Let That Be a Lesson For You, Part II

Way back in 2009, I wrote about a case in the Netherlands where an Arab NGO was prosecuted for hate speech after publishing an article insinuating the Holocaust was exaggerated. The thing was, the NGO did not actually think the Holocaust was exaggerated -- rather, it was trying to draw attention a claimed double-standard after Dutch authorities had dropped hate speech charges against right-wing Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders for a film critics claimed insulted Muhammad. 

Drawing on entry #45 of advice for evil overlords ("I will make sure I have a clear understanding of who is responsible for what in my organization. For example, if my general screws up I will not draw my weapon, point it at him, say 'And here is the price for failure,' then suddenly turn and kill some random underling."), I observed that when a non-Jewish far-right extremist engages in hateful speech towards Muslims, the proper response -- even if one believes in tit-for-tat -- is not to turn and attack some random other minority group (here, Jews).

In the files of "all that's old is new again", a similar situation appears to be brewing in Sweden, where a Egyptian writer has postponed (but not cancelled) a planned "protest" of burning a Torah scroll in front of the Israeli embassy. Why is he burning a Torah scroll in front of the Israeli embassy? Because a far-right Danish journalist and politician (who is not Jewish) recently burned a Koran in front of the Turkish embassy. A hateful and despicable act, to be sure -- but why is the response to awful behavior by a right-wing, non-Jewish Dane to attack the Jewish community in front of the Israeli embassy? Burning a Christian Bible in front of the Danish embassy would not be justified, but at least it would have symmetry. But for some reason Jews are always the random bystander executed in situations like this.

I also want to emphasize that local Jewish community leaders credit the prevention of the Torah burning to Muslim leaders in Sweden speaking out against it. This "protester" is a hateful schmuck whose hate happens to illustrate a particular form of pathology I wanted to highlight. Fortunately, he's a hateful schmuck in the course of being repudiated, and that's a good thing.

It's Terrible How Fugitives Have To Hide From the Law

CNN gives us another entry in my "the UN is worthless" file.

A UN rights working group has found that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been arbitrarily detained by being forced to hole up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid arrest. Assange, who is wanted in Sweden for alleged sex offenses, has been in the embassy for three and a half years.

Forgive me if I don't see either the "arbitrary" or the "detention." It's not arbitrary since the principle that the UK will respect extradition requests from Sweden is hardly some weird legal anomaly. And it's not detention since Assange can leave whenever he feels like being accountable to normal judicial processes just like everyone else. Admittedly, this does not account for the age old legal norm that accused rapists should be able to walk the earth freely while completely ignoring judicial summons. So it's fortunate we have a UN group to remind us that process is for peasants.

UPDATE: Good analysis from Carl Gardner. This is just a joke.

If It's a War You Want....

Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom provoked outrage in Israel when she alleged that the nation was engaging in "extrajudicial executions" when police forces killed terrorists engaged in stabbing attacks in civilian areas. Israel has responded by declaring that Wallstrom is no longer welcome in the country.

The bases for critiquing Wallstrom are legion, including the usual charges of hypocrisy (police officers in Europe -- including Sweden and France -- have killed armed assailants before, without any fretting by Wallstrom about the deaths constituting "executions"). Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman also observes that Wallstrom seems to badly misunderstand the relevant international law principles she purports to be defending. Most notably, Feldman observes that even if police use of lethal force in stopping an armed attacker presents an international law question in the first place (far from clear), the international law language she appeals to is that governing armed conflict, not criminal conduct. Questions of "proportionality" and "distinction" refer to the legality of military strikes which will result in civilian casualties in pursuit of a bona fide military objective. Civilian and military targets must be distinguished, and civilian casualties must be proportionate to the military objective pursued. These considerations are simply inapposite where the police are seeking to stop an identified criminal in a civilian context.

There's another point worth making here that Feldman does not raise. Obviously, some defenders of Palestinian attacks on Israel would argue that these are military, not criminal actions. It's possible that this is the view that Wallstrom is seeking to channel: the stabbing attacks conducted by Palestinians against Israelis are part of an ongoing military conflict between Israel and Palestine, and so therefore Israel's response should be thought of in terms of the laws of war.

Obviously, the goal of this framing is to elevate the stabbing attacks beyond that of unsavory criminality. The stabbers are not mere criminals, but soldiers, entitled to all the respect that position entails. Now there are all sorts of reasons why characterizing stabbing attacks as military operations is problematic, and another lengthy list of reasons why if they are "military" they're also war crimes. But putting that aside, Wallstrom and other advocates of "militarizing" Palestinian stabbing attacks overlook one essential characteristic of the laws of war relevant to this conversation:

Soldiers can be killed.

This is a bedrock feature of the law of armed conflict: it is obviously not illegal (in of itself) to kill a soldier on the battlefield. They can be killed immediately, without warning, and without opportunity to surrender. And one can kill as many soldiers as one wants. There is no "proportionality" requirement with respect to combatants. Nor is there a requirement that they be given judicial process. A combatant who does legitimately surrender is entitled to have that surrender accepted, and upon capture is entitled to various protections as a POW. But there is no obligation to try and take enemy soldiers alive. If they're there and they're active, they can be killed -- even if they aren't an immediate threat to kill someone.

In this way, one might say, it's sometimes better to be a criminal than a soldier. Criminals are entitled to judicial process; that's the process through which they are punished. Killing a criminal on the street is only justified if there is an objective, imminent threat to someone's safety (the officers or surrounding civilians). None of that is necessary to kill a soldier. This oddity exists because, odd as this might sound, killing a soldier is not taken to be punitive. We don't kill soldiers on the battlefield as punishment for them breaking a law (being a soldier does not, in itself, break a law). We kills soldiers on the battlefield because that's what war is. And so by the same token, a captured soldier cannot be punished simply by virtue of their status as a soldier. Detention in a POW camp is also non-punitive; it is lawful as a means of incapacitating an enemy force. To punish an enemy soldier -- e.g., to hang him -- you need to charge him with a crime (such as a war crime). But judicial process is not something that exists on the battlefield itself.

For my part, I think it is evident that the Palestinian knife attackers are not soldiers, but ordinary criminals. And so that does mean that they are subject to ordinary rules of policing, which means they cannot be killed unless they pose an imminent safety threat. But if their defenders want to cloak them in the garb of the soldier, they need to accept the consequences of the label. Soldiers can be killed in war. That's what war is. And if it's a war Palestine wants, Israel is not under any obligation to lose it.

Having My Back

Here’s a message I got recently: “Anybody who helps or even protects the enemy Jew is a traitor. This is not a biased opinion, but an objective matter of fact. On the matter of enemies and traitors we must be clear where we stand. The punishment is DEATH.”

As a Jew, I'm grateful to anyone who takes time out of their life to be an advocate against anti-Semitism and in favor of Jewish equality. But I'm particularly grateful to those who do so in circumstances where such an act puts them in quite real physical peril. So I just want to say thank you to Siavosh Derakhti, a Swedish Muslim who founded "Young People Against Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia" (formerly "Young Muslims Against Anti-Semitism"). As the above quote makes clear, this is not a risk-free action on his part. So it is worth noting, and it is worth praising.

Everyday Citizens

The nation of Sweden tried an experiment with its official twitter feed: handing it off to a random Swede each week. Sounds like a fun, funky idea -- until one of them spent her week asking about those strange Jew-people she's heard so much about.



You know, say what you will about Americans, but we're smart enough to know in advance that a similar project with random American citizens would end in similar disaster.

Meanwhile, I am in agreement with those who say that the list of messages isn't hostile or anti-Semitic, just profoundly clueless. But still -- not exactly a shining moment. (Via WWPD).

A European Problem

The Forward has a stellar, if chilling, article on growing anti-Semitism in Malmo, Sweden, which is driving the Jewish population away from the city and into Israel. But buried inside, they also quote from some downright scary polling done inside Europe:

A continentwide study, conducted by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, released in December 2009, found that that 45.7% of the Europeans surveyed agree somewhat or strongly with the following statement: “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.” And 37.4% agreed with this statement: “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews.”

“[There is] quite a high level of anti-Semitism that is hidden beneath critics of Israel’s policies,” said Beate Kupper, one of the study’s principal researchers, in a telephone interview with the Forward, citing this data and a tendency to “blame Jews in general for Israel’s policies.”

Kupper said that in places where there is a strong taboo against expressions of anti-Semitism, such as Germany, “Criticism of Israel is a great way to express your anti-Semitism in an indirect way.”

That 37.4% figure seems like a perfect match of folks whose "anti-Israel" politics is leading directly into anti-Semitism, or at least "understanding" it. The 45.7% figure, by contrast, overlaps nicely with folks who have lost all sense of perspective or proportion (and what might be the cause of that?). Given these findings, I find it hard to disagree with Kupper that anti-Israel politics is often (not always) simply a socially acceptable way of operationalizing anti-Semitic attitudes.

Swedish Blood Libel Paper Publishes Anti-Muslim Screed

Report here. While it is "nice" to see that the paper is an equal opportunity purveyor of ethnic hatred, the same can't be said about the Swedish government*: Whereas aggrieved Jews got a sober lecture on the freedom of the press in response to calls for official governmental denouncement, "The opinion piece by Jimmie Akesson, the leader of Swedish nationalist political party, the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), has prompted harsh condemnations and accusations of racism from all political party leaders, including Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt."

To clarify: I have no problem with the government's condemnation of Mr. Akesson's racist article -- it appears to be quite appropriate. I simply note the incongruity faced when the government, which barely a month ago was faced with a clear case of published anti-Semitism and decided public comment would be an inappropriate impingement on free speech, has so blatantly reversed itself in an essentially identical case (that didn't involve Jews).

* Equal treatment, not purveyance of ethnic hatred, needless to say.

Do Not Cross

While a significant chunk of countries left the hall for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's racist tirade before the UN General Assembly, Sweden was not one of them, insisting that its "red line" was not crossed.

The "red line", apparently, does include Holocaust denial and calling for Israel to be annihilated, but does not include speaking of a "small minority" which "dominate[s] the politics, economy and culture of major parts of the world by its complicated networks." (Gosh, whoever could he be referring to!) An assertion of the blood libel would have made for an interesting dilemma, though.

Rumor: Sweden Will Condemn Blood Libel Article?

Ha'aretz reports that Sweden is preparing to present a resolution condemning anti-Semitism to the EU, which will include a specific denunciation of an article published in Aftonbladet claiming -- with virtually no evidence -- that Israelis kill Palestinians and harvest their organs. The article, however, is second-hand -- it's quoting an Italian official who apparently has been working with Sweden to resolve the crisis, but there isn't any official word out of the latter country.

Israeli officials respond:

"Every initiative against anti-Semitism is welcome," said Yigal Palmor, that ministry's spokesman. "But if the declaration is general and does not specifically relate to the article in Aftonbladet, it will not resolve anything.

"We did not ask for an apology, or for measures against the newspaper or the journalist," he added. "All we asked of Sweden and the Swedes is that they reject and decry the content of the report. And our position has not changed."

We'll see if this controversy can finally be put to rest.

UPDATE: Well, damn.

Swedes are Morons

Even when they aren't spreading blood libels: "Chlymedia helps young men feel more 'manly': Swedish study.

This is the Test

There is a form of defending criticisms of Israel from the charge that they are anti-Semitic that seeks to hermetically sealed off from each other. Under this hypothesis, criticism of Israel, so long as it is expressed as criticism of Israel, cannot be anti-Semitic no matter what form it takes. The idea seems to be that since Israel and Jews are distinct (true), it isn't targeting Jews qua Jews, and thus it is insulated. I admit I never found it persuasive in the first place, because I think prejudicial treatment of an entity affiliated with a marginalized community implicates prejudice towards that group (particularly, though not necessarily, when expressed through tropes that are typical associated with racism towards said group). But apparently some people do.

And now we have an excellent test case. A Swedish newspaper is actually accusing the IDF of harvesting Palestinians for their organs, a new twist on the classic blood libel that has rival papers calling them out for anti-Semitism.

But the liberal Sydsvenskan - southern Sweden's major daily - had harsh criticism for the rival paper, running an opinion piece under the headline "Antisemitbladet" (a play on the name Aftonbladet [the paper which published the original accusation]).

"We have heard the story before, in one form or the other. It follows the traditional pattern of conspiracy theory: a great number of loose threads that the theorist tempts the reader to tie into a neat knot without having been provided with any proven connection whatsoever," writes leading columnist Mats Skogkär of Sydsvenskan.

"Whispers in the dark. Anonymous sources. Rumors. That is all it takes. After all we all know what they [the IDF] are like, don't we: inhuman, hardened. Capable of anything," the opinion piece says. "Now all that remains is the defense, equally predictable: 'Anti-Semitism' No, no, just criticism of Israel."

Are they right? I think the paper is engaging in pretty classic anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering. But perhaps this, too, is just "criticism of Israel"?

I suppose there is an out here -- the article ties the accusations to the recent arrest of an Orthodox Jew in New Jersey accused of brokering a kidney sale. So it's tied to Jews, not just Israel. And the cognitive dissonance survives another day.

UPDATE: Apparently the author of the piece has been walking down this road for quite some time now.

UPDATE #2: But of course he's "no anti-Semite". They never are.

UPDATE #3: A must-read post by Barry Rubin.

White Out

This picture, from a Swedish protest against the Israeli Davis Cup team at Malmo, Sweden (which went on to defeat the Swedish team), gets at one of the more pernicious elements in the way anti-Israel criticism operates.

Israel came under significant criticism for its use of White Phosphorus in the Gaza campaign. I'm not an expert on international law nor the law of war, so I might be wrong in the details, but here are the facts as I understand them. White Phosphorus' primary function is as an illuminating device and a smoke screen, and it is incontestably legal to use it against military target for these purposes. It also can be used as an anti-personnel device due to its potential to cause severe burns. The legality of this use is disputed, but the weight of the evidence seems to be that it is forbidden.

The critiques of Israel were not that it was using White Phosphorus as an anti-personnel device. Rather, the criticism was that it was being used (as illumination and smoke screen aides) in dense urban environments where it was known it would affect civilians. Again, the legal status of this use is open for criticism: The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, Protocol III (of which Israel is not a signatory to) prohibits indiscriminate incendiary attacks against military forces co-located with civilians, but exempts materials whose incendiary properties are secondary, like White Phosphorus. Still, it would be a fair claim that morally if not legally such use should be highly constrained, as the potential for unintentional damage to civilians would seem to be very high.

So, that's where I'm at: there are at least some grounds to allege that Israel used White Phosphorus in violation of the laws of war, though this is hardly beyond dispute; the case that Israel used WP in a way that isn't consistent with the highest moral standards, by contrast is much stronger. Hence, I don't think there is any problem, per se, with criticizing their usage.

But, I do think there is a problem with what the Malmo protesters compared it to. Zyklon B was the gas used in the planned, deliberate murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. The usage of Zyklon B was not a "war crime" in any meaningful sense, as it wasn't used in the context of a battlefield: it was just Hitler's preferred method of executing his genocide. The atomic bombings of Japan killed over 200,000 people, nearly all civilians. Napalm was used as an anti-personnel device and unlike WP its primary purpose is as an incendiary -- making its use in civilian areas a clear violation of Protocol III (the US, it's worth noting, is not a signatory either). I don't know what event they're referring to with Mustard Gas, so I can't comment on that.

Israel's WP use has not been alleged to have caused a single death, albeit severe burns on a few dozen victims. That's bad, of course, but it doesn't put it in the same breath as the other weapons on the poster. Of course, the Holocaust comparison is particularly repugnant, and in a significant way represents a form of Holocaust denial: If one can't understand why using White Phosphorus in a military campaign (which harms a handful of civilians but is responsible for zero deaths) is distinguishable from rounding up millions of civilians and gassing them to death, you clearly don't understand what the Holocaust was.

By trying to group Israel's actions into categories it clearly doesn't belong, the protesters significantly distort the terms of the debate and implicitly counsel responses to Israel's actions that would not be justifiable outside cases where they actually were doing something like napalming civilian areas. Ultimately, this is another example of criticism as moral hatred, with all the implications that flow therein.

There is very little probability that "criticism" such as this will have any meaningful impact towards creating circumstances of justice for the Israelis and Palestinians. But that is not its intent. Its intent is to externalize the bad actors as supreme evildoers, affirm that the protesters are not them by drawing strict lines between those inside and outside of society, with the latter group worthy of whatever hatred, scorn, prejudice or violence that is heaped upon them. It is primarily self-indulgent, and for that reason repugnant when actual people are suffering from the fact that too many people are content to mouth (or scream) ideological platitudes rather than work for solutions.

OMG! I Love That Blog Too!

Lars Ohly is currently the party chairman of the Swedish Left Party -- essentially, the successor to Sweden's communist party. He is a member of parliament along with 21 of his party mates. He also has a list of favorite blogs. Number two on the list contains some delightful sentiments about Jews:

“If Obama hadn’t crawled before the Jewish Zionist mafia AIPAC & Co, we would never have heard of him, US policy is governed directly from Tel Aviv”.

“The Zionists has bought all resistance within the most important sectors of the world with the billions of dollars from the Holocaust industry”.

“Talmud encourages the Jews to kill Christians”.

Nice.