Let's try this again. You know we couldn't stay away. Even if this author weren't a bug in the light for controversial issues, this gets at the heart of this whole event and to ignore it is a break in integrity. This post will not be the barnburner the title implies, but it will be controversial in a completely different way.
The answer, at least in the West, is either that it's nearly everybody you know, or it's a relatively small group of people you know. There is no real in between answer. And likewise, the only way to answer this question is either to do it extremely pithily, or take it into extreme depth. There's no in between answer, so any answer I give here will be incredibly inadequate. How do I answer a question which an entire field of scholarship has covered exhaustively and still, every writer takes issue with every other writer's answer (the writers are mostly Jews after all...)?
Even the very word 'anti-Semite' is extremely misleading in ways that I'm a little queasy about admitting. The very word 'Semite' refers to peoples who speak Semitic languages: which includes both Jews AND Arabs.
I worry that people could read that and see an admonition that Jews use this to pull the wool over everybody's eyes about the true extent of prejudice against Arabs and Muslims. I implore you, do not interpret it that way. Antisemitism is, so far as we know, the world's oldest racial prejudice. The term 'antisemitism' was coined in the 19th century and this term only makes sense in a period when Europeans still encountered Jews far more often than Arabs, but why did it take so long to have a term for a prejudice powerful nations held for more than three-thousand years? The only logical answer is that before 1800, barely anybody realized there was anything shameful in antisemitism.
Whereas, though we think of Europeans as having colonized the Middle East for centuries, the truth is that while colonialism in the Middle East was always an enormous problem, European colonization of the Middle East was a relatively brief period. For most of modern history, the Middle East was colonized by the Turks (Ottomans), in other words: fellow Muslims - who also colonized a significant portion of Europe. That does not mean that Europe didn't have designs on the Middle East for a millennium, or that Europe's colonization elsewhere wasn't exactly as awful as advertised, but unless you include the Crusader kingdoms of Jerusalem and Tripoli as part of modern European imperialism, the only Middle Eastern country that was colonized by Europe for more than 100 years was Algeria. For most of their history, Arab nations were either colonized by fellow Muslims, or were the colonizers themselves.
Let there be no doubt, today's Arabs are victims of overwhelming Western prejudice, and as they're ever more forced by Middle Eastern war and climate change to emigrate northward, the prejudice against them will only increase, quite possibly by an exponent. But the Arab peoples, like all of us, are actors in history, and the same rules of history apply to them as apply to us all.
For years, I've been gradually making my way through David Nirenberg's book length study: 'Anti-Judaism and the Western Tradition.' His argument is a little complicated, but once understood (if I understand it...), it's both kind of ridiculous and nevertheless hard to refute: the argument is that over Western history, society after society baked antisemitism into the foundations of their very identities, and grew to define themselves as everything which they perceived Jews are not. Nobody knows why, but they grew to perceive in Jews the greatest impediment to solving their very particular problems, and see themselves as fighting to administer the antidote to the societal disease Jews cause.
I could try to take you like Nirenberg through society after society and show the process of how this happened, and I have my own theories that build on his in addition to having big reservations about it, but that would expend much too great an effort to elaborate, and history is not the issue in question: the issue in question is now, and here, and us.
So to talk about us, there are three-and-a-half questions in play:
1. Who's an antisemite? The answer, at least among people I know, is just a few people.
2. Who harbors antisemitic beliefs? The answer, so far as I'm concerned, is the majority of people I know.
3. Which people harbor antisemitic notions that are benign, and which harbor antisemitic notions that are malignant?
We can dispense with questions 1 and 2 pretty quickly, but the answer will be very objectionable to a lot of people:
The problem with the 'who's an antisemite' debate is little different than the problem with debating who is a racist. The longer and more heated debate gets, the further we get from an answer. Both questions are more or less impossible to answer unless people make statements that are unmistakably bigoted, but the more people are provoked by accusations of being a bigot, the more entrenched they grow in the beliefs they already have.
It will be easier to understand if we start from the race side: the more that intersectional progressives require a checklist of antiracist beliefs in order to kosher fellow humans as not racist, the more the lay conservative public grows entrenched in believing themselves not racist, and the more susceptible they grow to racist beliefs that are particularly malignant. And simultaneously, the more answers progressives get from the general public they don't like, the more they see racism baked into society. The answer is that, of course, the lay public has many, many racist beliefs, they always have and they always will.
But the question we should ask is not whether society has racist beliefs, it's whether society's racist beliefs exist at the surface, or are the beliefs kept on an unconscious, subterranean level of racist implications, which is where they belong; and by drawing attention to them and making those beliefs conscious we are drawing most of them closer and closer to conscious racism.
The problem with Nirenberg's book is that it's basically the argument for 'structural racism' but with the object in question being Jews rather than peoples of color. In both cases, there is a wide variety of structural prejudice, but the structure is so deep that it's impossible to get rid of: it exists at the level of neurology, not society, and once pruned, it simply grows back in a new form. This doesn't mean it shouldn't be fought against, but it does mean that just like in war, if fought against too indiscriminately, you should expect the eventual counter-response to be much stronger. (pro-Israel crowd take note...)
What this means for Israel is pretty simple. Yes, traditional antisemitism has grown back in the form of antizionism, and there is deep antisemitism implied in much criticism of Israel, but the majority of it is just implication, not intent, and assuming that the people who criticize Israel intend to be antisemitic, or even that they are at heart antisemitic, provokes them to embrace more extreme anti-Israel arguments, which genuine antisemites find extremely useful to provoke people until they become antisemitic in intent, and indulge in actions that are deeply antisemitic.
So this brings us to question #3, and this is why, as I grow older, I grow as weary of arguments that assume antisemitism in the arguments of most Israel criticism as I am of arguments that assume racism in most criticism of American minorities.
Yes, of course there are plenty of antisemitic and racist implications in criticism of both, but implication is not intent, and what is particularly maddening is that on either side of this debate is that it's the same extremists who see one of the two everywhere that are the most flagrant perpetrators of the other. And there are many on either side.
In neither case are these extremists necessarily racists or antisemites, but their beliefs are deeply mistaken, and deeply, deeply dangerous.
But we're here to talk about antisemitism, not racism. So in the second and hopefully last part, we will delve into exactly what is antisemitic in intent and what is antisemitic only by implication.
The answer, at least in the West, is either that it's nearly everybody you know, or it's a relatively small group of people you know. There is no real in between answer. And likewise, the only way to answer this question is either to do it extremely pithily, or take it into extreme depth. There's no in between answer, so any answer I give here will be incredibly inadequate. How do I answer a question which an entire field of scholarship has covered exhaustively and still, every writer takes issue with every other writer's answer (the writers are mostly Jews after all...)?
Even the very word 'anti-Semite' is extremely misleading in ways that I'm a little queasy about admitting. The very word 'Semite' refers to peoples who speak Semitic languages: which includes both Jews AND Arabs.
I worry that people could read that and see an admonition that Jews use this to pull the wool over everybody's eyes about the true extent of prejudice against Arabs and Muslims. I implore you, do not interpret it that way. Antisemitism is, so far as we know, the world's oldest racial prejudice. The term 'antisemitism' was coined in the 19th century and this term only makes sense in a period when Europeans still encountered Jews far more often than Arabs, but why did it take so long to have a term for a prejudice powerful nations held for more than three-thousand years? The only logical answer is that before 1800, barely anybody realized there was anything shameful in antisemitism.
Whereas, though we think of Europeans as having colonized the Middle East for centuries, the truth is that while colonialism in the Middle East was always an enormous problem, European colonization of the Middle East was a relatively brief period. For most of modern history, the Middle East was colonized by the Turks (Ottomans), in other words: fellow Muslims - who also colonized a significant portion of Europe. That does not mean that Europe didn't have designs on the Middle East for a millennium, or that Europe's colonization elsewhere wasn't exactly as awful as advertised, but unless you include the Crusader kingdoms of Jerusalem and Tripoli as part of modern European imperialism, the only Middle Eastern country that was colonized by Europe for more than 100 years was Algeria. For most of their history, Arab nations were either colonized by fellow Muslims, or were the colonizers themselves.
Let there be no doubt, today's Arabs are victims of overwhelming Western prejudice, and as they're ever more forced by Middle Eastern war and climate change to emigrate northward, the prejudice against them will only increase, quite possibly by an exponent. But the Arab peoples, like all of us, are actors in history, and the same rules of history apply to them as apply to us all.
For years, I've been gradually making my way through David Nirenberg's book length study: 'Anti-Judaism and the Western Tradition.' His argument is a little complicated, but once understood (if I understand it...), it's both kind of ridiculous and nevertheless hard to refute: the argument is that over Western history, society after society baked antisemitism into the foundations of their very identities, and grew to define themselves as everything which they perceived Jews are not. Nobody knows why, but they grew to perceive in Jews the greatest impediment to solving their very particular problems, and see themselves as fighting to administer the antidote to the societal disease Jews cause.
I could try to take you like Nirenberg through society after society and show the process of how this happened, and I have my own theories that build on his in addition to having big reservations about it, but that would expend much too great an effort to elaborate, and history is not the issue in question: the issue in question is now, and here, and us.
So to talk about us, there are three-and-a-half questions in play:
1. Who's an antisemite? The answer, at least among people I know, is just a few people.
2. Who harbors antisemitic beliefs? The answer, so far as I'm concerned, is the majority of people I know.
3. Which people harbor antisemitic notions that are benign, and which harbor antisemitic notions that are malignant?
We can dispense with questions 1 and 2 pretty quickly, but the answer will be very objectionable to a lot of people:
The problem with the 'who's an antisemite' debate is little different than the problem with debating who is a racist. The longer and more heated debate gets, the further we get from an answer. Both questions are more or less impossible to answer unless people make statements that are unmistakably bigoted, but the more people are provoked by accusations of being a bigot, the more entrenched they grow in the beliefs they already have.
It will be easier to understand if we start from the race side: the more that intersectional progressives require a checklist of antiracist beliefs in order to kosher fellow humans as not racist, the more the lay conservative public grows entrenched in believing themselves not racist, and the more susceptible they grow to racist beliefs that are particularly malignant. And simultaneously, the more answers progressives get from the general public they don't like, the more they see racism baked into society. The answer is that, of course, the lay public has many, many racist beliefs, they always have and they always will.
But the question we should ask is not whether society has racist beliefs, it's whether society's racist beliefs exist at the surface, or are the beliefs kept on an unconscious, subterranean level of racist implications, which is where they belong; and by drawing attention to them and making those beliefs conscious we are drawing most of them closer and closer to conscious racism.
The problem with Nirenberg's book is that it's basically the argument for 'structural racism' but with the object in question being Jews rather than peoples of color. In both cases, there is a wide variety of structural prejudice, but the structure is so deep that it's impossible to get rid of: it exists at the level of neurology, not society, and once pruned, it simply grows back in a new form. This doesn't mean it shouldn't be fought against, but it does mean that just like in war, if fought against too indiscriminately, you should expect the eventual counter-response to be much stronger. (pro-Israel crowd take note...)
What this means for Israel is pretty simple. Yes, traditional antisemitism has grown back in the form of antizionism, and there is deep antisemitism implied in much criticism of Israel, but the majority of it is just implication, not intent, and assuming that the people who criticize Israel intend to be antisemitic, or even that they are at heart antisemitic, provokes them to embrace more extreme anti-Israel arguments, which genuine antisemites find extremely useful to provoke people until they become antisemitic in intent, and indulge in actions that are deeply antisemitic.
So this brings us to question #3, and this is why, as I grow older, I grow as weary of arguments that assume antisemitism in the arguments of most Israel criticism as I am of arguments that assume racism in most criticism of American minorities.
Yes, of course there are plenty of antisemitic and racist implications in criticism of both, but implication is not intent, and what is particularly maddening is that on either side of this debate is that it's the same extremists who see one of the two everywhere that are the most flagrant perpetrators of the other. And there are many on either side.
In neither case are these extremists necessarily racists or antisemites, but their beliefs are deeply mistaken, and deeply, deeply dangerous.
But we're here to talk about antisemitism, not racism. So in the second and hopefully last part, we will delve into exactly what is antisemitic in intent and what is antisemitic only by implication.
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