The tropes of 'Jewish antisemitism'

[grassfed]

From the moment he took the job heading the UN Human Rights Council's mission to investigate human rights and international humanitarian law violations during the Gaza conflict, it was inevitable that Judge Richard Goldstone, born into a South African Jewish family, would be labelled a "self-hating Jew" and a Jewish antisemite. Immediately on the release in September of his findings, which concluded that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes, Israel's finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, couldn't wait to make this accusation.

He certainly wasn't alone. The charge is so popular these days that people who use it must have felt as though they had won the lottery when they were presented with such a high-profile target like Goldstone. They were probably still savouring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's outburst in August when he railed against the two senior and Jewish aides of President Obama, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, calling them "self-hating Jews".

If anything finally shows up the concept as bogus and bankrupt, it should be the use of it against Goldstone. Jewish self-hatred means rejecting everything about yourself that is Jewish because it is so hateful to you. As a description of Goldstone, nothing could be further from the truth. A life-long Zionist and a Governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Goldstone believes bringing war criminals to justice stems from the lessons of the Holocaust and that the creation of Israel symbolised what the postwar human rights movement was all about. But to those who level the accusation, the real degree of Jewish affiliation of the accused is irrelevant.

Now it's quite obvious that calling someone a self-hating Jew in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict is intended as a demeaning political insult, a way of delegitimising the views of Jews with whom you violently disagree. But one of the reasons why the charge is so ubiquitous and is impervious to evidence and argument that proves it to be bogus is that it's not just used as an epithet. To some scholars and serious commentators, Jewish self-hatred is a proven psychopathological condition, an academically respectable category, and exponents of it can be found throughout history. Their testimony helps to underpin the accusation.

more http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/05/self-hating-jew-antisemitism

[sui generis]

1. group sociology at work

label your enemy as an outsider, and therefore devalue anything they have to say. I got this growing up asking questions in shul: oh you wouldn't understand you're only half jewish, and likewise in CCD - you wouldn't understand you're only half-catholic. Oy 2 the Vay.

We do it all the time on DU when we call people freepers here who disagree with us over trivial shit. It's just another lazy tactic but the cool part is people use it when they have no other argument.

It's a tool of last resort in an argument, and using it points that out.

[bemildred]

2. As I like to say: "Name calling is not an argument."

It more of an admission that you have no argument, but you want to demand obedience anyway.

[shira]

7. i agree with you - and this gives the author of the OP an excuse to avoid defending the report...

on its merits, which neither he or any other defender of Goldstone would dare attempt.

[bemildred]

8. He doesn't really seem much concerned about the report, it's true.

He seems to want to attack the usage of the term "self-hating Jew", and also to defend Goldstone himself.

[shira]

9. while he's correct about such labeling, he's guilty of doing it himself

he's cleverly portraying all criticism of Goldstone as 'shooting the messenger', and that is - of course - a convenient way for him to avoid debating the substance of Goldstone's report.

[bemildred]

10. Attacking Goldstone, not the report, is a classic ad hominem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

To point that out IS to defend the report, at least to the extent that the attacks on Goldstone ARE attacks on the report; and it is also a counter-attack on those parties that are attacking Goldstone, i.e. it is a defense of Goldstone himself.

[shira]

11. we're in agreement - but he is also guilty of ad-hominem attacks on critics of the report

Antony Lerman wrote this article a couple weeks ago...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/15/human-rights-gaza-israel?showallcomments=true

In that article, he describes any criticism against HRW and similar organizations as despicable attacks and lies, while denouncing critics as attack dogs for arguing that reports from human rights agencies are biased against Israel.

He is therefore also guilty of anti-intellectual, ad-hominem attacks.

[bemildred]

12. There is nothing wrong with attacking persons as such, one is not required to like persons.

The point is that an attack on the person is not a refutation of any argument that person has made, and vice versa. It's a matter of making proper distinctions. Thinking is hard enough without letting yourself get sloppy about it.

[shira]

13. just saying, it's funny the author is writing on this when he does the same thing himself

[bemildred]

15. I'm OK with that.

He is certainly unkind to various parties. He does also make several arguments about the misuse of "self-hating Jew" which I think have some merit, though I would probably express some things differently, and omit some of them (e.g. the stuff about the founders of zionism, I don't think it really illuminates much to assert that they were self-hating Jews, I suppose he intends irony, but it doesn't really work for me.) I think the term has narrow legitimate uses, but has been so broadly misused in political discourse as to become virtually meaningless, or just a synonym for someone with whom one disagrees politically, any Jew that opposed Israeli government policy. Political argument tends to have that effect, it destroys words, debases vocabulary.

It is important to remember that this is not deductive logic here, not science, it is political discourse, one makes various arguments in hopes of swaying the views of ones audience. One attacks the author of an argument for precisely that reason, in hopes of swaying the audience to take a dim view of what he says, and one points out that that is an ad hominem attack in order to get them to reconsider whether they ought to take a personal dislike for him into account when considering the merits of what he has to say.

[Poll_Blind]

3. The term is used so frequenlty by right-wing Jews against left-wing Jews that...

...it does the unthinkable: dilutes the gravity of the term in the first place. Similarly, the accusations (for instance) against Jimmy Carter by the Jewish right as an anti-Semitism "enabler" or any of the spectrum of similar insults used to smear also dilute the meaning.

I think it's probably the single-most telling example of how the concept of "The New Anti-Semitism" has backfired horribly on the hard Right. Hint: They really don't give that much of a shit about anti-Semitism if they're so freely willing to label so many they disagree with as anti-Semites or (if Jewish) "self-loathing Jews".

AFAIK, while the concept of the "New" anti-Semitism has been around since the mid/late 70's, it was't until the 90's that it really "caught on". More information in my sig line, below.

PB

[LeftishBrit]

4. The term is overdone especially by Israeli hardliners

At the extremes, the hostility of some hardliners to dissenting Diaspora (and sometimes Israeli) Jews can come across as not quite as many million miles from a form of antisemitism as they would like to think. Extremes here as elsewhere can start to meet, and complaints about the influence of "those self-hating Jews" can sometimes start to sound a little too much like other complaints about the influence of "those Jews". Jews have the same right as anyone else to our own views and opinions. (I have no doubt that the extreme hardliners would regard *me* as an antisemitic Jew, or at least as a disloyal one.)

However, there are of course real Jewish antisemites - Gilad Atzmon instantly comes to mind; just as there are homophobic gays, anti-immigrant immigrants, African-American opponents of civil rights, anti-Arab Arabs, and any number of anti-feminist women.

[Violet_Crumble]

6. It's overdone and wrongly used a lot in relation to the I/P conflict....

It seems to be used in a way that someone else's identity as a Jew hinges on whether or not they give Israel 110% unquestioning support when it comes to the Occupation....

Another example of what hopefully no-one would argue wasn't a self-hating Jew is David Cole.

[Howardx]

14. who even listens anymore?

the true believers on this board and others have so overused the phrase its been completely diluted.

[shira]

5. the author of the OP is just as guilty of using the author's jewishness to fend off criticism...

...as those who use his jewishness to label him a self-hater. For example, how can the report be bigoted/antisemitic, etc.. if a Jew authored it, etc.?

It doesn't help matters any for Goldstone when he opens himself up to this attack by stating the reason he took on this probe was because he's a Jew.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3785324,00.html

But all this is smoke and mirrors - the fact is the report deserves every bit of harsh criticism it receives based on its many demerits...

The Goldstone Report: A Study in Duplicity
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1736

Who cares what Goldstone's motivations are for piecing together his 600-page monstrocity - the fact is he deserves the harshest of criticism for partaking in this kangaroo court. His report could have been drafted entirely without any investigations within Libya or Iran - it's that ridiculous. Labeling him a self-hating Jew is wrongheaded and distracts from the facts (or lack thereof in Goldstone's probe).