I watched a sometimes compelling, sometimes frustrating documentary on PBS called Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations, written and directed by Andrew Goldberg. The “Four Mutations” actually represented four different modern-day countries, which Goldberg cited as particular examples of anti-Semitism either pursued as official government policy or invoked by major political movements in them. After the show ended I wrote a quick synopsis of its four sections:
The
United States: North Carolina state
legislative candidate Andrew Walker, the rise of anti-Semitism as part of white
supremacism and “America First” nationalism; footage of Richard Spencer and the
rise of credibility of white nationalism with the election of Donald Trump.
Hungary: The coming to power of Viktor Orbán as ruler in 2010 and
his re-election campaign in 2016, which used Hungarian émigré George Soros as a
personification of evil Jewish capitalism and capitalists out to rule the
world.
Great
Britain: Jeremy Corbyn’s opposition to
Israel and its encouragement of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, leading to a
lot of Jews and Jewish sympathizers leaving the Labour Party and likely
contributing to its overwhelming election defeat in December 2019, cited as an
example of anti-Semitism on the Left that also afflicts the U.S. and other
countries.
France: A wave of terrorism against Jews largely by Muslim
immigrants from France’s former colonies in North Africa who are recruited by
extremist Muslims into aligning with ISIS and other jihad groups and attack Jewish synagogues, schools, Kosher
markets and Jews in their own homes, including an 87-year-old Holocaust
survivor who was knifed to death in her apartment.
The show seems to have been inspired largely by mass
shootings at U.S. synagogues, including the ones in Pittsburgh and Poway,
though the first segment dealing with the U.S. focused more on anti-Semitism in
politics. When it covered mass shootings, it was mostly in terms of the
mass-shooter drills synagogue congregations and their officials have had to
conduct. It featured interview segments with Brad Orsini, a heavy-set, totally
bald, middle-aged white guy who’s a retired FBI agent the Tree of Life
Synagogue in Pittsburgh had hired to conduct mass-shooter drills and do
security work before there was an actual mass shooting —and while 11 people
were killed in the real shooting, Goldberg and Orsini stressed that the death
toll would probably have been even worse if they hadn’t practiced beforehand, and in particular if the rabbi
hadn’t followed his advice to have a cell phone and keep it on during the
service so he could call 911 immediately once the mass shooter appeared. The
most fascinating person profiled in this segment — indeed, in the entire
program — was Andrew Walker, who among other things bore a striking resemblance
to Brad Orsini (the politician preaching anti-Semitism and the ex-FBI guy
trying to protect Jews from anti-Semitic assassins were both totally bald, heavy-set middle-aged white guys!) and
also had a folksy down-home charm that belied the foulness of his message. The
show traced his particular brand of anti-Semitism back to the battles over
racial integration in the South in the 1950’s, when the racist defenders of
segregation couldn’t believe that African-Americans were intellectually capable
of organizing a movement for civil rights. No, there had to be puppet masters
behind them pulling the strings, and because a lot of the early white
supporters of the Black civil rights movement were Jews, they concluded that
the civil rights movement was part of the vast Jewish conspiracy to destroy the
white race and take over the world. (Actually this sort of bigotry vastly
pre-dated the 1950’s; the original Ku Klux Klan, and even more the variant of
it that became popular after the huge success of D. W. Griffith’s The
Birth of a Nation inspired the Klan revival
that eventually captured the state government of Indiana and became hugely
influential throughout the U.S. in the 1920’s — attracting adherents like New
York City real-estate developer Fred Trump, father of the current President —
was not only anti-Black but anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic as well, so they
would have hated me for both
sides of my heritage.)
The show drew a direct connection between the disarming
Walker, alt-Right activist Richard Spencer, and Donald Trump — it quoted
Spencer making his familiar argument that Trump isn’t an alt-Rightist himself
but his “America First” nationalism (remember that “America First” was one of
the dog-whistle slogans used by America’s fascist and Nazi sympathizers in the
late 1930’s, when Hitler and the original Nazis were still a going concern)
fits neatly within the alt-Right world view and leads them to regard Trump’s
presidency as a golden political opportunity. The second segment was focused on
Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and in particular his surprisingly (or maybe
not so surprisingly, once you remember that Hungary was itself a fascist
country in the old days of the original fascism — indeed Hungary’s fascist
leader, Admiral Horthy, took power in 1919, three years before Benito Mussolini
took over Italy, after he led the counter-revolution that overthrew the
short-lived Communist government of Béla Kún, and he aligned Hungary with the
Axis during World War II and stayed in power until the Red Army of Russia
invaded Hungary in 1944) Hitler-esque rallies. In particular the show focused
on George Soros, who has become the figure in Orbán’s demonology that Fulgencio
Batista was in Fidel Castro’s — the show displayed pro-Orbán posters depicting
Soros painted to look like the traditional image of the behind-the-scenes
Jewish power broker (much the way U.S. anti-Semites personify the Rothschilds
as the Jews responsible for all evil in the world, with their alleged control
not only of the world financial system but the media as well), and Orbán’s
propaganda portrays Soros as the fount of all the world’s evil, funding
globalization and other causes designed to destroy the (non-Jewish) white race
and lead the world into degeneracy and destruction.
The third portion, dealing
with anti-Semitism on the Left, was obviously going to be the hardest one for
me to take; the focal point was former British Labour Party leader Jeremy
Corbyn, though the biggest sins Andrew Goldberg was able to attribute to him
were his public questioning of whether the state of Israel should continue to
exist and his appearance on Iranian TV with representatives of Hezbollah and
Hamas. Goldberg’s argument here is that any questioning of Israel’s right to exist as a “Jewish
state” is anti-Semitic. Frankly, I think it’s wrong for any state to define itself in terms of a religion — it’s
wrong for Iran to call itself an “Islamic Republic” and, for the same reason,
it’s wrong for Israel to declare itself a “Jewish state,” and for the same
reasons: it sends a message to believers in any other religion (or no religion
at all) that they cannot be truly equal in the eyes of that government.
Goldberg, to his credit, at least paid lip service to the idea that one can
criticize the policies of this or that Israeli government without marking one
as a Jew-hater. But he’d probably regard me as an anti-Semite because I think the best solution
for Palestine would be a secular, democratic republic ruled by its Arab
majority but with ironclad political and social protections for its Jewish
minority — essentially what Nelson Mandela and F. W. DeKlerk were attempting to
achieve in South Africa when they negotiated the end of apartheid — and failing that I regard Israel much the way
Abraham Lincoln regarded slavery before the Civil War: it was wrong but we had
to let it alone where it existed because the cost of getting rid of it would be
even higher than allowing it to exist but confining it to where it stood.
(Lincoln got shoved off that position when the South responded to his 1860
election as President by seceding, and though Lincoln at first disclaimed the
idea that the Civil War was a struggle against slavery, once he issued the
Emancipation Proclamation that’s what it became.)
Goldberg’s argument was that
attacks on the current Israeli government for advancing settlements in the West
Bank and suppressing the rights of the Palestinians (whom he seems to regard
merely as terrorists — he’s scornful of the idea that the Jews are doing to the
Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews, but there are similarities between the historic tactics of
anti-Semitic governments in western Europe — the locking of Jews into ghettos,
the denial of many jobs to them, the control of their movements via internal
passports and the overall impoverishment of their communities by locking them
out of much of the economy — and the way the government of Israel is treating
the Palestinians today) lead inexorably to attacks on the right of Israel to
exist, which in turn leads to people adopting the same old bigoted tropes of
Right-wing anti-Semitism (Jews as the world’s puppet masters, Jews as a
“vulture culture” who have no real home and are therefore trying to take over
the world, etc.), and he interviews American college students who otherwise consider
themselves Leftists who have been shouted down at Leftist political meetings on
campus for defending Israel’s right to exist.
Goldberg is nowhere nearly as
specific detailing the anti-Semitism of the Left than he is the anti-Semitism
of the Right, mainly because there simply aren’t as many specific incidents to
draw on — and he also ignores the complexities surrounding President Trump, who
on the one hand gives aid and comfort to America’s white supremacists by
calling them “very fine people” while also giving in to the demands of the
Israeli Right and its U.S. supporters (including Republican Party mega-donor
Sheldon Adelson) by regarding Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a
sort of nationalist brother-in-arms and moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to
Jerusalem (a long-standing demand of the Israeli Right despite it throwing a
monkey wrench into what little is left of a peace process — the current Israeli
government is openly annexing huge sections of the West Bank and putting the
so-called “two-state solution” utterly beyond reach … and, ironically, making
the one-state solution more
likely once the rest of the world gets disgusted with Israeli aggression and
makes Israel a pariah state the way South Africa became during the last two
decades of apartheid). The fourth
segment dealt with anti-Semitism in France, and particularly acts of free-lance
terrorism conducted against Jews by immigrants from France’s former colonies in
North Africa, and Goldberg rather snippily dismisses the French Arabs’ concern
for the rights of the Palestinians by outright saying, essentially, “They’re
North Africans — why the hell should they care about the Palestinians?”
There are certainly some tragic stories
here — including the predictably ironic one of an 87-year-old French woman who
survived the Holocaust but was hacked to pieces (literally!) by an Arab
terrorist who broke into her apartment (the real grimness of this irony is that she survived an
organized attempt by a modern, technologically advanced state to exterminate
all Jews but she fell victim to one guy who’d been radicalized by an
acquaintance in prison and told he’d go to Heaven for killing a Jew), and
throughout the show there’s a sort of Leitmotif (and yes, I’m fully aware of the irony of using that
term in this context!) of the rise of the Internet. One radical-Right activist
interviewed in the U.S. segment recalled that he and his group used to have to
publish a newspaper with their anti-Semitic garbage, roll up thousands of
copies and hand them out on the street; today’s anti-Semites have access to the
Internet in general and social media in particular to distribute their
propaganda. Among other things, the Internet has eliminated the current
government of Germany’s ability to ban Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf; today any German can download the complete German
text of Mein Kampf and read it —
and a lot of them are doing so and regularly logging on to German-language Web
sites openly calling for the return of Nazism. (Maybe Andrew Goldberg should
have included a fifth “mutation” dealing with the rise of a neo-Nazi movement
in the country that gave birth to the original Nazis.) Viral — a metaphoric term that should probably be laid to
rest now that the biggest immediate threat facing humanity is a real virus, SARS-CoV-2 — is actually quite a good movie,
despite my resentments at the way it equates concern for the rights of
Palestinians with hatred of Israel and, therefore, hatred of Jews; the
talking-heads are well chosen (and Goldberg was able to interview at least two
former heads of state, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and former British
Prime Minister Tony Blair) and they generally have sensible things to say,
though there’s a certain despairing tone in the film about the depth, breadth
and longevity of this particular human prejudice.
