Guest Post: Ali Abunimah’s Orwellian Definition Of Antisemitism For Israel-Haters

petraPetra Marquardt-Bigman is a German-Israeli freelance writer and researcher with a Ph.D. in contemporary history. Her blog, The Warped Mirror, has been published by The Jerusalem Post since late 2006, and her writings have appeared at The Guardian’s Comment is Free, World Politics Review, The Commentator and other sites.

Veteran anti-Israel activist Ali Abunimah always gets angry when someone accuses him of antisemitism. He is absolutely sure he isn’t an antisemite. He’s also sure that Zionism is “one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence today” and that “[s]upporting Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.”

It’s presumably a sign of an insufficiently progressive outlook when you disagree with Abunimah and think that it is rather the call for the killing of all Jews in the Hamas Charter that should be considered a “continuation in spirit” of the hatred that led to the Holocaust. But as far as Abunimah is concerned, there is nothing that can detract from the terror group’s admirable record in fighting Zionism – and since Abunimah considers Zionism “one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence today,” he may well count Hamas among the most ardent opponents of antisemitism in our time.

It is thus only fitting that Abunimah published a truly Orwellian re-definition of antisemitism some four years ago. While just 121 people – plus Abunimah himself – publicly endorsed this pathetic effort to revive the notorious equation of Zionism with racism at Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada (https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/struggle-palestinian-rights-incompatible-any-form-racism-or-bigotry-statement), there can be little doubt that many more embrace it in order to pretend that opposing the existence of the world’s only Jewish state has nothing whatsoever to do with antisemitism.

If Zionism is racism and, as Abunimah claimed, “one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence today,” it follows that anti-Zionism is anti-racism and opposition to antisemitism. This kind of perverted thinking allowed Columbia University professor Joseph Massad to introduce Abunimah as “a fighter against antisemitism” at an event held at the university two years ago. Unsurprisingly, Massad’s own attempts to re-define antisemitism already more than a decade ago resemble Abunimah’s more recent efforts; thus, Massad once reportedly asserted that “the claim … that criticism of Israel is ‘anti-Semitic’ is the most anti-Semitic claim of all.”

Abunimah clearly considers Massad a kindred spirit and often promotes his writings. Most recently, he tweeted a link to an Al Jazeera op-ed by Massad in order to defend former London mayor Ken Livingstone against accusations of antisemitism, claiming that both Livingstone and Massad were unjustly condemned “for recalling fact of Zionist-Nazi alliance.”  The Massad op-ed Abunimah regarded as helpful to Livingstone had been denounced  by the prominent commentator Jeffrey Goldberg as “one of the most anti-Jewish screeds in recent memory” when it was published in May 2013. Al Jazeera reacted to the outcry caused by Massad’s piece by temporarily removing it from their site – a step that Abunimah furiously criticized and countered by reposting the piece on his Electronic Intifada (https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/al-jazeera-management-orders-joseph-massad-article-pulled-act-pro-israel).

Abunimah emphasized in his passionate defense of the op-ed that “Massad has long argued – convincingly – that Zionism and anti-Semitism are two sides of the same coin.” Needless to say, Abunimah had only scorn for Massad’s critics – including myself. Astonishingly, he linked to my relevant post, where I pointed out that “Massad’s writings on Israel can easily be confused with material from the neo-Nazi ‘White Pride World Wide’ hate site Stormfront.” I also noted that at least in one case, Massad “actually did write a passage that closely resembles a Stormfront post that is taken from David Duke’s notorious ‘minor league Mein Kampf’.” At the end of my post, I challenged readers to take a quiz to see if they could distinguish between the writings of Columbia University professor Massad and material from Stormfront (quiz reproduced at the end of this post).

I would have loved to know how Abunimah did in this quiz – but all I know is that it didn’t bother him in the least to see the similarity between Massad’s writings and material posted on Stormfront. Abunimah insisted that the “backlash” against Massad’s screed “has been so intense precisely because Massad goes to the core of Israel’s claim to represent Jews and to cast its critics as anti-Semites by showing that indeed it is Israel and Zionism that partake of the same anti-Semitism that targeted European Jews.”

In other words, Abunimah repeats here the same equation between Zionism and Nazism that he implied in his tweets cited at the beginning of this post.

He then goes on to claim that “Massad pulls the rug from under Zionists and Israel lobbyists by demonstrating that they are the anti-Semites and taking away the most formidable weapon they wield against critics of Israel: the accusation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

So once again, Abunimah highlights his completely deluded Orwellian thinking: Zionism is antisemitism, and therefore anti-Zionism can’t be antisemitism; instead, as he emphasizes so preposterously in the following paragraph, Massad’s anti-Zionism reflects a “pro-Jewish position and strenuous attack on Zionist anti-Semitism.”

If Massad’s anti-Zionism reflects a “pro-Jewish position,” it seems that Massad (and presumably Abunimah) prefers dead Jews. As Massad made clear in the first paragraph of his long and rambling Al Jazeera piece, “Jewish opponents of Zionism” were the ‘good’ Jews who early on recognized what Massad would later announce to the world: that Zionism was just another manifestation of antisemitism. Developing his fantasies further, Massad claimed that even under Nazi rule, “the majority of Jews continued to resist the anti-Semitic basis of Zionism and its alliances with anti-Semites;” however, he then notes that “the Nazi genocide not only killed 90 percent of European Jews, but in the process also killed the majority of Jewish enemies of Zionism who died precisely because they refused to heed the Zionist call of abandoning their countries and homes.”

Of course, if you are as “pro-Jewish” as Massad and Abunimah, the murder of all the “Jewish enemies of Zionism” that you admire so much is no reason whatsoever to question if anti-Zionism was really so “pro-Jewish.” Instead Massad doubled down, bitterly complaining that after the war, the “United States and European countries, including Germany, would continue the pro-Zionist policies of the Nazis.”

It can’t get more deranged than that – but it’s probably not easy to intensely hate the world’s only Jewish state while at the same time trying to convince everyone that this all-consuming hatred has nothing whatsoever to do with antisemitism.

***

Last but not least, here is the quiz – while I developed it when I first researched Massad’s writings three years ago, pretty much the same material was used recently by apologists defending Ken Livingstone’s “Hitler was a Zionist”-claims. Can you distinguish the Abunimah-endorsed Al Jazeera op-eds by Massad from material posted on Stormfront? The correct answers are provided at the bottom (Stormfront links lead to the relevant posts there; so do not click them if you prefer to avoid the site).

1) “Nazism was a boon to Zionism throughout the 1930s.”

2) “For all intents and purposes, the National Socialist government was the best thing to happen to Zionism in its history.”

3) “In Germany, the average Jews were victims of the Zionist elite who worked hand in hand with the Nazis.”

4) “Hitler could have just confiscated all the Jewish wealth. Instead he used the ‘Haavara Program’ to help establish the State of Israel.”

5) “Between 1933 and 1939, 60 percent of all capital invested in Jewish Palestine came from German Jewish money through the Transfer Agreement.”

6) “In fact, contra all other German Jews (and everyone else inside and outside Germany) who recognised Nazism as the Jews’ bitterest enemy, Zionism saw an opportunity to strengthen its colonisation of Palestine.”

7) “Zionists welcomed the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies. Like the Nazis, they believed in race-based national character and destiny. Like the Nazis, they believed Jews had no future in Germany.

8) “the Zionist Federation of Germany […] supported the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, as they agreed with the Nazis that Jews and Aryans were separate and separable races. This was not a tactical support but one based on ideological similitude.”

9) “Zionism […] developed the idea of the first racially separatist planned community for the exclusive use of Ashkenazi Jews, namely the Kibbutz.”

10) “The Zionists were afraid that the ‘Jewish race’ was disappearing through assimilation.”

1) Massad  2) Stormfront   3) Stormfront    4) Stormfront    5) Massad    6) Massad    7) Stormfront    8) Massad    9) Massad    10) Stormfront

2 thoughts on “Guest Post: Ali Abunimah’s Orwellian Definition Of Antisemitism For Israel-Haters”

  1. Abuminah’s screed is a disgrace to the memories of the six million. Like many others, I lost family members who had joined Zionist organizations in Europe and died while desperately dreaming of being able to reach Israel. They didn’t “refuse to heed the call of Zionism”, they were imprisoned against their will and executed.

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