Anti-Jewish conspiracy myths have a unique ability to adapt and thrive in any environment, trapping the unaware in their flawed and fatal thinking. For people on the progressive left this is especially the case when these ideas are presented via the language of anti-Israel campaigning. It is as if, like Harry Potter donning his invisibility cloak, the antisemitism that ought to be apparent magically disappears.
The unorthodox Feminist writer Mary Harrington recently coined the word 'Omnicause', in which "all contemporary radical causes seem somehow to have been absorbed into one. A protean animating energy seems to ingest every progressive issue it encounters, to create a kind of ever-spreading, all-encompassing omnicause."
I think there's something to in the notion of intersectionality, as a comprehensive worldview, which encourages this sort of thinking: everything bad is connected with everything else that's also bad and at root the problem is x. I don't think they even realise that what they're substuting in for 'x' is "the Jews" – they are doing it, but I don't think they consciously know they're doing it.
I'm thinking back to when Maxine Peake claimed that the American police learned from Israeli secret services how to kneel on George Floyd's neck. It's true that some police departments in the United States will do training exercises with Israeli police departments, just as they do with other countries. But it was the Israeli one that had to be guilty.
And I'm thinking also here of Slavoj Žižek's critique of populism in 2006. He argues that populism, because it inherently condenses social dysfunctions which occur on the structural or systematicatic levels into a figure of an enemy which explains and can be held responsible for the dysfunction, it necessarily always contains both an element of ideological displacement and a long-term Fascist tendency. I think we can expand that idea here in relation to antisemitism.
If the intersectional mindset emphasises that everything bad is fundamentally connected (if only you can discern the connections which others cannot); if what marks out antisemitism is its conspiratorialism; and if Žižek is correct that this line of thinking inherently relies on a kind of scapegoating mechanism à la Girard resulting in a long-term Fascism, then add in a few decades of propaganda via Soviet anti-Zionism and Muslim Brotherhood antisemitism, and I think you'd end up more or less where we are right now.
Conspiratorial thinking plus the scapegoating mechanism is more or less, imo, the essence of antisemitism. And when you combine left-wing populism with intersectionality plus those influences... well, I think you get what we have now.
The accusations of dishonesty are in and of themselves antisemitic, as the age-old trope about Jews always lying to achieve their goals rears its ugly head again. It is enduring and provides the basis for David Hirsh’s Livingstone Formulation.
It's classic conspiracy propaganda. A fake claim of exposing a hidden order, which falls apart the minute you look at it logically. Four of the five evils listed are universal to all societies past & present, whilst "settler colonialism" can easily describe the entire western Hemisphere, Australasia, the Arab conquests, the Bantu displacement of the Batwa & Khoisan, the Barbarian invasions of Rome, & both the Celtic & Saxon settlements of Britain. I'm sure there are others.
The unorthodox Feminist writer Mary Harrington recently coined the word 'Omnicause', in which "all contemporary radical causes seem somehow to have been absorbed into one. A protean animating energy seems to ingest every progressive issue it encounters, to create a kind of ever-spreading, all-encompassing omnicause."
I think there's something to in the notion of intersectionality, as a comprehensive worldview, which encourages this sort of thinking: everything bad is connected with everything else that's also bad and at root the problem is x. I don't think they even realise that what they're substuting in for 'x' is "the Jews" – they are doing it, but I don't think they consciously know they're doing it.
I'm thinking back to when Maxine Peake claimed that the American police learned from Israeli secret services how to kneel on George Floyd's neck. It's true that some police departments in the United States will do training exercises with Israeli police departments, just as they do with other countries. But it was the Israeli one that had to be guilty.
And I'm thinking also here of Slavoj Žižek's critique of populism in 2006. He argues that populism, because it inherently condenses social dysfunctions which occur on the structural or systematicatic levels into a figure of an enemy which explains and can be held responsible for the dysfunction, it necessarily always contains both an element of ideological displacement and a long-term Fascist tendency. I think we can expand that idea here in relation to antisemitism.
If the intersectional mindset emphasises that everything bad is fundamentally connected (if only you can discern the connections which others cannot); if what marks out antisemitism is its conspiratorialism; and if Žižek is correct that this line of thinking inherently relies on a kind of scapegoating mechanism à la Girard resulting in a long-term Fascism, then add in a few decades of propaganda via Soviet anti-Zionism and Muslim Brotherhood antisemitism, and I think you'd end up more or less where we are right now.
Conspiratorial thinking plus the scapegoating mechanism is more or less, imo, the essence of antisemitism. And when you combine left-wing populism with intersectionality plus those influences... well, I think you get what we have now.
The accusations of dishonesty are in and of themselves antisemitic, as the age-old trope about Jews always lying to achieve their goals rears its ugly head again. It is enduring and provides the basis for David Hirsh’s Livingstone Formulation.
Yes, Ben Jamal might as well have included the notorious Simon Maginn's "itwasascam" hashtag
You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests align.
It's classic conspiracy propaganda. A fake claim of exposing a hidden order, which falls apart the minute you look at it logically. Four of the five evils listed are universal to all societies past & present, whilst "settler colonialism" can easily describe the entire western Hemisphere, Australasia, the Arab conquests, the Bantu displacement of the Batwa & Khoisan, the Barbarian invasions of Rome, & both the Celtic & Saxon settlements of Britain. I'm sure there are others.