It’s become normal for far-right parties in Europe that run on xenophobia and ethnonationalist themes, including the AfD (Alternative for Germany) in Germany and the FPÖ (“Freedom” Party of Austria) to claim they are friends of Israel.
The basic conceptual formula is “We hate Muslims, and Muslims hate Jews, so we can’t possibly be anti-Semitic and, hey, we support Israel behaving as brutally as they want toward Muslims, so we’re pro-Israel.”
Back in the late 1950s and 1960s when the John Birch Society was new – sadly, it still exists but in a rump form, though its fanaticism has been “mainstreamed” in the Republican Party’s Trumpism – they based their own organization on what they took to be the structure and methods of the Communist Party. They saw the Communist Party in the US in total McCarthyism terms as pure evil but devilishly effective (?!?). So, of course, they tried to make themselves a mirror image of it.
The formula above for European xenophobes – who strongly tend to be actually anti-Semitic and to worship “traditional” gender roles and to adapt a Social Darwinist racial attitude – is actually very similar to the Birchers’ approach. Of course, learning from what the Other Side is doing is normal in all politics. But when it starts off from a conspiracist, stereotyped, demonizing caricature of what the Other Side actually is, the results can be pretty bizarre.
An unfortunately familiar American example is how Trumpistas use the famous line from Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington speech of 1963, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." King’s four children, of course, were African-American like him. And in 1963, everyone including the many whites who dearly hated MLK knew that most white Americans did judge his children and all other Black people by “the color of their skin.” Those judgments had been so deeply embedded in American law, particularly but by no means only in the segregated South, that the Nazis literally modelled their infamous 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws on US segregation and immigration laws.
Today’s “anti-Woke” (asleep?) conservatives claim that what King meant was that nobody should ever even notice race. So when equal-rights advocates observe that racial discrimination is going on and can be clearly documented, that means they are looking at some people as being part of a race and therefore people who object to racial discrimination are the Real Racists. It’s idiotic and even childlike (in the non-charming sense),
And since that reference touches on Holocaust territory, let’s be clear that Hitler and the National Socialists eventually took their racism and anti-Semitism to a level beyond anything it reached in the US after 1935. Hitler also admired the historic Americans handling of the native population of North America, which is important to remember even if it gives the heebie-jeebies to critics of “post-colonial” analysis.
The IHRA definition of anti-Semitism
The US House of Representatives just passed a bill that incorporates what is known as the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism1, which has been used as justification for equating criticism of Israel or the Israeli government or of the ideology of Zionism with anti-Semitism. The New Republic on Substack recently summarized the background2:
H.R. 6090 would require the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to use the definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association in 2016 when investigating complaints of bias at institutions that receive federal funds. That means college campuses (even private universities like Columbia receive federal grants and so on).
The IHRA definition, debated for years, has been adopted by around 20 countries, including the U.K., Canada, Germany, and more. Its definition is mostly nonproblematic, but to Nadler, one aspect of it threatened to squelch free speech on campuses. "You could read it as saying that criticism of Israel is antisemitic," he said.
And this is where we get to the question of the Republicans’ motivation in introducing this bill. The IHRA definition is not without controversy, precisely because of some language about criticism of Israel that many consider blurry. Two other definitions of antisemitism have been promulgated—the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus Document. Choosing to rely solely on one of the three definitions struck some critics as concerning. Even the author of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, has become a sharp critic of using it with respect to speech on college campuses, and Nadler told me that Stern opposed this bill.
But: The IHRA definition did have a notable champion in the United States: Donald Trump. As president in 2019, he signed an executive order to protect Jewish students under the Civil Rights Act, using the IHRA definition. Sounds good and uncontroversial, but numerous critics, including progressive Jewish groups, worried about its potential chilling effect on campuses. Stern, writing in The Guardian [3], argued that his definition "was created primarily so that European data collectors could know what to include and exclude.… It was never intended to be a campus hate speech code, but that’s what Donald Trump’s executive order accomplished this week." [my emphasis]
Stern himself recently discussed his view of the matter in some detail4:
In Germany and Austria in particular, the government and political parties have used their aid to Israel and political support for Israel’s position in foreign policy as a key sign that they have rejected the legacy that produced the Shoah (Holocaust). Which has lead to unusual measures against demonstrations and political meetings critical of the Netanyahu governments war-and-starvation policies against Gaza civilians. Yanis Varoufakis speculates, “My hypothesis is that Germany’s political class has a penchant for national catechisms that unite its members behind a common will: net exports as Germany’s strength; China as German industry’s playground; Russia as its source of cheap energy; and Zionism as proof that it has turned a page, morally.”5
One of Austria’s major daily newspapers, Die Presse, on Saturday devoted most of its front section to articles on the protests against Israel war crimes, with the overall theme of “The Anti-Israel Wave seizes Europe’s Colleges and Universities” with this lead photo:
The front-page opinion piece by Christian Ultsch declares, “The world is not black-and-white like the Palestinian cloth [keffiyeh].” The keffiyeh is a bogeyman symbol for Islamophobes.6
Keffiyehs are not all black-and-white, by the way.7
He concludes his article with a standard “pro-Israel” talking point: “Why don't [Türkiye's President Tayyip] Erdoğan and pro-Palestinian sympathizers in universities, for all the partially justified criticism of Israel, demand the capitulation and the withdrawal of Hamas? Because they are applying a double standard?”8
Well, Erdoğan is the head of a state with its own web of international relations and interests, and therefore presumably measures by multiple standards like every other head of state. As for those and pro-Palestinian sympathizers in universities, who the heck is he talking about? Protesters against aid to ongoing war crimes by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government? To university “We Love Hamas” clubs (of which one may surely doubt if there are many such clubs in Europe and America)?
Another front-section article by Elisabeth Hofer in its first paragraph credulously reports the implied claim by the head of an Austrian students’ organization that it is common in the antiwar demonstrations in American universities to call for “Bomb Tel Aviv” and “intifada,” both of which he says means a call to kill Jews. The first presumably would mean that, although if any of the Jewish student activists leading the university protests call for bombing Tel Aviv, it’s not something I’ve seen reported. “Intifada,” of course, is the Arabic word for “uprising” and does not mean “kill Jews.”
Hofer also quotes sources criticizing the University of Vienna for inviting Francesca Albanese to speak at a presentation titled, “Genocidal War and Complicity? The War on Gaza and Western Responsibilities.” Albanese is the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. Hofer stenographically reports that a well-known Austrian Jewish leader calls her a “notorious Israel-demonizer and antisemite,” and also that the University defended inviting her. This side says, the other side says: and if we only had a reporter to actually check the claims, we might have an idea of how accurate they are.
Another article is devoted to reporting on an interview with a Johns Hopkins political scientist, Benjamin Ginsberg, who explains that the American students protesting against US aid to Netanyahu’s war-and-hunger campaign against Gazans don’t know anything about history. And they also have bad parents: “These kids have liberal parents,” he says. It’s just like those dang student protests in 1968, he goes on to say. Only in the last two paragraphs do we have any suggestion (but not from Ginsberg) that the protesters might actually be motivated by a concern over their government’s foreign policy.
Ginsberg is a conservative who this 2024 bio at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute describes: “He served as national counsel to the 2000 and 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaigns and played a central role in the 2000 Florida recount.” And: “He represented four of the last six Republican Presidential nominees.”9
In other words, lousy reporting on the American student protests against US aid for the war on Gaza is sadly not limited to some of the lazier American establishment press reporting we’re getting.
Amiri, Farnoush (2024): House passes bill to expand definition of antisemitism amid growing campus protests over Gaza war. AP News 05/02/2024. <https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinian-campus-protests-columbia-congress-df4ba95dae844b3a8559b4b3ad7e058a> (Accessed: 2024-04-05).
A Dem’s Principled Opposition to a Grandstanding GOP Antisemitism Bill. The New Republic Substack 05/03/2024. (Accessed: 2024-04-05).
Stern, Kenneth (2019): I drafted the definition of antisemitism. Rightwing Jews are weaponizing it. The Guardian 12/13/2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect> (Accessed: 2024-04-05).
He Helped Define “Antisemitism”; Now He Says the Term Is Being Weaponized. Amanpour and Company YouTube channel 05/02/2024.
Varoufakis, Yanis (2024): Banned by Germany. Project Syndicate 04/30/2024. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-germany-bans-and-arrests-israel-critics-including-jews-by-yanis-varoufakis-2024-04> (Accessed: 2024-04-05).
Sainato, Michael (2023): Three Palestinian students shot and wounded in Vermont, police say. The Guardian 11/26/2023. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/26/palestinian-students-shot-wounded-vermont> (Accessed: 2024-04-05).
Sottile, Zoe (2024): The keffiyeh explained: How this scarf became a Palestinian national symbol. CNN 11/28/2024. <https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/28/style/style-palestinian-keffiyeh-explained/index.html> (Accessed: 2024-04-05).
Sainato, Michael (2023): Three Palestinian students shot and wounded in Vermont, police say. The Guardian 11/26/2023. <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/26/palestinian-students-shot-wounded-vermont> (Accessed: 2024-04-05).
Benjamin L. Ginsberg. UVA Karsh Institute of Democracy 2024. <https://karshinstitute.virginia.edu/person/benjamin-l-ginsberg> (Accessed: 2024-05-05).
"The US House of Representatives just passed a bill that incorporates what is known as the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism1, which has been used as justification for equating criticism of Israel or ...of the ideology of Zionism with anti-Semitism". 📢