Faculty Anti-Semitism, Part Four: Why It Matters

The first three parts of this series have explored recent expressions of anti-Semitism by Michael Chikindas of Rutgers University and and Hatem Bazian at UC Berkeley, and the defenses raised on their behalf by other scholars.  This post will expand on the phenomenon of trivialization, which occurs when anti-Jewish bigotry is treated as a nothing more than an annoyance or a slip-up, as opposed to the seriousness with which other forms of racism are addressed.  I am not arguing here that Chikindas or Bazian should be disciplined, but rather that faculty anti-Semitism has been treated with far too much complacency.

Both Bazian and Chikindas circulated cartoon figures that mocked Jews and Judaism (included in Parts One and Two) while repeating venerable anti-Jewish slanders.  For centuries, similar images have served as both the motive and excuse for violence against Jews.  As the author Neil Gaiman has pointed out, “all images, particularly images of people, go straight into our heads and create empathy, create disgust.” That is why they need to be taken seriously.  If the defenders of Chikindas and Bazian do not recognize the historical power of anti-Semitic images, the neo-Nazis at Stormfront understand it all too well, as explained in their “Style Guide”:

Packing our message inside of cultural memes and humor can be viewed as a delivery method.

Writing on the AAUP’s Academe Blog, however, John Wilson dismissed Michael Chikindas’s posting of Nazi-like anti-Jewish caricatures as idiocy that amounted to nothing more than “uncomfortable” views.  Following Hatem Bazian’s retweet of equally vile memes, San Francisco State’s Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi brushed it off as merely an inadvertent “mistake” that led to an overreaction by the “Zionist establishment.”

Both Wilson and Abdulhadi – out of either naiveté or zealotry – miss the point.  Anti-Jewish caricatures and internet memes have harmful consequences in the real world.  Anti-Semitism is not an unpleasant artifact of the past, but rather a present danger, as we have seen in recent violent attacks on Jewish institutions including synagogues, day schools, community centers, and museums.  Moreover, there is a clear relationship between the circulation of hateful images and the spread of dangerous anti-Semitism.

Hatem Bazian, for example, is a founder of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and a well-known BDS advocate with over 16,000 followers on Twitter.  Here are some tweets that have been posted by members of an autonomous SJP affiliate chapter (all punctuation and orthography original):

Hitler should have took you all.

I honestly wish I was born at the time of the second world war just to see the genius, Hitler, at work.

Where is hitler when u need one?’ I literally ask this every day.

the reason i kept some jews alive is so i can show you why i killed them in the first place. –Hitler

I suspect my french teacher of being a jew cause I saw her picking up a penny off the floor yesterday.

Zionists don’t count as human beings. I would say they’re cockroaches, but that’s offensive to the cockroaches.

I keep saying, we need to cleanse the world of creatures such as these dirty white Americans.

Bazian and Abdulhadi will surely express abhorrence of the on-line Hitler-fest, but how many of the bigoted students are followers of Bazian’s twitter feed?  How many of them felt encouraged or reinforced in their hatred by Bazian’s retweet of the charge of Jewish “organ smuggling”?  Both of Bazian’s memes included derision of Jews as the “chosen” people (which in Biblical terms, of course, means chosen for a task and does not imply superiority), which is echoed in one of the more foul tweets of the young BDSers:

‘Gods chosen people’ lmfaoooo oh you mean god chose you to kindle hell fire with.. Tru.”

However innocent their intentions, Bazian, Abdulhadi, and others have played a role in producing a generation of activists at ease with the idea of genocide. Nor are those sentiments unrelated to the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and Sabbath-eve shoppers in Paris. Quoting again from the Daily Stormer Style Guide:

There should be a conscious agenda to dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths.

Against that backdrop, Bazian’s retweet of blatantly anti-Jewish images – especially in the guise of humor – must be recognized as something far more troubling than an inadvertent mistake.

Chikindas does not have the same broad constituency as Bazian, but his Facebook posts included even more anti-Jewish caricatures, complete with hook-noses and greedy leering.  His appeal seems more directed to the Alt-Right than to the campus left, although he also frames his bigotry in terms of anti-Zionism. More characteristically, Chikindas says that Jews control the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, Hollywood, the law courts, pornography, sex-trafficking, and something he calls “the cancer industry.” The Daily Stormer agrees (boldface original):

Prime Directive: Always Blame the Jews for Everything:

As such, all enemies must be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance.

So no blaming Enlightenment thought, pathological altruism, technology/urbanization, etc. – just blame Jews for everything.

Wilson’s post on the Academe Blog discounted such stuff as idiocy and “personal opinions,” but there is more at play here than quirkiness or eccentricity.  The white supremacist demonstrators in Charlottesville marched past a synagogue shouting “Jews will not replace us.”  The next day, Heather Heyer was murdered, and 19 more people were injured, when one of the white nationalists drove a speeding car into a crowd of counter-demonstrators.  The alleged driver, James Alex Fields, was a known Nazi sympathizer.  What sort of caricatures and “personal opinions” do you think he encountered at the neo-Nazi websites he had frequented for years?

Chikindas did not draw the anti-Semitic caricatures himself.  He found them on the internet and posted them on his Facebook page, in a move that was directly out of the Daily Stormer playbook.  That is just how anti-Semitism spreads, as seemingly respectable figures such as university professors endorse its memes. The results are sadly predictable and not the work of idiots.

[Note: I have not linked to the sources for the above-quoted anti-Jewish tweets, because they identify the individuals, most of whom are undergraduates, by their names, photographs, and twitter accounts.  My intention is to use their tweets as exemplars, but not to encourage anyone to threaten or troll the students.]

Comments

[Deep State Special Legal Counsel]

Even in death, Hitler is still killing. That is why it matters.

[Darryll Jones]

Thank you Steve for this very informative series. I'm left with troubling cognitive dissonance. You very effectively make the case that at its logical conclusion hate speech enables (or results in) violence, if only initially by a misguided minority. And I get the feeling that you conclude that is an invariable result, not a mere possibility. On the other hand, you seem willing to accept the notion that academic freedom or, more broadly, freedom of speech, prevents society's efforts to prevent the invariable result -- we may not sanction the speech, we can only take steps to exonerate the captive audience from penalties for not listening. Yet the speech is still dangerous because invariably some will willingly listen and then act upon the speech. That is what makes the speech something more than mere trivial ramblings of an idiot. It seems to me that we cannot have it both ways. At the point that speech is the invariable fuse for violence, society -- through its governing institutions -- has the right and indeed the obligation (I think you might agree that the "good" Germans who did hate but also did not act against hate speakers in 1939 were complicit in the result) to sanction that speech. The argument regarding whether we should take hate speech seriously or simply dismiss that speech as the thoughts of idiots demonstrates the point. Once we are convinced that hate speech is a clear and present danger, we ought to take it seriously. What does "taking it seriously mean? Simply deciding that we will not force students to listen or endure hate speech does not cure the problem as you seem to [correctly] define it. A minority, and perhaps later a disaffected majority, will invariably act on those words in violent ways. I think that is your conclusion, one with which I agree, but the proposed solution leaves me with the notion that maybe you don't really believe in your conclusion. If we believe in the conclusion, sanctions are not only warranted but required.

[Steve L.]

I appreciate your very thoughtful comment, Darryll. You have posed the issue extremely well. I am afraid that I have only the standard (and classic) liberal answers to your question: The possibility that someone will "act on those words in violent ways" is a risk inherent in the principle of free speech. The remedy I urges is also a classic: More speech, but it must be speech that does not trivialize or shrug off the underlying danger.

Perhaps there is a better answer, but I do not know it.

[anon]

We have always recognized the "clear and present danger" that speech can entail, so let's not forget that.

ANd, let's not forget that the First Amendment does not protect speech in general: it protects speech from GOVERNMENT interference.

And, the problem here isn't that academia is indifferent to hate speech: in fact, academics are the first to proclaim their adherence to strict standards in this regard: but Jew Hate is an exception.

The problem here is that many in academia are hateful, spiteful persons. Their hate cannot be openly expressed against certain groups. But middle aged straight white men, fine, have at it. Say what you will.

Jews? Oh boy, a hate fest here! ANd, those who want to go there can always resort to the "I'm only talking about Zionists and evil Israel" defense (this defense always falls apart).

I know some are probably thinking: "What's the problem? There are too many Jews in academia, not too few."

My point, exactly.

[Prof. Kevin Heller]

I have disagreed intensely with Professor Lubet's attempts to paint Steven Salaita as an anti-Semite, but this series of posts is critically important and spot-on. Of course we on the left need to resist the right-wing's desperate attempts to equate all criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism (see anon above for a particularly incoherent example.) But that does not mean there is not true anti-Semitism in the world -- including in left-wing academic circles. Chikindas and Bazian are striking examples, as Professor Lubet proves beyond doubt. The left does itself a great disservice when it excuses or minimises the actions of such disgusting anti-Semites.

[[M][a][c][K]]

The late Connor Cruise O’Brien had a test for a category of bigot, he called the ‘sneaking regarder....’ The way he described it, they would seem to agree with the condemnation, a sectarian murder, attacks on Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Arabs, Blacks .... and at some point into their discussion woukd creep the inevitable “but they ..... [as a group did some terrible thing]”. In a way, I find the sneaking regarder, or the quiet acquiescer more dangerous than the out-and-loud bigots.

I just finished reading Robert Dallek’s FDR biography, and the epilogue discusses Roosevelt’s role in the Holocaust:

“No issue in Roosevelt’s legacy remains as contested as his response to the Holocaust: Hitler’s annihilation of six million Jews. As Blanche Wiesen Cook wrote in the third volume of her splendid Eleanor Roosevelt biography, “Debates over FDR’s ‘indifference’ to the Jewish slaughter will surely continue. Those who argue that FDR did ‘everything possible’ are contradicted by ER’s assertion that nobody did all they could have. . . . ‘We let our consciences realize too late the need of standing up against something that we knew was wrong.’” In 2003, when Cook asked Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Roosevelt biographer and John Kennedy White House adviser, “How can you argue that FDR did everything ‘possible’ to rescue and save the perishing?” Schlesinger responded by pointing to the realities of American politics of the era, in which anti-Semitism was prevalent. “Look at the numbers,” he said. “Thirty percent of the U.S. population was German-American; the Democratic Party was Irish, Italian, and Southern. There was no congressional support to save the Jews, no movement to save them, and intense division among Jewish leaders—many of whom remained silent throughout. Silence. Denial. Complicity.””

Indeed.

[anon]

Heller is as nasty as always, but I think brackets has described, very nicely, the "coherence" of the Heller tack:

"sneaking regarder....’ [he] would seem to agree with the condemnation [of] attacks on Jews .... and at some point into [his] discussion [he will] creep the inevitable “but they ..... [as a group did some terrible thing]”.

We have debated this issue before here in these pages. Suffice it to say, as stated above, the "Zionists are evil but that has nothing to do with Jews per se" argument is risible and always falls apart when closely examined.

[anon]

Just noticed this whopper, really important piece of insight into the self described mind of the "left" here:

"Of course we on the left need to resist the right-wing's desperate attempts to equate all criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism."

Ah, so! According to this brilliant bit of observation, the "right wing" attacks others for "anti-Semitism" when all these others have done is legitimately attack "Israel"?

This "right wing" that attacks "anti Semitism" plays a very odd role indeed in the confused alternative reality described by this really rather strikingly bizarre statement.

[Prof. Kevin Heller]

Describing an incoherent argument as an incoherent argument = "nasty." I can see why anon is anon. I would be too, if I was such a snowflake.

[[M][@][c][K]]

anon & Kevin Heller:

As someone who is often very critical of Israeli policy - yes, criticism of Israel does, sometimes attract wrongful accusations of anti-semitism. But a difficulty that anyone criticising Israel has to face up to is that many critics of Israel start from an antisemitic position, many Palestinian groups have embraced antisemitism, quite a few critics are at least in part motivated by antisemitism - and far too many on the left (or the right) tolerate this anti-semitism, or at least engage in an embarrassed silence, and shuffle their shoes.

That reality does not mean that critics of Israeli policy should accept being routinely and dishonestly being called antisemitic. An interesting detail from some opinion polls I like to point out to those who suggest that Jews are uncritical Israel supporters - most surveys I have seen have found that non-Israeli jews are more likely to be critical of Israeli policy than gentiles in the general population, by about 2-5%. I'd have to dig out the date, but it's reliable and fairly consistent (lot of "don't knows" in the general population.)

[anon]

Brackets

Very true. "Jews" are not, as some would contend, part of "world wide Jewry" and do not slavishly adhere to ideological positions associated with the "Jewish race" in the face of reality.

Of course, as instructed above and in the world view of those who say such things, it is the "right wing" that wrongly and "desperately" attacks "anti Semitism" on the "left" (!) - when in truth, those on the "left" (as we all should know, again, as one is to suppose from the comment above) have in the main exemplified principled opposition to Jew Hate and propounded only principled opposition to the "Zionists" in Israel. ("Of course we on the left need to resist the right-wing's desperate attempts to equate all criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism ...") Yes, the "right wing" is the defender of Jews, and, well, the "Left" is too!

Is it any wonder that Jew Hate thrives in legal academia? Is it not possible to draw conclusions based on the fact that a scholar ensconced in legal academia would propound assertions such as these as facts?