Palestinian Government Publishes Holocaust Denial On Web As Part Of ”We’re Not Even Trying To Hide It Any More” Campaign (Also: The Rhetoric of Anti-Semitism – Introduction)

By
Omri Ceren
– January 30, 2004Posted in: Global Antisemitism, Palestinians

Mark Glenn, notorious anti-Semite, regular contributor to the subtly named Jewish Tribal Review, and favorite of the Indymedia crowd, has published a sputtering and screeching piece of Jew-hatred at the International Press Centre of the Palestinian Authority. This is what the internationally recognized government of the world’s 6 million Palestinians is publishing on what amounts to their Foreign Ministry site: an article that suggests that only 6,000 Jews died in Hitler’s death camps and which openly gloats about a coming time when the world will abandon Israel so that the Arabs can finish what the Nazis started.

That this filth was published on the PA’s English site is news in itself (the other two languages you can read the PA’s site in? Arabic and French. Too perfect). Additionally, this article is also elegantly paradigmatic of the “we’re anti-Zionists not anti-Semites” strategies that Jew-haters use to deflect criticism. Sure, it is filled with easily dismissible straw arguments and random anti-Semitic provocations (my favorite: the completely out of place “the murder of Christ by the leadership of Israel”). However, there are at least three also seemingly straight-forward strategies that are actually a little more subtle – the insistence that anti-Semitic discourse is actually anti-Zionist discourse, the identification of Jews with Nazis, and the multiple ways of denigrating the significance of the Holocaust – that call for closer analysis (remember, these authors want to avoid saying anything that would allow the label of anti-Semite to stick to them). These strategies deceptively seem plain, and it is imperative that we avoid the mistake made by some critics who tease out one, largely superficial anti-Semitic tactic, describe and thus criticize it, and then declare that they’ve restored balance – all that does is leave more pernicious dynamics still operating.

Which is not to say that Glenn doesn’t slip up and deny the Holocaust or utilize Nazi rhetoric – he does both:


the murder of six million, or six thousand, or sixty million, or whatever number in actuality it is…

… they have revealed themselves to be vampires and ghouls without an ounce of soul… dispossessed of the qualities… which separate man from beast.

But it is to say that most of the time he’s doing a lot of rhetorical work so that his other statements can express the same sentiments without being so openly anti-Semitic. In the next couple of days, I’ll do some analysis of that work, focusing on the three dynamics that I decsribed above.

  • Anti-Semitism/Anti-Zionism – The currently fashionable way to approach the problem of anti-Semitic statements that are ostensibly or literally anti-Zionist is to point out that as an empirical matter, they partake of anti-Semitism (“sure, you say Israelis, but it’s clear that you mean Jews” is the typical line). This line of criticism is unable to deal with statements that are more subtly anti-Semitic in that they are only sensible when applied to Israel, but that nonetheless gain their persuasive force by partaking of anti-Semitic canards (“Israel destroys the US economy by taking all its money in defense loans” does not make any literal sense if you substitute “Jews” for “Israel,” but it nonetheless still operates rhetorically in a field constituted by anti-Semitism).
  • Jewish/Nazi Identification – Every good Leftist rally has a couple of Sharon=Hitler posters and some flags of swastikas embedded in the Star of David. Early on, the conventional wisdom was that such spectacles were just thinly veiled excuses for people who wanted to wave around Nazi symbols to do so under the rubric of legitimate protest. That explanation never really resonated because the symbols that were being used were clearly doing more work than simply advocating Nazism. Then, in 2001, then-Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior advanced a more nuanced theory that held that Europe desperately wanted to associate modern-day Jews with horrific violence so that they could in some sense justify the Holocaust to themselves. But that explanation was too Freudian to last. So now, such displays are waved off with a snort about how insensitive it is to associate Jews, who suffered so much under Hitler, with Nazis. I’ll argue that there’s more going on – that the association of Jews with Nazism is anti-Semitic in some pretty fundamental ways.
  • Holocaust Denial – As Melchior’s comments suggest, the stakes in what the Holocaust means are stark. There are a series of increasingly more subtle methods that are being deployed in order to denigrate its magnitude. At the end, I’ll work on elaborating them.

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