Recently I spent a day typing a lot of updates on this blog relevant to Sinn Fein and anti-semitism. Then, about 8 hours later when I woke up, one of the first things I saw on the Web was a
story about a SF TD (MP in the South) being accused of anti-Semitism. I couldn’t fucking believe it. First, there are two more stories you might want to read (if you feel like subbing to the Irish-Times)
here and
here.
I was of course curious what exactly the tweets had said. Even though SF (and possibly Cronin as an individual) seems to be admitting that they were anti-semitic, I wanted to know because supporters of the Palestinians are often falsely accused of being anti-Semitic but even some of the progressive ones ARE anti-Semitic. So I found the Irish news site that broke the story. An update to their original story is
here. The story that has the details of the controversial tweets is
here.
First, the first article linked to says:
“She had previously made the news this past weekend when the Sunday Times reported that she had accused Israeli intelligence of interfering in the recent UK election to prevent the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister. Mr. Corbyn himself had been accused of anti-semitism in the run-in to that election.”
I haven’t followed the anti-Semitism controversy in the Labour Party very much. I DO know that one of the most outspoken critics (in terms of how big they think the problem is) of anti-Semitism in the party is also VERY supportive of the Palestinians. On the other hand, a friend who is a very solid opponent of anti-Semitism says that the accusations are pro-Israel nonsense. I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel IS involved, but at the same time the allegation about the Mossad mentioned above comes from someone who I think IS or WAS an anti-Semite.
Why do I think she is or was an anti-Semite? Let me quote and discuss each of the actually or allegedly anti-Semitic tweets.
“Israel have taken Nazism to a new level, by showing they can get away with it.”
This is the most solidly anti-Semitic of the tweets. Calling Israel Nazi is anti-Semitic. First, a friend points out that some Jews do that. That’s different. It’s fairly comparable to black people in America using the n-word. Here are my thoughts about this:
1. It's not too different from calling people of color in America racist.
2. You can call Jewish people fascists, but not Nazis.
3. If you want to say that Israeli policy towards the Palestinians could shift towards the genocidal, fine, but don't call them Nazis (for info about how horrible Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is, see
this and many of the articles you’ll find
here).
4. If you absolutely insist on comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, write a detailed, argumentative, well-documented 10,000 word essay, not a tweet.
From the Gript story: “Deputy Cronin once responded to a message containing an image of a large number of monkeys sitting at computers by saying that she had thought it was an image of the inside of the Israeli embassy.”
The Israeli embassy represents a fairly democratic state and the tweet was four years before the controversial
“Jewish Nation State” law was adopted. Although this fairly democratic state is also engaged in something colonial, it, for better or worse is defined as the Jewish State. Many would say that’s the problem and I kind of agree (I will soon do a post about that and related matters (UPDATE 3/8/20 That post is
here) and for those of you who think I am a hypocrite because I’m an Irish republican, see the brief essay at the bottom of this post), but it is 80% Jewish and although, yes this is also a problem, the State is politically even more Jewish in terms of who has power. The Jewish population in Israel is roughly between 35% and 44% of the world’s Jewish population and probably another 30%-38% (that is, a large majority of Jewish-Americans) identify with Israel (and probably 50-75% of the rest of the world’s Jewish population identify with Israel). And the best Cronin can do is the tweet described above. It shows a complete lack of willingness to take the Jewish population seriously and treat their representatives with some respect. An embassy is more a representative of a State (in the European sense) than a Government. So it’s not Netanyahu she’s making fun of. I am saying something similar to what I said in item #4 when I discussed calling Israel Nazi, but I certainly find substantive criticism of Israel much more acceptable than calling it Nazi, it's just that this tweet was not substantive criticism.
The next example of anti-Semitism is something she re-tweeted that I almost dismissed as misunderstood by her critics- I thought it couldn’t have been anti-Semitic because it criticized Hitler. It said, according to Gript, that Hitler was a pawn of the Jewish-founded Rothschild bank. Not only was the bank owned by a Jewish family, it is frequently referred to by people who are definitely anti-semites. The thing is, this claim is saying that Jews were responsible for the Holocaust or POSSIBLY is saying that the Holocaust didn’t happen.
According to Gript.ie and some of the screen shots they show in their article, she believes strongly that banks control the world and at least once mentions a bank owned by the Rothschild family. She also tweeted that “those wars were instigated and funded by banks.” There is an anti-Semitic stereotype of bankers as Jewish and Jews as bankers. I don’t know what the stats are about religion and bankers, but if you look at a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, only 44% of Jewish-American households had a yearly income of $100,000 or more. Yes, that is higher than other religious groups, but how many bankers don’t earn A LOT more than that? I mean, if a banker’s household is earning $100,000 a year, they must be a a horrible banker. And even if we focus on those Jews earning as much as successful bankers earn, what about all of them who get rich from various other businesses such as retail, manufacturing, real estate, Hollywood, the media, etc? Also, you need a college degree to be a banker, and to one extent or another (depending on the bank and how senior the position is) you need a graduate degree, and I’m sure many people at the very top have a Ph.D. According to the PRC, in 2016, 59% of Jewish-Americans had a college degree. Ahead of them were Hindus at 77%, and Unitarian Universalists at 67%; tied with Jews were Anglicans at 59% and right below them were Episcopalians at 56%, and of course all the other religious groups and Atheists were below that. First, like I said, to one extent or another you need a graduate degree to be a banker. Second, finance is only one of roughly 100-150 degrees available in America. Anti-Semites would say that there is some kind of strong integration among Jewish people that connects the bankers and the non-banker (ridicuously vast) majority. Even during the Nazi era there was division among Jews. A minority wanted to fight, another minority collaborated or supported collaboration or advocated for it, and most were passive. Look at voting in America. In recent decades about 2/3 of those who vote vote Democratic, about 1/3 vote Republican, and although Jewish voter turnout is a little higher than it is with the general population, that still leaves a lot of Jews staying home. And on Israel there are similar divisions. In 2013 (according to the PRC), only 70% said they feel “very” or “somewhat” attached to Israel. According to a 2020 poll of Jewish-Americans (described in an article
here (the Times of Israel is only slightly pro-Israel and publishes so many articles that expose what I call Israeli Apartheid that about half the articles I link to from my
post about that are in the TI)) commissioned by the Jewish Electoral Institute:
Only 32% of Jewish voters characterized Israel as “one of the most important” issues to them in the upcoming election. Of far greater concern to Jews are healthcare, medicare and social security, and gun safety.
Although 91% said they were generally pro-Israel, 56% identified themselves as “critical” of the Netanyahu government, a government which had the support until recently of a majority of MKs (MPs) and which might possibly be returned to power with a similar majority of MKs.
The article describes some more results of the poll, in reference to Trump:
Fifty-one percent said they supported his Israel policies; 39% said they didn’t. A slightly larger majority (52%) said they approved of his decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty of the Golan Heights.
The US Jewish community appeared much more divided on Trump’s decision to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which roiled the White House’s relations with the Palestinians. Whereas 45% approved of the move, 42% said they were opposed to it.
American Jews are similarly split on a dimension of the president’s peace plan that would allow Israel to annex the existing West Bank settlements: 44% approve of that policy and 40% disapprove of it.
Although this is anecdotal, I’d like to address the idea that Jews with a lower income somehow benefit from the wealth of those bankers who ARE Jewish. I have lived in Boulder, CO my entire life. As you may know, Boulder is an expensive place to live, it has always been more expensive than the county that surrounds it, and recently it has gotten very expensive and the supply of affordable housing is insufficient. I think that most of the Jewish people I have known who either work in Boulder or who I went to high school with, live/lived outside Boulder and I’m pretty sure it’s for financial reasons.
I’m not sure if I just addressed some of what leads people to become anti-Semitic, but I think I may have.
Crucially, an aspect of this is the idea that bankers are central to capitalism. I’m not an economist or business school graduate, but I think the role of bankers in capitalism is slightly if not significantly exaggerated by people who generally like capitalism but (probably) don’t like Jews. The bankers are coordinating capitalism and the flow of capital, but are not making decisions about wages, benefits, working conditions, unions, etc. They don’t make decisions about whether or not to shift production to low-wage areas. They don’t make decisions about what to produce. I’m not saying that it’s impossible for them to make decisions about loans based on their agenda (and apparently they play a major role in urban development), but I think this is exaggerated. They want to make the loan so they can make money on it by collecting interest, and once the loan is made I seriously doubt they’ll make a negative decision if the company recognizes a union, for example- I’ve never heard of that happening and I have been a socialist for 25 years (and I doubt that hardly any businesses would take a loan whose terms involve the absence of a union because if they lose a certification election, they default on the loan). Investors do that sort of thing, and although banks are to one degree or another part of that community, they are not all of it. Unions invest, individuals invest, corporations invest, pension plans invest, non-profits invest, etc. This hostility towards banks also implies that they are inherently capitalist and do nothing good for society, communities and individuals. I have tried to find out if anti-Semites are known to also attack credit unions, an institution which I have no problem with at all. If they ARE hostile to credit unions because they extend their stereotype about Jews and bankers to them as well, that just proves beyond any doubt that they are motivated not by any hostility towards capitalism, but simply bigotry. And, although this might fuel anti-Semitic hostility towards credit unions, here and there and maybe more often than that, Jews have organized credit unions.
The actor Mel Gibson, clearly an anti-Semite, once said that all wars were the fault of Jews. Even IF there was more than the tiniest amount of truth to the stereotype about Jews and bankers, I would have to say, even as a socialist, that wars are not always solely the result of economics (and as I said, there are more components to capitalism besides banks). Imperialism is of course almost always present and there is an economic dimension to that, but there is also right-wing nationalism, racism or some other kind of bigotry. There is often support for war among the military (who often have great influence while a decision to GO TO war is being made), and that is almost always independent of capitalist beliefs and/or the defense industry. I won’t go anywhere near an exhaustive survey of war, but here are my thoughts on some wars.
1. The “American Revolution.” Although I’m not happy with the European settlement that preceded it or the westward expansion that followed it, the colonists had legitimate, non-capitalist complaints against London. I suppose some would say that the British effort in that conflict was for the benefit of banks, and there’s probably some truth to that.
2. The American Civil War. Yes there was an economic dimension, but there was also a great deal of principled opposition to slavery on one side and racist support for it on the other (yes that racism was encouraged by capitalists, but the most direct explanation for popular opposition to abolition was racism).
3. World War I. This was incredibly imperialistic and nationalistic, although I think the racist nature of that nationalism was almost nil. There was militarism. This may have been a war that could be largely attributed to bankers.
4. World War II in the Pacific. I’m not real familiar with what I call Japanese Imperialism (you could also call it Japanese Fascism). There was an economic dimension, although I’m not sure to what degree it was for the benefit of capitalists. There was undoubtedly militarism, possibly even more so than was the case with the Nazis (these Imperialists believed in what you might call a ridiculously negative and fascist warrior code that included killing prisoners or treating them much worse than the Nazis treated POWs of WESTERN Allied states). There was incredible racism towards other Asians (remember that race is socially constructed; I did a few google searches and it seems that at least MANY Japanese have light skin; Apartheid South Africa, for economic reasons, classified Japanese as White and I don’t think it was JUST economic; they were allied with Nazi Germany; I read about how an American white supremacist music label would receive a lot of orders for CDs from Japanese people who considered themselves the “white men of the East”). Although some powerful people in the United States may have primarily been worried about Japan as an imperialist rival, and FDR pursued a foreign policy that put us on a collision course with Japan, A) Japan WAS doing bad stuff, B) FDR was NOT a solid capitalist, C) Pearl Harbor was attacked, D) FDR may have allowed it to happen so that he could go to war with Germany (see below).
5. World War II in Europe. Although the Nazis were
sort of capitalist and capitalists supported them, they were driven much more by bigotry, militarism, imperialism, (a crude, populist) anti-Communism and a reverence for power and strength and violence. I’d say roughly the same thing about Italian fascists, with less anti-Semitism and perhaps a little closer to socialist instead of NATIONAL socialist. The Soviet Union fought largely because they were going to be destroyed, although there were certainly some genuinely anti-fascist tendencies in Moscow (if you believe they were more than tendencies, what about the non-aggression pact between Moscow and Berlin that lasted until Germany invaded?). The British were certainly an imperialist and capitalist power at the time, but they were also a liberal democracy and recognized Nazi Germany for what it was in terms of authoritarianism and expansionism. And shortly after the war the British Left/Center-Left won a massive electoral victory, so I think most of the people at every level were motivated by a left-wing opposition to fascism. The United States quite possibly allowed a situation to develop where they would go to war with Nazi Germany. Yes, America was a capitalist and imperialist country, but once again, it was also a liberal democracy, and there seemed to be a massive center-left/left minority in the years leading up to the war and during the war, and FDR was just to the right of that (although as President he was fairly disappointing when it came to racial justice and equality, his wife was not and that’s not totally irrelevant).
6. Vietnam. The Vietnamese had been fighting for independence from the French (and briefly the Japanese) for decades and wanted a united, communist nation-state. I’m not real familiar with Vietnamese communism but banks are not inherently capitalist, and I just did some searches and apparently, for better or worse, there are almost zero Jewish people there. The United States was certainly motivated in part by capitalism. JFK and LBJ were economically to the right of FDR and Nixon certainly was. But there was also a conflict between a block of liberal (and often social) democracies and a block of communist countries that, whatever the progressive value of their social, economic and foreign policies, were authoritarian. Although the US introduced the nuclear weapon to the world, and aimed missiles at the USSR, there were a bunch of them aimed at the US.
7. Israel. Conflicts involving Israel are not anywhere near as much the fault of Jews as many people think. First, although Zionism is very flawed in multiple ways (See
this) and
I have serious problems with what happened to the Palestinians, the seizing and settlement of lands beyond the pre-1967 borders and states defined by ethnicity and/or religion, Israel’s Arab neighbors wanted in the past to DESTROY Israel- not in the sense that a one-state solution would “destroy” Israel, but in the sense that Jews would be driven into the sea. And this was just decades after the very flawed pacifistic response of European Jews to the Nazis contributed to 2/3 of that population being killed. As far as American fuel for Israel’s behavior towards its neighbors, see some of the material in this
post. As far as an alleged Jewish role in the Bush administration’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq, see what I’ve said about support in America for Israel, and consider what I wrote elsewhere on this blog:
Bush's reasons for invading Iraq were many, Israel was a small part of it. There was the opportunity to give lots of money to corporations in multiple ways, the strong desire for using the US military that most GOPers have, the desire to teach the world a lesson in terms of what the US will do to them if they piss off D.C., the desire for oil, the idea of democratizing the Middle-East. I also heard something about it being connected to countering the growing strength of the Euro. It's possible they half believed that stuff about WMDs and Al-Qaeda. Israel was a small part of it.
I’m going to end my discussion of war there.
I believe that TD Raeda Cronin was an anti-Semite. The relevant tweets were made about 6 years ago, and she has apologized. In connection with what I write
here (the first article I link to in that post is not relevant, but the rest of that post is) I’m not against the idea that SF should expel her or at least have her stand down as a TD, but I’ll continue to support SF even if they don’t. As I sort of prove
here, SF is against anti-Semitism. I did this post largely because the controversy gave me a chance to discuss anti-Semitism among progressive supporters of the Palestinians, and to combine the anti-bigot part of this blog with the Ireland/N. Ireland part of the blog.
**********************
I’ve referred twice to my concern about Israel being officially called The Jewish State and being defined by ethnicity and/or religion. Some would call me a hypocrite because I’m an Irish republican. So let me explain this. Don’t call me a hypocrite. You will lose every time you try that.
After the War of Independence in Ireland, in 1920-1925 the South became what was called a “Free State.” Its independence from the UK was limited. For example, members of Parliament had to swear an oath to Queen. The 1937 Constitution created the position of President and the first President was a Protestant. Presidential terms are normally seven years and someone can serve two terms. In the 1970s there was another Protestant President for about 2 years before he died. So out of nine Presidents, two were Protestant. As far as the 1937 Constitution and Catholicism, it’s true that early drafts emphasized Catholicism and the Catholic Church, but there was GREAT opposition to that. The final draft of the relevant section recognized the existence of the main Protestant churches in Ireland, as well as the Jewish religion, and it recognized “the special position” of the Roman Catholic Church “as the guardian of the faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.” This special place for the Catholic Church was done away with in 1972. The ban on divorce was done away with in 1995. There were of course homophobic laws (only in 1993 was homosexuality decriminalized) and the constitution had to be amended in 2015 to allow for gay marriage (there wasn’t anything in the document about “a man and a woman,” but still, only in 2015 was it amended to solidly legalize gay marriage in a country where a law could be more easily overturned by politicians if the country drifted to the right) and abortion is 99% illegal there, but there is plenty of homophobia and pro-life politics among Protestants, Jews, Muslims, etc. (also, although the Catholic Church is in two ways sexist, that can be exaggerated, and in recent decades, FREQUENTLY the Tánaiste (Deputy Prime Minister) has been a woman and between 1990 and 2011 the slightly powerful position of President of Ireland was held by women, one of whom went on to be the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights)
Is Ireland defined by ethnicity? Until about 20 years ago the South was almost literally 100% white, and there weren’t many non-Irish white people (in the last 20 years there has been bigotry that sort of resembles racism towards, for example, Poles). In 2004 there was an Amendment to the constitution that eliminates birthright citizenship for people born to parents who are not both citizens of Ireland. But if one parent is a citizen, they get citizenship. Also, although naturalization has been restricted, it’s still possible and it’s still fairly easy for citizens of the European Community, although that could be interpreted as racist, but I don’t think they had much of a choice as a member of the EU. First, the parties in Ireland I primarily support (SF and Irish Labour) opposed it as racist (and also as being in conflict with the Good Friday Agreement). Second, although I couldn’t have said this until recently, the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland for the last few years was a man named Leo Varadkar, whose father is Indian. Also, he’s an openly gay man. I don’t like him or his party (Fine Gael, who are sort of socially liberal but sort of pro-British and in love with capitalism). According to wikipedia, he was a government minister between 2011 and 2017 when he became Taoiseach. Between 2007 and 2011, when FG were in Opposition, he was a Spokesperson (shadow minister?). The Irish language is recognized by the Constitution as the first official language and English is recognized as the second. A lot is done to promote the former, but practically everyone practically always speak the latter and everything official is available in both languages. The British came very close to stamping out the Irish language (and they WERE trying to).
The South is not comparable to the Jewish State. And SF doesn’t want a United Ireland to be any more Catholic or Irish than the South is now. The second half of this (starting with the sentence “A lot of people…”) talks about the former, and most of this deals with the latter.
