Check Label Before Reading

Today I dodged a cinematic bullet.  A few days ago, I arrived in Florida to visit my parents for a few weeks.  There being not that much to do here, my dad suggested we all go see a movie on Sunday.  Before going to bed on Saturday, I suggested we see “something original.”  To my horror, my dad confronted me Sunday morning with a choice of three movies that he thought “looked pretty good”: The Proposal, Easy Virtue and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.  Why, when a fantastic movie like Up was still out and none of us had seen it, did they choose three generic boiler-plate genre pieces?  I got my answer on the ride home, after I saw Up and they had seen The Proposal: because my step-mom “doesn’t like animated movies.”  She’s well into her sixties, so I suppose I can excuse her from not knowing that the good name of Pixar is synonymous with universally accessible and deceptively insightful animated films.  Or from knowing that animated films and films that can be enjoyed by adults are not mutually exclusive categories; last year’s superb animated genre-defier from Israel about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Waltz with Bashir, comes to mind, as does the similarly mature 2007 narrative of a woman’s experience of the Iranian revolution, Persepolis.  But maybe labels don’t have any significance.  They probably still would’ve seen The Proposal if it was billed as a formulaic fish-out-of-water rom-com.  And, as much as I hate to admit it, they probably would’ve walked out saying it was fantastic, just like they did today.  Shudder.

I have a new interest in saving the term ”anti-semite” from the people who regularly abuse it to tar political opponents, namely AIPAC, the ADL and a grab bag of assorted neo-conservatives, many of whom write over at the op-ed page of the Washington Post.  Before I move any further, let’s be clear here – an anti-semite, as I (and probably most people) broadly define it, is someone who hates or is in some way prejudiced against jews.  It’s also worth noting that anti-semitism still definitely exists.  The murder of a security guard at the holocaust museum in the United States last week testifies to that, as does the enduring-if limited-popularity of far-right and often thinly veiled anti-semitic parties in Europe (see here and here for just a few high profile examples).  The frequency with which the aforementioned groups and individuals toss around the term anti-semite would be pathetic and transparent if they weren’t so influential.

Consider the current situation of UCSB Prof. William Robinson.  Robinson, who is himself Jewish, mass mailed students in one of his classes an e-mailcomparing Nazis and the behavior of the IDF.  I encourage you to read the e-mail yourself; from the furor over it I expected something much more inflammatory.  In any case, the usual backroom shenanigans occurred (which resulted in a separate investigation by the UCSB academic senate) and Robinson found himself before the academic senate explaining his “anti-semitic” behavior and fending off attacks by the ADL, among others.  Leaving aside the question of whether a semite can be an anti-semite, comparing Nazis to Israelis is not in and of itself anti-semitic.  Inappropriate?  Yes, such comparisons usually are unless they are very, very carefully nuanced – nothing the IDF has done to date compares with murdering 6 million people (or 11 million, depending on how you define the holocaust).  People can be idiots without being anti-semites.

If the condemnation of Robinson were an isolated incident, then this post wouldn’t be necessary.  Unfortunately, it is part of a larger pattern of painting individuals and opinions as anti-semitic that the groups with brush and bucket in hand disagree with.  Witness the recent spatbetween The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan and The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb, in which Goldfarb stretched Sullivan’s words beyond recognition in order to make the smear work.  Sullivan isn’t an anti-semite, and Goldfarb isn’t smearing him because he’s part of a secret jewish cabal; Goldfarb is smearing him because Goldfarb is an idiot who subscribes to a discredited and laughable political ideology – and because using the term anti-semite, regardless of whether even the objective facts on paper even remotely resemble something that couldbe construed anti-semitic, still has currency.  The more Goldfarb et. al. keep this up, the less meaning the term has.

And that’s unfortunate, because, as noted earlier, anti-semitism still exists.  But if AIPAC (a lobbying group that represents a the right wing of a foreign government and shares little else besides a common religion with the 2 million or so American jews) and its ideological counterparts in the United States continue to conflate criticism of Israel and “anti-semitism,” or, indeed, criticism of anything they advocate by virtue of their political ideology and “anti-semitism”, then the term will eventually lose its meaning and go the way of “literally,” whose depressing descent into misuse deserves to be wider known.  I want to be able to pick out people from a crowd who are prejudiced against jews so I can give their views the scorn and revulsion they deserve.  Don’t you fucking take that away from me, AIPAC & company!

Bonus Paragraph:
While fiddling with some ideas earlier today, I read thisop-ed by the Washington Post’s (natch) Michael Gerson.  In case you didn’t catch it, I will quote for you one rather choice excerpt:

The anti-Semitic community is varied in background and ideology. It includes both Internet Nazis and campus leftists carrying signs that read, “Jews = Nazis.”

I think the implication here is that while some of these insidious campus leftists may be clever enough to disguise their jew hate in the language of opposition to Israeli policy, they are all, at base, expressing the same vicious sentiment as the above referenced “campus leftist.”  If you think about it, there really is no other context in which an anonymous campus leftist would be toting a sign like that.  So kudos to Michael Gerson for again suggesting a relationship between anti-semitism and criticism of Israel, albeit quite subtley.

Bonus Paragraph #2:
There are 14 drafts by various other authors in the drafts section.  Get off your duffs and publish some shit, bitches!