When the Duke of Wellington was asked what his strategy would be for defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, he replied, "I shall be governed by the circumstances."
As the principal investigator of a research project on illiberalism in East Central Europe, Prof. Ivan Kalmar of the University of Toronto will be interviewing applicants for a part-time research assistantship. The interviews will take place online in the winter of 2021. Details of the position and the application procedure are given below.
Research Assistant: Social Media Analyst
The Research Assistant (RA) will assist the Principal Investigator (PI) in the continued collection and analysis of social media posts, mainly tweets, related to the PI’s research on illiberalism in Central Europe. Most of the tweets collected mention George Soros, as the research is pivoted around perceptions of this Hungarian-American financier and philanthropist.
The RA is required to maintain, and occasionally redesign, the automated collection process, and to help in reading and evaluating the results.
The social media posts are in all languages, but the focus is on those in Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian.
Qualifications
The Research Assistant should 1) have at least an intermediate competency in Information Technology, including programming in at least the Python programming language; 2) understand with ease posts in Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Hungarian, using a dictionary if necessary for one of them; and 3) read and write English. Applicants who know only Hungarian or only the three Slavic languages may be considered if we do not find a qualified RA who can follow all four.
The RA may work remotely, from any location. This position is open to residents of all countries.
Funding
The research is funded entirely by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The rate of compensation is $20 Canadian (about €12.50) per hour, net.
The length of engagement for the Research Assistant is negotiable. An initial estimate is that the work will take 3-7 hours a week.
Application Instructions
Please apply as soon as possible. Contact Prof. Ivan Kalmar of the University of Toronto, i.kalmar@utoronto.ca. Please include: 1) a cover letter explaining why you are interested in the position, 2) a CV, and 3) the email of three referees. The referees should understand an English request for a reference, but may answer in the local language.
Soros and Gates, Breeders of Coronavirus: Is this conspiracy theory antisemitic?
Conspiracy theories about George Soros have been around for a long time. The American right-wing scaremonger Lyndon LaRouche blamed the Hungarian-Jewish-American for the Asian financial crisis back in the nineties, an idea that was enthusiastically propagated by the Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahatir Mohamad. More recently, Soros has been blamed on everything from a coup in Macedonia to the fall of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and the migrant caravan that tried to enter the US from Central America. (In that case, President Trump mentioned Soros himself.) During the 2015-16 so-called refugee crisis in Europe, Russian propagandists and Alex Jones’ Infowars in the US both broadcast, on practically the same day, the idea that Soros was paying Muslims to illegally enter the European Union. Two American political advisors who heard this advised Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel as well as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary to use the Soros conspiracy theory in their political propaganda. Orbán, in particular, did so and still does, with a vengeance.
Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, who made his money at the head of Microsoft, has for several years turned his attention to charitable work. This has included providing vaccines for children who need them, including in poor countries. That work has apparently earned the ire of the anti-vaccine crowd across the globe, who have developed conspiracy theories about Gates with a virulence that approaches those about Soros.
In one of the conspiracy theories about coronavirus, Soros and Gates meet as co-owners of the lab in Wuhan that has supposedly manufactured the virus and released it to infect millions. Perfect! Why did they do it is anyone’s guess. Perhaps Gates wants to make more money selling vaccines. Perhaps he’s just evil. Soros is, of course, an evil Jew, and Jews have been blamed on epidemics since they supposedly poisoned wells during the Black Death.
But then, many conspiracy theories would deny such extreme thoughts, or even being antisemitic at all.
Soros is a rich Jew who uses his money to support left-wing causes. Attacks on him fall right within the antisemitic tradition of “discovering” connections between Jewish money and Jewish liberals and socialists. The class source for those is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery from more than a hundred years ago, which once graced the desks of people from Henry Ford to Colonel Gadhafi. The Protocols speak of a Jewish-Freemason conspiracy led by Jewish elders who include the financier Rothschild. (The current Rothschilds are often connected by right-wing social media posters to George Soros.) In our research, we have found countless social media entries where Soros is openly attacked as a Jew. Yet at the same time, the more “respectable” anti-Soros conspiracy theorists deny that they’re antisemitic. In Israel, they are even Jewish themselves. Bill Gates is not Jewish, although some mistakenly believe that he is (he is very rich, after all!).
These facts may give the impression that the Soros + Gates conspiracy theory about the origins of the coronavirus is not necessarily antisemitic. Not necessarily may be right. However, what all this reveals, is the nature of antisemitism as it has been since the late nineteenth century. The Protocols’ ultimate target was not Jews as such, but rather two figures of modernity opposed by conservative populists: the international financier and the left-wing agitator. Antisemites managed to associate both with the little understood and already, for religious reasons, much disliked Jew. The Nazis, fatally, did elevate the Jew and indeed the entire “Jewish race” to the cosmic enemy. But before and after them, it is well known that some of the antisemites’ best friends were Jews. It is possible to hate rich supporters of the left without being literally an antisemite; after all Gates is not even Jewish. But not being antisemitic according to the letter does not mean you’re not an antisemite in spirit. This is why even a Jew and, certainly, some of a Jew’s best friends, can be antisemitic.
Across the world, among the populations most affected by the coronavirus pandemic are poor, segregated members of racial minorities. The best example, perhaps, are AA. In Slovakia, which we may probably use as typical for East Central Europe, the closest group to African Americans in terms of racial segregation and discrimination are the Roma. When the pandemic reached Slovakia in the spring, some blamed the outbreak on Roma workers returning home from places like England and bringing the virus with them. Anxiety about the Roma as coronavirus carriers were compounded by traditional racist fears of them as a dangerous group of outsiders, but they were not wholly unjustified, given the fact that in cities Roma often live in crowded ghettos, and in the countryside they’re settled in villages that resemble the Third World more than the European Union, often with no running water or modern sanitation, and with 10-15 people living in close proximity in a single shack or apartment. The government’s attitude was intensive testing, especially of returning migrants, and insisting on enforcing quarantine regulations with the thinly disguised aim of isolating Roma to prevent them from infecting white people. As the pandemic began to subside, though, it became apparent that the worst fears about Roma susceptibility to the virus did not get fulfilled.
Paradoxically perhaps, this may have been because the situation of the Roma in Slovakia and neighbouring countries is even worse than that of African Americans. There are several reasons why it is thought that African Americans have been particularly affected by Covid-19. It’s true that the high density of accommodation in some of the black urban ghettos is at least as bad as that of the Roma. And the prevalence of health issues associated with economic deprivation and racial discrimination is only worse among Slovak Roma, if that is possible. These shared factors would make us expect to see more, not less, infection among the Roma. However, one factor that has worsened the situation for African Americans is different. A disproportionately large number of African Americans work in front-line service occupations, where contact with the public is high. Many are employed, for example, as cleaners, couriers, security guards, or hospital workers. These may not be the highest paying jobs in the community, but they provide a kind of economic security that is not accessible for most Roma in Slovakia. A large number of Roma are restricted to casual work at sites that were closed due to the pandemic. The result seems to be that they ended up isolated with their own people, just as the authorities probably wished. This quasi-quarantine may have ended up protecting them by keeping infection largely out of the Roma communities. Disaster has been avoided, at least for now, though possibly only because to date the pandemic seems to have been relatively mild in Slovakia.
As right-wing nationalism becomes more and more mainstream, there’s one go-to gambit for right-wing nationalists to protect themselves from charges of anti-Semitism: profess friendship for “the Jews,” and declare your love of Israel. But there’s a new twist. This same technique – loud protests that you’re against anti-Semitism – is now used to deflect charges not only that you’ve got a problem with Jews, but to deflect from other forms of racism, too.
Compare how self-declared anti-anti-Semitism was used as a defense in two different controversial incidents recently: the use of the anti-Semitic dog-whistle, “cosmopolitan” by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, and the call by President Trump on four Congresswomen of color to “go back” where they came from.
In a keynote speech to the National Conservatism Conference last week, Hawley referred to “a powerful upper class and their cosmopolitan priorities,” who “identify as ‘citizens of the world.’ They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community… The cosmopolitan elite look down on the common affections that once bound this nation together: things like place and national feeling and religious faith… Our national solidarity has been broken by the globalizing and liberationist policies of the cosmopolitan agenda.”
When understandably attacked for constantly using words of a proven anti-Semitic pedigree such as “cosmopolitan,” Hawley denied that these were anti-Semitic dog-whistles. “Delivered at a conference organized by an Israeli Jew, to an audience of many Jewish-Americans, and from a guy who has been an ardent advocate of the state of Israel and the Jewish people? Nice try.” He went even further, offering perhaps the anti-anti-Semitism defense in extremis: “You’ll have to carry me out on a slab before I compromise my defense of the Jewish people, their greatness, their history, their safety, and the state of Israel.”
Fittingly, the reactions to his performative philo-Semitism tweets from some of his (erstwhile) fans showed them openly declare their anti-Semitism, calling him the “good goy” and accusing him of dual loyalties. That’s because his remarks were meant to distinguish him from a crude racist who wouldn’t have bothered dressing up his prejudices with trope-infused language. Hawley is a far better class of bigot than that, after all – and he’s holding his own with conservative “intellectuals.”
Now to President Trump. Having told the Congresswomen of color to go back “where they came from,” he defended his attacks by tweeting that the women hated “Israel with a true and unbridled passion.” There is at least a clear logic at play to Sen. Hawley’s declaration of support for Israel as a means to dispel accusations of anti-Semitism, because his speech dripped with anti-Semitic tropes. But here Donald Trump was defending himself against charges of racism, not anti-Semitism. Evidently, declaring one’s admiration for “the Jews” and Israel is the coin that right-wing nationalists believe can purchase the right to use both anti-Semitic and other racist appeals to their supporters.
It used to be that the standard pre-emptive defense before you said something outrageously racist was to say, “I am not a racist, but …” . Now, you just have to interject somewhere that you love Jews and Israel.
If Trump had “only” asked the Congresswomen of color to “go back to where you came from,” he would no doubt be celebrated by many of his admirers anyway. But adding on how much they “hate Israel” is meant to put a protective coating of respectability on his despicably racist statement, making it more palatable, even admirable, to “moderates” among his supporters.
The argument goes like this: “You say that I’m a racist. But I say that you’re an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is the worst form of racism. Therefore you’re a bigger racist than I am, so you can’t complain about my racism.”
The presumption that anti-Semitism is the worst form of hatred is crucial to this line of thinking.
It is in this light that we need to view the storm of outrage on the Right when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (one of the women attacked by Trump) compared migrant detention centres to concentration camps. The frenzied condemnation of what she said aims to enforce the perceived Jewish copyright on major suffering, a prime rhetorical tool also used to protect Israel from reproach. But now the insistence on anti-Semitism as the greatest hatred is being employed as well to silence complaints about other forms of racism.
This new anti-anti-Semitism is aimed more against the Left than against real anti-Semitism. “Leftists” and liberals have long been the bane of unapologetic hard right anti-Semites, who see them as Jewish or Jewish-dominated. Now, leftists and liberals are themselves regularly accused of anti-Semitism by the anti-anti-Semitic right, largely for their opposition to the current Israeli government.
Among the accusers are many right-wing Jews, including in Israel. In what was perhaps the most notorious case, Benjamin Netanyahu defended the Hungarian government for its attacks on the American Jewish financier George Soros, the alleged “mastermind” of the anti-nationalist Left. Everybody knows that the anti-Soros hysteria is anti-Semitic, but it can be excused if, like the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, you beat your chest in support of Israel and “the Jews.”
Prof. Yoram Hazony, the conservative American-Israeli professor who organized the event where Hawley spoke, insists that “cosmopolitan” a legitimate term in political science, and not anti-Semitic.
To be sure, the new anti-anti-Semitism does require avoiding overt anti-Semitic clichés. As a result, it creates everywhere a split between the intransigent, street-fighter far right, who have no hope of political success, and the politically savvy, mainstreaming right, who use anti-anti-Semitism to gain a minimum degree of respectability.
In this way, they can appeal to the white supremacism, less and less hidden, of more and more Americans – including even some on the Jewish Right, who are gratified by the “protection” thrown up around them by effusive comments about Jews and Israel, and don’t feel solidarity with other minority groups. More importantly, right-wing nationalist candidates can build an alliance with the respectable “little guy” who may have no taste for white nationalist mass shootings, but whose misdirected anger can be stoked to forge an electoral foundation for the rule of the kleptocrats and the super-rich.
In Hungary, combining pro-Jewish and pro-Israel declarations with anti-migrant, Islamophobic racism allowed Orbán to win an unassailable majority by diminishing the power of the notoriously racist and blatantly anti-Semitic opposition party, Jobbik. Jobbik then promptly split into a moderate, anti-anti-Semitic faction and the die-hard Jew-haters.
In America, Trump, Hawley, and their allies are performing a similar feat: to move open racism from the unacceptable fringes to the political center stage, at the small price of leaving the crudest forms of anti-Semitism to the far-right fringe. Most of the far right continue to adore the Trump project anyway, as they understand the game all too well.
Anti-Semitism is racism. But the loudly declarative opposition to Jew-hatred – anti-anti-Semitism – in the hands of a Hawley, a Trump, or a Netanyahu – itself becomes racism, as well as a tool to use against the “wrong” kind of Jew.
[This is a slightly different version of my op-ed in Haaretz, July 22, 2019. Thanks to the Haaretz op-ed editor, Esther Solomon, for her edits.]
Doug Ford’s government will attempt to amend the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities Act so that professors like me can no longer get their pay while also getting their pension. Since we must by law take our pension at the end of the year when we turn 71, delaying our pensions is not an option. Instead, the government proposes to decrease our remuneration by an amount that according to news reports could reduce our pay to zero.
The clear intent is to force professors who are active after the age of 71 into retirement. This violates the spirit and probably the letter of the Ontario Human Rights Code, which prohibits mandatory retirement.
When the Ontario Human Rights Commission intervened in favor of banning forced retirement, it noted that there was no evidence that it led directly to the hiring of younger employees, which is one of the Ford government’s mistaken arguments. Moreover, the Commission noted that discrimination against one group in favor of another (like barring women from work so there will be more jobs from men) is “offensive to human rights principles.”
This sudden about-turn would rob the education system of experienced, productive workers who should be part of a mix of faculty of different ages. It wrecks the retirement plans of people who counted on working into old age, and of their families. This noxious proposal should be stopped as a populist attempt to penalize a small group in the name of alleged efficiency and fairness, when what it would achieve is the exact opposite.
[This is a copy of my article published in Haaretz on January 14, 2019.]
A recent Hillel fundraising email claimed Jewish students in Canada felt ‘ashamed, angry and exposed’ by academics filling their classrooms with radical leftist propaganda. That’s a trope taken straight from the fear-mongering populist Right.
Illustration: University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Toronto, Canada\ MARK BLINCH/ REUTERS
Jair Bolsonaro, the newly elected president of Brazil, vows to reform his country’s educational establishment. In a recent tweet, he promised to “tackle the Marxist garbage in our schools head on. We shall succeed in forming citizens and not political militants.”
Bolsonaro was voicing a concern common to right-wing populists across the globe. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán chased Central Europe’s most respected university out of the country.
The educational system, for them, is a nest of left-wing elitists, who poison the youth by spreading “ideology of gender, legalization of abortion and drugs, and encourage the Islamic invasion of Europe.” That’s Brazilian lawmaker and third presidential child Eduardo Bolsonaro’s assessment of George Soros, nemesis of the international populist Right.
Another Soros basher is Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government, too, looks unkindly at “leftist” education: Miri Regev, the fiery culture minister, advocates “freedom of funding” for the government, which would enable it to cut support to people and groups “disloyal” to the State. Like Bolsonaro, she considers leftist culture to be political, while her own stance merely represents common sense.
Miri Regev, now minister of culture and sport, waving the flag at a women’s panel. (Amir Avramovich)
This espousal by the Israeli government of an anti-intellectualism traditionally more typical of the anti-Semitic Right is disconcerting in itself. But, sadly, its influence seems to have reached Jewish communities everywhere, including Canada, where I live.
That false moral panic – hordes of professors filling their classrooms with radical left-wing, anti-Zionist propaganda – seems to now have been espoused wholeheartedly by Ontario Hillel, which provides comfort and support to Jewish students on the province’s campuses.
Recently I received a fundraising email signed by Marc Newburgh, CEO of the organization. It was dominated by a large blue headline, “Alex wanted to sink into the floor.” Next to it was a picture of a movie screen showing flames engulfing a Star of David. A young woman, presumably Alex, was watching in a dark lecture hall, her loneliness emphasized by the empty seats around her
Alex was “a first-year student at a well-known Ontario university,” the message said, and “she attended her first art history class, where the lecture topic was Orientalism. The lights turned down, and class began with a video clip of the burning of an Israeli flag.” Alex, a Jewish student, “felt ashamed, angry, and exposed.”
Hillel Ontario fundraising email with the story of ‘Alex’ and the burning of the Israeli flag (Ivan Kalmar)
I have had an opportunity to find out more about this episode from Marc Newburgh and his advocacy officer Ilan Orzy, to whom I am sincerely grateful for their willingness to meet me. Marc and Ilan were not prepared to name any names, but they convinced me that the email was inspired by a true story.
Yes what the email implies about the nature of the incident is problematic. Fair enough, Alex is not the student’s real name. But while it was true that it was “her” first art history class, it wasn’t, contrary to what one might understand from the text, the first lecture of the course. My interlocutors said that “Alex” transferred into the class in November (classes generally start in September in Ontario.)
More importantly, it’s misleading to describe the video as a “clip of the burning of an Israeli flag.” It was a film about Edward Said, which included some people, presumably in the Middle East, burning the flag. I was given no reason to believe that either the film or the professor actually approved of the action.
I was reminded of an old Soviet joke about a local call-in radio show in the USSR’s equivalent of Chelm. “Is it true,” a caller asks, “that Boris Nikolaevich won 20,000 rubles in the lottery?” “It’s true,” the anchor answers, “but it wasn’t Boris Nikolaevich. It was Nikita Vasilevich. And,” he adds, “it wasn’t 20,000 rubles but 750. He didn’t win it but he lost it. And it wasn’t in the lottery but playing cards with his friends. But,” the anchorman concludes, “otherwise the story is completely true!”
There is, to be fair, a lot more truth in the Hillel email than that. But its conclusions are exaggerated. Though you wouldn’t know it from the email, for example, the professor apologized to “Alex” once – counselled by Hillel – she brought her concerns to him. Her fears that her academic standing would be “jeopardized” were unfounded. Hillel and the professor can both take credit for this civil resolution, which was left out of the email.
In many university subjects, an apolitical approach is impossible. It is pedagogically sound for professors to sensitively expose their political stance, in order to encourage discussion in class. An “anti-Zionist” view is no more political than an “Israel advocacy” one, nor, one might add, does it hold more potential to intimidate if misused by an unprofessional educator.
But most professors at this province’s universities are interested in stimulating their student’s minds, not in hurting their feelings. There may be a few exceptions, but this professor, evidently, was not one of them.
Protesters are silhouetted against an anti-Israel sign during a small demonstration outside the Art Gallery in downtown Vancouver, Canada. July 31, 2006. (Reuters)
The email goes on to declare loudly, in large blue letters, that “This has happened too many times, to too many students.” No, it hasn’t.
Of course, even one time is too many, but clearly that’s not the point here. Nor is it the undeniable fact that Jewish students, mainly but not only Israel advocates, have been the subject of harassment by anti-Zionist students, particularly at political events outside the classroom. The email is about professional educators and their behavior in the classroom, and that is not the same thing.
This message has crossed the border from defending concrete cases of abuse by student organizations, to joining the right-wing chorus maintaining that academics as a group intimidate students who don’t agree with them.
My request for names and dates of examples other than “Alex’s” was met by a principled refusal by Marc Newburgh. However, Ilan Orzy did volunteer the case of a Ryerson University professor, who tweeted anti-Israel messages, using the derogatory term “Zio.” “Zio” has been used as a slur against Jews indiscriminately, and although the Ryerson prof says she did not mean to do that, she should have known better. She is likely to have intimidated any Jewish students in her class – if they knew about her tweet.
This is bad, but it’s still not the same thing as if she used the slur in class, which, apparently, she did not. Outside class, professors in a free country are allowed to be as partisan as anyone. In class, they need to couch their convictions more carefully. In a few notoriously disputed cases across North America, some have failed to do so. There is no solid evidence that this is common, in Ontario or elsewhere.
To mix up cases of in-class abuse by academics with messy student protests outside is a questionable strategy. Its aim is to discredit segments of the academic community perceived as actually or potentially supporting BDS, and its effect is to align Israel advocacy with the anti-academic hysteria of the populist Right.
To drive home the point about academics, it’s not surprising that the authors of the email, who were in general rather selective, chose to mention that the lecture was on Orientalism.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left center, is received by Brazil’s President-elect Jair Bolsonaro at the military base Fort Copacabana, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Friday, Dec. 28, 2018. Leo Correa/Pool Photo via AP
“Orientalism” is a term associated today with the very Edward Saidthat the class video was about, who meant by it a largely negative portrayal of, essentially, the Arab Muslim world. He recognized, though, that “Hostility to Islam in the modern Christian West has historically gone hand in hand with, has stemmed from the same source, has been nourished at the same stream as anti-Semitism.”
But Said was a Palestinian-American and, as such, an unyielding critic of Israel. That has been enough for some to condemn his imperfect, yet enormously influential and widely admired work, as a paragon of the kind of academic balderdash that Bolsonaro calls “Marxist garbage.” Hillel’s message tunes into this evaluation of a scholar, whom some Israel advocates have mistakenly described as radically anti-Zionist, and even anti-Semitic.
This anonymous diatribe against an academic has all the structural hallmarks of a typical populist, fear-mongering conspiracy theory – unnamed victims and unnamed aggressors, plausibility (but only given certain assumptions on the part of the audience), lack of deniability due to lack of specifics, the intimation that this is happening everywhere and all too often. And then, just before the demand for a donation, the call for revengeful action: “We won’t let it happen anymore!”
This kind of presentation might inspire some right-wing donors to give to Hillel. It is likely to turn off those the money is meant for: Jewish students. They are far too smart to fall for such manipulation.
We see enough manufacturing of crisis and stoking of fear elsewhere, but Hillel has generally stayed within the bounds of reasoned argument before. I hope that they have not now decided to join a trend.
This is a copy of an article published in Haaretz, November 16, 2018.
By Ivan Kalmar and Azeezah Kanji
A favorite online meme of the white supremacist far right harks back to medieval times: Donald Trump as America’s Crusader president against the specter of a ‘Judeo-Muslim enemy’ Credit: Twitter
The social media profile of American synagogue shooter Robert Bowers is a disturbing window into the distorted reality produced by anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-refugee hysteria.
In the days before inflicting mass carnage at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Bowers shared posts warning that “it’s the filthy EVIL Jews bringing the filthy EVIL Muslims into the country!!,” and asserting that ISIS executions are actually a form of “Jewish Ritual Murder … also known as Blood Libel.” He also posted an image of 15th-century anti-Ottoman campaigner Vlad the Impaler with the epithet “make impaling great again” – fusing Donald Trump’s promise to restore American greatness through racism, with the White supremacist valorization of the notoriously brutal Vlad as a heroic defender of European Christendom against Muslims and Jews.
Neo-Nazi post alleging plot by ‘filthy evil Jews’ to bring ‘filthy evil Muslims into the U.S. retweeted by Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bower. Credit: Twitter
Bowers’ fever-dream of nefarious Jewish-Muslim collusion continues a long tradition of intertwining anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim animus. Centuries of European Christian polemic depicted “the Jew [as] the theological (and internal) enemy” and “the Muslim [as] the political (and external) enemy,” as Columbia University professor Gil Anidjar explicates in his book The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy.
Some medieval European authors portrayed Islam as a perverse reincarnation of the “law of Moses,” and there are clear parallels between the classic Christian notion of “the Old Testament God” as a vengeful, unloving, “obscene Father,” and similar Christian representations of the Muslim “Allah.” The ruthless authoritarianism of this dual trope of Jehovah/Allah was reflected in western Christian visions of the typical Muslim ruler, described as an almighty oppressor. This “oriental despot” figure still underlies some of the current Islamophobic portrayal of Islam as the enemy of secular democracy.
Conspiracy theories of anti-Christian collaboration between Muslims and Jews were recurrent in medieval Europe. Jewish communities were accused, for example, of aiding Muslim troops against the Christian Visigoths in Spain in the 8th century, working with the Fatimid Empire to destroy the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in the 11th century, and plotting with the Muslim king of Granada in the 14th century to infect Christendom with leprosy. The accusation that Jews or Muslims wish to dominate the world is ironic, since it was Christianity that first used the worship of the One God as the justification for building a world-wide empire.
A white supremacist wears a shirt with the slogan “European Brotherhood” at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S., August 12, 2017.\ Credit: JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS
A common stock of stereotypes was applied to dehumanize and demonize Jewish and Muslim populations. Both Muslims and Jews were represented as monstrous cannibals, who literally eat away at humanity – even though it was Christian soldiers who were revealed to have consumed the flesh of their adversaries during the Crusades. Popular calumnies denigrating Jews as well-poisoners and Christ-killers were also transferred to Muslims. Medieval and Renaissance paintings of the crucifixion of Christ anachronistically featured Muslim characters wearing turbans and waving the crescent flag alongside Jewish figures, while medieval English mystery plays described Jesus’s natal enemy King Herod as a “Mahumetan.”
Due to the conflation of Jew and Muslim, calls for Crusades on Muslim-held lands frequently led to pogroms against Jewish communities within Europe. In 1215, the Catholic Church’s Fourth Lateran Council imposed the same clothing restrictions on Jews and Muslims, “as if the two infidel races were halves of a single body of Semitic aliens,” in the words of medieval literature specialist Geraldine Heng.
Contemporary right-wing extremist movements in North America and Europe are fond of evoking medieval history to advance current racist agendas. White supremacist activists don Crusader costumes at rallies, employ Crusader slogans like “Deus vult” (“God wills it”), and circulate memes picturing Donald Trump as a Crusading knight.
Far right nationalists march on Poland’s National Independence Day in Warsaw, Poland. Their banner reads ‘Deus Vult’, a Christian ultranationalist slogan. Nov. 11, 2017. Credit: Czarek Sokolowski,AP
President Trump’s lamentation in the wake of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting – that “we just don’t seem to learn from the past” – rings hypocritically cheap, when it is he and his supporters who are trying to mold the present into their vicious and exclusionary vision of the past.
At a 2014 conference hosted at the Vatican, future Trump White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon cited medieval history to bolster his narrative of an “outright war” between the “Judeo-Christian West” and “jihadist Islamic fascism”: “If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing. I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours [the sites of two well-known medieval battles], or other places. It bequeathed to us the great institution that is the church of the West.”
Like the call to Make American Great Again (MAGA), what could be labelled the Make America Medieval Again (MAMA) fantasy aims to recreate an imagined past that never existed. The image of a uniformly White Judeo-Christian Europe united against Islam is a figment of modern supremacist ideology, not an accurate rendition of medieval reality. Historically, it was not Judaism and Christianity that were inextricably connected, but Jews and Muslims as the targets of animosity.
While modern-day overt White supremacists like Robert Bowers continue to openly proclaim their loathing for both Muslims and Jews, Trump and Co purport to renounce anti-Semitism with revisionist references to “Judeo-Christian” civilization and uncritical support for Israel’s policies against Palestinians.
But despite this disavowal, Trump’s anti-Semitic dog-whistle comes through loud and clear. During his presidential campaign, for example, Trump ran ads vilifying philanthropist George Soros and several other Jewish figures as representatives of predatory “global special interests.” This is a common theme in coded anti-Jewish discourse, going back to the infamous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zions, which at the beginning of the twentieth century blamed Jews for plotting to destroy Christian civilization, through controlling both global finance and the political left.
Hungarian government poster portraying financier George Soros and saying ‘Don’t let George Soros have the last laugh’ is seen at a tram stop in Budapest, Hungary July 6, 2017. Credit: STAFF/REUTERS
Bannon’s Breitbart News Network and other right-wing publications regularly smear Soros for funding projects to address Islamophobia and support Muslim (as well as non-Muslim) refugees. FrontPage Magazine – edited by David Horowitz, whose “freedom center” groomed “some of the most powerful and influential figures in the Trump administration” according to the Washington Post – described Soros as an “enabler of Islam which has been expanding by conquest and deception for 1,400 years.”
According to our research, the “charge” that Soros supports Muslims was first raised by a Russian propaganda site, which blamed him for financing the huge migration of Muslims to Europe in 2015, in the wake of the Syrian civil war. It was immediately repeated in the Polish edition of the Prison Planet site run by Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory-peddling dean of the American far right. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, then made it a centerpiece of his government’s domestic propaganda, placing Soros at the head of forces supporting a mainly Muslim migrant wave that will deal a “final blow to Christian culture.” The Trump-propagated canard that Soros financed the caravan of Central American migrants heading for the United States is thus a mutation of what was originally an Islamophobic as well as an antisemitic charge. As if to drive the point home, Trump felt the need to say, falsely, that the caravan included people from the Middle East.
Community members hold candles at a vigil for the victims of the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting at Cambridge City Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 30, 2018. Credit: AFP
Soros was the first to receive a pipe bomb from fanatical Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc, and was maligned by Robert Bowers on social media. In the post immediately preceding his deadly rampage, Bowers attacked another Jewish target accused, like Soros, of facilitating infiltration by Muslims and other supposedly dangerous migrants: HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, an organization that actually aids immigrants of all faiths. (It happens to have helped one of us, Ivan Kalmar, to immigrate to the US.) It is easy to see in the context that the immigration that was, according to Bowers, causing “my people” getting “slaughtered,” was part of the same threat to white supremacy as the Muslim migrants “invading” Europe.
In this uncertain world, the Judeo-Muslim enemy reappears as the alleged culprit to those who feverishly seek to protect their precarious privileges against all sorts of enemies: the black and the brown, the unemployed, environmentalists, LGBT people, women organizing against sexual harassment and violence. One way to explain it all is to resurrect as the cosmic origin of all evil the medieval spectre of the Judeo-Muslim enemy: the dehumanized object of Bowers’ unholy hate.
Ivan Kalmar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He has written widely about how Jews and Muslims have been represented in related ways in western Christian cultural history. He co-edited, with Derek J. Penslar, the book Orientalism and the Jews, and is the author of Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power. His current research is on Islamophobia in East Central Europe, and on the origins and continuing spread of the anti-Soros conspiracy theory.
Azeezah Kanji is a legal academic and journalist based in Toronto. She is Director of Programming at Noor Cultural Centre, a Muslim religious, educational, and social justice institution (www.noorculturalcentre.ca).
Rabbi Marmur’s opinion piece (“Behind the Rise of Anti-Semitism in Europe”) in The Toronto Star mentions some of the horrendous violence by Muslims against Jews, especially in France. These acts are, sadly, well-known and have been loudly decried by most of the French political leadership. They led to support demonstrations in which French Jews were joined by non-Jewish citizens, including Muslims. Dow Marmur’s intent is, clearly, not to reveal the horrors that are already known, but to go “behind” the rise of anti-Semitism to reveal that it is really due to Nazi-style antisemitism being “Islamized.” This is actually also a very well-known though controversial theory, and it is a limited half-truth at best. Anti-Semitic Muslims are clearly misinterpreting both traditional and most modern Islam, but more importantly, they are misinterpreting the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, which is the elephant in the room that Rabbi Marmur judiciously does not touch. It is this poisonous conflict that has not only introduced anti-Semitism among Muslims, but also Islamophobia among Jews. Certainly, there are Islamists, including imams, who have adapted anti=Semitic language to Islam, but there are proportionately no more of these than there are Jews, including rabbis, who have adapted Islamophobic language to Judaism. True, some anti-Semitic Muslims have been more violent in Europe than Islamophobic Jews, but that is probably because Muslims are far more likely to live in violent slums, where anger more easily bubbles up as overt aggression. The perpetrators of some of the most hair-raising violence expressed the belief that they were attacking Jews who were “rich.” But beyond class issues, anti-Semitism among Muslims should be associated with geopolitics, not religion. So should be Jewish Islamophobia. Neither is justified, both are appalling, and both are fed by the Israel/Palestine conflict. To be portrayed fairly, both need to be mentioned (and fought) together.
“We want the social revolution in order to bring about the national revolution,” proclaimed Georg Strasser, an early Nazi, to the German Reichstag in 1922, “We National Socialists want the economic revolution involving the nationalization of the economy.” In circumstances that are not yet entirely, clear, Strasser was killed in his prison cell twelve years later, during the “Night of the Long Knives.” This was an operation orchestrated by Hitler, and which cemented his role as a dictator. Its purpose was to get rid, through murder, of his opponents. Most of these belonged to the “brown shirts” or SA, the paramilitary unit that had brought Hitler to power. Now that he was at the helm of the State, he needed to distance himself from the anti-capitalist rhetoric that he once himself espoused, and thus from the most anti-capitalist among his radical supporters. “National socialism” now became socialist only in name. The move made Hitler more than acceptable to the German political and economic mainstream. The army declared its loyalty. The judicial system justified the murders unambiguously. The industrial-military-financial complex was reassured that it had nothing to fear, maintaining and indeed increasing its power at the minimal cost of its Jewish members.
Since the beginning of the Trump era, comparisons to pre-Nazi and early Nazi Germany have been popping up instinctively. The inevitable parallel between Trump’s Islamophobic and other racism and prewar German antisemitism was widely taken up by journalists, scholars, and the public.
The Trump-Bannon feud may suggest a new comparison: Trump is to Bannon as Hitler was to Strasser and the SA. The publication of Michael Wolff’s ascerbic book, Fire and Fury, heavily based on interviews with Bannon, has given the Trump-Bannon split an irreversible finality. But all the celebrity-talk style discussion of the affair misses the very substantial fact that their conflict is political. Trump just emerged triumphant from Congress passing, with his support and blessing, a tax reform bill that by most accounts constituted a gift to the rich. Bannon had advocated a 40% tax on the richest, to pay for tax breaks for the middle class. As Strasser was Hitler’s “socialist,” so was Bannon Trump’s.
Like all comparisons between Trump and the Nazis, this one is only partly valid at best, and not only because Trump is not Hitler and no one was killed. It’s also that Bannon is not Strasser. For as Trump was indeed moving to become more respectable by distancing himself from Bannon on his right, Bannon (unlike the “left-wing” Nazis) was himself trying to become more acceptable to the mainstream. For example, in a pattern followed by Trump as well as some European leaders moving from the right to the “center,” Bannon, too, has lately espoused anti-anti-Semitism and beats his chest in support of Israel.
This may pay off some day, should Trump’s personal craziness and his coziness with Wall Street finally lose him his voters. Then Bannon can step forward as Trump’s serious alter ego who will not betray Trump’s original working and lower middle class base. Either that, or he has sentenced himself to oblivion by falling into the gap between the president and the even more radical Right.
How do we know that Bannon has been banned for good from the right wing of the Right? Frank anti-Semitism has now become the line dividing the right, between the extreme become mainstream and the recalcitrant ultras. And the latter have already declared that Bannon was in cahoots with the Jews
The 2015-16 “European migration crisis” and its aftermath have given the centuries-old relationship between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia yet another twist. The more than a million, mostly Muslim, arrivals in the European Union have given mainstream politicians an opportunity to generate and exploit racist, xenophobic, and ultranationalist urges in the public, of the sort that had previously been the exclusive preserve of the extreme right. This successful vote-getting strategy hinged on disassociating ethnoreligious hatred, which Islamophobia is, from its most stigmatized example in Europe: anti-Semitism. Professing a fondness for “Judeo-Christian” values and for Israel became de rigueur for Islamophobic politicians wishing to remain, or become, “respectable.” The increasingly populist Israeli government has happily supported this trend, turning a blind eye to troublesome manifestations of past or present anti-Semitism among its new-found friends.
Nowhere has this process been clearer than in Hungary, infamous for “solving” the migration crisis by erecting a wire fence along its borders. In Hungary, anti-anti-Semitism and support for Israel is a sharp ideological dividing line – and perhaps indeed the only dividing line – between the governing “mainstream” FIDESZ party of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and the notorious far-right Jobbik party, which remains unrepentantly anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist. This does not mean that classic, old-fashioned anti-Semitism is disappearing among the rank and file. Barely hidden under the cover of condemning anti-Semitism (and blaming it on Muslims) and of support for Israel, old anti-Semitic stereotypes thrive. Most obvious among these is promoted by FIDESZ’s hate campaign against the Hungarian-Jewish American financier, George Soros, and his support for NGOs and institutions that Orbán associates with “cosmopolitan” liberalism. The government officially refers to an imaginary “Soros plan,” allegedly aiming to de-Christianize and denationalize Europe, including Hungary. The parallels to old-fashioned anti-Jewish conspiracy theories are clear, even if the leaders of FIDESZ disingenuously pretend to be blind to Soros’ Jewishness and how much their voters are aware of it.
Crypto-anti-Semitism thus combines with anti-anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, in a discourse whose main target is not as much the Jews or even the Muslims as, ultimately, liberal democracy. Orbánism, or as Orbán himself calls it “illiberal democracy,” has gained friends among the enemies of open society world-wide, among the European and American Right but also in Israel and even in Muslim Turkey.
In Europe, top leaders in Austria and Bavaria are Orbán’s friends. Putin is a good buddy. The worst thing to do would be for the world to imagine that what is going on in Hungary is simply a manifestation of (wrongly) alleged East European obscurantism, isolated from and with no repercussions for the West.
The 2015-16 “European migration crisis” and its aftermath have given the centuries-old relationship between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia yet another twist. The more than a million, mostly Muslim, arrivals in the European Union have given mainstream politicians an opportunity to generate and exploit racist, xenophobic, and ultranationalist urges in the public, of the sort that had previously been the exclusive preserve of the extreme right. This successful vote-getting strategy hinged on disassociating ethnoreligious hatred, which Islamophobia is, from its most stigmatized example in Europe: anti-Semitism. Professing a fondness for “Judeo-Christian” values and for Israel became de rigueur for Islamophobic politicians wishing to remain, or become, “respectable.” The increasingly populist Israeli government has happily supported this trend, turning a blind eye to troublesome manifestations of past or present anti-Semitism among its new-found friends.
The Wellington Review 