“Not anti-Semitism but anti-Zionism”: A Few Brief Thoughts on Politics and Prejudice
Allegations of anti-Semitism are used to shut down legitimate criticism of the state of Israel, and to justify Islamophobia. In a free society, people must be allowed to offer criticism of an allied state that practices apartheid politics and is involved in the murder of innocents and the dispossession of people’s ancestral lands. Anti-Semitism is a muddy term that cannot clearly be defined, and thus is open to exploitation by powerful groups with hidden interests. Most of all, anti-Zionist critiques of Israel — or of Israel’s allies in the West — are not anti-Semitic, because they are political in essence, not attacks upon Jews as Jews. Calling them anti-Semitic is therefore just playing into the hands of the rich and the powerful who want those criticisms to be silenced.
You don’t need to travel very far in today’s politics to hear versions of these arguments developed with much greater eloquence and subtlety than I’m capable of giving them. The hard form of anti-Semitism, where Jews are attacked and hated explicitly for being Jews, is pretty rare on the ground, at least in public debate (though undoubtedly more common today than it was only a few years back). Even in those parts of the world where the most virulent anti-Semitic language can be found, many people argue that they don’t hate Jews because they are Jews, but because of what they’ve done: controlling the media, invading Muslim lands, controlling the world’s financial organisations, controlling Congress, you take your pick.
“I’m not a racist, but the crimes black men commit are disgusting, and we need the police to robustly defend our homes”, “Some of my best friends are gay and I’ve got no problem with them, but the traditional family is the bedrock of society and needs defending.” We’ve all heard these arguments before. They should be easily dismissed, but the claim that one’s views are legitimate because they focus on matters political not personal is one of the most persistent defences of prejudice and one of the trickiest to disentangle.
Indeed, the suggestion that political groups are using allegations of anti-Semitism to shut down legitimate criticism of Jewish politics is certainly nothing new. In the 1930s, arguably the most influential anti-Semite in the United States was the radical Catholic priest and radio talk show celebrity, Father Charles Edward Coughlin. Coughlin rode to fame during the early depression years by attacking the international plutocratic class for driving the United States into the ground, fostering inequality, and ignoring the needs of the American people. He was also a passionate anti-Communist. He argued that the international elites and the professional revolutionary radicals shared a set of atheistic and modernist political values unmoored from any real commitment to timeless religious truths or the community. At his peak, his radio hour, syndicated across the US by CBS, reached tens of millions of people. Stories were told of referees stopping Sunday football matches to allow schoolboys to listen to his sermons. It was said in his home town of Detroit that you could walk along some streets and listen to the sermon uninterrupted as it came through the windows of each of the houses, one after the other.
Coughlin was involved in a populist effort to challenge FDR for the presidency in 1936, a third party campaign that, like most, went disastrously wrong. As his reputation and influence began to decline in the late 1930s, he became increasingly radical and conspiratorial. Complaints about exploitative banks increasingly turned into attacks on Jewish bankers. He began to praise, and even quote, leading Nazis. He attacked the US democratic system, which seemed to him hopelessly corrupted, and began to speak in favour of corporatist models of government. By 1940, the FBI was investigating allegations that he had been involved with the organisation of militant Christian Front groups that had been attacking Jewish shopfronts in American cities. Eventually, during the war years, the Church placed a ban on him giving public political statements in order to pre-empt his federal investigation, and he lived out his last years in relative obscurity.
Often people conflate Coughlin’s influence at its peak, in the early 1930s, with his radical and proto-fascist agitation in the late 1930s to suggest that support for fascism in America at this time was larger than actually it was. In fact, as Coughlin’s politics grew more extreme, support for him declined and opposition grew exponentially. Jewish groups, liberals, radicals, conservatives and even other populists criticised his attacks on Jews as dangerous, divisive and even “un-American.”
As pressure on Coughlin grew, he responded to attacks by defending his position as legitimate on the grounds that his complaints were essentially political. He had no problem with “good Jews”, as he put it, only those Jews who engaged in dangerous political activities. In one radio sermon, entitled “Not anti-Semitism but Anticommunism,” he argued that those people accusing him of anti-Semitism were actually trying to silence him because he was a leading critic of Communism’s influence in America. “Would not a dispassionate judge be inclined, then, to conclude that the effort on the part of my critics to assail my person and scoff at my presentation of facts — would he not conclude that this is related to their desire to protect Communism?,” he asked. “There is no Jewish question in America,” he argued. “Please God, may there never be one. However, there is a question of Communism in America. … Please God, we will solve it. If Jews persist in supporting Communism directly or indirectly, that will be regrettable.”
With hindsight, the manipulation seems obvious, but at the time fears of Communism were rising and the manoeuvre helped to confuse many Americans who were worried about Coughlin’s increasingly aggressive statements but naturally reluctant to do anything that might be seen to shut down legitimate political debate.
It was a canny move. But what we might call the “political defence” was not unique to Coughlin. George Sylvester Viereck, a leading pro-German propagandist operating in the United States during the interwar years, travelled to Germany in 1933 and, according to his account of the visit, met with Hitler to discuss American politics and how best to influence it. Viereck told the Führer that Germany’s reputation would be significantly strengthened if their propaganda in the US was directed at “internationalists” and Communists — what Viereck termed “bad” Jews — rather than the Jewish people as a whole. Indeed, this is what much of the pre-war pro-Nazi propaganda in the West looked like: efforts to explicitly attack Jews as Jews were watered down while efforts to present attacks upon Jews as essentially political criticisms were played up. This is why there was such a strong (and enduring) effort to associate Jews with Bolshevism, among other things.
You can see the “political defence” in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which after all is essentially a “political” attack upon Jews for supposedly leading a global conspiracy to set up a world government. You can even read it into the Blood Libel, the ancient smear that Jews kidnapped and murdered Christian children in order to use their blood on religious events, or in the “Jews killed Christ” canards. The idea that anti-Semitism is not anti-Semitism because it is political, because it is about what Jews do not who they are, is a lie as old as anti-Semitism itself.
Does this mean that any attempt to criticise Jewish groups politically is anti-Semitic? Does this mean that you’re not allowed to say anything negative about Israel? Of course it doesn’t. There wouldn’t be such controversy on this question if there was a clear line between what’s acceptable and unacceptable in public debate. All I’m suggesting here is that the line between anti-Semitism and acceptable criticism of Israel, or of attacks on “Zionists,” is not one that can be drawn on the basis of whether the complaint involves “politics” or not.
Politics is always involved in these matters. The real question is prejudice.
If your criticism is so sweeping that it obscures all complexity; if your rendering of the situation means that one side in a conflict has no redeeming features; if your criticism places close to 100% of the blame on one side or group and ignores the way events unfold in a messy and tragic world; if your criticism serves to demonise and dehumanise the people you disagree with; then that’s the problem. That’s prejudice, whether it’s directed at an individual’s skin colour, religious beliefs, or politics. Prejudice, not politics, is the issue at stake. And nuance, doubt, complexity, discussion, and a willingness to accept the humanity of the people with whom you disagree are the only things that point the way to the solution.
A note on sources: I write in more detail about the connections between anti-Semitism and anticommunism in the United States in the interwar years in my book, Loyalty and Liberty: American Countersubversion from World War I to the McCarthy Era (Illinois, 2013), especially part III. A fuller bibliography of the subject can also be found there.
