Yves here. It may seem that some independent sites and anti-Israel-genocide pundits are going on overmuch about the heavy-handed campaign to smear throughly warranted criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. Yours truly has to disagree. As long as the slaughter in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank continue, opponents need to keep up all their many forms of protest. And that necessitates forcefully (and it appears repeatedly) rejecting the anti-Semitism canard.
The Rob Urie post below has some acid phrase-making, as well as an interesting consideration of what makes for a religious state.
By Robert Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
With Israel launching genocide 2.0 in Rafah (Gaza) as this is being written, the implied purpose of the violent police repression of protesters on college campuses last week, in conjunction with the media effort to label anyone who objects to the events unfolding as ‘anti-Semitic,’ is to provide political breathing room for the assault of Rafah. It won’t work. The implied logic is clear— the protesters must be cleared before the images of more murdered Palestinians light the world on fire. Missing from ‘the conversation’ is the self-reflection needed to understand that it is the genocide that is politically incendiary, not objections to it.
The same (state) media outlets in the US, including many of the same media personalities who promoted the Iraq WMD and Russiagate frauds, have been telling their rapidly dwindling audiences that it is hatred of Jewish people, rather than abhorrence of Israeli atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza, that is motivating student protests in the US. Surely, the media based this charge on extensive interviews with the protesters to uncover their true motives, right? Well, no. In fact, the media’s failure to engage with the protesters is evidence that these outlets don’t want to know what the protesters’ true motives are.
Bizarrely, thousands, likely tens of thousands, of the protesting students have made clear through their protests what their goals are. The practice of the propagandist class of calling every person and institution that opposes American imperial slaughters abroad, including those by proxy in Ukraine and Gaza, pro ‘the enemy’ may work in the tit for tat idiocy in the DC bubble where bought and paid for official blather is a currency of sorts. But it is stunningly socially destructive. It’s almost as if the goal of officialdom is to keep us at each other’s throats to take the focus off of their own failures.
The Russiagate and Iraq WMD frauds are cited here for a reason. They were both politically motivated, state-sponsored, psyops. Their implied goals were to defraud the American public into supporting the foreign policy goals of the CIA. And the way in which they were advanced was to silence critics with fabulated, demagogic, drivel regarding fake threats to the nation. And no one from the FBI or CIA has been arrested or charged for the Russiagate fraud.
Since the end of WWII at least, America has acted as a Wizard of Oz fronting for the Einsatzgruppen. There used to be clever and sincere operators working within the bowels of major state institutions. But the official line over recent decades has always, always, always, been fabulist bullshit put forward to kill, torture, starve, and maim, large numbers of people so that a few rich folks could pay for their 37th dream kitchen. And thoughtful and sincere opposition to these never-ending American slaughters has always been portrayed as support for whatever enemy-of-the-week the good Wizard has conjured.
In terms of political logic, the loaded charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ currently being applied to those who criticize the state policies of Israel reflects a category error that has been used by demagogues in the US and Israel for political benefit for several decades now. Some fair bit of the criticism of Israel’s state policies coming from American Jews is that the Israeli-right is overplaying its hand in slaughtering Palestinians, to the long-term detriment of Israel. While this view is critical of Israel’s state policies, the motive is to the ultimate benefit of Israel and Israelis. That the exterminationists in Israel lack the imagination to move their political vision forward without committing genocide makes them fascists.
A similar principle was at work in the US when the George W. Bush administration, acting in league with Congress, launched its misbegotten war against Iraq in 2003. While Mr. Bush and his minions were quick to claim that opposition to their war was ‘pro-terrorist,’ many of us who opposed it had concluded that gratuitously slaughtering a million Iraqis while lighting the rest of the Middle East on fire would diminish the US national interest, not improve it. In retrospect, Mr. Bush’s war was the beginning of the end of the US.
Within the terms of Mr. Bush’s political logic, the American slaughter in Iraq was a demonstration of America’s military might. Missing from this logic was that there were few in world at the outset of the war who doubted American military might. And few would have noticed if the US had ‘prevailed’ in Iraq. But it didn’t, demonstrating to the world that while the US is capable of killing a lot of people and destroying nations, it is incapable of the imperial management needed to sustain the empire.
Recall: while Mr. Bush knew that it was his father’s (and his own) business partners who attacked the US on 9/11, he lied to the American people and blamed the act on Iraq. To be clear, he didn’t just lie about Iraqi WMDs, he lied about who it was that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks for his own, and his family’s, benefit. This isn’t to suggest that Bush & Co. planned or participated in the attacks. In his letter to America, Osama bin Laden takes implicit credit for them. Nevertheless, missing from American discussion of 9/11 has been a single iota of truth regarding US military actions abroad, as well as al Qaeda’s true motives (bin Laden letter) for attacking the US.
Mr. Bush’s ‘they hate us for our freedoms’ was the ‘anti-Semitism’ (or ‘disinformation’) of its day, self-serving bullshit that flatters the malinformed public into psychologically reaffirming American empire. However, most Americans aren’t ‘privileged.’ Read Mr. bin Laden’s ‘letter’ (link above) to understand how insidious this unfounded belief in American ‘privilege’ really is. Living in a state that has a billionaire or two doesn’t make us all billionaires. And voting in a rigged system (the parties control ballot access) doesn’t mean that ‘we,’ the great unwashed, choose who governs us, or their policies.
With respect to Joe Biden, the Democrats have perfected their ‘powerless’ schtick in order to carry out heinous acts without angering their constituents. Despite Democrats holding the White House and both houses of Congress in 2021, Joe Biden was ‘powerless’ to enact his stated agenda. The Congressional bottle-washer (clerk) had the ultimate say, claimed Biden. Like Barack Obama before him, Biden has enacted one of the most audacious agendas of all time. He launched a pointless and gratuitous war against nuclear armed Russia in Ukraine for the benefit of ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs as he is sponsoring a full-blown WWII-style genocide in Gaza.
While it’s difficult to avoid blaming the Israelis when watching images of the carnage unfolding in Gaza, it is the Americans who are funding Israel, supplying it with weapons and materiel, giving Israeli bombers air and logistical support— including assistance in targeting Palestinians for death, and holding competing regional interests at bay. Here(starts 2:48) is US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stating that Israel’s attack on Palestine would end immediately if the US stopped supplying Israel with weapons. What will be revealed in coming months or years is that the Israeli genocide is a result of the long-term strategic ‘vision’ of the US. And all of the world except the American people knows it.
What makes Biden’s actual agenda so audacious is that it’s all Wizard of Oz-style bullshit. Of course, the killing is real. However, having participated in gutting the American manufacturing base (but not the military budget) as a neoliberal, neocon Senator, Biden is starting wars that the US can’t finish. Biden’s chosen targets, Russia and China, both have manufacturing bases with which to manufacture weapons and materiel. The US not only exported its industry starting half-a-century ago, it sent its engineers (knowledge base) to flip burgers at Mickie Dees until they died of old age.
While the impact of various state policies is always open to debate, the insistence that one side in the debate gets to claim the national interest for itself— in either Israel or the US, is the realm of demagogues, not legitimate political difference. This is why the US and Israeli governments are working so hard to delegitimate assessments of their policies that differ from their own. If legitimate differences with state policies are admitted, then the ability of particular state actors to define them unilaterally is diminished. Question: without ‘anti-Semitism’ to fall back on, what possible explanation could Israel give for its behavior in Gaza that would be deemed legitimate by outsiders?
Moreover, nation-states are political entities so organized to be able to conduct affairs of state with other nations. Given that all of the major religions have footprints that lie outside of any single national boundary, nations that claim state religions (e.g. Israel, Iran) don’t represent those religions politically outside of their national borders. In this way, criticism of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza has no bearing on Jews living in Canada or Brazil. This, despite Israel calling itself a ‘Jewish state.’ No one holds Canadian or Brazilian Jews responsible for Israel’s state actions.
By analogy, the political right in the US has long claimed that the US is ‘a Christian nation.’ In terms of religious self-identification, this is most certainly true. Most Americans who are religious identify as Christian. Yet in all of my years of publicly opposing US foreign policy (1969 – 2024), I don’t recall being accused of being anti-Christian for doing so. A large contingent of the American anti-war movement during the Vietnam war was church-based, with prominent church leaders putting their lives and freedom on the line to end the slaughter.
The point here is that the political leadership in the US could have slandered American anti-war protesters of the era as ‘anti-Christian’ because the US , according to them, ‘is a Christian nation.’ But lots of Christians had already concluded that the war was an abomination. Israel is in a similar position today, with Zionists running the Israeli government. Many of the anti-genocide protesters in the US are Jewish. And for those who aren’t, there are multiple legitimate criticisms of Israeli and US state actions that bear no relation to the claimed religious status of Israel.
This latter point is crucial to the conception of how nation-states operate. When Venezuela negotiates legal arrangements with China, it is the nation-states that act as signatories. Religious communities within these nations may have input into the negotiations, but they aren’t the legal entities that act as signatories, and they aren’t the legal entities charged with enforcement. So, while history and religious passion may guide the tenor of state-to-state negotiations, every nation has internal interests acting behind the scenes.
Conversely, if some nations are religious-states, in the sense of being so governed, why aren’t religious entities (church, synagogue, mosque, etc.) the signatories to international agreements? For instance, since the Revolution in 1979, (the Islamic Republic of) Iran has had a hybrid secular – religious system of governance. While powerful religious figures (Ayatollahs) have significant say in the affairs of state, it is the nation-state of Iran with which international agreements are inked.
Within the Jewish community in Israel, half of Israeli Jews describe themselves as ‘secular,’ versus a combined maximum of around 25% who describe themselves as ‘orthodox’ or ‘ultra-orthodox.’ Secular Jews by definition aren’t interpreting scripture to determine state policies. This doesn’t mean that they are any less sincere in their religious beliefs than orthodox Jews. What it means is that the religious beliefs differ. They may all fall within the broad category of Judaism. But differences within the broad category make assertions that Israel’s state polices are ‘Jewish’ simplistic to the point of being misleading.
Again, by analogy, evangelical Christians in the US provide support for the political right to an extent that activist and political commenter Chris Hedges crafted the term ‘Christian fascists,’ to describe their politics. Conversely, variations on Liberation Theology inform the Christian ‘left,’ if such a descriptor can be claimed. Support by American liberals and the evangelical right for Israeli state policies with respect to the Palestinians is antithetical to the ‘secular’ Christian view that genocide is morally and politically repugnant. It was morally and politically repugnant to Israelis until the American MIC took over the West.
The commonly held view that evangelical Christians and orthodox Jews are ‘more’ Christian or Jewish, respectively, than other denominations is a denominational quibble, not religious doctrine. As the Spanish Inquisition and Irish orphanages illuminated, individual and institutional assertions of superior righteousness are often used to place evil people in charge of Christian institutions. This occasional rule by demagogues renders visible the political natures of both church and state. Religionists who act politically are politicians acting within the realm of state power.
Following each of the World Wars, maps of the world were redrawn by the victors with little concern for political, economic, cultural, and religious differences. Since WWII ended, part of the rationale for the US crushing movements for democracy around the globe has been the desire to ‘manage’ the resulting tensions through political repression. For instance, before he was ‘the new Hitler,’ Saddam Hussein (Iraq) was the CIA asset in Iraq put forward to quash ethnic tensions resulting from these externally drawn maps.
List: remarkably, five of the ten countries with the largest oil reserves have been governed by ‘the new Hitler’ in the last twenty years. Imagine, one Hitler in all of the twentieth century, but five in the last twenty years. In contrast to this Hitler-heavy concentration, four of the remaining countries, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and the US, are liberal democracies (not). Readers are encouraged to read Osama bin Laden’s letter to America (link above) to understand how insidious fake liberal democracy (US) can be for we little people. Source: oilprice.com.
With respect to the timing of police violence against protesters coincident with the state media putting on its crazy pants to point and shout ‘anti-Semite,’ the likely reason is the resumption of the US / Israeli genocide Rafah. While the official lie coming from US / Israeli sources is that Hamas is ‘dug in’ in Rafah, the politicians of the Israeli right have spent recent months openly describing their genocidal aims. Their goal is to ‘clear’ Palestine of Palestinians. The nations surrounding Israel have stated publicly that they have no intention of absorbing Palestinians fleeing Israel.
While clever and knowledgeable people are (correctly) claiming that the police violence used against protesters was both unnecessary and excessive, the question back is: where in the hell have you been living? At the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) encampment at Zuccotti Park, the NYPD drove over protesters with their motorcycles. The NYPD soaked peaceful and compliant OWS protesters with pepper spray. In my first march against the Vietnam War at the tender age of twelve, boiling water was poured out of open windows onto us. I was threatened with being murdered twice by people with guns for my political views before my sixteenth birthday.
At Columbia University, an adjunct professor named Rebecca Weiner— who also works for the NYPD ‘anti-terrorism’ unit, coordinated the clearing of the encampment. In interviews after the campus was cleared, Ms. Weiner spoke in the conceptually-muddled techno-drivel of the ‘anti-terrorism’ industry. Ms. Weiner circuitously clamed that 1) free-speech wasn’t being suppressed because 2) it was a ‘change in tactics’ 3) with respect to the language, 4) used by the anti-genocide protesters, 5) that was shut down by the NYPD.
That Ms. Weiner’s political logic isn’t being reported as fallacious nonsense is likely a fashion issue particular to the industry that she works in. Briefly, a change in linguistic ‘tactics’ still leaves the actions of the students at the level of Constitutionally protected speech. If it hadn’t, legally actionable consequences unrelated to student speech would have ensued. But Ms. Weiner made no assertion that this was the case. What she did assert is that it was the change in tactics that rendered the protesters subject to legal sanction, not that illegal acts followed from doing so.
For example, my use of the term ‘industry’ to describe the ‘anti-terrorism’ industry is a tactic to place its motives in the commercial framework of political economy. In fact, the modern ‘anti-terrorism’ industry was created when George W. Bush put thousands of people to the task of ‘finding’ a very, very, small number of actual terrorists. The result: the FBI now exists to fabricate fake terrorist plots. What makes police entrapment a legitimate defense in criminal cases isn’t that the FBI thought about, or discussed (both are linguistic ‘tactics’), entrapping people, but that it actually entrapped them.
The problem that Ms. Weiner— as well as the Biden administration, the NYPD, and the exterminationist-right in Israel, are trying to overcome is that the protesting students have heard their explanations of the events in Gaza and come to different conclusions. Rather than trying to convince the students otherwise, the official response in the US has been slander, propaganda, censorship, and police violence. This is fundamentally different from making one’s views known as citizens regarding the affairs of state by protesting. Shutting down ‘free-speech’ isn’t its opposite. Coerced speech is. Shutting down ‘free-speech’ is political repression.
One illuminating / particularly troubling aspect of this police repression is that billionaires hired private militias to attack the protesters. The protesters didn’t attack these private militias, they were attacked by them (link above). At UCLA in particular, a private militia allegedly funded by Jessica Seinfeld (link above), wife of ‘comedian’ Jerry Seinfeld (listen to his stand-up and decide for yourself), had the look and presence of the Gestapo. Wearing masks to hide their identities, the ‘counter-protesters’ softened up the UCLA protesters for the violent police assault that followed.
To be clear, the ‘counter-protesters’ weren’t protesting anything. They are modern-day Pinkertons hired by Wall Streeters and ‘celebrities’ (links above) to commit violence against actual protesters. One of the defining characteristics of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s was violence committed by private militias. This makes the claim that the counter-protesters are ‘fighting anti-Semitism’ morbidly ironic. The comment by Chanamel Dorfman, aid to Israeli Security Chief Ben Givr, that the problem with the Nazis was that ‘they killed the wrong people,’ suggests that he (Dorfman) knows who ‘the right people’ are.
Finally, Donald Trump’s value to the American people in 2016 was in bringing to light that political and economic power in the US is dug in like ticks, or possibly tapeworms. Now that he has officially joined the uniparty by telling House Speaker Mike Johnson to fund the campaign war chests of Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu with $91 billion in arms ‘purchases,’ he has gone full AOC as a fake renegade sheep-dogging for empire. Cobbled to his Reaganesque Republican policies, this makes him, like Joe Biden, the wrong person for the age.
This written, it is the US war against Russia in Ukraine that is more ominous for the world, and in need of being taken out of American officialdom’s hands very quickly. For details of the nuclear back-and-forth, here is Scott Ritter. Most frightening from Ritter is the abject stupidity of the American political ‘leadership.’ George H. W. Bush was the last American political leader trained in statecraft (his father was ‘banker to the Fuehrer’ during WWII, Prescott Bush). Following H. W. Bush, the requirement that American President’s be able to speak at least one language (George W. Bush didn’t, Joe Biden is a toss-up) was apparently deemed too onerous.
With Biden’s recent ‘major speech’ on the ‘dramatic rise in anti-Semitism in the US,’ the calcification and irrelevance of American ‘leaders’ on the world stage is sealed. What Biden and his minions conspicuously cannot comprehend is that we dogs are no longer eating the dogfood. This isn’t ‘revolutionary’ in any political sense. The powers that be can either stop lying or come up with better lies. But having the same people from the same three-letter agencies promoting the same lies eventually loses its potency as social engineering.
Listen to the Scott Ritter interview (link above) as you channel Jennifer Lawrence’s character in Don’t Look Up shouting ‘we’re all going to $#!?& die.’ Allowing one, two, or three morons in the basement (or Oval Office) of the White House to decide the fate of humanity is not reasonable. To Democrats— get a handle on your boy. You inflicted this genocidal jackass on the rest of us. To Republicans— get a handle on your boy. You inflicted this uniparty jackass on us. Then consider: with no political bench to draw from, possibly the problems are systemic.
