Krugman vs. Krugman

MICHAEL LIND

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ORIGINAL PHOTOS: RICARDO RUBIO/EUROPA PRESS VIA GETTY IMAGES; JAVIER VAZQUEZ/EUROPA PRESS VIA GETTY IMAGES

Time to huddle: Antisemitism on the field

BEN COHEN

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Sagiv Jehezkel played for the Turkish soccer team Antalyaspor. Credit: Antalyaspor.

As unsettling and painful as the current wave of global antisemitism that followed the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel is, it’s still important to remember that those bestial atrocities were an episode in, and not the fundamental cause of, the renewal and remodeling of this ancient superstition.

Where it all began remains a matter of debate. Many analysts nod to the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, where several of the memes visible in today’s pro-Hamas protests were rudely on display, as the point of origin. Others go back further, into the Cold War, when the Soviet Union ran a vicious campaign of anti-Zionist propaganda centered on the claim that Zionism is a form of Nazism. And one can go back even further, to the antisemitic riots and revolts targeting Jewish communities in British Mandate Palestine in 1929 and 1936. The point is that the basic message—Jews as colonial interlopers who must be destroyed—hasn’t really changed.

The other consideration is that certain sectors are more amenable than are others to anti-Zionist antisemitism, or antizionism, as I prefer to call it. Over the last two decades, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement seeking to quarantine Israel alone among the world’s nations has been the most tangible and energetic expression of contemporary opposition to Zionism. In the worlds of culture and academia, especially, boycotts of Israel and shrill rhetoric denouncing Zionism (or more precisely, a caricature of Zionism) have been the order of the day.

Regardless, then, of where and when we believe the current wave began, that discussion is less important than an assessment of where we are headed—and specifically, which spheres of human activity alongside art and education will start to echo the growing antisemitic chorus, both in their words and in their deeds.

The world of sport is emerging as the next battleground. It is a much more fearsome prospect; a row over an art exhibition featuring antisemitic caricatures or a lecture at a provincial campus promoting antisemitic tropes is, let’s be honest, a picnic compared to a row involving an athlete with instant, global name recognition.

Someone like the French soccer icon Karim Benzema, a former Real Madrid striker and winner of the coveted Ballon d’Or football (soccer) award who now plays in Saudi Arabia, and who this week announced that he would be suing Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin. A devout Muslim, at least outwardly, Benzema fired off an angry social-media post denouncing Israel’s “unjust bombardments” in the Gaza Strip. When Darmanin was asked about the post in an interview with a conservative broadcaster, he lambasted Benzema for his silence on the Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel and then charged that the player retained close links with the Muslim Brotherhood, the global Islamist network that includes Hamas.

Benzema angrily denied any links with the Brotherhood, accusing Darmanin of exploiting his fame—and notoriety—to push an Islamophobic smear. Now Darmanin may have to answer in court for his impulsive statement (it would have been more prudent to describe Benzema as an “echo chamber” for the Brotherhood) in a spectacle that will draw the French and international media like bees to honey. Benzema will present himself as the victim and will enclose the Palestinian population of Gaza in his victimhood in a circus that will only compound the fear prevailing among French Jews and bolster the view among hundreds of millions of soccer fans that the State of Israel is a criminal enterprise—whether or not he wins or loses any eventual court case.

The demonizing discourse about Israel now percolating in the world of sports is, alarmingly, being matched with acts of discrimination against Israeli and Jewish athletes—just as Jewish and Israeli academics, artists and musicians have suffered discrimination as a result of antisemitic agitation in their spaces.

Last week, Sagiv Jehezkel, an Israeli winger playing for the Turkish soccer club Antalyaspor, was arrested by security forces before being booted out of both his contract and the country. Jehezkel’s offense was to score an equalizing goal in a match against Trabzonspor and then celebrate by displaying his bandaged wrist to the cameras. On the bandage, Jehezkel had scrawled a Star of David and the words “100 days” (a reference to the continuing plight of Israeli hostages in Gaza) and “7/10” (the date of the Hamas pogrom.)

The reaction in Turkey was furious. Jehezkel was abused as a “Zionist dog” and accused of violating Turkish sensibilities. Should he ever return to Turkey, he will likely face arrest and prosecution. But it is unlikely that he will go back, just as it is unlikely that any Israeli soccer talent will find its way to Turkey for the foreseeable future. Sports in Turkey are effectively Judenrein.

There are good grounds to fear that a similar situation is emerging in South Africa, too, where the U-19 Cricket World Cup is currently being hosted. One week before the tournament commenced, Cricket South Africa (CSA), the sport’s domestic governing body, announced that it was removing David Teeger, the South African team’s sole Jewish player, from his role as captain, citing “security fears” about angry protests by Hamas supporters targeting Teeger as the official reason.

This was—in a word summed up by MLB Hall-of-Famer Kevin Youkilis, who declared his solidarity with Teeger—“bullsh*t.” Shortly after the Hamas pogrom, Teeger was the subject of a complaint submitted to CSA by pro-Hamas campaigners who objected to his remarks at a Jewish communal award ceremony, where he lauded “the State of Israel and every single soldier fighting so that we can live and thrive in the diaspora.” They argued that Teeger had brought the game into disrepute, though an independent commission reporting to CSA duly found that Teeger had not violated CSA’s code of conduct with his speech, clearing the way for the talented young batsman to be appointed as captain the following month.

Even so, the political pressure from the ruling ANC was unrelenting. It is no accident that Teeger was humiliated in the same week that South Africa launched a legal case against Israel at the International Court of Justice on the trumped-up charge of “genocide”—elegantly, if inadvertently, illustrating the inevitable domestic impact of an antisemitic foreign policy.

Here in the United States, Jewish professional athletes are unlikely, for the moment, to experience this kind of discrimination. Yet as the recent antisemitism scandal involving the NBA’s Kyrie Irving (and others in different athletic arenas before him) demonstrated, our sporting scene is as vulnerable as anywhere else to antisemitic propaganda, often of the crudest sort. It’s definitely time to huddle.

Ben Cohen – writes a weekly column for JNS on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Haaretz and many other publications.

Joe Biden: Izraelowi wojna w Gazie szkodzi, nie pomaga

Marta Urzędowska

Prezydent USA Joe Biden skrytykował izraelskiego premiera Benjamina Netanjahu, przekonując, że kontynuowanie wojny w Gazie bez skutecznego chronienia cywilów szkodzi Izraelowi i jest “sprzeczne z tym, co Izrael reprezentuje”.

W efekcie w Izraelu zaczynają się antyrządowe protesty – w ostatnią sobotę demonstrowali m. in. mieszkańcy Tel Awiwu, domagając się przeprowadzenia wcześniejszych wyborów.

Świat zastanawia się, jak pomóc mieszkańcom Gazy

Sytuacja humanitarna w całej Strefie Gazy wciąż jest dramatyczna. ONZ i Światowa Organizacja Zdrowia alarmują w kolejnych oświadczeniach, że mieszkańcom enklawy brakuje jedzenia, wody i leków, a dzieci zaczynają umierać z głodu. W ostatnią sobotę ministerstwo zdrowia Strefy Gazy – powiązane z Hamasem – podało, że w ciągu ostatnich dziesięciu dni z niedożywienia i odwodnienia zmarły 23 osoby, wśród nich kilkoro dzieci.

Dostarczanie pomocy na miejsce jest bardzo trudne. Izraelczycy i Egipcjanie blokują enklawę od lat, a odkąd wybuchła wojna, przejściem w Rafah wpuszczana jest jedynie minimalna ilość pomocy, która – zdaniem ekspertów – zaspokaja jedynie ułamek potrzeb miejscowych Palestyńczyków. Teraz narasta niepokój, że jeśli Izrael uderzy w Rafah, pomoc w ogóle ustanie.

‘As a Jew’ Oscar moment shows how woke antisemitism works

JONATHAN S. TOBIN

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British Film director Jonathan Glazer attends “The Zone of Interest” premiere during the 67th BFI London Film Festival at the Royal Festival Hall on Oct. 12, 2023. Credit: Fred Duval/Shutterstock.

Unless you’re a film buff, you may not have heard of Jonathan Glazer before his viral moment at this year’s annual Academy Awards ceremony. After “The Zone of Interest”—a highly-praised film about the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp that is very loosely based on a Martin Amis novel with the same title—was named the winner of the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, Glazer appeared on the stage along with the rest of the production team to accept their trophies. Standing with producer James Wilson and their billionaire financial backer Leonard Blavatnik, Glazer, who wrote and directed the movie, chose not to speak extemporaneously but instead read the following prepared statement:

“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness in a Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza—all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

The tortured syntax of his comments notwithstanding, what Glazer said wasn’t merely deeply offensive. It marked a new low in Hollywood’s descent into fashionable rationalizations of hatred for Jews. It also showed us how the new woke antisemitism works, especially when its standard-bearers are Jews with little or no connection to their heritage. As such, it was the quintessential “as a Jew” moment in which persons invoke their Jewish identity to denounce other Jews.

Who ‘hijacked’ the Holocaust?

Glazer had made a movie about the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz, and on Sunday night was being showered with praise and all the financial, professional and social benefits that go with it. But he was not content with that. He decided to use his invocation of the most painful moment in Jewish history to smear Israel and the Jews.

To link the Holocaust to Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip to eradicate the organization that perpetrated the atrocities committed in Jewish communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is to turn history on its head. Pretending that it is the Jews who are today’s Nazis, rather than Hamas and its Palestinian supporters, is a big lie. It is the Palestinians of Hamas who are the contemporary torch-bearers for Adolf Hitler’s plans for the genocide of the Jewish people, as made explicit in their charter and all of their propaganda, which seeks Israel’s destruction and the slaughter of its population. This sort of inversion tactic is—as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of the term makes plain—textbook antisemitism.

To speak of the “occupation” in this context is to use the word in the way that Palestinians deploy it. When they say “occupation,” they refer to the Jewish state’s rebirth in 1948 and are referencing all of Israel, as Hamas makes explicit.

Moreover, by speaking of an “occupation” that had “hijacked” the Holocaust, he was using carefully chosen language to back up the canard that the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet was the result of Jews exploiting the Nazi campaign of extermination that he had depicted on film. Zionists didn’t “hijack” the Holocaust to help create a Jewish state. They had asserted Jewish historical rights to their ancient homeland which they had never abandoned. The murder of 6 million Jews who lacked the power that a sovereign state would give them and who had no safe haven to go to was proof that the establishment of one was necessary and just.

If anyone “hijacked” the Holocaust, it was Glazer.

To say that the “occupation” led to the current conflict is also a lie if it is a reference to Israel’s gaining control of Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem or the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War or whether Jews have the right to live there. The Gaza Strip wasn’t “occupied” on Oct. 7. Israel had withdrawn every soldier, settler and settlement from it in 2005, and it had been an independent Palestinian state in all but name since then. And to treat the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust in the Palestinian orgy of slaughter, rape, torture and kidnapping on Oct. 7 as analogous to Israel’s efforts to eradicate the terrorists is as absurd as it is immoral. That puts the murderers on the same moral plane as those who wish to stop them from murdering again.

And what else could he have meant by saying that he and his colleagues “refute our Jewishness” in connection with this “occupation” other than to try to disassociate Jews and Judaism from Israel and its efforts to defend itself?

But that is the point of such “as a Jew” virtue-signaling. Such protestations that seek to differentiate the “good” Jews who want to tell the world that they want nothing to do with the “bad” Jews in Israel and those who support them are particularly important right now. They are an essential element of the new version of antisemitism that is rooted in the toxic ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality in which the world is divided between two perpetually warring groups: “white” oppressors and “people of color” who are their victims.

In this worldview dictated by the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), it is incumbent that members of the oppressor class—who are all deemed as guilty of racism as the worst neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klan member—must repent of their crimes by embracing “anti-racism.” DEI deems Jews and Israel to be “white” oppressors” of Palestinians, even though the conflict isn’t racial and half of all Jewish Israelis are themselves “people of color” since they trace their origins to North Africa or the Middle East. So “good” Jews must condemn Israel, regardless of what it or those who wish to destroy it do.

And that is what Glazer, as well as those who wore red pins—which bear an eerie resemblance to the bloody hands of a Palestinian Arab who had participated in the lynching of two Israelis at the start of the Second Intifada in 2000 in an iconic photograph of that awful moment—in support of an immediate ceasefire, was doing at the Oscars this year.

Politics at the Oscars

There is nothing new about Oscar winners using the internationally televised ceremony to virtue-signal their political beliefs or to highlight the causes they support. We’ve come a long way from the moment in 1973 when Marlon Brando decided to have Sacheen Littlefeather accept his Best Actor Oscar for appearing in “The Godfather” to highlight his support for the plight of Native Americans. When the buckskin-dress-clad woman took the podium, she was booed by the audience. But like everyone else in Hollywood, Littlefeather was just playacting. It turned out that she was not, as she claimed, a member of the White Mountain Apache tribe or any other sort of Native American, though that only became known after her death.

Five years later, when Vanessa Redgrave accepted her Best Supporting Actress award for “Julia,” she used her moment to denounce “Zionist hoodlums” who had protested her support for the terrorists of the Palestine Liberation Organization that sought Israel’s destruction. Later in the show, the writer Paddy Chayefsky—himself a three-time Oscar winner, as well as a wounded combat veteran of the war against the Nazis and an ardent supporter of Israel—repudiated Redgrave to the applause of those in attendance.

But what seemed shocking then is commonplace now. In recent years, as just about everyone associated with the entertainment industry has become more and more concerned about demonstrating their adherence to fashionable leftist causes (or determined to hide their actual beliefs if they don’t), politics at the Oscars is a given. And the best way to curry favor with the woke mob that’s always ready to tear apart anyone in the public eye who dissents from the current orthodoxy is to proclaim one’s fealty to its causes. There was no audible booing and no refutation of Glazer’s statement from any of the actors and filmmakers who subsequently were seen on stage.

That is why so many in Hollywood are following the lead of political progressives and wrongly characterizing Israel’s efforts to ensure that there will be no more Oct. 7 pogroms as “genocide.” They treat the war in Gaza as an unpardonable crime rather than a campaign that is a necessity if peace is to ever have a chance in the Middle East.

Fighting Nazis, then and now

It is no small irony that the only way the mass murderers who are depicted in “The Zone of Interest” were defeated and brought to justice was by Allied soldiers and airmen who were presented with the same dilemma faced today by Israel. In 1945, as American, British and Soviet troops closed in on the last Nazi strongholds, the Germans refused to acknowledge their inevitable defeat and fought to the bitter end. As they did elsewhere, they made the Red Army fight for every street and house in Berlin. Two million German civilians were killed in Allied bombing campaigns and the conquest of the Third Reich, and as many as 125,000 were killed in the last weeks of the war in Berlin alone.

As horrible as those numbers may sound, decent people everywhere understood that the future of civilization required the defeat of the Nazis, and if that meant German civilians must die, then so be it. They knew that massive civilian casualties—far outstripping even the dubious figures supplied by Hamas of those killed in the current war—were the price that the German nation had to pay for allowing itself to be led by a genocidal movement that most of its citizens had supported so long as the Nazis were winning the war.

The Palestinians and Hamas are in a similar position today. Their ideology of hatred for Jews is hardly different from that of the Nazis depicted in Glazer’s movie. Their crimes on Oct. 7 were committed with a shameless embrace of barbarism that those who administered Auschwitz actually sought to conceal from the world. But because woke ideology deems the Palestinians to be intersectional victims and Israelis as their oppressors, fashionable opinion is adamant that the war to eradicate Hamas must stop and the Jews must be subjected to more atrocities in the future, if not killed and robbed of their homeland “from the river to the sea” as the pro-terror mobs demand.

Sadly, in 2024, there was no proud Jew who would refute and denounce Glazer later in the ceremony as Chayefsky did to Redgrave in 1978. Steven Spielberg had the chance to say something but chose to stick to his script. In contemporary Hollywood, complaints that Jews are being erased by the woke catechism that is inextricably linked to antisemitism in the new Oscar “diversity” rules going into effect for next year’s awards are ignored. It is the “as a Jew” celebrities who have the bully pulpit and those who would speak for the justice of Israel’s cause who are marginalized.

Those, like Glazer, whose efforts are aimed at helping contemporary practitioners of Jewish genocide survive and win—and do so “as Jews”—are a disgrace and deserve to be remembered throughout history with opprobrium along with the worst examples of those who betrayed their own people. They also illustrate the moral depravity of artists and intellectuals who have been captured by an ideology that enables a virulent form of antisemitism that masquerades as advocacy for human rights.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.