Exordium!
Friends have asked for my reaction to Ilhan Omar, Jeremy Corbyn, and the whole issue of left antisemitism in politics. And I kept putting it off, because the more I considered it, the more comprehensive I felt any worthwhile answer had to be. My response stretched beyond what a Facebook post could reasonably hold, and so I’ve decided to do it as a DailyKos diary instead.
As usual, let me start somewhere off track. I promise, I'm leading to something. Warning: contains opinions.
Here's what sci-fi used to look like. You've got a shirtless hero with trapezius muscles so defined he could open beer bottles with their edges, a bearded and bald villain, and a helpless blonde in a bikini you'll note is cleverly made of animal pelts to keep her warm. Also two, count 'em two, whips. Maybe if I ever read the story —"Tyrant and Slave-Girl on Planet Venus" is the very on-the-nose title it was published under — I'd have a better idea about why they're all wearing Venusian mukluks. But you can see that in 1951 we're still not very far from the "weird menace" pulp genre of the 1930s which at its best gave us H. P. Lovecraft but at its worst pandered this kind of torture-porn.
The writers in this issue include Fritz Leiber, not yet famous enough to deserve a first name, "and others." One of those others as it happens was Arthur C. Clarke, with a story called "The Sentinel." I've got a footnote about this story, though some of you won't need it. ("John Beynon," if you’re curious, is a pseudonym of the spectacularly named John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, who from that phalanx of possibilities drew "John Wyndham" when he published "The Day of the Triffids.")
Arthur C. Clarke didn't stay in the sci-fi ghetto long. In 1951, he also had the good fortune of having a non-fiction book —"The Exploration of Space"— selected by the Book of the Month Club. And by 1960, he had acquired enough of a literary reputation to land a story in one of the elusive, well-paying slicks: Playboy. The story is "I Remember Babylon."
And I decided I can't talk about antisemitism and politics without going back to this story.
Clarke tells the story in first person, as himself, and loads in some biographical details of the life he was then living in Ceylon before it renamed itself Sri Lanka. At first, he gives us a rough guide to his coping strategies when invited to boring Ceylonese embassy events, where he of necessity did too much of something he didn’t enjoy, small talk with strangers.
But then he meets someone who very, very much wants to talk with him.
Geeks will already know that Clarke is generally credited with putting two and two together about artificial satellites. Clarke didn't invent the geosynchronous orbit -- the idea is already implicit in Kepler's laws in the early 1600s -- but he's credited with suggesting in 1945 the first reasonable use case for actually orbiting something: a convenient radio relay point. It’s a 1960 story, so we are in the interval between Sputnik and Telstar I.
The stranger has something he’s positively bursting to tell Clarke about communication satellites. Finally, worn down by the implacable assault, Clarke submits.
The stranger turns out to be a fanatic Marxist, who is working with the Russians and the Chinese in a joint effort to destroy America the inexpensive way. The plan: orbit a television relay over the US, giving coast-to-coast coverage of an unjammable television signal. But not for Radio Moscow-style propaganda; no one would tune in. Instead, this was going to be primal, lowest-common-denominator stuff, aimed straight at the id, absolutely free of the possibility of governmental or corporate censorship. This was going to be stuff you don’t want the neighbors to know you’re watching. The propaganda would be subtle but constant.
To subdue a nation, grab it by the id. Not to enforce certain thoughts … but to expedite their possibility, to provide seeds and fertilizer. Because a mind goes where it goes, especially when the path has been somehow paved and polished for it beforehand. That is what the satellite was for: paving mental paths.
And they would choose the paths. Not brainwashing per se, just a constant leeching of poisons into the mental ground water.
Now let’s have another look at that pulp cover. Because there’s something else going on there besides the engineering inanity of a fur bikini. Because the three figures are ... ethnic. The hero is Greco-Roman, looking as if he’s off to the chariot races as soon as this villain is sorted. Foreign, but good-foreign. Whereas the villain is some sort of amalgamated Asiatic Turkish, some sort of a Silk Road Warrior. Foreign, but bad-foreign. The pulps obviously didn’t treat Asians kindly — Fu Manchu, his cut-rate knock-off Wu Fang, and such. (The always-curvaceous Asian women did better, but only — like Shylock’s Jessica — by back-stabbing dad.) And the Scandinavian-ish blonde is … a Scandinavian-ish blonde.
Pulp science fiction was largely a collision of conventions, and that unsurprisingly included racial conventions. Why? Because these zhlubs at the typewriters were being paid by the word, and lazy archetypes got the bills just as paid as ornately nuanced psychologies would, and were easier to pour out under deadline. Exposition and backstory? Why bother? It’s all in this guy’s DNA, this bald guy with the goatee and the pelt-belt. What more is there to know?
The pulp writers were simply trotting down a road that had been well paved for them by hundreds of years of racial stereotyping. Beats thinking.
By now you should be getting a clue where I’m going with this.
So, Jews. A brief bigoted history.
Medieval Jews: the “Synagogue of Satan,” and Satan’s conspiring agents on earth, murdering Christian babies to use their blood in strange Passover rituals. Borat sang “Throw the Jew Down the Well” knowing — as his audience likely didn’t — that such things literally happened. Why? Because the Jews, as agents of Satan, were conspiring to destroy the nation, to destroy Christianity, and to literally enslave mankind, by deceiving them, by seducing them, selling them into service to The Big Red Guy for thirty pieces of silver. They are not of us, only among us, and they care only about themselves. To oppose the Jews is everyone’s spiritual duty. They must be destroyed.
Then to “Protocols”— a work hacked together by the Tsar’s secret police from other identifiable nutbar works of fantasy. The Jews are still having their secret conspiring meetings, no longer in a synagogue but in the cemetery across the street from one. Their supernatural power now? Unlimited wealth, bottomless wealth, all for pernicious but purely destructive purposes. To buy out the press and control the gentile mind. To buy out governments and control the gentile body while plundering their wealth. To rule the world. It’s about literally enslaving mankind, deceiving them, seducing them, selling them into service to the Elders, the Jewish conspiracy that runs the world. They are not of us, only among us, and they are not loyal to our nation. To oppose the Jews is everyone’s national duty. They must be destroyed.
Then the Nazis. Jews, conspiracy, secret meetings, unlimited wealth, pernicious and purely destructive purposes, baby killers, seducing the German with sexually degeneracy, deceiving the German, owning the press, owning the banks, owning the governments, stabbing Germany in the back. They cry “victim” even as they victimize you. They are not of us, only among us, and they are not loyal to our nation. To oppose the Jews is everyone’s national duty, and economic duty, and moral duty, and cultural duty. They must be destroyed.
All of them different cars, but rolling down the same road: well paved, well known, well mapped, polished by a thousand years of traffic. Well-entrenched bigotries don’t disappear, really. They just morph.
You know what’s wrong in the Mideast? The Zionists. I hate them, hate them, hate them. They control our government’s policy, they use their PACs with their unlimited wealth to buy candidates, buy elections, and silence the opposition. They run the media too, intentionally deceiving the country; they are princes of lies. They are not merely wrong, not merely misguided, but actually evil. Not wrong, evil. Zionism is an evil to be eradicated. Zionists cry “victim” as they shoot Palestinians. It’s every progressive’s political duty to destroy Zionism, the political expression of Jewish nationhood. They’re not loyal Americans; their true allegiance is not to the US but to Israel. The only real solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict is to end the Jewish state: Palestine must be free from the river to the sea, where “free” is defined as “anything but a Jewish state.” We must destroy the Zionist monster.
But wait, Zemblan! Aren’t you just saying that criticism of Israel or ZIonism is antisemitic? Because fuck off with that if you are.
No, I’m saying something else, which is this.
The question is: is criticism of Israel or Zionism antisemitic?
My answer is: is criticism of hip hop racist?
Anyone smarter than their own doorknobs will know the answer to that one: depends on the criticism. If you’ve said something about hip hop that draws heavily and repeatedly on the classic standard memes of racism deployed against African Americans, then no, you don’t get to hide behind “but but but I was only criticizing music, how could that be racist.”
Is criticism of Israel or Zionism antisemitic?
The answer is not “yes” and not “no.” The answer is, show me the specific criticism, and let’s see whether and to what degree it resonates with the long-standing rhetoric of antisemitism. The previous section is a negative example: antisemitic memes dusted off and repurposed for a new century.
But the next question is just as important.
Is someone who falls into racial memes racist?
Here, my answer is: yes, if there’s a pattern of it. Assume good faith, in the absence of a pattern. Anybody can make a mistake, anybody can in a moment of fatigue let their guard down and take a step down the well-paved road. What matters in those cases is, if that’s where you are, if that’s where you’ve found yourself — what do you do next?
Unfortunately, there’s a great example on the world stage of how to do this exactly wrong. A master class in how to get your schlong stuck in the light socket over and over and over. His name is Jeremy Corbyn, the inept leader of the Labour Party in the UK — you know, the one who, even as PM Theresa May metaphorically shits the bed four times daily on Brexit and her approval rating goes radioactive, still manages to be even *less* popular than she is? Though he’s generally progressive, and I wish I could like him, he’s taking massive damage — daily — because of his mishandling of Labour’s antisemitism crisis. And he deserves every fucking bit of it, because he’s earned it the hard way.
This diary is too short to catalog his catastrophic run of missteps, misdeeds, misstatements. Let’s just note that, while he insisted there wasn’t an antisemitic bone in his body, his encouraging words didn’t keep his actions from convincing 86% of British Jews that he’s an antisemite. Either Corbyn’s an antisemite, or he’s an Inspector Clouseau putting his “I’m not an antisemite” sign on backwards.
His defenders insist Saint Jeremy is without blemish, it’s all just a stalking horse for Zionism, and all Jewish complaints about Corbyn should therefore be disregarded as duplicitous, strategic, faked, cooked up in Tel Aviv and paid for in shekels. The Corbynistas have of course a secret weapon: a solid brass and undentable certainty that, because they are on the left, and therefore the good guys, they are inherently immune to racism in any form and that no introspection on antisemitism is ever necessary, not a single second of it. So they’re one thousand percent certain that Jeremy Corbyn has caused no actual pain whatsoever to the Jewish community of the UK, except for the pain some duplicitous right-wing Jews are feigning.
What’s the fundamental problem? Corbyn — and his vomitudinous head strategist, Seumas Wormtongue Milne — have made it their strategy to play the good Jew/bad Jew game.
This game says that Zionism — that is, being pro-Israel — is nothing more than a kind of Jewish Nazism, inherently racist in a way no other national liberation movement is considered to be. Zionism isn’t *really* Jewish, isn’t really the political expression of the Jewish people. It’s actually anti-Jewish. *Good* Jews, we’re told, are the ones who reject ZIonism and reject Israel. Otherwise they’re *bad* Jews and *bad* people. Corbyn makes sure to interact only with *good* Jews, the ones who aren’t pro-Israel, and to deride *bad* Jews, the ones that are.
Well, then. It’s all just a political difference about Israel, right? If you’re pro-Israel, you’re evil, to hell with you, problem solved. Antisemitism has nothing to do with it. There are *good* Jews, and *bad* Jews. That’s Corbyn’s approach. But it’s not antisemitic — how could it be? Corbyn praises *good* Jews, so how could it possibly be antisemitic?
A little while ago I read a poll of American Jews in the weeks before the 2018 election. One question asked Jews to place themselves in one of these groups:
- Generally pro-Israel, support current Israeli government policies (35%)
- Generally pro-Israel, critical of some current Israeli government policies (32%)
- Generally pro-Israel, critical of many current Israeli government policies (24%)
- Not generally pro-Israel (3%)
How many *good* Jews, how many *bad* Jews, by Corbyn standards? If you use the Corbyn yardstick, then only 3% of Jews are *good* Jews.
But that’s been his gleeful, self-righteous message to the Jews of the UK: I’m no antisemite, I really, really like 3% of you; the rest can rot in hell, ya bastards, you’re basically Nazis.
Not hard to see why it’s gone so excruciatingly poorly for him.
(Well, there’s other stuff too, like his having laid a commemorative wreath in Tunisia on the grave of the Black September planners of the Munich Olympic massacre, in which you’ll recall 11 Israeli athletes were murdered, and it turns out the Tunisia trip was probably funded by Hamas, and his response when caught was a spectacularly hapless “I was present but not involved,”— a didn’t-inhale line that follows him everywhere now. Fuck this guy. Imagine the leading organization of Jewish Democrats saying their party’s candidate very plainly didn’t give a damn about antisemitism and they think he/she’d make a terrible leader. More or less, that’s what just happened to Corbyn via the Jewish Labour Movement. Resolution passed unanimously.)
So I hope my position is clear.
The *good* Jew/*bad* Jew game might sound progressive, but it’s not. It’s just a way to tell the vast majority of Jews to fuck off.
But not everybody’s up on all the classic memes of antisemitism. Unintentional racism happens. Our brains are buckets of growth and nets of limitations. What matters is how you handle it when you fuck up. Are you wise, or are you Corbyn?
Which brings us, finally, to Ilhan Omar.
Of *course* Omar would instantly become the Fox News avatar of The Other, the ones who are killing America. She’s young, she’s female, she’s Muslim, she’s of Somali extraction. Of *course* Fox News would pick her as a target for barely-veiled race-baiting and misogyny. Just like they chose Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Because they look a lot like America’s future, and Fox News is about frightened old white men clinging to the past, looking for young colored women to bully.
And Omar made some newbie mistakes. As you do, especially when Fox News is ready to go live with a pasty-pudgy-codgerati panel on your every fart and belch because the implication of your being in the House scares them to death.
But it is what happened next that matters. And … she blew it. Not by being anti-Israel, not by being pro-Palestine. She dealt the dual-loyalty trope, but apologized once she learned why that was double-plus-uncool. Then came the “It’s all about the Benjamins”— implying that political support for Israel was not a reflection of the generally pro-Israel attitude of the American people, but of Jewish cash buying the government. And that one she wouldn’t step back from.
And until she does, that’s me off the Ilhan Omar bus.
Peroration!
As Clarke predicted, we are now at the mercy of an oversimplification engine of vast, unstoppable power. But it’s not television, but the internet, which has a capacity for social dysfunction we are still learning … even if you don’t particularly consider the Russian bots — human and automated — who are intentionally probing our fracture lines. Including antisemitism.
And that gives us a challenge we’ve never had before. What if there’s now so much information of all kinds, we lose our ability to judge what’s right and wrong, because — like the conveyor belt in the chocolate factory — it’s all going by too quickly?
The only answer has to be the phrase, “stop and think.”
When some pre-digested meme comes along, carefully crafted to punch your button — perhaps by the very same Russian bot farms who helped sell the UK on Brexit and worked overtime to put Trump in the White House and doing other things that Clarke’s story anticipated — step one is: stop. Think next, yeah, if you want. But it’s the stopping that’s turning out to be our underdeveloped skill, the lack of which countless bad actors are only too happy to exploit.
Kinbotitudes!
I promised a footnote about the Arthur C. Clarke story "The Sentinel." Aficionados will already know this. In 1964 Clarke sold the story to one Stanley Kubrick, fresh from the release of his "Dr. Strangelove." The two of them built a larger story around it: "2001: A Space Odyssey."