Antisemitism weekly roundup

I tweeted on this the other day but let me recap here: This NYT piece reported that the ships in the Free Gaza Movement flotilla were funded by something called the Perdana Global Peace Organization. Greta Berlin, a founder of the Free Gaza Movement, herself acknowledged this link to Perdana. Look around Perdana’s website and you’ll find the organization is chaired by Mahathir Mohamed, former prime minister of Malaysia and one of the world’s most notoriously outspoken antisemites — a man who said this at a January conference:

The Jews had always been a problem in European countries. They had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole Governments to ransom. Even after their massacre by the Nazis of Germany, they survived to continue to be a source of even greater problems for the world. The Holocaust failed as a final solution.

And people accuse Jews of fabricating the issue of antisemitism as a smokescreen.

There’s been very little reporting on Mahathir’s ties to the Free Gaza Movement as far as I’ve seen. Lots and lots of discussion about “what Israel has become” and such. Very little discussion of what the Palestine solidarity movement has become.

As for IHH, the Turkish organization involved in the melee on the flotilla’s biggest ship, my friend Yigal Schleifer, in his must-read posts on the Turkey-Israel diplomatic crisis, describes IHH as an organization of the Islamist far right. Yigal’s coverage is some of the fairest, most non-ideological and rigorous you’ll come across anywhere.

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In last week’s New Yorker, Pankaj Mishra reviewed Paul Berman’s new book The Flight of the Intellectuals, about the widespread liberal-left acceptance of Swiss Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, and what this phenomenon says about intellectual culture in our time. Mishra, in short, offers a fine example of what Berman was trying to diagnose. He subjects Berman to a relentless drubbing over his liberal-hawk support of the Iraq war, thus shooting the messenger, while giving Ramadan a pass on his uncritical support of the extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi.

First of all, Qaradawi doesn’t simply justify suicide attacks against Israel, as Mishra notes, although this would be bad enough. Qaradawi says things like this:

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place.

Mishra further tries to undermine Berman’s case:

[Berman] says that Ramadan not just “admires” but “worships” Qaradawi, although the citations of Ramadan that he produces to illustrate this claim reveal nothing more fervent than the standard lexicon of scholarly attribution: “Yusuf al-Qaradawi aptly notes that…”; “For details, see Yusuf al-Qaradawi….”

I very much doubt that Mishra would agree it’s benign for Ramadan to cite, whether calmly or fervently, the work of a man who believes Hitler put the Jews in their place.

And yet wait. Here is Paul Berman himself, responding to another negative review, in which he notes that

…Ramadan, who has contributed prefaces to two of Sheikh Qaradawi’s collections of fatwas [my emphasis – DA], has revered and applauded Qaradawi in every one of his major books, beginning with the book about [Hassan] al-Banna. Anyone who takes the trouble to read through Ramadan’s work will discover that Qaradawi has been the most important of his mentors—a distinguished and learned sheikh with his own history of ties to the Ramadan family, by the way (which I mention … because Ramadan himself, in his book on al-Banna, chooses to boast of it).

Mishra, it seems, is misrepresenting facts in order to burnish his conclusion: that Ramadan “may not be ideal, but the impulse to engage with him seems to exemplify the best kind of liberalism….”

By all means, engage Ramadan, but do it in the way that George Packer did in this exchange, in which he pressed Ramadan repeatedly on the issue of antisemitism. “[H]e couldn’t give me a direct answer,” writes Packer. “He hedged, he spoke about context, he suggested that the quotes were mistranslated, that they didn’t actually exist. But he refused to acknowledge that his grandfather and the Muslim Brotherhood in its origins were characterized by anti-Semitic or totalitarian views. It seemed clear that there was a limit to what he would allow himself to say or think, and that I had found it.”

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Last but not least, the fact that racists such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are blasting veteran White House reporter turned pundit Helen Thomas does not mean that Thomas’s remarks were anything less than disgusting. And racist.