The Left and Anti-Semitism

[reviscom1]

Right-wingers often claim that there is a strong vein of anti-semitism running through the left.

Previously, I have always dismissed this as a right wing smear, or at best a misunderstanding of criticisms of Israel.

However, recently I have myself seen signs of what looks like anti-Semitism on various message boards - using "Jewish" instead of "Israeli", pointing out that journalists they disagree with are Jewish, claiming that the media is controlled by a "pro-Jewish" cabal. One even mentioned the "Jewish run banks"!!!

What are peoples' thoughts on this? Is this a thing? Do you have any sympathy with it? (Hopefully not)

[cyu]

If you treat people like your enemies, then they will act like your enemies.

If you treat "The Other" as your soul mate just trying to give you something to do, well, how can anyone tell if everything we experience isn't just your favorite dungeon master trying to show you a good time?

If you view the world as a battle between good and evil, then that's how you will categorize everything you see.

If you view the world as a dance between you and your soul mate, then that's how you will categorize everything you see.

[Fourth Internationalist]

Right-wingers often claim that there is a strong vein of anti-semitism running through the left.

Previously, I have always dismissed this as a right wing smear, or at best a misunderstanding of criticisms of Israel.

However, recently I have myself seen signs of what looks like anti-Semitism on various message boards - using "Jewish" instead of "Israeli", pointing out that journalists they disagree with are Jewish, claiming that the media is controlled by a "pro-Jewish" cabal. One even mentioned the "Jewish run banks"!!!

What are peoples' thoughts on this? Is this a thing? Do you have any sympathy with it? (Hopefully not)

Well, it is true, antisemitism exists. And so it is also on the internet, including on some message boards. Are these explicitly leftist boards, though? If so, doesn't that simply show the absurdity of trying to lump all "leftists" into this single "left" category?

[reviscom1]

Yes, these are left wing message boards and nominally left wing commenters (radical left, not centre left)

[Counterculturalist]

These pseudo leftists are using age-old right-wing conspiratorial analysis that rejects real examination of class society in favor of just-so stories about an unstoppable cabal of Semitic supervillains. They have nothing to offer us, and if we can't win them over to our side, we need to flush them out of the left milieu like we would any other fascists.

ETA: Recent thread about similar subject here, for further reading: http://www.revleft.com/vb/anti-semitism-left-t194747/index.html

[Fourth Internationalist]

Yes, these are left wing message boards and nominally left wing commenters (radical left, not centre left)

Can I ask exactly what message boards these are? It is clear, as the other poster above me alluded to, they have nothing in common with Marxist revolutionaries who are scientific in their analysis of society and its history. This is why there is nothing particularly useful about labeling them as "leftists" along with us. We really have nothing in common with such people.

[#FF0000]

I do think this sort of thing happens. It's not as if being a radical leftist precludes people from ignorance or bigotry. I don't think its an inherent part of the Left, though.

[reviscom1]

The Guardian, and some radical groups on FaceBook, but not ones particularly concerned with Middle Eastern politics.

I would not say they are Communists, more like radical Parliamentary leftists.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

The thing is, "the left" is an extremely broad category. Marxist socialists, anarchists, parliamentary "socialists" (which in turn form a spectrum from Altamirano to Craxi), bourgeois liberals, bourgeois radical liberals, certain nationalists, all of them are called "left". And yes, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in there. It's disgusting. And we reject it.

But I wanted to say something more. Broadly, I think, the self-proclaimed socialist left can be divided into two parts. One, basing itself on the progressive legacy of the previous revolutions, aims to institute a rational society where political rule will become an archaism, and the current global circulation of goods and large-scale industrial production will be made to serve human need. The other, essentially a reactionary creed, takes the standpoint of the petty proprietor, and dreams of overthrowing the global circulation of goods, large-scale industrial production and so on. One opposes capitalism as it exists from the perspective of a more rational society, the other from the perspective of a return to petty production. The late great American conservative and miserable fuck Ch. Lasch wrote quite a bit on the second sort of socialism and its closeness to (his) conservativism. If you can hold your nose, it's an interesting read.

Why is this important? Because, to the second group of "socialists", the European Jews, stereotypically a people without an "honest profession", are anathema. They are said to embody everything the petty-proprietor "socialist" hates about modernity, from finance capital to "moral decay". But more importantly the reactionary "socialist" hates the Jewish intelligentsia which has done such a great service to mankind in developing socialism as a progressive doctrine of the liberation and advancement of mankind.

[bricolage]

I do think this sort of thing happens. It's not as if being a radical leftist precludes people from ignorance or bigotry. I don't think its an inherent part of the Left, though.
I think there's two ways it intersects with left.

On the one hand it happens when anti-capitalism is reduced to just anti-financial capitalism, and especially anti-banks. This isn't a new phenomenon but has resurfaced again after the financial crisis. There's always been a strong vein of anti-semitism in anti-baker rhetoric and when it is prioritized at the expense of wider anti-capitalism it tends to surface.

The second instance is, of course, to do with Israel. There's always been the stupid scenario here where the defenders of Israel maintain that every critic is an anti-semite and the opponent stress that none of them could be anti-semites, really it lies somewhere in the middle. Certainly this is not helped by the claims of Israeli politicians to be acting in the name of all Jews which in turn both leads some Jews to sympathize with them, but also leads to anti-Zionists internalizing this same logic. In addition there are just plain people who don't like Jews and in turn don't like Israel. I have to say the majority of Palestinian activists I've known and done stuff with, while often having some dodgy political views, have not been anti-semites. But of course they do exist in semi-substantial numbers and it's important to expose them when they make themselves known.

[Aslan]

Its usually has a presence in tankies. Although Anti-Semitism in left communists and Anarchists is not unheard of.

Albanians were pretty distrustful of Jews during the rule of the PPSh, but these days there aren't many Jews in Albania anyway so...

[Ismail]

Albanians were pretty distrustful of Jews during the rule of the PPSh, but these days there aren't many Jews in Albania anyway so...Albania was the only European country where Jews were sheltered by significant portions of the population during the war, and this reflected the good relations which existed between Albanians and Jews before the war.

There was no instances of anti-Semitism in Albania after the war, although Judaism was struggled against just as Islam and Christianity were during the campaign against religion.

[JaffaRed]

The Israeli regime LOVES to blame any critic of being an "antisemitic", and any Jewish critic of being a "self-hating Jew". Zionism tries to claim that it represents the whole Jewish people and thus if you criticize Zionism, you criticise Jews. The regime also tries to blame communists of "antisemitism" to obscure the fact that it was the Red Army under communist leadership, and not some Zionist militia, who liberated the death camps and kicked Hitler in the arse.

[PikSmeet]

Albania was the only European country where Jews were sheltered by significant portions of the population during the war, and this reflected the good relations which existed between Albanians and Jews before the war.

There was no instances of anti-Semitism in Albania after the war, although Judaism was struggled against just as Islam and Christianity were during the campaign against religion.

So well treated that by the time the communist regime collapsed only 73 jews remained.

[Ismail]

So well treated that by the time the communist regime collapsed only 73 jews remained.No. According to the Jewish Virtual Library (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/albania.html) (a Zionist source) the vast majority were airlifted to Israel after the "communist regime collapsed," hence why there's less than 100 Jews living there today. The reason wasn't because of anti-Semitism but due to the collapse of the economy and public order which also led to the largest European refugee situation since WWII as a great many Albanians fled the country.

The ranks of Jews in Albania were not thinned by any executions or forced conversions, despite you insinuating that they were.

[PikSmeet]

I am not insinuating that they were executed or forced to convert but you are misinterpreting what the article at the jewish virtual library says.
It does not contradict my point that less than a 100 remained by the time communism fell and even states that the Jews in Albania were isolated from the Worldwide jewish community. Hardly qualifies as good treatment now does it?

[Ismail]

I am not insinuating that they were executed or forced to convert but you are misinterpreting what the article at the jewish virtual library says.
It does not contradict my point that less than a 100 remained by the time communism fell and even states that the Jews in Albania were isolated from the Worldwide jewish community. Hardly qualifies as good treatment now does it?The article says that less than 100 Jews remain today. There were only a few hundred Jews in Albania in between the 40s and 90s.

The article makes no mention of anti-Semitism, and in fact despite the 100+ books I have on Albania (most published in the West), I've never come across a single instance of anti-Semitism mentioned in any of them. Being "isolated from the Worldwide jewish community" doesn't mean much when descriptions of Hoxha in bourgeois accounts rarely fail to include the claim that he supposedly isolated the whole country from the outside world.

[Aslan]

The article says that less than 100 Jews remain today. There were only a few hundred Jews in Albania in between the 40s and 90s.

The article makes no mention of anti-Semitism, and in fact despite the 100+ books I have on Albania (most published in the West), I've never come across a single instance of anti-Semitism mentioned in any of them. Being "isolated from the Worldwide jewish community" doesn't mean much when descriptions of Hoxha in bourgeois accounts rarely fail to include the claim that he supposedly isolated the whole country from the outside world.

Ok, I'll actually retract my earlier statements. You're right, Enver was actually very generous with the Jews of Albania. Enver did actually defend the Jews. It was only in the civil war of 97 where the Jewish population was air-lifted.

I'm sure there were Albanians who were anti-semetic during his rule. Maybe the Ballists were anti-semetic (since they were facist reactionaries). I don't know any though, they seem somewhat positive towards them

[GLF]

The only leftists that I've ever seen that were explicitly antisemitic were Strasserists, but they are pseudo-leftist and, when you really get down to it, are actually social demo****s who happen to be nationalist.
Many Jews find rank among us. It would be utterly silly to be antisemitic.

Now, Judaism as a religion is another thing altogether. But this is seperate from ethnic Jews the same way whites were called "Christian" hundreds of years ago beofre "white" was invented.

[RedAlthusser]

Again, this concept is nothing new. The appropriate measures must be that we do not confuse anti Zionism as anti Jew. In the United States, when anyone questions the Israeli state, the label of anti semite is thrown around to silence the critic. It's very quite amusing. Zionism equals Nazism. In the greater scheme of things..Oppression just diguised as petty Nationalism. The average Christian American gives Israeli occupation a free pass in the name of religion... Sounds familiar doesn't it. Any Jew who is not a fascist is always welcome...just as any person of any religious orientation that doesn't use their religion as a hand grenade.

[Devrim]

Its usually has a presence in tankies. Although Anti-Semitism in left communists and Anarchists is not unheard of.

What?

Devrim

[Heretek]

What?

Devrim

I was thinking the same thing. What left-coms are guilty of this? What anarchists? The only thing I can think of would be anarcho-capititalists, if such people were actually anarchists. Maybe primitivists, I'm not really familiar with that brand of backward.

So who are you talking about, and what evidence is there?

[motion denied]

Bakunin did say some, er, regretfully bad things, to say the least, about jews. But that's widely known. Proudhon was also a piece of shit about "this race that poisons everything".

As for the left-comms, maybe the Hamburg national-bolsheviks?

I don't know if Aslan was referring to these though.

[newdayrising]

As for the left-comms, maybe the Hamburg national-bolsheviks?


Again, what?

The association of left-communism with anti-semitism usually has to do with the text "Auschwitz, Or The Great Alibi", atributed to Bordiga. It's clear to anyone who reads it that it's a preposterous accusation, whether one agrees with it or not. But it was probably fueled by the fact that it has been published by Pierre Guillaume, a character associated with the so called "ultra-left" who became a famous holocaust denier.

[motion denied]

I forgot about "Bordiga" and French ultra-lefts, though I had though of Les Amis de 4 Million de Jeunes Travailleurs (Idk if they can be labelled left-comm). They were expelled, but national-bolsheviks did help the foundation of the KAPD.

I didn't say there is a necessary correlation.

[newdayrising]

I forgot about "Bordiga" and French ultra-lefts, though I had though of Les Amis de 4 Million de Jeunes Travailleurs (Idk if they can be labelled left-comm). They were expelled, but national-bolsheviks did help the foundation of the KAPD.

I didn't say there is a necessary correlation.

The National Bolsheviks did infiltrate the KAPD, but they were absolutely not left-communists in any shape or form.
Also, I'm not sure if anti-semitism was a part of the German version of National-Bolshevism at the time. Was it?
They were a different beast than later nazbols as we know them today.

[Texan.Marxist]

I'm not anti-Semitic whatsoever, like most leftists.
But obviously I'm critical of Zionism and the acts of Israel. And I have noticed a prominently Israeli control over media outlets. While this doesn't exactly mean anything, as it wouldn't if majority blacks or Asians controlled the media, there is a strong Jewish presence in the media.
Nonetheless: hate the Zionism, not the people.

[Abdullah Tshabal]

Again, this concept is nothing new. The appropriate measures must be that we do not confuse anti Zionism as anti Jew. In the United States, when anyone questions the Israeli state, the label of anti semite is thrown around to silence the critic. It's very quite amusing. Zionism equals Nazism. In the greater scheme of things..Oppression just diguised as petty Nationalism. The average Christian American gives Israeli occupation a free pass in the name of religion... Sounds familiar doesn't it. Any Jew who is not a fascist is always welcome...just as any person of any religious orientation that doesn't use their religion as a hand grenade.
The use, or rather misuse of the term "anti-semitic" goes a step further here in South Africa, where counter-protests are a thing and pro-Israeli groups (such as the SAJBD, the SAZF and to a degree, the ACDP) are labeling anyone who is even slightly critical of Israel as "anti-Semitic". They have gone as far as to berate even predominantly Jewish anti-Zionist/Apartheid Israeli groups (Example: JVJP) as being "self-hating Jews". Furthermore, the SAZF has even attempted to censor media and literature on the subject. Fortunately, they have been unsuccessful so far.
Oh, and the "pro-Israeli" groups in South Africa are suspected of being in bed with Israel and getting their pockets lined with many Shekels and Rand.

[Devrim]

The national Bolsheviks were never members of the KAPD. The were expelled at the same time, but excluded from the the KAPD at the founding congress.

Devrim

[John Nada]

The only leftists that I've ever seen that were explicitly antisemitic were Strasserists, but they are pseudo-leftist and, when you really get down to it, are actually social demo****s who happen to be nationalist.There's nothing "left" about Strasserites. It's Nazism with a populist facade.
Many Jews find rank among us. It would be utterly silly to be antisemitic.Yet both history and this very thread seem to confirm this silliness.
Now, Judaism as a religion is another thing altogether. But this is seperate from ethnic Jews the same way whites were called "Christian" hundreds of years ago beofre "white" was invented.WTF?:confused:
I'm not anti-Semitic whatsoever, like most leftists.This usually ends with a clause that says the opposite:unsure:
But obviously I'm critical of Zionism and the acts of Israel. And I have noticed a prominently Israeli control over media outlets. While this doesn't exactly mean anything, as it wouldn't if majority blacks or Asians controlled the media, there is a strong Jewish presence in the media. Nonetheless: hate the Zionism, not the people.Israeli=/=Jewry=/=Zionists:glare: Most Zionist are probably Christians(which is strange:confused: ). The bourgeois media's just racist, bigoted, jingoist, and imperialist as fuck, because capitalism itself is imperialist, jingoist, bigoted and racist as fuck anyway.

This sounds like the "Jews control the media!" conspiracy theory. There might be an disproportionate representation of Jewish people in the media due to old antisemitic rules restricting career choices and a culture that emphasizes literacy, but there's not some big "Jewish conspiracy". Wouldn't surprise me if English-Americans are disproportionately represented in the media industry, yet none would claim this is some shadowy plot on part of people of English descent worldwide.

Beside, Jewish people aren't a monolith. A lot don't support Zionism, even in Israel. Why Karl Marx, Rosa Luxembourg and Leon Trotsky were of Jewish descent, and IIRC opposed Zionism. I don't see what the supposed ethnicity of the bourgeoisie has to do with them having, well, a bourgeois outlook.

Besides, you got it ass-backwards. Of course a lot of the US bourgeois media supports Zionism, because it's an extension of US imperialism. The US imperialist-bourgeoisie(overwhelmingly Christian) obviously support basically a US settler-colony, because Israel functions as a permanent forward operating base to police US neo-colonies in the Middle East. Zionism is militarily and economically beneficial to US imperialism.