John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY YVONNE RIDLEY IN MIDDLE EAST MONITOR

 

“Palestine: Read all about it… but not in the mainstream media”

 

Conflating “anti-Semitism” with legitimate criticism of a heavily-armed state has always been absurd, absurd in ways quite apart from the clear effort to make a victim of an aggressor.

If Israel wants to be a state regarded by the world as being a state just like any other, and I think it does very much want that, then it must be subject to criticism, as all other states are.

Otherwise, Israel is granted a special place outside the laws and norms for nations. And, de facto, that is just the situation we have today.

Not yet through the effects of any laws, although we do see disturbing efforts being made along legislative lines, but through constant intimidation and name-calling of those who say what they are entitled to say – indeed, what they are obliged to say if they are supporters of Western traditions of human and democratic rights.

The granting of that kind of exceptional status to any national state is itself genuine prejudice, a form of reverse-prejudice.

My other favorite point on the absurdity of what we read all the time in false claims of anti-Semitism involves the former Soviet Union.

The “anti-Semitism” claim about criticism of Israel’s actual behavior – not its identity, not its religion, not its ethnicity, but its actual behavior – is precisely parallel with someone’s having claimed that criticism of the Soviet Union – and we all know there was a great deal, both at home and abroad, to criticize in the practices of the Soviet Union – was the same thing as hating Russians, what today we would call “Russophobia.”

Anyone can understand the absurdity of that.

It is time to call out all of the apologists and lobbyists for Israel on this matter. Israel is not entitled to a “Get out of Jail Free Card” when it commits crimes and starts wars and abuses great numbers of people. Nor indeed, were Israel’s intentions always honorable, would it even expect to receive one.

Yet there are ongoing efforts in many countries and in many states of the United States to get laws, wholly inappropriate laws, passed to do exactly that, just as there are efforts to suppress people’s right to support peaceful boycott to pressure Israel to change its ways.

The lobbying activity for such laws is totally inappropriate. It is the truest kind of interference in the internal affairs of other countries. It works to suppress people’s most basic rights in a free society. And it works to defend the indefensible when Israel commits obvious atrocities such as shooting into unarmed crowds of demonstrators or when it commits piracy on the high seas or when it bombs people with whom it is not even at war.

We all understand the dangers of treating any person in our society with such privileged status that he or she can do just as they please, disregarding all laws and norms. But how much more dangerous is the same practice in the case of a nation state, a very heavily-armed and often belligerent nation state?

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RINF

 

Recently, there has been a steady drumbeat at The Guardian and other British papers on this subject with columnist after columnist writing fantastical stuff about “the Left’s anti-Semitism problem.”

And this comes after a long campaign to vilify Jeremy Corbyn himself – a thoroughly decent man, after his becoming leader of the Labour Party – as weak, out-of-date, and ineffectual, quoting day after day such wonderfully credible sources and paid hacks as Tony Blair. This campaign reached the sickening point of the Prime Minister’s publically insulting Corbyn and refusing to apologize, but of course we know David Cameron is a corrupt and unreliable political figure.

The government of Israel thoroughly dislikes Corbyn – as it dislikes Donald Trump, disliking them both for being independent-minded and fairly honest speakers – and it is making the force of its views felt in indirect, behind-the scenes pressures on many matters such as rules against criticizing Israel and making advocacy of BDS illegal.

Of course, the “anti-Semitism” referred to in these efforts is not what most people in the world would regard as anti-Semitism, the actual hatred of Jewish people because they are Jewish.

No, instead it is an unwarranted negative labelling of those who criticise Israel or who advocate BDS, both legitimate and ethical exercises of free speech in a supposedly free country. This is anti-Semitism only in the phony propagandists’ sense that criticising the former Soviet Union might have been labelled hatred of Russians.

This really is depressing since our political system is based on free speech and open views, and Israel unquestionably does things regularly and before our eyes that most of us have long ago have been taught are immoral and wrong.

Israel refuses to change anything that it does, any of its abusive and violent and law-breaking policies, but increasingly it also expects people in other lands to be pressured by unjust laws and rules into shutting up their objections.

It is definitely poor, short-term thinking to push things in this fashion and generate an even greater sense of injustice.

This does tell us, along with other measures of recent years, just how desperate Israel is becoming over honestly-expressed public opinion in the rest of the world.

So King Canute is going to command the waves on the sea to stop, and we do come to a ridiculous and unsustainable place, the very same place motivating Israel’s unreasonable demands.