Among the Truthers (35 page)

Soft anti-Semitism would stagger on for decades in Europe and North America—the sort that kept Jews out of certain country clubs and law firms till the 1970s and 1980s. But it would never again be permissible in the mainstream West to speak of Jews disparagingly as a race, or even to begin a dinner-party monologue with the words “The Jew.” Overt anti-Semitism became dispersed to the fringes of intellectual life—the militant black ghetto and the Nation of Islam; neo-Nazi- and skinhead groups (which are largely extinct in North America, but still occasionally assert themselves in chants emanating from the cheap seats at European soccer games); and—as discussed at greater length in this chapter—militant, left-wing anti-Israeli obsessives, such as Kevin Barrett, who have made common cause with hatemongers in the Muslim Middle East.

Even most “mainstream” (if that word can be used) conspiracy theorists, I was surprised to discover, now go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the taint of Jew hatred. This is especially apparent among right-wing New World Order types, such as Alex Jones—despite the fact that their central narrative, the existence of a moneyed cabal of all-controlling globalists who oppress ordinary hard-working Americans, is precisely congruent with old-school anti-Semitism in just about every other aspect. Michael Ruppert, perhaps the most influential 9/11 Truther there was in the movement's early years, began his epic conspiracist tome
Crossing the Rubicon
with “special thanks” to “all of the American Jews who took to this book and my work in full recognition that we all worship the same God.” Robert Bowman—the one-time head of the Star Wars missile defense program under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, now a peace activist and 9/11 Truther—defends himself against allegations of consorting with Holocaust deniers by averring, “My father was an ethnic Jew.” Even Barrett felt compelled to start up an odd organization called “Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth” to give ecumenical cover for his conspiracy theories.

Perhaps my favorite example in the but-some-of-my-best-friends-are-Jewish conspiracist niche is Victor Fletcher, the editor and publisher of the
Toronto Street News
, a bizarre fortnightly newspaper sold for two dollars a copy by homeless people. While the publication was conceived as a way to provide dignity to beggars who otherwise would simply be asking passersby for a handout, its crackpot contents have instead reinforced the worst stereotype of homeless people as paranoid, hate-addled lunatics. One 2010 edition, for instance, contained an article titled “The Kaballah: The NWO's Satanic Bible,” claiming that “the ‘god' of the Kabbalah is not god at all. It is Lucifer. Freemasonry is based on the Kabbalah. Illuminati Jews and their Freemasonic allies are stealthily erecting a New World Order dedicated to Lucifer. That's why the ubiquitous logo of the City of Ottawa, where I am currently visiting, is an O with three tails. 666.” Yet on the newspaper's masthead page, Fletcher—who once was forced to apologize for running an article calling for the murder of “Jew bankers”—proudly declares the
Street News
to be a “Jewish Newspaper, 60% written by Jews.”

Of course, some conspiracy theorists do cross the line into out-and-out unapologetic anti-Semitism (and its inevitable cousin, Holocaust denial). But when that happens, they typically become radioactive to less radicalized conspiracists such as Jones, Alten, and most of the other leading conspiracy theorists whom I have profiled in this book. At this point, the typical pattern is for the anti-Semite to schism publicly from the movement—a melodramatic blog posting is now the usual medium for this maneuver—and set out down his own hateful, idiosyncratic path, adding his erstwhile conspiracists-in-arms to the long tally of Jewish and semitophilic conspirators he keeps tacked to the virtual bulletin board at the back of his mind.

The process can take years. By all appearances, Kevin Barrett is well on his way.

A New Home on the Left

Since the French Revolution, anti-Semitism typically had been a creature of the Right, in the European sense of the word—which is to say, the reactionary defenders of the established social, religious, and economic order: As already noted, the Jew was a stand-in for capitalism, mobility (physical and otherwise), new ideologies, and the marginalization of the sturdy gentile rural folk who plowed the fields, threshed the grain, and embodied the romantic pastoral core of the nation's collective identity.

This began to change in 1948, when the creation of the state of Israel, simultaneous with the extinction in the West of traditional anti-Semitism. Gradually, Jews would be spoken of less as social pollutants or passive victims within larger Western societies—and more as protagonists in the geopolitics of a once-obscure corner of the British Empire. After the Jews established their own state, it became impossible to typecast them as mere parasites contaminating foreign hosts. The Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel scored a crushing military victory against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, furthered this transformation. Writing in that same year, one scholarly expert on the
Protocols
declared: “Today, the story is already almost forgotten—so much so that it is quite rare, at least in Europe, to meet anyone under the age of 40 who has even heard of these strange ideas.”

Yet at the same time that an old breed of Jewish-focused conspiracism was dying, a new one was blooming on Israeli soil. As Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi wrote in
The Iron Cage
:
The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood
, the Jews who arrived in Israel from Europe were mostly white, well educated, and politically sophisticated—alien beings amongst the largely rural, uneducated, and illiterate Arabs who populated the area. Far from the likes of David Ben Gurion, the Palestinian leaders of the British Mandate period were fez-wearing grandees held over from another age—feuding, risk-averse patriarchs who were far more concerned with preserving their traditional status than agitating for Arab rights, much less organizing a modern state. And so when civil war broke out between the two sides in 1947, the result was decisive.

Seen from North American shores, the Jews' transformation of Israel from an Ottoman backwater into a thriving, powerful Western nation continues to inspire: Here was an ancient people returning to their homeland following two millennia of statelessness and a European dictator's effort at extermination. But to the Arab peasants whose sleepy, agrarian society was being transformed into an alien landscape by immigrants speaking another language and embracing another religion, the Jews looked as much like colonialists as the British officials they replaced.

In the 1960s, Yasser Arafat would popularize this colonial narrative in the West by presenting himself as a sort of Arab Che Guevara. Equally influential was Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, whose books helped convince the Western intelligentsia that every corner of Western society—from the novels of Jane Austen to U.S. foreign policy—was soaked in bigotry and exploitation; and that the Western media, in particular, was poisonously disposed toward Eastern cultures. From the Palestinian point of view, the genius of this approach was that it cut through the complex history of Jews and Arabs, casting the Palestinian struggle as a simple microcosm of the Orient's larger battle against imperialism.

In the emerging propaganda against the Jewish state—which, in the West, now takes its most common form on websites and campus posters announcing Israel Apartheid Week and other anti-Zionist events—the old anti-Semitic stereotypes have been revamped. In the centuries leading up to the Holocaust, the Jew often was seen as rich, but also physically flaccid, diseased, and somewhat wretched. Fagin, from Charles Dickens'
Oliver Twist
, for instance, was described as “disgusting.” In
Ivanhoe
, the Jew Isaac is introduced as “a tall thin old man, who . . . had lost by the habit of stooping much of his actual height.” By the 1970s, this stereotype was thrown into reverse: In the emerging propaganda, the Jew now was shown in the cockpit of a helicopter or fighter jet—an omnipotent, teched-up superman murdering defenseless Palestinian children from the sky. As in the Nazi era, the Jew isn't fully human—but now he's an all-powerful Nazgûl instead of a pitiful Gollum.

In the common usage of child victims to communicate the extent of the Jew's evil, the anti-Israeli propaganda of today is similar to the posters and textbooks of the Nazi era, which often showed shadowy Hebrews menacing German families. But the Nazis took care to personalize the Jew as a craggy, hook-nosed ghoul—an image meant to further the idea that Jews were so genetically inferior as to be literally inhuman. Aside from editorial cartoonists in the Arab world (many of whom continue to faithfully copy Nazi-era stereotypes to this day), anti-Semitic propagandists of our own age typically omit the Jew's features in favour of a faceless, Star-of-Zion-emblazoned machine of war. During the second Intifada, for instance, a photo genre much favored by newspapers was the image of a small boy throwing a rock at a monstrous chunk of moving steel—an Israeli tank or bulldozer.

In keeping with our society's obsession with victimhood, the propaganda strategy against Israel now is entirely passive-aggressive. While the Nazis dwelled on the virility and superhuman indomitability of Aryans, the Jews' enemies now are represented in propaganda by five-year-olds carrying teddy bears. In 2009, for instance, the worldwide organizers of Israel Apartheid Week circulated a slick sixty-second promotional movie on apartheidweek.org, in which they depicted a cartoon mock-up of Gaza's population containing no men of military age, just a group of sorrowful children, mothers, and grandparents. The complex moral dimension of the conflict has been replaced by a sentimental Marxist-inspired tale of the virtuous oppressed rising up against an evil oppressor. Slogans of racial purity have been replaced with the mantras of “social justice.”

As a result, anti-Israel activism has drawn in the whole hodgepodge of leftist activists—and even world leaders—who know little about the Middle East, but who identify in a broad sense with the Marxist-inspired struggle of worker against capitalist, black against white, colonized against colonizer. During the 2008–2009 Gaza War, for instance, Hugo Chavez's “bolivarian” government in Venezuela declared its “unrestricted solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people” and denounced Israel's “criminal atrocities.” A few months later, Chavez's deposed Honduran ally, Manuel Zelaya, told the world he was under siege from “Israeli mercenaries” armed with what a
Miami Herald
interviewer described as “high-frequency radiation” and “toxic gases” that “alter [Zelaya's] physical and mental state.”

Back in North America, this merging of shrill anti-Zionism and traditional left-wing activism has produced bizarre juxtapositions—such as lesbian feminists who defend the
niqab
as a form of resistance against Western capitalism, and “peace activists” marching alongside
kafiyeh
-clad protesters who chant for Jewish blood in Arabic. Perhaps the most bizarre example I have witnessed is Toronto's annual Gay Pride parade, a popular tourist-friendly spectacle whose out-and-proud homoeroticism would constitute a death sentence for participants were the event held in the Arab world. Yet these parades have contained a contingent of “Queers Against Israeli Apartheid” who shout slogans against one of the most gay-friendly nations in the entire world. (Gays serve openly in the Israeli army, and there are gay pride parades in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.)

What makes such poisonous attacks on Israel especially notable is the fact that community activists in Toronto's gay community otherwise have shown themselves obsessively committed to the principles of nondiscrimination. The mission statement of the Pride committee, for instance, is a lengthy catalog of pledges to “value diversity” in regard to every imaginable sexual subniche. Yet, like many other left-wing activists, they often exhibit a single-minded hatred of Israel no less obsessive than the hateful campaigns once commonly launched by reactionary xenophobes. The same is true of the ultraliberal United Church of Canada, whose activists rarely raise a peep when Christians are slaughtered in Pakistan or Iraq, but militate for sanctions against one of the only nations in the Middle East where Christians can worship without fear. Then there is
Adbusters
, an ultra-
bien-pensant
Vancouver-based anticorporate magazine whose parent foundation earnestly describes itself as “a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators, and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age.” In late 2010,
Adbusters
ran a photo spread (
Truthbombs on Israeli TV
) comparing the situation in Gaza to that of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War—a feature so vile that Canada's largest drug-store chain pulled all copies of it off its shelves. Equally offensive was a 2004
Adbusters
feature—“Why won't anyone say they are Jewish?”
—
ticking off all the powerful Jews who had pushed for the invasion of Iraq. After decades of political correctness, it has become clear that the hypertolerant mantras of modern leftism supply no defense against the mind-warping effects of conspiracism: They simply deflect the conspiracist impulse to more fashionable targets such as Israel and the Jews that support it.

Even Jews themselves sometime have been seduced by this phenomenon. Noam Chomsky is an example. So is leftist icon Naomi Klein, who, as noted earlier, believes that Israeli elites are somehow secretly complicit in the terrorist attacks against their country.

Another example is Toronto-based Jewish anti-Israel activist Diana Ralph, who co-founded a group called Independent Jewish Voices. Among the group's causes: a total economic boycott of Israel, defense of the UN's original anti-Semitic Durban conference, and promotion of the blood libel that Israel deliberately targets Palestinian “children playing on roofs.” In a 2006 essay, Ralph argued that the Sept. 11 attacks were not perpetrated by al-Qaeda, but rather by American and Israeli conservatives seeking to implement “a secret, strategic plan to position the U.S. as a permanent unilateral super-power poised to seize control of Eurasia, and thereby the entire world”—a plan rooted in a 1979 Zionist conference organized by none other than future Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.