Anti-Semitism’s Straw Man
Stories We Tell Ourselves or Stories We Are Ourselves, Part Nine
“What an American Jewish child inherits, according to novelist Philip Roth, is ‘no body of law, no body of learning and no language, and finally, no Lord . . . but a kind of psychology; and the psychology can be translated in three words: ‘Jews are better.’” —Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry
This is what Wikipedia has to say about Holocaust Denial in 2024:
In December 1991, the American Historical Association, the oldest and largest society of historians and teachers of history in the United States, issued the following statement: “The American Historical Association Council strongly deplores the publicly reported attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust. No serious historian questions that the Holocaust took place” (emphasis added).
No serious historian. Got that?
The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity defines Holocaust denial as “a new form of anti-Semitism, but one that hinges on age-old motifs” (p. 45). The Anti-Defamation League stated in 1998: “Holocaust denial is a contemporary form of the classic anti-Semitic doctrine of the evil, manipulative and threatening world Jewish conspiracy.” French historian Valérie Igounet wrote in a 1998 issue of Le Monde Diplomatique: “Holocaust denial is a convenient polemical substitute for anti-Semitism.”
The stakes are rising: no serious historian, and no humanitarian, civilized historian, either.
German political scientist Matthias Küntzel took it a step still further, in 2006, in an essay entitled “Judeophobia and the Denial of the Holocaust in Iran”:
Whoever talks of the “so-called” Holocaust suggests that over ninety percent of the world’s media and university professorships are controlled by Jews and thereby cut off from the “real” truth. In this way, precisely that sort of genocidal hatred gets incited that helped prepare the way for the Shoah. Every denial of the Holocaust thus tacitly contains an appeal to repeat it (emphasis added).
Got it? No serious, humanitarian, non-genocidal historian questions the Holocaust. Ever.
Küntzel does at least explain the popular reasoning that Holocaust denial = Anti-Semitism, by subtly but significantly altering the formula to Holocaust denial leads to anti-Semitism. Not that it is either/or: as I have already commented, there certainly does seem to be a progression of belief, as described by Küntzel here, for some people. And I would agree that it is problematic.
Küntzel takes it a step beyond any sort of reasonable logic with his last line, however: just as if anti-Semitism must always involve or lead to a desire to exterminate Jews. (There are no half-measures among anti-anti-semites.)
Also, his main argument (as quoted here, I haven’t read the full essay) is partially, if not largely, made of straw, because it assumes that any organized attempt (“90% of the world’s media”) to maintain a false narrative around the Holocaust™ can only be laid at the doorstep of Jews. As if there weren’t other interests that could (and do) benefit from that narrative, and from the industry that has grown up around it (including, or especially, the US-backed war machine focused on the Middle East).
It’s highly ironic, because Küntzel’s “Jew-centric” view demonstrates exactly the sort of simple/literal-minded thinking that he accuses conspiracy theorists of—and with the same result. It attributes a (hypothetical) global control of the media to a single racial-religious category.
And what is a strawman, after all, but a burnt offering?
Why (Is There So Much) Anti-Semitism?
“Beyond this, however, the Holocaust framework apprehended anti-Semitism as a strictly irrational Gentile loathing of Jews. It precluded the possibility that animus toward Jews might be grounded in a real conflict of interests (more on this later). Invoking The Holocaust was therefore a ploy to delegitimize all criticism of Jews: such criticism could only spring from pathological hatred.” —Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (p. 37)
The official (ADL) answer to the question “Why Anti-Semitism?” is, essentially and eternally, circular: hostility against the Jews exists because of anti-Semites. Gentiles are just bad. They are envious of the Jews’ specialness, and want it for themselves.
The official explanation for anti-Semitism is, in a word, racist.
It is also somehow self-contradicting, because to cry anti-Semitism requires not to acknowledge that Jews might actually have some kind of unusual social “clout.” They must be seen, above all, as victims of anti-Semitism. And, or but, it is from their sustained status as victims that their power derives. Round and round the vicious circle goes.
Finally, then, “Jew-envy” on the part of Gentiles remains unsatisfactory as an explanation for so-called anti-Semitism; and it should likewise be unsatisfactory to Jews, Israelis, Zionists, and the staunchest of philo-Semites.
Norman Finkelstein is one Jew who has been unafraid to go out on this limb looking for a real answer, most notably in The Holocaust Industry, where he quotes the celebrated book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, by (the celebrated, Jewish) Hannah Arendt:
“If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument. The more surprising aspect of this explanation is that it has been adopted by a great many unbiased historians and by an even greater number of Jews” (Finkelstein, p. 51).
Translation: the propagation of the idea that anti-Semitism is and always has been prevalent among all peoples of the world, is itself anti-Semitic! (As well as anti-Gentile.)
Finkelstein slides a little further out on the limb by quoting the German Chancellor emeritus of The Jewish Theological Seminary: “A gifted, well-organized, and largely successful minority can inspire conflicts that derive from objective inter-group tensions,” Ismar Schorsch points out, although these conflicts are “often packaged in anti-Semitic stereotypes” (p. 52).
Some people might see the above as the understatement of the 20th century.
But even Jews talking about genuine historical (non-psychological) reasons for centuries of hostility towards Jews—reasons independent of the specter of “anti-Semitism,” i.e., as causes rather than effects of it—must be extremely careful never to overstate their case, lest they be accused of self-loathing (anti-Semitism).
From Finkelstein, Arendt, and Schorsh, it is barely a hop, skip, and a jump to Zionist Bernard Lazare’s Anti-Semitism, its History and Causes (L'Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes, 1984), which begins with the following passage (chapter one, second paragraph):
If [anti-Semitism] had been shown towards the Jews at one time or in one country only, it would be easy to account for the local causes of this sentiment. But this race has been the object of hatred with all the nations amidst whom it ever settled. Inasmuch as the enemies of the Jews belonged to divers races, as they dwelled far apart from one another, were ruled by different laws and governed by opposite principles; as they had not the same customs and differed in spirit from one another, so that they could not possibly judge alike of any subject, it must needs be that the general causes of antisemitism have always resided in Israel itself, and not in those who antagonized it. This does not mean that justice was always on the side of Israel’s persecutors, or that they did not indulge in all the extremes born of hatred; it is merely asserted that the Jews were themselves, in part, at least, the cause of their own ills.
Before you start to panic, relax: Wikipedia assures us that Lazare’s book is considered anti-Semitic by present day standards.
What a relief, heh?!
(Over the Paywall: What is a Jew Anyway? and Why You Should Never Call a Jew a Jew)