The trouble with “tropes”, in the age of high-velocity discourse analysis
JVL Introduction
Tropes are slippery things. One person’s critical comment becomes to someone else a slap-in-the-face assault. Those searching for signs of antisemitism have become very adept at finding them.
Reuben Bard-Rosenberg offers some thoughts on this fraught topic suggesting: “The important question to ask is not ‘can I spot an anti-Semitic trope in this rhetoric’. Rather it is ‘is this the most useful framework through which to interpret this person’s words’.
And he concludes with some thoughts about how to survive in a world characterised by “high-velocity, crowd-sourced discourse analysis”.
This article was originally published by Medium on Sat 4 Jul 2020. Read the original here.
The trouble with “tropes”, in the age of high-velocity discourse analysis
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A good piece but accusers trawling for tropes know full well that in most cases antisemitism has nothing to do with it, and the decision makers also know this when they send suspension letters to socialist Labour members. It’s a pretext, and the real battle lies in the politics we have all be fighting for many years.
Eventually, trawling for tropes will die down, probably according to what happens in Israel, but it will be replaced by other things.
“Or you could, as per some interpretations doing the rounds, connect it [M Peake’s comments] with the blood libel, despite Peake’s claim involving neither the killing of children nor the consumption of blood”.
Peake’s comment “is patently not antisemitic. Israel is neither a Jew nor the representative of the Jewish people collectively – except in the imaginations of antisemites and the hardcore Zionists who people the Israel lobby” [Jonathan Cooke].
The question at issue here is can the state of Israel be criticized by anyone without being called an anti-Semite? Keir Starmer has called Ms Peake an anti-Semite a very serious allegation which has the potential to ruin her career, witness the calls in the Daily Mail and the Sun to ban Ms Peake and never use her again, plus over 800 mainly negative comments, if a bully like Keir Starmer thinks he can abuse someone on a false allegation of anti-Semitism everyone is at risk and we will be entering the American McCarthy era, have you now or have you ever in the past criticized the Israeli state?
“Zionist does get used as a euphemism for Jew”
Really I have yet to find an example. Please provide one.
The vast majority Zionists in the Labour Party are not Jews and the anti Zionists that have influenced me most, Sholomo Sand, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappe, Jacky Walker are all Jews. I don’t object to Zionism because some of the advocates are Jews, I object to Zionism because it is a racist ideology that deprived 85 percent of the indigenous Palestinian population of Israel of their homes in 1948 for the sole reason that they came from the wrong race. I judge Jews by EXACTLY the same standard as Gentiles. If you are a racist and particularly if you engage in violent ethnic cleansing then you are a disgusting human being. There are absolutely no excuses for being a racist. Past abuse does not entitle you to become an abuser.
Presumably that´s why IHRA guidelines state that the overall context should be taken into account to determine if a statement (or action?) is actually antisemitic.
I am not sure I get what is being talked about. I don’t understand what is meant by ‘is this the most useful framework through which to interpret this person’s words?’ Useful to whom or for what purpose? Who decides? There is no objective answer here – no elephant that is or isn’t in the room. Surely a better question is: where is the independent evidence that can be produced to suggest that Maxine Peake was thinking ‘this’ rather than ‘that’? And as in a great many of the Labour Party so-called antisemitism cases, evidence is there none.
On the other hand, I do like the idea of ‘ . . . a trashily accusatory spirit . . . .the kind of thing that happens when the cost of critique has been reduced to something approaching zilch’. That covers so much, from Trump, to Johnson, to the so many of the supposed antisemitism spotters.
Finding ‘excuses’ to use to ‘legitimately’ accuse your enemy of heinous crimes in order to get rid of them is as old as the hills. It features in the Old Tesrtament. When you fail to rebut them, you fail. Politics is crude but one thing is clear. You have to dominate the narrative. Nice as he was, I always felt that Corbyn was stunningly underqualified as a bruiser. The mass of people instinctively see through false claims but if they have little confidence in the person who is targeted by them, they will not disturb their intellects too much to think about it. Corbyn’s biggest failing – and that of those advising him – was not to fight back.
The Labour party never fought back against the anti-Semitism allegations, witness this pathetic sight at a Labour Party husting hosted by the JLM just before the last General election.
Robert Peston…. Do you regard it as anti-Semitic to describe Israel, its policies or circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact, is that an anti-Semitic statement?
RL Bailey.. Yes
Peston.. So J Corbyn presented to the NEC a document in which he wanted the NEC to approve which would have said that statement is not anti-Semitic, that was a disgrace wasn’t it?
RL Bailey… I can’t remember the exact words…… huge laughter from the audience followed by a shouting rant from Peston.
RL Bailey was humiliated and clearly out of her depth but then so were all the other candidates or stooges. https://twitter.com/simulacrax/status/1228280250196545537
Excellent piece; so many good points. At the risk of expulsion from the Labour Party, I’d take issue with the lack of quote marks round the word “myth” in the author’s “reiterating the myth that Jews exercise dodgy cross-border influence”. Read Jeff Halper’s “The War Against the People” to learn more about Israel’s role in policing, surveillance and oppression worldwide. I rest my case.
To Harry Law, posting on 10 July at 11:12 : thanks for the link to the JLM hustings. What a shameful episode. I wish RLB had had the courage to say no to Robert Peston’s question about the supposedly anti-Semitic statement. But that would have required immense courage in the face of a witch-hunt and of the acquiescence of her fellow candidates.
That televised hustling was an ambush. The leadership candidates should not have agreed to it. The audience did not include a full cross section of the Jewish community including JVL and nobody from the Palestinian community in the UK was invited to attend. Furthermore the chair was clearly not impartial. The ITV should ashamed.
I’m neither a Jew nor a Labour supporter but I totally support your wise words. I’ve come across this with my nuanced views in feminism and trans. We need people to stop and see the shades of grey in issues.
Oh dear, John Webster, it breaks my heart to say so, but your succinct summing up of Corbyn – “was stunningly underqualified as a bruiser” – is sadly right. (As leader, he often reminded me of when my husband made the mistake of becoming head of a very run-down school where the children ran amok. All the staff, from teachers to cleaners to dinner servers, kept saying “what we need is a strong man. ” Being a kindly, non-abrasive soul like JC, believing in co-operation, not confrontation, he only lasted a couple of terms, and went back to class teaching, at which he was brilliant.) The question is, why do we NEED a bruiser? Our seemingly unchangeable DNA demands a king, a god, a Big Daddy,a powerful ‘leader’ – and it’s been our ruination. (I’m sorry to digress from the main topic here).