Respectability Politics and the Causes of Anti-Semitism

The civil rights leaders were saying to the country: “Look, you guys are supposed to be nice guys, and we are only going to do what we are supposed to do. Why do you beat us up? Why don’t you give us what we ask? Why don’t you straighten yourselves out?” For the masses of black people, this language resulted in virtually nothing.

-- Stokely Carmichael & Charles Hamilton (1967)

I've been doing some more thinking about Rev. Shipman's letter about which I posted on earlier. The letter posited that the best thing Jews (or "Israel's patrons") could do to stop anti-Semitism abroad would be to lobby for changes in Israel's policies. Many people, myself included, lambasted Rev. Shipman for victim-blaming.

The primary defense of Rev. Shipman has been to assert that his was a mere descriptive observation that anti-Semitism spikes when Israel takes actions that anger others (in a semi-apology Rev. Shipman refers to it as a "correlate"). See, for example, the comments here or Phoebe Maltz Bovy's interlocutors. What's so objectionable about noting a correlation? The first answer is that his letter wasn't just a descriptive observation but actually focused on a normative prescription -- objectionable Israeli acts correlates with anti-Semitism, therefore, people should object more strenuously to objectionable Israeli acts. The description does not lead to the prescription -- if such a correlation exists, the prescription could just as easily be objectionable Israeli acts correlates with anti-Semitism, therefore, people should be exceptionally vigilant against and display zero-tolerance towards those who target Jews writ large under the guise of "objecting to Israeli policies". It may or may not be true that female alcohol use "correlates" with sexual assault; nonetheless, the right prescriptive response is to take a stronger stand against those who would exploit vulnerable women, not "women shouldn't go to bars."

But I also want to unpack the alleged correlation on its own terms a bit, because I think doing so leads to some interesting observations. The argument is basically one of "respectability politics" -- that the way for a group to overcome prejudice against it is to act in ways that earn the respect and esteem of their fellows. And on the one hand, there's a degree to which the descriptive claim is true to the point of banality -- Jews are less likely to be disliked if prominent Jewish actors don't take actions that people dislike. The problem is that this framework enforces anti-Semitic impulses in that it tacitly accepts the entitlement of non-Jews to dictate Jewish behavior. When a group is forced to tailor its behavior to match the preferences of dominating outsiders, the outsiders will be very likely to view such acquiescence as its birthright and be more incensed if and when the dominated group does take independent and disapproved actions. This, as I argued recently, lies at the core of modern anti-Semitism and its linkage to Israel:

It is a unique feature of the past 60 or so years that . . . . sometimes, in some contexts, Jews can criticize Christians without the automatic specter of a massacre looming. Or -- and this I suspect is worse than Jewish criticism -- Jews can sometimes ignore Christian criticism without immediate and obvious consequence. For people who view their power over Jews as an entitlement, this I think is what really rankles: there is an entity, that is Jewish, that Christians criticize, that sometimes does not listen.

If being seen as an equal requires acting as if one is an equal, a huge part of that is not adhering to the demands and mores of the dominant group but rather (when appropriate, not for its own sake) making conscious decisions to sometimes disregard them. This was a key part of the argument that Zionism would reduce anti-Semitism over time -- like the picked-on kid who stands up for himself and thus earns the respect of the bullies, the existence of Israel places Jews in a historically near-unprecedented position of political and social agency akin to that enjoyed by various gentile majorities through much of history. Expressing that agency and autonomy places Jews on the same plane and therefore creates a descriptive equality which (the hope goes) will change attitudes to match. The call -- from non-Jews at least -- for "respectability politics" is really just a call for Jews to revert to the subordinate state of affairs where they do, as a matter of course, listen to gentile demands.

Put another way, it probably is the case that a non-Jew is less likely to punch a Jew in the face if he perceives Jews (as a group) as largely behaving in ways he sees as salutary. But that does not mean there is necessarily less anti-Semitism in such a state of affairs, if this view is transformed into an entitlement to such agreeability from Jews. That's just anti-Semitism in a different form; the "safety" it provides to Jews purchased at the price of their independence. Anyone can have positive attitudes towards groups who behave in ways they like; the true test of egalitarianism is respecting the minority when it behaves differently than how you'd want it to.

I don't mean to minimize the difficulties here -- there might be no more nettlesome problem facing pluralists than deciding when we must defer to alternative political practices we find distasteful versus when we're obliged to speak out against them. I don't take the view that people from one group can never criticize those of another -- including members of traditionally privileged groups vis-a-vis their historic subordinates. But respect for pluralism means there must be that basic acknowledgment of the right of differentiation, the right of the other to make choices different from those which we imagine we would make were we in their shoes. And perhaps more difficult than that, due accord for history means being appropriately skeptical that the dominant group has it right in every case where majority and minority disagree (even passionately) about important normative questions:

Privilege -- gentile or otherwise -- means that one can always choose to maintain the primacy of one's own perspective on matters affecting the marginalized group. A very large part of anti-oppression analysis is about convincing the privileged to at least suspend that outlook and recognize that it is possible -- maybe even likely -- that the marginalized person is epistemically more credible on the subject, and that our own view -- even if honestly arrived at, even if fervently held -- may be suspect after all. Persons consistently unwilling to engage in that "quietude" towards Jewish voices cannot claim any presumption of egalitarian views vis-a-vis Jews.

It is precisely because we have the duty to hold these things together -- our right to be critical of others, our duty to respect difference, and our obligation to be mindful of our privilege -- that I have asserted the need to foreground discussions of anti-Semitism when discussing Jewish institutions. It ensures that the positions we take about Jews "seriously grapple with the ways in which historical and present anti-Semitism implicate the positions that [we] hold and how [our] arguments account for the actual facts of Jewish existence and what they need to exercise their individual and collective rights as a people." Such grappling, I suggest, is a prerequisite to thinking about Jews well.

As for me, I tend to doubt both the respectability politics position (that if Jews behave well, people will like us and anti-Semitism will go away) and the muscular Zionist counter (that if Jews vigorously demonstrate their independent agency, people will respect us and anti-Semitism will go away). In many ways, I view anti-Semitism as a constant -- I'd like it to disappear, of course, but I don't think Jewish political energies are best spent trying to convince non-Jews to "straighten yourselves out." Zionism is important not because Jewish agency makes people respect us but because it makes it matter less if they do or not -- they can fulminate all they want about how much they hate Jews, because unlike years past we've got some big fucking tanks backing us up. And in turn, I don't support Palestinian equality and national aspirations because I think being nice to Palestinians will make people like Jews more. I do it because, well, the whole point of being an autonomous agent is that we get to make the choices, and I want to choose to do the right thing. People who say that we can't create a Palestinian state because of this or that thing Palestinians do or refuse to do drive me nuts: what's the point of Zionism if Jews are going to sit on their hands and complain while waiting for someone else give us permission to make a decision? (You may sense the roots of my support for unilateral withdrawal). As the black nationalist saying goes: "do for self."

The Tan Man

Let's be real: That was an ugly-ass tan suit. That being said, Rep. Michael Kors Peter King (R-NY) seriously needs to get a grip:

"There's no way any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday," King said on NewsMaxTV on Friday. The interview was flagged by Buzzfeed. "When you have the world watching … a week, two weeks of anticipation of what the United States is gonna do. For him to walk out —I'm not trying to be trivial here— in a light suit, light tan suit, saying that first he wants to talk about what most Americans care about the revision of second quarter numbers on the economy. This is a week after Jim Foley was beheaded and he's trying to act like real Americans care about the economy, not about ISIS and not about terrorism. And then he goes on to say he has no strategy."

You're not trying to be trivial? Try harder. Geez.

More On Christian Contributions To Combating Anti-Semitism

Responding to Deborah Lipstadt's column on the rise of anti-Semitism and "why Jews are worried", Episcopalian Reverend Bruce M. Shipman (affiliated with Yale University) had this to say:

Deborah E. Lipstadt makes far too little of the relationship between Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza and growing anti-Semitism in Europe and beyond.

The trend to which she alludes parallels the carnage in Gaza over the last five years, not to mention the perpetually stalled peace talks and the continuing occupation of the West Bank.

As hope for a two-state solution fades and Palestinian casualties continue to mount, the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel’s patrons abroad to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question.

Institutional Christianity continues to display its unrivaled expertise in the field.

H/T (among others) Paul Horwitz.

Thinking Critically About "Uncritical"

One hears the refrain thrown out repeatedly, even casually -- the great mass of Jews (or perhaps most Americans, but mainly Jews) who are "uncritical supporters of Israel." Often times it comes from Jews who claim to have been blind before they learned to see. Here's Antony Lowenstein:

Although support for the Jewish state has been an unofficial second religion for Jews for decades – in my own family it was simply expected that Israel would be uncritically backed in times of war and peace, with Palestinians demonised as unreasonable and violent – times are changing.

And here's Bonnie Honig: "Too many of us are too committed to being uncritical of Israel."

It comes in academic tomes -- Laurence Silberstein's chapter on "American Jewry's Identification with Israel" uses variations on the word "uncritical" (or synonyms) four times in its first page. It comes in pleas that I might generally support, such as in this letter from Israelis for a Sustainable Future: "The belief that being “pro-Israel” means uncritically supporting the actions of the Israeli government and military does not help the Israeli people."

And so it is that Gil Troy, responding to (natch) Joseph Palermo calling him "an uncritical booster of Israel", writes the following:

Calling me “an uncritical booster” suggests I am more propagandist than analyst, more cheerleader than thinker. It plays into stereotypes of pro-Israel types as monolithic and blind to any Israeli faults – an absurdity considering the many passionate debates constantly roiling the Zionist community. It legitimizes the delegitimization of Israel through a perverse reverse projection. While escalating every Israeli imperfection into proof that Israel should not exist, delegitimizers project their absolutist all-or-nothing attitudes onto Israel’s supporters. Underlying this is an unfair singling out of Israel as a country on probation, acceptable only if it behaves well. The charge also reflects an anti-Zionist prejudice assuming that thinking people can only support Israel by bypassing logic.

Contrary to Palermo’s caricature, I have publicly criticized Prime Minister Bibi Netanhyau for failing to lead boldly, charging him with acting like a Chicago ward heeler rather than a statesman. I have said that Israeli leaders should be driving the peace train rather than Barack Obama or John Kerry, tapping Israel’s world-famous creativity to find solutions. I criticized anti-Arab violence long before the horrific revenge killing last month. I have criticized the chief rabbinate for being too rigid.

In short, just like a patriotic American criticizes the United States – while still loving it; just like a devoted wife criticizes her husband while still loving him; I criticize Israel – without questioning Israel’s right to exist. To support Israel one need not mortgage one’s soul or override one’s critical faculties. In fact, democratic Israel invites thoughtful supporters, loving critics, ardent advocates for different solutions to the country’s various problems.

He's right of course. But there's something deeply pathetic about this laundry list of times he's criticized Israel -- as if this will at all alter the refrain; as if proof that Jews (and not just the Naomi Klein fans of the bunch) criticize Israel on a regular basis is even relevant to the belief in question.

Because on face, the idea that there is any significant subset of Jews who are "uncritical supporters of Israel" is not just untrue; it's transparently ludicrous. Anybody who's had an opinion on Israel is critical of it, at least some of the time -- the odds that multi-million person sovereign nation would always in all cases map on precisely to anyone's idiosyncratic policy preferences (much less somehow managing to unite the entire Jewish community writ large in "uncritical" support) is obviously absurd.

"Israel critic" is an incredibly broad term that probably encompasses every single person who has ever had an opinion on the subject -- including Israel's defenders. I am a defender of Israel, I am also a critic of Israel. Caring about something means having opinions about it, it would be a remarkable coincidence if my opinions about Israel (or any other country, or institution, or person) perfectly tracked Israel's actions. ZOA is a critic of Israel, as it has every right to be. The point being, first and foremost, that those who adopt the mantle "critic of Israel" are in reality a narrow and provincial subset of the class, who should not be allowed to insist that the vast majority of Jews are mindless zombies "incapable of criticism of Israel."

When they say "uncritical of Israel", they mean "not criticizing the things I want criticized, in the manner I want to see them criticized." But that Jews reject particular forms of criticism does not make them "uncritical", that's an exercise of critical faculties.

Simply put, I'm sick of hearing about this mythical sector of uncritical Israel supporters. It doesn't exist. But the people who partake in the refrain are people who seemingly can't make the, dare I say critical, distinction between disagreeing with a specific criticism and being incapable of criticism.

Blurring the DREAM

Rand Paul has just come out in favor of deporting hundreds of thousands of undocumented Latinos who came to America as children. But he also traveled to Guatemala to give medical examinations to some lucky locals. Jon Chait smells a new policy:

The 2016 hopeful opposes universal health insurance, and he wants to deport half a million people who grew up in America. But Rand Paul will personally provide every deported immigrant with a free eye exam. Call it compassionate paleolibertarianism.

That youth support is around the corner!

The Apostates

A very interesting review by Adam Kirsch of three books which touch on the theme of Jewish apostasy -- Jews who betray the Jewish community to hostile gentiles. This, of course, must mean something beyond criticizing Jews -- Kirsch immediately draws the distinction between those who criticize from within the community as an attempt to make it better, and those who remove themselves from the community and seek to tear it down. Moreover, he observes that their is a significant qualitative difference between how one criticizes Jews when they are purely in a position of marginalization and weakness versus when they have gained some measure of power and influence (not the least of which comes in the form of a state with an army).

But the key point Kirsch returns to is that Jewish apostasy has been the source of some of the gravest threats to Jewish lives and livelihoods across history. It was medieval Jewish apostates who could credibly claim "insider" status whose polemics against the Jewish community and the Talmud sparked some of the most aggressive anti-Semitic campaigns by the Church. This is in many ways the violent cousin of Derrick Bell's concept of superstanding -- the heightened authority African-Americans receive when they speak out against the majority of the African-American community. Likewise, there is always a healthy audience for Jews who will eagerly tell non-Jews exactly what they've always yearned to hear about Jews; that even a Jew will affirm that most Jews are worthy of contempt.

I don't mean to minimize the difficulty of the question: freedom for Jews, or any minority group, includes the freedom to dissent from the orthodoxy of one's own community. No doubt there are strong vested incentives for those currently in positions of authority within a community to take a broad view of what counts as apostasy against it. This is an age-old problem -- one not limited to Jews -- and I don't pretend to have an easy answer other than adopting a principle of anti-tokenization. It is fine to be a Jew who is deeply critical of mainstream Jewish practices. But it is not okay for people to treat such voices as emblematic of Judaism such that it replaces their need to engage with the Jewish community writ large.

Pretend-Standard

To everyone furiously parsing Rule 35 of the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure in order to argue that Halbig v. Burwell (also affectionately known as the "moops" case) is or is not en banc worthy -- stop. We all are well aware that the standard for en banc review is no more and no less than "if the court feels like it." That's it. Indeed, when I clerked on the Eighth Circuit a panel once asked for supplemental briefing on whether a case should go en banc (some of the judges disliked a prior Eighth Circuit precedent that granted jurisdiction over the appeal in the first place), and the lawyers' really had no way to argue one way or the other because granting en banc review is for all intents and purposes a pure exercise of unfettered discretion.

A Ship Docks in Oakland

Protesters in Oakland have blocked an Israeli-owned ship from unloading. The ship is owned by ZIM, the 10th largest shipping company in the world. Notably, ZIM is privately-owned (the Israeli government divested its minority ownership in 2004) and to my knowledge there is no claim that the company is implicated in the occupation other than by its nationality.

Protesters claim that local unionized dockworkers (members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, I believe) honored the picket line and refused to unload the ship; with one leader saying "[t]his is the first time in history that this has happened." If indeed the workers made a voluntary decision to refuse to unload the ship in deference to the picketers, that would be a first -- but only because the last time time this happened the picket temporarily succeeded only because the union workers feared for their personal safety if they unloaded the ship.

UPDATE: This news story indicates that we're in roughly the same boat as we were in 2010 -- union workers did not cross the picket line "for safety reasons." The ILWU confirmed that it had not taken a stance favoring (or disfavoring) the picket.

UPDATE x2: The ship was unloaded last night, when the union concluded there was no longer a "safety issue." Basically, this great non-violent BDS "success" was that they successfully created a safety hazard for union workers which kept them off the job. Hurray!

Return of the Mack

I've already stated my view that the revocation of Steven Salaita's offer to teach at Illinois was a violation of academic freedom. So I think Corey Robin is surely right that whether or not Steven Salaita's tweets are anti-Semitic has no bearing on the legal (or normative) argument regarding whether he should have had his offer revoked. But his claim that Salaita has "a long history of not only denouncing anti-Semitism in general but also confronting specific instances of it on Twitter" because (in addition to non-specific bromides about equality) he courageously called out Macklemore defies parody.

The blogger he links to, far from providing a "monumental analysis" demonstrating the lack of any anti-Semitism in the tweets, instead provides a textbook demonstration of what (in the racial context) Ian F. Haney Lopez has called the inference of innocence (or what I have labeled innocent until proven Nazi). No matter how sharp the impact on the minority group or how it is perceived by them, if there is any reading of the statement which with a straight face can be attributed to a rationale other than overt antipathy, then the act or statement is an "innocent" one and any claim of discrimination is spurious. Much of the apologia comes in the form of ludicrously fine parsing that would make Kevin "but humans are primates too!" Williamson blush. The defense of the "anti-Semitism is honorable" tweet actually takes two contradictory positions -- he both argues on the one hand that Salaita was mocking people who think Zionism has made anti-Semitism "honorable" and, on the other, that he agrees with such people because "Zionism" has labeled things that he considers to be "honorable" anti-Semitic (how any ideology, as opposed to individual persons who may or may not identify as Zionists and may or may not be representative of the broad spectrum of Zionist beliefs, could have that effect is left unsaid I misremembered the tweet -- he attributed this to Zionists rather than Zionism. Even still, this remains a gross overgeneralization of a huge swath of the Jewish community who stand accused of persistently deploying anti-Semitism in bad faith). In any event, the latter view is clearly the correct interpretation; it is also not fundamentally distinct from people who claim to wear "racist" as a badge of honor because they accuse Al Sharpton of being too quick to cry racism; and consequently feel justified in adopting a blanket policy that virtually any time any Black person says something is racist they're probably lying and/or insane. Which is itself anti-Semitic.

Simply put, anti-Semitism (like most -isms) always comes couched in platitudes about how the speaker is not anti-Semitic and is in fact deeply horrified by the real anti-Semitism (defined as Hitler and/or some safely trivial event far from any political or social positions of value to the speaker). As we found out today, one can claim one is not an anti-Semite at the same time as one calls for each civilian death in Gaza to be met "eye for an eye" against the largest Jewish communal organization in another country. To engage in such "monumental" efforts to find a twisted path where the statements are in fact fully compatible with totally egalitarian attitudes towards Jews and Jewish equality is difficult to square with any sort of politics which respects either the history of anti-Jewish oppression or the right of Jews to be taken seriously when they describe their own experience.

Conveying a Final Message to the Jews of South Africa

The other day, I noted an ultimatum delivered by the head of the ANC's Western Cape branch to the South African Jewish community. It gave them "until the 07 August 2014 to stop their Zionist propaganda in Cape Town, failing which we will boycott and call strikes at all of their member – and supporting companies and organisations."

On the one hand, the official (Tony Ehrenreich), gave the Jews an extra week to respond. On the other hand, he also raised the stakes well beyond a "mere" boycott:

Ehrenreich wrote that South Africa’s Jewish Board of Deputies, the national Jewish communal organization, should suffer for its support of Israel.

“This makes the Jewish Board of Deputies complicit in the murder of the people in Gaza,” he wrote. “The time has come to say very clearly that if a woman or child is killed in Gaza, then the Jewish board of deputies, who are complicit, will feel the wrath of the People of SA with the age old biblical teaching of an eye for an eye.”

And now we have a call for a pogrom. Lovely.

In case you're curious, yes the SAJBD is accusing him of hate speech and incitement. Ehrenreich, for his part, says he will sue the SAJBD "for supporting crimes against humanity in Gaza, and for being complicit through their actions or inactions, in the killing of women and children in Gaza" (emphasis added).

Finally, Ehrenreich also gets off the obligatory denial that he is in any way anti-Semitic for calling for mass violence against the South African Jewish community. While he contends he is attacking only the SAJBD for "condoning" the Gaza campaign, it is notable that his verbiage (which equates silence with active support of alleged war crimes) would apply to any Jew (really, any person, but of course Ehrenreich only focuses on Jews) who has not spoken out against the Gaza campaign in a manner Ehrenreich finds acceptable. See also Bongani Masuku's statement that "silently consenting or grumbling under tables" would not be sufficient for Jews to "imagine [South Africa] to be their home."

So What if Just War is Impossible?

From time to time one hears the following apologia for various Palestinian war crimes (this is one example, but it's decently representative):

Based on the fact that the West Bank and Gaza are occupied territories that are economically and politically controlled by Israel – and where there is no freedom for its residents – I believe they have the absolute right to fight for that freedom. I personally do not think Hamas’s rockets are a productive strategy of resistance, but it still has the right to respond in such a manner – as does any liberation movement against colonialism.
[...]
The argument that Hamas is using human shields has no weight. There is no evidence that this is actually occurring en masse. Gaza is tiny – about the size of the Cape Flats. It is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. There is no place where Hamas could stockpile arms away from a population centre.

This argument, in essence, is that Palestinians have a "right to fight" against Israel, and since the only way that they can functionally exercise that right is by indiscriminate rocket fire and by intermingling their fighters within the Palestinian civilian population, those activities are acceptable.

This is, of course, nonsense. The laws of war do not contain an exception for when following them means one's preferred side won't win. The laws of war are, by design, indifferent as to which side "should" win, operating off the reasonable presumption that each side in any armed conflict will think itself just and therefore view itself as exempt from the strictures of the laws of war. This is why we largely no longer adopt the Augustinian approach to just war theory. The point being, if you can't win a war while obeying the laws of war, then don't fight it. There is no right to win an armed conflict.

But here's the thing -- this cuts both ways. One also often hears defenses of Israeli strikes which have crippling civilian casualties on the grounds that, well, Hamas uses human shields and stockpiles its weaponry in civilian areas. Quite true! But that is not carte blanche authority for Israel to do whatever it will. There are valid questions over who should be considered responsible for civilian casualties when Party A strikes Party B's military targets embedded in a civilian population -- if for no other reason than to deprive B the incentive to do just that. Nonetheless, it cannot be the case that infinite civilian casualties are justified simply because of B's (admitted) legal violation. Considerations of proportionality need to come into play. And if that limits Israel's ability to effectively prosecute a war on Hamas -- well, the laws of war don't guarantee you get to win a war.

Immigration versus Colonization

Periodically, one hears some, er, "reactionary" elements describe the movement of non-White persons into the United States or Europe as "colonization". "The Mexicans are colonizing Texas!" "The Arabs are colonizing France!" Given the history of how the United States got control of Texas, there is irony here. But it also got me to thinking -- when a person moves from the place they were born to another country, what distinguishes "immigration" from "colonization"? Both involve people permanently moving from political jurisdiction A to political jurisdiction B. But the former term is positive, happy, pursuit-of-happiness and land-of-opportunity. Even said reactionaries usually characterize their opposition as being to illegal immigration; as opposed to immigration generally which was the foundation of our nation. Colonization or colonialism, by contrast, is bad, evil, sounding in injustice if not outright theft of lands that rightfully belong to others.

So what is the difference? One answer is that we call the movement of people we approve of "immigration" and that which we disapprove of "colonialism". But that's not satisfactory -- it seems like there is an actual distinction here worth preserving. Another answer is that immigration is colonization where it does not come with the permission of the members of the destination polity. But if that's right, then the conservative immigration critics are right that illegal immigrants are engaging in acts of colonialism, which really doesn't sound correct to me.

Drilling further, it seems that a large part of colonization has to do with control. So maybe immigration becomes colonization if the new immigrant group wrests control over political outcomes from the prior residents. But once again, on reflection that can't be right -- it cannot be the immigration is permissible so long as the immigrants never end up winning elections.

Perhaps what's missing is the element of external control. When we talk about "colonialism", we usually have reference to a mother country. The United States was a British colony, Indonesia was a Dutch colony, the Congo was a Belgian colony, etc.. So maybe the mark of colonialism is that the new population wrests control over political outcomes and transfers it to a foreign entity. One colonizes on behalf of somewhere, one does not immigrate on behalf of anywhere. That seems to me to be the cleanest distinction, and the one that most closely coheres to the traditional model of colonialism (colonies and parent nations). But maybe it also suffers from inadequacies -- I'm happy to hear suggestions. But the point is it seems like we don't have a strong distinction of when people have a right to move to a new location (indeed, it's praiseworthy or at least respectable) versus when it is improper. This leads to considerable conceptual fuzziness; it also buttresses anti-immigrant sentiment insofar as it poses too-strong rights claims on behalf of those who happen to be residing on a plot of land at some arbitrary prior point in time.

Sometimes Conservatives Win Elections. In Conclusion, Jewish Self-Determination is a Failure

I've been wanting to link to this Tablet piece by Eylon Aslan-Levy on why Europe has so much trouble wrapping its head around anti-Semitism for days now, but I've never had the opportunity. The point is, it's really good -- in particular in noting the fact of Jewish history that serious anti-Semitism has typically co-existed with relative Jewish prosperity. But I didn't have much more to say than that, and that seemed thin gruel.

So let's just use the rightness of that post as a counter-balance to the embarassing wrongness of this one. It starts off well enough, with the writer admitting (after a commenter's challenge) that "There is no reason to assume that all Zionists support Likud's policies." Indeed! In fact, we can safely assume that the 77% of Israelis who voted for parties other than Likud oppose its policies at least some of the time, and the roughly 50% of Israelis who cast ballots for parties outside Likud's coalition oppose these policies most of the time.* So while this shouldn't have exactly been some sort of mind-bender, good work nonetheless!

But then we get this howler:

That said: if you support creating a religiously ethno-nationalist and democratic state, you can’t simply disavow any responsibility for the conduct of a right wing nationalist party. In democracies, one faction never retains control forever. The ideology, conduct, and treatment of perceived enemies of the nation we find in Likud seem pretty typical of right wing nationalism generally (they seem worse because the occupied territories and Hamas belligerence provide some unique opportunities for bad behavior). You simply can’t count on a state with a religious ethnonationalist identity that isn’t going to have a belligerent conservative faction in charge occasionally.

Hmmm. Interesting point. But perhaps it could use some editing:

That said: if you support creating a religiously ethno-nationalist and democratic state, you can’t simply disavow any responsibility for the conduct of a right wing nationalist party. In democracies, one faction never retains control forever. The ideology, conduct, and treatment of perceived enemies of the nation we find in Likud seem pretty typical of [the] right wing nationalism generally (they seem worse because the occupied territories and Hamas belligerence provide some unique opportunities for bad behavior). You simply can’t count on a state with a religious ethnonationalist identity that isn't going to have a belligerent conservative faction in charge occasionally.

Consilience is your friend!

Seriously, can anyone tell me what work "religiously ethno-nationalist" is doing here? For starters, modern Zionism isn't -- or at least isn't necessarily, and was not originally -- a religious ideology. I know that Jews' unique status as both a religion and an ethno-national group can be confusing, but let's put in a modicum of effort shall we? The author later on admits to some basic misunderstandings of the structure of religious Jewish politics in Israel anyway, but he really should know that founding-era Zionism in particular was sharply secular. Indeed, most of the explicitly religious elements of Israel's current political structure (such as devolving control over family law to religious authorities) is an Ottoman era holdover. Is it one I'd love to see repealed? Yep. Is the most fervent advocate favoring such a repeal in the current Likud-led coalition? You bet.

Okay, how about "ethno-nationalist"? I take the author's point to be that states which specifically are founded on nationalist principles are more vulnerable to reactionary right-wing elements which oppress minorities. Is that true? One problem with figuring it out is that most states today remain founded on ethno-nationalist principles. But even those states which plausibly are not founded on that concept or do not currently identify that way (e.g., the United States, the former USSR, China -- it's notable that all of these cases are at best arguable ones) also periodically see right-wing coalitions come to power and act in ways hostile to minorities. That seems to be a unifying feature of states and polities. Indeed, the real moral of the story here is that a state does not need to explicitly identify itself in ethno-nationalist terms in order for an ethno-nationalist element to have appeal amongst members of a majority ethnic class. Israel, after all, famously does not characterize itself as a Jewish state in its Basic Laws -- it is neither unique nor surprising that this does not eradicate the potency of right-wing ethno-nationalist claims within the Israeli polity.

A great pet peeve of Israel supporters is when people take attributes common across many or all states and single out Israel for special opprobrium. Israel does have a reactionary right-wing nationalist element in it, one that I think is repulsive on its own terms and destructive to the long-term wellbeing of both Israelis and Palestinians (not to mention the Jewish self-determination project more generally). But there's nothing unique or strange about that. Pretty much any democratic polity has elements like that; using their existence to say that the whole group's desire for self-determination is doomed to failure is ludicrous on its face and obviously not going to be applied consistently in practice.

* This is a simplification of course, but its worth noting that in the current coalition only two of the four members of the current coalition (Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu and Jewish Home) are really committed to the settlement and greater Israel project that the author is most angry about. Together, these two entities combined for about 32% of the vote. Yesh Atid (14%) is somewhat ambivalent, while Hatnuah (5%) ran specifically as a pro-negotiations, pro-peace party.

Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy: The Case of Steven Salaita

Earlier this year, I published a short piece in the Florida International University Law Review's microsymposium on academic freedom titled "Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy." The piece unfortunately isn't available online (UPDATE: here it is!), but it's short so I'll just repost it below:

What does it mean when a university department invites a person to speak? It clearly does not mean is that the department endorses the speaker’s views. Persons are regularly invited to speak in a university setting whose views are opposed by many if not most of their audience—often including the very people who invited them. Rather, the invitation indicates that the department believes the speaker is academically legitimate: their contribution is one that, whether right or wrong, usefully advances scholarly discussion. It is probable that most members of a university community believe that both Newt Gingrich and David Duke are “wrong”, but only one’s views are illegitimate.

Academic freedom and academic legitimacy map imperfectly onto one another. Academic freedom is content-neutral: it does not attempt to distinguish between “correct” and “incorrect” views. Academic legitimacy, by contrast, is very concerned with content: it asserts that certain views should not be considered valid entrants into a productive scholarly discussion. But these two concepts are often conflated. A university facing criticism over a controversial speaker will often respond by invoking “academic freedom.” This is a valid response at one level: academic freedom implies that even a David Duke cannot be barred from speaking if invited by an authorized member of the university community. But at another level, it misses the point entirely. The problem is not that Duke was allowed by some higher university authority to speak, the problem is that he was invited in the first place; that a department or research center or student group believed his views were academically legitimate. To structure the question in terms of academic freedom—should he be banned—misstates the good being pursued. The demand is not for formal barriers against such horrible views but to not need such barriers at all.

To see why this distinction matters, consider another obvious truth: David Duke is not invited to speak at colleges. This is not because “academic freedom” is being systematically breached, but rather because the academic community has voluntarily decided that Duke’s views do not make any useful scholarly contribution. And that we’ve made that decision is a very good thing—we would rightly worry about the caliber of an academic community that could not come to a general intersubjective agreement that Duke’s views are illegitimate.

But what happens when this consensus doesn’t exist? Efforts to restrict allegedly malign ideologies are assumed to be a tool of the strong, but often they are a tactic of the weak—people who are not confident that their community will unify in agreement that the ideology is in fact oppressive. That there now is massive intersubjective agreement that overt White supremacist ideology is illegitimate gives people of color nothing more than what Whites long enjoyed effortlessly, and if that consensus were threatened minority students would be rightly concerned.

Many controversies labeled as ones of “academic freedom” are actually about academic legitimacy. Is Pat Robertson properly analogized to David Duke? Is Gilad Atzmon? The Black Panthers? BDS activists? David Horowitz? What about “scientific” creationists or climate change denialists? It is fair game to argue that a well-functioning university community would not view any or all of these persons as academically legitimate, and that position itself is perfectly consistent with believing that agreements regarding academic legitimacy cannot be enforced through explicit bans or sanctions. That is all that “academic freedom” contributes to the discussion: a constraint on remedies. Enlisting it to do more confuses two distinct questions and sidesteps the true nature of many academic controversies.

David Schraub, Academic Freedom versus Academic Legitimacy, 9 FIU L. Rev. 71 (2013)

Today I read the story of Steven Salaita, whose offer to teach at the University of Illinois was rescinded after review of "uncivil" tweets about Israel, Jews, and anti-Semitism (Salaita previously taught at Virginia Tech). Corey Robin is appalled; he labels this "a symptom of the effects of Zionism on academic freedom, how pro-Israel forces have consistently attempted to shut down debate on this issue, how they 'distort all that is right.'" Salaita provides an "unapologetic defense of the rights of Palestinians", while some of his tweets may "jar or shock a tender sensibility", that's part and parcel of writing on social media. The overall theme of the post is that Salaita is a sometimes brash but valuable contributor to scholarly discourse who is being "punished" for being critical of Israel.

And then we read some of the tweets in question. I'll focus on two of the most egregious:

"By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic shit in response to Israeli terror."

"Zionists, transforming 'antisemitism' from something horrible into something honorable since 1948."

Calling anti-Semitism "honorable"? Yeah, I think we're a bit beyond "uncivil" here. The fact that it is couched in a "critique" of a particular sector of Jewish experience and comes with a healthy dose of victim-blaming hardly changes the analysis: if I wrote "Al Sharpton, transforming 'racism' from something horrible into something honorable since 1991," I would not simply be criticizing the National Action Network. One would hope we'd have little trouble understanding the racism latent in such a statement (though admittedly I suspect a significant segment of the American political right would fervently deny there is any such racism in that statement. Needless to say, emulating the right-wing definition of racism as "Klan members, and then only if they are chanting 'White Power' while actually lynching someone" is hardly a ringing endorsement).

But here's the thing -- this observation doesn't change Robin's analysis either. And that's what I find frustrating. This debate seems to be, on the one hand, "Salaita's views are abhorrent and therefore Illinois was right to rescind his offer" versus "Salaita is a valuable contributor to scholarly discourse who is being wrongfully punished for his unpopular views." In other words, both sides are conflating Salaita's academic freedom -- the freedom not to be punished in the academic context due to one's political opinions -- and his academic legitimacy -- whether his statements should be considered in-bounds when we think about what positions are valid in political discussion. The right answer, it seems to me, is that "Salaita has said some horrifying, anti-Semitic stuff, but Illinois made its bed and now it has to lie in it." Academic freedom still protects people who say racist or anti-Semitic trash. I can say from my time teaching at Illinois, no less, that I was the periodic recipient of blast emails from a tenured faculty member who liked to go on about the Zionist Fascist Neo-Con Straussian Rockefeller Evangelical conspiracy of war and world domination. Tenure is a beautiful thing. The point being, said faculty member had the right to say those things, but one would hope that everyone else recognized him as a lunatic (which they did). It wasn't scary that he wasn't fired, but it would have been very scary if most other faculty members thought he had a point.

Turning back to Salaita's case, if one wanted to there are ways to distinguish it from the "academic freedom" paradigm. The tweets in question are not part of any scholarly discussion, they were mere social media outbursts. For obvious reasons though I have no interest in seeing academics targeted due to their social media postings, so as far as I'm concerned that's out. Another difference is that Salaita was only not hired at Illnois, he was not fired for his positions. That would be a valid distinction, I think, had this decision been made at the department level. I addressed this issue previously in the context of supposed "discrimination" against faculty candidates who oppose LGBT rights:

Being a law professor is an academic, policy-oriented position. The question of LGBT rights is a normative, political question. It goes to the heart of what a professor does. If someone gets that question "wrong", is there any reason why I can't evaluate them more harshly on the merits of their candidacy? How else is one supposed to evaluate it? This gets to the deep tension within academia: academic freedom means letting people take whatever position they like and pursue any line of inquiry they desire; academic merit necessarily requires judging those positions and inquiries as good or bad. I don't mean to discount the possibility that somebody can take a position that I think is wrong while conceding that they argue for it in a powerful and sophisticated fashion. I do mean to say that the deeper ingrained a particular commitment is, the less likely that one will believe the dispute to be one of reasonable disagreement, rather than simply the other side making a profound moral error.

Indeed, I think this gets at a large part of the discomfort over Salaita's hiring -- that functionally in hiring Salaita they're saying (at least in part) that viewing anti-Semitism as an honorable calling is a valid, legitimate position in the constellation of academic debate, just one of many positions that we might have political disagreements about. That judgment is a concerning one. Whether or not a professor could get hired if she had written that "Hamas has made Islamophobia something honorable" or "Louis Farrakhan has made racism something honorable", I'd certainly hope that she wouldn't be -- that we would view that position as outside the bounds of good legitimate scholarly debate. That distinguishes the decision to hire from the decision to fire -- it is well-known and agreed that not firing an academic for his or her appalling opinions does not signal any endorsement of the validity of those views. By contrast, making the affirmative step of hiring an academic inevitably contains some such endorsement. Consequently, one has to wonder how it is that viewing anti-Semitism as "honorable" rather than "horrible" for the past 65 years has come to be a position smart, well-connected academics are willing to endorse.

So on the one hand, if Salaita had written this after already having been hired at Illinois, it would be both protected by academic freedom and abhorrent. If the hiring committee had decided they didn't want to hire him because they didn't think viewing anti-Semitism as "honorable" was up to their standards of merit, they'd be equally justified (and right). Salaita is somewhere in the middle given that he had been offered the job but had not yet formally gotten upper-administration approval; but I'm inclined to agree that this was too late. It is well-known that this approval is pro forma; like Salaita I too announced my departure from my prior job before getting final approval by the Chancellor (or whoever) for my position having relied upon the offer from the folks at the law school. Nobody views the chancellor's approval of the hiring decision as an endorsement; it is a rubber-stamp. That's why anyone inside the academic community views this as having taken something away from Salaita, which in turn raises academic freedom concerns. And since, to reiterate, racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic views are as protected by academic freedom as any other, this should in no way stop anyone from recognizing the anti-Semitism in Salaita's writings.

Long story short -- academic freedom protects anti-Semitic statements such as the claim that anti-Semitism has become "honorable." Viewing that statement as anything other than an abhorrent view that is nonetheless protected by academic freedom is frightening. That people on both sides of the debate over Salaita's hiring continue to conflate these two concepts blurs both of these important conclusions.

UPDATE: The Illinois AAUP committee on academic freedom has released a statement supporting Salaita. It's mostly unobjectionable, but it does fall into the trap I outlined above. Salaita's statements were less a "plea to end the violence" so much as to redirect it ("Jeffrey goldberg’s story should have ended at the pointy end of a shiv."; "I wish all the fucking West Bank settlers would go missing" -- said in the aftermath of the kidnapping of three Jewish teenagers in the West Bank who were later found dead). And the end paragraph, which expresses concern "if a university would void a contract of a professor exercising a right of citizenship in protesting actions of another country that much of the global community including the U.N. Secretary General and even the U.S. State Department have found 'disgraceful,'" is another entry in the long history of conflating everything from "anti-Semitism is honorable" to tactical critiques of military operations into an indistinguishable glob known as criticism of Israel.

None of which alters the broader point -- but again, I don't know why it is so hard for people to defend academic freedom without affirmatively arguing that the speech in question is actually great. That's not what academic freedom is about.

Conveying Another Message to the Jews of South Africa

The Western Cape branch of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) is threatening a widescale boycott of the Jewish community -- and urges them to leave South Africa outright:

If the Jewish Board of Deputies wants to advance a Zionist agenda, they should leave South Africa and go advance their agenda elsewhere. To let these funders of a war against a defenceless people act with impunity in South Africa, is against South Africa’s commitment to the people of Palestine. The Jewish Board of Deputies must be advised in no uncertain terms that if they are not part of the solution then they are part of the problem.

The Jewish Board of Deputies are given until the 07 August 2014 to stop their Zionist propaganda in Cape Town, failing which we will boycott and call strikes at all of their member – and supporting companies and organisations. The Jewish Board of Deputies should know that just because Premier Zille supports them, it does not mean that they can act with impunity against the will of the majority of South Africans.

This is reminiscent of another COSATU official, Bongani Masuku, who stated he wished

to convey a message to the Jews in SA that our 1.9-million workers who are affiliated to COSATU are fully behind the people of Palestine… Any business owned by Israel supporters will be a target of workers in South Africa.

He later rumbled that "none of those who tolerate Israeli apartheid and racism should ever imagine it [South Africa] to be their home." In terms of what it meant to cease support for Zionism, Mr. Masuku was clear that it would not be enough to be "silently consenting or grumbling under tables." For this, Masuku was found to have engaged in hate speech.

Incidentally, Western Cape is also the province where an ANC official posted on Facebook that Hitler "was right". The ANC and COSATU are two of the three members of the "Tripartite Alliance" that has been the dominant political player in South Africa since emerging from apartheid in 1994.

Corporate Governance

Much of the liberal dismay over Hobby Lobby (and before that the campaign finance cases) has centered around the question of "corporate personhood" -- whether a company, like an individual, has the various rights protected by the Constitution. I've always thought this was the wrong question. I think everyone agrees that corporations should not have the right to vote, on the one hand. And on the other hand, I think everyone does agree they have the right to the freedom of the press -- shutting down the New York Times and justifying it because "it's a corporation" wouldn't fly with anyone.

So really the question isn't "do corporations have 'individual' rights", it's "what rights do corporations have." But even that, I think, doesn't get at the dismay so many felt over Hobby Lobby. I don't think the problem is necessarily even that Hobby Lobby asserted a freedom of religion claim. There are corporate-religion claims that I can imagine many people finding plausible and worth endorsing -- a kosher butcher suing over state restrictions on meat slaughtering. Another would be the efforts of Jewish-owned businesses to be exempt from Sunday closing laws (efforts that were almost entirely unsuccessful, at least in the courts).

The problem is that Hobby Lobby's decision feels less like "respecting an individual's choice of conscience" and more like "government imposing its religious beliefs onto me." And here's the important point: from the vantage point of its employees, Hobby Lobby bears a much closer resemblance to government than to a fellow citizen.

As a private citizen I might be able to request a religious exemption to, say, wear a beard at work or have Saturdays instead of Sundays off. This has at best an incidental effect on people-not-me. By contrast, if I assert that an entire highway needs to be moved to accommodate my religious sensibility, affecting thousands of other people, I'm going to encounter far more skepticism. We tolerate religious accommodations where they are primarily private matters that have an at most incidental impact on other members of the polity (which I support -- why not?). But Hobby Lobby's decision is hardly private; the primary effect of its decision is felt by its workers. In its ability to seriously and materially impact the lives of thousands of other people, Hobby Lobby is approximating a government far more than a person.

The broader point is that for most people, most of the time, the entity that "governs" their daily lives and conduct is not Congress, its their employer. Your boss largely decides how much you're paid, what benefits you are entitled to, when you can come and go, even what you must wear. There are differences, of course. A business relationship is contractual; I can leave for a new job. But then again, in the formal sense I can move to a new state or country. And in this economy, it is hardly a given that (practically speaking) people can willy-nilly move about jobs or countries. Ultimately, the ability to exit is somewhat more robust in the corporate context. But there are other areas where government has the advantage. I have many routes to influence my government, including voting, campaigning, writing letters, and protesting -- in fact, I have a right to submit grievances. There is typically no functional analogue in the corporate context, and many of the above options are a quick route to being canned for insubordination. Advantage: government.

In any event, the point is not to say whether government or corporations on net do or can deprive us of more liberty. Functionally speaking, most of us most of the time are subjected to corporate, not congressional, governance. That the company plays this role in our lives means people are -- justifiably -- going to mentally slot it in as a ruler rather than a peer when it starts making decisions that impact us. Fundamentally, it's a rejection of the libertarian conceit that economic relations are the free interaction of coequals. Rather, we're talking about what powers "government" -- defined functionally rather than formally -- has over individuals. And when the government tries to say "we're going to obstruct your access to contraception because we find it religiously immoral", people are going to have the same reaction as if an old-school government made the same decision.

The Pros and Cons of Being Pro

Or "anti" for that matter. Paul Waldman has an incisive post critiquing the concept of being "pro-" or "anti-" Israel. That's a slight over-simplification -- Waldman argues that "pro-Israel" should be limited to the narrow question of whether "Israel ought to exist." This is no longer a debate in mainstream western circles (so Waldman asserts, anyway), and beyond that the terminology distracts us from specific policy questions like, e.g., should Israel withdraw to 1967 borders, should Israel engage in military operations against Hamas, should Israel maintain its blockade of Gaza, and so on and so forth. One can take a variety of a positions on these questions while still believing that "Israel ought to exist", so what good does the label do us?

I think there is a lot to Waldman's argument. It tracks Phoebe Maltz Bovy's narrow definition of Zionism, that the creation of Israel was a good idea and it shoudl stick around. Of course, I think Waldman might understate the contemporary salience of the "Israel should not exist position." In the west this depends on what one considers "mainstream", but of course the world does not consist of only the west. Both regionally and internationally, the debate over Israel still very much encompasses the question of whether it should be there at all. And because that debate does, in fact, remain very live, it is understandable that even on policy questions where people on both sides genuinely believe that Israel ought to exist; coming to the right conclusion (or at least not getting it catastrophically wrong) has real impacts on whether Israel will in fact be around as a Jewish democratic state in 20, 50, or 100 years.

But none of that diminishes the important point, which is to not think of Israel in terms of bare-bones "solidarity" politics. Caring about something means having opinions about it. If you care about Israel, as many people do, you should have opinions about it, and it is highly unlikely that those opinions will perfectly track those of any particular governing coalition.

Trains and Their Alternatives

By far, my favorite species of libertarian writing is the article which attacks a government spending project by articulating all the other spending projects -- also opposed by libertarians -- that could instead receive the money. This Reason article making fun of a new light rail project in downtown Detroit is a great example of the genre.

I don't know enough about the particulars of Detroit to know if the project makes sense or not. I do note that reviving urban cores via densification around light rail hubs has a very strong record of success and plays into the increasingly car-less preferences of the millennial generation. Given that this is pretty much the trend in urban revitalization, you'd think the article might mention it somewhere, but alas. Indeed, the article seems peculiarly attached to the thesis that "downtown" is a doomed concept which fell apart in 1967 and will never rise again -- a theory that seems to my ears to be, what, a decade out of date? At least? The trend in the United States has been towards restoring the central nature of "downtown" areas, as young professionals like being able to walk (or take a quick hop on public transportation) to their jobs, their favorite restaurants, or their after-work hangouts. So the idea that Detroit would benefit from following this path is hardly some sort of absurdist boondoggle.

The real joy though, comes in all the caveats that are snuck in throughout the article, much as a parent might hide vegetables under the mashed potatoes. "Detroit's light rail line could be written off as a typical government pork fest, if only a large share of the construction funds weren't coming from private sources." Uh-oh -- sometimes private benefactors make choices with their money that don't perfectly align with Reason's read on Rational Choice Theory? Say it ain't so! What about convenience? Well, obviously, the best way to think about that is their absurd hypothetical where a local business magnate uses his god-given right as a Free Market Maker issues some sort of decree to "mandate that his employees utilize the new light rail line in their daily commutes after it opens in 2016." The idea behind these light rail projects typically is that people move close to the train stations and don't drive anywhere, but that really basic concept is again nowhere to be seen.

And what about the "26 percent of Detroit households that don’t own cars"? Here, Reason suggests that further investment in the city's bus lines would be a better use of the money. And maybe so -- there are a lot of reasons to favor rapid-bus transit over train lines, greater flexibility being among the most prominent! But of course, if that was on the table it would be another government spending atrocity Reason would oppose on principled libertarian grounds. And even if Reason was remotely likely to offer its full-throated support to massive government subsidies to local bus lines -- which I don't think we'll see in any form except as a hypothetical counterplan to actual proposed projects -- the fact is one of these projects is on the table (thanks to private money, no less), and one isn't.

So yes, color me skeptical that their problem with the rail project stems either from Reason's deep understanding of contemporary urban redevelopment policy or their heartfelt commitment to bus service.

Religious Mantras

The former editor-in-chief of Newton, Iowa (pop. 15,254) was fired after he wrote comments describing his fight against the "Gaystapo". Now he's claiming religious discrimination and filing suit. Here's his statement:

On April 28, 2014, I penned a theologically based article stating my sincerely held religious beliefs about efforts by some to criticize and remold my faith through what I believe is false teaching. In my article, I quoted at length from a variety of sources, most prominently, from the Holy Bible.

That blog post described my sincerely held religious beliefs regarding Holy Scripture and the definition of marriage. My comments on my blog were personal in nature and reflective of my sincerely held religious beliefs. Furthermore, I felt compelled by my sincerely held religious beliefs to share my Biblical view with the few folks who read my blog.

I'm probably reading too much into this, but the way he's repeating "sincerely held religious beliefs" after Hobby Lobby reminds me a lot of shooters after Trayvon Martin who kept saying "I'm standing my ground" right before blowing some "threatening" kid away. It's interesting to watch legal doctrine percolate down into the public consciousness and how they are understood (and misunderstood) by average people. I am quite skeptical that a religious discrimination claim will go anywhere based on these facts; "sincerely-held" beliefs notwithstanding.

Bonus fun fact: The man is being represented by the Liberty Institute -- formerly known as the "Free Market Foundation". Because when I think "conservative ideals about the free market", I think "judicial intervention to stop private businesses from voluntarily deciding who they employ as their Editors".

I Will Never Yield in My Commitment to Compromise My Principles

A new poll asks what sort of people Americans wish had a greater presence in Congress. There's some interesting findings, but the one that immediately struck me was this:

Gallup finds that by a margin of 63% to 30%, Americans believe the country would be better (as opposed to worse) governed if in political office there were more “people who think it is more important to compromise to get things done than to hold firm to their principles.” Okay. But by a margin of 56% to 38%, they believe life would be better if there were in political office more “people who think it is more important to hold firm to their principles than to compromise to get things done.” These would appear to be diametrically opposed and exclusive propositions, unless “Americans” are saying they want more highly conflicted people in office, or just want more of everything.

I really, really, really wish I could get into the head of the people who prefer both the pro- and anti-compromise positions.

One-Liner

A Palestinian defendant -- facing deportation after being accused of covering up her convictions and subsequent prison sentences for two Jerusalem bombings -- wants her Jewish judge off the case because of his alleged ties to the "pro-Israel" community (the motion is here). While I don't doubt that the Judge is "pro-Israel" in some broad sense of the word, I say "alleged" because some of the supposed "ties" are really just connections to the Jewish community that, if we're charitable, are simply being misunderstood. The label "Builder of Israel", for example, given by the Judge's synagogue for his charitable donations to the community, is a reference to the Book of Ruth that does not necessarily reflect anything about Israel qua Israel.

In any event, we've seen arguments like this before -- a Catholic Judge asked to recuse himself due to his ties to Ave Maria College; the effort to get Judge Walker to recuse himself in the gay marriage cases. Were it up to me, I'd dispose of the motion in a single sentence:

The motion to recuse is denied. See Pennsylvania v. Local Union 542, Int'l Union of Operating Eng'rs, 388 F.Supp. 155 (E.D. Pa. 1974).

But I'm cheeky.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XI: Shooting Down the Malaysian Airlines Jet

Here's a shocker -- of course the attack on the Malaysian Airlines jet that was shot down over Ukraine would be blamed on the Jews [http://theunhivedmind.com/UHM/new-venice-zionists-shoot-down-malaysian-airlines-mh17-to-ignite-confrontation-with-brics-head-russia/]:

NEW VENICE ZIONISTS SHOOT DOWN MALAYSIAN AIRLINES MH17 TO IGNITE CONFRONTATION WITH BRICS HEAD RUSSIA
[...]
Just this week the Ukrainian Army were given numerous BUK-M1 weaponry which were deployed right next to the Donetsk region and in Kharkiv by Wednesday all just one day prior to this event and all ready to take down any enemy combatants. So one outcome of this event may well be Israel soon getting commercial airline orders for all civilian aircraft to be fitted out with Multi-Spectral Infrared Countermeasure and Directional InfraRed CounterMeasure systems from Elbit. This today will also aid Israel by allowing their zionist media networks to cover-up the Gaza war crimes as interest all lies back on President Putin and Russia rather than on the ground invasion of the Gaza Strip happening on the very same day.
[...]
Expect a lot more plane events like this using Boeing aircraft but most aircraft run the same type of system today so they are all basically drones you should never use. So in truth the U.S could just fly this aircraft into the ground and claim on their media networks (MI6, MI5, CIA, Mossad) that the plane had been fired upon even if it had not and the herd would believe such lies thanks to Serco OOOI interventions. This MH17 flight was supposedly followed by two Ukrainian jets just prior to the downing of the aircraft. I could believe that these Zionists may even go to the length of painting up an aircraft as Ukrainian and firing on this airliner to wind up Pro-Russians but usually they will do this in the enemies colors but if they use Ukrainian colors then Putin might just step in and confront the Ukraine as he has threatened over the recent shelling from Ukraine into Russia killing an innocent Russian citizen.

And I think we have our mole -- "One Israeli Dies in Malaysia Airlines Shoot-Down Over Ukraine. Smoking gun! Let's learn all about this dastardly Mossad agent who no doubt orchestrated this heinous act:

Itamar Avnon, Convert to Christianity....

Whoops -- let me revise. Let's learn all about this dastardly Mossad agent who no doubt orchestrated this heinous act brave martyr murdered by the Elders of Zion for his heresy.

That's how you conspiracize, people. I know this is breaking news and all, but I shouldn't have to clean up afterwards like this.

Fireable Offenses

In case you were wondering whether the ANC official who said Hitler was right would be terminated or even disciplined by the party, the answer is no. No, he will not.

Indeed, in an interview with theSouth African Jewish Report, ANC Secretary General Gwede Mantashe refused to even distance himself or his organization from the apparently now controversial subject of whether global Jewry should be slaughtered en masse.

But remember -- the real injustice is when Jews have sufficient political influence that policymakers feel they must be attention to their concerns.

I Smell Another Hate Speech Case

Remember that time that a top COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) official announced he wished to "convey a message to the Jews" of South Africa -- specifically, that he and his union would make their lives "hell" if they supported Israel? It led to a hate speech conviction by the South African Human Rights Commission -- a ruling COSATU was not exactly chagrined by. But less we feel too bad, it did not stop the BDS advocates in the British University and College Union from inviting him to give a talk.

Oh, those were the days. It was almost like that time a major South African government official said "Jewish money" controlled America.

But I digress. Today, an official with African National Congress (South Africa's ruling party) decided to join the "Hitler was right" brigade on Facebook:

The post by Rene Smit, who works at ANC Western Cape, displayed an image of Hitler with the title "Yes man, you were right..." followed by the line: "I could have killed all the Jews, but I left some of them to let you know why I was killing them." At the bottom of the image was the message, "Share this picture to tell the truth a whole world."

Something tells me that this could head right back to the SAHRC. And something tells me that, if and when he is found to have engaged in hate speech, the same "Palestinian solidarity activists" will come out of the woodwork to defend him.

"Ism" Claims and Rule 12(b)(6)

A twitter conversation I had today made me think, oddly enough, of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6).

Rule 12(b)(6) enables a plaintiff's case to be dismissed for "failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted," prior to there being any discovery or fact-finding. It can be invoked when the plaintiff's claims, on their face, don't make out a legal violation. The most obvious example would be a lawsuit accusing the defendant of "being a jerk". "Being a jerk" is not against the law, so there's no point in allowing discovery or fact-finding to figure out what "really" happened (or even what the parties' respectively say happened) -- even if everything the plaintiff alleges to have occurred was believed by a jury, the plaintiff still could not win.

A more recent (and subtle) variation is when the plaintiff superficially claims a real legal violation, but it is implausible that the facts she alleges actually would prove the claim. For example, suppose a plaintiff claims two companies conspired to violate anti-trust laws, and her evidence was "I saw them eating lunch together once". Conspiracy to violate anti-trust laws is a real legal breach, and it's possible that it occurred here (maybe the topic of the lunch conversation was "how to best form a cartel"), but it is exceptionally implausible that those alleged facts would actually get any reasonable jury to find for the plaintiffs.

Of course, the plaintiff will cry, he can't demonstrate facts that prove the law was violated unless he has the opportunity for discovery to determine what the facts are. And so 12(b)(6) dismissals, at least outside first outlined scenario where on face no legal violation is plead, tread delicate ground. On the one hand, denying them means forcing defendants (and the judiciary) to go through time-consuming litigation on claims that may well be frivolous and in which the plaintiff can't win even if he finds what he putatively seeks. On the other hand, allowing them means blocking off potentially valid claims based on a judges -- as opposed to a jury's -- sense of what's "plausible", uninformed by any sort of comprehensive factual record.

What does all of this have to do with the above conversation? Well, Mr. Black's initial assertion was that "No matter how hard you try to smear, being anti-Israel is NOT being anti-semitic." And I answered back with my typical rejoinder, that whether a particular stance on Israel is or isn't anti-Semitic is context-dependent; it's not something one can declare one way or another in a vacuum. And Mr. Black agreed that "I'm sure anti-semites are also anti-Israel," but argued it's "still total bullshit to smear someone opposing Israel as anti-S[emitic without] proof."

This, to me, is somewhat of a strange reply given the position I had laid out. An "anti-Israel" position may or may not be anti-Semitic; to determine which requires a careful and sensitive inquiry into the totality of the surrounding circumstances. It's not something that we can usually state with definitiveness one way or another simply by looking at the face of things -- certainly not at the level of generality that "being anti-Israel" implies. Anti-Semitism requires inquiry -- it can neither be proven affirmatively true or categorically denied without a hard look into motives, consequences, and other like considerations.

Juxtapose that with Mr. Black's response: "still total bullshit to smear someone opposing Israel as anti-Semitic without proof." Arguably, this takes aim only at people who definitively declare (prior to engaging in any analysis) that their anti-Israel interlocutor is anti-Semitic. But if so, that's a substantial retreat from his initial statement: that, flatly, "being anti-Israel is NOT being anti-semitic." Mr. Black instead seems to be aggrieved by the initial allegation of anti-Semitism. He does not seem to think that the claim of anti-Semitism is something that requires thorough consideration of detailed facts. He thinks that the claim is implausible on its face. In essence, he wants to dismiss the charge without having to go through the discursive equivalent of discovery -- of digging through the facts and context to determine whether the claim has validity. While he concedes that there could be a case where an anti-Israel position was anti-Semitic, he thinks that in general the juxtaposition of anti-Semitism alongside an anti-Israel position is so implausible as to not require any further thought.

This is, in essence, a request for Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal. It stems from the belief that such charges are so unfair, so manifestly implausible on their face, that they should be dismissed without any further analysis. As I observed last year, there is a perceived entitlement to be free from the vicinity of an anti-Semitism discussion:

Well let's approach it from the opposite angle. Why would it be a bad thing? The answer, it seems to be, is that it is generally unfair to be accused of anti-Semitism (or forwarding an anti-Semitic position, or being insufficiently attentive of anti-Semitism). There is a perceived entitlement of people to not have to deal with it unless the case is exceptionally egregious. . . .

I honestly do not understand the foundation for this entitlement. Why is this something that people are owed? Why is there any right to be free from the vicinity of an anti-Semitism claim? At best, one could say that it stems from an obligation of presumed good faith -- we should not assume our interlocutors' positions stem from evil motives. There are three problems with this argument, though: (1) It's internally contradictory, since the objection to being called anti-Semitic inevitably takes the form of claiming the accuser made the charge in bad faith, (2) It isn't altogether clear why Jews should be forced to assume good faith of non-Jews with respect to matters of Jewish equality, given that historically such trust has not exactly been earned, and (3) It relies on a particular (and particularly narrow) conception of anti-Semitism wherein it only exists if it is the product of conscious and overt antipathy towards Jews. This definition of anti-Semitism is debatable at best, and in the context of the instant discussion seems to serve more as a way of shielding a wider-ranging discussion of the subject by transforming it from a systematic discussion of what Jews are owed as equal global citizens into an investigation of the personal character of the individual.

Consequently, I reject the notion that there is any special entitlement to not have anti-Semitism raised as an issue when Israel is discussed.

Of course, this isn't to say that there could never be a claim of anti-Semitism that was so implausible on its face we could wave it aside -- a charge based on the statement "I can't stand lox and bagels", for example, or (to use my preferred Israel-related example), "the traffic in Tel Aviv is awful". But the 12(b)(6) style averments seem to extend much beyond that -- basically innocent until proven Nazi. There's simply no reason to agree to such a broad shield against full and honest inquiry into how anti-Semitism may or may not intersect with particular positions vis-a-vis Israel.

Fitness Tests

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens, commenting on the brutal kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, stated that "a culture that too often openly celebrates martyrdom and murder is not fit for statehood." This column came across my Facebook feed last night, and I immediately noted its resonance with the neo-colonialist position of Daniel Doron. The nickel version is simply this: self-determination is not a cookie that we give to reward the good boys and girls. One's right to self-determination is unconditional -- one has it regardless of whether as "a culture" (to inevitably overgeneralize) one is good or bad. We deal with bad states all the time. And bad states with bad policies and bad worldviews and bad human rights records should be dealt with. But the solution is not "deprive their constituent populations of their right to vote."

There is a name for putting a people under the occupation and political control of an external sovereign, of whom they are not citizens and have limited political, social, and legal rights, until such time as they are deemed enlightened enough to be worthy of self-governance. Its name is colonialism, and its track record is not good.

Hold that thought.

Early today it was discovered that a Palestinian teenager was abducted and murdered in Jerusalem. This grisly discover occurred contemporaneously with a vicious campaign amongst some segments of the Israeli population calling for violent revenge and mass expulsions of Israeli Arabs. These were not all fringe figures: the General Secretary of Bnei Akiva, the world's largest Religious Zionist youth movement, put up a post calling for Israel to slaughter 300 Arab youth and take their foreskins as prizes (apparently he did not realize that Muslims, like Jews, circumcise their children).

The point of this post is not to say that Israeli culture celebrates death or anything of that nature. Just as President Abbas condemned the kidnapping of the Israeli teenagers, Prime Minister Netanyahu was firm in his condemnation of the "revenge" killing. There are enough people who seem to take comfort that their adversaries truly are an indistinguishable mass of monsters; I do not join them.

The point is that we play dangerous games when we start talking making sweeping statements about "cultures" and whether they "deserve" basic human rights. Anyone who is active in Zionist circles is, or should be, familiar with the favored tactics of Israel's adversaries, which begin from the fact that Israel's inception was not an idealized deliberative process as John Rawls would have envisioned and draw the conclusion that therefore Jews clearly don't "deserve" a state of their own. It's a reprehensible game, the terms of which act to openly encourage racist and anti-Semitic generalizations. Ultimately, it reinforces the very elements -- and they are elements, which are neither trivial nor stand-ins for the whole -- that view murder, mayhem, and incitement as positive goods.

Those, like Bret Stephens, who are up in arms about the barbarity not of the kidnappers themselves but entire swaths of Palestinian society are notably quiet when it comes to the brutalism of the Price Tag movement or calls by Jewish mobs for revenge on Arabs writ large. And vice versa -- those who view the most vicious and irredentist portions of Israeli society as emblematic of the whole are typically the first to excuse violent terrorism and genocidal impulses by Palestinians as legitimate resistance.

We play dangerous games in a land that does not need more danger.

The Openness of the Presbyterian Church

The Presbyterian Church has released an open letter to its "American Jewish Interfaith Partners." It contains a lovely series of platitudes, but not much else. Seriously, please tell me if you see anything in there that is remotely substantive. I've read it three times and I've got nothing. "Nor does this [resolution] indicate any desire for the PC(USA) to walk away from our deeply held, multilateral Jewish-Christian relationships." I have no doubt that's true, but that does not tell us whether these "deeply held" relationships will yield any productive fruit. "The assembly's action came about through much prayer and discernment." I don't know what "discernment" means in this context, but suffice to say deep thoughts can still be wrong thoughts. I'd wager that much of the Church's history has been spent taking action regarding Jews that is the product of "much prayer and discernment"; the products of said action have an exceptionally ugly history.

For me, at least, what is missing here is any sense of introspection by the Church -- any sense that the products of continued interfaith engagement with the Jewish community may require the Church to act differently than it would like to if left to its own devices. The Church, to borrow from a Christian theologian, desires "cheap grace" -- it wants absolution from Jews without having to give up anything in return. But why should I give them such dispensation? As best I can tell, the offer on the table is that the Church wants to communicate with Jews, so long as the results of that communication do not require the Church to take any action it would not have otherwise done in the absence of the Jewish voice. That means nothing to me. It does address the root of the harm and it does not acknowledge the nature of the sin.

I've thought quite a bit about what it would take to bring the Church "back into Communion", if you will, assuming that they don't rescind the resolution (which they won't). The answer for me has actually been rather straightforward: Condemn "Zionism Unsettled" as an anti-Semitic document. Don't just "disavow" it as not an "official" Church document -- "Hop on Pop" is not an official Church document. "Zionism Unsettled" is representative of a particular Christian worldview vis-a-vis Jews that is deeply oppressive and problematic, and one that (though not always expressed so starkly) has a deep influence on how Christians understand the Jewish experience. The critical question is whether Christians acknowledge that the Jewish vantage point may require painful reassessments of some deeply held commitments. There is no reason that Christians should expect or are entitled to a reconciliation with Jews that is "self-bestowed":

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it a man’ will gladly go and self all that he has. It is the pearl of great price to buy which the merchant will sell all his goods. It is the kingly rule of Christ, for whose sake a man will pluck out the eye which causes him to stumble, it is the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him.

Christian reckoning with "Zionism Unsettled" requires that they acknowledge the reality of anti-Semitism in their own community and how that inevitably colors their instincts when they elect to speak on Jewish affairs. Recall that the divestment resolution passed by 7 votes. The resolution disavowing (which is to say, stating that the document "does not represent the views" of the PCUSA) "Zionism Unsettled" received eight negative votes in Committee. In a very real sense, it is the people who do believe in the validity of "Zionism Unsettled" and do believe it should reflect Church policy, that gave this resolution its margin of victory. Will they "pluck out the eye which causes [them] to stumble"? Plucking out eyes hurts, or so I imagine. It is not fun, to be sure. It is costly. Grace, in contexts such as the historical oppression of Jews by Christian, should be costly.

As noted in my last post, a (if not the) key question regarding the entire Presbyterian participation in this debate is why anyone -- Jewish or Christian -- should believe that the voice of institutional Christianity is a credible contributor on questions of normative values in general and Jewish experience in particular. Historically speaking, there is no reason to believe they are and will continue to be anything but terrible at this, in large part because the warp and woof of institutional Christianity thought and practice has been suffused with anti-Semitic ideology from top to bottom. Deconstructing (unsettling?) those foundations is a critical step in demonstrating that the Church recognizes there may be something internal to themselves that requires a change. In order for me, at least, to find talking to the PCUSA valuable, I need to know that they recognize these basic facts about themselves, their history, and their relationship to the Jewish people -- a legacy of prejudice and oppression that renders them deeply suspect (to say the least) as partners.

The Church wants cheap grace. It will not get it. If it wants to speak to Jews, it needs to first reckon with itself.

UPDATE: This op-ed by Rabbi Gary M. Bretton-Granatoor of the World Union for Progressive Judaism really puts an exclamation point on the above. I'm not exactly one to put a ton of stock in musty position papers sitting in a drawer, but I admit I assumed the PCUSA had one somewhere. That it, apparently alone amongst major Christian denominations, has never undertaken a formalized inquiry into their relationship with Judaism and how their own ideologies may be implicated by historical and theological Christian anti-Semitism is amazing. That really should have been Step 0 before undertaking a move like this.

Not The Historical Problem

Spotted amongst the arguments for Presbyterian divestment:

At the General Assembly itself, a shocked Presbyterian blogger reported that during prayers, Virginia Sheets, the vice moderator of the Middle East issues committee, “suggested that Jesus wasn’t afraid to tell the Jews when they were wrong.”

My first instinct, upon reading this, was to vomit.

But after the initial wave of nausea passed, I had two different thoughts. The first was to observe that, among the many characteristics one might use to describe institutional Christianity across history, "unwillingness to tell Jews how they ought behave" is not really on the chalkboard. One might even say it is the unifying feature of the Christian tradition -- starting with Jesus, perhaps, but continuing all the way down. Exhorting Christians to be less passive about criticizing Jews is like telling Mississippi to stop bending to the NAACP, or France to let the Germans win for once. And one might further add that this particular Christian fetish might be not just the single thing they're worst at, but (at least in terms of duration) the single most-worst thing ever. It is quite possible that no single entity has ever been as consistently bad at something over a longer period of time than Christians have been at making normative judgments about Jews -- a multi-millennia run of failure, often punctuated by violence, invariably associated with oppression, that characterized Christians never-ending self-assurance that they understand the Jewish situation better than Jews do. But be not afraid, Presbyterians! This time, it will be different I'm sure.

Thought number two goes to this idea of fear. Rev. Sheets' fellow Christians should not be "afraid" to tell them Jews what's what. One hears this refrain a lot -- how deeply frightening it is to stand up to the dreaded Jewish Lobby. Christians, of course, have rarely been particularly "afraid" to take Jews down a peg -- mostly because the scariest thing about criticizing Jews is the prospect that the Jews will say something that makes you feel temporarily bad about yourself (before reminding yourself that They're Just Playing the Anti-Semitism Card -- always a quick pick-me-up). Jews, on the other hand, have historically had to be genuinely fearful of telling Christians they're wrong, or refusing to heed Christian "criticisms" of Jewish behavior. To do so often quite literally was to render one's life forfeit. At best, it runs the risk of a massive backlash that threatens hard-won and precariously-preserved political and social rights. And so Jews have historically stepped quite lightly around Christian sensibilities; mouthing meek assertions about how maybe tones could be tempered and aren't we all brothers here and I know you mean well, but ....

It is a unique feature of the past 60 or so years that this situation has changed a little bit. Not that Christians now have to fear Jews, though there appears to be no power on earth that could convince the most powerful social organization the earth has ever seen that it is not being victimized by The Other. But it is the case that sometimes, in some contexts, Jews can criticize Christians without the automatic specter of a massacre looming. Or -- and this I suspect is worse than Jewish criticism -- Jews can sometimes ignore Christian criticism without immediate and obvious consequence. For people who view their power over Jews as an entitlement, this I think is what really rankles: there is an entity, that is Jewish, that Christians criticize, that sometimes does not listen.

Power, as Carol Gilligan once wrote, means you can "opt not to listen. And you can do so with impunity." Like most things, this is a double-edged sword. Of course being in position where can "opt not to listen" means one can safely ignore voices at the margins, and thus comfortably maintain a privileged state. But being able to not listen is also a predicate to autonomy. For historically marginalized groups, such as Jews, having the option not to listen is a break from thousands of years of imperial domination where our fates, our rights, and our lives were governed by the whims of others whose words we were bound to respect. Part of liberationist politics is respecting the reality that the formerly dominated group will make its own decisions and, sometimes, stand by those decisions even when their former rulers passionately disagree.

It's a lesson Virginia Sheets, and the Presbyterian Church, might want to learn.