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Wednesday, October 2, 2002
02:17 a.m.
Antisemitism smear, Harvard-style
Over the last year or so, one of the most serviceable weapons in the armoury of Western supporters of the Israeli government has proved to be the charge of antisemitism.
It's come in many forms - the first, to my knowledge, an article by Barbara Amiel. But the speech of Harvard President Lawrence Summers is a useful example of the smear in action. There's no question - as with broadcast interventions - of accidental excess; or - as with newspaper pieces - of circulation-related sensationalism. Summers' 900 or so words are calculated and sober.
And all the more disturbing for that.
It's a tale of Innocence Lost, delivered - to start with, at least - in the way of a Fireside Chat.
Summers paints himself as a Jew
identified but hardly devout
in whose lifetime
anti-Semitism has been remote from my experience.
You feel Jimmy Stewart in Mr Smith Goes To Washington scarcely had a more sheltered life out West with his Boy Rangers than Summers did in the cauldron of politics within Harvard and in the administration of the Great Fornicator.
I was struck during my years in the Clinton administration that the existence of an economic leadership team....that was very heavily Jewish passed without comment or notice.
This utterly incredible sketch of a Golden Age of Tolerance is evidently intended to bring into relief the Jew-baiting bigotry of today.
His technique is to give us particular examples, and allow us to infer a pattern - I forebear to use the word 'conspiracy' - of attacks on Jews around the world.
Observers in many countries have pointed to the worst outbreak of attacks against the Jews since the Second World War.
Truly impartial 'observers' would want to examine, for example, how the statistics compared with attacks against other groups, the possibility of changes in reporting patterns, etc. Crime statistics are notoriously liable to distortion at all levels - collection, reporting and analysis: I'm sure there are Harvard journal citations a-plenty to that effect!
Candidates who denied the significance of the Holocaust reached the runoff stage of elections for the nation's highest office in France....
The electoral system in France allows for two rounds of voting; in the first, so many candidates ran that Le Pen got into the runoff with 16.9% of the vote - that notorious tide of post 9/11 French Jew-hating brought him a whole 2 points more than in 1995. And an extra 0.9% in the head-to-head against Chirac. In subsequent parliamentary elections, his party scored just 11.3% in the first round, and 1.9% in the second!
Did Summers not research the facts, or did he decide they got in the way of his story?
State-sponsored television stations in many nations of the world spew anti-Zionist propaganda.
Words appropriate to Arab or (some) African TV, no doubt; but placed in the same paragraph as references to France and Denmark. He's inviting the inference that French TV
spew[s] anti-Zionist propaganda
without the need to say as much. (The Israeli government were bolder in accusing the BBC of antisemitism in the context of a programme on Sharon's part in Sabra-Shatila.)
Then, a reference to the
United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism
which supposedly
spoke of Israel's policies prior to recent struggles under the Barak government as constituting ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.
Now, I've looked through the WCAR Declaration and, whilst it's full of historical travesty (slavery all whitey's fault, etc, etc) and Third-World-speak - a hazard of allowing tin-pot countries a seat in international councils - I could find no reference to Israel in connection either to 'ethnic cleansing' nor 'crimes against humanity'.
Interestingly, this gives the voting on the inclusion of charges of racism against Israel in the declaration. Amongst the majority voting against one finds - those arch-antisemites, France and Denmark. (It's an ADL page, so must be correct....)
Then he decides to come
closer to home. Of course academic communities should be and always will be places that allow any viewpoint to be expressed.
There's an unspoken 120 decibel 'but' in there, which soon emerges:
where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists
ie, white trash long a mainstay of the Democratic vote in the South!
profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities.
Note the switch from
anti-Semitism
to
anti-Israel:
he wants you to equate the two without realising it.
But then he comes to his soundbite. Prepare to savour:
Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.
The reference to
Serious and thoughtful people
shows he's talking about you and me (as opposed to the trash previously alluded to).
And
actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent
are what?
There are two main objections to this:
First, the core meaning of antisemitism is surely 'hostility to Jews' - how can hostility exist without intention?
Second, if being anti-Israeli is defined as antisemitism, how can one ever oppose Israeli policy without being antisemitic?
If the motives of those proposing the divestment, say, were antisemitic, why have they not proposed similar divestment from US or European firms with significant Jewish ownership?
Moreover, Israeli Jewish opinion is scarcely a monolith, even today with a coalition government. How may one support those Israeli Jews who oppose their government's policy without incurring the charge of antisemitism?
The examples he gives - of proposed academic boycotts and demonstrations - can surely only concern a small proportion of Western academics and students. What proportion?
He saves his tribute to Godwin's Law to the end:
I have always throughout my life been put off by those who heard the sound of breaking glass, in every insult or slight, and conjured up images of Hitler's Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel. Such views have always seemed to me alarmist if not slightly hysterical. But I have to say that while they still seem to me unwarranted, they seem rather less alarmist in the world of today than they did a year ago.
The substance is not exactly apocalyptic; but anyone using the H-word is aiming for an effect going beyond substance (as witness the late German Justice Minister).
All told, a textbook piece of propaganda:
- use of isolated instances to imply a pattern;
- assertions made without identifying their source [the man publishes his speech on his site, but gives no supporting references there - is that what passes for academic integrity in Harvard?];
- different words chopped to appear equivalent;
- use of bogey words to try to stir emotion with a view to distracting listeners from the sense (or lack of it) of the assertions made.
Now, if Summers were just any old Harvard professor sounding off, that would be one thing. But Summers is the boss: he must to an extent set the tone of academic discourse in the university; and professors not yet tenured will no doubt be paying particular attention to what he said.
Time will tell. Meanwhile, we can all sit back and admire the speech as rather a crafty piece of work.
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