“Antisemitism cannot be regarded as just one more lazy, ill-thought-out bigotry. The anti-Semite hates and fears Jews because he interprets the world through them. Wistrich quotes the French monarchist Charles Maurras’s candid admission that anti-Semitism ‘enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over and simplified.’” From my Jerusalem Post review of Robert Wistrich’s epic new book, A Lethal Obsession.
Archive for the 'recommended reading' Category
 |
The Tehran Symphony Orchestra has been wending its way around Europe performing a piece nauseatingly entitled “Peace and Friendship Symphony,” by Majid Entezami, and described - in a brilliant piece by Michael Kimmelman - as “a four-movement jeremiad of martial bombast and almost unfathomable incompetence and silliness.” As Kimmelman points out, protests did greet the orchestra in certain cities, but I’m not aware of Naomi Klein, Brian Eno, John Pilger or any other minor radical celebrity urging a boycott.
According to Germany’s Spiegel magazine, Iran’s regime is being pressured “on the question of who exactly is responsible for the country’s nuclear program — and what this says about its true nature. The government has consistently told the IAEA that the only agency involved in uranium enrichment is the National Energy Council, and that its work was exclusively dedicated to the peaceful use of the technology.”
 |
Here are some items which have crossed my desk in the last week which are well worth passing on. Warning: it’s mostly sobering or depressing. Of particular note in that regard is the letter from Joseph Cari in the Financial Times - widely regarded as a sensible, centrist newspaper - which reproduces just about every antisemitic trope going. If Mr. Cari’s name seems familiar, it isn’t because of his weighty contributions to public policy analysis; he is best known for pleading guilty in an $850,000 extortion racket back in 2005 which involved disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.
“Ostensibly sold to voters as a weapon against Islamism, an all-too-real political phenomenon in Europe, this new law in fact makes no distinction between religion and ideology, instead choosing to alienate the primary victims of Islamic fundamentalism and the best allies of Western liberals - moderate Muslims.” So says Michael Weiss in an excellent piece for The Daily News on the Swiss referendum which resulted in a ban on the construction of minarets in new mosques.
It bears saying again and again: far right parties are not our allies in the struggle against Islamism, but our deadly enemies. For these boneheads and their leaders, all Muslims - whether from Albania or Yemen, whether a teenage girl facing an arranged marriage or a cleric preaching hatred - are all the same, all just dirty foreigners.
Yaghoghil Shaolian, the Jewish teenager arrested for taking part in the Tehran electoral protests in June, has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison, accused of espionage. An international effort to protect the Jewish teenager’s rights in jail has intensified in recent days.
Well, it’s finally out. Anthony Julius’s epic, sweeping account of English antisemitism, “Trials of the Diaspora,” can now be purchased online. Advance praise has been generous. No less than Philip Roth describes the book as an “essential history…written by a man with the extraordinary fluency, staggering erudition, scholarly integrity, intellectual acumen and moral discernment of Anthony Julius.” As long-time Z Word readers will know, Anthony honored us by allowing us to publish early drafts of some of the chapters in his book. You can read those selections here. And then go and buy the book.
“The first thing to say is that Israel was not what I expected, at all. ” “There was a discussion about the boycott and it is clear that Palestinians don’t want it – all they want is equal pay and a living. ” Just a flavor of what you’ll read on this remarkable blog - thanks to the redoubtable TULIP and Engage for highlighting it.
Adam Holland’s guest post earlier this week examined the growing connections between the far right and Muslim anti-Zionists. One of the photos we published in that piece showed a conference in Kuala Lumpur featuring former Malaysian leader and antisemitic conspiracy theorist Mahathir Mohamed, Holocaust denier Michael Collins Piper and a certain Yvonne Ridley, who will be well-known to Z Word readers in the UK as a loyal sidekick of insidious parliamentarian George Galloway - when she’s not acting as a mouthpiece for Iran’s murderous theocrats on their Press TV propaganda channel. Anyway, Adam has an updated post here which covers all this and is well worth reading.
I’ve just discovered that Dore Gold (former Israeli Ambassador to the UN,) Michael Oren (current Israeli Ambassador to the US) and a few other well-known names (among them the brilliant Leon Wieseltier) all hung out at a Zionist commune at Columbia University in 1970s. An intriguing piece on Tablet by Jordan Hirsch.
Over at the CST blog, Dave Rich has an absolutely superb piece examining how racists of both leftist and rightist varieties will vilify a person not because of what they say, but because of what they are called. Barack Hussein Obama. Michael Abraham Levy. Rahm Israel Emanuel. Go and read it. And then savor the Woody Allen clip at the end - perhaps the greatest stand-up routine, like, ever?
Bob from Brockley has compiled an engaging list of links, so do go and have a look - highlights include Adam Holland on how Counterpunch is spreading the blood libel, a selection of bloggers on the latest twists involving the boycott movement and the opportunity to listen to some wonderful Punjabi Sufi music from Pakistan. Shana Tovah and Eid Mubarak.
The increasingly nauseating Max Blumenthal is ably taken apart by Dvar Dea here. Serendipitously, Dvar’s piece came into my in-box while I was reading Blumenthal’s whine on the Huffington Post (look it up, I ain’t linking) comparing Israel’s security forces with those of Iran.
Should it ever dawn upon Blumenthal that intrepid journalism involves more than filming a bunch of drunken kids in the safety of west Jerusalem, perhaps he might venture to Tehran. Or at least London, where Press TV may well be willing to take him on, given that so many other pundits are bailing out on the voice of the Iranian regime.
Also recommended: Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez in The Boston Review write about antisemitism in Chavez’s Venezuela.
