Our last blog ended with a crude turning of the causes of the Mumbai massacres on their head and the willful inversion of the antisemitic impulse onto the victims themselves. Since then this inversion seems to have gone upscale and multi-layered, and found a comfortable home in the liberal-left prediliction of regarding Jews and Israel at the heart of all global conflicts.
Engage founder and analyst Dave Hirsh peels back the layers of prejudice in his blog post below, while in a second article, novelist Howard Jacobson offers a powerful cautionary analysis of the incendiary quality of what Jeff Goldberg refers to as the judeocentric conspiratorial worldview.
DAVE HIRSH
On BBC radio’s Any Questions, Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Green Party was asked the following question (about four minutes in to programme):
“We’ve just seen over the past two days on the news about the terrorist attacks in India. This follows the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 7/7, the Madrid bombings, Bali bombings and many others. Can extremist ever be defeated.”
Here is her answer:
“Let me first say in response to the situation in Mumbai that it’s clearly a terrible act of terror, our thoughts are very much with the families there. It’s a criminal act and the perpetrators must be brought to justice. In terms of whether there is a way of defeating extremism, my answer very clearly would be not by military means. I think all the evidence we’ve seen from Iraq and Afghanistan right across the board that you don’t bring peace through the barrel of a gun. I think that when you see many people seeing that the war on terror hasn’t made us safer – it’s been interpreted by many as a war on Muslims and I think that’s enormously damaging. I think what we should be doing is looking at some of the root causes of some of the terrorist acts we see – not to condone it but I do think that we have to try to understand it, and I think that the situation in Palestine for example, with the ongoing Israeli occupation with the absolute strangulation of Gaza with this siege on Gaza – essentially this economic blockade – is really feeding so much anger right across the world and it means that there is more of a fertile breeding ground then for extremists to flourish. So I think that if we are to defeat extremism then we have to go to the root causes of it – we have to look in particular at how marginalised communities are being treated, we have to look in particular about countries like Palestine.”
Caroline Lucas says we need to “understand” but she doesn’t, herself, show any evidence of understanding. In the past, Lucas has claimed that Israel hides behind a bad faith accusation of antisemitism which it throws at “all who criticise its policies”. Now, Lucas is responding to a number of terrorist murders which include the antisemitic murder of Jews, targetted as Jews, with reference to what she calls the “strangulation of Gaza”.
This is a serious misrepresentation. Not primarily because “strangulation” is an inadequate description of what is going on in Gaza. But because even if it wasn’t, it would not explain why anger at Israeli policy was mystified into a racist anger against Jews.
Usually we hold racists and other bigots responsible for their hateful propaganda and their hateful actions. We understand racism as being a grossly unfair and unreasonable response to things that happen in the real world.
We don’t “understand” a woman wearing a short skirt as being one of the causes of her rape.
We don’t “understand” black kids’ involvement in street crime as being one of the causes of racism against black people.
And we don’t “understand” Israeli policy as being one of the causes of racism against Jews.
Caroline Lucas is right to want to try to “understand”. But she isn’t going to understand racism so long as she believes that racism against Jews is a trick, played by Israel against the world with the intention of covering their evil Jewish crimes.
Usually antiracists have little difficulty in condemning racism as being wholly wrong-headed and morally vile. Usually we don’t accept the reasons given by the racists for their hatred as being worthy of much serious consideration or “understanding”. Antisemitism should be no different. So why is it different for some antiracists?
ANOTHER ACT OF TERRORISM, ANOTHER ATTEMPT TO PLAY THE BLAME GAME
There is no hierarchy of the dead. The slaughtered are the slaughtered. This is not always what the slaughterers think. For those who kill in the name of religion their killing answers to deserts – a casual bullet in the face if you’re a poor Hindu, a more selective punishment if you’re American or British, a slow, luxuriating torture if you happen to be a Jew. In reward for which, their religion tells them, they themselves will be arranged according to degree in heaven: the more assiduous their killing in God’s name, the closer to His right hand they will sit. They are cruelly mistaken. No rewards await them in another world. Just as no restitution according to degree of suffering awaits their victims. In death there is no hierarchy.
So I mean nothing hierarchical when I talk about the Jewish victims of the Mumbai massacre. I sorrow no more for them than I do for the impoverished Bihari migrant workers waiting to catch trains home, innocent of any involvement in the mythical cause the gunmen had been brainwashed into believing they must kill for. I allude to the Jewish aspect of this tragedy, not because I am Jewish myself and know a little about the outreach programme in which the murdered Jews were involved – the provision of kosher food and a place of prayer for Jewish tourists in Mumbai – but because it bears on the blame game which, with the usual unseemly haste and ignorance, has already begun in this country.
As it was after 9/11 so it has been after Mumbai – hearts going out to the victims, necessity of bringing perpetrators to justice, blah blah, and in the same breath the moral exculpation of those perpetrators in one of those acts of “understanding” which in fact understand nothing but give the speaker the opportunity to inveigh piously against our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israel’s presence anywhere. Even before the bodies had been recovered from the towers, contributors to Question Time were laying the blame for 9/11on us. After Mumbai, before the blood on the streets had dried, they were doing the same on Any Questions?. It’s not the programmes’ fault. They merely hold the mirror up to nature. Though you might ask how the BBC always manages to have the appropriately sanctimonious speaker on hand to remind us that, whatever the calamity in whatever part of the world, we in the West in general, and Israel in particular, are responsible.
It was Caroline Lucas who, unlike the Bihari migrant workers, happened on this occasion to be in the right place at the right time. Caroline Lucas, should the name mean nothing to you, is the elfin leader of the Green Party. But she could, as far as attributing the usual culpability is concerned, have been anyone at that end of British politics. Reader, I could have gone on the programme and said what she said for her. To wit, Iraq and Afghanistan prove we can’t bring peace at the end of a gun (though it would seem that “understanding” can be found at the end of a terrorist’s gun), many people see the “war on terror” as a war on Muslims (a point that fails to distinguish between what people choose to “see” and what is the truth of the matter), and, in her actual words, “if we are to defeat extremism we have to go to the root causes of it – we have to look in particular at countries like Palestine”.
We are not unsubtle in this column. We understand that a simmering resentment will not always express itself rationally or fairly. In frustration, the angry often kill the wrong people in the wrong places. But to argue that Palestine fuelled the massacre at Mumbai, that the Hindu waiter shot in the forehead after serving water to a terrorist was paying for the inequities of Gaza, that he wasn’t already, in the eyes of that terrorist, expendable enough as an unbeliever, as one who had stolen Kashmir, or simply as a spot of target practice en route to a mad and misguided martyrdom, is not only preposterous, it is irresponsible.
I don’t doubt that the terrorists’ moral education included lessons about the vileness of Jews, along with lessons about the vileness of everyone else in the west, but we cannot be responsible for the lies people tell about us. Vileness of the Jews, note, not vileness of the Israelis. However carefully Caroline Lucas distinguishes between Jews and Israelis in her frequent newsletters and platform speeches on these and other “Green” issues; whatever her hurt at being accused of anti-Semitism when it is only a Jewish country, for God’s sake, and not Jews themselves she abominates – it would appear she has not succeeded in communicating this nice distinction to the Mumbai terrorists.
Frankly, my dear, they don’t give a damn. The Chabad Centre in Mumbai was a Jewish organisation, not an Israeli one. Its occupants were tortured and killed for being Jews, not for being complicit in the “strangulation” of Gaza, unless all Jews are held to be complicit in the strangulation of Gaza, in which case Caroline Lucas must be very careful where and in what language she lays blame. If she is right that the perception of a great wrong in Palestine motivates such murders as those in Mumbai, then it behoves her, as one who influences perception, to be scrupulous in her observations.
Scrupulous, I say, not discreet. I would not wish her, in caution’s name, to speak other than the truth. But truth is hard to find. I have visited Israel several times recently, making a documentary about Jesus, travelling in the company of Israelis of all parties and persuasions. The “Green” view is that there are good Israelis and bad Israelis, the good being those who oppose the occupation. Nothing could be more simplistic. I encountered extreme left-wingers who could not bear what their government was doing, but understood its sometime necessity; I met right-wingers who had no sympathy with settlers, and could not wait to live in peace with Palestinians; all wanted change, all were frightened, all loathed the naive, ahistoric sentimentalism that paints them as brutal invaders of a foreign land, and not as fellow combatants in a long and tragic struggle for safety and self-determination.
Whatever doesn’t tell that story is propaganda – the institution of a falsehood into truth. And propaganda, by Caroline Lucas’s own account, kills. Come the next massacre, when she is looking around for someone other than the perpetrators to blame, she might ask how much of their hatred she has stoked. When the world is a tinder box, it is a crime to play with matches.
