It is an anti-fascist duty to protest against the Israeli ambassador
JVL Introduction
Barnaby Raine’s coruscating analysis here pinpoints the doublethink that dominates white western politics, expressing an antiracism that tolerates and indeed supports racist regimes everywhere.
Raine shows how treating the Holocaust as unique reduces rather than increases our understanding of it, with the horror seen as coming from a unique history of antisemitism, isolated and disconnected from any wider colonial and imperial history.
So the Nazis who honed their skills in an imperial genocide in Namibia become invisible, and the Jim Crow thinking underpinning Hitler simply vanishes.
It makes sense for “the white world order” to treat it in thus, “lest we draw connections or start associating atrocities in dangerous family trees”.
So Europe’s “most visible bloody sin” is first isolated, then treated as alien to it, now projected onto the savages where antisemitism resides today: Arabs, Muslims and the radical left, anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists.
So Raine remembers the Palestinians, the innocent victims who have been paying for Europe’s antisemitism for nearly three quarters of a century and brings them back centre stage.
In so doing he pays tribute to those who protested against the Israeli ambassador Tzipi Hotovely at LSE last week, while senior British politicians, Labour and Tory, rushed to defend her.
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Thanks to the author for permission to repost.
This article was originally published by Salvage on Thu 11 Nov 2021. Read the original here.
It is an anti-fascist duty to protest against the Israeli ambassador
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We need to campaign against ‘Nakba denial’.
As Orwell said ‘“[Hitler] is only the ghost of our own past rising against us. He stands for the extenuation and perpetuation of our own methods…” and Yitzhak Laor wrote that ‘The struggle against racism had been ‘transformed into a false ideology…. A source of violence.’
Identity politics have transformed the oppressed into the oppressor and the oppressor into the oppressed. It is a good example of the operation of political and ideological hegemony under capitalism. Words are what you want them to mean or as Humpty Dumpty observed, the only question is who is master.
Lucy Dawidowicz with her ‘War Against the Jews’ which argued that the Nazi project was simply a war of extermination against Jews, no one else, wrote that subsuming Jewish losses under a universal classification is effectively to justify anti-Semitism. For Elie Wiesel to compare the sufferings of others with Jews is a “betrayal of Jewish history”.
As Barnaby says, in order to do this the holocaust must be removed from history. It has no causes other than German pathology best summed up by Daniel Goldhagen in his execrable book ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust’.
In essence racism is now defined as racism against White people and Jews are the ideal ‘victims’. The holocaust has been adopted, with its museums and memorials, as part of the incorporation of the holocaust into western imperialist ideology just as the class nature of fascism has been elided.
Agree with everything but ‘White World Order’. Let’s start a race war, Jews are white (the bad guys) & Arabs are Black (the good guys). My son, Asa (whose mother is black), has some young white skinned friends in Germany, should he remind them of their skin colour & their blame for WW2? My skin is white but my father’s family are gypsy, but every time you use the definite article you give holocaust cultural appropriation & giving historical Western Imperialist Ideology a skin colour is dangerous & misleading.
Brilliantly incisive analysis, thank you