Germany is a challenging place for all minorities. On multiculturalism and its proponents, in today’s Berlin. Yours truly, in Tuesday’s Souciant.
Addendum: Check out Wednesday’s thread about the article on Reddit. The commenter turns out to be an immigrant to Germany, most likely Greek.
You have to appreciate the linkage of the word “Nazi” to Islamophobia. As easy as it is to call any racist a fascist, at the same time, it’s an admission of what ties contemporary anti-immigrant politics to modern anti-Semitism.
What’s the difference between a caricature and the real thing? This is the question I always ask myself whenever I hear complaints about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indulging his anti-Jewish reflexes. This is not to deny the fact that the Iranian president’s statements are prejudiced and wrong. They should be condemned. My question is whether they have any ideological purchase.
Considering the nature of his statements, it’s easy to understand why German leftists would use his figure to combat Judeophobia. Prone to problematizing the Shoah, Ahmadinejad’s declarations parallel those of Holocaust revisionists. Similarly, his criticisms of Israel have an all-too familiar aura of scapegoating about them. Criticizing him this way illuminates both concerns.
The problem is that Ahmadinejad is Iranian. How useful can he really be, as a foil, to discourage discrimination against Jews, in Germany, instead of Iran? Doesn’t the contribution of German forces to NATO’s war effort in Afghanistan problematize such expressions of anti-racism? What about Israeli rightists, for whom the Nazi comparison serves different political requirements?
The responsibility for this situation is shared. Ahmadinejad has no difficulty reconciling the language of European anti-Semitism with anti-imperialism. It’s easy to misconstrue. Germans who emphasize his racism, without considering its significance, unnecessarily complicate their struggle against Judeophobia, by suggesting European and Iranian anti-Semitism are the same.
Photo: Lamp post sticker, west Stuttgart, July 30th.
“In the old days, they’d paint a Magen David on your door.” So remarked my father, when I told him of the symbol scrawled at the entrance to our building.
Black bloc to the rescue. Circle A detournement, twenty-four hours later.
The final solution, so to speak. In my view, a different shade of white would do.
“Anti-Semitism” was once an unambiguous concept. It was, quite simply, racism directed against Jews. In recent decades, however, the concept has been repurposed to include criticisms of the State of Israel. Once taken for granted, the conflation of Israel-criticism with anti-Semitism is a subject of much controversy, particularly amongst American and Israeli Jewish liberals.
Seeing the invocation of anti-Semitism in these stickers, as part of a larger platform against discrimination, by a radical political organization, albeit an anti-fascist one, cannot help but stir a certain kind of nostalgia amongst Jews. Even among those on the right, who would inevitably bridle at the clichéd leftist rhetoric, but only because its logic still makes some sort of basic sense.
We often forget that one of the primary proponents of anti-Islamic ideology in the West prior to the War on Terror were Serbian nationalists like Radovan Karadzic, pictured above, in drag as a new age healer.
Attributed to progressives sympathetic to Islamist criticisms of Israel and Zionism, this genre of anti-Semitism is the least understood form of prejudice against Jewry. Viewed as opportunist in its support of Islamic and right-wing Arab views of Jews and Zionism, as a means of disguising racism as anti-colonialism, left-wing anti-Semites are treated almost as though they are false progressives, who don the multicultural mantle of the left in order to be openly prejudiced.
Jews are incited against not because they profess an inferior culture or religion, but because the object of their faith is a state that discriminates against non-Jews, specifically, Muslims. Because their concept of the state is so integral to their religious identity, Jews are viewed as being inherently biased against non-Jews. Whether they are Diaspora or Israeli Jews, the foundational importance of the Zionist state, as an exclusively Jewish state, is supposed to be similarly viewed by progressives and by Islamists as an iconographic instance of the core politics of Jewish identity.
In short, Judaism is a synonym for racism because behind it hides Israel. Progressives aren’t supposed to like Judaism, first, because Israel stands for the indivisibility of religion and state, and second, in the form of the Israeli state, for the official practice of discrimination against Palestinians on the basis of their ethnicity. Though Judaism is found to be deeply problematic, both historically and theologically, the notion of returning to the promised land that Zionism prescribes is less important than how it is understood to function as a cultural cover for the West’s theft of Arab lands.
- From an article I’m currently working on
Tehrangeles has officially been taken over by American members of Hezbollah, and appropriately renamed to reflect the identity of its new, turban-bedecked rulers.
So reported an email from an LA-based Mashdown reader this morning, claiming that he snapped the Hezbollywood picture above as he drove to Canters for a light breakfast.
The subject line: Shi’ite Culture Jamming.
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