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Canary in the Coal Mine, or You Could Be Next
After the last attacks on Israel by Hamas, the canards began to escalate against Israelis once more: they stole the land, they abuse the Palestinians—well, the list goes on. In recent months there has also been discussion on this site about whether anti-Semitic attacks in this country are increasing or not, whether the concern was being exaggerated or should be seriously addressed.
I’ve decided to take a different approach to the “Jewish question.” From my perspective, there are three types of attacks on Jews that have a great deal to teach us and serve as a warning: (1) the relevance of the merging of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist thought in these times; (2) the subtlety of criticisms of Jews, and how Jews are adding credence to these statements, (3) the lessons that need to be learned from the current situation by Jews and non-Jews alike.
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So many of the arguments denying that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are the same are misleading, are lies, or are trying to use current politics to attack both mindsets. I would prefer to use long-standing tropes that try to justify attacking Israel with lies and deceptions as a means to separate out the two ideas.
First, those who deny the connection say that Jews invaded Israel and essentially kicked out the Palestinians. Anyone who has studied Jewish history knows these statements are not true. The Jews have lived in that part of the world for thousands of years, and although their population decreased, they were continuously resident. The Jews repeatedly made efforts to engage the Arabs in the region, but they refused.
Second, People think that Israelis believe that criticism about them is anti-Semitic. The problem arises when the media either ignores the actions of non-Israelis in the country or distorts the information about Israel.
Third, Israel is an apartheid state. This is an illegitimate claim. The term “apartheid” was used to describe South Africa: apartheid dictated where South Africans, on the basis of their race, could live and work, the type of education they could receive, and whether they could vote. None of these restrictions apply to Arabs in Israel. Arabs can live in Israel, have full access to schools (although more needs to be done to improve education for Arabs), live in mixed Israeli and Arab communities, and the Arabs can vote.
Israel has been condemned by the United Nations more than any other nation in the world. When one considers the atrocities and repression committed all over the globe just in recent years, one only needs to look at Syria, Rwanda, Cuba, Myanmar, South Sudan, Congo and Darfur. Let’s not forget China.
There are many other claims about the legitimacy of Israel, and as long as arguments of legitimacy are used as a cudgel, the legitimacy of the anti-Zionist argument becomes moot. It is part and parcel of the anti-Semitic rhetoric
* * * *
The reason I became convinced of the merging of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism was that a definition of the former is precisely the same for the latter. Bret Stephens (whether you like him as a Conservative or not), in a panel discussion with Bari Weiss (see below), defined anti-Semitism not just as racist (technically, Judaism is not a race), but in this way:
It is a conspiracy theory which holds that Jews are imposters and swindlers. If you look at the 19th century, they were considered to be imposters: they were ‘trying to be’ Germans and French, and they were ‘stealing the wealth’ of those countries”; anti-Zionism is the same.
Contemplate that definition for a moment. The definition held true in Europe, and it holds true today in Israel—and might be emerging in our own country.
* * * *
It’s helpful to remember that many bigotries against Jews were encoded in law in European countries; gradually some restrictions were removed, and Jews appeared to assimilate successfully in almost every country where they lived. But the assimilation was misleading. Jews were repeatedly expelled from countries. Just under the surface, and sometimes even blatantly, Jewish hatred reared its ugly head. Some opportunities were considered unwise to pursue by both Jews and non-Jews, whether in commerce or government; Jews were concerned about being perceived as seeking to live above their station and to rekindle the hatred toward the Jewish community. And then we endeavored to survive the wreckage and destruction of World War II.
Today, only a few people unashamedly publicly attack the Jew. We see these attacks by our own government representatives. Some people are wise enough to do it in the absence of Jewish company. There may be enough people in this country who would speak out against anti-Semitic remarks. The people who are the most tolerant of anti-Semitic rhetoric: the Jews themselves. They have lulled themselves into a sense of safety and wellbeing; after all, it’s not like they wear strange clothes or mumble in Yiddish around their friends. Anti-Semitic jokes can be brushed off or ignored. Jews take off time for the same holidays as everyone else; they eat the same foods as their secular friends. In effect, they are barely Jewish. So when they find themselves in the position of having to defend Jews, or worse yet, Israel, they put on their Progressive hats so they can blend into the crowd. They take pride in the fact that they are no different than anyone else, and as Jews have done through the centuries, they fight for the underdog—the other. One has to ask in all seriousness, who is the underdog in Israel, and how is that defined?
* * * *
So, where do I find myself in this discussion? If it’s possible, I’m more zealous than ever in my support for Jews all over the world, and especially for the state of Israel. I’m not going to make apologies for my stance. I am critical of Israel when it does foolish things, but I will attack the lies, too, like these:
Palestinian land (despite the fact that Israel vacated the territory from which it was subsequently attacked) and wanton violence against Palestinian civilians, particularly children (despite the fact that Israel regularly warned its targets to vacate buildings before targeting them) — can’t help but make me think of ancient libels about Jewish greed and bloodlust.
—or vociferously:
For example, when you hear that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, which it of course manifestly is not, you are abusing that word and trafficking in a classic anti-Semitic trope, suggesting that the Jewish people have a particular kind of bloodlust. Or if you say that Israel or Israeli leaders have hypnotized the world to get them to do their bidding, that again, goes back to an old anti-Semitic trope.
* * * *
If you’re not Jewish, why should you be concerned? Because in this country, it isn’t the Jews who have a bloodlust; it is the Progressive party. And it is against anyone who doesn’t adopt their program and its propaganda. I’m suggesting that the Jews are not the only ones in the sights of Jew-haters; they are just the canary in the coal mine. If you’re Christian, a gun owner, a Conservative, a cop or former military, get ready.
You could be next.
The one-hour panel on The Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism: How Should We Respond, particularly the first nine minutes
.
Published in Foreign Policy
So I will admit this wasn’t worded well. I have had experiences reading Jewish thought and blogs, etc where some are rather unveiled in their contempt. It’s a thinking I was shocked and appalled by. The Jewish community can tend to have not nice thoughts about Evangelical support for Israel, as well.
So that colors my perception a bit.
No one is perfect. I don’t expect it. That goes for all groups. The west has been paying penance for wwii for decades (all my life). My grandmother paid penance and her husband was Jewish!
For a great amount of the education over the Holocaust, I have felt we learned the wrong lessons. The focus has been on protecting Jews while ignoring similar treatments being perpetrated on other groups (like Whites in America recently). But to point that out, you are accused of minimizing the holocaust, no matter how careful you are. Another bad lesson learned is that nationalism is evil. Is it? Yoram Hazony recognized that was a poorly learned lesson and defends nationalism, even though he severely waters it down for America.
It doesn’t really matter how eloquent I speak or how many eggshells I try not to break, there are raging questions I have that if I give them voice, no matter how gently, I will be accused of hate. So I should just suffer through it.
Thank you for what little attempt you have made to not dismiss my comment as hateful. I really appreciate it. I don’t dislike the Jews. I just don’t understand why the questions are not permissible.
You didn’t ask questions here, Stina. You made ignorant statements. For the record, you might find it helpful to know that all Jews don’t fit into a cookie cutter in their beliefs and attitudes. Reformed and secular Jews are overwhelmingly Progressive, so you can figure out their positions from there for the most part; many of these people reject Evangelical Christians because they fear that the effort will be made to convert them (the Jews) to Christianity. This attitude shows their ignorance, too. And reading blogs with Jews commenting is not a smart way to draw conclusions about Jews overall.
For a great amount of the education over the Holocaust, I have felt we learned the wrong lessons. The focus has been on protecting Jews while ignoring similar treatments being perpetrated on other groups (like Whites in America recently). But to point that out, you are accused of minimizing the holocaust, no matter how careful you are.
I’m not clear on just what you actually said, but killing six million people is in a different category than hate against whites in America. If you were trying to draw an equivalency, I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t go over well.
The lesson we should have learned from the Holocaust is recognizing the progression. People didn’t wake up one day and *boom* 6 million dead.
There was a progression and it began with removing Jews from businesses and universities. Then the Germans taught their youth that Jews are evil oppressors (sound familiar at all?). There were steps. If we don’t want 6 million dead of ANY group ever again, then we can’t wait til they are already dead to get outraged over it.
You have to be outraged way before then.
Just curious, are you saying that noticing similarities is not allowed, and nobody can point out anything about that, until at least six million whites in America have also been killed? (Or allowing for share of population etc, it might have to be a lot more than six million.)
I thought expressions like “never again” were supposed to be about not letting that even START, regarding ANY population, not just recognizing it again, afterwards. And certainly not in regard to only Jews.
Indeed. Unless the argument to the Uighurs is supposed to be “get back to us when 6 million of you are dead.”
The Germans had a long history of anti-Semitism. At times it just ran dormant. So the teaching you speak to was in the culture hundreds of years before. How do you wipe out hundreds of years of Jew hatred? And for the teaching that happened in the 30’s and 40’s, it was probably already too late to stop them. The Jews had done their best to assimilate—which you would have supported, since you don’t like Jews keeping themselves separate. You can see where that got them. Nowadays we have secular Jews and Reformed Jews trying to fit in. What are they supposed to do to those like Ilhan Omar and her ilk, as well as BDS?
So I’m voicing outrage. Now.
@kedavis–I didn’t say anything remotely like that. See my latest comment to Stina above. I was simply saying that comparing actually 12 million killed in the Holocaust and the threats to white America doesn’t make a good comparison.
Arguably, if two different people got the same impression, maybe at least what you wrote wasn’t as clear as you thought.
Maybe it would help to emphasize more that people like Ilhan Omar aren’t just anti-semitic, they’re apparently anti-white in general, and to them, Jews are – at least in the US – just other white people.
It’s a perfectly adequate one. You just reject it.
ce la vie. White hatred is passé and nothing to be concerned over. As Gary says, there’s so many of us, it wouldn’t get anywhere. But our passivity makes me wonder.
6 million or 12 million?
Since you’ve added this, I’ll add this:
Again, it’s about history and trends and steps… We’re looking at 12 million killed (total) in the rear-view mirror now. Would you not, if you could, go back and stop that while the trends were just getting started? I assume you would. So, why not behave the same now? Or do you need to wait and then change the expression to “Okay, but not a THIRD time!”
How the heck is the West paying penance for WWII? We beat the Nazis, the Italians, the Bulgarians, the Hungarians, the Romanians, and the Japanese. We were on the right side. I don’t see any Americans apologizing for it.
Now, Germany is part of the West, and it’s true, they are held responsible for the holocaust. Why not? They did it.
So what would you do to stop attacks on whites?
What would you have done to stop it in Germany?
If your answer is that it was inevitable, then it seems like all the “never again” stuff should just stop. If it was inevitable then, why isn’t it inevitable in the future? And if it wasn’t inevitable then, why not try to stop it now?
Because it isn’t happening, and the comparison is ridiculous. Jews were something like a tenth of the German population. Hundreds of thousands left Germany when it was still possible to do that. The Nazis rounded up Jewish people from all over eastern and central Europe to top those numbers up.
Whites are 60% of the US population. Add in Asians–that is, unless you think they’re coming after us, too–and it’s 67%. About 220 million people. There are not 2.2 billion American Blacks plotting our oppression and murder. The “white holocaust” is a sick joke.
Retroactively stop the holocaust? Number one, don’t vote for Hitler.
I’m not so sure a 10-to-1 or 100-to-1 or 1,000-to-1 advantage is required, if the targets largely surrender willingly.
Imnsho it’s foolishness to talk about ‘the Jews’ or ‘the Muslims’ or ‘the gays’ or ‘white people’ or ‘the blacks’ or ‘evangelicals’ etc. These are all large groups that contain a multitude of opinions and experiences. None of us are stereotyped monoliths, which is what bigotry reduces us to in order to project whatever fears and insecurities it has onto the resulting blank screen in the form of hate.
@susanquinn – I am not an antisemite – I don’t believe Jews are an evil (?) monolith, or that they are intrinsically more different from other groups than those other groups are from each other. In fact I don’t think that you and I are that different. I am anti-Zionist because I see the creation of Israel as a colonial act, by its nature unjust, and I also don’t see (any) ethnic nationalism as automatically a good (or bad) thing. I could be right, I could be wrong, I could be partially both – but I don’t stereotype you, Susan, please don’t stereotype me.
Susan, I don’t agree with your interpretation here. I think that the “invasion” argument is a bit over-the-top rhetorically on the pro-Palestinian side, but I also don’t think that it’s proper to dismiss the Palestinian objection.
Here is a link to the Jewish Virtual Library’s entry about the population of Israel/Palestine. The highlights are:
That’s quite a transformation over a mere 37 years. Less than 10% Jewish to almost 90% Jewish. Note that over 1 million non-Jews disappeared from the region between 1947 and 1948.
Also note that the Jewish population increased by almost 1 million in just 8 years, between 1947 and 1955. Almost all of that was immigration. Using the information from the Jewish Virtual Library (here), immigration in these years was (rounded to the nearest thousand):
That’s a total of about 750,000 immigrants, in just 7 years. The 1947 report of the UN (here — in paragraphs 15 and 16) state that:
To sum up: The region was over 90% non-Jewish in 1918. By 1955, 1.1 million Jews moved in. By 1955 — mostly in the single war year — 1.1 million non-Jews left. The region was almost 90% Jewish in 1955.
I think that given these facts, it’s pretty fair to say that the Jewish folks moved in and kicked out the Palestinians. Yeah, there were a handful of Jews at the outset, and a handful of non-Jews at the end, but the demographics of the region was fundamentally transformed.
I have a question unrelated to my prior comment, about the “canary in a coal mine” analogy.
Does anyone know of any historic examples of this? If this hypothesis is true, then various pogroms or persecutions of Jews, over the centuries, should be followed by persecutions of other groups. Has this happened? I don’t know much about this history, in specific details.
I did briefly look into the issue with respect to Spain. The Jews were ejected from Spain in 1492, apparently about 200,000 of them. Was there any other expulsion of people immediately afterward?
I found a report of an expulsion of the Muslims/Moors from Spain, apparently involving several hundred thousand people. It occurred around 1610. If that’s a “canary in a coal mine” situation, then the reaction is extraordinarily delayed — over a century.
I don’t write this to suggest that mistreatment of Jewish folks is OK. It’s not. I’m just looking for empirical evidence regarding the validity of the “canary in a coal mine” argument.
The Spanish Inquisition started in 1478 and ran for three centuries. Another expression of the drive for homogeneity (and therefore bad for the ‘different’).
The Moriscos who were expelled were the converted descendants of the Muslim Moors (who had been driven out of Spain much earlier, except for Granada which was [re]conquered in 1492).
It looks like identity politics, to me. I did not notice this until recently. The emergence of BLM and the Critical Race Theory propaganda led me to notice that the pro-Jewish folks, mostly on the political right, had long been engaging in precisely the same tactics.
There is the virtue-signaling. There is the hysterical exaggeration of violence directed against a group, when such events are vanishingly rare as a statistical matter. There is the discussion of historic victimization, raised incessantly. There is the elevation of any slight, or even joke, to an outrage. There is the vilification of anyone who questions the narrative. There is the dismissal of the actual, empirical facts.
I found that I actually used to engage in pro-Jewish, pro-Israel identity politics. I fell for the story, and even felt self-righteous about it. No longer.
We gave up national sovereignty for immigration and a safe space for the huddled masses and playing world police man because we felt bad over our inaction in WWII. We have condemned nationalism in any form and are offended by “America First.”
Yes, how have we done penance except in abject self flagellation for all the wrongs the west has perpetrated on the world?
It’s that the anti-Zionists, like Hitler, decided they have to start somewhere.
The actual canaries for WWII were the communists in Germany, who were being politically persecuted first.
In Spain, it was the Spanish heretics (that included Jews).
In America, the canary, if the rise in anti semitism has been over the last four years, was lawfare persecution of Christians, where masterpiece cakes occurred in 2012.
Persecution of Christians in Rome was the canary for persecution of the Jews, for whatever reason they caught flack for being closely related to the Christians (a large number having been Jewish).
Pretty much, if the government starts getting totalitarian on anybody, the Jews can expect that totalitarianism to fall on them x10.
I find this to be one of the strangest swipes at Jews I have ever heard. I read a later comment of yours that said you had learned about this through reading Jewish blogs. Do you personally know any Jews? I’ve dealt with hundreds of Jews in my life, both personally and professionally, both secular, atheist, ultra-orthodox, democrat, and republican. I’ve never seen a hint of a superiority complex. If anything, they tend to have self doubts. There is a well-known stereotype of the “woe is me” complex.
I’ll grant you that Hollywood has had a negative impact on culture (but certainly not on the economy), but banks and the Federal Reserve?? Destroying our culture and economy??? This is truly bizarre. Hardly any banks are even owned or controlled by Jews. Maybe they were in Europe at one time.
You don’t think debt (facilitated by banking and lending) is a huge destructive force on the economy?
Sure, short term debt is fine for investment, but at what point does debt become an anchor around your neck, enslaving you to interest rates for decades?
Same thing as happened to the Christian populations that predated the arrival of Islam in modern Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Egypt . . . .
Christians were persecuted as a threatening rival faith to those approved by the regimes.
Without banks, few people would be able to buy their own homes, and few businesses would be able to expand. They serve a critical function in a capitalistic economy.
Now if you are talking people who get into too much debt, that is of course a bad thing. One should spend (or borrow) within their means. But that doesn’t mean that banks are the culprit. Any function of money can be abused by an undisciplined person just like other positive things in life.
Maybe you are referencing the outrageous Federal Debt, but that has nothing to do with bankers or the Federal Reserve. That is the fault of politicians spending money we don’t have. I think the Federal Debt would be almost nil if Congress were replaced by a bunch of bankers.
In his first year as president, Ronald Reagan famously declared, “I’ve had it up to my keister with these bankers”. Which got what I thought was a pretty funny response from Bill Mauldin, the editorial cartoonist:
While we mostly hear about the Holodomor, which preceded the Holocaust, as a Russian (Moscow) attack on Ukrainians, the same policy was in play in Kazakhstan, where the Kazakh ethnic majority was suddenly reduced to a minority in their own territory, slaughtered by deliberate famine.
Deliberate famines are horrifying, but killing people because they don’t matter or their presence is inconvenient seems qualitatively different from killing them because they are intrinsically the problem.