AUSTRALIANS AT WAR

AUSTRALIANS AT WAR
THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.

Thursday, December 04, 2008

ISLAMAPHOBIA IS AS MUCH RACISM AS ANTI-SEMITISM IS.

There is a gross misconception that is being pushed by right-wing Western extremists that Islamaphobia is not racism. Furthermore, among right-wing Zionists there is even a push to assert that to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semite.

Western right-wing extremists that are Islamaphobic argue simplistically that Islam is not a race and, therefore, it cannot be racist to be Islamaphobic. They ignore that discrimination against people because of their religion and/or culture is as much racist as discriminating against people because of their blood and biology.

In his piece published in the ‘Jerusalem Post’ on 3 December 2008 Clemens Heni, a post-doctoral research fellow at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, wrote:

Quite aside from the fact that Judaism embraces both a race and a religion, whereas Islam is strictly a religion, anti-Semitism is different than other forms of prejudice or racism. Whereas the racist view of blacks, for example, holds that they are "below" whites, anti-Semites think Jews are planning to rule the world. The Israel Lobby by American academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt is just one example of this viewpoint.

Firstly, Mearsheimer and Walt quite emphatically do not suggest that “Jews are planning to rule the world” as Heni deceitfully infers. They merely suggest that the Israel Lobby, which includes non-Jews such as Christian Zionists and neoconservatives and other pro-Israel Zionists who are not Jewish, wield an extraordinary amount of influence over US foreign policy with regard to the Middle East generally and the affairs of Israel particularly.

Nor is it entirely true to say that “Judaism embraces both a race and a religion…” Not all practitioners of Judaism are actually ‘Jewish’ by race yet it is quite properly accepted that to discriminate against people that call themselves ‘Jewish’ by religion and culture because they or, more likely, their ancestors converted to Judaism for what ever reason, is racism.

Zionism, however, doesn’t fall into any ‘racism’ category. Zionism is a right-wing political ideology that embraces Israeli nationalism and a notion of a Greater Israel that precludes Arabs (which, in itself, is racist). The fact that many, but certainly not all, of Zionism’s adherents happen to be Jewish is in fact incidental. Zionism is not a ‘race’, nor is it a ‘religion’ and it is not a ‘culture’ – it’s an ideology.

Heni also becomes confused with regards to how anti-Semites view Jews. He argues on one hand that anti-Semites do not view Jews in the same way as, “for example”, white racists view blacks, which is as being, as Heni says, “below” whites, yet in the very next paragraph Heni writes:

Anti-Semitism was the motif for the Holocaust. Those unprecedented crimes combined religious Jew-hatred, quasi-scientific racial theories, and modern anti-Semitism in all its forms, including a comprehensive worldview.

Those “quasi-scientific racial theories” were based around the Nazi perception that many races that were non-Germanic or Aryan races, including, but not exclusively, Jews, were “untermenschen” (sub-human). Those perceptions of racism, not just anti-Semitism, were the blueprint upon which the Holocaust were perpetrated; indeed, it was what made anti-Semitism no different at all from other “forms of prejudice or racism” as Heni otherwise says.

Contrary to Heni’s view that the Holocaust somehow made anti-Semitism unique, Heni should be aware that had Hitler prevailed over the USSR, the number of European Jewry that perished would have paled against the slaughter that Hitler and Himmler had planned for the peoples of Russia and the Slavic nations. The point is that the Holocaust wasn’t just about European Jewry; it was about what the Nazis believed was the superiority of the Germanic and Nordic races relative to virtually all other races.

Despite Heni’s view that ‘anti-Semitism isn’t the same as Islamaphobia’, from the point of view that anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia are both resultants of discriminatory attitudes, they are exactly the same – they are both very much racist.

4 comments:

Aliza "La Jewminicana" Hausman said...

The word "racist" implies that people are being prejudice against a specific group of people based on their race. Followers of Judaism and followers of Islam do not all fall under a specific race. There are black Jews (not converts) and white Muslims just as they is the reverse. Make no mistake, I believe that Anti-semitism and Islamaphobie are both forms of PREJUDICE, of DISCRIMINATION but they have nothing to do with race and the color of one's skin. And I won't deny that this type of prejudice and discrimination isn't 'weaponized' in the same way as racism, there are crazies walking around who think that they are superior in body and mind to your average Jew or Muslim.

Anonymous said...

What really gets me is the presumption that the whole WWI started because of the Holocaust.
Poland was invaded both by Germany and Russia not because of Jewish population in Poland. Austria or Chechoslovakia were not annexed because of anti-semitism; neither was England or France. People like myself, born in a concentration camp, like thousands of children born in concentration camps are inconvenient evidence of Jewish and non-Jewish birth rate in the camps.No one supports the lagers (camps) but,for God's sake, at least three times more Slavs were killed than Jews during the war.Why is it that we have no adequate numbers of memorials or museums.

Anonymous said...

Hi Damian. I Always read ur amazing blog. Was just wondering if u knew about the Muslim Massacre video game that was released in Australia & developed by an Australian developer. Here is a link to the article-http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,24335375-5014117,00.html.

I cannot believe that there wasnt any strict action taken against the people responsible. If this was "Jewish Massacre" the developer would have been arrested for Hate Crimes, his career finished, & he wouldnt even be able to get a job as a toilet cleaner. But yet in your country such people are protected under the banner of 'free speech'. Ha, 'Free Speech' what a pathetic cliche'. Whats more interesting are the comments on the article. I have never read such hateful venom. It seems the plan of the power elites of the world is working. Every1 hates Muslims & fears Islam, & their minds have been twisted & warped. What is even worse is the realisation that Muslims are so weak that we cannot even speak out, we are too busy apologizing for being 'Terrorists' & 'extremists'. Plz check out the story.

Damian Lataan said...

Hi dr. I hadn't caught up with that one. I'll look into it.