Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Dual Loyalty

Illustration, coincidentally, from this morning's installment of Roy Edroso's ongoing study of "Grandpa's Inbox". Note how the rightwing bottom-feeder scum associate one of the congresswomen with the theory that there's an incredibly wealthy Jewish financier working to bring the entire world under his secret personal control.

So much stuff I really don't want to think or write about, from the presidential campaign, above all Bernie and Biden, to the whole tsuris over Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born freshwoman from Minnesota who wears the hijab, and her rhetorical approach to the pro-Likud lobbying forces in US politics, as described with some initial restraint by Jonathan Chait:
Earlier this month, Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!” in response to a report about AIPAC, a pro-Israel organization. Omar’s tweet echoed a longstanding anti-Semitic trope — in particular, the implication that Jewish political influence operates entirely (“all about”) through money.
After wide condemnation, Omar apologized. It seemed fair to read her tweet generously: Perhaps she was not familiar with the particular vein of anti-Semitism she happened to echo. Indeed, progressives often make crudely reductive statements about the influence of money in supporting policies they oppose (to wit: everything Bernie Sanders says), so it wasn’t necessarily anti-Semitic for Omar to extend that thinking to Jews. Her apparently sincere apology seemed to set to rest a minor offense.
Chait is right about the more simple-minded of us progressives attributing everything bad in politics to money influence, but has the story itself completely wrong, in fact: there was no report about AIPAC. There was a report about House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had issued a vague threat against Omar and another new congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib of Detroit, who had done something he didn't like which he equated with Iowa Rep. Steve King's remarks about not understanding when white supremacy became a bad thing:

Statements by freshmen Democrats Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota were equal to King’s and “more so”, McCarthy said. He did not say what action he might initiate against them.
It’s not clear what statements McCarthy particularly found offensive, but both lawmakers embrace the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, and both have been accused of tweets that cross the line to anti-Semitism: Tlaib in January when she appeared to accuse senators of dual loyalty for advancing a bill that would protect states penalizing commerical [sic] Israel boycotts; and Omar in 2012 when she said Israel was “hypnotizing” the world. (Haaretz, 10 February)

(That Rubio-written provision in S1, encouraging states to discriminate against companies that boycott Israel, fortunately defeated by Democrats, was so clearly unconstitutional on free-speech grounds, and I think the constitutional prohibition on bills of attainder, that it's hard not to wonder about the loyalty to the Constitution of anybody who would support it. Omar's 2012 Tweet was an emotional response to the Israeli war crimes, killing of civilians including journalists, in the Pillar of Defense assault on Gaza that November.)

“If they [Democrats] do not take action I think you’ll see action from myself,” said McCarthy. “This cannot sustain itself. It’s unacceptable in this country.” Glenn Greenwald emitted a Tweet, since deleted, complaining, I presume, about the false equivalence and Joe McCarthy–like sweep and menace of McCarthy's warning (which was in reality plainly meant not so much as an attack as a bothsidering no-racist-no-racist-you're-the-racist defense of the indefensible King), and Omar appended her own Tweet about the Benjamins, and after that is where AIPAC came into it:
the conversation didn’t turn into a full-blown controversy until Forward opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon jumped in; in response to Omar’s tweet, she condemned the congresswoman for tweeting an “anti-Semitic trope” about Jewish people and money, and called on Omar to name who’s “paying American politicians to be pro-Israel.” Omar responded, “AIPAC!,” which stands for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. (Amanda Arnold/The Cut)
Which was at least technically wrong, on her part: AIPAC, as a lobbying group, doesn't directly contribute to candidates. Nevertheless it's more than a little disingenuous to suggest they have nothing to do with it, since the members control dozens of PACs that do, and the organization can and does bring about very significant fundraising for candidates with actually doing it, and sometimes takes pride in making it known, as seems to be clearer when you look further back in its history, like Mehdi Hasan in The Intercept,
to 1984, when Sen. Charles Percy, a moderate Republican from Illinois, was defeated in his re-election campaign after he “incurred AIPAC’s wrath” by declining to sign onto an AIPAC-sponsored letter and daring to refer to Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat as more “moderate” than other Palestinian resistance figures. AIPAC contributors raised more than a million dollars to help defeat Percy. As Tom Dine, then-executive director of AIPAC, gloated in a speech shortly after the GOP senator’s defeat, “all the Jews, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians —  those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire — got the message.”
Nobody called out Tom Dine for anti-Semitism of course for this assertion, nor did they call out the more critical Tom Friedman or Jeffrey Goldberg for anti-Semitism in more recent times:
are we also expected to forget that the New York Times’s Tom Friedman, a long-standing advocate for Israel in the American media, once described the standing ovations received by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, from members of Congress, as having been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby”? Or that Goldberg, now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and dubbed “the most influential journalist/blogger on matters related to Israel,” called AIPAC a “leviathan among lobbies, as influential in its sphere as the National Rifle Association and the American Association of Retired Persons are in theirs”?
So it's only an anti-Semitic trope if a Muslim woman deploys it.

In any event, Chait was able to forgive Omar for that transgression, but went nuts over the next one:
But at an event last night, Omar went much farther, reports Laura Kelly. After an audience member shouted out, “It’s all about the Benjamins,” at which, according to Kelly’s reporting, she smiled. (Jeremy Slevin, Omar’s press secretary and strategist, denies she acknowledged that line from the audience.) Later she stated, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
This is much worse. Accusing Jews of “allegiance to a foreign country” is a historically classic way of delegitimizing their participation in the political system. Whether or not the foreign policy agenda endorsed by American supporters of Israel is wise or humane, it is a legitimate expression of their political rights as American citizens. To believe in a strong American alliance with Israel (or Canada, or the United Kingdom, or any other country) is not the same thing as giving one’s allegiance to that country. Omar is directly invoking the hoary myth of dual loyalty, in which the Americanness of Jews is inherently suspect, and their political participation must be contingent upon proving their patriotism.
I'm not getting this at all. The "allegiance to Israel" (i.e. to the corrupt, militaristic, Saudi-allied government that has put an end to Israeli socialism and democracy while running the country as a one-party state for the last 20 years in unified opposition to the peace process in which Americans supposedly believe) isn't just for Jewish politicians but for all Republicans since the defeat of poor old Chuck Percy and a good many Democrats. The whole of the evangelical church adores Israel (while looking forward to hellfire for the unconverted after King Jesus wins at Armageddon) and hates everyone in America that doesn't subscribe to its religion (but they don't even mind giving billions of dollars to a government that pays for 20,000 abortions a year through its excellent public health system). Who were they loyal to in the contest between the US and Israeli governments over a deal with Iran, or when the Republican Congress invited Netanyahu to address a joint session with the specific purpose of opposing President Obama's foreign policy? Is it anti-Semitic to ask about the loyalty of John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell?

The ancient stereotype of Jews isn't about divided loyalty but treachery toward all; Captain Dreyfus was accused of being an agent of Germany, not of Jewishness. The hoary American myth of dual loyalty is in the first place about ideological rather than national-ethnic identities in the long 19th century, Freemasons, Catholics, anarchists, Communists (including many Jews who were the victims of anti-Semitic prejudice, no doubt, but not accused of a loyalty to a specifically Jewish polity), and immigrants with countries to be loyal to in the 20th—Germans in World War I, Japanese in World War II, Chinese in the present, as signaled in the suspicious sniffs of Stanley A. Renshon of the anti-immigrant Center for Immigration Studies:
Lan Samantha Chang (1999), a novelist writing in response to the Wen Ho Lee case, could say in a New York Times op-ed piece entitled Debunking the Dual Loyalty Myth, "True, many immigrants have strong ties to their countries of birth. ... But cultural or familial loyalties are on a different level from political allegiances ... I love China, but I am a citizen of the United States." Ms. Chang appears to want to distinguish a love for one's "home" country from being willing to commit treason against one's adopted one. This is obviously a fair, reasonable, and appropriate distinction.
Yet, in the process of making such a distinction, she acknowledges the duality of her feelings. The issue is not between love of one's country of origin and treason, but rather the multiple loyalties that appear to be part of many immigrants' psychology.
Whereas the idea of a loyalty divided between the US and the nation of Israel, the Jewish State, couldn't exist until the state did, from 1948. No reason to say it can't be anti-Semitic, but it's certainly a recent development in a long tradition of general xenophobia.

And then as with the Benjamins it is definitely not always anti-Semitic:




I've never been really shy about calling out anti-Semitism myself where I see it, most furiously against the repellent attacks on George Soros as a kind of Eldest of Zion (in which you can see even Jewish Israelis participating, like young Yair Netanyahu, alongside the vile anti-Semites of the current Hungarian government—you truly don't have to be Gentile to get involved in anti-Semitism), and the chuckleheaded amusement of Donald J. Trump over the kind of people he prefers to hire in the bookkeeping department ("short guys in yarmulkes") and the fondness of Jewish businessmen for reneging on contracts ("Is there anybody in this room who doesn't like to renegotiate a deal?"). I'm just not seeing unreasoning prejudice or conspiracy belief in these two women concerned with real issues, but rather in the opposition to them, to tell the truth.


Bonus:

The most anti-Likud Minnesota Congresswomen is called Betsy McCollum. Jonathan Chait needs to call her out fast.
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