At JTA, a Rabbi Emily Cohen makes a muddled case against boycotting Twitter for 48 hours to protest its acceptance of antisemitism.
Her arguments are all over the place, but a couple of them are worth dismantling:
First, there’s the issue of this boycott catalyzing around a Black man. Anti-Semitism comes from everywhere. While perhaps it’s chance, and celebrity, that led to Wiley’s particular thread being the tweet that broke the bird’s beak, I can’t help but worry that white Jews and their allies were more ready to speak out against Wiley than against anti-Semitic white people.
She is not the first person to see racism by Jews who go after Black antisemites. She must have some proof, right?
In the United Kingdom, white people — including prominent politicians like Jeremy Corbyn — have been spouting anti-Semitism for some years. While these statements have hardly gone unnoticed — responses have included a film about Labour Party anti-Semitism and suits for libel resulting in formal apologies — to my knowledge there has not been a public call for a comparable social media boycott. Not for Corbyn, not for the many George Soros conspiracy tweets and not for any of the countless instances of anti-Semitism that show up on my feed every day.
Did Corbyn ever spend an entire day with many posts directly attacking Jews? His antisemitism was not primarily on social media but behind closed doors in the Labour Party – and the justified attacks on him were properly centered on his political position, not his social media accounts. . To say that no one demanded a Twitter ban on Corbyn – and that this is somehow proof that the people demanding such a ban on Wiley are racists – is bizarre and insulting.
It is also racist. To add more obstacles before calling out antisemitism for a Black man than for a white man is pretty much racism, as if the Black man cannot be held responsible for his actions as much as a White man should.
Cohen then contradicts herself:
I believe that we must stand against anti-Semitism in all its forms, but I also know that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in white supremacy. Fixating upon anti-Semitism expressed by Black people more than that expressed by white people hurts all marginalized peoples.
But she just said above that “anti-Semitism comes from everywhere.” Now she says it is “deeply rooted in white supremacy.” If the second statement is true, then black antisemitism or Arab antisemitism are virtually impossible.
No, Emily, antisemitism is not rooted in white supremacy. White supremacy is rooted in antisemitism.
For a rabbi, Cohen is surprisingly ignorant about Jew-hatred. Was Martin Luther’s antisemitism based on white supremacy? How about that of Voltaire? Marx? The Spanish inquisitors? The Mufti of Jerusalem? Louis Farrakhan? Ice Cube?
Jew-hatred is independent of philosophy, logic, politics or skin color. Anyone who tries to tie it to any of those is likely to be condoning some types of antisemitism as somehow more justified and less objectionable than others. And it is a disgrace when this comes from someone who calls herself a rabbi.
Too many on the Left want so desperately to say that white supremacy is the primary kind of antisemitism and want to soft-pedal all other kinds. These are the people who want to weaponize antisemitism against their political enemies – and in so doing, they are enabling antisemitism from the likes of Wiley or Professor Griff or Mahmoud Abbas. Plenty of antisemites are not white, just as plenty of them are.
To look at antisemitism primarily through the lens of race means that you don’t really care about antisemitism.