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(Deutsche Übersetzung)

One of the most disturbing aspects of the fragmentary American Left today is the tendency of many leftists in the US (though, obviously, not just in the US) to make decidedly poor choices when it comes to selecting allies. One well-known example of this – tirelessly pointed out by Paul Street, Glenn Ford, and many others – was the combination of wishful thinking and denial that led so many progressives and leftists to hitch their wagons to the star of centre-right neoliberal Barack Obama, the darling of such classic Left institutions as Wall Street and the nuclear power industry.

Over the past couple of years, there has been a dawning realisation that this was a very bad idea indeed, and that many on the Left had fallen for a product of the PR industry specifically designed for them to fall for. It certainly was one of Madison Avenue’s great successes, so much so, in fact, that the Obama campaign beat out Apple in 2008 for the industry’s coveted award for best ad campaign. However, Obama’s PR makeover, which transformed a centre-right, neoliberal militarist only Citigroup could love into the darling of the anti-war movement, can’t hold a candle to the image makeover enjoyed by one Ron Paul. While Madison Avenue managed to transmogrify the centre-right Obama into a supposed stealth leftist, Ron Paul’s PR has managed to make a potential Left ally out of a far-right white supremacist who courts the favour of the sort of people Trotsky once suggested should be ‘acquainted with the pavement’. However, much less has been written about this continuing strategic cockup than the subject deserves.

In the following, I will briefly sketch the actual views of Ron Paul, to show what sort of person so many on the anti-war left have hopped into bed with. I will then propose an explanation for why this sort of thing happens, and keeps happening. The Ron Paul readers will encounter in the following will bear little resemblance to the sanitised Ron Paul who courageously rails against the current wars and declares himself to be against empire and the National Security State, and for personal liberty.

The Real Ron Paul

(Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-Communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressmen [sic]. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan Approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.)

Listen to a black radio talk show in any major city. The Racial Hatred makes a KKK rally look tame. The blacks talk about their own racial superiority, how the whites have a conspiracy to wipe them out, and how they are going to take over the country and enact retribution. They only differ over whether they should use King’s non-violent approach (i.e., state violence), or use private violence.

– Ron Paul on the Civil Rights Movement

When, on occasion, I have attempted to discuss Ron Paul’s views with his fans on the Left, I have regularly been accused of ‘smearing’ him. The accusation is understandable, because Ron Paul espouses views with which no decent person would willingly be associated. As we will see below, Ron Paul, far from being an ‘almost unique’ politician who ‘transcends the left-right pseudo-divide,’  and ‘doesn’t want to make a country of the left or a country of the right”, can in fact be quite easily located on the far-right end of the ‘left-right pseudo-divide’, alongside such ‘almost unique’ politicians as David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Craig Roberts. All that is true in the laudatio quoted above is that Ron Paul most definitely ‘doesn’t want to make a country of the left’.

Before he rose to national prominence, Paul was a little less cautious about publicising his views. In 1996, the year Adolph Reed, Jr. became the first on the Left to call out ‘vacuous to repressive neoliberal’ politician Barack Obama, left-progressive Texan commentator Molly Ivins wrote:

Dallas‘ 5th District, East Texas‘ 2nd District and the amazing 14th District,which runs all over everywhere, are also in play. In the amazing 14th, Democrat Lefty Morris (his slogan is “Lefty is Right!“) faces the Republican/Libertarian Ron Paul, who is himself so far right that he’s sometimes left, as happens with your Libertarians. I think my favorite issue here is Paul’s 1993 newsletter advising “Frightened Americans“ on how to get their money out of the country. He advised that Peruvian citizenship could be purchased for a mere 25 grand. That we should all become Peruvians is one of the more innovative suggestions of this festive campaign season. But what will the Peruvians think of it?

This, it should be noted, is one of the relatively innocuous passages from the newsletters Ron Paul has sent out since 1978.

‘The criminals who terrorize our cities — in riots and on every non-riot day –‘, Paul’s newsletter proclaimed on one occasion, ‘are not exclusively young black males, but they largely are. As children, they are trained to hate whites, to believe that white oppression is responsible for all black ills, to ‚fight the power,‘ to steal and loot as much money from the white enemy as possible.’ Carjacking, we learn from a 1992 Ron Paul Newsletter, is the ‘hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos.’ This they may have learned by following the example of the ‘pro-Communist philanderer’ Martin Luther King, Jr., who ‘seduced underage girls and boys’, and ‘replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.’ Not unsurprisingly, Paul’s newsletter described Martin Luther King Day as ‘our annual Hate Whitey Day’.

In another story, Paul regales us with tales of ‘needlin’, a new form of racial terrorism’. ‘At least 39 white women’, he claims, ‘have been struck with used hypodermic needles –-perhaps infected with AIDS—by gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14.’ Against this background, it is probably not terribly surprising that Paul’s newsletter refers to African Americans as ‘the animals’, and suggests that a more appropriate name for New York would be ‘Zooville’.

Much has been made of Paul’s attempts to deny any connection to the statements above, and many, many more like them, attempts that he only began making when it became clear that he had a shot at national prominence. Back in 1996, when his opponent for a Texas congressional seat distributed Paul’s newsletters to the voting public, he was not as coy:

Dr. Paul, who served in Congress in the late 1970s and early 1980s, said Tuesday that he has produced the newsletter since 1985 and distributes it to an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 subscribers. A phone call to the newsletter’s toll-free number was answered by his campaign staff. […]

Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation. […]

–Dallas Daily News, 22 May 1996

A campaign spokesman for Paul said statements about the fear of black males mirror pronouncements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has decried the spread of urban crime.

Paul continues to write the newsletter for an undisclosed number of subscribers, the spokesman said.

—Houston Chronicle, 23 May 1996

Essentially, then, Paul’s argument back in 1996 was that his writings – which he publicly admitted were his – were being taken out of context, a symptom of ‘The Coming Race War’, no doubt.

Twelve years later, however, Ron Paul had apparently realised that his ‘Sure, I called black people a bunch of criminal animals who want to rob you of everything you have and give you AIDS, but I didn’t mean it in a bad way’ defence probably would not cut it with his new, left-leaning national audience:

The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‚I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.‘

However, in Paul’s view, African American ‘animals’ are not the only threat we must face. As he explained in a 2007 interview with the white-supremacist website VDare.com (co-edited by none other than Paul Craig Roberts, another strange bedfellow), we face two other great dangers: undocumented workers, the social safety net, and the looming ‘United Nations government’:

Well, I start off with saying that [immigration is] a big problem. I don’t like to get involved with the Federal Government very much, but I do think it is a federal responsibility to protect our borders. This mess has come about for various reasons. One, the laws aren’t enforced. Another, the welfare state. We have a need for workers in this country because our welfare system literally encourages people not to work. Therefore, a lot of jobs go begging. This is an incentive for immigrants to come in and take those jobs.

It is compounded because of federal mandates on the states to provide free medical care—that’s literally bankrupting the hospitals in Texas—and free education.

So my main point is to get rid of incentives that cause people to break the law—entitlements as well as the promise of amnesty, citizenship.

I also want to revisit the whole idea of birthright citizenship. I don’t think many countries have that. I don’t think it was the intention of the Fourteenth Amendment. I personally think it could be fixed by legislation. But some people argue otherwise, so I’ve covered myself by introducing a constitutional amendment.

(emphasis supplied) The problem of undocumented workers taking our jobs is apparently compounded by something Paul calls ‘the racial component’. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

In the same interview, Paul also announced that ‘I don’t think we should have minimum wages to protect the price of labor. I want the market to determine this. At the upper level as well.’ The Haitian approach to labour law.

As a professed ‘libertarian’ (in the appropriated, right-wing sense of the word, not the traditional sense), Paul loves words like ‘freedom’ and liberty’. Indeed, he has said that: “On the right-to-life issue, I believe, I’m a real stickler for civil liberties,’ except those of women:

It’s academic to talk about civil liberties if you don’t talk about the true protection of all life. So if you are going to protect liberty, you have to protect the life of the unborn just as well.

I have a Bill in congress I certainly would promote and push as president, called the Sanctity of Life Amendment. We establish the principle that life begins at conception. And someone says, ‘oh why are you saying that?’ and I say, ‘well, that’s not a political statement — that’s a scientific statement that I’m making!“

I know we’re all interested in a better court system and amending the constitution to protect life. But sometimes I think that is dismissing the way we can handle this much quicker, and my bill removes the jurisdiction of the federal courts from the issue of abortion, if a state law says no abortion, it doesn’t go to the supreme court to be ruled out of order.

(emphasis supplied)

I’ve heard his Left (yes, Left!) defenders respond to me that Paul merely wants limited government on the issue of abortion, to get the federal courts and government out of the matter so that the states can decide. I wonder how they square that with his vote in favour of the federal ban on the life-saving dilation and extraction (D&X) procedure, upheld by the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Gonzales v. Carhart.

Not surprisingly, then, Ron Paul generates enthusiasm in the sort of people the Left generally do not like to be associated with. The Neo-Nazi website Stormfront donated $500 to his campaign, which Paul pointedly refused to return. For their support, Stormfront leaders were rewarded with a photo-op. As a Stormfronter with the evocative handle ‘Wolfsnarl’ noted:

If we can get them to defend their race without them actively thinking they are doing so in those terms-through mainstream anti-immigration groups like NumbersUSA or Ron Paul activism for example. After all, how many foot soldiers of the jewish [sic]/communist takeover actively thought of themselves as communists or whatever?

Klan leader David Duke, too, ‘like[s] Ron Paul’s campaign’ enough to offer him some free advice on What Ron Paul Must Do to Win, even though ‘Ron Paul does not do enough to defend the heritage and interests of European Americans.’ Note that Duke’s criticism is not that Paul isn’t a white supremacist, but that he isn’t enough of one.

Now, it’s true that a person can’t entirely be faulted for the fans they accumulate. Anyone with any public persona at all will probably acquire a few fans whose views they do not share. Barack Obama, for example, still has quite a few left-progressive, antiwar fans.

However, a person can be faulted for how she deals with those fans. Barack Obama has made valiant efforts to show that left-progressives’ Obama admiration is not mutual. He has ridiculed and disparaged them on numerous occasions, and has pursued an agenda that stands for everything they stand against. Clearly, then, Obama cannot be faulted for the fact that some people just can’t take a fucking hint.

Not so Ron Paul. First of all, as we’ve seen above, Ron Paul does share the views of the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists in his cheering section. Indeed, he has long actively courted them, through his newsletter, by appearing at their meetings, by talking to their media (e.g., VDare), by taking their money, and by grinning into the camera at photo-ops with some of their leaders. This does not sound like the behaviour of a man who opposes everything the swastika-wearing Right stands for; this is the behaviour of someone who considers their views at least palatable, and who values their support. At the very least, Paul is a little too comfortable in the presence of people who would like to beat his Left supporters to a bloody pulp.

Ron Paul: A Symptom of Left Dysfunction

Despite a consistent, decades-long record of public pronouncements that, in any other country, would have anti-fascist activists shouting him down at every public appearance, quite a few left-leaning people in the US will defend Ron Paul to the death, attacking any critic who points out the niggling little matter of his positions on the issues. Why?

Most Left Paul supporters I’ve encountered sum up their support for him more or less as follows: He is anti-war, anti-USA PATRIOT Act, anti-empire, and for the legalisation of drugs. Any reference to the fact that he is also a misogynistic white supremacist who is virulently anti-labour is dismissed either as ‘smears’ or ‘fear-mongering’.

In other words: ‘He’s with us on one or two issues, so we have to support him. Who cares what kind of society he wants to build. You can’t have everything!’

This is the same thinking that has people in the Palestine solidarity movement approvingly quoting the likes of Jeff Blankfort, Paul Craig Roberts, and Gilad Atzmon.

Overall, the idea seems to be that we on the Left are alone in a corner, and can’t be choosy about our friends. ‘Well, if you don’t like Ron Paul’, I’ve often been asked, ‘name a politician you do like.’ The idea that there is no need to limit ourselves, in our search for ‘friends’, to the narrow-spectrum, ‘one-and-a-half-party’ political class, it seems, doesn’t even occur to them. No grass-roots movement building, no eschewing the corporate-managed electoral system in favour of exerting pressure from below and without – You picks yer candidate, and you tries yer luck. You can’t have everything. This is the thinking that allowed the Barack Obama campaign to sedate all of the grass-roots activism of the Bush years.

This is compounded by the often stunning political illiteracy one encounters in the American Left, where conspiracy theories from the far right have a disturbing tendency to migrate leftward (with certain modifications).

Witness the Fed conspiracy theories. The first time I heard someone (falsely) claim that ‘no one knows who owns the Fed’, and go on to (falsely) claim that the Fed is privately owned, it was in a ‘documentary’ called Freedom to Fascism. In this ‘documentary’, we hear that American workers enjoyed an almost utopian degree of freedom and prosperity until 1916, when the income tax was passed into law (women were free to not vote, all working people were free to not join a union or get shot, workers were free to be paid in company scrip instead of real money, African Americans were free to be photographed amongst grinning psychos whilst being burned at the stake, you know the drill). Luckily, the ‘documentary’ informed us that there was no law actually requiring us to pay income tax, quoting a number of notorious hucksters to this effect. Other examples of the looming ‘fascism’ cited by the film included the fact that, during Hurricane Katrina, white Louisiana residents were actually being investigated for opening fire on un-armed black Louisiana residents who made the fatal mistake of crossing a bridge into their neighbourhood in hopes of finding safety.

Two years later, I discovered that this Coughlinesque nonsense about an ‘international (Jewish) bankers’ conspiracy in the form of the ‘privately-owned’ Fed had been lapped up by quite a few left-progressives. Of course, the original narrative of the pre-union rights, pre-income tax, pre-women’s suffrage utopia wouldn’t sell in this crowd. Luckily, someone has come up with an alternate Utopia Lost narrative, using everyone’s favourite war criminal, JFK. JFK had long been the subject of misguided adulation on the American Left based on the idea that he had super-secret plans (so secret that they find not even the slightest hint of support in the declassified record) to end the war that he started and wholeheartedly supported. Now, not only was inveterate red-baiter John Fitzgerald Kennedy secretly going to end the occupation of Vietnam – he was going to take on the Fed by issuing silver certificates.

My intention in bringing this up is not to refute this or any other right-wing conspiracy theory that has made its way leftward – others more masochistic than I have already done an excellent job of that. Instead, my interest in this is that it parallels the dysfunctional choice of ‘friends’ we see in so many people on the fragmentary American Left. The appeal of these theories is not their veracity – they are so false as to be insulting. Their appeal – like that of Ron Paul and those like him – is that they appear, at least superficially, to be challenging powerful capitalist institutions. Moreover, they do so in a way that justifies inaction (they’re all-powerful, the ‘Sheeple’ just won’t listen, etc.), and appears to explain why we have no functional Left in this country without ever assigning any blame to the failure to engage in any sustained organising effort, the failure to distinguish healthy pluralism from dysfunctional opportunism (witness Ron Paul), and the failure to distinguish insistence on principle from insular sectarianism.

To be sure, there is plenty of blame to go around. We have decades-long attempts to infiltrate and undermine Left organisations by the FBI and local red squads, a propaganda system that convinces 80% of the population that they’re in the minority with their views, a Democratic Party that pretends to be progressive when they’re not in office, a Republican Party so scary that the Democratic Party looks good, and any number of other obstacles. However, those external obstacles do not absolve us from the responsibility to take a serious look at our internal dysfunction. There is little that a weak, fragmented, insular Left can do right now about the massive structural obstacles we face, but we can certainly do something about the mess in our own house.

In the age of the re-declared War on Terrorism, one state legislature has decided to buck the system, placing itself in the vanguard of those who wish to end this war, which was declared by Reagan in 1980, re-declared by Bush in 2001, and is currently being enthusiastically prosecuted by “Dove”-in-Chief Barack Obama. And they’re not taking some wishy-washy, bourgeois civil libertarian stance, either – if a bill currently in the South Dakota state legislature is passed, South Dakota will have officially taken the most radical stance against the War on Terrorism that one can imagine: South Dakota will have officially legalised terrorism.

I’m sure that some readers may be a bit surprised, to put it mildly, to hear this. A crazy, right-wing state legislature like South Dakota’s taking a stand against the bipartisan US Right’s favourite war?

It seems inconceivable, I know, but it is true. South Dakota is considering a bill that would make it justifiable for religious fanatics, egged on by foamy-mouthed fundamentalist clerics seeking to establish a misogynist, homophobic, transphobic theocracy right on US soil, to murder civilians in furtherance of that goal. That, it’s worth recalling, is the definition of terrorism Congress itself enacted in Title 18 of the United States Code: targeted attacks on civilians and civilian objects in order to intimidate a civilian population or otherwise in pursuit of political or religious ideological goals.

Assuming you heard the news at all, you probably heard things a bit differently. Most likely, you heard that South Dakota is considering making it justifiable homicide to kill abortion providers. The word “terrorism” was almost certainly not used, even though this bill would legalise precisely what we are constantly told that that the US trying to stop in Afghanistan: religious fanatics murdering anyone who dares to provide needed health care to women (yes, it’s bullshit, but it’s the official justification, and if that’s good enough for ‘progressive’ intellectuals to justify blowing up Libyan civilians, it’s certainly good enough for argument’s sake).

The federal government, and the US political class and media generally, take a more nuanced position, to be sure. To use the words of US State Department Spokesperson P.J. Crowley’s attempt to explain the US position on the Mubarak dictatorship on Al-Jazeera English, our political class doesn’t see this as an “either-or proposition”. To them, “terrorism” is a feeling, a vibe, like abstract art. You can’t just go around applying rigid legal definitions to a thing like terrorism or you miss the whole point of having the term.

Thus, it isn’t automatically “terrorism” just because religious fanatics commit cowardly murders against defenceless civilians in order to intimidate women and those who support their rights. It all depends on context. When it happens in Afghanistan, and is done by the Taliban (rather than our even more misogynistic collaborators there), it’s terrorism. Indeed, it’s even terrorism when the Afghan resistance (some of whom are Taliban as we understand the term, and many of whom are not) launch attacks on the military personnel who are illegally occupying their territory, even though that clearly does not constitute an attack on civilians.

But when enraged and deluded white men decide to kill gynaecologists, it’s not terrorism. When one of them opens fire at a member of Congress, it’s not terrorism. Indeed, even firebombing a mosque doesn’t count as terrorism (though, judging from the FBI’s surveillance practises, attending one does). And blowing hundreds of thousands of defenceless civilians to bits in an effort to “liberate” them from the idea that they should be the ones choosing their government, when that’s clearly our job, certainly isn’t terrorism. That goes without saying.

Clearly, then, this “terrorism” business is much more complex than it seems, if an act is generally agreed to constitute terrorism in one case, when identical – or sometimes much worse – acts cannot be considered terrorism in other cases.

This apparent paradox quickly evaporates once we abandon our prescriptive approach and acknowledge that the operative usage of “terrorism” bears only a faint resemblance to the actual definition of the term. Implicit in the actual usage of the term is an unspoken requirement: “…if and to the extent that such attacks harm the interests of the powerful.”

This requirement is clearly met in the case of attacks on major US financial and commercial hubs, and just as clearly met in the case of attacks on foreign governments installed or propped up by, or otherwise subservient or useful to the US. Indeed, if the requirement of harm to powerful interests is met, even clear definitional requirements – such as the requirement that the attack be directed against civilians or civilian objects – are superseded, as in the case of an attack by indigenous resistance fighters against a US military occupation, or the revelation by a journalist of documents conclusively proving US war crimes and showing US policy in general in an excessively realistic light.

However, when the paramilitary wing of the openly theocratic fundamentalist Christian movement in the US bombs a gynaecologist’s office, and/or murders doctors, nurses, and patients, the power structure is not harmed. Therefore, it is not terrorism, and those who commit these crimes need not worry about drone attacks on their homes and offices or the prospect of being abducted in the dead of night to be tortured at a clandestine concentration camp. They are not terrorists; their crimes are just deplorable excesses to some – or, to others, laudable contributions – in the ongoing public debate on whether or not women are human beings with human rights, a matter on which “reasonable” minds can clearly differ.

What we are witnessing today is historic: Hosni Mubarak, who had been propped up by the US as dictator of Egypt for 30 years with massive military aid, has been forced out of power by a mass popular uprising, the second such dictator to scarper in recent weeks. Second only to Israel, Mubarak had long been the cornerstone of US power in the oil-rich Middle East, and was directly complicit in US-Israeli crimes including the murderous siege on the occupied Gaza Strip.

From the beginning, the revolutionary forces in Egypt have recognised this, calling Mubarak “the agent of the United States and Israel”. When we watch the images of the celebrating multitudes in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt, we whose states have underwritten tyranny in Egypt (and in so many other places) would do well to remember that their description is entirely accurate.

Mubarak has scarpered, a fact that, in itself, is cause for celebration and a testament to the power of an organised, committed populace. However, Mubarak did not rule alone, and the US-backed secret police, the US-financed and –armed army, the massive USAID infrastructure that ensures that US funds go where the US want them to go – all of this is still there. The man who departed the presidential palace in Cairo like a frightened mouse was a subcontractor of the United States, and it is clear both from the history and from the reports coming out of Al-Jazeera and elsewhere that the US are busy seeking a replacement.

Now that Mubarak – the dictator whom the US had supported to the bitter end – is gone, we will likely hear public acknowledgement of what an evil bastard he was, without any acknowledgement that the US government had knowingly and, indeed, enthusiastically supported this bastard for three long and bloody decades. We may even hear US officials start to acknowledge that Mubarak was a dictator, something they had denied even throughout the weeks of upheaval in Egypt. This follows a well-established pattern: When a US-backed murderer becomes untenable (either because he can no longer hold on to power or because he stops obeying orders from the home office), the crimes he committed with our decisive support are acknowledged and condemned (without noting our critical role in committing them). We then hear that nobody ever really liked him, and calls for an “orderly transition” to democracy, ignoring that – in many cases – the same people had claimed all along that there already was democracy in the country in question.

As we hear all this, we would do well to remember the telling words of Joe Biden at the beginning of the Egyptian revolution:

„Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region, Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel … I would not refer to him as a dictator…”

This is the – usually unspoken – operative definition of “democracy” for US imperial managers. As long as a regime remains “responsible” – i.e. compliant with US interests – he is “democratic” enough for us. By definition, no one we – The Good Guys – support could be a “dictator”. At the most, our preferred dictators will be called “strongmen” or “authoritarian leaders” (though Obama refused to describe Mubarak even as “authoritarian”). “Dictator” refers to those who do not play ball. Thus, we routinely hear of the democratically-elected president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, as a “tin-pot dictator”, even though the opposition controls 80% of the media, and even media outlets actively involved in the 2002 CIA coup attempt have not faced any real consequences for their criminal actions. Meanwhile, Colombia, where opposition journalists and activists, union organisers, and peasants are routinely massacred by US-armed death squads, is a stellar democracy by US standards. Colombia follows US orders. Venezuela not only openly flouts them, but is actively aiding others in disobeying.

We should make no mistake that the US is seeking – once again – to impose just this sort of “democracy” on Egypt.

As those of us in the United States and Europe celebrate this landmark victory of popular power over a dictator backed by the most powerful state in the world, we should never lose sight of this fact, and the responsibility for us that arises out of it:

What happens in Egypt depends critically on the amount of freedom of action the United States government has, and the freedom of action of the United States government – and its European “lieutenants” (though the fashionable word is “partner”) – depends critically on what the people in those countries do. The Egyptians and Tunisians have ejected their dictators, and it looks like the Jordanians and Yemenis are on their way to doing the same. But it is we who can ensure that no more dictators are imposed from outside on the peoples of the world. That is the power we have, and it is our sacred responsibility.

Except for a few cases in which they allowed Mubarak’s secret police to massacre demonstrators, and themselves attacked and imprisoned demonstrators, the US-backed Egyptian military have taken a studied neutral stance. They know that they have the trust – however underserved, given their role in supporting Mubarak for 30 years – of the Egyptian people, and they would have been foolish to squander that trust before they had a chance to take power outright.

Barring a rank-and-file mutiny, the Egyptian army has secured its role as heir-apparent to Mubarak’s thirty-year dictatorship. US president Obama has already called on the military to take power in Egypt (after weeks of refusing to demand that Mubarak leave power), a vote of confidence that should be deeply disturbing. If the military end up playing along with the US, we will likely soon see massive military repression, camouflaged as “protecting the population from Islamist rioters” or the like.

“The army has been here for thirty years. Why should I trust the army?” an Egyptian pro-democracy activist just asked on Al-Jazeera. Amidst the celebration, we should be asking ourselves that question as well.

People throughout the US and Europe have demonstrated in solidarity with the Egyptian people. It is time to take that solidarity to the next step. We have the power to provide more than just moral support: We can weaken and restrict the states that have long underwritten the oppression of the Egyptian people. If we truly want to support the Egyptian people, we should do in our countries what they have done in theirs. If they can do it under much more repressive conditions, then we can certainly do it. A Tahrir Square in every city in Europe and the US, a space of mass struggle and social reconstruction capable of reducing the orders of politicians and riot police to mere words, would be a huge step on the way to ensuring that the Egyptian people will not have to settle either for a chief lieutenant of Mubarak, such as Soleiman, or an Ahmed Chalabi-style carpetbagger in the mould of Muhammad ElBaradei.

And it would be damned good for us, too.

CAMERA’s Latest Scam:

The San Remo Irrelevancy and the Occupied Palestinian Territory

Sometimes the much-maligned Facebook ads have their merits. Last night, I happened upon a Facebook ad offering a course approved by the State Bar of California for credit towards the Bar’s minimum continuing legal education (MCLE) requirements entitled “Who owns Jerusalem?“.

It turned out to be an advertisement for a “course”, sponsored by the “pro”-Israeli PR organisation CAMERA and held by an obscure Canadian lawyer by the name of Jacques Gauthier, claiming that an even more obscure document from 1920 known as the “San Remo Resolution” had vested full legal title to the entirety of Palestine to Israel.

Before we turn to the content of the San Remo document, let us recall what the International Court of Justice, the supreme judicial body in the international system, concluded about the legal status of the territories occupied in 1967 (including East Jerusalem) after exhaustive analysis of the matter:

78.          The Court would observe that, under customary international law as reflected (see paragraph 89 below) in Article 42 of the Regulations Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to the Fourth Hague Convention of 18 October 1907 (hereinafter „the Hague Regulations of 1907“), territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army, and the occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.

The territories situated between the Green Line (see paragraph 72 above) and the former eastern boundary of Palestine under the Mandate were occupied by Israel in 1967 during the armed conflict between Israel and Jordan. Under customary international law, these were therefore occupied territories in which Israel had the status of occupying Power. Subsequent events in these territories, as described in paragraphs 75 to 77 above, have done nothing to alter this situation. All these territories (including East Jerusalem) remain occupied territories and Israel has continued to have the status of occupying Power.

Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, paragraph 78 (emphasis added).

Put briefly, under the basic international legal principle of the “inadmissibility of territorial acquisition by war”, Israel has no claim to sovereignty over any of the territories occupied in the 1967 war. Those territories – the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem – are and remain “occupied territories”. The Court based this conclusion on an exhaustive study of the relevant legal framework, including foundational documents of international humanitarian law such as the Hague Regulations of 1907, the General Assembly’s Partition Resolution (on the strength of which the State of Israel was founded), and various Security Council resolutions calling for the withdrawal from the occupied territories (UNSC 242) and declaring “totally invalid”

„all legislative and administrative actions taken by Israel to change the status of the: City of Jerusalem, including expropriation of land and properties, transfer of populations and legislation aimed at the incorporation of the occupied section […]”

(UNSC 298).

CAMERA and Gauthier claim that the San Remo document negates all this, and gives Israel full title not only to the territory within Israel’s recognised (pre-June 1967) borders, but to the territory occupied in the 1967 war. If this is true, then the entire international legal consensus on the status of the Occupied Palestinian Territory is dead wrong.

This, of course, raises the question: Is it true? In order to answer this question, two fairly obvious requirements must be met:

(a)   The San Remo document must actually grant sovereignty to Israel (or, given that Israel would not exist for another 28 years, to a „Jewish state“ to be created on the entire territory of Mandatory Palestine); and

(b)   It must continue to be valid and applicable, meaning that any and all subsequent enactments must either not concern the subject matter of the San Remo document, or, if related, not conflict with it (the “last-in-time” principle – lex posterior derogat priori).

Note that (b) is a subsidiary question. If the San Remo document does not actually grant sovereignty over the territory in question to Israel or a future “Jewish state”, then its continuing vitality is of no relevance to whether Israel has any claim to the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Thus, we must first turn to the relevant provisions of the San Remo document:

(a)     To accept the terms of the Mandates Article as given below with reference to Palestine, on the understanding that there was inserted in the proces-verbal an undertaking by the Mandatory Power that this would not involve the surrender of the rights hitherto enjoyed by the non-Jewish communities in Palestine; this undertaking not to refer to the question of the religious protectorate of France, which had been settled earlier in the previous afternoon by the undertaking given by the French Government that they recognized this protectorate as being at an end.

(b) that the terms of the Mandates Article should be as follows:

[…]

The High Contracting Parties agree to entrust, by application of the provisions of Article 22, the administration of Palestine, within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, to a Mandatory, to be selected by the said Powers. The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

In other words, the San Remo document calls for the implementation of the Balfour Declaration, which called for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, and twice provides that the “rights hitherto enjoyed”/”civil and religious rights” shall in no way be impaired by the establishment of this “national home”. There is no reference to a “Jewish state”, nor any transfer of sovereignty to “the Jewish people” or to anyone else, merely a “national home” for Jews “in Palestine”. Even more fatally to Gauthier’s claims, the San Remo document makes no determination whatsoever as to boundaries, only noting that boundaries are to be determined on some later date by the Principal Allied Powers.

When I raised these fairly obvious issues on the Facebook event page set up by CAMERA Regional Coordinator, attorney Talia Shulman Gold, she claimed that “national home” and “state” were the same thing: “Just what do you think establishing a „national home“ meant anyway, Elise[1]?“

While this assertion may have some superficial appeal owing to the peculiarity of the phrase “national home”, there remains an obvious problem. The term “state” was in common use at the time that the San Remo document was signed. The drafters of the document can be reasonably assumed to have been aware of the term “state” and of its meaning. And yet, they did not use the term “state” to describe what they were creating for “the Jewish people” in Palestine, preferring the term “national home”. If they had intended to establish a legal basis for the creation of a “Jewish state”, they could quite simply have referred to “the establishment in Palestine of a state for the Jewish people”. Instead, they specifically chose to use a different term. To claim, as Shulman Gold has (and Gauthier must), that the drafters actually meant “state” is to claim that they did not really mean what they wrote.

Even if we were to accept, for the sake of argument, that it is permissible to read “state” where “national home” is written, the central claim – that the San Remo document gives Israel full sovereignty over the entirety of Mandatory Palestine, including the Occupied Palestinian Territory – runs into an even more serious problem: The San Remo document makes no determination at all with regard to boundaries, except to provide that “the administration of Palestine, within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, [is entrusted] to a Mandatory” (emphasis added). The Principal Allied Powers left the determination of the boundaries of Palestine for a later date.

In other words, the Gauthier-CAMERA claim that the San Remo Resolution made a final and irrevocable determination that the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem should be contained within the boundaries of the State of Israel is a cynical fraud. Israel’s lawful boundaries are the internationally recognised, pre-June 1967 boundaries, and the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem are – as was authoritatively reaffirmed by the International Court of Justice – Occupied Palestinian Territory.

A Hoax Worthy of Joan Peters

It is worth noting that this blatant misrepresentation of the content and legal status of the San Remo Resolution is not the only fraud promoted by the „Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America”. CAMERA’s “suggested book list” includes such lowlights of American intellectual life as Joan Peters’ discredited From Time Immemorial, which grossly falsified archival documents in an effort to claim that Palestine was uninhabited on the eve of Zionist colonisation, and Alan Dershowitz‘ The Case for Israel, which plagiarises numerous passages from From Time Immemorial, and embellishes on it with further absurdities.

Why would an organisation ostensibly dedicated to “accuracy” in media reporting promote a long-since-exposed hoax like From Time Immemorial (absurdly claiming that “Joan Peters dispels the myth of Zionist dispossession of „native“ arabs [sic] in Palestine, drawing on rarely examined archives and statistics. She makes a credible case for Jewish indigenous habitation lasting thousands of years; a groundbreaking study necessary to any discussion of the current conflict in the region.”) and a phantasmagorical distortion of the San Remo Resolution and the legal status of the Occupied Palestinian Territory?

Obviously, these stories aren’t being promoted for their “accuracy”, so there must be some other motive. What goal could CAMERA be pursuing by promoting a work that falsely claims that Palestine was uninhabited prior to Zionist colonisation, and that an obscure 1920 document grants Israel full title to the Occupied Palestinian Territory? Simple: Promoting works such as these provides a pretext under which moral and legal objections to the constant violations of Palestinian rights by the US and Israel – from the ethnic cleansing (“Nakba”) of 1948 to the 1967 occupation and the displacement of Palestinians through state-subsidised illegal settlements – can be dismissed. It provides rhetorical cover for some of Israel’s most severe crimes.

They Give CLE Credit for This?

It is not particularly shocking that CAMERA is promoting a hoax that provides fraudulent reasons for ignoring Palestinian human rights. This is what they do, and they make no bones about it (even Dershowitz at least tried to camouflage his reliance on the Peters hoax). However, it should be the slightest bit alarming that the State Bar of California has seen fit to give attorneys continuing education credits for listening to a lecture that promotes it.

The California State Bar’s standards for approving MCLE activities are set forth in Rule 3.501 of the Rules of the State Bar, which requires that the activity “relate to legal subjects directly relevant to members of the State Bar and have significant current professional and practical content” (Rule 3.501(A)) and that the provider “have significant professional or academic experience related to its content” (Rule 3.501 (B). Unless California is a hotbed of litigation on the legal status of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, it is hard to see how even an accurate lecture on “Who Owns Jerusalem?” could be considered “directly relevant” or to have “significant current professional and practical content”.

Moreover, it seems a bit of a stretch to claim that Gauthier, who, based on a Google search for ‘“Jacques Gauthier” Israel’ (the latter term added to narrow down the vast multitude of people called ‘Jacques Gauthier’ in the world), has never held an academic post, has never published in a peer-reviewed journal of international law, and whose “academic or professional experience” appears to be limited to giving lectures like this to various right-wing Israeli PR organisations, qualifies as having had “significant academic or professional experience” on the subject.

There is no explicit requirement in the rules on approval of MCLE activities that an activity provide an accurate portrayal of applicable law; however, it seems fairly reasonable to assume that the California State Bar would not grant MCLE approval to, say, the hucksters who claim that there is no obligation to pay income taxes, or the right-wing “common law” militias who claim that the Fourteenth Amendment is invalid and that the only competent courts in the US are the “common law courts” they have created. Lest these seem like somewhat extreme examples, it is worthwhile to recall at this point that we are talking about a lecturer who claims that the entire international legal consensus on the status of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem is wrong, and bases this on a blatant distortion of an obscure 1920 document that has long since been superseded, in an effort to deny the Palestinians any right to self-determination or even protection under the Fourth Geneva Convention. This is a serious fraud.

The State Bar of California needs to answer a few questions in this matter:

(a)   Is the “Who Owns Jerusalem” lecture in fact approved as an MCLE activity, as is claimed on its Facebook event page?

(b)   What representations were made in the request for approval?

(c)    Was the request signed by a member of the State Bar of California?

(d)   On what basis was the lecture found to have “direct relevance” and “significant current professional or practical content”?

(e)    How in-depth is the Bar’s review of proposed MCLE activities?

(f)     What safeguards, if any, are in place to prevent the approval of fraudulent providers?

It’s traditional around this time of year to nominate “words of the year“, whether they’re particularly incisive ways of expressing nettlesome concepts or particularly hideous ways of obfuscating bloody realities. I would like to contribute to this fine custom by nominating a candidate for the most inane phrase of the last twenty years:

GETTING THINGS DONE

These three words, in their various permutations, are a mainstay of what passes for a political discourse in the US. Politicians tell us that it’s time to put aside “partisanship” so that we can roll up our sleeves and “get things done”. The media praise those sleeve-rolling politicians as “pragmatists who get things done”. Any time someone raises a principled objection to a policy – say, a multibillion-dollar giveaway to insurance companies – they’re lectured for letting “ideology” get in the way of “getting things done”. There is now even a “movement”, known as No Labels, that presents itself as being about getting things done. “Getting things done”, it seems, is the political class’ equivalent of nirvana, a sublime state of being to which many aspire, but few attain.

Now, politicians wouldn’t say this, speechwriters wouldn’t write it, and pundits wouldn’t praise it unless there was some indication that a significant number of people are inspired by the very notion of “getting things done”.

At this point, a rather obvious question comes up: Do these people really exist? Has our moribund society actually gone so far around the bend that people can be whipped into ecstasy by the mere notion of “doing stuff”? Apparently, there must be. Focus groups are there for a reason.

This raises some even more disturbing questions, such as why? What exactly is the mindset that allows a person to be impressed by this? To me, it brings to mind a condemned man whose executioners are arguing about whether to use the guillotine or the gas chamber: “Enough! Just get it over with!” Judging from the population’s inert response to a government that promised “change” intensifying the most criminal policies of the government they’d just overwhelmingly rejected at the polls, I think this image is probably pretty close to the truth: “Look, guys, I know you’re going to stuff me, and I don’t care anymore. I’m used to it. I’ll even stuff myself. Anything! Just so long as you shut the hell up about it!”

Personally, I seem to be immune to the “getting things done” fever. Call it a mental defect, but my first response when I hear something talk about “getting things done” is: “What things?” and “To whom?”

“Things” is a rather broad category, after all. It applies, essentially, to everything in the universe. There are things that I’d like to see get done, and things I think we should probably give a miss. You wouldn’t, I fancy, be willing to eat a “soup with things in it” (at least not without ascertaining the whereabouts and wellbeing of the neighbours’ pets, and the neighbours themselves).

The maddening non-specificity of “getting things done” raises another question as well: Why not just tell us what things they’re talking about? Why be vague rather than painting a picture? Why not just say, for instance:

‘I’m going to roll up my sleeves and give more of your money to the top 0.5%, and then I’m going to sign an executive order that says I can execute any one of you on a whim if I believe that you’re harming US interests. And then I’m going to make you a captive market for the health insurance companies that 4% of you consider “generally honest and trustworthy”, spend hundreds of billions of dollars destroying other people’s countries, and cut what’s left of your social safety net because we can’t afford it if we’re also going to spend your great grandchildren’s money on a trillion-dollar gift to the banks that kicked you out of your home and raised your credit card interest rate to 90%. And wait till I tell you what I’m going to do after lunch…’

On second thought, I suppose “getting things done” is not without its merits.

Seit einer Woche arbeite ich an einem spannenden neuen Projekt: mein erstes Buch, Arbeitstitel: Reunion – A Travelogue (Wiedersehen – ein Reisebericht).

Der satirisch-introspektive Reisebericht Reunion (voraussichtliches
Veröffentlichungsdatum der englischsprachigen Ausgabe: Mitte Januar 2011) wird mich auf einer Reise durch
Deutschland, Polen, Österreich, Italien, Spanien, Frankreich und
Tschechien begleiten, wobei ich nach 10jähriger Abwesenheit vom Kontinent die
Bekanntschaft mit vertrauten Orten erneuern und Orte explorieren werde, die ich bislang nicht kennengelernt habe. 30 Tage lang werde ichverschiedene Städte besuchen, mir die örtlichen Infoshops, Antiquariate, Nahrungsquellen und politischen Brennpunkte ansehen und mich mit alten FreundInnen, AktivistInnen und sonst allen unterhalten, die mir über den Weg laufen. 

Das Vorwort zu Reunion, das
von einer surrealen Reise von München nach Berlin im Dezember 1996
erzählt, erschient als Serie auf der Projektseite.

 Wer mitmachen will…

Wer zur Finanzierung des Projekts etwas spenden will oder im Voraus ein
Exemplar zum ermäßigten Preis von USD 12,- kaufen will, kann das hier tun. Ebenfalls wäre ich an Tipps interessiert, was ich mir in den jeweiligen Städten unbedingt mal ansehen sollte oder was sonst alles interessant sein könnte. Wohlgemerkt: "Interessant" ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit angenehm. Auch an interessant-beschissenen Tipps wäre ich natürlich interessiert. 

If there is one piece of ancient wisdom that has never lost even a bit of its validity over the centuries, it is Cornelius Tacitus‘ axiom that, “Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.” Indeed, this appears to be the underlying principle of the US-Israeli PR campaign that has been launched in the wake of the almost universally condemned Israeli commando raid on the unarmed Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which carried aid to the Gaza Strip in an effort to break the siege that has strangled the 1.5 million people there since 2007.

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They think Obama’s a socialist. They think climate change is a hoax. They think that Obama’s a Muslim, and that all Muslims are out to get us. A lot of them think the Earth was created sometime before last Tuesday by a magic invisible man who forgot to mention dinosaurs in his history of the universe. Some of them still think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They believe that Obama is a foreign-born Manchurian candidate who wants government “death panels” to decide whether their great aunt gets the operation she needs. They can’t tell the difference between Hitler and the Soviet Union. And they think that all their problems are due to a combination of liberal “socialists”, immigrants, uppity women and minorities, and the Homosexual Agenda. In short, they believe a whole lot of stupid bullshit.

They see their salvation in multimillionaire con artists like Rush Limbaugh and soap opera melodramatist demagogues like Glenn Beck. And every time that the protofascist Sarah Palin says something that makes us long for the eloquence and erudition of George W. Bush, they applaud her even more for enduring the ridicule of the educated classes.

It’s hilarious stuff. Really priceless. But don’t laugh too long, because if the followers of Beck and Palin ever come into any real power, these will be the stormtroopers who burn down mosques and shops suspected of being Muslim-owned, who break the windows of GLBT community institutions and lynch those inside. They’ll be the ones looting gynaecologists’ offices and that independent feminist bookstore you get your copy of Bitch from.

Ha, ha. How entertaining – and if it comes to pass, we will only have our own arrogance, laziness, and tactical stupidity to blame.

They are pissed off, and as much as many of us seem to regard anger as scary and uncouth (preferring, apparently, an attitude of detachment that borders on ennui) – they have every reason to be pissed off. Their jobs have disappeared, their wages have stagnated, their benefits have been plundered, their communities have been decimated, and their kids are probably going to be even worse off than they are. And the politicians, the Times, and the Post would have them believe they’re living in unparalleled prosperity.

They believe a lot of crazy, stupid shit. Of course they do – they wisely don’t trust the mainstream of the corporate media – and the only source they know of that even begins to acknowledge that they have a reason to be angry and scared are fundamentalist hustlers and far-right propaganda outlets like FOX News, Vdare, and talk radio. People are only as smart as the information they have access to. And who’s talking to them every day, empathising with their rage, and giving them a framework – loony as it may be – to understand it? Certainly not us. We laugh at their misspelt signs and bizarre theories, and feel so much smarter, whilst we abandon them to the tender mercies of the Beck-Limbaugh-Palin Gang.

A history lesson is in order here. The Nazis didn’t need a majority to come to power; they just had to make an electoral showing strong enough that the mainstream right had to govern with them in order to govern at all. Goebbels’ propaganda – diabolically brilliant though it was – didn’t achieve that result alone. He was aided by a “Social-Democratic” Party that had sold its working-class base down the river, a Communist Party that took its marching orders from Russians who had no understanding of German politics, and a left that ignored the countryside, preferring the safety of the cities, where they could preach to the choir. In this setting, Hitler,–who was bankrolled by rich industrialists and the deposed Hohenzollern nobility – could plagiarise Left issues and offer distorted versions of Left solutions – and win over the working class and the petite bourgeoisie as the only party that had not (yet) sold them out.

Every fascist success is also a Left failure.

What there is of a Left in the United States suffers from chronic amnesia. There is no real continuity between the struggles and organisations of one generation and the next. We start from scratch every time, and occasionally succumb to the illusion that a few good mass demonstrations and direct actions are all that is needed to have an effect on policy. We forget that there needs to be “someone operating the mimeograph machine”, as Noam Chomsky once put it, and that movement building means going to places where we’re currently absent, and talking to people who may not (at least initially) be happy to see us. These are lessons that the far right has learned. They have people going door to door, managing phone trees, and constantly talking to the people they’re looking to win over, strengthening the allegiances of the existing members and mining the prospects for new ones. They make sure that there isn’t a major issue of the day that people don’t hear their version of. Of course, they also have a bankroll fattened by the Scaifes, Coors, Schlaflys, and other sources of concentrated wealth with reactionary sympathies, a budget of which a real popular movement can only dream.

The Greek Left has passed down knowledge and insight from generation to generation – from the struggle against the Nazi occupation, to the struggle against the Allied-backed fascist-monarchist régime, to the struggle against modern state capitalism. Greece has a mass antiauthoritarian Left movement with real popular support (when the cops come after their demonstrators, people in the neighbourhood can be counted on to provide them with shelter).

We, on the other hand, have the Tea Party.

And a choice to make. Either we can continue to amuse ourselves with the latest idiotic sign or sublimely stupid claim, and chuckle to ourselves over the fact that these people have named themselves after the practise of dipping one’s scrotum in another man’s mouth, or we can start talking to the same people that they get their support from. Some of them are probably unreachable – dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore racists, fascists, and fundamentalists who won’t hear any argument, and who would be saying the same thing even if this society were run for the benefit of the working class and poor majority. Others are just there by default. How many of each there are is anyone’s guess, but if we are actually serious about creating a socially just, participatory society, we will not consider it an academic question.

Einige haben bemängelt, daß mein satirischer Kurztext zum Thema „Antideutsche“ eben keine politologische Abhandlung mit allerhand Fundstellennachweisen sei. Zwar könnte man dagegen einwenden, daß das schließlich zwei völlig unterschiedliche Genres seien, die unterschiedliche Stilmittel einsetzen und unterschiedliche Ziele verfolgen. Damit wäre eigentlich alles gesagt.

Der Kernfrage – Was sind diese „Antideutschen" eigentlich für welche? – möchte ich mich aber schon etwas ausführlicher zuwenden. Die im folgenden zitierten Äußerungen habe ich repräsentativen antideutschen Presseorganen entnommen, und zwar teils dem Aufsatz „Gegen die antisemitische Internationale“ und Teils den „Aktuell“-Artikeln des antideutschen Verlags „BAHAMAS“. Wer als Antideutsche/r der Ansicht ist, daß diese Quellen nicht repräsentativ für die ganze besondere antideutsche Denkart seien, ist selbstverständlich herzlich eingeladen, in den Kommentaren repräsentativere Quellen zu verlinken (bitte beachten, daß Umlaute nicht angezeigt werden können – woran das liegt, ist mir ein Rätsel, also bitte: Keine Umlaute und keine Sonderzeichen).

Die Antideutschen haben ein wirklich merkwürdiges Verhältnis zum Judentum. Zum Ausdruck kommt dieses Verhältnis u.a. im Untertitel des Aufsatzes Israelkritik – die zarteste Versuchung seit es Antisemitismus gibt: „Warum den Antisemitismus nicht kritisieren kann, wer mit Israel nicht solidarisch ist.“ Die grammatischen Besonderheiten dieser Äußerung sollen uns nicht weiter aufhalten. Wichtig ist zunächst die Frage, was man nach Auffassung der Antideutschen unter „mit Israel solidarisch“ zu verstehen hat. Diese Frage haben die Volksgenossen bei BAHAMAS mehrfach beantwortet. „Solidarität mit Israel, so weiß antideutsche Kritik“, heißt es in einem Beitrag von Tjark Kunstreich, der unter Antideutschen als so etwas wie ein Intellektueller zu gelten scheint, „ist entweder bedingungslos oder sie ist keine.“ So stellt schon „die trotzige Beanspruchung [des Rechts], Israel kritisieren zu dürfen“ einen „Verrat an Israel“ dar.  In der „Verteidigung Israels gegen jede Kritik“, so der Aufruf zu einer antideutschen Konferenz (auch bei BAHAMAS zu finden), liege eine der Hauptaufgaben der antideutschen „Kritik“.
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