Together at last. Last week, I wrote about every leftwing liberal's favorite Muslim, Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan, you'll recall, is the Geneva-based "thinker" (according to Time magazine) who looks alarmingly like Moby in an Armani suit. As part of the build-up to the European Social Forum meeting in Paris in mid-November, Ramadan had written an essay criticizing French Jewish intellectuals — such as Andre Glucksmann, who makes short work of the Euro-Islamicist in the Nouvel Observateur — for being way too Jewish.
Ramadan's document has pretzel-twisted the conglomerate of leftwing, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and, notably, pro-Palestinian groups who make up the ESF. You can see this humiliating spectacle unfold in the leftwing, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and, notably, pro-Palestinian pages of Liberation, where the paper embraces the fashionable notion of calling for the establishment of a secular, "bi-national" state in Israel. That way, anti-Semitism can be disentangled from anti-Zionism. This would allow the Jews who live there to be bludgeoned into submission by the pro-Palestinian left while keeping their hands clean of the stain of anti-Semitism. But the Israelis don't seem to want to cooperate, and the issue won't admit to such a simple solution anyway, so a subsequent edition of the paper explains how Ramadan's anti-Semitic remarks (he wasn't talking about French Jewish intellectuals being too Israeli, after all) are causing embarrassing fractures in the left.
I received some interesting comments after last week's column, including a very perceptive note from Eli Weinerman, a scholar and historian, who is working on a study of leftwing anti-Semitism. Weinerman notes that "anti-Semitism on the part of the non-Islamic left is not racial, ethnic, or religious, it is rather political. Therefore we see quiet a few Jews among its proponents." Historically, he writes, the same type of anti-Semitism was always present among those on extreme left, "including even Lenin. The truth is that there always was a very thin line between political anti-Semitism, which rejects Jews with ideas [unacceptable to the Left] and 'traditional' anti-Semitism, which hates Jews simply because they are Jews."
He must be right, because I heard from quite a few of both. The leftwing anti-Semites called me anatomical names and a "stupid, greedy Zionist." And bless my sainted Irish mother if the traditionalists didn't call me a "Heeb" and the like. One Dutch correspondent wrote: "[National Review Online] is enough proof that Jews are running your country. Sometimes I believe Hitler was right. More and more people believe this is true." For sure. Many of them are leftwing, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and, um, notably pro-Palestinian.
Benny at the ramparts. One of those French Jewish intellectuals Ramadan dislikes was the remarkable Benny Levy, who, for much of his life, was an atheist and a Marxist. As "Pierre Victor," Levy was one of the leaders of the violent student protests in Paris in the '60s. His revolutionary politics led him to help found Liberation and then to Jean-Paul Sartre, who, late in his life, collaborated with Levy on a series of interviews published as Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews. The book infuriated the French left because in it Sartre seems to dismiss nihilism and Marxism and embrace a form of messianic Judaism. After Sartre's death, Levy became an Orthodox Talmudic scholar. He died last week in Israel. Jean-Claude Milner, the linguist, eulogizes his friend in Liberation. The Daily Telegraph does the job in English.
This must be why all our Marxists find this a common cause.