perpetrators employed more than one type of discourse, often mixing references to the Middle East with references to Nazism. It is more accurate to say that the Middle East and the Nazi period are both used by antisemites of all backgrounds as sources for material to use when abusing Jews.
Holocaust denial and the blood libel feature in many of the incidents, percolating out of their original far right home into Muslim contexts, while the Israel lobby meme features in others, filtering out of its original anti-Zionist home into far right contexts. There are examples of acts of racial abuse that mention both the World War II and the Gaza flotilla.
And the equation of Jews with Nazis, a meme derived from the anti-Zionist movement, is prevalent, as in this viral e-mail: “GREEDY Tribe of Nazi jews need to STOP your EVIL Deeds again [sic] Humanity”. Or in these comments, made by two men at a student activist meeting in Nottingham, revealing that Nazi sympathy are perfectly compatible with left-wing politics: “Israel is the aggressor; they are the same as Nazis”, “The Nazis did not set out to kill the Jews” and “All Jews are dirty Tories”.
One example especially struck me:
Glasgow, September: The local council erected two banners near its offices, one celebrating the Jewish festival of Rosh Hashanah and the other celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid. Graffiti reading “Love Jews Smash Zionism” was daubed on the Rosh Hashanah banner.
Here, the perpetrator has tried to show that it is not Jews, just “Zionism” that is the object of hate – but the location of the vandalism, a Rosh Hashanah banner, belies this.
In all, the report completely refutes the notion promoted by many anti-racist anti-Zionists that there is no connection between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The section “Antisemitic or anti-Israel?” (p.32) is particularly interesting in this regard.
CST is often asked about the difference between antisemitic incidents and anti-Israel activity, and how this distinction is made in the categorisation of incidents. The distinction between the two is often subtle and the subject of much debate and disagreement. Clearly, it would not be acceptable to define all anti-Israel activity as antisemitic; but it cannot be ignored that much contemporary antisemitism takes place in the context of, or is motivated by, extreme feelings over the Israel/Palestine issue. Drawing out these distinctions, and deciding on where the dividing lines lie, is one of the most difficult areas of CST’s work in recording and analysing hate crime.
The CST received several reports of anti-Israel activity they did not categorise as antisemitic and did not include in the stats. Their rules of thumb are instructive: “Fuck Israel” daubed on a place frequented by Jews is antisemitic but the same slogan daubed on a High Street isn’t; an anti-Israel leaflet sent to a Zionist political group is not antisemitic, but sent unsolicited to a synagogue is; comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is antisemitic, comparing it to apartheid South Africa isn’t.
Finally, there is evidence that “the socialism of fools” is alive and well, as in the “Jews are Tories” quoted above, or the following incident in London in April: “A group of visibly Jewish men were standing outside a café when two white men walked past, and one said, “Look, it’s a meeting of Goldman Sachs planning how to rip us off”.”
***
Winston Picket of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (EISCA) has a blog post at the JC on the report, focusing on the press coverage the report got. He made an interesting observation relating to the “trigger events”: “what appears to be taking place is that a particular hatred is expressed, reaches a high water mark, recedes, but over the long run is seen to be constantly rising.” He thinks it is significant that the CST is now talking about “embedded” antisemitism, and a “bedrock” of antisemitism, exposed by the trigger events, but there already, and slowly growing.
***
A useful concept deployed by the CST at their blog is “Ziocentrism”. Dave Rich defines it: “This ‘Ziocentrism’, which insists on placing Israel at the centre of any Middle Eastern story, also leads people to assume their positions on any given crisis according to how it may affect Israel.” He gives a series of examples of accounts of the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt, which view them thoroughly inappropriately (and often offensively) through an anti-Zionist prism. Mark Gardner explores one particularly pernicious example, using the Israel lobby meme, from Johan Hari, a commentator I usually admire. I have given further examples on my own blog here:
One of the most depressing aspects of both events in North Africa, especially Egypt, and the leftist commentary on it, is the power of the anti-Zionist narrative. Take as an example this well-written Marxist analysis at 19th Brumaire. Here’s one sentence: “Ahmed Ezz, the personification of the unity of personal corruption, neoliberalism and abasement to Zionsim has resigned.” What does “abasement to Zionism” mean? Why “abasement” and not, say, “accommodation with”, given the Egyptian ruling class and the Israeli state clearly have interests in common? Why talk about “Zionism” and not about, say, the Israeli state? There is something about the demonic Z-word that takes this phrase out of normal political discourse into another space. The demonic Z-word is a blunting of materialist analysis. (For more on insane anti-Zionism, see Snoopy. One of the things that is clear is that anti-Zionist antisemitism also pervades the pro-Mubarak camp, which makes the leftist anti-Zionist nonsense even more pernicious.)
Or for another example, from someone subject to antisemitic conspiracy theories himself, George Soros in the Post: “The main stumbling block [to democracy in Egypt] is Israel.”
(However, as blogger Waterloo Sunset points out, there is plenty of Ziocentrism from the other side too, with pro-Israel commentators wondering if what has happened in Israel is good or bad for Israel, rather than if it is good or bad for the people of Egypt.)
***
Finally, I want to look briefly at two incidents which dramatise some of the issues this post has touched on. One occurred in my local area, Lewisham, where a leading local left-wing anti-cuts campaigner interrupted a speech at an official Holocaust memorial day ceremony to call upon a rabbi to mention Gaza in a list of genocides. Was this simply anti-Israel, a legitimate intervention to remind people of a state-perpetrated atrocity? Or was it antisemitic, because it was effectively acting a rabbi (as a Jew) to apologise for something done by the Israeli state? Or was it antisemitic because it trivialises the Holocaust by comparing the mechanised slaughter of millions to the killing in war-time of hundreds? And what matters most, the presence or absence of antisemitic intent on behalf of the heckler, or the effect (in the form of offence) on Jews, or the discursive context of intensified anti-Zionism? And is drawing attention to this sort of thing within our movement a distraction from real politics, designed to let our class enemies off the hook, or a necessary act of anti-racist self-criticism in a left that is ever more prone to this sort of thing?
The other incident occurred in Manchester (revealed by the CST report to be Britain’s no.2 hotspot for antisemitic incidents). Aaron Porter, the president of the National Union of Students, who has distanced himself from any militant activity by students protesting against cuts and fees, was subjected to a barrage of chants, jeers and taunts by student radicals. Two witnesses thought they heard antisemitic abuse of Porter (“Aaron Porter, you’re a Tory Jew” and so on). This was picked up by the right-wing press and widely reported, including hard-hitting articles by the likes of Nick Cohen, scourge of the indecent left. However, it now seems clear that, although there were several chants and not all of them were that easy to follow, the report was based completely on a mishearing, a point made by Sacha Ismail of the AWL and reported carefully in the Manchester Mule and at the blog The Great Unrest. Again, a warning against paranoia.
Left-wing Canadian writer and campaigner Terry Glavin notes:
The [Alliance for Workers' Liberty]‘s Sean Matgamna recognized the “new antisemitism” (a phenomenon that most of the “Left” persists in pretending is a right-wing hoax) as far back as 1988: “It was a doctrine that dared no longer speak its old name except in whispers and occasional back-alley fascist shouting; but by the ’70s it had another name which it dared to speak, indeed to shout, in a loud chorus in which participated most of the governments and states of the world, including some of the worst governments in existence. A new name: anti-Zionism.” Matgamna was noticing antisemitism masquerading as “anti-Zionism” in the Irish Workers Group as far back as 1967-68.
Matgamna’s account of the IWG is a fascinating case study in the history of left antisemitism and worth reading, although some of its complex details may appear obscure and impenetrable for the non-initiated. Here is an extract: Continue Reading »
From Principia Dialectica:
Populism and anti-semitism go hand in hand
The crisis of the economy has thrown up all sorts of protests. Some more populist than others. The EDL comes to mind for example, a proto-nationalist outfit that resembles the Northern League in Italy. Other forms of populist action is examplified by UK Uncut, a vociferous flash mob which intends to half criticize the commodity. In fact it seems they want this system to work in a clean manner, they talk of “Morality Tax”, they have attacked Topshop because Philip Green , the owner of that firm, has apparently managed to divert alot of cash to his wife’s bank account in Monaco.
But most firms use creative accounting , that is capitalism. UK Uncut need to get down to the root of the problem, not the surface. The targeting of Green has also an antisemitic side to it. if only he had been of Palestinian origin. It is imperative to analyse what goes on, and not fall for easy populist answers to a deep problem.
History is Made at Night noted someone who tweeted that the Wikileaks revelations would prove that geopolitics is not in fact determined by the Bilderberg Group, Masonic conspiracies or the Israel lobby, but in fact confirms the boring old Marxist materialist theory of history (except it was said wittily in 140 characters). For example, Wikileaks shows that it is the Arab oil lobby, not the neocon/Israel axis, pushing military aggression against Iran – small-imperialist power politics, not Jewish conspiracy.
(Doug Henwood made a similar points here: “revelations like these are further proof that the conspiracist view of history, in which a secret cabal plans everything and everyone else is just an ignorant dupe, is wrong.”)
Then almost immediately, History is Made… told me, he turned to Indymedia to find it full of claims that Wikileaks is a Mossad/CIA false flag operation to deflect us away from the real conspiracies…
As far as I can tell, the meme has been promoted by the Wayne Madsden Report, and then taken up by Pakistan Daily:
WMR has learned from Asian intelligence sources that there is a strong belief in some Asian countries, particularly China and Thailand, that the website Wikileaks, which purports to publish classified and sensitive documents while guaranteeing anonymity to the providers, is linked to U.S. cyber-warfare and computer espionage operations, as well as to Mossad’s own cyber-warfare activities…
In China, Wikileaks is suspected of having Mossad connections. It is pointed out that its first “leak” was from an Al Shabbab “insider” in Somalia. Al Shabbab is the Muslim insurgent group that the neocons have linked to “Al Qaeda.”… Our sources in Asia believe that Wikileaks ran afoul of their CIA paymasters after it was discovered that some of Wikileaks’s “take” was being diverted to Mossad instead of to their benefactors at Langley.
There are strong suspicions that Wikileaks is yet another Soros-funded “false flag” operation on the left side of the political spectrum. WMR has learned that after former Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) decided to oppose Soros’s choice of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s deputy Mark Malloch Brown as President of the World Bank, succedding the disgraced Paul Wolfowitz, Soros put the Wikileaks operation into high gear. “Daniel Schmitt” hacked into Coleman’s supporters list, stealing credit card info, addresses, and publishing the “take” on Wikileaks. Democrat Al Franken, who was strongly backed by Soros, defeated Coleman in a legally-contested and very close election…
It is also believed by informed sources that Soros is behind the operation to move Wikileaks to Iceland… Iceland is classic prey for Soros. The Icelandic krona has been decimated as a currency and has no where to go but up in value, especially if the British pound and the euro depreciate. Soros is currently talking down the euro, planning its fall and shorting it, just like he did versus the pound in London in the 1980s. After the UK’s and Europe’s currencies are devalued, Soros will buy every euro note in sight, thus making trillions.
Soros and his Wikileaks friends have in Iceland a practically unregulated banking system desperate for an influx of capital — money that will come from the exiled Russian tycoons in Israel, London and the United States. Israeli investors like Bank Leumi, and awash in siphoned-off Bernard Madoff cash, will do their bit for this smash-and-grab operation by Soros’s Quantum-linked hedge funds.
This text, full of postmodern re-workings of images drawn from the deep well of antisemitic stereotype, has circulated widely on Indymedia, e.g. on Indymedia UK here and here, Indymedia NL here, Indymedia Ottawa here, and so on. Mossad as the personification of secret Jewish power; Soros and Madoff and shadowy “Israeli investors” as the personification of evil finance cpaital; the healthy real European economies preyed on by unnatural financiers; and “the neocons” as a malevolent cabal of Jewish string-pullers. Why, Doug Henwood asks, “are the evil financiers almost always Jews?”
Once again, as Shift noted some time ago, “Sadly, Indymedia offers a platform to invent caricatures of the Israeli state and of its policies. Instead of recognising the political context, it helps to perpetuate an image of Israel, and of Jews, as sinister conspirators with a secret plan to turn the world into one massive settlement.”
Also see: Digital Journal: 9/11 skeptics on Julian Assage; Media Matters: Glenn Beck, Soros and the economic meltdown; Chip Berlet’s guide to anti-Jewish conspiracy theories; Datacide on crisis and continuity in the 9/11 denial movement.
