Racism, Anti-Semitism and Zionism

I. What is Racism?

 

There is a great deal of confusion about what constitutes racism. We live in multi-ethnic societies where any person can be racially prejudiced against another person of a different ethnic background. It means that this person forms an opinion about another person solely on the basis of the “racial” group to which that person belongs.

If the person is discriminating against the other, and this could take the form of ignoring, excluding, avoiding, ridiculing, threatening or even violence, it is not necessary racism. Racial prejudice and discrimination become racism only at the point at which one racial group has more social, economic, political power than another racial group and it uses that power for its interests against the other group in a systemic manner.

To do that, the more powerful group has to be in a position to incorporate their prejudices into society’s laws, institutions, policies and norms, which they can then use to discriminate against the oppressed group. The power of the ruling class and of individuals of this class to discriminate is based not on language but on their position in the process of production and in many cases – as the result of this – their control of the state apparatus. Those who own the means of production are the ruling class. They exploit and oppress other classes and when the oppressed are of another ethnicity - this is racism.

Because of the confusion about what constitutes racism, it is very common to label a person who expresses prejudice as a racist. This confusion serves the interests of the ruling class. Part of the ideology that justifies racism is the claim that the verbal and written hate expressions against oppression and the acts of the oppressed against the oppressors are equal if not worse than the acts of the exploiters and oppressors, who claim that they are forced to defend themselves against savage terrorists.

Thus the rebellions of the Black slaves are equated to the cruelty of the slave masters. The raids of indigenous nations on the white settlers are characterized as savage bloodthirst. The killing of armed Jewish settlers or soldiers is characterized as terrorism while the racist terror of the Zionist state is characterized as self-defense or actions of deterrence.

Take the case of Example Ilhan Omar. In 2012, while then an employee of the Minnesota Department of Education she tweeted: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”

In January 2019, New York Times editor Bari Weiss claimed that accusing the Jewish state of hypnotic powers amount to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews are supernatural puppeteers — which fueled our persecution in ancient Rome and Nazi Germany.

Confused Omar apologized to Weiss. “My use of the word ‘Hypnotize’ and the ugly sentiment it holds was offensive,” wrote Omar. “It’s now apparent to me that I spent lots of energy putting my 2012 tweet in context and little energy in disavowing the anti-Semitic trope I unknowingly used, which is unfortunate and offensive.” Omar then deleted the tweet. ^[1]

Another example that illustrates the confusion about racism is the case of Farrakhan. In the USA it is common for the liberals to demand from people on the left to condemn Islamic leader Minister Louis Farrakhan as a racist. For example Jeremy Hunt of the right-wing Fox News wrote:

“Racism and religious and ethnic prejudice are a cancer on the soul and deserve sharp condemnation by every decent man and woman – whether such bigotry comes from a neo-Nazi, a Ku Klux Klansman, a radical Islamic terrorist, or an American religious leader. But as the case of Nation of Islam hatemonger Louis Farrakhan sadly illustrates, too many on the left are reluctant to condemn hate when it is spewed by a black activist…

Farrakhan has a decades-long history of racist comments aimed at whites and anti-Semitic comments demonizing Jews. And he’s proud of his vile rhetoric – posting videos of his speeches on YouTube just a few days ago in Chicago.

In the above speech Farrakhan declared: “White folks are going down and Satan is going down, and Farrakhan, by God's grace, has pulled the cover off of that Satanic Jew, and I'm here to say you're time is up – your world is through." ^[2]

In the real world the Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan is a reactionary and says things that show that he is racially prejudiced against white people, gays and Jews. Yet he is not a racist in relation to whites simply because he does not have the power to oppress them. Those who put him on the same plan as Trump, or the KKK are turning racism into mere verbal expression rather than institutional oppression. In doing so they help smear those who oppose real oppression and, because of it, refuse to condemn Farrakhan as a racist.

It is possible that Jews in the USA, especially those who support Israel, were offended by the word ‘Hypnotize’, yet it is a fact that American and European imperialists support Israel in spite of the systematic oppression of the Palestinians. This support needs an explanation. The Zionists themselves can provide the explanation. The Zionists are very proud of their role as the front line of the western-imperialists control of the Middle East.

“Hanit is the Hebrew word meaning spearhead. That word explains why Israel is a vital strategic asset not just to Great Britain, but to the West as a whole”. ^[3]

“Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where the American flag is rarely (if ever) burned in protest – indeed, some Israelis fly that flag on their own independence day. And avenues in major American cities are named for Yitzhak Rabin and Golda Meir. Arguably, there is no alliance in the world today more durable and multifaceted than that between the United States and Israel”. ^[4]

Due to this role, the pro-Zionist ruling classes, that controls the mass media, have managed to confuse Anti-Semitism with Anti-Zionism. Those who oppose Israel’s brutal repression of the Palestinians are accused of Anti-Semitism. By doing so, the pro-Zionists lump together the persecution of Jews with the opposition to racism. To understand the meaning of this confusion, the reader should bear in mind that for many years the imperialists, including the US and Israel, supported South Africa’s apartheid. Would it surprise anyone if some black Americans condemning South Africa’s Apartheid would have been saying that South Africa ‘hypnotizes’ the world? Would it surprise anyone if those who defended apartheid would have called them racists?

It is important to differentiate between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism. Only by using the scientific method of Marxism is it possible to truly understand the difference. It is not an easy task but it is necessary in order to provide real knowledge to those who support the Palestinian cause and at the same time oppose all forms of racism.

Racism appears in different forms and different levels. The lower level is discrimination based on the racial background of groups, classes and nations. The more severe forms are the robbery of the land and natural resources of the native people. Many times it includes ethnic cleansing and even genocide of the oppressed.

In this booklet we will deal with the racism against the North American Indians, Blacks slavery, Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism and then with Zionism as a form of racism.

 

The roots of racism

 

Merriam Webster dictionary defines racism as:

A belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

2a: a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles

2b: a political or social system founded on racism

3: racial prejudice or discrimination

Thus the dictionary offers definitions that focus on one hand on idea-belief and on the other hand on social and political system. It does not deal with the dialectical relations between the two.

Believing that ideas come first is the essence of the idealist philosophy. Those who hold to this philosophy are likely to say that hard working people thought that it would be wonderful if they would have slaves to do the hard work. Or that God created some people to be slaves. Those who hold to the materialist philosophy will seek the explanation for slavery in the conditions of society.

Marx was the theoretician who explained the relationship between ideas and the economic foundation of society. In the German Ideology Marx wrote:

“Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production. (…)

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. (…)

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness.” [5]

Thus Marx explained that the superstructure includes culture, ideology (world views, ideas, values, and beliefs), norms and expectations, identities that people adopted result of social institutions (education, religion, media) and the state-political apparatus that governs society.

The superstructure grows out of the economic base, and reflects the interests of the ruling class that controls society. The superstructure justifies the base, and in doing so, justifies the power of the ruling class and the exploitation and the oppression of the working people. The superstructure is not passive but influences the classes in society that in non-revolutionary days of stability act according to the ideas originated by the servants of the ruling class.

The history of racism is the history of mainly the middle class, who instead of fighting against the ruling class, attack an ethnic minority, blaming them for the suffering of the middle class. Thus in times of historical and periodical deep crisis like the period we live in now, racism is on the rise.

It follows that if we want to understand racism we must begin with the understanding of the relationship of production in a given society, its level of the forces of production and the place of classes in the relationship of the production.

As we live at the end of the capitalist epoch, to understand the racism of today we must analyze the history of this mode of production which began with the primitive accumulation of capital.

 

II. The Extermination of the Indigenous Peoples of North America

 

The indigenous people of North America lived there tens of thousands of years before the white Europeans arrived. Most likely they came from Asia passing through what is known today as the Bering Strait land bridge during the Ice Age. American Indians developed a wide range of language customs and civilizations. They created many tribal nations. They were not only hunters and fishermen on the west coasts but farmers who grew corn and squash. They raised turkeys and guinea pigs.

“From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.” ^[6]

“The reasons for this racial genocide were multi-layered. Settlers, most of whom had been barred from inheriting property in Europe, arrived on American shores hungry for Indian land—and the abundant natural resources that came with it. In addition, Indians' collusion with the British during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 exacerbated American hostility and suspicion toward them. Furthermore, indigenous people were just too different: Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension.” ^[7]

“The Europeans brought with them their diseases that the Indians did not have a cure for and they were devastated by them. Unlike the Europeans and Asians, whose lifestyle had a long history of sharing close quarters with domesticated animals, Native Americans were not immune to viruses spread by domesticated cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and horses. Consequently millions were killed by measles, influenza, whooping cough, diphtheria, typhus, bubonic plague, cholera, scarlet fever and syphilis.” ^[8]

“Spreading disease was not always intentional on the part of the colonists. But there were instances that confirm that the European settlers exterminated natives. In 1763, a serious uprising threatened British garrisons in Pennsylvania., Sir Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet at Fort Pitt: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians [with smallpox] by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.” ^[9]

“During Pontiac's uprising in 1763, the Indians besieged Fort Pitt. They burned nearby houses, forcing the inhabitants to escape. The British officer in charge, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, reported to Colonel Henry Bouquet in Philadelphia that he feared the crowded conditions would result in disease. Smallpox had already broken out. On June 24, 1763, William Trent, a local trader, recorded in his journal that two Indian chiefs had visited the fort, urging the British to abandon the fight, but the British refused. Instead, when the Indians were ready to leave, Trent wrote: "Out of our regard for them, we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Smallpox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."…“There's no doubt that his act met with the approval of the British military in America and may have been common practice. Sir Jeffery Amherst, commander of British forces in North America, wrote July 7, 1763, "Could it not be contrived to Send the Smallpox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them. About a week later, he wrote to Bouquet: "You will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians by means of Blankets as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race."^[10]

One of the known massacres of the Indians was in 1890 in Wounded Knee. To end the Ghost Dance spiritual movement the police arrested the famous chief Sitting Bull and murdered him. When the Indians resisted the US Army 7^th Cavalry raided the village and killed 150 Indians. It is likely that this was a revenge for the regiment defeat and the death of the butcher Custer in Little Bighorn. ^[11]

In 1973, the American Indian Movement (AIM) led by Dennis Banks and Leonard Peltier occupied the place and another battle with the police took place. In 1975 two FBI agents were killed in Pine Ridge reservation during a raid on the village and Peltier was arrested and sent to life in prison even though he is likely not the one who shot the agents. ^[12]

Thus to create a capitalist society in North America it was necessary for the settler colonialists to destroy the Indians and their civilization. “At the beginning in British North America the British pretended to treat the Indian chiefs with some respect, to give them presents, to sign treaties with them, to bring influential chiefs to England to meet the King. Later on primarily from economic motives the Indians were perceived as savages. The English in particular were contemptuous of them, treating them as lackeys for the fur trade and despising the French and Spanish who took intermarriage and Indian land rights seriously. Smaller tribes on the East Coast, the first to recognize this, were destroyed and their people enslaved when they tried to drive the English out. Larger tribes on the interior managed (often by playing their own game of divide and survive among the rival empires) to maintain their self-respect and their independence up to the time of the American Revolution. But by siding with the British in 1776, all the Indians east of the Mississippi went down to final defeat. Some of the Indian nations, like the Creeks and Seminoles in the Southeast and the Delawares and Shawnees in the Old Northwest, managed to wage wars against the Americans from time to time thereafter, but even these tribes knew that they would never again have total freedom. They were simply fighting to avoid total destruction.” ^[13]

The Indians were portrayed at the beginning as Noble Savages. The American painter George Catlin, painted them as: “pure, bold, and noble beings, brave and honorable warriors and beautiful princesses, gifted orators, and creatures of innocence and simplicity living from the bounty of nature.”

In the nineteenth century, during the Romantic period, many European writers adopted the idea of the noble savage and used it to express their longing for simplicity, beauty, and deep connection to nature. However, this image was changed in the second part of the 19^th century. Charles Dickens, an Anti-Semite, wrote in his 1853 essay “The Noble Savage”:

“To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I don’t care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage something highly desirable to be civilized off the face of the earth.... [H]e is a savage—cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, blood- thirsty, monotonous humbug.”

According to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a "vast genocide..., the most sustained on record." By the end of the 19th century, writes David E. Stannard, a historian at the University of Hawaii, native Americans had undergone the "worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed, roaring across two continents non-stop for four centuries and consuming the lives of countless tens of millions of people." In the judgment of Lenore A. Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr., "there can be no more monumental example of sustained genocide—certainly none involving a 'race' of people as broad and complex as this—anywhere in the annals of human history." ^[14]

Yet even today you can find white scholars who deny that there was any holocaust of the Indians. “The most hideous enemy of native Americans was not the white man and his weaponry, wrote Alfred Crosby, "but the invisible killers which those men brought in their blood and breath." It is thought that between 75 to 90 percent of all Indian deaths resulted from these killers”.^[15]

What this holocaust denier is hiding is the fact that in many cases the white settlers refused to provide medicine to the Indians because they wanted them to die. The colonialists saw in the epidemics that devastated the Indians the will of god that wanted to give the lands to the Christians.

“King James I cited the epidemic-induced depopulation: “Those large and goodly Territories, deserted as it were by their natural Inhabitants, should be possessed and enjoyed by such of our Subjects and People.”… The mortality amazed European colonists. Their responses illustrate many themes that occurred repeatedly as Europeans, and then Americans, witnessed the ongoing health problems among American Indians. As already seen, providential explanations came quickly to Puritan minds. John Winthrop, for example, wrote that “Gods hand hath so pursued them, as for 300 miles space the greatest part of them are swept away by the small poxe.” ^[16]

For some reason a legend was created that the white colonialists were unable to enslave the Indians who prefer to die than to be slaves. It is not true that the European colonialists did not enslave Indians.

A study by Linford D. Fisher, associate professor of history at Brown University, finds that Native Americans, including noncombatants, who surrendered during King Philip’s War to avoid enslavement were enslaved at nearly the same rate as captured combatants.

Native American slavery “is a piece of the history of slavery that has been glossed over,” Fisher said. “Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas in addition to 12.5 million African slaves.”…While natives had been forced into slavery and servitude as early as 1636, it was not until King Philip’s War that natives were enslaved in large numbers, Fisher wrote in the study. The 1675 to 1676 war pitted Native American leader King Philip, also known as Metacom, and his allies against the English colonial settlers….During the war, New England colonies routinely shipped Native Americans as slaves to Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Azores, Spain and Tangier in North Africa, Fisher said. ^[17]

Indians were enslaved in Virginia by settlers and traders from shortly after the founding of Jamestown until the end of the eighteenth century, peaking late in the seventeenth century and providing a workforce for English plantations and households. By this time the Atlantic slave trade was at its peak, flooding Virginia with cheaper African labor. African slavery took nearly a century to develop, however, and in the meantime those white Virginians who required men and women to work as servants or in tobacco fields mostly relied on indentured servants and enslaved Indians. Europeans sold guns for slaves in an existing indigenous trading market, and encouraged allied tribes to provide the slaves by targeting Indian groups on the periphery of English settlements (similar to African participation in the capture of slaves in Africa). While there are examples of continued enslavement of Indians throughout the early settlement period, mass enslavement typically coincided with the upheaval of war that led to Indian prisoners who could be sold as slaves. Virginia's laws were neither clear nor effective with respect to the enslavement of Indians, at times banning the practice and at other times encouraging it. Some scholars argue that Indian enslavement had declined by 1800 because Indians were prone to illness or escape, but others maintain that it was only when Indians, wracked by war and enslavement, could not provide a sufficient quantity of cheap workers that English colonists turned primarily to chattel African slavery. ^[18]

 

Indian Victories

 

There were important victorious wars between the Indians and the US army in addition to the famous Little Bighorn in 1876, when American Indians annihilated George Armstrong Custer’s cavalry.

In 1791, settlers and land speculators were eager to get their hands on the rich lands of Ohio but met the resistance of the Indians. President Washington sent General Arthur St. Clair and 2,000 soldiers to destroy the resistance, the villages on the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio.

On November 4, about 1,000 warriors from a coalition of Indian nations—Shawnees, Miamis, Delawares, Wyandots, Kickapoos, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Potawatomis, Iroquois, and others—encircled and attacked the American camp on the bank of the Wabash River. When General St. Clair had to retreat, the survivors fled for their lives. The Americans suffered 630 killed and almost 300 wounded; on the Indian side, there were about 25 killed and perhaps 50 wounded.^[19]

While the American non-Indians are aware of the US’s defeat in Little Bighorn and a famous movie Little Big Man was made about it, they are not aware of the US army defeat in 1791.

 

Anti-Indian Racism Today

 

Trump has used racist language to justify further robbery of the Indian lands.

"You have a president who constantly uses Pocahontas as a racial slur and also a denigration against the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, because Pocahontas was a victim of child rape and kidnapping. Then you have the president making light and being flippantly dehumanizing and offensive about our genocide here in Lakota Country," said Chase Iron Eyes of Lakota People's Law Project on Democracy Now!”^[20]

“Native Tribes have advocated and fought for the protection of Bears Ears for years, resulting in it being named a national monument under the Obama administration. About one year ago, Trump approved slashing the protected Bears Ears site by 200,000 acres, and recently announced it will be opened for oil and gas bidding… In one of his first actions as President, on January 24, 2017, Trump signed an executive order that reversed the Obama legislation and advanced the construction of the fiercely-opposed Dakota Access pipeline expediting the environmental review that Trump described as an "incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process. On February 7, 2017, Trump authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to proceed, ending the environmental impact assessment and the associated public comment period. These pipelines are a direct attack on tribal sovereignty, clean water, clean air, sacred sites”. ^[21]

“Native Americans are killed in police encounters at a higher rate than any other racial or ethnic group, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet rarely do these deaths gain the national spotlight”. ^[22]

 

Indians and Zionist

 

It is not a mere accident that Prof. Gerald Aranoff of Ariel University (in the 1967 occupied lands) wrote in Arutz 7, the Zionist settlers west bank news: “America had an Indian Savage problem. Before July 4, 1776, the day the USA declared its independence, savage Indians, history records, would sneak into homes of new immigrants from Europe, and brutally stab to death sleeping men, women and children, who never did the least harm to the Indians. History records that these Indians would boast of their heinous cruelties at night-long campfire celebrations. This was Amalek in America. The Amalek that attacked the Israelites after the Exodus were a true horror. The Indians attacked defenseless women and children without mercy, and scalped their victims in battles”

Then he quoted Benjamin Franklin one of the founders of the US:

“The year following, a treaty being to be held with the Indians at Carlisle, the governor sent a message to the House, proposing that they should nominate some of their members, to be joined with some members of council, as commissioners for that purpose. The House named the speaker (Mr. Norris) and myself; and, being commissioned, we went to Carlisle, and met the Indians accordingly.

As those people are extremely apt to get drunk, and, when so, are very quarrelsome and disorderly, we strictly forbade the selling any liquor to them; and when they complained of this restriction, we told them that if they would continue sober during the treaty, we would give them plenty of rum when business was over. They promised this, and they kept their promise, because they could get no liquor, and the treaty was conducted very orderly, and concluded to mutual satisfaction.

They then claimed and received the rum; this was in the afternoon: they were near one hundred men, women, and children, and were lodged in temporary cabins, built in the form of a square, just without the town. In the evening, hearing a great noise among them, the commissioners walked out to see what was the matter. We found they had made a great bonfire in the middle of the square; they were all drunk, men and women, quarreling and fighting. Their dark-coloured bodies, half naked, seen only by the gloomy light of the bonfire, running after and beating one another with firebrands, accompanied by their horrid yellings, formed a scene the most resembling our ideas of hell that could well be imagined; there was no appeasing the tumult, and we retired to our lodging.

At midnight a number of them came thundering at our door, demanding more rum, of which we took no notice. The next day, sensible they had misbehaved in giving us that disturbance, they sent three of their old counselors to make their apology. The orator acknowledged the fault, but laid it upon the rum; and then endeavoured to excuse the rum by saying, 'The Great Spirit, who made all things, made everything for some use, and whatever use he designed anything for, that use it should always be put to. Now, when he made rum,' he said, 'Let this be for the Indians to get drunk with,' and it must be so.

And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the sea-coast.”^[23]

Yet this right-wing Zionist settler savage is slandering Franklin who organized defense of the Indians from a group of right-wingers vigilantes.

On December 14, 1763, fifty-seven vigilantes from Paxton and Donegal, two frontier towns, rode into Conestoga Manor, an Indian settlement, and killed six of twenty Indians living there. Two weeks later, more than 200 "Paxton Men" (as they were now called) invaded Lancaster, where the remaining fourteen Conestoga Indians had been placed in a workhouse for their own protection. Smashing in the workhouse door as the outnumbered local militia looked on, the Paxton Men killed the rest of the Conestoga band, leaving the bodies in a heap within sight of the places where the Anglo-Iroquois alliance had been cemented less than two decades before.

Franklin responded to the massacres with the most enraged piece of penmanship ever to come off his press -- A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County of a Number of Indians, Friends of this Province, by Persons Unknown. The essay, published in late January 1764, displayed a degree of entirely humorless anger that Franklin rarely used in his writings:

But the Wickedness cannot be Covered, the Guilt will lie on the Whole Land, till Justice is done on the Murderers. THE BLOOD OF THE INNOCENT WILL CRY TO HEAVEN FOR VENGEANCE!

As Franklin reconstructed the story, the Paxton Men had gathered in the night, surrounding the village at Conestoga Manor, then riding into it at daybreak, "firing upon, stabbing and hatcheting to death" the three men, two women, and one young boy they found. The other fourteen Indians were visiting white neighbors at the time, some to sell brooms and baskets they had made, others to socialize. After killing the six Indians, the vigilantes "scalped and otherwise horribly mangled," them, then burned the village to the ground before riding off in several directions to foil detection.

At considerable length, Franklin went on to reflect on the qualities of savagery and civility, using the massacres to illustrate his point: that no race had a monopoly on virtue. To Franklin, the Paxton Men had behaved like "Christian White Savages." He cried out to a just God to punish those who carried the Bible in one hand and the hatchet in the other: "O ye unhappy Perpetrators of this Horrid Wickedness!"

On February 4, a few days after Franklin's broadside hit the streets, the assembly heard more reports that several hundred vigilantes were assembling at Lancaster to march on Philadelphia, and Province Island, to slaughter the Indians encamped there. Governor Penn, recalling Franklin's talent at raising a volunteer militia, hurried to the sage's three-story brick house on Market Street at midnight. Breathlessly climbing the stairs, a retinue of aides in tow, he humbly asked Franklin's help in organizing an armed force to meet the assault from the frontier. To Franklin, the moment was delicious, for eight years before Penn had been instrumental in getting British authorities to order the abolition of Franklin's volunteer militia.

During two days of frenzied activity, Franklin's house became the military headquarters of the province. An impromptu militia of Quakers was raised and armed, and Franklin traveled westward to the frontier with a delegation to face down the frontier insurgents. As Franklin later explained in a letter to Lord Kames, the Scottish philosopher:

I wrote a pamphlet entitled A Narrative &c (which I think I sent you) to strengthen the hands of our weak Government, by rendering the proceedings of the rioters unpopular and odious. This had a good effect, and afterwards when a great Body of them with Arms marched towards the Capital in defiance of the Government, with an avowed resolution to put to death 140 Indian converts under its protection, I formed an Association at the Governor's request.... Nearly 1,000 of the Citizens accordingly took arms; Governor Penn made my house for some time his Head Quarters, and did everything by my Advice.

While his timely mobilization may have saved the 140 Indians' lives, the sage's actions drained his political capital among whites, especially on the frontier.^[24]”

Indeed the similarity of the Zionist settler colonialists with the white American racists is striking. No wonder that the Zionist robbers identify with the robbers of the Indians. The white colonialists did not have any hypnotic powers, they had guns and viruses. They wanted the lands and natural resources, they needed slaves. The reason the other colonialist powers like Spain, Portugal, France did not protest the genocide and the enslavement of the Indians was that they did the same.

The reason confused Omar is unable to explain to herself why the US and Europe support Israel is the lack of working class historical perspective and awareness. This however does not make her an anti-Semite. Being a member of the imperialist Democratic Party does not help her solve the riddle. Yet she is a progressive person and should be defended against reactionaries.

The Indians are now “small nations” to borrow Lenin’s terminology, who deserve the right of self-determination, not life in reservations that are the equivalents to the Bantustans of South Africa‘s apartheid. When they clash with racist police it is the duty of all freedom lovers to defend the Indians, to protect their lands and their natural resources. This is part of the RCIT program for the socialist federation of North America.

 

III. Black Slavery

 

One way to measure a country’s level of racism is by looking into the percentage of different ethnic-racial groups in the socio-economic and political positions.

In the US, the population is 329 million people. 60.4% of them whites, while blacks constitute 13.5%. Thus, if the US has 13.5% of blacks in the top level of society it could be considered a capitalist, but non-racist society.

As of mid-2018, white people constituted 100 percent of the ten richest Americans, 90 percent of the U.S. Congress, 96 percent of U.S. state governors, 100 percent of the top U.S. military advisers, 84 percent of full-time university professors and 90 to 95 percent of the people who decide which television shows, music albums and books get produced and published.^[25]

In 2016, 43.1 million – or more than 12.7 percent –lived under the poverty line.

Black households earn $57.30 for every $100 in income earned by white families. And for every $100 in white family wealth, black families hold just $5.04.

Almost 40 percent of African-Americans are poor enough to qualify for welfare, housing assistance and other government programs that offer modest support to families living under the poverty line.^[26]

21.2% (9.0 million people) of African Americans fell below the poverty line in 2017.^[27]

The three richest individuals Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos—collectively hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of the domestic population. ^[28].

In other words - imperialist US is a white racist capitalist system.

The discrimination of the black people has always been the continuation of slavery. The racist discrimination of African Americans has been continuing long after the abolition of slavery in 1865. Super-Exploitation and oppression of black people extended through peonage, convict leasing, sharecropping, Jim Crow, redlined black ghettos and mass incarceration. The ideology of white supremacy, used to justify slavery, persists.

Reactionaries promote portrayals of human biology that are used to justify racist, views of “human nature.” Although the so called “race science” has been debunked long ago, in this reactionary period of the capitalist class, it has made a comeback. In the US it is advocated by the “alt-right”. In July 2016, Steve Bannon, who became by then Breitbart chairman, and who claims that black people are naturally violent became Donald Trump’s chief strategist.

Another racist, Nicholas Wade, a former New York Times science correspondent, wrote a book on race science, “A Troublesome Inheritance”, where he claimed that the notion of “race” corresponds to profound biological differences among groups of humans; that human brains evolved differently from race to race; and that this is supported by different racial averages in IQ scores.

Contrary to the ideology that present IQ tests are proof of intelligence, this test measures a person’s ability to perform academic tasks. It is used to justify social inequality because middle class and rich children are better prepared to perform academic tasks than poor working class children.

“While University of Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne described Wade’s book as “simply bad science”. The right-wingers, latched on to Wade’s ideas, calling him a paragon of intellectual honesty who had been silenced, not by experts, but by political correctness.” ^[29]

It will be a major mistake to believe that racism is a result of ignorance and that educated people cannot be racists. Racists suck their racial hate ideology from the doctrines developed by educated men that justified slavery.

“A few weeks before the Civil War the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, said that the Confederacy’s cornerstone “... rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination [of blacks] to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” ^[30]

The churches of the slave holders justified slavery:

“Christianity was proslavery,” said Yolanda Pierce, the dean of the divinity school at Howard University. “So much of early American Christian identity is predicated on a proslavery theology. From the naming of the slave ships, to who sponsored some of these journeys including some churches, to the fact that so much of early American religious rhetoric is deeply intertwined. . . with slaveholding: It is proslavery. Some theologians said it was providence that had brought Africans to America as slaves, since their enslavement would allow them to encounter the Christian message and thus their eternal souls would be saved, said Mark Noll, a historian of American Christianity.” ^[31]

Some Christian theologies claimed that black slavery is the will of God. They referred to the Hebrew Bible and the story of Noah and his sons.

“20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunk; and he was uncovered within his tent.

22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant." ^[32]

The church of the white settlers used this passage and said that Ham is the black person. In reality during ancient slave society the color of the skin was not associated with slavery. Slavery was the mode of production of Greece and Rome. Yet these slave societies did not use racist ideology as color of the skin was not a justification for enslaving black people. Slaves were merely those who lost the war but lived. ^[33]

Some more liberal preachers encouraged slave owners to allow their slaves to attend worship services but only in separate gatherings led by white proslavery preachers. Those preachers argued that the sermons would promote obedience among the black slaves. ^[34]

“In the 1700s and early 1800s, scientists in Europe and the Americas studied “race science”—the idea that humankind is divided into separate and unequal races. They tried to explain the contradiction between the belief in human equality expressed during the American and French Revolutions and the emergence of slavery in the United States and several European countries. Carolus Linnaeus, an eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist, was among the first scientists to sort and categorize human beings. He regarded humanity as a species within the animal kingdom and divided the species into four varieties: European, American, Asiatic, and African.Petrus Camper, an eighteenth-century Dutch professor of anatomy, believed that the ancient Greeks had come closer than other people to human perfection. He used Greek statues to establish standards of beauty and ranked human faces by how closely they resembled his ideal.Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German scientist, coined the term Caucasian in 1795 “to describe the variety of mankind that originated on the southern slopes of Mount Caucasus” along Europe’s eastern border. He claimed it was the “original” race and therefore the most “beautiful.”Samuel George Morton, an American anthropologist, theorized in the mid-1800s that intelligence is linked to brain size. After measuring a vast number of skulls from around the world, he concluded that whites have larger skulls than other races and are therefore “superior.” ^[35]

The Atlantic Slavery of black people by Europeans began by Portugal in 1444 when 235 black people were snatched from the coast of West Africa and were sold in Lagos that today is a beach resort. ^[36]

This period was glorified as the age of discoveries when European ships sailed to Africa, Asia and South America and brought death and robbery of the natives’ resources and lives. From the middle of the 15th century, European commercial capitalism developed a relationship with Africa that led to the devastation and depopulation of Africa, while contributing to the wealth and development of Europe and later of North America. From then, until 1865, Europeans traded in African people some 400 years. [37]

In 1518 the first black slaves were shipped directly from Africa to America. ^[38] The majority of them were exported from the coast of West Africa, some 3,000 miles from North America.

According to Henry Louis Gate, the most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, he believes that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial “gold standard” in the field of the study of the slave trade.

Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. Less than half a million were exported directly to North America. ^[39] In other words, according to this account 2 million died on the way.

Yet Henry Louis Gate said that “according to the Federal census, in 1790 approximately 650,000 slaves worked with rice, tobacco, and indigo in the “Deep South”. By 1850 the country had 3.2 million slaves, 1.8 million of whom worked in cotton. By the middle of the 19th century, the southern states were providing two-thirds of the world's supply of cotton. Between 1916 and 1930, and from 1940 to 1970 the Great Migration saw a total of six million African Americans leave the South.” ^[40]

Karl Marx in Volume One of “Das Capital” wrote correctly:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China.” ^[41]

While some historians claim that slavery was a result of racism, Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery states correctly that "slavery was not born of racism; rather racism was the consequence of slavery.” ^[42]

In 1516, Frey Bartolomé de las Casas, suggested importing black and white slaves from Castile to preserve the life of the Taino population of the island of Espanola. He has been condemned ever since for hypocritically advocating the initiation of the African slave trade in defense of American Indians. Years later, he regretted the advice he gave the king on this matter—he judged himself culpable through inadvertence—when he saw proven that the enslavement of blacks was every bit as unjust”.^[43]

In 1552 there was a slave rebellion in Hispaniola. This is the first of over 100 recorded revolts which erupted throughout the Caribbean and the Americas up until the late 19th century. In 1552 the Bristol Society of Merchant Venturers was established. It had links with the Spanish and Portuguese slave trade. In 1562 James Hawkins became the first Englishman to go on a slave-trading voyage to Sierra Leone and the Caribbean, burning African villages and towns to get slaves. ^[44]

Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the US, began as a slave master and Indian hater but over time became an opponent of slavery and the killing of the Indians. He published on March 23, 1790, a letter in the Federal Gazette under the signature “Historicus.” In this letter, to ridicule Jackson’s speech in Congress in support of slavery, he quoted a speech by Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, a member of the Divan of Algiers, who justified the slavery of white Christians with very similar arguments.

In his speech Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim said : “If we forbear to make slaves of their people, who in this hot climate are to cultivate our lands? And is there not more compassion and favor due to us as Mussulmen than to these Christian dogs?” Who is to indemnify the masters for their loss?... And if we set our slaves free, what is to be done with them?... Must we maintain them as beggars in our streets, or suffer our properties to be the prey of their pillage? For men accustomed to slavery will not work for a livelihood when not compelled. And what is there so pitiable in their present condition? Were they not slaves in their own countries? They have only exchanged one slavery for another and I may say a better; for here they are brought into a land where the sun of Islamism gives forth its light, and shines in full splendor, and they have an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with the true doctrine, and thereby saving their immortal souls. [They are] too ignorant to establish a good government. While serving us, we take care to provide them with everything, and they are treated with humanity. The laborers in their own country are, as I am well informed, worse fed, lodged, and clothed.... Here their lives are in safety. As for those “religious mad bigots” with their “silly petitions,” it was pure foolishness to argue that slavery was “disallowed by the Alcoran!” Were not the two precepts “Masters, treat your slaves with kindness; Slaves, serve your masters with cheerfulness and fidelity” ample evidence to the contrary? It was well known, explained the African, that God had given the world “to his faithful Mussulmen, who are to enjoy it of right as fast as they conquer it.”^[45]

 

Slave Rebellions

 

There were more than 200 slave rebellions in the US, the historian Herbert Aptheker in his study, American Negro Slave Revolts, has found records of approximately two hundred and fifty revolts and conspiracies in the history of American Negro slavery.

According to Henry Louis Gates the five most known were:

Stono Rebellion, 1739.

It was the largest slave revolt ever staged in the 13 colonies. On Sunday, Sept. 9, 1739, 20 slaves under the leadership of Jemmy led a group of blacks who were soldiers, either from the Yamasee War or Angola, where they were captured.

They raided a warehouse killing the white owners and placed their victims’ heads on the store’s front steps for all to see. They moved on to other houses in the area, killing the occupants and burning the structures, marching through the colony toward St. Augustine, Fla., where under Spanish law, they would be free. On the way many left the march, the rest paraded down King’s Highway, carrying banners and shouting, “Liberty!” - lukango, in their native Kikongo.

The slaves fought off the English for more than a week before the colonists rallied and killed most of the rebels.

The New York City Conspiracy of 1741.

At that time 1,700 blacks lived in a city of some 7,000 whites. In early 1741, Fort George in New York was burned to the ground. Fires erupted elsewhere in the city — four in one day — and in New Jersey and on Long Island. Several white people claimed they had heard slaves bragging about setting the fires and threatening worse.

In the investigation that followed, 30 black men, two white men and two white women were executed. Seventy people of African descent were exiled to far-flung places like Newfoundland, Madeira, Saint-Domingue and Curaçao. Before the end of the summer of 1741, 17 blacks would be hanged and 13 more sent to the stake.

Gabriel’s Conspiracy, 1800.

A slave named Gabriel a skilled blacksmith found inspiration in the French and Saint-Domingue revolutions of 1789. He planned a fight for freedom that was supposed to begin on august 30.

The rebellion was barely under way when the state captured Gabriel and several co-conspirators. Twenty-five African Americans, hanged together before Gabriel went to the gallows and was executed, alone.

German Coast Uprising, 1811.

The Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804 led by Touissant Louverture and fought and won by black slaves under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines — struck a chord with African slaves in America.

In 1811, about 40 miles north of New Orleans, Charles Deslondes, a mulatto slave driver on the Andry sugar lead what the historian Daniel Rasmussen calls the largest and most sophisticated slave revolt in U.S. history in his book American Uprising. on the rainy evening of Jan. 8, Deslondes and about 25 slaves rose up and attacked the plantation’s owner and family. They hacked to death one of the owner’s sons, but carelessly allowed the master to escape, singing Creole protest songs while pillaging plantations and killing whites. Some estimated that the force ultimately swelled to 300, but it’s unlikely that Deslondes’ army exceeded 124.

The US army crushed the rebellion. In the slaughter that followed about 20 insurgents lay dead, another 50 became prisoners and the remainder fled into the swamps.

By the end of the month, whites had rounded up another 50 insurgents. In short order, about 100 survivors were summarily executed, their heads severed and placed along the road to New Orleans.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831.

On August 22, 1831, Turner and about 70 armed slaves and free blacks set off to slaughter the white neighbors who enslaved them.

In the early hours of the morning, they bludgeoned Turner’s master and his master’s wife and children with axes. By the end of the next day, the rebels had attacked about 15 homes and killed between 55 and 60 whites. After white militia began to attack Turner’s men, most of the rebels were captured quickly, but Turner eluded authorities for more than a month.

On Sunday, Oct. 30, a local white man stumbled upon Turner’s hideout and seized him. A special Virginia court tried him on Nov. 5 and sentenced him to hang six days later. Enraged whites took his body, skinned it, distributed parts as souvenirs and rendered his remains into grease. His head was removed and for a time sat in the biology department of Wooster College in Ohio. 21 slaves went to the gallows, and another 16 were sold away from the region. As the state reacted with harsher laws controlling black people, many free blacks fled Virginia for good. Turner remains a legendary figure, remembered for the bloody path he forged in the war against slavery.^[46]

 

Jews and Black Slavery

 

Louis Farrakhan claims that Jews played a disproportionate role in the enslavement of African Americans — and that this fact has been covered up. For this he is accused of Anti-Semitism. Is his allegation true?

Jacob Rader Marcus, a historian and Reform rabbi, wrote in his four-volume history of American Jews that over 75 percent of Jewish families in Charleston, South Carolina; Richmond, Virginia; and Savannah, Georgia, owned slaves, and nearly 40 percent of Jewish households across the country did. The Jewish population in these cities was quite small, however, so the total number of slaves they owned represented just a small fraction of the total slave population; Eli Faber, a historian at New York City’s John Jay College reported that in 1790, Charleston’s Jews owned a total of 93 slaves. Several studies of the Jewish role in the slave trade were conducted in the 1990s. One of them, by John Jay’s Faber, compared available data on Jewish slave ownership and trading activity in British territories in the 18th century to that of the wider population. Faber concludes that the claim of Jewish domination is false and that the Jewish role in slavery was “exceedingly limited.” According to Faber, British Jews were always in the minority of investors in enslaving operations and were not known to have been among the primary owners of slave fleets. Faber found that, with few exceptions, Jews were minor figures in brokering the sale of slaves upon their arrival in the Americas, and given the urban-dwelling propensity of most American Jews, few accumulated large rural properties and plantations where slave labor was most concentrated.^[47]

So it seems that rich Jews were involved in the slave trade and were slave owners but did not played a disproportionate role in the total enslavement of African Americans.

In late 1991, Farrakhan's Nation of Islam published "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews," quoting from the extensive research of Jewish historians to indict, in effect, today's Jews for everything from the ownership of South American sugar plantations three centuries ago to Jewish participation in the Confederate war effort. When a black professor at Wellesley College assigned the book to his introductory African-American history class, Jewish students protested and four national Jewish groups recommended the professor's job status be reviewed. Both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith have published rebuttals comparing "The Secret Relationship" to the most infamous works of antisemitic propaganda in the 20th century. ^[48]

“The role of rich Jews in the slave trade is even more complicated because most slaves were not sold directly to North America but to South America Especially in Brazil where Jews owned a small percentage of the sugar plantations but were the predominant retailers of slaves in the colony, according to Arnold Wiznitzer's "Jews in Colonial Brazil." The shipping of Africans to Brazil was monopolized by the Dutch West India Company, which sold them "at public auctions against cash payment," Wiznitzer writes. "The buyers who appeared at the auctions were almost always Jews." These brokers then sold slaves to plantation owners on credit. More than 23,000 Africans were shipped to Brazil between 1636 to 1645, Wiznitzer says, a period when perhaps half of the 3,000 white civilians living there were Jews”. ^[49]

When Portugal captured Brazil many Jews escaped. “While many of Brazil's Jews headed for the freedom of the Netherlands, some Sephardic traders were "eager to remain in the West Indies," according to a history of colonial Jewry by Jacob Rader Marcus, longtime director of the American Jewish Archives. Some "fled to French Martinique and Guadeloupe, others to Jamaica and to English Barbados, where they furthered the sugar industry and the Negro slave economy which it created," Marcus writes. ^[50]

"Most Jews in Barbados and Jamaica in the 18th century were small men, shopkeepers.... The sugar trade became increasingly concentrated in the hands of the sugar-planters' agents in London, a restricted and confined circle. {Jews} did not participate.

The civil war in the USA was a completion of the democratic revolution that freed the slaves. This was a test for different groups on which side they were the North or the South. Jews were on both sides but more on the side of the South. The Jewish newspaper Forward wrote on this issue:

“As Jewish historian Dale Rosengarten expresses it, quoting a Talmudic precept: “The law of the land is the law of the Jews.” From a modern perspective, it seems anomalous that a people whose history hinged on an epic escape from servitude would not have been deeply troubled by America’s “peculiar institution” — but few were.

Some Jews owned slaves, a few traded them, and the livelihoods of many, North and South, were inextricably bound to the slave system. Most southern Jews defended slavery, and some went further, advocating its expansion.

Notable among these was Judah P. Benjamin, labeled by the abolitionist Ben Wade, who served with Benjamin in the U.S. Senate, as “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.” Even in the North, many sympathized with the South and only a very few were abolitionists. Almost all Jews sought peace above all else. Until the war was at hand, they remained silent on the subject”.^[51]

Thus the role of rich Jews in the slave trade changed in different places and different times. To accuse all the Jews of this trade is wrong and to deny the role of rich Jews in the trade of human beings is wrong. The issue is similar to the question of who killed Jesus. The Jewish high priests were involved in the killing of Jesus but blaming all Jews for it is an Anti-Semitic position.

The problem with the propaganda of the Zionist organizations is that they cry Anti-Semitism whenever the actual role of the upper class Jews, which is not different from other non-Jewish capitalist, is exposed.

 

 

IV. Anti-Semitism in Slave Society and Feudalism

 

It is necessary to differentiate between the attacks on rich Jews as part of the ruling class and attacks on all the Jews regardless of their class. When rebelling slaves killed slave masters, among them Jews, it was not a racist act but part of the struggle for the liberation of the slaves. When mobs in 1903 in Russia killed Jews in a pogrom against Jews regardless of their class it was Anti-Semitism. [52]

It is possible that Anti-Semitism existed already in the ancient world. Peter Schäfer in Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (1998) wrote that it began with two fierce outbursts of hostility in Egypt: the destruction of a Jewish temple in Elephantine in 410 B.C.E. and the riots in Alexandria in 38 C.E. According to his account the reason for these outbursts were deep-seated ethnic resentments. It was from Egypt that hatred of Jews, based on allegations of impiety, xenophobia, and misanthropy, was transported first to Syria-Palestine and then to Rome, where it acquired a new element: fear of this small but distinctive community. To the hatred and fear, ingredients of Christian theology were soon added to form a mix all too familiar in Western history. [53]

It is not true that the Jews have suffered from Anti-Semitism for 2000 years. Jews have been on both sides of the class struggle. There were periods that some powerful Jews helped persecute others. There is no doubt, for example, that the upper class Jewish priests who owed their position and power to the Romans conspired to have Jesus put to death. They were afraid of his teachings and viewed him as a threat to their power. Yet Jesus was a Jew who was killed because he was a rebel. By the middle of the second century, the Gospel of Peter portrayed the Romans as friends of Jesus, and the Jews as the ones who crucified him. Thus, a Jewish victim of Roman rule and their servants was transformed into a Christian victim of Jewish violence. For centuries, such notions fueled anti-Semitism, leading to the denunciation of Jews as Christ-killers.

While the church in the Middle Ages spread Anti-Jewish feelings, the real reason for the Anti-Semitism back then was the social position of the Jewish upper class. Some Jews became prominent in banking and money lending, because early Christianity didn’t permit loans with interest. To divert class animosity of the peasants the rulers directed it against the Jews and in some cases it led to the expulsion of Jews from European countries among them France, Germany, Portugal and Spain during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

“From 1189 to 1190, the anti-Jewish pogroms in London, York, and numerous other cities and towns displayed cruelty and barbarity never before seen by English Jews. Prior to 1066, no Jews were recorded living in the English kingdom. However, during the Norman Conquest, William the Conqueror brought Jews from Rouen, France. Because he wanted the government’s dues to be paid in coin, not by kind, and he saw the Jews as those who could supply him and the kingdom with it. William the Conqueror saw the Jews as an important financial asset, one which could fund the kingdom’s treasure.

Those Jews enjoyed privileges unknown to the English peasants. King Henry I (1100 – 1135) permitted all English Jews to travel freely without the burden of tolls or customs, the right to be tried by their peers in a court of law, and the right to swear on the Torah, among other liberties. Henry also declared a Jew’s oath to be worth that of 12 Christians. This did not endear the Jews in the eyes of the peasants.

During the reign of King Henry II (1154 – 1189), English Jews prospered economically. Aaron of Lincoln, a Jewish financier, became one of the richest men in all of England. Jews were able to build themselves houses of stone, a material which was usually reserved for palaces. By the end of Henry II’s reign, however, increasing Jewish financial wealth had incurred the anger of the English aristocracy that saw the Jews as a threat to their power as they accumulated debts owed to the rich Jews.

To the coronation of King Richard I on September 3, 1189, many prominent English Jews arrived at Westminster Abbey to pay homage to the new king. The nobles incited against the Jews and the Jewish attendees were flogged and thrown out of the banquet following the coronation. A rumor spread that Richard had ordered the English to kill the Jews. Christian peasants attacked the predominantly Jewish neighborhood, setting the Jews’ stone houses on fire at night and killing those who tried to escape. King Richard did not protect the Jews.

When Richard left on the Third Crusade Lynn’s Jews suffered attacks. Similar attacks occurred in the towns of Colchester, Thetford, Ospringe, and Lincoln. While their houses were ransacked, the Jews of Lincoln managed to save themselves by taking refuge in the city’s castle. On March 7, 1190, attacks in Stamford, Lincolnshire killed many Jews, and on March 18, 57 Jews were massacred in Bury St. Edmunds. However, the bloodiest of the pogroms took place from the 16th to the 17th of March in the city of York.” ^[54]

Another example is Spain. In the 8^th century, the Berber Muslims (Moors) conquered nearly all of the Iberian Peninsula. Under Muslim rule, Spain flourished, and Jews and Christians were granted the protected status of dhimmi. ^[55]

The conditions in Spain improved so much under Muslim rule that Jews from all across Europe came to live in Spain. There the upper class Jews flourished in business and in the fields of astronomy, philosophy, math, science, medicine, and religious study.

“In the early 11th century, centralized authority based at Cordoba broke down following the Berber invasion and the ousting of the Umayyads. The disintegration of the caliphate expanded the opportunities of rich Jews.

Yet, despite this prosperity under Muslim rule, the Golden Age of Spain began to decline as the Muslims began to battle the Christians for control of the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish kingdoms in 722. The decline of Muslim rule gave a rise to anti-Semitic activity as Jews were identified with the declining caliphate. In 1066, a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace in Granada, and crucified Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred most of the Jewish population of the city. Many Jews fled the Iberian Peninsula to neighboring nations.

Though initially the Christian rulers were as hostile to the Jewish population as the Muslim rulers had become, the Christians formed an alliance with the leadership of the Jews and enlisted many of them in their war effort. The Christians relied on the Jews for assistance in fighting the Muslim rulers since the Jews were familiar with the local language and customs. Collaboration between the Jews and Christians brought the Jews increased persecution from Muslim rulers, but full autonomy in Christian controlled regions.

Alfonso VI, the conqueror of Toledo (1085), offered the Jews full equality with Christians and even the rights offered to the nobility to give the wealthy Jews the loot from the Moors. Jews prospered under Alfonso and by 1098, nearly 15,000 Jews were living in Toledo, a city of 50,000.

At one point, Alfonso’s army contained 40,000 Jews, who were distinguished from the other combatants by their black-and-yellow turbans. (So important were the Jews to the Spanish Christian army that the Spanish chose not to begin the battle of Zallaka until after the Sabbath had passed).

After the Christian loss at the Battle of Ucles (1108), a riot by poor Christians that identified the Jews with the ruler broke out in Toledo; many Jews were killed and their houses and synagogues burned.

King Alfonso VII at the beginning curtailed the rights and liberties that his father granted the Jews. He ordered that neither a Jew nor a convert may exercise legal authority over Christians, but at the same time he made the Jews responsible for the collection of the royal taxes. He later became friendlier, and gave the Jews all their former privileges and even additional ones.

Under the reign of Alfonso VIII, the upper class Jews gained greater influence that angered the Spanish nobility. When the king was defeated at the battle of Alarcos, the nobility retaliated by murdering his Jewish lover and her relatives in Toledo.

With the crusades the condition of Jews began to deteriorate and an Anti-Jewish riot broke out in Toledo (1212), robbing and butchering Jews. Like the Jews of France, they were required to distinguish themselves from Christians by wearing a yellow badge on their clothing. A decree issued by Pope Innocent IV in April prohibited Jews from building new synagogues without special permission, outlawing proselytizing by pain of death, and forbidding most forms of contact between Jews and Christians.

The money lending business brought the rich Jews wealth and influence. Kings and prelates, noblemen and farmers, all needed money, and could obtain it only from the Jews, who were forced to act as bailiffs, or tax-collectors since Christians were forbidden from charging each other interest rates. Becuase of their acquired wealth, as well as government anti-Semitism, Jews were discriminated and persecuted.

In 1492, with the final victory of the Christians, taking back Spain, the rulers were no longer in need of Jews and thus Jews as well as Muslims were expelled from Spain. The systematic robbery of South and North America and the slave trade compensated for the lack of the skills of the Jews.” ^[56]

Thus Anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, like all other forms of racism, was rooted in the place of the Jews in the relationship of production. Yet it is a different form because it is not directed against the most oppressed but against the middle and upper class Jews who built their fortune by oppressing the working masses in the service of the ruling class. To divert the hate of the oppressed, the ruling class directed it towards Jews in general, including the Jewish working people.

For this reason the Socialist Ferdinand August Bebel (22 February 1840 – 13 August 1913) said that Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the fools.

 

The new Anti-Semitism between the later part of the 19th century and World War 2

 

The Anti-Semitism of the late 19^th century is different in socio-political reasons and the ideology that justifies the persecution of the Jews than the Middle Ages. Capitalist modernization, for Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, led to the transformation of the role of Jews in European societies. By the end of the 19th century, European states became less dependent on wealthy Jewish financiers and Jews experienced a new status characterized by a significant loss of power while retaining significant wealth.

For Arendt, the inconsistency between insignificant power and phenomenal wealth created, within the general public, the image of Jews as a despised parasitical social group. Arendt cites as evidence that the greatest periods of modern Anti-Semitism coincided with the decline in Jewish influence. While there is an element of truth to this argument it is a weak one, because at the time, pogroms against Jews took place mostly in countries still much dependent upon Jewish wealth.

In any case, this single factor is not sufficient to explain modern Anti-Semitism and the ideological claim that Jews are an inferior race. Other elements were the mass immigration from East Europe of Jewish artisans that competed against non-Jewish artisans and shop-keepers. The periods of economic crisis within decaying capitalism created an incentive for the ruling class and the mass media to divert public anger towards the Jews. The fact that many Jews in Russia supported the Bolsheviks led to the accusation of all Jews as Bolsheviks. Thus, at the same time, Jews were accused of being the capitalist overlords of the world as well as of anti-capitalist Bolshevism.

19^th century Anti-Semitism in Russia was rooted in the uneven development of capitalism of the empire. Better medical treatment led to a high rate of natural living births and to the increase of the population that many of them became surpluses who could not be absorbed into the traditional Jewish occupations. Capitalist development, after the liberation of the serfs in 1861 opened up new sources of livelihood for a small number of rich Jews owners of industry and banking, but caused deprivation to most Jews, as it had eradicated many of the traditional occupations.

This development was exacerbated by the expulsion of the Jews from the villages and their eviction from occupations connected with the rural economy. Many Jews became artisans and there was fierce competition among them, while others became day-laborers and, in fact, remained without livelihood. Most of them could not find employment in the new modern industry. Many Jews emigrated to West Europe and even more to the US.

Like in the Middle age the Russian ruling class with the support of the Orthodox Church diverted the hatred of the suffering peasants and the urban poor toward the Jews. This is the reason behind the “Protocol of the Elders of Zion” and the accusation of Jews of using the blood of Christian children for the Passover rituals. The “Black Hundreds”, a proto-fascist organization, created by the Russian police, organized pogroms against the Jews, especially as Eastern approached. Shops were looted, women were raped, and many were killed.

In his diary for 1920, the great Jewish writer Isaac Babel describes witnessing one such outbreak: “they cut off beards, that’s usual, assembled 45 Jews in the marketplace, led them to the slaughter yard, tortures, cut out tongues, wails heard all over the square.”

The pogroms started in the 1880s after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, out of fear of the coming socialist revolution and reached the climax during the civil war after the Russian Revolution of 1917. “It seems clear,” Zipperstein says, “that no fewer than one hundred thousand Jews were murdered in these offhandedly brutal horrors, and at least that many girls and women raped and countless maimed between 1918 and 1920.” ^[57] What the Zionists hide is that the advanced workers, armed with whatever they could use, led by the Bolsheviks and others, defended the Jews against the pogroms.

Thus the Anti-Semitism in the Russian empire was directed against the socialist revolution. It is not by chance that many Jews joined the revolutionary movement, making the connection between the struggle against Anti-Semitism and the struggle for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed.

“At the same time, Jewish bankers supported the Tsar. The Russians approached the financiers of the West for the first time as early as 1890. By then the pogromist fury had been raging for nine years. The impassioned demurrer of 1882 had no effect; the crimes showed no signs of subsiding. The Rothschilds of Paris, the first to be approached, flatly refused. They put forward strictly economic considerations. Within fifteen months, however, they changed their minds. In April 1891, a Rothschild-Bleichroder combination, assisted by the German Diskonto Gesellschaft and Messrs. Mendelssohn (of Berlin), concluded a loan of $300,000,000 at 3 per cent for the conversion of $175,000,000 of 4 per cent bonds of the Russian Credit Foncier Mutuel.

The English Rothschilds criticized this deal because allegedly it was against the interest of the suffering Jews, however Britain became an ally of the Tsar and the Jewish banker Sir Ernest Cassel supported the Loan the British King provided the Tsar. The French Rothschilds, under pressure, retreated from the deal but only for a short time. Upon the renewal of the deal they declared: "It became a patriotic duty to assist Russia in her financial requirements, and the Rothschilds recognized that they would have to ignore the special interests of the Jew.”

The Jewish Austrian banker Theodore Ritter von Taussig, the director of one of the foremost banks, the Boden-Kreditanstalt offered Russia a loan “He suffered a penalty, however, at the hands of his fellow-Jews who promptly disowned him.”

“When the German "Russia Syndicate" was launched in 1895, the Frankfurt Rothschilds kept aloof, but willing cooperation was secured from Messrs. S. Bleich-Roder, Mendelssohn & Co., and the Berlin Handels-Gesellschaft under the direction of Carl Fiirstenberg, one of the best-known latter-day German Jewish financiers, whose relations with the Tsarist authorities were in fact so intimate that he described himself as 'the banker of Russia”. ^[58]

In the civil war between the Reds and the Anti-Semite Whites, some pro-monarchist Jews joined the whites in spite of the White pogroms. These people were at the same time Russian and Jewish-Zionists-nationalists. One of them was Daniel Pasmanik. Around 1900 he became involved with the Zionist movement and became a leading figure in the Russian branch of the Zionist organization together with Vladimir Zabotinsky. He admired Herzl. He advocated Zionist cooperatives that will be closed to Arabs. By 1906 he became close to the Poalei Zion (Zionist labor). He opposed the Bund and supported the colonization of Palestine. Later on he became an admirer of Nietzsche, quoted from the book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and loved his superman idea.

According to him the new Jewish supermen would be the “national aristocrats”. He trusted the Duma of 1912 (the period of reaction) to help the Jews. He volunteered to the Russian army in WWI and supported the victory of British and French imperialism that according to him will advance Russia. During the Russian revolution he joined the bourgeois Kadet Party that even Zabotinsky criticized as an anti-Jewish party. He joined the whites while remaining a loyal Zionist. With the defeat of the whites he escaped to Paris where he praised Mussolini’s fascism. ^[59]

He was not an exception, after all, Zabotinsky opened a sea cadet academy in Mussolini’s Italy.

 

Anti-Semitism in the US

 

Even though American Jews did not suffer the same level of virulent, state-sanctioned aggression as European Jews have, nor the level of persecution Indians and blacks suffered in the US, anti-Semitism very much existed in the US as well. Right-wing populist politicians in the 19th century preached that the Jewish bankers, not all the capitalist class, are a threat to the security of hard working Americans. Images of Jews with big noses and crooked faces were used in political cartoons. When more than 1.7 million Eastern European Jews arrived in the country at the turn of the 20th century to encounter furious petit bourgeois’ nativist hate.

The most famous American Anti-Semitic incident took place in 1915 when a right-wing mob stormed a Georgia prison to seize and lynch a Jewish businessman Leo Frank, who had been falsely accused of murdering a 13-year-old Christian girl.

Henry Ford, the car industry tycoon, published a newspaper in the 1920s, The Dearborn Independent, that used anti-Semitic propaganda. Ford wrote: “Jewish plan to control the world, not by territorial acquisition, not by military aggression, not by governmental subjugation, but by control of the machinery of commerce and exchange.” Another known Anti-Semite was the pilot Charles Lindbergh, a sympathizer of Nazi Germany. Another known Anti-Semite was the priest Father Charles Coughlin, who railed against “world Jewish domination.”

In the South, the Ku Klux Klan also targeted Jews and not only African Americans. In Dorchester, Massachusetts, Irish Catholic gangs in the 1940s attacked Jews in the streets. Jews faced restrictions that kept them out of law firms, medical professions, universities and colleges, fraternities, hotels, country clubs and more. Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton universities imposed strict quotas on how many Jews they would admit. Like African Americans, Jews were subject to restrictive real-estate covenants that prevented “Hebrews” from living in particular neighborhoods. ^[60] The fascist organization known as the Silver Shirts led by William Dudley Pelley, protected by police, marched in the streets.

Thus, once again, Anti-Semitism was a diversion of the class struggle against capitalism to the Jews, whether capitalists or working class. Class hatred of the capitalist Jews as part of the capitalist class is not Anti-Semitism. Hatred of all the Jews is.

 

World War 2

 

The Jewish holocaust had millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis and their supporters. It is well documented and we will not repeat it in this booklet. The Nazi’s policy of extermination of the Jews came after the Jews became physically weak because of the conditions in the labor camps and Ghettos while other sources of cheap labor from East Europe were available to the Nazis. The mass killing of the Jews began when it was clear to Hitler that he failed in the war with the Soviet Union which foiled his plan to settle the Jews in Siberia. Also, firmly believing that Jews controlled the US, he hoped that by holding the Jews hostage at the threat of extermination would stop the US from entering the war.

The United States, however, did not even welcome Jewish refugees from Europe. In 1939, 83% of Americans were opposed to the admission of refugees.

In the midst of the Great Depression, many feared the burden that immigrants could place upon the nation’s economy; refugees, who in most cases were prevented from bringing any money or assets with them, were an even greater cause for, as early as 1930, President Herbert Hoover reinterpreted immigration legislation barring those “likely to become a public charge” to include even those immigrants who were capable of working, reasoning that high unemployment would make it impossible for immigrants to find jobs.

In 1939, Senator Robert Wagner, a Democrat from New York, and Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, a Republican from Massachusetts, sponsored a bill that proposed to allow German Jewish children to enter the United States outside of official immigration quotas. The bill caused a loud and bitter public debate, but it never even reached a vote in Congress.

In 1940, members of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees argued with the State Department to simplify immigration procedures for refugees. This effort was also defeated. Those in power in the State Department insisted on enforcing the nation’s immigration laws as strictly as possible. Breckinridge Long, the State Department officer responsible for issuing visas, was deeply Anti-Semitic. He was determined to limit immigration and used the State Department’s power to create a number of barriers that made it almost impossible for refugees to seek asylum in the United States.

For example, the application form for US visas was eight feet long and printed in small type. Long believed that he was “the first line of defense” against those who would “make America vulnerable to enemies for the sake of humanitarianism.” Long and his colleagues at the State Department went so far as to turn away a group of Jewish refugees aboard the St. Louis in May 1939 when the German ocean liner sought to dock in Florida after the refugees were denied entry to Cuba. Following their deportation back to Europe, many of these people perished in the Holocaust. ^[61]

The United State was urged to bomb the railways leading to the Nazi death camps but the government of the US refused, while bombing the working class neighborhoods of the German industrial cities.

“There had been efforts by members of the War Refugee Board in Washington and Geneva to prod the U.S. to bomb the camps. John Pehle, executive director of the War Refugee Board, made repeated appeals to John McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War who wielded significant influence over the use of military resources but dismissed the idea as “impracticable.” McCloy wrote Pehle that the bombing of Auschwitz “could be executed only by a diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations elsewhere and would in any case be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources.”^[62]

Yet the US had plenty of resources when it came to save the Nazis at the end of the war.

“In his new book, The Nazis Next Door, Lichtblau reports that thousands of Nazis managed to settle in the United States after World War II, often with the direct assistance of American intelligence officials who saw them as potential spies and informants in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.” ^[63]

“Honest and idealist … enjoys good food and wine … unprejudiced mind …” That’s how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg’s SS unit performed “special duties,” a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other “undesirables' during the Second World War.

Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue’s gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence agencies shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies. ^[64]

It is not a secret that the American’s space industry was based on the Nazi V2 program. The United States eventually planted a flag on the lunar surface, though without the help of any orbital reactors. And all through the Space Race, von Braun, a German scientist scooped up by the U.S. in the waning days of World War II, was the public face of the American space program, as well as one of its chief architects. But much of the Cold War-era coverage of von Braun downplayed the darker details of his past: before he was building rockets for America, he was building them for Hitler. Germany launched more than 3,000 missiles of his design against Britain and other countries, indiscriminately killing approximately 5,000 people, while as many as 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died assembling the weapons. ^[65]

Thus the argument that Jews control the US and this explains the support of the US for Israel is not only wrong but Anti-Semitic. The truth is that Israel is supported by the US because of its role as the front line of imperialist control of the region.

 

V. Islamophobia

 

Islamists killing of Jews like the 2012 shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse or the case of the Hypercacher kosher supermarket in 2015 should be condemned. Yet not every killing of a Jew by a Muslim can be categorized as Anti-Semitism. One such known case, was the 2017 murder of Sarah Halimi, a sixty-six-year-old Jewish woman beaten in her home by a Muslim man under the influence of drugs. While killing her he was yelling “Satan” and then he threw Halimi from her balcony onto the street, this was a crime of temporary insane person not a case of Anti-Semitism.

The real enemy of the Muslims and the Jews are the far-right parties that recruit mostly middle class people and the bourgeois politicians who denounce Islam and the Muslims as a primitive terrorist religion and by doing so strengthen the far-right and Islamophobia.

In some aspects there are similarities between Anti-Semitism prior to WW2 and Islamophobia, especially in relation to immigrants. Muslims, to a large degree have replaced the Jews as scapegoats. While anti-Semitism is on the rise, Islamophobia at this time is much worse than Anti-Semitism (Anti-Jewish), because of the racist agenda of the far-right against Muslims has become mainstream and there are more attacks on Muslims than on Jews.

Very few non-Jews or non-Muslims believe our days that the Jews are controlling the world while many people in France believe that unless they will stop the Muslims, they will control France even though in reality it’s utter nonsense.

It is not clear when Islamophobia began, but it existed already in the time of the crusades and the long struggle between the Muslim and Christian kingdoms in Spain–Andalusia. Later on it developed with the European struggles with the Ottomans and the occupation of the Arab East and North Africa.

The image of the Arabs and the Muslims as terrorists who want to occupy the West is hiding the fact that in modern times it is the imperialist West that occupies the Arab and Muslim countries whether before or after WW2.

The imperialist wars, the super-exploitation of the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa, the economic crisis of 2008 have produced a large wave of refugees and Muslim immigrants to Europe. The reactionary politicians have diverted the anger of the mostly insecure middle class against the refugees and Muslim immigrants. The demagogic cry “They are going to control Europe” became the battle cry of the reaction. This was the battle cry of the reactionaries against Jews prior to WW2.

In this situation a united front of the minorities with the working class to defend themselves from racist terrorist attacks is called for. It is no more the case where only the far-right extremist groups on the political fringe of the society are Islamophobes, but rather the far-right racism that moved to the center of political power.

Consequently, it is not only right-wing extremist groups that rely on Anti-Muslim propaganda but social democrats, liberals, and centrists who are infected with this virus. This united front of Muslims and Jews has been sabotaged by the Zionists who have joined the crusades against the Muslims and from time to time are the leading force of Islamophobia.

According to the European Islamophobia Report for 2017 there were 101 attacks on Mosques, 1413 attacks on refugees and 908 hate crimes against German Muslims. This report points out to the growing influence of the Anti-Muslim reactionaries.

“While most far-right parties are still in opposition, some have gained major influence by becoming governing parties such as in the cases of Austria, Bulgaria, and Finland. While others may still be in opposition, their Islamophobic discourse, which is so central to most of them, has become mainstream since their issues have been co-opted by former centrist political parties.

In Sweden, for instance, the once marginal anti-Muslim Sweden Democrats became the third or second largest party in opinion polls, pushing most other parties to adjust their policies accordingly. Secondly, we also observe a stronger cooperation of various Islamophobic parties in Europe. For instance, the Czech Freedom and Direct Democracy Party (SPD) organized a meeting of representatives of its partners from the European Parliament in December 2017 in Prague. Politicians such as Geert Wilders (Dutch Freedom Party) and Marine Le Pen (Front National) were amongst some of the participants.” ^[66]

“In the Czech Republic, a new party called ANO won the elections. Its leader supported the notorious Islamophobic politician, Czech President Miloš Zeman. The leader of the right-wing populist party Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), which campaigns continuously for a legal ban of Islam...” ^[67]

“In Serbia, there are ministers such as Aleksandar Vulin, minister of defense, and Nebojša Stefanovic, minister of the interior, who attract attention by stirring ethnic and religious hostilities.” ^[68]

In Poland state-funded media outlets seem to carefully select their guests, who spread a stereotypical portrayal of Muslims as “violent,” “terrorists,” “Jihadists,” “sexists,” “rapists,” “uncivilized,” “double-faced,” and in general “a threat” to European and Christian values.” ^[69]

In the US, Trump issued executive orders to limiting the entry of nationals of certain majority-Muslim countries. In September 2016 an armed right-wing demonstrated against the proposed building of a mosque in Newton County. The county government delayed granting the building permit. Leading Islamophobic figures like Pamela Geller, lawyer David Yerushalmi, Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, commentator Steven Emerson, Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney play a major role in the anti-Islamic lobby - which under Trump has translated into White House policy. ^[70]

In August 2016, the New York imam and his associate were shot and killed by a right racist. In Canada in January 2017 Alexandre Bissonnette, 27, killed six Muslim worshippers and injures scores of others in an attack at a Quebec City mosque. In London, on June 2017 a 48-year-old man drove a van into a group of worshippers coming out of a mosque and a 51-year-old man was killed and nine others were injured. ^[71] In March 2019 at least 51 Muslim worshippers were killed at two mosques in New Zealand.

The right-wing Zionists encourage Islamophobia out of fear that the growing number of Muslim immigrants to Europe and the US will influence public opinion in favor of the Palestinians, while the fear of Anti-Semitism pushed Jews to immigrate to Israel and pushes Israelis even further to the right. In recent years some 60,000 French Jews moved to Israel.

In 2011, the Center for American Progress (CAP) issued a report, which examined the so-called ‘misinformation propagating Islamophobic ideas in the public sphere that reached millions of Americans.’ It traced donations from the seven most significant donors, among them the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The CAP report notes the Zionist connections to many of the personnel involved in the Islamophobia industry. ”The figures demonstrate an undeniable overlap in the giving patterns of at least four out of seven of the foundations, which as well as funding Islamophobia, gave indisputably significant amounts to Zionist projects during roughly the same period: The Anchorage Foundation & William Rosenwald Family Fund gave around $1.1 million; Fairbrook Foundation gave almost $1.8 million; Newton & Rochelle Becker Foundations & Charitable Trust gave just under $2.4 million; and the Russell Berrie Foundation gave $4.6 million.” ^[72]

Arun Kundnani has observed, in the context of the US, that:

“The extent to which pro-Israel lobby groups have cultivated such an atmosphere [of Islamophobia] has reflected their anxiety that the Muslim-American population is growing, and that the political influence of Muslims in the US might one day reflect their numbers….This fear – that acceptance of Muslim participation in democratic processes could influence domestic government policy on, as well as public attitudes about, the Middle East – has been articulated by Alan Mendoza, director of the UK’s Henry Jackson Society, with regard to the European context. When he spoke at the AIPAC conference in Washington, in June 2013, about waning support for Israel on the continent, he pointedly noted that: ‘The European Muslim population has doubled in the past 30 years and is predicted to double again by 2040.’ Therefore, the so-called ‘demographic threat’ commonly discussed in Israel with regard to Palestinians (referred to as ‘Israeli-Arabs’), is transposed to the USA and to Europe.” ^[73]

 

Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in France

 

An estimate 600,000 Jews and 5.7 million Muslim live in France. Up to 10% of its population comes from Muslim backgrounds. They are descendants of the country’s former French colonies: Algeria, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia, and Senegal. Many of them are working poor who have been struggling for equality against systematical discrimination in a manner similar to the U.S. civil rights movement. A French person of non-French background is two to three times less likely to be called to a job interview if he or she is assumed to be a Muslim rather than a Christian. ^[74]

“Like most immigrants in industrialized countries, the Muslims who came to France during the second half of the twentieth century have endured lasting economic and social hardships. They first had low-level jobs, predominantly in the industrial sector, when they arrived in the 1960s and early 1970s. Their situation became more difficult as the abundant, stable jobs of the postwar boom disappeared in the economic downturn of the 1970s and 1980s. That helps explain why the economic and social indicators for this population have been so unfavorable. Immigrants have experienced higher unemployment than the rest of the population; a higher incidence of accidents on the job; housing problems, such as being isolated in large, high density housing projects on the outskirts of big cities that were slowly deserted by native French families; problems at school; and high levels of crime and unrest. Those problems have been reinforced by the economic situation in France, especially the stagnant job market, and they failed to improve in the 1990s” ^[75]

France is the country of the most known case of Anti-Semitism at the end of the 19^th century - the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus who was convicted, in December 1894, of treason. His trial was part of the Anti-Semitic attack on the Jews as disloyal citizens of France. What made it an Anti-Semitic case is who stood behind the accusations: the church, the army commands and the reactionary politicians and judges. Once again we see that racism including Anti-Semitism is institutional.

In recent years mass media has focused on incidents where Muslims attacked Jews as proof that Islam is Anti-Semitic and racist towards white people. The Islamophobia, with its rhetoric ”We are in war against terrorism’, portrays Islam as the enemy of the Western civilization, which ultimately leads to terrorism. By calling Muslims “Islamic fascists”, Islamophobia turns the victims of the imperialist destructive bloody wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria to the enemy of civilization. In a very similar manner, as we’ve seen, colonists portrayed the “Indians” of North America.

To understand the uneasy relationship between Jews and Muslims in France it is necessary to examine the social and political conditions of both Jews and Muslims, the imperialist wars of France against Muslim countries, the role of Israel and its oppression of the Palestinians and the role of the Zionists in France.

Beginning in 1989, an Anti-Muslim debate surfaced in France known as “The headscarf debate”. Muslim girls were suspended or expelled from schools for refusing to remove their headscarves. In 2004, all religious symbols were outlawed in public schools in the entire country. In 2016, a number of beach towns banned the burkinis, a body-covering swimsuit. In 2017, the far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, in her campaign, demonized Islam by comparing Muslim prayers to the Nazi occupation of France. Her slogan was “eat pork or go hungry”. It was aimed at putting pressures on schools to stop offering alternative meals to the Muslim students.

Anti-Muslim sentiments were used by other politicians including the Stalinist leader Andre Gerin who ignited the debate on the headscarf. “Andre Gerin, a Parliament member who is pushing for a ban, told the Post that full-face veils are the visible tip of an Islamist underground that threatens the French way of life.” ^[76]

While the major victims of French racism are the Muslims, Jews are targeted as well by the re-emergence of right-wing nationalism. Desecrated cemeteries and spray-painted swastikas are part of this ugly picture.

The interest of the majority of the Jews and the Muslims is to fight together alongside the workers against the racists. Racism will disappear only in a world socialist society. However the enemies of socialism, among them the Zionists, are acting to fan the flames of hatred against the Muslims and to instill fear of Muslims in the minds of the Jews. No doubt there are reactionary Muslims who would oppose such an alliance as well.

“There is increasing evidence that Israel and far-right groups around the world are converging in a global movement that aims to promote and grow far-right ideology and politics…At the core of this emerging union is the conspiracy theory of the "great replacement" which was laid out by the infamous far-right ideology Renaud Camus in his book "Le Grand Remplacement". Camus offers an extreme interpretation of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations", arguing that Europe faces a Muslim invasion which will lead to "change of civilization". This idea has spread beyond Europe and reached as far as North and South America, India, Australia, etc. In it, Israel sees a reflection of its own demographic anxiety about the fact that the Palestinians have been and remain the majority on the ground in Palestine. And while this theory in some places has also acquired anti-Semitic tinges - such as in the US, where in 2017 a far-right march chanted "Jews will not replace us!" - Israel has actively encouraged belief in it. European far-right ideologues and groups who espouse the "great replacement" conspiracy theory are also all eager supporters of Israel. Camus, himself, has expressed his admiration for Israel on a number of occasions. In December 2017, after Donald Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, he tweeted: "Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Israel is a model of resistance. We must make Europe a greater Israel''. ^[77]

When France was forced to leave Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, large populations of Jews in those countries fled to France, especially from Algeria, where the Jews unlike the Muslims had French citizenship as part of the imperialist policy of divide and rule. 90% of Jews in that country headed for France. The North African Jews were more willing than their predecessors in France to engage in politics along ethnic anti-Muslim lines, coming out, for example in support of Israel during the 1967 war.

While Jews have been allowed to integrate into the mainstream and became mostly middle class, this has not been the case for the Muslim immigrants that have been discriminated by the French imperialist state. In the 1980s, tensions began to grow between the two communities. By the end of the 1980s the possibilities for the cooperation between the two communities had been weakened dramatically because of three reasons: the First Intifada that the Muslims supported while many Jews supported Israel; the rising electoral strength of the National Front that had an impact of its anti-immigrant feeling upon the French middle class that feels insecure because of the globalization and the economic crisis; and the first headscarf debate in 1989, which focused on Muslim religious customs. Muslim activists emphasized the structural bias against Muslims, while Jewish activists began to emphasize Jews’ long history in France and their integration compared to Muslims.

In other words, many Jews express their support for Islamophobia. It was similar to their support for French colonialism when they became citizens of France in Algeria.

French Jews overwhelmingly voted for Macron who is a pro-Zionist and an Islamophobe investment banker in the final round. While most Jews see the far-right parties as an enemy, a growing number of right-wing Zionists are voting for these parties – Fidesz in Hungary; the Freedom party in Austria; Lega in Italy; Alternative for Germany; and National Rally (formerly the National Front) in France. They also support France’s imperialist war in Mali. Needless to say this does not win them any favor among Muslims.

For these reasons, while we are bombarded with stories about the Anti-Semitism of the Muslims, we hardly hear about the real French Anti-Semites like the French website Démocratie participative ("Participating in Democracy") that posted articles accusing Jews of setting the fire in Notre Dame. The first article, posted April 15, 2019, was titled "The Jews Are Burning France."

“DP is formatted almost identically to the U.S.-based white supremacist and neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer. Like the latter, DP calls for donations "in shekels," purports to be against violence, and features the disclaimer that it is "committed to peace and non-violence." (The Daily Stormer is, in turn, based on the World War II-era Nazi propaganda tool, the German antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer.)”^[78]

There have been a number of cases where Muslims killed Jews in France. The slaughter of Jewish children at an Orthodox school in Toulouse in 2012, the terrorist attack on a kosher supermarket in a Paris suburb in 2015 and the brutal murder in 2018 of Mireille Knoll, a Holocaust survivor, got a lot of publicity. The mass media have presented these killing as proof of Anti-Semitism. [79]

While these criminal killings must be condemned, they are not Anti-Semitic in nature simply because they are not actions of people in power, but of the very marginal section of society. They can kill some individuals but they cannot for example organize a pogrom or death camps, because they do not get support from ministers of government or the police. The publicity they get is because their actions serve the interest of the French ruling class to divert the anger from them to the Muslims and to justify the war in Mali, for example.

At the same time, we hardly hear about the racist activities resulting from Islamophobia in France. Attacks on mosques and Islamic sites have been a common occurrence since 2007 when 148 Muslim headstones in a national military cemetery near Arras were smeared with anti-Islamic slurs and a pig's head was placed among them. Dozens of French mosques were also assaulted following the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015, with some targeted with firebombs, grenades or gunfire.

In 2005, riots broke out in cities across France in reaction to the killing of two boys chased by police officers in Paris. Decades of discrimination, alienation, and police violence had turned the suburbs into a tinderbox. Yet for the Zionists these protests were simply manifestations of Anti-French, Anti-White racism.

The Zionist French philosopher Finkielkraut, in an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, said that these protests “are directed against France as a former colonial power, against France as a European country, against France, with its Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition.” ^[80] This was an echo of the line of the Zionists right-wingers in Israel.

“It is still taboo in some French elite circles to mention that a significant third motivation for some of the rioters was racist-ethnic, namely, anti-French and anti-white. Politically correct members of the European elite have long maintained, against all evidence, that there is only one type of racism-that of whites against the colored. During the recent turmoil, some of the rioters told the media explicitly that they were driven by anti-French and anti-white feelings.” ^[81]

In February 2019 when the Yellow Vests protesters saw him, some cried: “Go back to Tel-Aviv”. “Zionist” France's president Emmanuel Macron has condemned this cry as anti-Semitic abuse hurled at the French philosopher in Paris. ^[82]

 

Zionism as Racism

 

The Zionist movement was born as a reaction of the Jewish petit-bourgeoisie to modern Anti-Semitism, but it is based on the main tenant of Anti-Semitism that the Jews are a foreign body in the nations they live in. The term Anti-Semitism was coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1878. In that year, he published a pamphlet titled “The Victory of Judaism over Germandom.” It stated, in part:

“There is no stopping them. German culture has proved itself ineffective and powerless against this foreign power. This is a fact; a brutal [inescapable] fact. State, Church, Catholicism, Protestantism, Creed and Dogma, all are brought low before the Jewish tribunal, that is, the irreverent daily press [which the Jews control]. The Jews were late in their assault on Germany, but once they started there was no stopping them. Gambetta, Simon, and Crémieux were the dictators of France in 1870–1871. Poor, Judaized France! In England, the Semite Disraeli [Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli], a German hater . . . , holds in his vest pocket the key to war and peace in the Orient [the East].” [83]

For Marr the Jews were a Semitic race even though in reality it is a group of languages of the Middle East and Africa (Amharic Aramaic, Arabic and Hebrew). To Marr and a growing number of other Europeans, all Jews, regardless of their religious beliefs, belonged to the “Semitic race.” In the late 1800s, many European and American scientists invented race “science” that divided the human race into different races to justify the oppression of certain groups.

The “Semitic race“, according to him, was dangerous and alien. He founded the League of Anti-Semites in Berlin in 1879 that was a failure, but another political party—the Christian Socialist Workers’ Party, founded a year earlier by Protestant theologian Adolf Stoecker that was also anti-Jewish was a success. The unification of Germany in 1871 united the Jews of Germany and a layer of Jews participated in the rapid mid-century growth of industry and trade. Although they accounted for only 1% of the population and most were not wealthy, more Jews than ever became increasingly visible members of society. ^[84]

This was also a time that the Social Democratic Party (SPD) was growing and its message was the unity in struggle of all the working class against the capitalist class. Anti-Semitism was useful for the capitalist class to divert the anger of workers and of the petit-bourgeoisie from the capitalist class to the Jews.

Zionists claim that Herzl who first thought that the solution of the Jews is to convert to Christianity became a Jewish nationalist in response to Alfred Dreyfus case. This is most likely not true because Herzl, the journalist, at the beginning joined the accusation of Dreyfus as a traitor. When he became a Zionist he accepted the same assumption of the Anti-Semites that the Jews are a foreign body in the countries they live in. They must leave and form their own state.

For Herzl it was not very important where European Jews would form a colony, but he became convinced later on, that to form a mass movement he must appeal to the sentiment of the Jews for Palestine. The fact that Palestine was inhabited by Arabs did not concern him and his followers who coined the slogan of “a land without a people for a people without land.”

The Zionists love to claim that the Anti-Semites distort Herzl’s writing. For example Lisa Abramowicz, in an article on Ynet under the title “Getting Away with Anti-Semitism”, charged Ingmar Karlsson, a former top Swedish diplomat of forgery because she claimed he misquoted Herzl.

Karlson quoted: “It is essential that the sufferings of Jews become worse. This will assist in the realization of our plans. I have an excellent idea. I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth. The anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The anti-Semites shall be our best friends."

She wrote that there is no such entry, neither in the German edition from 1922, nor in the complete English translation of Herzl’s diaries from 1960. The latter has an entry which shows that the first two sentences have been added by Karlson and the rest of the alleged quote has been distorted so as to completely alter the message. ^[85]

She quotes Herzl: “It would be an excellent idea to call in respectable, accredited anti-Semites as liquidators of property. To the people they would vouch for the fact that we do not wish to bring about the impoverishment of the countries that we leave. At first they must not be given large fees for this; otherwise we shall spoil our instruments and make them despicable as 'stooges of the Jews' Later their fees will increase, and in the end we shall have only Gentile officials in the countries from which we have emigrated. The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.”

Clearly Herzl in both quotes says that the anti-Semites will liquidate Jewish properties and will be paid for it. They will be friends of the Zionist movement, the anti-Semitic countries its allies because this will force to Jews to live their countries.

It looks like poor Lisa simply does not understand what she reads. The idea in both quotes is the same and testify to Herzl’s concept that Jews should be forced to leave their countries by the Anti-Semites - i.e. the best friends of the Zionists.

But Lisa’s accusation that Ingmar Karlsson added two of his own sentences is wrong as well.

“There’s an amusing Youtube video in which a journalist presents a number of Israeli students with a quote from Herzl and asks who they thought wrote it. Every one of them says Hitler. They are shocked to discover the truth; the Herzl they learned about in school could not have written such an anti-Semitic statement. This is the quote: An excellent idea enters my mind — to attract outright anti-Semites and make them destroyers of Jewish wealth.” ^[86]

In his book, “Der Judenstaat”, published in 1896 Herzl wrote:

“The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it (i.e. Anti-Semitism) does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migration. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted and there our presence produces persecution…. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of Anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.”

It is not an accident that Herzl was loved by the Anti-Semites like Édouard Drumont who published the virulently Anti-Semitic La France Juive, in 1886 and by Eugen Dühring who in the final editions of the Judenfrage, wrote that: “Since the Jewish character was an unchangeable one, the only means that would be effective against them would have to be of a terroristic nature. In the last edition of his work (1901), Duhring even suggested that all the specific social and political remedies proposed by him against the Jewish evil in the earlier editions were bound to be inadequate in the long run and must necessarily be reinforced by stronger means which do not permit the possibility of Jewish existence within the European communities any longer.” ^[87]

A very well-known pogrom against the Jews took place in 1903 in Kishinev. Most historians consider that Pavolaki Krushevan was the chief instigator of the Kishinev Pogrom, but there is no doubt that he was a servant of the government in Petersburg, that used him to implement the atrocities in Kishinev and in other places. The Minister of Interior, von Plehve was behind the Pogrom together with von Raaben, the Minister for Bessarabia and his deputy Ustrgov. Prime Minister Levendal and Tchemzenkov, the commander of the local gendarmes and civilians like Pronin, the notary Pisarevsky, Semigradov, Bolinsky, I. Popov, the judge Davidovich and many others. The Prime Minister of Russia before the First World War, Count Sergei Witte writes in his memoirs about the role of von Plehve, the Minister of Interior in his government:

“When von Plehve was Minister of the Interior he searched psychological methods to crash the revolutionary movements of the masses especially during the Japan War. Von Plehve believed that the Pogroms against the Jews are just the ways to stop the revolutions. This is how we can explain the big number of these brutal pogroms, especially the one in Kishinev, during his time in office.” ^[88]

For Herzl this pogrom was a chance to recruit Jews to his colonial project with the backing of the government of the Tsar. After the pogrom Herzl met with von Plehve.

Leni Brenner wrote on this meeting: “The Russians were concerned about the effect of Kishinev on Western opinion and he prepared a memo for the minister. If the Russians would intervene with the Turks on behalf of Zionism, and subsidize Jewish emigration, the announcement could be made at “Our Congress, which will meet at Basel from the 10th to the 23rd of August... This would, at the same time, put an end to certain agitation.” Von Plehve explained his concern about the new directions he saw Zionism taking:

“Lately the situation has grown even worse because the Jews have been joining the revolutionary parties. We used lobe sympathetic to your Zionist movement, as long as it worked toward emigration. You don’t have to justify the movement to me. Vous prêchez à un converti [You are preaching to a convert]. But ever since the Minsk conference we have noticed our changement des gros bonnets [a change of bigwigs]. There is less talk now of Palestinian Zionism than there is about culture, organization, and Jewish nationalism. This doesn’t suit us. We have noticed in particular that your leaders in Russia... do not really obey your Vienna Committee

Herzl jumped at his opening: “Help me to reach land sooner and the revolt will end. And so will the defection to the socialists.” Herzl and von Plehve exchanged letters. The Russians formally announced, in the vaguest terms, their support for Zionism, on proviso that the local organization confined itself to emigration and did nothing on behalf of Jewish national rights inside the empire.

In return Herzl enclosed a letter he had just written to one of the Rothschilds: It would substantially contribute to the further improvement of the situation if the pro-Jewish papers stopped using such an odious tone toward Russia. We ought to try to work toward that end in the near future.” ^[89]

Thus, Herzl indeed saw the Anti-Semites as the best friends of the Zionists. He was an enemy of the Jewish masses suffering from repression and pogroms. Instead of calling on the Jews to join the self-defense of the Jews organized by the socialists, he promised the Tsar to take the Jews away from the influence of the socialists. He was one of the first to prove that it was possible and even likely to love the Zionist project and hate the Jews. At the same time Herzl’s project of settler colonialism in the service of imperialism was a racist project against the native Arabs. Herzl is known for writing in his 1896 treatise on the Jewish State:

“We should there [in Palestine, Ed.] form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” [90]

Herzl formed the model other leaders of the Zionists adopted later on. The Zionist movement has a long history of collaboration with the most racist murdering regimes that, among others, have killed Jews.

On the collaboration of the Zionists with the Nazis (Haavara - sabotaging the boycott of German goods, adding pressure to the US policy of closed doors before the Jewish refugees) Leni Brenner wrote the Iron Wall and Zionism in the Age of Dictators [91] and there is little to add.

What should be added is the close relations of the Israeli state with far-right parties and regimes in our days:

“Israel may have crossed a red line today when it was flaunted on the major News portal, both in Lithuanian and in English, that Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon had found the time this week to stage a demonstrative PR-photographed visit to the chief campaigner for The parliament’s decision less than one month ago to name 2018 in honor of Adolfas Ramanauskas —, who is a prime icon of the ultranationalist camp that often glorifies various collaborators and participants in the Holocaust on the grounds that they were also anti-Soviet activists. The PR move came just after a major political commentator asked what Lithuania is getting in return for its staunch political support for the Netanyahu government.” ^[92]

“The meeting of the so-called Visegrad states in Israel that had been scheduled for Feb. 19 was the natural culmination of the efforts of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to integrate his country into the nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic Eastern European bloc that is the enemy of the liberal West. Then, last week, Netanyahu declared that “Poles cooperated with the Nazis” while his acting foreign minister, Israel Katz, asserted that Poles “suckle anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk,” leading to fury in Warsaw. Katz’s remarks—quoting the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a Jew who grew up in Poland like his predecessors David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin—may have been nasty, but many Polish Jews in Israel would agree with them.But the fact that Poland’s governing Law and Justice party pulled out of the scheduled meeting in order to protect its credibility with its rabidly nationalist and anti-Semitic base and that the event has become a series of bilateral meetings instead of a summit has not changed its basic purpose.” ^[93]

“It is baffling that some Zionist organisations have links with far-right groups who fuel hatred against Jews. Mick Napier of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) has said that the organisation has been harassed by pro-Israel activist Sammy Stein. “[Stein] works on behalf of the Israeli Embassy to defend Israeli mass murder, torture, sexual abuse of Palestinian women and children and every manner of Israeli crime,” Napier points out. “Stein was caught in flagrante recently with neo-Nazi Max Dunbar.

Dunbar was a leading promoter of the British National Party’s neo-Nazi ideology of White supremacy, which included Holocaust denial. He and Stein have been filmed and photographed working together to harass those tending a Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign street stall. To be fair, when the SPSC exposed Dunbar’s far-right pedigree the link was severed.

Napier, the co-founder of the SPSC, is perhaps a little less forgiving. “Like Trump caught boasting of his serial sexual assaults,” he responded, “or the Israeli Chief Military Rabbi endorsing rape of Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers in time of war, the glare of publicity on such practices usually prompts a public apology or retreat, but few take seriously such retreats [made] under pressure.

Moreover, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had no such qualms at all about meeting Italy’s Deputy Premier Matteo Salvini, who is on record as expressing admiration for his country’s former Fascist Dictator Benito Mussolini. Salvini’s visit to Israel in December last year was exploited by what remains of the Israeli left, who accused Netanyahu of embracing fascists like Salvini, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki. The director of the Richard Koebner Minerva Centre for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, historian Moshe Zimmermann, explained recently that the new European fascists, who hate Muslims, love Netanyahu because of what he has done to the Palestinians.” ^[94]

The truth is that the systematic oppression of the Palestinians did not begin with Netanyahu. It began with the arrival of the Zionist colonialist settlers. It began by the forced removal of the Fellahin (peasants) from Fula in 1920. It continued with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1947-8 (The Nakba). It continued with the Massacre of Kefar Qasem in 1956, with the occupation of the West-Bank and Gaza in 1967, with the settlements in the 1967 occupied lands, with the annexation of Jerusalem and the Golan with the siege of Gaza and the killing of protesting Palestinians every Friday.

The Zionists are doing to the Palestinians what the American settler colonialists did to the Indians and the Afrikaners of South Africa did to the black Africans. Thus Zionism is clearly racist towards the Palestinians. [95]

In 1975 in a period which was less reactionary than the current ultra-reactionary rule of the capitalists, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution condemning Zionism as racism.

“Resolution 3379 (XXX). Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination” stated: Recalling its resolution 1904 (XVIII) of 20 November 1963, proclaiming the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and in particular its affirmation that "any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous" and its expression of alarm at "the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures".

Recalling also that, in its resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of 14 December 1973, the General Assembly condemned, inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism.

Taking note of the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace, 1/ proclaimed by the World Conference of the International Women's Year, held at Mexico City from 19 June to 2 July 1975, which promulgated the principle that "international co-operation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination".

Taking note also of resolution 77 (XII) adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity at its twelfth ordinary session, 2/ hold at Kampala from 28 July to 1 August 1975, which considered "that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being."

Taking note also of the Political Declaration and Strategy to Strengthen International Peace and Security and to Intensify Solidarity and Mutual Assistance among Non-Aligned Countries, 3/ adopted at the Conference of Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries held at Lima from 25 to 30 August 1975, which most severely condemned zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperialist ideology, determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” [96]

Thus when the Zionists say that Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism while they work together with the Anti-Jewish far-right, whether in East or West Europe, they purposely confuse the real Anti-Semites with those who struggle against oppression. It is impossible to be against oppression without being Anti-Zionist. At the same time Jews in Europe and the US should be defended against the real Anti-Semites who love Trump and Israel and hate the Jews.

 

Anti-Semitism Today

 

It is a difficult time to be a Jew, not only because real Anti-Semitism is rising but because many bourgeois politicians are responding, not by protecting Jews, but by victimizing the Palestinians and Muslims in general.

On March 14, 2017, the European Court of Justice (EJC), for the first time, made two decisions to rule on non-discrimination at work on religious grounds. The EJC ruled that employers would be able to prohibit the wearing of religious garments by their employees. This was despite the content of Article 9, which secures the freedom of thought, conscience and religion of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance of the Council of Europe (ECRI) publishes an annual report, which covered the year 2016. The ECRI points to the fact that “Muslims continue to experience discrimination in various areas of social life, including education, employment and housing.”

And while Islamophobia is spreading a new official definition of Anti-Semitism has been adopted by the reactionary politicians. This definition, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016, includes among its “contemporary examples” of Anti-Semitism “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”. In other words, anti-Zionism is equated to Jew hatred. This definition has been adopted by imperialist France, Germany, Britain, the United States and 30 other governments that serve the imperialists.

The pro-Zionists argue that to deny the Jews the right of self-determination amounts to singling out the Jews and discriminate against them. This argument is false as the anti-racist movement opposed the right of self -determination of South Africa’s apartheid. The American progressive movement in the 19^th century opposed the right of self-determination of the American South because of so called “unique intuition” namely slavery.

Those who supported the self-determination of white South African and the Southern confederation were racists. Most of those who support the Zionist state, not only oppose the full rights of the Palestinians for self-determination that includes the right of return of the Palestinians refugees who were expelled from their own country, but do not support the right of self-determination of oppressed nations like the Armenians, the Catalonians and many others.

For the record, the Zionists refused until 2016 to recognize the genocide of the Armenians. This denial began already with Herzl, because he hoped to get the approval of Hamid the Sultan for his colonialist project. For years, Israel and the Zionists organizations in the US refused not only to recognize the genocide of the Armenians, but the right of the self-determination of the Kurds in Turkey, because of close relations with Turkey. At the same time Israel had close relations with Barzani Kurds in Iraq.

“AIPAC, ADL, AJC, B’nai B’rith, and JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security of America) have colluded with Turkey to defeat Armenian Genocide resolutions in Congress. Demanding Holocaust legislation while thwarting recognition of another genocide is hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy”.^[97]

“However, the adage that governed Israel's relations with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) was the opposite of that with the Barzani-dominated Kurdish Democratic Party. With the PKK, the reality was: "My enemy's friend is my enemy." The PKK's friends were Syria and radical Palestinian groups acting under Damascus's auspices while Israel's long-time friend was Turkey”. ^[98]

Another, but similar, pro-Zionist argument is that maybe Israel should not have been formed, but now it is a fact that must be recognized. South Africa’s apartheid was formed in the same manner Israel was formed. Yet it was politically and morally correct to put an end to it.

A third argument, which is false, is that those who are Anti-Zionists are also Anti-Semites. In the real world, many of the most pro-Zionists like the American Evangelists are anti-Jewish.

The truth is that you cannot be for the right of self- determination of the Zionists and the Palestinians. One is excluding the other. The formula of “two states for two people” is a hoax. Under its cover, the Zionist state is taking over the West Bank, and divides the Palestinians into three different parts - the West Bank, Gaza and the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

It is impossible to remove the Zionist settlers in the West Bank short of a civil war and in Israel there is no power to fight the settlers. Israel is by far under the influence of the settlers and their religious supporters.

The interest of the international working class supports only the right of self–determination of the oppressed nation and Israel is an oppressive imperialist nation of a settler-colonialist nature.

The pro-Palestinian movement of middle class activists and working class is known as the BDS. The Zionists attack this movement claiming it is Anti-Semitic. In the real world, BDS is not an Anti-Semitic organization. David M. Halbfinger, Michael Wines and Steven Erlanger, in an article that appeared on July 27 2019 in the New York Times, wrote:

“What is B.D.S.?

The B.D.S. movement seeks to mobilize international economic and political pressure on Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians. Modeled on the fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa, it calls for countries, businesses and universities to sever ties with Israel unless it meets three demands:

* Ending its occupation of all land captured in 1967 and dismantling the wall and fence that separate Israel from much of the West Bank, dividing many Palestinian neighborhoods.

* Granting “full equality” to Palestinian citizens of Israel.

* Assuring the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to the homes and properties from which they or their ancestors were displaced in the wars that led to the establishment of Israel in 1948.Many who embrace B.D.S. see it aimed primarily at ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

The Zionists say that full equality for Arab citizens of Israel would require overturning or amending Israeli laws that grant Jews automatic citizenship and define Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Granting a right of return to the Palestinians classified as refugees — the original refugees and their millions of descendants — would spell the end of a Jewish majority. In an interview, Omar Barghouti, a top B.D.S. spokesman, called the Israeli laws racist and exclusionary. A democratic state could still provide asylum for Jewish refugees, showing “some sensitivity to the Jewish experience,” he said, “but it cannot be a racist law that says only Jews benefit.” Asked if that means Jews cannot have their own state, he said, “Not in Palestine.” ^[99]

Clearly to accuse BDS of Anti-Semitism is similar to the accusation of white Afrikaners who argued that those who supported the sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid are anti-white racists.

Defenders of Israel deny the similarity between Israel and South Africa’s apartheid. Yet the activists who participated in the struggle against the apartheid have said that Israel is like South Africa, In 2014 “Desmond Tutu, the noted civil rights leader who became the first black archbishop of Cape Town, compared Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the apartheid regime that discriminated against blacks in his native South Africa…."I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces," he said in a statement.

Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government."

Observers in South Africa are preparing to mark "Israeli Apartheid Week" on Monday. Tutu, meanwhile, has declared his support for the use of boycotts and economic sanctions as a means to compel Israel to alter its policies.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our democracy without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the apartheid regime," he told News24.

The same issues of inequality and injustice today motivate the divestment movement trying to end Israel's decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory and the unfair and prejudicial treatment of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government ruling over them.” ^[100]

From 1973 on Israel maintains very close relations with South Africa’s apartheid. It declared the ANC a terrorist organization in 1976. During the 5th Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Colombo, Sri Lanka, a resolution calling for an oil embargo against France and Israel because of their arms sales to South Africa was adopted.

From the middle of the 1970s, Israel was involved in joint nuclear-weapons development and testing. According to Seymour Hersh, for example, the 1979 Vela Incident was the third joint Israeli–South African nuclear test in the Indian Ocean. ^[101] Thus as the maxim says “Tell me who your friends are and I will tell who you are.”

Real Anti–Semitism is a form of racism. Yet due the role Israel plays as a front line for the imperialist control of the Middle East, the Israeli state has been able, with the support of the imperialist states and the imperialists mass media, to confuse Anti-Semitism with Anti-Zionism, then charge the pro-Palestinians as Anti-Semites and the semi-colonies states or organizations that are enemies of Israel of being “Nazi regimes”.

According to NGO Monitor, a pro-Zionist organization: ”On May 17, 2019, the German Bundestag passed a resolution defining BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns against Israel as Antisemitic. The joint resolution, “Stand Resolutely Against the BDS Movement: Combat Anti Semitism,” was supported by the CDU/CSU (The Union), SPD (Social Democratic Party), FDP (Free Democratic Party), and Green parties”.^[102] “The equating of BDS with antisemitism echoes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism (officially recognized by the German Federal Government), which defines attempts to deny “the Jewish people their right to self-determination” and apply “double standards” as anti-Semitic”.^[103] Among the organizations declared as Anti-Semitic are Heinrich Boll Foundation and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Yet in Germany the Nazi marches are protected by the police. In May 2019, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the neo Nazis “The Third Way” in black uniforms marched in Plauen Saxony shouting “National Socialism Now”! Another Neo Nazi rally protected by the police took place in Duisburg with Signs calling for the destruction of Israel.” ^[104]

Yet in Germany in May 2019 the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that broadcaster ARD must air the racist advertisement by the National Party of Germany (NPD) on free speech grounds. ^[105]

The same is true in the US. In July this year the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution that condemns the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. The bill, formally known as House Resolution 246, also calls for increased security aid to Israel. ^[106]

Yet in the US the Neo Nazis, that under the Anti-Semite President feel free to march in the American streets, are protected by the police. This is a place where Trump blamed the Jewish victims of Pittsburgh synagogue, for not hiring armed guards. This is a place where Trump accused the Jews who support the Democratic Party as disloyal and it does not matter whether he meant disloyal to the US, Israel or himself. The double loyalty of Jews is an old Anti-Semitic propaganda.

Manfred Gerstenfeld of the Zionist Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies wrote: “Accusations of dual loyalty are the main anti-Semitic hate motif worldwide, as well as in the US. Extrapolating from poll data, it can be inferred that up to seventy-five million Americans might believe their Jewish co-citizens are more loyal to Israel than to the US… The recent murder of 11 Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh was followed by the release of a 2017 FBI publication that reported that 60% of all religiously biased hate crime incidents in the US were anti-Jewish, far exceeding the figure for other religions… The 2014 ADL Global 100 study also found that the false accusation of dual loyalty is the main international anti-Semitic stereotype. Forty-one percent of the world populations included in the survey believe this to be true… The charge that Jews are not loyal to the society or country in which they live existed long before the State of Israel was founded. During the mid-fourteenth century, at the time of the Black Death, Jews were burned on the accusation that they had poisoned food, wells, and streams.” ^[107]

What Gerstenfeld fails to mention is that Israel has used the political sympathy of American Jews to Israel to spy on the US as was the case of Jonathan Pollard, who was convicted by the US of spying for Israel. A case that convinced the Anti-Semites that the American Jews are more loyal to Israel than the USA. To make things worse, for the Zionist propaganda Pollard is the modern Alfred Dreyfus. If this were true then Dreyfus was disloyal to France as the French Anti-Semites claimed in 1894.

 

Israel and Iran

 

The Zionists claim that Iran is a Nazi regime. This January Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz declared that “Iran is like Nazi Germany,” and said “the world had not learned the lessons of the Holocaust in light of the threat Iran poses to the Jewish state.Steinitz made his comments at Israel’s official ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. ^[108]

At the same time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likened Iran’s “dangerous” flouting of the nuclear deal to the Nazis occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, in a call for European countries to sanction the Islamic Republic over its ramped-up uranium enrichment. ^[109]

This is pure demagogy. If Iran since 1979 is like Nazi Germany why did Israel provide it with weapons in the Iran-Iraq war? If Iran was in 1980 a Nazi regime and Israel provided it with weapons what does it make Israel?

“In the wake of the past two decades of acrimony between Iran and Israel, it may be hard to imagine that the countries ever had friendly relations and cooperation on multiple levels. Yet they were once friends and allies. And even after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when Iran abruptly severed diplomatic ties with Israel, military cooperation continued for several years as Iran turned to Israel to arm it during its devastating war with neighboring Iraq.” ^[110]

Even though the Iranian regime is a reactionary one that should be toppled by the Iranian workers and poor [111], it cannot be compared to Nazi Germany that was an imperialist state while Iran is a regional power, a type of intermediate semi-colonial state. [112]

Germany needed markets and cheap labor for its industry. Iran is not seeking super cheap labor power. Germany exterminated, among others, Jews, however, in Iran Jews have a party in the Parliament and no one touches them. While the Israeli army attacks Iranian military positions very often in Syria, Iran does not seek war with Israel that is much stronger than Iran. Iran wants to develop its nuclear capacity while Israel possesses atomic bombs.

If nuclear weapons for Iran is like the Nazis occupation of the Rhineland in 1936 as the PM of Israel claims why in 1975 Israel and Iran cooperated on “Project Flower,” a joint plan to develop a missile that could carry a nuclear warhead.

Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons to defend itself from American-Israeli–Saudi-Egyptian possible imperialist war. Trump and Israel want to topple the regime and bring back a Shah-type regime, the kind of regime Israel supported while the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who consolidated his power after a U.S.-led coup restored him to power in 1953, had a toilet made of gold in a country that many people did not have enough food.

By equating Iran and Nazi Germany the state of Israel is helping those Anti-Semites who deny the holocaust. Since Iran does not kill Jews, Nazi Germany did not kill Jews.

The question to ask is why the Zionist state hates the Iranian regime so much? Three weeks after Ayatollah Khomeini returned from Exile on February 18 1979 he severed relations with Israel. Adding insult to injury, Khomeini turned the evacuated Israeli Embassy over to the PLO. Supporting the Palestinians is a great sin in the eyes of the Israeli government. Even more importantly by severing relations with Israel, Iran was no more a close to semi-colony of Israel as it was in the 1960s and 1970s “when, Israel had so many contractors and military advisers resident in Tehran, that a Hebrew-language school was opened there for Israeli children. And El Al operated regular flights between Tel Aviv and the Iranian capital.” ^[113]