DANGEROUS IDEAS

THE UNINTELLIGENTSIA SUCCUMB TO SMART-SOUNDING LEFTIST CONCEPTS. BUT IT’S THE SAME OLD TIKI TORCHES.

Noam Chomsky: Using big words to convince dumb people for 60 years.

As a lifelong lefty who is focused on calling out antisemitism, I might be expected to rail against rightwing Jew-hatred. But my main focus of attack is on my sometime colleagues on the left. That’s because the betrayal of our ostensibly shared values is what really drives me. The hypocrisy of antiracists I’ve marched with now being the foremost cause of Jewish unease enrages me.

There’s more to it, though. I view leftwing antisemitism as inherently more dangerous in the long run than the rightwing kind.

Rightwing antisemites may be more likely to perpetrate hate crimes — and I am not diminishing the severity of that problem — while leftwing antisemites are more likely to pass resolutions and issue media releases. In the long-run, though, the latter holds a greater threat to our society. (Caveat: I’m leaving aside for now the demographics of antisemitic violence in Europe and North America, which is most prevalent among immigrants from societies where Jew-hatred is endemic, or their descendants. That is a serious problem but it is different. It is neither specifically leftwing nor rightwing, though these perpetrators tend make common cause with, and are too often welcomed by, the left. More on that in future, I promise. Don’t @ me.)

The reason leftwing antisemitism is more dangerous is because it can infect our mainstream dialogue in ways the rightwing sort cannot. Rightwing antisemitism is founded on little more than blatant racism. Leftist antisemitism is founded on ideas.

I mean, sure — the polo-shirted, tiki torch-carrying suburban hatedaddies who marched through Charlottesville have ideas too. But everyone sees those “ideas” for what they are: the juvenile notion that “My skin’s better than your skin” (or, in the case of Jews, gays, women and others whose skin may not enforce these bigots’ sense of superiority, it’s some other innate “inferior” characteristic). In any event, these are ideas that can mostly persuade those who are already down the rabbit hole of hate.

Right-wing antisemitism may be more likely to become violent — and in a dangerous cross-pollination, leftwing rhetoric can incite rightwing violence. And, as I will discuss in my next post, this is one instance where progressives demonstrate no caution whatsoever about the impacts of their words on vulnerable populations, which is proof positive that many on the left don’t give a damn about whether Jews get beaten up — and if that is not the very definition of antisemitism, I don’t know what is. But anyways.

Leftwing antisemitism is more dangerous in the long run because it uses intellectual (or, let’s say, pseudo-intellectual) arguments to make its case. And in a world of short attention spans, digital dopamine loops and cognitive overload, antisemitism is almost made for the moment. Dangerous ideas about Jews, and scapegoating Jews for a society’s problems, have always reached their apogee at moments in human history when people are craving simple answers to complex problems and when we are looking for a target for our frustrations with the way the universe is unfolding. Today, the world is more complex than ever — and yet, individually and collectively, we have less bandwidth than ever to confront the challenges that come flying at us.

Today, leftist antisemitism employs just enough smart words and seemingly astute concepts to make the unintelligentsia — the masses of people who are too busy, lazy or senseless to probe difficult questions — succumb to what is, at root, the oldest hatred. We talk about “privilege,” “oppressors,” “racialization” and entire glossaries of newspeak. But most of us lack the time to really understand what the terms mean — or how they can too often be operationalized to reinforce, rather than challenge, longstanding prejudices and assumptions.

Nowhere is this more evident than in anti-Zionism.

If you read my stuff often, you know that I have a particular take on the whole “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” extravaganza. The perpetrators of these offenses employ a form of logical fallacy in which they reduce the issue to its simplest form and then ridicule it. They assert that people like me are saying that, if people hate Israel, they must hate Jews, which sounds like an unsophisticated slur.

The problem (for them but also for us) is that the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism is more complex. By refusing to address that complex — let’s say — intersectionality, they are able to go about their business (as unconscious antisemites) without having a whiff of doubt that they carry no hatred toward Jews.

In most cases, it’s true — these people may not harbor hatred. They may have no conscious bigotries at all. What they have are unconscious antisemitic biases of which they are not even remotely cognizant, which inform their approaches to Israel. (Simplest example: Although Israel has given away proportionately more land in peacetime than any other country in history — 75% of its landmass in the Camp David Accords with Egypt — a core premise of anti-Zionism is that Israel “steals Palestinian land.” The reason this is the most powerful libel in the anti-Zionist arsenal, despite being demonstrably wrong, is that it tracks with the antisemitic tropes we have inherited as part of our civilizational DNA: Jews as greedy, thieving, untrustworthy and acquisitive. The Oslo Process, in which the Palestinian leadership rejected an offer of 100% of what the world was led to believe they wanted, is more proof. Israel is not stealing Palestinian land. They can’t even give it away.)

Anti-Zionists, who mostly consider themselves “progressive” and “antiracist,” do not interrogate their own inner assumptions and instead shout “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” to drown out their self-doubts.

Notwithstanding my assertion just a couple of days ago that the anti-Zionist/“pro-Palestinian” movement is fundamentally anti-intellectual, it is conversely pseudo-intellectual.

If you read the vacuous, pretentious apologias for hatred from the leading lights of the Palestinian movement — Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Rashid Khalidi, et al — you will see how impressionable first-years can get sucked in. (It is no coincidence that Chomsky is not a historian. He’s a linguist. And he manipulates language to infect the brains of the young.)

Even Chomsky, Finkelstein and their sort know it is (in a few places, still, anyway) not OK to be overtly racist toward Jews. So they invent concepts that sound high-fallutin’ to achieve the same effect. They apply theories like settler-colonialism, ethnocracy, structural violence, demographic engineering, erasive historiography, discriminatory spatiality and — yada yada yada — you’ve turned a generation of young Western activists into fanatical enemies of Jewish national self-determination.

Suddenly, using terms that sound justifiable, you create a majority of 18-to-35s who think Jews should become a stateless people again, with all that entails. The fact that understanding what “all that entails” requires a modicum of knowledge about history is no hurdle at all for Chomsky et al. They can be assured the targets of their bumf are likely to gobble up their dollar store dogma in a vacuum of historical ignorance.

This is junk political science, but it is catnip to rudderless intellectual seekers desperate for a life raft of meaning in a complex world. Just like their great-grandparents jumped aboard the less sophisticated-sounding scapegoating of their era.

These may be bad ideas — but they are ideas. And that is key. Unlike flaming tiki torches and explicit calls for annihilating Jews, these ideas can be slid into party platforms, trade union advocacy manuals, supplementary teaching resources, op-eds and do-gooder NGO mission statements without raising hackles the way “Kill the Jews” might set off a few alarms.

And yet ideas and terminology that have the same intent and effect — “Globalize the intifada!” “From the river to the sea” “By any means necessary” — have infected (what remains of) the mainstream left. (I’m leaving out a few choice ones like “Go back to Poland” or the more specific “Go back to the ovens,” which are not at all as rare as you might think.)

Ridicule is one of the most powerful tools in confronting and disarming bad ideas. Insofar as Charlottesville’s khaki-clad klansmen with their neo-Nazi nightlights have ideas, they are ideas that are easily ridiculed and therefore widely rejected.

Leftwing antisemitism, with its accelerant of anti-Zionism, uses ideas that have just enough intellectual heft to leave smart people dumbfounded and dumb people persuaded.

More to the point, leftwing ideas that undergird antisemitism (and anti-Zionism, which may not be the same thing — but that is irrelevant here) have permeated the minds and spaces of erstwhile progressive, antiracist people and movements. These people and movements, by extension, are permeating our society in ways that smarmy suburban stormtroopers never will.

That’s why I’m focused on leftwing antisemitism.

Now, having taken up a chunk of your holiday Monday explaining why leftwing antisemitism is more dangerous that the rightwing kind, in my next post, I’ll explain why the differentiation hardly matters.