deliberation
Jay Knott
The following paper was submitted to
The Journal of Hate Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA, USA, on March 14, 2012. It was rejected without explanation. My paper criticizes the approach the discipline of Hate Studies had taken hitherto. It argues that Hate Studies has over-estimated the extent of white racism in the USA, and neglected Zionism as a source of hate. It backs up these criticisms with evidence, and a rigorous approach to evaluating it.
Abstract
The Journal of Hate Studies asks for “cutting-edge essays, theory, and research that deepens the understanding of the development and expression of hate”. The following submission for the 2012 issue of the journal (
Call for Papers, Tsai, R.L., 2012) is all of the above. It argues that Zionism generates hate, and that hate studies writers have neglected it. Further, it produces evidence that hate studies researchers have exaggerated the amount of racism in white gentile America. In the process, it examines the methodologies which have led to this miscalculation, and suggests a more balanced approach.
I. Introduction
In his paper
Hate, Oppression, Repression, and the Apocalyptic Style, (2004), one of the founders of hate studies, Chip Berlet, defines the field as “inquiries into the human capacity to define, and then dehumanize or demonize, an ‘other,’ and the processes which inform and give expression to, or can curtail or combat, that capacity”. The current paper argues that Zionism includes examples of the above “human capacity”, but that no contributor to hate studies, until now, has noticed them.
Noel Ignatiev’s contribution to the
Encyclopedia of Race and Racism, (2007, pp. 240–244), describes the Zionist state of Israel as a “racial state, where rights are assigned on the basis of ascribed descent or the approval of the superior race”. Ilan Pappe’s
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (2006), shows how Israel was initiated by the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their homeland, because they were not Jewish. I therefore argue that Zionism is a valid subject of hate studies.
However, a survey of the current publications of hate studies reveals a lack of concern with Zionism, in contrast to an emphasis on anti-Semitism and white racism. I illustrate this below with citations from the major works of hate studies, analyzing examples of alleged hate incidents to suggest a more scientific approach to the evaluation of hate. I cite the recommended works which allege there is an “epidemic” of hate crimes, and the one book currently in print which directly falsifies this hypothesis,
Hate Crimes – Criminal Law & Identity Politics (Jacobs, J.B. & Potter, K., 1998). I make use of Steven Pinker’s recent work on the decline of violence, including hate crimes,
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Pinker, S., 2011), and a number of newspaper and online reports of alleged hate crimes.
II. Inadequate attention to Zionism
The Zionist justification for expelling Palestinians has included expressions of “the human capacity to define, and then dehumanize or demonize, an ‘other,’” (Berlet, C., 2004). When Zionist leaders recognize the Palestinians’ existence, they sometimes refer to them as “devil’s spawn” (Rachel Abrams’ weblog; 2011). Other representative epithets include “drugged cockroaches”, “two-legged animals” and “Arab scum” (according to the
Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, 14 January 2002, citing
The New Statesman, June 25, 1982). Some Zionists go so far as to say it would be justified to kill gentile babies “if they would grow up to harm us” – Rabbi Shapira, reported by Roi Sharon in Maariv, 2009. The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, in a book about self-deception,
The Folly of Fools, the logic of deceit and self-deception in human life, (2011), in a section entitled “False Historical Narratives”, contrasts the Zionist myth with the reality:
a racialist (and then racist) country was shoehorned into the Middle East, so that Jewish people (half and quarter also) from around the world can immediately claim citizenship to this land but none of those who were so recently expelled could do so. (p. 236).
Nevertheless, only one of the papers for hate studies’ most recent conference mentions Zionism, and not to criticize it
for racism, but to ask at what point criticism
of it becomes racist – “Not every criticism of Israel and Zionism was viewed as antisemitic, but on many occasions such comment served to mask antisemitism” – Michael Whine,
The Community Security Trust – Best Practice in Combating Antisemitic Hate, (2011),
Journal of Hate Studies (vol. 9, p. 114).
Kenneth Stern, a founder of the discipline of hate studies, vigorously defends Zionism against the “racism” charge. In his first pamphlet on anti-Semitism for the American Jewish Committee,
Anti-Zionism, the Sophisticated Anti-Semitism,
(1990), Stern wrote: “This anti-Semitic slander – that Zionism was racism – first appeared at the United Nations in the early 1960s” (p. 6). Even the Jewish Agency for Israel says, of the right of return for Jews, “It has been suggested that an immigration policy which explicitly gives priority to one ethnic or religious group cannot be justified in liberal democratic terms” (2004). But Stern has consistently argued that describing the Law of Return as racist, is itself racist (Stern 2006). In an extensive survey of the literature, I have been unable to find anything recommended by the hate studies department at Gonzaga University’s
Bibliography of Hate Studies Materials (Thweatt, E., 2002), which agrees with the United Nations that Zionism as a form of racism.
As well as the United Nations, Stern’s complaints about “anti-Semitism” are directed at rural political movements, known as “militias”, in the USA. In 1996, Stern wrote an article for USA Today entitled
Militia Mania, a Growing Danger, and published a book called
A Force Upon the Plain, subtitled
The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate, claiming that anti-Jewish attitudes are central to these movements’ ideologies (p. 246). Concern about militias is a recurrent theme in the hate studies literature (Dees, M., 1997; Berlet, C. & Lyons, M, 2000; Thweatt, E., 2002).
An example is
Public Eye journal – “Researching the Right for Progressive Changemakers” – edited by hate studies pundit Chip Berlet. In her article for the journal,
The Montana Human Rights Network, (2005), Abby Scher claims the following statement, from a leaflet produced by a militia in Montana, is an example of an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory: “George Bush… cynically used the tragedy of September 11th to silence dissent and to launch the war for Israel his Zionist neocon handlers wanted.” Arguments for the claims that the neoconservative movement is overwhelming Zionist, and that it was instrumental in persuading the US government to attack Iraq in 2003, include scholarly ones such as those of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (
The Israel Lobby; 2007). Deciding how much truth there is in this view is beyond the scope of the present essay – my point is simply that classifying this analysis as “anti-Semitic” may tend to discourage us from asking legitimate questions.
III. The influence of pseudo-science
The field of hate studies has made use of the evolutionary approach in understanding ethnic conflict, for example in publishing Harold Fishbein’s
The Genetic/Evolutionary Basis of Prejudice and Hatred (2004), and James Waller’s
Our Ancestral Shadow: Hate and Human Nature in Evolutionary Psychology (2004). However, less scientific ideas have also been given credit. For example Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt’s
Hate Crimes, (1993), which is recommended in hate studies’ bibliography (Thweatt, E., 2002), and referenced in several papers in the field, relied on a 1950 treatise on hate and prejudice,
The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, T., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J., & Stanford, R.N., 1950): “Decades ago, the authors of
The Authoritarian Personality recognized that prejudice satisfies a deep-rooted psychological need to protect or enhance self-esteem” (p. 48)
.
In
The Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno and his colleagues claimed to have found “quantifiable relations” between conservatism and anti-Semitism via the “Politico-Economic Conservatism” scale, the “Ethnocentrism” scale and the “Anti-Semitism” scale (p. 49).
The above diagram illustrates the general principle. If person A believes P and Q, and person B believes P, the likelihood that person B also believes Q is greater than the occurrence of belief Q in the general population. This is as true of any one class of beliefs as of any other. Yet the Frankfurt School believed it could derive “the determination of the potential fascist in childhood” (Adorno et al. 1950, p. 56) from this statistical banality.
The authors claimed that a German who joined the Nazis “can apparently never quite establish his personal and masculine identity; he thus has to look for it in a collective system where there is opportunity both for submission to the powerful and for retaliation against the powerless” (page 370); they did not apply this psychological explanation to Communist Party recruits of the same period.
The Frankfurt School’s approach still has influence. As a contemporary example of the use of psychoanalysis to reinforce political, and possibly racial, bias, consider Naomi Klein’s recent article about climate change for
The Nation, Capitalism vs. the Climate (2011). She argued that “conservative white men” tend to disbelieve the theory of unprecedented anthropogenic global warming “because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview”.
That official, Richard Falk, the UN's special rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, called for a worldwide boycott earlier Thursday of companies tied to Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
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