Anti-Semitism is a fact of life. After the recent bashing of Melbourne Orthodox Jew Menachem Vorchheimer, debate has re-surfaced regarding its prevalence in Australia. I have long argued, not unlike Norman Finkelstein, that whenever Israel faces increased international pressure or condemnation, the cry of “anti-Semitism” is heard from the Jewish community. Bashing Jews because they are Jewish is clearly anti-Semitic. Damning Israeli policies is usually not.
The Geelong Advertiser examined this issue last Saturday (page 1 is here page1.PDF and page 2 is here page2.PDF)
“F**king Jews” and “Go the Nazis”,
Do you really think Antony that these Australian Rules football players were reacting to Israel and Lebanon.
Jews are 1.4% of the population of the US, Muslims 0.6%.
USA religious attacks
2005, 68.5% anti-Jewish, 11.1% anti-Islamic
2004, 67.8% anti-Jewish, 13% anti-Islamic
2003, 69.2% anti-Jewish, 10.9% anti-Islamic
2002, 65.3% anti-Jewish, 10.5% anti-Islamic
2001, 55.7% anti-Jewish, 27.2% anti-Islamic
1995, 82.8% anti-Jewish, 2.2% anti-Islamic
It would seem that there is no need to complain about increasing attacks on Jew in the USA, it never stops. What is interesting about those stats, apart from the disproportionate number of Jews attacked, is the reduction in percentage with the increase in attacks on Muslims. Could conclude from that that hate criminals just run with any excuse to attack, and some have transferred their violence to Muslims.
This is the USA though which has always been more tolerant of Jews than Europe. Occasionally Europe admits, even France, that anti-Semitism is coming back in strength.
And yet in India.
“India is home to several communities of Jews. There have been no anti-Semitic incidents from other Indians in the nearly 3-millenium history of Indian Jewry.”
Why aren’t there some Indians who hate “Zionism” and Israel? Maybe it is because they don’t hate Jews.
To believe that Jews get attacked so much because of Israel, not because they are Jews requires one to believe that an extremely anti-Semitic Europe abandoned a millenniums long meme of anti-Semitism at the end of WW2, and took up a new meme, anti-Zionism. A more logical conclusion is that the meme of anti-Semitism morphed into anti-Zionism. A good reason for assuming that the meme has merely changed its name is that now it is Zionists that supposedly control the world’s finances and media etc. (Your mate Margo for one). The reasons for hating Jews are the same as the reasons for hating “Zionists”. Both are considered murderers, thieves and conspirators. Possibly new is that now they are also stealing land. Europe has never considered that Jews should be allowed to own land. And the ME has adopted the same meme. Jordan for one has legislated to that effect.
The fact that there are disproportionate attacks against Jews, not Zionists, says that even if the intellectual elite are sincere in their dislike of the political ideology of Zionism and the existence of a state called Israel, those who are attacking Jews are making no such distinctions. Hence what Israel does is not the point, it is any excuse to hate a Jew that drives the violent. Or nasty violent Aussie Rules footballers.
You claim that the waves of attacks on Jews, and hence the attack on Menachem Vorchheimer is because of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, not because of that eons old disease anti-Semitism. So you can conceive therefore of this same mob of bullies, on passing a Chinese family walking down the street would attack them because of the illegal and brutal occupation of Tibet by China. That they would shout “f…cking Chinese’ and “go the Japanese”.
If you didn’t mean to imply that he got attacked by these oafs because of Israel, rather that he was attacked for being Jewish, say so and sincerely condemn, rather than excuse the violence. Just the reality? A fact of life. I think you could understand if Menachem didn’t want to invite you around to his home. That he might suspect you of using his attack to promote your views about Israel and Australian Jews, rather than feel any compassion for him, or empathy for the fear with which he and his family must now live.
There is no justification for attacking an Australian because he was identifiable as Jewish. Israel is the excuse, not the reason.
It is hard to understand how you could have grown up here and never grasped the fidelity, fecundity and longevity of the anti-Semitic meme in this country for one. Or never wondered if this malevolent meme has ensured its fidelity, fecundity and longevity, in the face of human embarrassment at the Holocaust, by changing its name.
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A meme refers only to a cognitive pattern that replicates for it’s own sake.
Israeli racism is real.
Israel’s apartheid policy, racial purity laws and ethnic cleansingpractices are real.
There is absolutely no ethcial justification for Zionism – a eugenic, religious and racial supremacist methylation of Darwin and Deuteronomy.
Anti-Zionism is not a meme: it is a moral obligation.
(note: the term meme was created by the anti-theist Richard Dawkins as an explanatory metaphor to help undermine skydaddy worship and other tragic faith-based tendencies – it doesn’t help to use the term in defense of a religious state – au contraire….)
Dawkin says that the original mission of the meme was a negative one, but not “as an explanatory metaphor to help undermine skydaddy worship and other tragic faith-based tendencies”. Rather it was coined as representing another kind of Replicator, to reinforce his argument that the gene was only a special case in the general process that he dubbed “Universal Darwinism”.
He also says of memes, “that gangs of mutually compatible memes – coadapted meme complexes or memeplexes – are found cohabiting in individual brains. This is not because selection has chosen them as a group, but because each separate member of the group tends to be favoured when its environment happens to be dominated by others.”
It may be the case that you believe that Israel is a racist state, that it is so because of Zionism, and hence it is a moral obligation to oppose it (Zionism, Israel?). Not sure which particular version of anti-Zionism you adhere to, the physical destruction of Israel and the death or expulsion of its Jewish inhabitants, or that Israel ought to be voluntarily transformed into a state in which Jews and Palestinians live together as equals. However the footy players who are the example discussed in this post are, I have no doubt, commanded by a group of mutually compatible genes that revolve around anti-Semitism, not the belief that Israel should become Palestine and its actions in Lebanon serve as proof of that necessity.
That Dawkins considers religion a virus is not what memes are about. I wouldn’t object to that view of religion, but then it is just another cultural system for me, just another natural phenomena, which leads to Dennett. Dennett’s view of memes which suggests that they “could create genuine differences in morals between cultures, perhaps even to the level of changing the basic tenets of morality”
The arguments that occur here could suggest that even within cultures there are genuine differences.
Anti-Zionism is your moral obligation, my morality obliges me to defend the Jews and their right to live in the nation-state of Israel.
But anti-Zionism does not excuse the abuse of individuals for being Jewish, or explain it.