[Marxism] "anti-Semitic" attack

[Ruthless Critic of All that Exists]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:16:44 -0600
> Dan Russell <proletariandan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I think the point trying to be made, which I agree with, is that Marxists
>> should be careful not to be seen as downplaying anti-Semitism
>
> Gotta disagree. Anti-Semitism is a thoroughly marginal
> and inconsequential force in the modern world. Far from taking
> it seriously, I think it's important to laugh it out of court
> whenever somebody starts beating that old drum. There's always
> a reactionary agenda behind it. Taking it seriously just yields
> ground unnecessarily.

By Jacques Hersh

<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/hersh220209.html>

"It may be said that a Jewish "Glasnost" has begun.  This Glasnost,
unlike the one that eventually led to the end of the Soviet Union, is
not initiated from above by elite reformers, but for the most part
from below, by countless ordinary Jews no longer fearful of purges
organized by the apparatchiks of the organizations that claim to
represent them.

The incipient Jewish Glasnost may meet an untimely end, however, if
new anti-Semitism is allowed to grow.

In its early years, Zionism hardly resonated among the Jewish working
classes, nor did it attract many supporters among liberal Jewish
professionals or traditional religious Jews.  Most politically
conscious Jews who searched for a movement for self-emancipation found
themselves in socialist movements of one kind or another.  It was a
massive growth of anti-Semitism in the midst of a great capitalist
crisis, culminating in Nazism and the Holocaust, that began to shift
the fortune of the Zionist movement.

Conversely, it was the actual waning of anti-Semitism in the West
after WW2, especially its dramatic decline through an upsurge of
movements against racism in the long sixties, that laid the ground for
a Jewish Glasnost today.

[...]  The Jewish Glasnost is the best weapon against the Zionists who
endeavor to make all Jews identify with Israel and defend it at all
times, whether its conduct is right or wrong.  For the Jewish Glasnost
to succeed, however, gentiles on the Left must see to it that none
among the critics of Israel shall ever conflate world Jewry with the
political class of Israel."

[ Jacques Hersh is professor emeritus of Aalborg University, Denmark
and former head of the Research Center on Development and
International Relations there.]

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