A recent column by Charles Krauthammer had my dander up for a minute, but that was good, because it got me thinking about the two different services anti-semitism provides to the American right. For some on the right, antisemitism is a thing to accuse the left of. For others, it's like a delicious protein.
Krauthammer used some inflammatory words to describe Obama's recent decision to abstain from voting on the UN resolution condemning Israel over settlements. This symbolic "no comment," in the framing we hear so often, is "shameful," and represents for Krauthammer circumstantial evidence of Obama's "deep-seated antipathy to Israel." To the columnist's credit, I suppose, he used the word "perhaps," and avoided the word "antisemitism."
I'll say right now that there may not be any other issue that affects me quite this way.
There are many controversial issues where I'm not afraid to weigh in, but this one is different. I have friends who are passionately and professionally dedicated to defending Israel. I'm kind of hoping they don't read this, but if they do, I hope they'll be frustrated with me rather than furious.
I can't put it off forever, so here's my point. I'm no Israel-hater, and I have mixed feelings about Palestine. But I don't see how it's healthy when anything less than full support of a powerful country's military policies puts you at risk for the charge of antisemitism. This has been the case as far back as I can remember. Which isn't really that far, and I assume that most people who care deeply about this know much more than I do, so I don't have an official ironclad stance about the morality of either side in the great Jewish fight. As far as I can tell from my minuscule research, both Israel and Palestine have done things that resulted in children being repurposed as bags of meat. As a leftist, I keep getting distracted by that.
Interestingly, Krauthammer's argument is similar to the one liberals use about Trump voters; even if they aren't racists, they enabled racists, which makes them just as bad. How much validity does this kind of logic have? Can it be reasonable in one instance, but not in the other?
I don't believe it can, but since the two situations are not exactly analogous, anyone who thinks I'm wrong won't have too much trouble typing a few angry paragraphs educating me about the difference. They will see this as a victory.
So, the charge of antisemitism is a useful tool to use against the left. It's reflexively and righteously thrown onto the table to shut down discussion. Since I'm gradually learning that I have zero tolerance for that sort of rhetorical ballet, I find people on all sides of the political and racial spectrum indulging themselves in this way.
And to protect myself before posting this, I examine myself for evidence of antisemitism. It would be a lot easier if I could just be screened for it at CVS, but unfortunately I have to use my noodle to suss this out. Accordingly, I find certain questions nagging me. I'll use the Socratic dodge, and just present the questions.
Is it necessary to agree with every Jewish person alive about everything to prove you're not antisemitic?
Is it even possible, given my assumption that at least a baker's dozen of Israelis at any given moment disagree with official Israeli policy?
Looking at it from a different angle, is it reasonable to assume that if a person is racist, he or she can't be right about anything?
This brings me to another topic I've been avoiding-- the alt-right. For a long time I've heard about the alt-right, and Trump's supposed ties to it. Trump's Coalition of the Shrilling has many strange bedfellows, but the oddest example may be that he's in bed both with enablers of antisemitism* and with the people that find antisemitism in every disagreement with Israel. That's a pretty big bed, and although I'm tired after a long drive, in this case I'll be happy taking the futon.
Here are a few fun facts from the "Normie's Guide to the Alt-Right," easily accessible online to anyone with the stomach for it.
In the words of Andrew Ranglin, whose website the Daily Stormer treats both Trump and Hitler as exciting Justin Bieber-like figures,
" 'Normie' is a term used to refer to individuals who have not yet joined the Alt-Right, remaining trapped in the mental-prison of the Jewish system. These people are viewed as being incapable of objectively processing information, and will instead revert to programmed slogans whenever they are presented with ideas that conflict with their synthetic value system."
Ranglin's overview of the items we normies haven't noticed is that, as he puts it,
"Jews are behind all of the things which we are against, the diametric opposite of everything that we stand for. In a very real sense, defeating and physically removing the Jews will solve every other problem. None of this would be happening if it were not for the Jews.
It is now fully-documented that Jews are behind mass-immigration, feminism, the news media and Hollywood, pornography, the global banking system, global communism, the homosexual political agenda, the wars in the Middle East and virtually everything else the Alt-Right is opposed to. This is, to a shocking extent, simply admitted by the Jews themselves."
An interesting psychological question is: how do these neo-Nazis square their love for Trump with his apparent attitude toward Israel? Trump at one point asked rhetorically how great it would be if his son-in-law managed to help him end the Israel-Palestine dispute, and for various reasons our President-Elect appears to be pretty firmly lodged in the group that sees all the fault on the Palestinian side. I don't know what rationalization Ranglin uses here, but since rationalization for the racist is like a screwdriver for the home repairman, I'm sure he's figured something out that makes sense to him.
I differ from most of my friends on the left in the following respect. I abhor racism, but not because of its immorality, or its selfishness. Ignoring the abundant evidence, I don't consider hate to be the core element of racism. Ignorance is the real ground zero criterion. Although I do find ignorant people (including myself) who are willing to learn when it's convenient, and for this reason I sometimes think the real culprit is the thorough lack of curiosity about the world's other people.
To put it bluntly, I'm more inclined to think of racists as stupid rather than deplorable. I don't care for stupidity, but it's unavoidable, and I've spent much of my life cataloguing it. Stupidity (in others as well as in myself) has thwarted me again and again in life, and I don't believe any race, demographic, or philosophy has ever cornered the market on it. Stupidity is a fundamental aspect of our world, and we struggle against it heroically but with diminishing returns; as with our battles against aging and gravity, the most optimistic spin about this never ending war is to hold aloft a litany of occasional skirmishes where we like to believe we let the enemy know he'd been in a fight.
So, for me, this tendency of Ranglin's to believe that one ethnic group can actually be responsible for all that's wrong with the world is stupid rather than evil.
Children, perhaps the most gullible of all demographics, love it when solutions are simple. They are suspicious of the cryptic excuses adults make when saying no to some obviously great idea about how the adult's money and time can be spent. It's always nice when a child grows up and starts thinking things through, but some folks never really move past this romance with convenient solutions. And when politicians trot out the fairy tale, voters go wild! Both parties in our terrible system tell their constituents that everything wrong in our country is caused by that group of other people over there. I'm tired of hearing this rube-baiting con, and I'm also tired of watching people congratulate themselves for figuring out that one party does this, while somehow missing that the other party does it too.
Whenever a repair guy comes to my house to fix one of the many broken items we keep on hand, he patiently explains to me what went wrong. Sometimes, if I'm on my game, I'll ask questions about how I can change my behavior to stave off future breakage. In short, he unwisely tries to teach me something about the world, and I make a good faith effort to take advantage of it. I'm generally assuming that a repair guy spends most of his time among ignorant, clueless people like myself, who see the mechanical world as a mysterious and frightening landscape. My lack of knowledge about it is so thorough, it's all I can do to avoid the comforting idiocy of superstition.
But his is precisely why I feel a kinship with a dishwasher repairman. Our fields of expertise are dissimilar in content, but our relationship to ignorance unites us. We both profit from ignorance, to some degree; ignorance is what gives us work, but it also takes work away and sometimes puts us at odds with our customers. (There's a widespread belief that bad teachers and bad repair guys are everywhere. I know they exist, but the non-scientific evidence I've gathered suggests that blaming teachers and/or repair guys for your problems is an American pastime that may have overtaken football in popularity.)
Our national discourse is like a dishwasher that is leaking all over the kitchen floor. I may not understand dishwashers, but I do know that the situation isn't sustainable. Until we can put a dent in American stupidity, I'm inclined to talk calmly and graciously to people I don't agree with, gently but firmly mentioning the fallacies in their logic while also acknowledging our points of agreement and admitting my own prejudices. I've been told with some vehemence that trying to talk stupid people down from their ledge is a dangerously quixotic activity. Perhaps it is. I'm well aware that we may be way too far down this road to find our way back. But I do know this-- screaming at stupid people doesn't work. In fact-- they love it when you scream at them, because now they can safely typecast you as a villain that they can oppose without any thinking or listening required.
*Eagle-eyed readers will observe my hypocrisy here. Earlier in the piece I suggest that the guilt-by-association or enabling charge is sometimes a dangerous phenomenon. I believe that, but I also believe there's a difference between what Trump voters have done (voted for a guy who's admired by racists) and what Bannon has done (court neo-Nazis to expand readership and make money). I don't know if Steve Bannon is an anti-Semite. The evidence for this is anecdotal, hearsay, conjectural, guilt by association, and circumstantial. It's interesting, though, to see Alan Dershowitz defending Bannon publicly. Dershowitz may not be the all-time champ of accusing people of antisemitism, but he's certainly a reliable go-to public intellectual when any prominent person criticizes Israel's policies, and there's a presumed need to "balance" the news story by finding someone who can aggressively discredit the criticizer. Dershowitz suggests that the evidence against Bannon is weak (which, in a legal sense, it is), but he also suggests that Bannon's support for Israel is the ultimate disproof of antisemitism charges. Perhaps. But if Dershowitz's ideas suggest anything, they suggest that some Jews care more about a person's unblinking support for Israel than any other aspect of their thinking.
This caused me to consider what I bring to the table as a non-anti-Semite. Not much, as it turns out.
I like to hang out with Jewish people because they have a sense of humor, read books, are interested in black music as well as the work of Bob Dylan and Woody Allen, and have seltzer in their fridge. Oddly, but delightfully, several of the best country music pickers I know are Jewish, another plus in my book. In other words, I like them when they remind me of me.
So, in the area of socializing, I'm making no real sacrifices by hanging around with Jews. How about my actual thoughts about how Jewish people have affected the world? American culture is unthinkable without the contributions of Jews. I'll table for the moment my typical primary theme, that black people are an essential component of American music, and instead I'll harp on my secondary theme. American humor, fiction, and film have been profoundly blessed by Jewish artists. (Don't even get me started on songwriting. A list of great American songs written by Jews would be longer than this essay.) I suppose that anti-semites don't enjoy the work of Sid Caesar or Mel Brooks, or that of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, or the Marx Brothers, but what kind of dried-up world would that be? I could go on, on and on actually, but I won't. The list is too long.
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