32 thoughts on “If You’ve Been Reading My antisemitism Posts, You Must Read This”

1. Ugh… This just strikes me as incred­i­bly sad. Some con­text: I’ve lived in Mozam­bique, trav­eled exten­sively in the region (quite a lot in Zim­babwe and a bit in South Africa), am prepar­ing a fel­low­ship pro­posal for study in South Africa, and have thought a lot about mov­ing my aca­d­e­mic career to Johan­nes­burg. This is applic­a­ble because: Here’s where my own priv­i­lege starts to become glar­ing. I can go to South Africa and feel safe.

   That said, there’s some­thing about South Africa that has always been fas­ci­nat­ing to me. That is, in the wake of apartheid they have the most osten­si­bly lib­eral con­sti­tu­tion in the world. Most peo­ple don’t don’t know this. As a polit­i­cal sci­en­tist, my focus was on South Africa, though, and this is well-known among schol­ars of com­par­a­tive pol­i­tics. South Africa was the first coun­try to legal­ize gay mar­raige. It has the great­est con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tions of women’s equal­ity in the world.

   And yet… Despite the instan­ti­a­tion of lib­eral rights (on a scale unprece­dented in other parts of the world), there are under­cur­rents of big­oted views that are not very far from the sur­face – even at the high­est level of South African pol­i­tics. Every­one remem­bers how Thabo Mbeki famously expressed pub­lic doubt that AIDS could have orig­i­nated in an African con­text because AIDS is a “gay dis­ease,” and “there are no gay Africans.” And given that South Africa has long had the high­est per capita num­ber of rapes in the world, it’s also clear that lib­eral rights haven’t uncon­di­tion­ally equal­ized the sta­tus of women.

   But as for this sit­u­a­tion: Many South Africans see a lot of par­al­lels between their his­tor­i­cal strug­gle and that of the Pales­tini­ans (And to an extent, this is jus­ti­fied, though if one wants to be his­tor­i­cally sen­si­tive, the com­par­i­son of Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries to ban­tus­tans is not com­pletely accu­rate or jus­ti­fi­able.). As such, it is not unheard of to hear “Zion­ists” used as a code for “Jews” in a way that makes it clear that the speaker is really think­ing “sup­porter of the South African National Party” as a code for “Afrikaner.” It’s not sur­pris­ing that this hap­pens. But it does, I will say, strike me as incred­i­bly sad. Not to men­tion, it’s ter­ri­bly unset­tling when words like that come from a polit­i­cal offi­cial. Oth­er­wise, I don’t know what to say, except: This is hor­rific. If she were one of my own polit­i­cal offi­cials, I would cer­tainly peti­tion that she lose her job. And I hope that’s what will hap­pen in this case.

2. There has been crit­icsm of Amer­i­can Jews for con­flat­ing Jews and Israel too much. Some of that crit­i­cism is deserved. It does hap­pen too much, and it’s a prob­lem. But we get it from both sides. When oppo­nents of Israel or Israeli poli­cies also con­flate Jews and Israel (which seems to me to hap­pen a lot), I think it makes a lot of Jews out­side Israel feel insecure/unsafe and that, in turn, makes them feel like they may need Israel some­day or makes them not want to crit­i­cize Israel. It’s a vicious circle.

3. ching­ona: Hon­estly, I’ve only crit­i­cized one per­son for doing that, but I can believe that this is prob­a­bly a trend that goes beyond just me. It’s not some­thing that I…actually hear very much (that is, the con­fla­tion of Jew­ish peo­ple and Israel). I can under­stand the his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship, but I don’t have much sym­pa­thy for essen­tial­ism on either side, to be hon­est. Also, I think it’s pos­si­ble to under­stand one’s his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship to the state of Israel with­out refer­ring to one­self as “Israeli” or using plural first per­son prepo­si­tions in dis­cussing Israeli state actions. To be clear.

4. Also, I think it’s pos­si­ble to under­stand one’s his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship to the state of Israel with­out refer­ring to one­self as “Israeli” or using plural first per­son prepo­si­tions in dis­cussing Israeli state actions. To be clear.

   Do you hear peo­ple do this a lot? I don’t, but I might not move in the right circles.

5. To clar­ify, what I was try­ing to get at in my first com­ment is that while I don’t think state­ments like the deputy for­eign minister’s jus­tify essen­tial­ism, there’s a per­cep­tion that those sen­ti­ments are either widely held or sim­ply won’t be con­demned on the pro-Palestinian left. Maybe that’s not a fair per­cep­tion, but when some­one in such a promi­nent role can say some­thing like that with­out any appar­ent sanc­tion, it enhances that perception.

6. My sen­ti­ment also (and per­haps ching­ona can cor­rect me if I’m off base) is that if Ms. Hajaig had replaced “Zion­ist” for “Jew” (“The con­trol of Amer­ica, just like the con­trol of most West­ern coun­tries, is in the hands of Zion­ist money and if Zion­ist money con­trols their coun­try then you can­not expect any­thing else.”) most Jews would not inter­pret the state­ment any dif­fer­ently. Which is not to say that “Jew” and “Zion­ist” are mutu­ally inclu­sive cat­e­gories, merely that when Zion­ist is used in that way, it comes off as code.

   The only dif­fer­ence, at least as far as I can see, is that Ms. Hajaig felt com­fort­able enough to drop the façade giv­ing her deni­a­bil­ity. Which is a very bad thing, but not because it makes the con­tent any worse so much as the sig­nal it sends about how warm Ms. Hajaig feels the water is for these sorts of sentiments.

7. ching­ona and David: Right, I see what you’re both say­ing. That would also be how I inter­preted it. I thought ching­ona was sug­gest­ing that the Left makes too big of a deal when Jew­ish peo­ple also con­flate Jews with Israel, and I assumed that this was a ref­er­ence to the threads of the past sev­eral days? So, I was try­ing to explain that I have a prob­lem with this too, of course. Maybe I mis­un­der­stood some­thing you said, chingona?

   Also, as far as “how warm the water is for these sort of sen­ti­ments.” It’s not my impres­sion that this is new in South Africa. I actu­ally read a book on this a few years ago, and now I’m blank­ing on the title… My first post was meant to put the South African exam­ple in some context.

8. Right, then, so here’s what ching­ona says:

   “There has been crit­icsm of Amer­i­can Jews for con­flat­ing Jews and Israel too much. Some of that crit­i­cism is deserved. It does hap­pen too much, and it’s a prob­lem. But we get it from both sides.”

   I only brought up essen­tial­ism because you made this point. Any­way, so this is clearer here:

   “while I don’t think state­ments like the deputy for­eign minister’s jus­tify essen­tial­ism, there’s a per­cep­tion that those sen­ti­ments are either widely held or sim­ply won’t be con­demned on the pro-Palestinian left. Maybe that’s not a fair per­cep­tion, but when some­one in such a promi­nent role can say some­thing like that with­out any appar­ent sanc­tion, it enhances that perception.”

   No, I don’t think it’s fair to assume that of every­one on what­ever con­sti­tutes “the pro-Palestinian left” believes this. I’m actu­ally still unclear on what you’re say­ing… Were you ref­er­enc­ing the past sev­eral threads or just refer­ring to this piece of news?

   My point was just: Yes, it makes sense how this might hap­pen among some Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties. Even so, I’m not okay with essen­tial­ism on either side (that is, with either side sug­gest­ing that Jews=Israelis=Zionists). And, no, I haven’t heard many Jew­ish peo­ple do this either, but… So, if we’re talk­ing about recent posts, I (and many oth­ers) thought David did and called that out. Sorry, David, not try­ing to use you as a punch­ing bag here. Just try­ing to fig­ure out what’s going on. In any case, I hadn’t planned on bring­ing this up – I thought it was what was being brought up?

9. Any­way, back to the topic… I would sug­gest that this kind of thing actu­ally con­sti­tutes what one could plau­si­bly call struc­tural anti­semitism. I am not con­vinced that some of the highly indi­vid­u­al­ized accounts of anti­semitism over the past few days would, but this kind of thing – a state offi­cial get­ting away with this kind of speech – would seem to fall into that category.

10. sorry, I’ll clar­ify. This sen­tence should read as follows:

    “I am not con­vinced that some of the highly indi­vid­u­al­ized accounts of anti­semitism [we’ve read in these var­i­ous threads] over the past few days would [be struc­tural in nature], but this kind of thing – a state offi­cial get­ting away with this kind of speech – would seem to fall into that category.”

11. Reread­ing my first com­ment, I expressed myself very poorly. I was in a hurry because I was at work. I’m still at work. I’ll explain bet­ter what I mean later. I just wanted to com­ment quickly before you spend any more energy pars­ing my state­ment. It may not be parsible in its cur­rent state.

    But I wasn’t really refer­ring just to you or just to David but more to a gen­eral sense from these posts and the Fem­i­niste dis­cus­sion and other dis­cus­sion on other blogs before any of had the plea­sure of each other’s company.

    So hang tight. I’ll be back later tonight to try to explain myself.

12. The other thing that struck me when I read Ms. Hajaig’s remarks was: What if she does get fired?

    Most of me would be very happy. But a small (but not insignif­i­cant) part of me is very ner­vous at the prospect.

    If Ms. Hajaig is fired, she’s not going to think “boy, I really must have said some­thing awful.” And I don’t think the folks who are sym­pa­thetic to her are going to be like “yeah, that state­ment was really out of line.” What was she talk­ing about? How Jew­ish influ­ence con­trols all. What hap­pens to her when she says it? She gets fired! To her and her allies, that’s not going to be repu­di­a­tion — it’ll be a data point.

    This was one of the points I was try­ing to get at with the hyper­power thing — it really boxes Jews in when stuff like this comes up, because the act of try­ing to mobi­lize and com­plain itself can be appro­pri­ated as proof of how we’re pulling the strings. It’s a prob­lem­atic dynamic; one I really don’t know how to break out of. And it’s some­thing that I feel bind­ing me when I want to do advo­cacy on issues like this.

    If Ms. Hajaig keeps her job, it’s proof that she was only say­ing what was right (or at least, jus­ti­fi­able), and the gov­ern­ment at least tac­itly con­curs (and bravely stand­ing up to the Jews in doing so). If Ms. Hajaig loses her job, it’s proof that she was right as well, and she is now a casu­alty of the all-mighty cabal. I think all told the for­mer is worse than the lat­ter, but either way, we’re going to take a hit.

13. So here’s what I meant to say the first time. You did mis­un­der­stand me a lit­tle, but I take full respon­si­bil­ity for that. I also mis­un­der­stood your response, which I think led to our rather baf­fling exchange above.

    Any­way …

    There’s a vari­ety of peo­ple who have posi­tioned them­selves as the offi­cial spokes­men of the Jew­ish peo­ple, and they go around act­ing like any crit­i­cism of Israel is an attack on the Jew­ish peo­ple. They’ve cheap­ened the accu­sa­tion of anti­semitism to the point that it’s lost all meaning.

    A lot of peo­ple are tired of this. They say, hey, we’re not attack­ing Jews, we’re crit­i­ciz­ing the actions of a government.

    And I agree that any­one should be able to crit­i­cize the actions of the Israeli gov­ern­ment, even very strongly, with­out it being con­sid­ered an attack on Jews.

    But when the rhetoric used to crit­i­cize Israel con­flates Jews and Israel or uses Zion­ist in a way that is clearly a code word for Jews, well, in that case crit­i­cism of Israel IS an attack on Jew­ish people.

    So while I don’t think the pres­ence of anti­se­mitic rhetoric on the left jus­ti­fies Amer­i­can Jews giv­ing uncon­di­tional sup­port to Israel, if rhetoric like that is either a) com­mon or b) allowed to slide as if there’s noth­ing wrong with it, I think the reluc­tance of a lot of Jews to openly crit­i­cize Israel (or crit­i­cize out­side of Jew­ish cir­cles) or openly ally with pro-Palestinian groups is some­what more under­stand­able, as is increased sus­pi­cion toward crit­i­cism of Israel. Because some of it is com­pletely legit­i­mate and some of it really is not, and it’s not always imme­di­ately obvi­ous which one you’re deal­ing with.

    Cir­cling back to David’s point, I agree with him that you can replace Jew­ish with Zion­ist in that quote and it’s still just about as bad, but she now has plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­ity. If you use Zion­ist in that quote, you have a pretty stan­dard crit­i­cism that I feel like I hear a lot (and I’m will­ing to con­cede that I may be over­sen­si­tive — the prob­lem­atic rhetoric may stand out more in my memory).

    None of this is to say that Zion­ism as an idea or Zion­ist as an adjec­tive should be out of bounds (in my opinion).

    But it is a really loaded word that means a lot of dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. The pos­si­bil­ity for mis­un­der­stand­ing is high, and I think big­ots exploit the ambi­gu­ity to say things they wouldn’t oth­er­wise be able to say. (And polit­i­cal hacks exploit the ambi­gu­ity to fake outrage.)

    Con­sider the dif­fer­ence in these two phrases: “Zion­ists con­trol the media” and “The U.S. media is biased toward Israel.” The first one sets me twitch­ing like crazy, but if I raise an objec­tion, I’ll likely get accused of play­ing the anti­semitism card. The lat­ter one is some­thing we can talk about, and not just because I think there’s a lot of valid­ity to that charge but also because it’s not phrased in such a way that I’m either forced into agree­ing with a nasty stereo­type about the group to which I belong or forced into turn­ing a dis­cus­sion about media bias into an accu­sa­tion of anti­semitism against the speaker.

    So that’s what I was try­ing to get at in the begin­ning, as well as respond­ing to some of the com­ments fol­low­ing it.

    So it wasn’t directed at you (or at your inter­ac­tion with David). I was aim­ing for a gen­eral obser­va­tion about a prob­lem that I thought this news item pro­vided a good exam­ple of.

    I guess my ques­tion for you, from your expe­ri­ence with Pales­tin­ian sol­i­dar­ity activism, is how do you think the audi­ence would respond if some­thing like what the deputy min­is­ter said were said at a rally in the U.S.? And how do you think they would respond if some­one said the same thing but used Zion­ist? How would it be received if some­one said it sit­ting around in a small group, in a conversation?

14. I think David’s last point is a good one.

15. And Kristin, I did appre­ci­ate the con­tex­tual infor­ma­tion about South Africa. It makes a lot of sense to me that black South Africans would feel a sense of con­nec­tion to the strug­gle of the Pales­tini­ans. I also have a vague sense that Israel was friendly with the apartheid régime, but per­haps they just sold them weapons. I don’t know where I picked up that idea, so it may be wrong. (Per­haps you know?)

16. ching­ona:

    I’ll have to answer quickly because I have to move on to teaching.

    “I also have a vague sense that Israel was friendly with the apartheid régime,”

    The short answer is that: Yes, it had a lot to do with weapons trad­ing. Through­out much of the ’60’s, Israel had been quite crit­i­cal of the apartheid régime, but the rela­tion­ship became friendly around weapons trade in the ’70’s and ’80’s. South Africa is well-known for hav­ing been a kind of pio­neer in mod­ern mer­ce­nary war­fare (Exec­u­tive Out­comes is the most well-known.), and the state of Israel was involved in help­ing them to orga­nize this indus­try. Also, the Israeli gov­ern­ment is alleged to have assisted the apartheid régime in devel­op­ing the nuclear bomb (I’ve seen this men­tioned in his­tory books, but hon­estly don’t know a lot of details.). The rela­tion­ship was fraught because many apartheid lead­ers – includ­ing the prime min­is­ter at that time – had been Nazi sym­pa­thiz­ers to the point of con­tribut­ing money to the Nazi régime (Even though I have a big prob­lem with the con­fla­tion of Israel with Nazi Ger­many, I think this rela­tion­ship is, in part, where it came from.). More cur­rently, the South African goven­r­ment main­tains friendly rela­tions with Israel, but its pub­lic offi­cials are known for polem­i­cal rhetoric against it.

    In any case, of course, the US gov­ern­ment was also involved in all of these things – and in par­tic­u­lar in some of the worst atroc­i­ties com­mited by the South African apartheid state (notably, for proxy war­fare in Angola and Mozam­bique through­out the dura­tion of the Cold War.).

    Any­way, you also asked:

    “I guess my ques­tion for you, from your expe­ri­ence with Pales­tin­ian sol­i­dar­ity activism, is how do you think the audi­ence would respond if some­thing like what the deputy min­is­ter said were said at a rally in the U.S.? And how do you think they would respond if some­one said the same thing but used Zion­ist? How would it be received if some­one said it sit­ting around in a small group, in a conversation?”

    So, it has been a few years since I lived in a com­mu­nity with a vibrant activist com­mu­nity, but… Basi­cally, I can’t speak for Pales­tin­ian sol­i­dar­ity activism as a whole. Rather, the group with which I was involved was a fairly equal mix of Mus­lim and Jew­ish stu­dents and com­mu­nity activists. And so: On the few occa­sions in which I heard these state­ments made (And it only hap­pened once or twice – always in sit­u­a­tions regard­ing one par­tic­u­lar per­son.), they were called out in con­ver­sa­tion. Which is, of course, a heart­en­ing trend. So, I never saw com­ments like that one go unchecked, no.

    That said… While I think it’s prob­lem­atic for any­one to say it, I do think it’s sig­nif­i­cant that the Left has vir­tu­ally no polit­i­cal power in the United States. It strikes me as far more alarm­ing when a state offi­cial gets away with some­thing like this than when some ran­dom eigh­teen year old activist har­bors these beliefs. Nei­ther is desir­able, but for a state offi­cial to get away with it – that would more clearly sug­gest a more struc­tural problem.

17. Also, to be hon­est, the only time I really ever heard such state­ments go (largely) unchecked was at an ANSWER rally. It’s a prob­lem at these func­tions, but then, it’s also use­ful to remem­ber that ANSWER is a pretty fringe-y orga­ni­za­tion itself – and one with a Lenin­ist ide­ol­ogy that isn’t taken par­tic­u­larly seri­ously. I stopped going after my under­grad years because of the extrem­ist ele­ments at those functions.

18. Kristin:

    A bit upthread, you wrote this:

    I am not con­vinced that some of the highly indi­vid­u­al­ized accounts of anti­semitism [we’ve read in these var­i­ous threads] over the past few days would [be struc­tural in nature], but this kind of thing – a state offi­cial get­ting away with this kind of speech – would seem to fall into that category.

    From what I remem­ber of the sto­ries, par­tic­u­larly in the Shar­ing Sto­ries thread on Alas, I gen­er­ally agree with you, but I think it’s also impor­tant to point out that some­thing can be struc­tural locally – i.e., in a school, in a town – with­out it being struc­tural at the national level. I am think­ing specif­i­cally, only because it comes to my mind eas­i­est, of my expe­ri­ence with the silence of my teach­ers when I was in grade school and with the inac­tion of my town regard­ing the anti­se­mitic graffiti.

    My rea­son for bring­ing this up is not to quib­ble about what is and is not struc­tural. I want to point out that, given the global reach of anti­semitism, struc­tural anti­semitism in, say, South Africa is likely to be expe­ri­enced as pretty threat­en­ing to Jews in other parts of the world as well, even if the threat is not imme­di­ately present at that level in their coun­tries; and it is threat­en­ing, in part, because the more sub­tle, local kinds of struc­tural anti­semitism are per­ceived by Jews as oppor­tu­ni­ties either to plug into the kinds of things we are talk­ing about in South Africa, or for the kinds of things we are talk­ing about in South Africa, should they come “here” (wher­ever “here” is) to plug into.

    (And while I do agree with you that some of the more indi­vid­u­al­ized expe­ri­ences of anti­semitism are not, strictly speak­ing, struc­tural in the sense that you are talk­ing about, they are cer­tainly struc­tur­ing of and struc­tured by the cul­ture in which we live. Well, there’s more I want to say about this, but I am look­ing at the clock and I need to run.)

19. Yes, what Richard said. I agree that there is no chance that any Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment offi­cial would ever say what Ms. Hajaig said (much less get away with it). And that’s a very good thing — but as much of a polit­i­cal junkie as a I am, not even I get to live my life in the Ray­burn build­ing. I live in par­tic­u­lar towns, and com­mu­ni­ties, and work at par­tic­u­lar offices and edu­cate myself at par­tic­u­lar schools.

    In some of these places, opin­ions like Ms. Hajaig’s are more salient than in oth­ers, and espe­cially when I’m going some­where new I really don’t know how salient they are. And to the extent the sen­ti­ments are live, they “link up” — what hap­pens to Ms. Hajaig in SA can be used by an ANSWER activist at UC to but­tress his argu­ment about the proper treat­ment of Jews in South Africa, at the Univ. of Chicago, and around the world. I’m glad that such opin­ions won’t get a strong hear­ing in the US Sen­ate — but that’s only some con­so­la­tion if it dri­ves me out of the employee lounge of my office.

20. I want to point out that, given the global reach of anti­semitism, struc­tural anti­semitism in, say, South Africa is likely to be expe­ri­enced as pretty threat­en­ing to Jews in other parts of the world as well, even if the threat is not imme­di­ately present at that level in their countries.

    I have a hard time see­ing anti­semitism as struc­tural in the same way as sex­ism or racism is struc­tural in this coun­try. On a day to day basis, being a woman has an infi­nitely larger impact on my life than being Jew­ish does. But the col­lec­tion of rel­a­tively minor anti­se­mitic inci­dents I have expe­ri­enced in my life have had a cumu­la­tive effect. There’s a nag­ging doubt, a seed of inse­cu­rity, and the soil it’s planted in is the whole arc of Jew­ish his­tory and my knowl­edge of just how bad anti­semitism can be. There’s an aspect there that can be unhealthy or unhelp­ful if we let it — I think we need to acknowl­edge the progress that’s been made, the ways in which things are dif­fer­ent than they were — but that his­tory is always there and it’s not going away.

    Adding to the inse­cu­rity is the rather unlikely places I have seen anti­semitism. I lived for two and a half years in Paraguay as a Peace Corps vol­un­teer. Paraguay has a very small Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion, con­cen­trated in the cap­i­tal, and while the com­mu­nity is gen­er­ally well-off, it’s not tied in with any polit­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant group in a way that would explain the exis­tence of anti­semitism. But it was not unusual to see graf­fiti say­ing “Hitler was right” or “Hitler should have fin­ished the job.” A lot of Nazis escaped to Paraguay after the war and were pro­tected by the gov­ern­ment. One Jew­ish vol­un­teer in a site very near me was vis­it­ing with a fam­ily in her com­mu­nity when one of the men asked if she wanted to see some­thing inter­est­ing. He dis­ap­peared into a room for what seemed like a long time, and he came out dressed in an impec­ca­bly pre­served, 100 per­cent com­plete SS uni­form. The bombs used to attack the Israeli Embassy and the Jew­ish Com­mu­nity Cen­ter in Buenos Aires in the mid-1990s almost cer­tainly were built by Hezbol­lah in Paraguay, but the Paraguayan gov­ern­ment did every­thing in its power to thwart Argen­tine inves­ti­ga­tors try­ing to pros­e­cute the case. Hezbol­lah con­tin­ues to engage in a lot of com­mer­cial activ­ity and arms traf­fick­ing there with no gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence. The dic­ta­tor in power for most of the sec­ond half of the 20^th cen­tury was eth­ni­cally Ger­man and a fas­cist, so he had his rea­sons, but Hezbol­lah is pro­tected by an eth­ni­cally Paraguayan and some­what demo­c­ra­tic government.

    Anti­semitism seems to exist in this dis­as­so­ci­ated state, as if it sprang from noth­ing, and that qual­ity makes it harder for me to be con­fi­dent that the progress Jews have made in the U.S. could not some­day be undone. I’m about 95 per­cent that we’ll be just fine, but I bring that extra 5 per­cent into every dis­cus­sion I have about this and into every half-conscious, split-second deci­sion I make about whether or not to reveal that I’m Jewish.

    I’m not try­ing to sug­gest that we have it “worse than” or “as bad as” any one of a dozen dif­fer­ent groups who still face more legal dis­crim­i­na­tion and open big­otry than Jew­ish peo­ple do in the United States today. I’m try­ing to explain why the lit­tle things mat­ter more than they might seem like they should.

21. Tan­gent: South Africa has some weird con­nec­tion to Paraguay. I met a num­ber of white South Africans there, most of them farm­ers, many of whom had left South Africa after the end of apartheid.

22. One more story, if you’ll for­give me, a story I had com­pletely for­got­ten about until after I wrote the above com­ment, that shows how these things can cir­cle around.

    Peace Corps and the vol­un­teer orga­ni­za­tion tra­di­tion­ally orga­nized a Thanks­giv­ing din­ner at hotel in a resort town about an hour out­side the cap­i­tal. Some­one came up with the idea of shift­ing the Thanks­giv­ing party to an area in the east of the coun­try, near some sig­nif­i­cant Jesuit mis­sion ruins, mostly as an excuse to give vol­un­teers who lived closer to the cap­i­tal an excuse to travel to another part of the coun­try. Every­one was pretty sup­port­ive of this idea, until the vol­un­teer orga­ni­za­tion announced the hotel where the din­ner would be held. Sev­eral Jew­ish vol­un­teers had stayed at this hotel in the past with their par­ents when their fam­i­lies had come to visit them. They had a seen a num­ber of things at the hotel that dis­turbed them, and they were fairly con­fi­dent that sev­eral old Nazi fugi­tives lived there full-time, shel­tered by the hotel owner, who was also Ger­man. This wasn’t based just on the nation­al­ity of the old men in ques­tion, but on a num­ber of things they had seen and heard said at this hotel. One fam­ily was so upset they left sooner than they had planned, which is a big­ger deal than it might seem because there aren’t a lot of nice places to stay in Paraguay.

    The Jew­ish vol­un­teers said they didn’t want to hold Thanks­giv­ing at this hotel, partly because they wouldn’t feel com­fort­able there and partly because they didn’t want to give a sub­stan­tial amount of money to some­one they believed was har­bor­ing war criminals.

    The reac­tion of the non-Jewish vol­un­teers was that the Jew­ish vol­un­teers were being over­sen­si­tive and “ruin­ing” Thanks­giv­ing for every­one else by rais­ing these absurd con­cerns. The dis­cus­sion devolved until a few vol­un­teers were actu­ally scream­ing at the Jew­ish vol­un­teers who had raised the objec­tions that they were racist against Germans.

    In the end, we had Thanks­giv­ing at the usual place, and it was fine. So I sup­pose the Jew­ish side “won,” and to be fair, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of non-Jewish vol­un­teers felt that if the Jew­ish vol­un­teers felt that strongly, it wasn’t worth it to stick with the plan. But there also was a fair amount of resent­ment toward the vol­un­teers who had objected.

    This was among a group that was almost entirely made up of peo­ple who iden­tify as lib­eral or pro­gres­sive. I know that many of us spoke up when­ever Paraguayans expressed big­otry toward native peo­ple or toward blacks or toward gays (all of which occurred fre­quently). But when the Jew­ish vol­un­teers had a prob­lem spend­ing their Thanks­giv­ing with real, actual Nazis, the gen­eral reac­tion was that they were just being a pain in the ass.

23. chig­ona — thanks for com­ment #22.

    I have a lot more to say but thanks is going to have to be it for now.

24. Eva … you’re wel­come? I guess I’ll have to wait to find out what I did right.

    Richard … I can paste them over there. The first one doesn’t seem to quite fit with the pro­posal for the thread, but if you want it there, I’ll put it there.

25. Richard, about that update. One, I think the lead of the arti­cle is a bit mis­lead­ing. A Jew­ish civil rights group in South Africa has filed a com­plaint, and it’s been received by the com­mis­sion. Two, the com­ments on the arti­cle are almost to a one full of really vile anti­semitism, many of which illus­trate David’s point about how com­bat­ing anti­semitism just con­vinces some that the Jews con­trol everything.

    The com­ments include this gem, to which the writer was not even embar­rassed to sign his name:

    jack thom­sen wrote:
    My Russ­ian grand­fa­ther hated Jews. He said Bol­she­vik Russ­ian Jews mur­dered 20 mil­lion Rus­sians, yet made movies that told us they were the vic­tims of a holocaust.

    I’ve watched this tiny minor­ity manip­u­late my coun­try, my gov­ern­ment, media and acad­e­mia since childhood.

    Per­haps now, Amer­ica can free her­self from this menace.

    My grandpa would be proud of my let­ter, but fear of those same Jews will send this mis­sive to the recy­cle bin.

    And they won­der why they are hated?

    Or this:

    Can speak­ing the truth right­fully be included in anti-Semitism? If so, it would seem that anti-Semitism is some­times one’s duty. Why should South Africa pun­ish some­one for doing her duty?

26. And it’s not just that some peo­ple on the Inter­net wrote a bunch of offen­sive stuff. It’s that the Sun-Times has a func­tion that allows read­ers to report inap­pro­pri­ate com­ments, and either no read­ers found this stuff big­oted enough to be worth report­ing, or the com­ments were reported and the Sun-Times doesn’t con­sider them bad enough to remove.

27. ching­ona:

    I had not even thought to look at the com­ments, but I just went to look and some com­ments have been removed and I reported a bunch of them just to seem what happens.

28. I nearly didn’t look, either, and then I was sorry I did. Where I live in the South­west, on-line news­pa­per com­ments are a total cesspool of anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant sen­ti­ment. At my own paper, I think for far too long we hardly inter­vened at all, allow­ing a really vile cul­ture to flour­ish in our own forum. Some­one had to basi­cally say that all Mex­i­cans should be killed before a com­ment would be removed. Finally a few His­panic employ­ees col­lected sev­eral hun­dred pages of print-outs of com­ments and sent them to cor­po­rate with a very well done let­ter ask­ing the exec­u­tives how they, as Latin@s, were sup­posed to feel about their employer vol­un­tar­ily pro­vid­ing a forum for these views. Now any thread related to immi­gra­tion or crime is very heav­ily mod­er­ated. It’s still bad, but not as bad. The equiv­a­lent of the first one I cited would come off, but the equiv­a­lent of the sec­ond one prob­a­bly would not.

29. But any­way, my big-picture point is that David is right that inci­dents of anti­semitism in another coun­try, far away, that don’t seem to have any­thing to do with our own coun­try, can con­nect to sen­ti­ments here. And of course, if the charm­ing man with the Russ­ian grand­fa­ther sees his com­ment removed, it will be one more exam­ple of how Jews con­trol every­thing and will not brook any criticism.

30. Pingback: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » What We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) When We Talk About (And Don’t Talk About) antisemitism and Israel - 5

31. ching­ona–

    These two sto­ries you have told would go great on the anti­se­mitic sto­ries post on Alas. Do you mind if I link them? Or if you want just to copy and paste?

32. ching­ona: I think post them both over at Alas. I think the bit in the first story about see­ing the graf­fiti is rel­e­vant over there; the rest of what you say in that com­ment pro­vides context.