Tuesday, July 28, 2020
From Ian:
Brendan O'Neill: Wiley isn’t ill – he’s racist
Ice Cube agrees to support condemning antisemitism with ZOA president
Brendan O'Neill: Wiley isn’t ill – he’s racist
Why is anti-Semitism treated as less bad than other forms of racism? Why is it a growing force in some sections of the left? Why is it often greeted with the words ‘well, he has a point’ rather than with the stern, irate condemnations we would expect in response to racism more broadly?The Loneliest Hatred
It’s because of identity politics.
Anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred. It has exploded in societies numerous times over the millennia, often with unprecedented murderous consequences. It sometimes changes shape – going from being a religiously motivated hatred to a form of biological racism, from a far-right pursuit to a shamefully left-wing phenomenon – but it is always there, in one form or another. And today, one of the forms it takes is identitarian categorisation.
Identity politics has helped to resuscitate anti-Semitism. One of the worst things identity politics does is categorise people according to whether they are oppressed or privileged. It creates hierarchies of victimhood. Intersectionality is an avowedly sectarian, divisive cause, given to grouping entire peoples according to whether they are historic victims or the beneficiaries of privilege. This very easily morphs into a form of moral categorisation: the victim groups are good, the privileged groups are bad. So black people deserve our sympathy and our support, while white people – the most privileged, apparently – deserve scorn, and constant lecturing (‘Dear white people’), and re-education. Witness how virtually every corporation in the West is now reprimanding and controlling its workforce through the mad ideologies of ‘white fragility’ and ‘white privilege’.
Identitarianism is a toxic, divisive politics. And it has proven particularly bad for Jewish people. Where do they go in the woke racists’ categories? Which inhuman identitarian box must they be placed in? It’s the ‘privileged’ one. Consider how both far-right and far-left racists flit between terms like ‘white privilege’ and ‘Jewish privilege’. Jews are successful, right? They aren’t struggling. Therefore, they are ‘privileged’. And ‘privileged’ is bad. It’s immoral. The ‘privileged’ are the new oppressors, requiring constant condemnation. White people, ‘cis’ people, people of Indian Hindu heritage, Jews… all privileged, all bad, all on the receiving end of the new hatreds whipped up by the destructive politics of identity.
Wiley’s racist rants contained elements of the old anti-Semitism, especially the vile trope about Jews running the world. But they had a big dose of identitarian anti-Semitism, too. His belief that Jews conspire in the repression of blacks, and that Jews (being white) can be racist but black people (being black) cannot be racist, springs directly from the identitarian ideology. It’s time to face facts: the new politics of identity, this racialisation of every facet of life, the myopic obsession over skin colour and ‘privilege’ and heritage, have breathed life back into actual racism, including the oldest racism. Identity politics is a gateway drug to actual racial hatred. Reject it.
In the last eight months, we’ve seen two mass murders of Jews—one attempted and one successful—by people who expressed interest in racially exclusive Black Israelism. Grafton Thomas, who burst into a Monsey, New York, rabbi’s home during a Hanukkah celebration and hacked at people with a machete, rambled in his journal about “Ebinoid Israelites” and “Semitic genocide.” David Anderson, who, along with an accomplice, sprayed a Jersey City kosher market with gunfire and killed three people (and a cop earlier), was steeped in Black Israelism, though he was wary of the organized sects. One wonders: When the coronavirus pandemic loosens its grip on public spaces and the proselytizing bands of Black Hebrew Israelites return to street corners to shout racist abuse at passersby, as they have done for decades without causing much controversy, will they draw the attention of anti-racist protesters?
And again, there is the steady anti-Jewish street violence. In New York City in the last two years, social media has recorded a sizable fraction of it in Brooklyn neighborhoods where Blacks and Jews coexist. Some of the perpetrators of those hate crimes revealed Black Israelite beliefs. One man beat and choked an Orthodox passerby while yelling about “fake Jews.” Another shouted “They’re not Jews!” and threw rocks at a group of Jewish women and children. Someone accosted a Forward journalist and screamed that she and her friends were “fake Jews … Whose time was almost up!” A woman berated an Israeli student on the subway: “You ain’t even a Jew, you white.” As Griff noted ominously to Nick Cannon, anticipating Wiley: “Now because you recognize [your Hebrew origin], you know who they are.”
There is not a racial crisis between Blacks and Jews. High-profile African Americans, including Charles Barkley, Stephen A. Smith, Michael Wilbon, Zach Banner, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, quickly and resolutely criticized DeSean Jackson and Stephen Jackson. And not all people influenced by Black Israelism—a broad group that includes thousands of “African Hebrew Israelites” living in Israel—are anti-Semites. But in our increasingly panicked politics, where fanciful and vicious conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon have seen viral adoption, the sudden mainstreaming of a racist conspiracy theory with demonstrated links to violence should stir serious concern.
Yet when Black people express anti-Semitism it is continually treated as nothing to worry about. It is not hard to understand why. Anti-racist thought developed in response to the racial caste system in America and is primarily concerned with power. For those who are marginalized, it sees an accretion of victimhood; a disabled Black woman experiences compounding oppression at the intersection of her identities. On the other hand, those at the top of the racial caste system—whites—are invested with an almost mystical power that tends to flatten their other identities. Jews are generally regarded as white and privileged, so in practice, Jewishness seldom registers as a marginalizable identity. Anti-racists are dumb to our global history of persecution and vulnerability in the present.
Because anti-Semitism, like all conspiracy theories, mimics a politics of emancipation, anti-Semites believe themselves to be opponents of injustice. Among progressives today, the movement to redefine racism as “prejudice plus power”—that is, to downgrade nonsystemic forms of racism to mere personal “prejudice”—has ominous consequences for Jews. It fosters the belief that people who are thought to be powerful are deserving of hostility. And when racism poses as resistance by victims of racism, as anti-Semitism often does, it disqualifies Jews from concern.
Those who favor this revisionist definition have made so much headway that Merriam-Webster has agreed to incorporate it. How will we address a form of racism that purports to “punch up” against an evil elite? Most anti-Semitism in the West is nonsystemic, but its very nature is being systematically eclipsed. The loneliest hatred lives on, as it has for thousands of years—outside the ambit of our racial reckoning.
Ice Cube agrees to support condemning antisemitism with ZOA president
Pro-Israel advocate and president of the Zionist Organization of America Morton Klein announced via his Twitter page on Tuesday that he had 2-hour conversation with rapper Ice Cube where he claims that the musical artist supports condemning antisemitism and racism.
"I, Mort Klein, just had a 2-hour conversation with Ice Cube. We both grew up poor in Black hoods. Cube told me he thanked Jews for starting NAACP, many Black schools and fighting for Black civil rights. Cube told me he supports condemning Black and all antisemitism, and I condemned all racism," Klein said on Twitter Tuesday.
Shout out to Mort Klein who had the courage to seek the truth and speak with me and see for himself I am obviously NOT an anti-Semite or racist. I admire him for the advocacy of his people and look forward to talking more on how Black and Jewish communities can work together... https://t.co/dnVijJkR8q
— Ice Cube (@icecube) July 28, 2020
Ice Cube has been immersed in a row as of late, after condemning NBA Hall-of-Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for writing an article mentioning the rapper on the topic of antisemitism, as well as tweeting an image of a mural that was removed from a wall in London in 2012 after complaints that the image was antisemitic.
The rapper vehemently denies that he supports antisemitism – or racism for that matter - mentioning that he only took issue with the article because he was mentioned in the article without being contacted first.
"Just for the record: I still love Kareem Abdul Jabbar definitely had a right to write against Antisemitism and racism," Ice Cube wrote on his Twitter page on Monday. "I was just hurt to be added into that article without a conversation to tell him that I am neither. But there is no wedge between me and my brother."
