THE EXPECTATION that a
commentator's views must be in lockstep with his or her ethnic, religious, or
sexual identity is always distasteful -- particularly when blacks, women, gays,
or Jews are labeled "self-hating" when they refuse to toe the
perceived party line.
Then again, maybe the
"self-hating" label is justified on occasion. That's what I found
myself thinking when I read a stunning recent commentary by author and pundit
Eric Alterman on the British Muslim Council's decision to boycott the ceremony
commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The reason
given for the boycott was that the commemoration of Nazi death camp victims did
not include the Palestinian victims of Israeli "genocide."
On his blog at
MSNBC.com, Alterman sneered at critics of the boycott. "I'm a Jew, but I
don't expect Arabs to pay tribute to my people's suffering while Jews, in the
form of Israel and its supporters -- and in this I include myself -- are
causing much of theirs," he wrote, suggesting that one might as well
expect gays to honor "the suffering of gay bashing bigots." Alterman
noted that "the Palestinians have also suffered because of the Holocaust.
They lost their homeland as the world -- in the form of the United Nations --
reacted to European crimes by awarding half of Palestine to the Zionists. . . .
To ask Arabs to participate in a ceremony that does not recognize their own
suffering but implicitly endorses the view that caused their catastrophe is
morally idiotic."
One hardly knows where
to begin. There is, for instance, the way Alterman not-so-deftly conflates
Muslims with Arabs and Arabs with dispossessed Palestinians, and then declares
Jews responsible for "much" of the suffering of Muslims everywhere.
Not the brutal theocracies such as the Taliban, which have tried to impose a
medieval form of Islam through terror; not the equally brutal secular dictators
of the Arab world such as Iraq's now-deposed Saddam Hussein, or the corrupt
monarchies. No, it's the Jews -- all lumped together, including long-dead
Holocaust victims.
By Alterman's logic,
every Muslim is justified in viewing every Jew as the enemy. Alterman frets
that his words will be "twisted beyond recognition," but it's hard to
see how they can be twisted into something more indecent than they already are.
(While he counts himself among Israel's supporters, he seems to regard the
creation of Israel itself -- not just the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
-- as an Arab "catastrophe.")
Call it self-hatred or
something less psychoanalytic; the bottom line is, this is the kind of rhetoric
that, coming from a non-Jew, would be clearly seen as anti-Semitic. This is not
exclusively a phenomenon of the pro-Palestinian left. Ironically, in the same
blog item, Alterman castigates a conservative Jewish commentator for giving aid
and comfort to anti-Semitism -- and, ironically, he's right.
The commentator is
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of a group called Toward Tradition, who has been in
the forefront of the alliance between conservative Jews and the Christian
right. Rabbi Lapin recently unleashed a bizarre tirade in The Jewish Press
against "the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of
our culture." His target is the movie "Meet the Fockers," in
which Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand play a sex-obsessed Jewish couple, as
well as radio sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, "shock jock" Howard
Stern, and trashy daytime talk show host Jerry Springer.
Rather shockingly,
Lapin quotes Adolf Hitler, who accused Jews of spreading "literary filth,
artistic trash, and theatrical idiocy" in pre-World War II Germany. His
ostensible point is that the Jewish community should confront and criticize
Jewish perpetrators of cultural degeneracy, to avoid giving ammunition to
Jew-haters. But he provides such ammunition himself when he misleadingly
singles out Jewish entertainers for blame -- as if Jewish contributions to art
and culture were limited to the "coarsening" kind.
Such tactics are not
new for Lapin. During the controversy over Mel Gibson's "The Passion of
the Christ," he wrote that it was hypocritical for Jewish groups to
protest what many saw as the film's anti-Semitic themes, given that Jewish
Hollywood executives had been involved with allegedly anti-Christian fare such
as the 1988 film "The Last Temptation of Christ." Never mind that "The
Last Temptation" was directed and scripted by gentiles.
We live at a time when
anti-Semitic rhetoric is creeping into the respectable mainstream: on the left,
in the form of Israel-bashing; on the right, in assertions that Christians own
this country and should "take it back." I'm not sure whether such
rhetoric is any more reprehensible when it comes from Jews. But it is certainly
no better.
Cathy Young is a contributing editor at
Reason magazine. Her column appears regularly in the Globe.