No Brakin' Akin

Akin update

After all the uproar over Representative Todd Akin's astonishingly obtuse and insensitive comments about "legitimate rape," pregnancy, and basic science, I wondered, half-rhetorically, what else there was to say—and finally came up with a historical angle.

Now, just when I thought there was nothing more to add, Mrs. Akin has intervened, somehow managing to plumb new moral depths by portraying her husband as a rape victim, and in the process mangling American history.

The Washington Post reports:

Lulli Akin, the U.S. Senate candidate’s wife, has compared his abandonment by party bosses to rape.
In an interview with “The National Journal,” she first described the move to get her husband to step down from the Senate race in Missouri as “tyranny, a top-down approach.”

She went on to say, “Party bosses dictating who is allowed to advance through the party and make all the decisions – it’s just like 1776 in that way.”

That was when colonists “rose up and said, ‘Not in my home, you don’t come and rape my daughters and my … wife. But that is where we are again.”

This time, I am literally at a loss for words.

9-11 and Amherst: Why Do They Hate Us? (part 1)

Amherst, September 10

Let's just get a couple of misconceptions out of the way.  Contrary to what has been reported in the press and widely believed (mainly, though not exclusively outside the borders of our quaint hamlet):

1) Amherst does not refuse to fly the American flag. It flies every day from the pole on the Common in front of our Town Hall, as well as from police and fire stations. Here's a picture from this afternoon.

Of late, we have also restored the small holder for the flags of the United States and the Commonwealth on the face of the Town Hall's west stair tower.

2) Amherst also marks the anniversary of the 9-11 jihadi terrorist attacks every year:

a) by lowering all flags on major public buildings to half-staff. Here's a photo of the Police Station from last year.

b) with a ceremony at the central Fire Station.

Last year, on the tenth anniversary, there was a larger official commemoration, involving police and firefighters as well as Town officials, on the Common.

Tomorrow, we solemnly mark the occasion at the Fire Station, as usual.

Those are the facts, and no one here denies them.

So why all the lies and misconceptions?

Although the local press for some reason basically ignored the 9-11 ceremony last year, every debate and deliberation about just how to mark the anniversary does seem to get covered. These are then sometimes picked up and distorted by the outside media. . . and thereby hangs a tale. For 11 years now, the question of 9-11 and flags has been the ugly scab that everyone likes to pick at.

The ugly scab that is never allowed to heal

Those who follow Amherst politics are all too familiar with the sequence of events, but to recap in brief:

Over a decade ago, the veterans' agent purchased a set of commemorative flags and proposed to fly them from downtown utility poles at the end of the summer, after the last of the holidays normally marked in this manner. Because, under our Town Government Act, the Select Board has control over the public ways (streets, in common parlance), the issue came before that august body one fine September evening.

Public comment turned not just on the question at hand, but also on attitudes toward "the flag" in general. Some residents spoke favorably of the flag. Some made some rather unfortunate remarks about their view of America and what the flag stood for. The Select Board, as was its right, voted against the additional display of flags. What was most unfortunate was that all this just happened to occur on the evening of September 10, 2001. In the coming days, the media were filled with stories not just about the terrorist attacks, but also about Amherst's alleged refusal to fly the flag, as such—this, at a time when flags became ubiquitous symbols of community and social solidarity.

In response to the catastrophe, residents put up the flags themselves. In fact, in October, the Select Board unanimously voted to leave the flags up till Veterans' Day and then return to the existing policy. Thereafter, the display became the subject of debate. (summary of flag policy, 2001-3) Fifth-generation Amherst native (as he describes himself) and blogger Larry Kelley has made commemoration of 9-11—in particular, through the flying of these flags—his cause célèbre. In 2007, Town Meeting voted down, by a margin of more than 2:1, his article proposing that the Town eternally mark the anniversary in this manner. In 2008, the Select Board approved a compromise policy of flying the flags only every third year, reflecting the split Town Meeting vote. Undaunted, Mr. Kelley has kept his promise to bring the issue up year after year.

Fast-forward to 2010 and the present Select Board, none of whose members, it should be stressed, was in office at the time of the 2001 controversy. Some of us were satisfied with the existing policy as a compromise reflecting the town's divided political opinion, some members found it illogical, and some found the raising of additional flags an inappropriate symbol of mourning. In the end, the only motion seconded and passed was one mandating the flying of the additional flags only on "milestone" anniversaries, that is, every five years. When Mr. Kelley again asked us to take up the issue last month, we held a sustained discussion, in the course of which it became clear that there was not enough support for a revision. No motion was made, so the existing policy remained in place.

Ironically, this year's calm and brief conversation, which simply allowed the previous policy to stand and did not even result in a debate or a vote, got much more attention than the policy under discussion when it was voted in.

It's hard to say exactly why this non-event became such big news, but it doesn't take much to start an avalanche of this sort once the snowball is rolling.

Full press court

Some people legitimately disagreed with the policy (as is their right), while others clearly misread the articles or read too much into what they saw, simply projecting all of their poison and prejudices onto Amherst, and its residents, and above all, its government (thanks; you have a nice day, too). Frankly, poor judgment and wording on the part of the press played a role in the debacle.

For example, local reporter Scott Merzbach's typically careful and balanced story in the Hampshire Gazette began with the accurate statement, "The anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be marked in Amherst with a solemn ceremony at the central fire station and the lowering of town flags," before turning to the latest deliberation on the additional flags. The equally careful Diane Lederman of the Springfield Republican offered a similarly nuanced piece.
But a casual reader who looked only at the titles of those pieces (usually the creation of the paper or editor, not the reporter)—"Amherst select board rejects September 11 flag display" and "Amherst officials offer perspectives on decision not to fly American flags on 9/11"—might easily leap to the wrong conclusion. And leap mightily many did.

Conor Berry's report in the Springfield Republican gave them a veritable springboard for just such a leap of logic. Taking the "inverted pyramid" model of journalism to its extreme conclusion, it led with the current deliberations (only fair), but left the explanation that Amherst did indeed commemorate 9-11 until the very last sentence. The in principle accurate but in practice entirely misleading headline was like a red flag to a bull (or a right-winger): "Amherst says 'No' to annual downtown flag display to commemorate 9/11 terrorist attacks on America."

It was downhill from there. A turning point was probably Mr. Kelley's interview on Fox News. Although he calmly presented his passionately held views, the interview revived the subject of the rather rancid comments about the American flag from 2001, which have nothing to with the current controversy or the current Select Board, none of whom held office at that time and none of whom holds those views. And the network, which boasts of its "fair and balanced" coverage, fanned the flames of popular anger with the (as Mr. Kelley, to his credit, acknowledged) misleading title, "Town won't fly American flags on 9/11," and equally manipulative subtitle, "Amherst: flags fly only 6 days of the year."




That Fox segment itself in turn became the subject of news coverage, just further feeding the feeding frenzy.

Further distortions followed, including a hopelessly addled piece of what passes for reporting by Anaridis Rodriguez of WWLP-TV. Although she proudly describes herself as a practitioner of "multi-platform journalism," she only managed, in the space of a very few lines, to make multiple errors, for example, claiming that Town Meeting rather than Select Board had crafted the current flag policy, and above all, quoting Mr. Kelley as impugning the patriotism of the Town Manager and Select Board (which he never did). The story has since been taken down and replaced with a cleaned-up version (though it still contains bizarrely irrelevant emphases in its coverage of the 2010 debate). In both cases, again, an inflammatory headline did neither the Town nor the truth a service: "Amherst won't fly flags this 9/11."

So, let's recap.  Look at a sample of those headings:

• "Amherst select board rejects September 11 flag display"
• "Amherst says 'No' to annual downtown flag display to commemorate 9/11 terrorist attacks on America"
• "Amherst officials offer perspectives on decision not to fly American flags on 9/11"
• "Town won't fly American flags on 9/11"
• "Amherst: flags fly only 6 days of the year"
• "Amherst won't fly flags this 9/11"

Is it any wonder that people hate us? that so much of the commentary was hostile, even vicious?

To be sure, Select Board Chair Stephanie O'Keeffe issued a thorough explanation of the Town policy and moreover responded personally to every complaint or query that we received.

"Never mind!"

Surprisingly, perhaps, some of the outraged epistolarians, upon learning the truth, suddenly became more contrite versions of Gilda Radner's famed "Saturday Night Live" character Emily Litella, who would go off on a total rant based upon a complete misunderstanding, and upon being corrected, simply said: "Never mind." Others continued to disagree with the current policy (as is their right), but admitted that they now understood it better and had been hoodwinked by bad reporting or succumbed to sloppy reading.

For example:

Thank you for your kind attention to my “epistle” of the other day. I want to apologize to you and the Select Board, I very obviously “jumped the gun” on reading a report from a “rabble rouser” . Sadly, there are lots of so-called “journalists” who are taking advantage of our present tumultuous time, in order to sway the public’s opinion (and sell newspapers)

and

OMG!!! Stephanie I am so sorry I wrote that letter to you. Word was that you were not flying the American flag. After some research of which I should have done in the first place I now find that not to be the case. 

Yep, same instructions I give to my students: do the careful research and reading in the first place—then tell me your opinion.

Clearly, the town remains divided over the issue of the—how many: 25? 26? 28? 29?—commemorative flags (the press can't even agree on the number). Yet I think almost all of us would agree with Larry Kelley's recent statement:

Now this flying-the-25-commemorative-flags-on-9/11-once-every-five-years story has taken on a life of its own.  And the real loser is the town.

Hard to argue with that.

Chocolate Chips, Microchips, and Palestinian Rights

from The Propagandist

So, what's the connection between chocolate chips, microchips, and Palestinian rights?

No, that's not a joke. Or: in another sense, it is.

Answer: nothing at all, and that's just the point.

This is the subject of my inaugural contribution for The Propagandist.

The anti-Israel "BDS" (Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment) movement reached new heights of inanity this summer, where, in Australia, it has made boycotting Israeli chocolate the centerpiece of its efforts.  No, I couldn't make this stuff up.

Their public enemy no. 1:  the chic "Max Brenner" chain of gourmet chocolate restaurants. Strident activists gather outside the stores to shout that the owner is a "murderer" and supporter of "genocide," and to chant for "Palestine from the river to the sea."

Founder Oded Brenner, who calls himself "a man of peace," has said, "Whether it is in Israel or not, anything to do with violence, aggressiveness or appearing at protests or boycotts seems silly (to me). But then again, I am just a chocolate-maker." He confesses to being "perplexed and dismayed" at all the controversy.

Can you blame him? The protests have gotten a lot of attention, almost all of it negative. Leading Australian politicians have condemned them.  Faced with the sight of screaming mobs harassing customers and trying to obstruct the operation of Jewish-owned stores, they have tried to point out: uh, folks, the Nazis tried this once before, and we don't think this is the best model for you to follow.  Even the head of the leading pro-Palestinian activist group in Australia, who supports BDS, as such, called these protests "indefensible and stupid."

The character of BDS has lately become even clearer, in case anyone was not paying attention. There is virtually universal agreement that the solution to the Arab-Israeli wars ultimately lies in the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and their mutual recognition that this division of the land puts a definitive end to their conflict. Indeed, that is at least the official position of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. How and when that will come about is another matter.

The Palestinian Authority is pressing ahead with its quest for a vote on statehood at the UN, and although there is quite some debate as to whether that move is an attempt to revive (1, 2) or circumvent (1, 2, 3) peace negotiations, it has focused world attention on the issue as rarely before.

You'd think the BDS folks would be pleased at this turn of events. Think again.

For them, even a return to the so-called "1967 borders" (actually: 1949 armistice lines) without adjustments would be inadequate. Anything short of the return of all refugees and their descendants to what is now Israel—which would of course in practice eliminate one of the two states—is treason and betrayal. One of the more vocal advocates of that view, "Electronic Intifada" co-founder Ali Abunimah, therefore argues that the "UN ‘Statehood’ Bid" actually "Endangers Palestinian Rights.”

Just last night, he foolishly picked a fight on Twitter with Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy, accusing her of not being sufficiently dedicated to the Palestinian cause because she would not state her support for BDS. She replied he was not woman enough to challenge her political credentials, and it was downhill from there. Anyone familiar with her work knows that she can be a harsh critic of Israel. But her refusal to play the BDS street cred game earned her a spot on the politically correct blacklist, causing her to say, "Thought police. I will not submit to your litmus test."

Yesterday, too, the demonstrators were out in force again in Sydney, and very proud of their achievement. Those actually trying to shop and eat were rather less enthusiastic about the result. (this video captures some of the flavor of the event)

There you have it: To many observers, Palestinian statehood seems at last within reach.  And meanwhile, more than 19,000 Arabs have died in the ongoing struggle against their own dictatorships in recent months.

And yet the BDS crew is convinced that (1) the possible creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel in the near future will be a betrayal and a disaster, but (2) persecuting a chocolatier and harassing Australian shoppers will bring about The Revolution.

So much for the chocolate chips. And the microchips? You'll just have to check out the whole thing in The Propagandist. (Hint: if you support BDS and used a popular search engine to get here, you'll have to change your habits. Better check that cell phone in your purse or pocket, too.)

Read the rest: "BDS Fail. Let the (Micro) Chips Fall Where They May"

Arabs Across the Middle East Are Dying to Vote (literally). And Amherst? ehhh

To cite Louisa May Alcott, "no earthquake shook the town" (more on that later).

Admittedly, the issues are rather less dramatic here than in Libya or Syria, and many races were uncontested (though because of either satisfaction or complacency rather than dictatorship).

Still, the turnout was abysmal and embarrassing (8.5 %, we are told).  When I went to vote in Precinct 1—properly restored to the traditional site at historic North Amherst Church parish hall after an embarrassing error earlier this year (1, 2, 3, 4)—around 4:00 p.m. the number of valid votes cast was still under 50 (there were a few spoiled ballots above and beyond that).

In the evening, I was in Town Hall for a Historical Commission meeting (next door to the School Committee) and then headed over to Rafters, where several candidates and their supporters were congregating. A good place to follow results, because, above and beyond the presence of the flat screen monitor tuned to Public Access Television, it's guaranteed that someone there will always be getting even newer running vote counts by text message or phone call. Ballots and beer, a match made in heaven.

The results in the key town-wide contested races:

Aaron Hayden won re-election to the Redevelopment Authority after a credible challenge from activist Vince O'Connor (880-504).

The big surprise—even stunner—of the evening was that incumbent Library Trustee Chair Pat Holland finished third (with only 660 votes) in the race for two seats, after fellow incumbent Chris Hoffmann (832) and newcomer Michael Wolff (665). There will no doubt be much speculation as to the cause, in light of recent controversies over the trustees' management of the Library.

As chance would have it, today is an important anniversary in the history of voting rights. Mass Moments tell us,

On this date, in 1880, Louisa May Alcott and 19 other women attended the Concord Town Meeting. The year before, the Massachusetts legislature had made it legal for women to vote in school committee elections. A strong supporter of woman suffrage, the author of Little Women was the first woman in Concord to register to vote. She rallied other women to exercise the limited franchise they had been given. When the day came, a group of 20 women, "mostly with husbands, fathers or brothers" appeared, "all in good spirits and not in the least daunted by the awful deed about to be done." When the votes were cast, she later reported, "No bolt fell on our audacious heads, no earthquake shook the town."(read the rest)

Now this was a revolutionary act, but it took place in the late nineteenth century rather than the late eighteenth, i.e. not part of the American Revolution (although the scene was Concord, Mass.) It can be so hard to keep this stuff straight. Impossible, for the irrepressible and ever-erring Michelle Bachmann, it would seem. Readers will recall that she put her foot in her mouth in January when she declared (in one of several gaffes) that the Founding Fathers "worked tirelessly until slavery was no more." Historians (and also just literate people) were quick to point out that the Founding Fathers owned slaves, and that slavery was not abolished until 1865.  She did it again this month when, speaking at an event in Macnhester, New Hampshire, she confused the Concord in that state with our own beloved Concord:  "You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord," and, lest there be any doubt, repeated the error a few minutes later. As the Boston Globe delicately pointed out, "The “shot heard ’round the world’’ may have echoed in New Hampshire, but it was, of course, fired in Massachusetts." Her response when reporters called attention to the gaffe: 

"So I misplaced the battles Concord and Lexington by saying they were in New Hampshire.

"It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it!"

Well, that fixes everything.

She claimed that the reporting of an error of which a schoolchild should be ashamed was proof of "media bias."

I wonder who she thinks was at the Boston Tea Party—Alice and the Mad Hatter?

And people say Amherst politics is surreal?

Yes, It's That Time Again: The Spring (Open) Season

It's that time of year again.  The beating of my heart quickened when I looked at the calendar—and not only because there was less than a week to go until the start of Daylight Saving Time.

No, it is of course also the season for the time-honored (well, at least since 2005) custom of "Israeli Apartheid Week" (IAW), in which activists, especially at western colleges and universities, attempt to persuade their comrades that the Israel is the most evil state and pressing topic in the Middle East and even the world—though the engrossing spectacle of the Arab revolutionary awakening that is unfolding before our eyes might suggest otherwise.

All the hype notwithstanding, last year's dramatic festivities—including the vaunted "apartheid wall" on the Town Common and campus—generated little interest. The typical result was a yawn rather than a yalla.

That was even more the case this year. Given the débâcle of resentment and bad publicity resulting from the disruption of a talk by an Israeli speaker here last month by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), it seems that the activists may have opted to cool down rather than rev up. (Some members have themselves—at least in private, and in contradistinction to confident public statements about plaudits from fellow-students and relentless movement from success to success—expressed regret for that tactical error, their only consolation or excuse being that they had contemplated but not undertaken even more provocative and risky actions.)

Indeed, if one hadn't been aware of the festive season to begin with, one almost would have had to go out of one's way to find out about it.
 The program was modest, but in light of recent controversies and episodes of harassment, the campus remains tense.

Still, there are hopeful signs. To begin with, there was comic relief, or at least, evidence of coexistence.

I came across this scene as I was preparing to teach class and then make a little presentation on the history of antisemitism, with some reference to debates on the Middle East, at the beginning of "Apartheid Week."  The Chasidic rabbi was standing next to the Students for Justice in Palestine table on the Library entrance landing, passing out hamentaschen (customary pastries for the Jewish holiday of Purim).  I politely declined what both had to offer. On my way back out of the building, though, I stopped for a moment to talk. Others, too, seemed interested in the juxtaposition, and engaged in conversation or snapped pictures.  The rabbi explained that he had simply been assigned this space and gladly shared it.  The people at the SJP table evidently felt the same way.

I had been asked to talk about the history and nature of antisemitism—not so much as a riposte to some of the "anti-Zionist" activism on campus (notwithstanding a subtitle on the poster, not of my own devising). Rather, the aim was simply to explain what the term means, given that there are concerns about the rise of antisemitism on campus, in particular, because Jewish history, religion, and culture are inextricably linked with the land of Israel, and because debates about the Middle East all too often seem to juxtapose accusations of antisemitism by one side with the counteraccusation by the other that raising the specter of antisemitism is just a dishonest way of warding off all criticism.

In essence, I did what I have done elsewhere. I recapitulated some of the things that I found to have worked well in a class here, an interfaith discussion group on the Middle East at a local church, and a diversity workshop.


I tried to focus on the historical rather than the political, as a means of explaining why certain traditionally antisemitic images or tropes, whether used intentionally or unintentionally, arouse such passionate reactions.  Further, I tried to suggest that a concerted effort to avoid them was not only morally and intellectually imperative, but also a practical necessity.  The more grave the issues and the more heated the passions, the more important it is to focus on the concrete nature of the controversial issue itself rather than simply applying inflammatory labels that generate more heat than light.

Even when some members of the audience brought up the recent controversy over the disrupted lecture (which I had deliberately avoided), the atmosphere remained calm. I would like to think that we achieved something, and not only by the minimal standard of avoiding conflict and recrimination. Rather, people began to talk honestly of beliefs and feelings alike. They did so in a frank but civil manner, and in a way that opened onto rather than closed off further debate. In fact, several people of varying political and other convictions expressed a desire for more such opportunities.

Hope springs eternal. It's almost spring, after all.

The Annual Thanksgiving History Buffet

"Embarcation of the Pilgrims": depicting the myth (see below)

It's time for the annual Thanksgiving piece again.

It's always intriguing and instructive to watch the evolving coverage in the press and blogosphere:  above and beyond the predictable pious thoughts (gratitude for friends, family, and prosperity; throw in a word for the troops these days, too) and generally gentle historical debunking.

Eels: They're What's for Dinner

Foodways of course still loom large in the Thanksgiving press in any given year (often intersecting with debunkery).  In my first Thanksgiving post, two years ago, I quite naturally began with the historical record of the "first Thanksgiving" and the historical menu.   Among my favorite points there:

1. Seafood was probably a major portion of the menu; the meats certainly included duck, goose, and venison, though some historians make a strong case for the wild turkey, as well.
2. The celebration included gunfire and, probably, heavy drinking.
3. The (presumed equivalent of) cranberries that the colonists knew from Europe were in fact not fruits, but pregnant insects.

In today's New York Times, James Prosek reminds us of the historical and current importance of one of those foods:  the eel. He begins by saying, in effect: forget for the moment the story about Squanto teaching the Pilgrims to farm by planting seeds along with a fish, to serve as fertilizer. They wouldn't have survived long enough to plant in the spring had they not had food in the winter, and one of the crucial sources—as they likewise learned from Squanto—was the eel.  Author of a new book on the fascinating fish, Prosek closes with an explanation of the threat to the species through unsustainable fishing practices and concludes:

What can we do to restore this creature that once made up 25 percent of the fish biomass of Eastern rivers? For starters, we can rehabilitate the local wetlands that nurture eels at all life stages, because eels historically fed not only humans, but nearly everything in the system, from striped bass to cormorants.

We also need to deal with dams that prevent the free exchange of life from the sea to inland waterways. If dams cannot be removed, then they should be equipped with eel ladders to help juvenile eels travel upstream. And hydrodam operators should consider turning off the turbines, which wound or kill eels, for a few hours on autumn nights during the peak of vast unseen migrations of the adult fish to the sea.

Let’s be thankful, then, for the beautiful but forgotten Thanksgiving eel. And let’s accept responsibility for preserving the fish that did so much to sustain the newcomers to these shores so many years ago.

As for the place of the sweet potato on the Thanksgiving table: as I pointed out in 2008, it was evidently not available to the Massachusetts colonists in 1621. The Library of Congress has a nice post on the food, in particular, the "candied" form familiar to us from the modern holiday menu. The plant is documented in the 8th century BCE in South America and, during the Age of Exploration, came to Europe, where it was for long the potato. (In fact, the piece explains, "It wasn’t until after the 1740’s that the term sweet potato began to be used by American colonists to distinguish it from the white (Irish) potato.") Although recipes for a prepared dish date from the first American cookbook of 1789 and appear elsewhere in the next half-century, it seems that the candied and casserole dishes really established their popularity in the final third of the nineteenth century. As chance would have it, two pieces in the Times address the fate of "the noble root" in the 21st century.

Kim Severson details the meteoric rise of a food that the Wall Street Journal  three years ago characterized as an obligatory once-a-year staple and 364-day loser (not the first time that publication has been wrong about something, of course).  The efforts to promote the crop that the paper chronicled and dismissed have in the meantime yielded an annual US harvest of two billion pounds. There are multiple reasons for the food's new allure, ranging from nutritional advantage to the consumer to economic advantage to southern farmers shifting away from tobacco.  Ultimately, though, Severson tells us, "sweet potato fries are at the center of the revolution." (Among our local establishments noted for serving this delicacy, one might mention Judie's, The Pub, and the Amherst Brewing Company. For eels, you'd have to venture a bit farther afield. A decade ago, Steve Kemper had a nice piece about that delicacy in Yankee Magazine.)

And like the eel, the sweet potato has a claim on our moral as well as gustatory and historical faculties.  Nicholas Kristof points to its growing role in staving off disease.  As he explains, malnutrition, particularly in third-world countries, is often the result of "lack of micronutrients" rather than of calories.  The American sweet potato is packed with beta carotene, but it does not grow well in Africa, where the prevalent variety, a staple, lacks this nutrient.  Distributing Vitamin A capsules is difficult and expensive, so scientists instead cross-bred the potatoes to develop a variety that combined the nutritional value of the one with the environmental appropriateness of the other.  This process of "biofortification," Kristof explains, is "one of the hot words in the global poverty lexicon." In this case, it's a matter of conventional hybridization.  An even hotter word, however, is "genetically modified."  As Kristof observes, "golden rice," which uses genes from daffodils and corn to produce Vitamin A, is another potential game-changer, but resistance (as I have noted elsewhere) is high and often irrational. In his words:

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. No battle against poverty goes smoothly, or as planned. And the European left’s sad hostility to scientific tinkering with crops may slow acceptance of biofortification. If that hostility gains ground, it will be harder to save children from blindness and death.

The Pilgrims:  Socialists, Capitalists, or Just Regular Seventeenth-Century Calvinist Guys?

Since we're on the topic of moralizing, what really struck me this year was that so much of the commentary was political, or about the politicization of the holiday and the Pilgrims.  The use of the past as a mirror or foil for our own values is of course nothing new, and the Pilgrim myth is but one of the most familiar to us. As James and Patricia Scott Deetz say, such "origin myths" are universal:

And in a nation that is so religiously diverse, it seems most appropriate that a secular event, no matter how transformed over time, serve such a purpose. But the Thanksgiving myth is only a part of a larger national myth for Americans; that of the Pilgrims and their supposed role in the making of modern America.
[The Times of Their Lives:  Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (NY: Anchor Books, 2000), 9]

I happened to pull out one random such example from my personal library, Mrs. Abby B. Whelpley's "The Embarcation of the Pilgrims," from The Christian Family Annual, edited by the Revered David Newell, volume 3 (NY, 1845).  The accompanying steel engraving (above), depicting the English port from which they sailed, is so riddled with anachronisms that one is tempted to believe they were deliberate rather than naïve, as if to underscore the presentist interpretation of that usable past. (A more likely, book-historical explanation—not least because it is more common to depict the departure from the Netherlands—is that someone recycled an existing plate and just added the caption.)

The piece begins by citing the peregrinations of the Pilgrims, as they went from Lincolnshire to first Amsterdam and then Leyden before deciding "the great question whether they should seek a home in the new world." "They were alarmed," Mrs. Whelpley tells us, "lest religion should become extinct with their posterity, for it was daily suffering from the licentiousness of the continent; and to use their own words 'they felt an inward zeal and great hope of laying some foundation for propagating the religion of Christ to the remote ends of the earth.'" (369)

Along the way, the essay also calls attention to the role of women:

   While we speak of the men whose lofty purposes were thus formed amidst numerous discouragements, a tribute of praise and respect is due to those females who, with not less magnanimity of spirit, forsook all the enjoyments, and in many instances, the luxuries of home, in an enlightened country, to join in the enterprise of planting the gospel seed in the wilderness, which they fondly hoped might yet 'rejoice and blossom as the rose;' they refused not the cross, but, with smiles of encouragement, cheered the hearts of their husbands, brothers and friends, in the glorious cause. (371-72)

Not third-wave feminism or anything like that, and rather, the traditional role of the helpmeet, perhaps retroactively infused with the ideology of republican motherhood, but interesting to note.

And it condemns those among their number for "faults of both opinion and feeling," when "their ranks were disgraced by a Henry Vane, a Hugh Peters, and others who evinced the same spirit as their persecutors."

The piece moves toward its conclusion:

After a protracted and tedious voyage, the pilgrims arrived in America in December, O.S. [=Old Style, i.e before the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar; JW], and soon the vice of praise and thanksgiving resounded along the snow-clad shore.  But the hand of the Lord was upon them to sanctify them yet further, by severe trials; scarcity of food, cold, hardship and fatigue, swept half their number into the grave, so that of the one hundred and one who landed on Plymouth rock, only fifty remained in the following spring, and truly it may be said that the good which afterwards sprang up in New England, was sown in tears and sorrow, over the graves of their loved ones. (372)

Mrs. Whelpley then offers the lesson of the story: the Pilgrims endured these trials of fate with Christian fortitude, and became the symbolic and practical founders of the American system, both devout and democratic.

The pilgrim fathers elicited the spark which illuminated this continent. They brought the Bible with them, which they made the rule and guide of their designs, and which was the instrument of laying broad the foundations of our institutions, civil, religious and literary. One of the first steps was to build a church, and by the side of it a school-house, and in both was deposited and taught the word of God. The Sabbath was truly sanctified among them, and where in this land is it so sacredly regarded to this day as in New England?  They laid the basis of their exertions in the extended establishment of common schools, considering it a point of conscience to furnish their posterity with the means of intellectual advancement; and they early laid the foundations of those higher seminaries of learning which are the brightest ornaments of this country.  They brought over with them the missionary spirit; their efforts were early turned to the conversion of the Aborigines, and in a short time many of them were brought under the saving influence of the gospel.  They implanted deep in the very soil, a love of liberty, struggling against, and resisting every thing that interfered with the exercise of their religion; and doubtless they had a principal share in laying the foundation of our national independence; indeed their principles were formed on a love of liberty, civil and religious. (372-73)

It's easy to make fun of this sort of stuff as pious posturing and propaganda, yet, when taken within the appropriate limits—the Puritans and Pilgrims were not devotees of abstract or secular civil libertarianism in the modern sense—it is arguably more accurate than the negative stereotypes.

As I try to explain to students, Puritanism is a funny thing. Like the Pharisees, the Puritans have become a caricature and a smear word bearing little resemblance to the historical reality.  The average person has some vague idea of Puritanism and repressive personal morality, witch-burning, and the like. In fact, a number of my progressive and even radical as well as evangelical friends are big admirers of the Puritans.  Every so often I think we should start a secret fan club.  Sure, the English Puritans were at times a stern lot.  I myself like the theater, but hell, they overthrew the monarchy and cut off the head of the king, paving the way for future revolutions (remember that Patrick Henry speech?).  Isn't that worth something?  As for our proverbial Pilgrim forefathers, they wore colorful clothing and habitually consumed alcohol in quantities that would nowadays get them sent to rehab clinics in a flash (one reason they needed to make landfall in Massachusetts was because their beer stocks were running low, and they needed a new supply of fresh water). And if they took a dim view of adultery, it was in part because they adhered to a single sexual norm rather than allowing men the luxury of the traditional double standard. The Pilgrims took sex seriously because they viewed it as a strong and normal human urge. Court records show that, in mid-seventeenth-century Plymouth, at least 11 percent of marriages involved premarital sex (and those were just the people who got caught).

As Harvard's David Hall, one of the great historians of early New England, points out in the pages of the New York Times ("Peace, Love, and Puritanism"), it behooves us for several reasons, practical as well as intellectual, to ask who the Puritans were and what they sought to achieve rather than just what they ate.  He blames Nathaniel Hawthorne for establishing the stereotype of Puritans as "self-righteous and authoritarian, bent on making everyone conform to a rigid set of rules and ostracizing everyone who disagreed with them."

Contrary to Hawthorne’s assertions of self-righteousness, the colonists hungered to recreate the ethics of love and mutual obligation spelled out in the New Testament. Church members pledged to respect the common good and to care for one another. Celebrating the liberty they had gained by coming to the New World, they echoed St. Paul’s assertion that true liberty was inseparable from the obligation to serve others.

For this reason, no Puritan would have agreed with the ethic of “self-reliance” advanced by Hawthorne’s contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Instead, people should agree on what was right, and make it happen. Wanting social peace, the colonists experienced plenty of conflict among themselves. It was upsetting when this happened, but among the liberties they carefully guarded was the right to petition any government and to plead any grievance, a liberty that women as well as men acted on.

This is where our own famously contentious Amherst Town Meeting (1, 2,) came from.  Hall highlights the political:

The most far-reaching of these Puritan reforms concerned the civil law and the workings of justice. In 1648, Massachusetts became the first place in the Anglo-American world to publish a code of laws — and make it accessible to everyone. Believing that the rule of law protected against arbitrary or unjust authority, the civil courts practiced speedy justice, empowered local juries and encouraged reconciliation and restitution. Overnight, most of the cruelties of the English justice system vanished. Marriage became secularized, divorce a possibility, meetinghouses (churches) town property.

And although it’s tempting to envision the ministers as manipulating a “theocracy,” the opposite is true: they played no role in the distribution of land and were not allowed to hold political office. Nor could local congregations impose civil penalties on anyone who violated secular law. In these rules and values lay one root of the separation of church and state that eventually emerged in our society.

Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America. 

Meanwhile, arch-conservatives have been attempting to claim the Pilgrims as the ancestors of their own brand of liberty. Over on the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin regurgitates an older piece by fringe economist Benjamin Powell.  The Pilgrims' early problems, Powell insists, were the results of "Bad economic incentives":

Once the Pilgrims in the Plymouth Plantation abandoned their communal economic system and adopted one with greater individual property rights, they never again faced the starvation and food shortages of the first three years.

(Suffice it to say that the situation was a good deal more complicated, involving, for example, various groups of settlers arriving under differing legal and economic agreements. Read any real history of Plymouth for the full explanation.) But why stop there?   On the floor of the US House, Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri) explained:

It might be helpful to think back and say, there’s more to Thanksgiving than the Pilgrims. They were a group of people who were willing to change the system, to think of different ideas. They came here and separated civil and church governments. They came here and created the model of a written constitution, the idea that the government should be the servant of the people. […] They came here with the idea that after trying socialism that it wasn’t going to work. They realized that it was unbiblical, that it was a form of theft, so they pitched socialism out. They learned that in the early 1620’s. [video here]

So which was it:  were the Pilgrims resolute anti-socialists from the start (Akin), or were they in fact, more akin (no pun intended) to neo-conservatives—socialists who got mugged by reality (Powell)?  Either way, these authorities insist, you can be damned sure they were against socialism in the end. You betcha.  Believe it or not, this sort of inanely anachronistic discussion is taken quite seriously in some circles.  As for me, I'll take my early New England history straight up from those who actually understand it. David Hall's major new book on the Puritans and "the transformation of public life" will be out in the spring.

Even overseas commentators are keeping an eye on our wackiness over the holiday weekend. The Spiegel noted, with a mixture of amusement and alarm, the rise of these crackpot tea party version of early American history:  "How the Pilgrim Fathers Abolished Socialism."  Over in the UK, Harry's Place called attention to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Thanksgiving proclamation of 1933 (cited in a Washington Post editorial), his first year as President, when the nation faced far greater and more numerous crises than it does today:

“May we ask guidance in more surely learning the ancient truth that greed and selfishness and striving for undue riches can never bring lasting happiness or good to the individual or to his neighbors. May we be grateful for the passing of dark days; for the new spirit of dependence one on another; for the closer unity of all parts of our wide land; for the greater friendship between employers and those who toil; . . . for the brighter day to which we can win through by seeking the help of God in a more unselfish striving for the common bettering of mankind.”

and commented:

“[S]triving for undue riches can never bring lasting happiness or good”? “May we be grateful for… the new spirit of dependence one on another”?

And some people call Obama a socialist.

Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers.

Even as European bloggers are watching our historical celebrations and appropriations with interest, the folks at History channel can't be bothered to take or teach American history seriously on this most popular of American holidays:  they're too busy pumping out pap about aliens from outer space. It took up hours of programming.  But more on that a bit later.

Resources

• The 2008 Thanksgiving post (origins of the holiday; foodways)
• The 2009 Thanksgiving post (some comments on teaching the history of Thanksgiving; some links)

Related articles

• 'Eels': James Prosek's natural history of a slippery, fascinating creature (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• The story of eels: Slithery, determined and mysterious (economist.com)
• James Prosek: 'Eels': The World's Most Mysterious Fish (huffingtonpost.com)
• All Praise the Lowly Sweet Potato (newser.com)
• Op-Ed Columnist: Bless the Orange Sweet Potato (nytimes.com)
• Give Thanks for ... Eel? (nytimes.com)
• ON THE TABLE: The Obamas' Thanksgiving menu (politico.com)
• Thanksgiving quiz (bbc.co.uk)

Islamism, the Betrayal of the Left, and Prospects for Real Coalition-Building and Peace-Work

One of the peculiarities of the contemporary Middle East conflict has been the historically unprecedented willingness of the putative "left" or "progressive" community to make common cause with or condone the behavior of extremist—notably: reactionary, clerical-obscurantist, even terrorist—organizations with whom they have nothing in common and would under any other circumstances have no truck.  Indeed, only the shared visceral opposition to Israel seems capable of generating this sort of cognitive dissonance.

Almost half a decade ago now, the late, brilliant independent leftist Fred Halliday (1, 2, 3, 4)  warned his erstwhile comrades against the naive belief that radical Islamism represented "a new form of international anti-imperialism that matches – even completes – their own historic project." To see in it only "a movement aimed against 'the West'," he insisted, is inadvertently to recapitulate the argument of "the imperialist right" and willfully or otherwise ignore that "long before the Muslim Brotherhood, the jihadis and other Islamic militants were attacking 'imperialism,' they were attacking and killing the left - and acting across Asia and Africa as the accomplices of the west." (Not the kind of argument you will hear in the "mainstream media"—or even in most leftist discourse, for that matter.)

He further urged a cold, hard look at Islamist social and cultural policy:

The reactionary (the word is used advisedly) nature of much of their programme on women, free speech, the rights of gays and other minorities is evident.

There is also a mindset of anti-Jewish prejudice that is riven with racism and religious obscurantism. . . . Here it is worth recalling the saying of the German socialist leader Bebel, that anti-semitism is “the socialism of fools”. How many on the left are tolerant if not actively complicit in this foolery today is a painful question to ask.

Rejecting the application of the label, "fascist," as inappropriate, he concluded,

It does not need slogans to understand that the Islamist programme, ideology and record are diametrically opposed to the left – that is, the left that has existed on the principles founded on and descended from classical socialism, the Enlightenment, the values of the revolutions of 1798 and 1848, and generations of experience. The modern embodiments of this left have no need of the “false consciousness” that drives so many so-called leftists into the arms of jihadis.

In a similarly complex and textured analysis, Dave Rich now takes up the question in the context of the recent flotilla incident.  In essence, he shows how a desperate and directionless European left, accustomed to subordinating itself to its new Islamist partners at home, unwittingly repeated the mistake at sea, with graver consequences.

He doesn't make casual accusations or carelessly fling epithets. Indeed, he avers, "It is unfair, and inaccurate, to label the leftist participants as useful idiots. Their reasons for action are genuine and their humanitarian efforts at least have political coherence." Instead, he concludes by asking, in the most sober terms, who is controlling whom, and who, if anyone, gained?  In a nutshell, he argues that the leftists and violent radical Islamists on the flotilla both had humanitarian and political goals but that these differed significantly in substance, and each moreover viewed the enterprise through entirely different lenses:

Islamism, globally, is a movement with energy, resources, self-belief and, in some countries, real power. Socialism is anything but. It has failed in power and lost its ideological certitude a long time ago, to be replaced by a vague and, at times, contradictory, set of ideas: anti-globalisation, environmentalism, anti-imperialism and so on. This is not an alliance of equals. European leftists, so used to being the junior partner in their cooperation with Islamists at home, have given up any pretence that their support for Hamas and other Islamist movements is one of critical engagement, or that they would rather work with secular, liberal forces in Palestinian society (or even their own). In this respect, the flotilla is a metaphor for the whole left-Islamist alliance. A journey over which leftists have a semblance of influence but little real control, into a confrontation not of their own making, from which they derive no political benefit.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Weinthal, writing in Gay City News, asks why elements of the LGBT movement have suddenly fallen prey to boycotts of Israel, a nation that, whatever its failings, is the only one in the Middle East to guarantee gay rights (indeed, in many ways, to a greater extent than does the United States).  In particular, he castigated philosopher Judith Butler's assertion that radical Islamists "could be described as left,” and thus worthy of sympathy.  Referring to recent controversies over events in Berlin, he cited "a blistering critique—“In bed with Hezbollah”—by Jan Feddersen, a gay German editor of the major left-wing newspaper TAZ:

“That Butler gives a thumbs-up to the concept of narrow self-righteousness is actually consistent,” Feddersen wrote. “She who cannot and will not think in civil rights categories favors, in a global perspective, alliances in which homosexuals cannot be interested. Hezbollah and Hamas, she recently decreed in a speech, should be positively rated from the leftist perspective [as] organizations that fight misery and poverty and oppose what she sees as the Zionist impertinence called Israel.“

Some of my well-informed and thoughtful friends on the left and in the gay movement found the critique of Butler overly harsh or lacking in nuance:  She and like-minded activists are well aware of the relatively pro-gay conditions in Israel, they say, but do not see this as reason to withhold criticism of other policies that they regard as deserving of censure.  They also are, obviously, aware of the shortcomings of the Islamists in sexual and gender politics, I am told, reassuringly.  Fair enough.  I don't think any reasonable person would deny or assume that these hypereducated people do not know this.  But to pose that defense, I think, is to beg the question.  The real question (and here is the connection to Halliday and Rich) is not: Does the progressive character of one policy of a country inoculate it against criticism of it on the basis of others? Of course not.  Please.  The critics are not so obtuse, either.  Rather, the question should be the one that I posed at the outset:  Just how many sins are we willing to overlook in order to conclude that it is worth allying ourselves—on the traditional logic that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," or in pseudo-Marxist terms, because it plays a "subjectively progressive" role—with a group that is otherwise inimical to our ideals and objective interests?  And to what extent do we morally compromise ourselves and become complicit in the crimes of these organizations if we do so? 

As noted, Fred Halliday, like many others in academe and on the left, was reluctant to apply the term, "fascism," to the Islamist movement, but on rigorous historical and intellectual grounds, and not simply, like the shallow majority left, because the Bush administration and other casual thinkers on the right had so passionately embraced it.

My fellow historian Jeffrey Herf is one who has had no such reluctance.  For several years now, he has sought to make a  case for the "fascist" nature of Islamism on the basis of its intellectual antecedents and concrete policies. Although rigorously argued, this has tended to be a minority view.  A turning point of sorts occurred when political scientist and German Green politician Matthias Küntzel, stunned by the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the Hamburg connections of the hijackers, pursued the origins of the event and indeed found them in Germany—but the Germany of the 1930s as much as the 1990s.  He published the results as Djihad und Judenhass:  Über den neuen antijüdischen Krieg (Jihad and Jew-Hatred: On the New Anti-Jewish War; 2002); in English as  Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press, 2007).  In his preface, Herf praised the book for showing how, following the defeat of Nazism, Islamism in effect assumed its mantle as the next "important political and ideological movement in world politics to place hatred of the Jews at the center of its ideology," thereby also forcing us "to rethink the issue of continuity and break before and after 1945 and expand our horizons beyond Europe to encompass the trans-national diffusion and impact of Nazism and fascism on the Arab and Islamic world."  It is precisely to these latter questions that Herf has now turned, with with pioneering empirical research into the causal connections between Nazism and Islamist antisemitism.

The not necessarily productive debate over Arab and Islamic complicity in the Holocaust has flared up again (e.g. 1, 2). Without delving into that whole topic, and to oversimplify: One view stresses the well-known collaboration of key Arab figures with the Nazi regime (from a Sadat for pragmatic reasons, to the Grand Mufti on grounds of ideological affinity). The other insists that the Arabs by and large remained immune to Nazism.  Each side can also point to evidence drawn from the behavior of ordinary people toward the Jews:  for example, the "Farhud," or pogrom against Iraqi Jews, on the one hand, or the increasingly well-documented efforts of Arab rescuers of Jews from the Holocaust (1, 2), on the other.  Herf addresses this historiographic problem in an interview with Viennese journalist and anti-fascist activist Karl Pfeifer concerning a recent conference on "Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism."

His Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, based on an analysis of German wartime radio broadcasts to the Middle East, actually helps to loosen if not break the logjam. (One can find a précis of some of the book's arguments in his article in Central European History 42 (2009): 709-36.)  It is noteworthy that it finally persuaded Daniel Pipes—an arch-conservative and critic of Islamism, if ever there was one, but hitherto a sceptic—that the fascist connection was integral and not incidental or rhetorical.  As he explains:

After reading Küntzel and Herf, I realize that my education about the modern Middle East was lacking a vital ingredient, the Nazi one. . . . As page after page of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World establishes in mind-numbing but necessary detail, the Germans above all pursued two themes: stopping Zionism and promoting Islamism. Each deserves close consideration.  

Nazi propaganda in Arabic portrayed World War II, history's largest and most destructive war, as focused primarily on the sliver of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. This interpretation both flattered Arabs and extended Hitler's grand theory that Jews wanted to take over the Arab countries and eventually the whole world, that the Allied powers were but pawns in this Zionist conspiracy, and that Germany was leading the resistance to them.

Palestine was the key, according to these broadcasts. If Zionists took it over, they would "control the three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. Thus they will be able to rule the whole world and spread Jewish capitalism." Such an eventuality would lead to Arabs oppressed and Islam defunct. "Should Bolshevism and Democracy be victorious," announced Nazi radio, "the Arabs will be dominated forever and all traces of Islam will be wiped out." To avoid this fate, Arabs had to join with the Axis.

Far from promoting antisemitism on "racial" grounds, which would have raised obvious problems among Arabs, the Nazis thus shrewdly justified their anti-Jewish policy on situationally appropriate religious and ethno-nationalist grounds. They took pains to anchor their antisemitism in the teachings of the Qur'an and Islam and in the language of the Arab revival and anti-imperialism (sound familiar?). In Pipes's words,

Ideas the Nazis spread in the Middle East have had an enduring twofold legacy. First, as in Europe, they built on existing prejudices against Jews to transform that prejudice into something far more paranoid, aggressive, and murderous. . . .

The fruits of this effort are seen not only in decades of furious Muslim anti-Zionism, personified by Arafat and Ahmadinejad, but also in the persecution of ancient Jewish communities in countries like Egypt and Iraq, which have now shriveled to near-extinction. . . .

Second, Islamism took on a Nazi quality. As someone who has criticized the term Islamofascism on the grounds that it gratuitously conflates two distinct phenomena, I have to report that Herf's evidence now leads me to acknowledge deep fascist influences on Islamism. This includes the Islamist hatred of democracy and liberalism and its contempt for multiple political parties, preference for unity over division, cult of youth and militarism, authoritarian moralism, cultural repression, and illiberal economics.

Beyond specifics, that influence extends to what Herf calls an "ability to introduce a radical message in ways that resonated with, yet deepened and radicalized, already existing sentiments."

To be sure, skeptics remain. In a debate in the Chronicle of Higher Education last fall, the otherwise generally intelligent and  well-informed Richard Wolin took Herf to task for purportedly concocting an intellectual history devoid of social context. Although Wolin seemed to direct his argument to issues central to the concerns of this blog—namely, the proper uses of history and analogy (especially where Nazism is concerned)—it soon became clear that his fear (or problem) was the conflation of Islam and Islamism. He objected to any association of Islam and fascism because that seemed to echo the disgraced vocabulary of the Bush administration and scurrilously implied "an integral relationship" between a historical political ideology and “one of the great religions of salvation”—a claim the book in fact never made. In ably defending himself, Herf clearly highlighted the real difference. Wolin asserted that Islamism was primarily a response to "the history and political experiences of the postwar Middle East."  In Herf's rather more nuanced view, by contrast, Islamism is neither a purely indigenous ideology arising from Islam itself nor a pure European import. “Rather, it emerged as the result of a conjuncture of fundamentalist currents within Islam and Nazi ideology and policy” and “was more cause than effect of the disasters of post-1945 Middle Eastern history.”

We seem to have come some distance from our original topic, yet these last issues are in fact intimately related to the earlier ones:  To point to these tainted origins of Islamism is not to indulge in accusations of guilt by association or inheritance. Rather, it is to cite one more reason for the most severe scrutiny of its contemporary manifestations.  There is simply too much here that should give western progressives pause.  There are far better ways to support Palestinian rights and peace and justice in the region as a whole than by "getting in bed with" the Islamists.

So, given this grim view of past, present, and future, why the flower at the top of the page?

Concerned by these developments and their deleterious influence on prospects for peace, labor leaders from the US, Europe, and Australia last year announced the formation of Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine, or TULIP,

a new global movement "to challenge the apologists for Hamas and Hizbollah in the labour movement" and to fight for a two-state solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

They explained:

The solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is clear – and has been accepted in principle by both sides. Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side, within secure and recognised borders, is the only workable solution to a conflict that has dragged on for decades. . . .

People of goodwill everywhere want a process to succeed delivering peace, justice and reconciliation. Trade unions can play a positive role here, and often do.

Among the practical aims of the organization are to:

Work together with Israeli and Palestinian trade unionists and associated NGOs to find ways to provide practical on-the-ground assistance — rather than empty slogans.

Words about real actions, rather than just more words:  words too rarely spoken.  Let a thousand TULIPs bloom.

Nazis, Nazis, everywhere, nor any stop to think: On the flotilla, historical argument, and evolving antisemitic discourse

Predictably but regrettably, the recent fighting over the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" brought forth a tidal wave of criticism of Israel.  It's not the criticism that is to be regretted, but its tone and thrust.  One can argue that the IDF acted illegally, immorally, unwisely, or just incompetently.  For that matter, one can argue that it acted justifiably and with restraint considering the circumstances.  Those are all positions on a legitimate spectrum of opinion, which can be defended or refuted on their merits.

What was dismaying was the animus, which led critics to assume the worst, maintain that stance even as countervailing evidence accumulated, and cast the criticism in terms that in many cases either went Godwin or echoed classic antisemitic tropes.

There was so much to keep track of that I didn't even attempt to survey it all.  In any case, analyzing everything in detail would be redundant because what we find are primarily clumsy and minimal variations on a crude theme (not exactly the political equivalent of "The Musical Offering.")  One can most easily track the degeneration of the discourse via sites that monitor hate speech on such prominent forums as the Guardian's "Comment is Free" (1, 2) and Huffington Post.  And we already have some preliminary analyses of general coverage of the crisis and its aftermath (1, 2).

That Fidel Castro even crawled out of retirement to issue a special denunciation was a sign of either how big the issue was or how deranged the discourse had become:

"The hatred felt by the state of Israel against the Palestinians is such that they would not hesitate to send the one and a half million men, women and children of that country to the crematoria where millions of Jews of all ages were exterminated by the Nazis," the ex-Cuban leader said.

"It would seem that the Fuehrer's [Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's] swastika is today Israel's banner" . . . .

"With these outrageous comments, Fidel Castro shames his old-time companions and the ideals he always pretended to serve. Che Guevara must be spinning in his grave," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said in Jerusalem.

(Almost more striking than Castro's hateful harangue are the Foreign Ministry spokesman's words of praise for Che and the ideals of the Cuban Revolution. Impossible to imagine them coming from the mouth of a high US official.)

Caricatures in the Arab press were predictably harsh and often crossed the line into bigotry. The only novelties were those details occasioned by the maritime setting—images of pirates, sharks, octopi or sea monsters—which crowded out otherwise common Nazi motifs but could easily be adapted to fit other antisemitic stereotypes.  An Egyptian cartoon managed to touch all the bases:

As I sifted through and reflected on the coverage in the western media, what struck me was the disturbing extent to which the Nazi analogy, even when it is not openly part of the discourse, nonetheless now implicitly defines and shapes it. (I am of course aware of and impatient with the cruder versions of the postmodern argument to the effect that "the absence of" topic x "really proves" its implicit presence. That is not what I am talking about here.)

The  pattern involves several elements:

(1) Easy recourse to a stereotype of wanton brutality.  What unites the more moderate and most vicious versions of the criticism is the apparently unshakable conviction that Israel and the IDF have no regard for the lives of others.  This once marginal but now distressingly widespread view received the imprimatur of the  Goldstone Commission report, which asserted that, in Operation Cast Lead, the IDF "carried out direct intentional strikes against civilians" and "that disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy"—accusations that Moshe Halbertal determined  to be "false and slanderous."  Obviously, the Nazis epitomized brutality toward soldier and civilian alike, but did not invent and have no monopoly on it, so what distinguishes the charge here is the assumed historical context.

(2) The corollary (and this is arguably the most important element) is that Israel has "failed to learn the lessons" of the Holocaust, a charge repeated ad infinitum, whether in sorrow or in anger,  in opinion pieces and talkbacks. Insofar as the implication is that the oppressed have become oppressors, this is really just the "soft" version of the Nazi analogy, here made salonfähig—fit for respectable company.

This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that it is not the sort of charge leveled at other nations. Did the French carry out a war of savage repression in colonial Algiers because they had so quickly forgotten the depredations of Klaus Barbie's Gestapo in Lyon?  When the Soviets, who lost nearly 27 million citizens in World War II, applied their brute force in Afghanistan, did anyone charge that this was because they had “failed to learn the lessons” of the even more brutal Nazi occupation?

The rationale is central to the criticism of Israel because Nazism is seen as central not only to the national experience, but also to the origins of the state itself. The “failed lessons” argument is thus one of the linchpins of what I earlier termed "the new discourse of regret.” If support for the creation of Israel was in essence only the result of excessive and misplaced European guilt, then Israel's new crimes have the paradoxical effect of partially absolving Europeans of the original sin of genocide (the victims were not pure, after all), while simultaneously saddling them with an even greater moral debt—more burdensome and more infuriating because it was incurred under false pretenses—for all the injustices done to the Palestinians from 1947 to the present. The only way to break this chain of interest slavery is to repudiate the original debt and make restitution by channeling the bulk of the remaining capital of sympathy to the real or more deserving victims of the Middle East conflict.

(3) What is most insidious is that the aforementioned charges have deep roots traceable to the classic soil of antisemitism.

One staple of that thinking posits a Jewish sense of superiority to the non-Jew—whether arising from the arrogance of “chosenness” or more nefarious causes—whose manifestations range from passive “clannishness” to active hatred, represented at its extreme by fantasies of medieval “ritual murder” or modern “world conspiracy.” This prejudice draws sustenance from a Christian theology whose invidious canon of binary oppositions asserts the moral inferiority of the “old covenant” to the “new”: a religion of particularism vs. universalism; external rituals vs. inner faith; letter vs. spirit of the law; retribution vs. love. The anti-Judaic polemics in the New Testament moreover present the Jews as blind to the truth of their own Scripture, as a result of which they reject and persecute their prophets and ultimately commit the supreme sin of deicide. The punishment, one cannot fail to mention, is exile from their land until they collectively see the error of their ways and acknowledge the New Dispensation, which is to say: cease to exist as Jews.

To this extent, then, the charge of willful brutality uncomfortably echoes traditional theological prejudices against a Jewish religion of “vengeance.” (One need but consider the frequency with which the biblical doctrine of “an eye for an eye" is misinterpreted in commentaries on the Middle East conflict.) And the new political discourse of “failed lessons” of the Holocaust—in which Palestinians supplant the Jews as the embodiment of innocent victimhood—is in turn just a secular recapitulation of the old theological discourse of “supersessionism” or “replacement theory,” according to which, after the Jews fail to understand the message of salvation through Christ, the Church becomes the new or “true” Israel (“verus Israel”) in the eyes of God.  Not coincidentally, this pernicious doctrine, which mainstream western churches had begun to repudiate in the final decades of the last century, has now reappeared in a number of church documents specifically addressing their relationship to Israel, Jewish interpretation of the Bible, and the role of the land of Israel in Jewish religion and history. (See, for example, these critiques of the "Kairos" document and recent deliberations by UK Methodists and US Presbyterians.)

Two recent cartoons from the Guardian further illustrate my point.

In the first, an Israel Navy patrol boat flies a flag in which the Star of David is made of human bones and the stripes of barbed wire, signifying that Gaza is a “concentration camp" and the IDF are its guards.  Inhumanity and murder thus literally become the emblems of the state itself:

The second is, frankly, ill-conceived and inane, but revealing for all that.

One need not go so far as to see here an echo of deicide (the dove traditionally representing one of the three persons of the Trinity), or even to point out that the IDF here attacks literally the entire endangered population of the planet.  No doubt, the inept artist didn't really think things through this thoroughly (if the earth is flooded and all human and animal life is on the ark, why is there still an Israel with an army and what in the world are they blockading?).  He was simply groping for some readily comprehensible way to depict absolute violence versus absolute innocence—and instinctively found those opposites in Israel and the symbol of salvation.  It suffices to point out that the wanton murder of the dove of peace, long a topos in anti-Israel caricatures (other recent examples:  1, 2), is given an implicitly religious as well as political dimension.

In these two cartoons, then, the pattern is complete: Israel acts cruelly and immorally because it has failed to learn the lessons of both its own religion ("Bible stories retold") and its own recent history (from the inmates to the keepers of the camps)—and thus, the principles of universal humanity, as well.

It’s just hard to have any sympathy for people like that.

Like fascism in its day, this deceptive new discourse of demonization did not arise in a vacuum or find an audience only on the margins of society. Both were able to establish themselves because they drew upon deep-rooted elements of “respectable” mainstream culture—and the support and prestige of intellectuals and other elites.

As chance would have it, one of the more culpable of these enablers recently passed away.  Most obituaries of Jose Saramago understandably focused on his literary achievements and status as a Nobel Prize laureate. However, it was worthwhile to be reminded that the man who was so sensitive to the nuances of ideas and language in his creative life displayed no comparable discernment in the political.

Here, all the pieces fall into place. Not only did he equate Israel’s actions during the Second Intifada with the death camps. He knew the reason:

• The Israelis are like Nazis
• because they have failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust, which is in turn
• because their religion itself teaches them arrogance, hatred, and exploitation.

“[I]n Palestine, there is a crime which we can stop. We may compare it with what happened at Auschwitz.” (April 2002)

“Living under the shadows of the Holocaust and expecting to be forgiven for anything they do on behalf of what they have suffered seems abusive to me. They didn’t learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents.” (October 2003)

“[C]ontaminated by the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God … the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: ‘Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.’” (April 2002)

There you have it.

Saramago is gone, but all too clearly, his legacy lives on. 

Fortunately, as memory of the recent fighting faded, the World Cup got underway.  There's still sports to bring people together:




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