Greens Engage

“Belief in conspiracy theories is rife. But what are they and why have they become so popular?”

Did anybody catch this back in 2007 – Channel 4 documentary ‘Conspiracy – Who Really Runs the World?’ I missed it but it’s on Google Video and on the Channel 4 site.

9/11 comes about 18 minutes in. David Icke – former Green Party spokesman, later expelled – is interviewed expounding at length on how the entire global population might be “programmed”.

At 34:19 two psychologists carry out an experiment to predict the likelihood that 30 students will believe in conspiracy theories in the absence of evidence. First they test the pyschological factors of trust, disaffection with society and quickness to make false assumptions based on partial evidence. The hypothesis is that high scores on these factors predict likelihood of believing conspiracy theories. Then they run an invented conspiracy theory past the people with the 6 highest and 6 lowest scores. The experiment confirms the hypothesis.

Chris French, one of the psychologists, takes the findings to David Icke on a beach at around 40:30. David Icke becomes cross (“gets up my nose … song-sheet science”).

Chris French (my emphases):

“OK, conspiracies take place. But it’s the nature of the conspiracies and when there is kind of overwhelming evidence against a particular conspiracy but people still cling tenaciously to it… That then moves into the realm – as far as I’m concerned – of probably trying to look at the psychology behind it.”

And a little later, as the camera operator backs away from the argument:

“I think there is a problem with the belief system in that it’s non-falsifiable – nothing could happen that could falsify it.”

As Nafeez Ahmed, author of ‘The War on Truth’ comments (around 44:25), conspiracy beliefs are born of a desire, in a state of uncertainly, for a solid way of looking at the world, but are almost religious in nature.

At 45:00, Patrick Lehman (the other psychologist involved in the experiment above):

“… and they can’t be shaken out of their beliefs. They are a bit like religious fundamentalists in the sense that their pursuing a certain dogma, they’re pursuing a certain line of attack, and I think being a conspiracy theorist is fundamental to who they are. They’re critical of government – they see government or big business as conspiring against individual freedoms or they see certain institutions as conspiring against them or against other people, so it’s a particular mindset and if you’re in that mindset, if you think “I am a conspiracy theorist” then you’re going to go out and look for conspiracy theories”.

The other day over lunch with David Hirsh I brought up a recent debate about the relationship between ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘anti-Muslim bigotry’. I asked what seemed to me an important question “Is it inevitable that to be Islamophobic is to be bigoted against Muslims?”  Hopefully you get the thrust of my question. In the same vein I could have asked whether it is inevitably antisemitic to be Judeophobic. The question was about whether it is bigoted to fear a given religion.

To which David replied “Yes, because all religions can be filled with different content”.

This unfixed nature of religion is evident in the enormous diversity of religious denominations, not only in the here-and-now but also over time. Islamophobia is a reaction to what Islamophobes insist is the correct reading of a holy text; they are irrational, singular – and therefore false – views of a religion. The irony of Islamophobes and anti-Muslim bigots is that they feel the same way about Islam as the extremists they fear.

But this won’t convince anybody who has a fear, let alone a phobia. I know such a person – he joined the BNP’s  embryonic coalition of different nationalists against Muslims. He considers me naive and, moreover, badly wrong. You have to know your onions to argue with people like him.

What might be helpful would be to look at Gabriele Maranci’s new book – Understanding Muslim Identity, Rethinking Fundamentalism, the introduction and index to which are freely available. His is a distinctly anthropological exploration of social identity and emotional fundamentalism:

“By rejecting culturalist and essentialist reductionist approaches to it, I have suggested that we need to understand ‘fundamentalism’ not as a ‘thing’ (i.e. cultural object) but as a ‘process’, and start from the individual before looking at the group. Of course, it is only the reader whom can decide whether a book may be interesting or not, but I am sure that Understanding Muslim Identity Rethinking Fundamentalism provides something new to the scholarly debate on radicalism and religious violence. Indeed, although I focus on Muslims, the argument presented in this book is not limited to them, and the theory on which it is based may be tested on other forms of ‘emotional religions’ or even ‘emotional secularism’.”

This strikes me as a good approach to arguing with people who subscribe to the ‘clash of civilisations’ theory.

Some people say that Avigdor Lieberman is only acting like a nationalist secular fundamentalist. If so he’s doing a very convincing job.

See Hitchens in Slate for a review of his approach to shaping Israeli society.

Hat tip: @CarrieWorthen.

Hosted by the Foreign Press Association – to book and for more details, see EventBrite

UK Friends of the Abraham Fund Initiatives, in co-operation with the Foreign Press Association present Moving Forward After Gaza: What next for Jewish-Arab coexistence in Israel? A briefing by Mohammad Darawshe Director of the Abraham Fund

Event Description The Gaza war has generated a public outcry, with thousands taking to the streets in London and around the world. In Israel, tensions between the Jewish and Arab communities have risen, threatening current cooperation efforts. From a unique perspective of a coexistence organisation between the Jewish and Arab communities, director Mohammad Darawshe of the Abraham Fund Initiatives will address the situation on the ground. He will outline the much needed action from governments and other agencies and will provide examples of tried and tested model projects already successfully implemented, which demonstrate that coexistence can work, but needs to be supported. About Mohammad Darawshe Mr Darawshe has been the Director of the Abraham Fund Initiatives since 2005 and he has presented lectures and papers at many international and academic institutions such as the U.S. congress, the European parliament, NATO Defense College, the World Economic Forum, and most recently the Herzlia Conference. He won numerous awards, including the Peacemaker award, bestowed by the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago and the Peace and Security Award of the World Association of NGOs. In 2008, he was elected as a council member of his own hometown Iksal.

Amnesty recommends (see p35) an UNSC arms embargo on Israel and “Palestinian groups”.

The hope is that if you take away their sticks they’ll stop hitting each other and make peace. Or maybe it’s some kind of “even playing field” hypothesis of fairness.

I heard a Foreign Office minister tell Press TV that Britain supplies Israel with parts but not weapons – this embargo call would principally affect the US and then Serbia, since Palestinian groups receive their weapons on the black market which would not respect an embargo. Notably, “Palestinian groups” here does not include Hesbollah which appears to have been sending rockets into Israel in the past week. Hesbollah is completely absent from the report. That’s one arms embargo which hasn’t worked. Not exactly reassuring for anybody who recognises that Israel not only has the right, but the need, to defend its citizens – alleged abuses of arms notwithstanding.

• The Jerusalem Post wants answers about what “Israel has the right to defend itself” mean
• Woodrow Wilson Centre’s Africa programme – arms embargoes don’t on their own bring peace

Eco-socialist and author of the other-worldly ‘Overcoming Zionism’, ‘The Enemy of Nature‘ and other works,  Joel Kovel’s sayings and writings have featured on various occasions into the Green World. He is a considerable influence on Green anti-Zionism, who “understand[s] the desire to smash Zionism” and considers Israel an “abomination” which itself constitutes an occupation.

He has lost his job at Bard College or it lost him – the occasion for a number of retrospectives, including from the man himself (as many anti-Zionists with conspiracy beliefs do when things don’t go their way, he believes it was political rather than professional), a response from Judeosphere, this piece from Ignoblus:

“I once saw Kovel speak at my local lefty book shop. I attended with my wife. It’s perhaps worth noting that, while she’s become sympathetic to the concerns of Zionists since knowing me, she is not herself a Zionist and continues to view the creation of Israel as a mistake. She was quite struck with the absolute absence of any discussion of antisemitism and even put off by the repeated assertions that antisemitism was irrelevant to the discussion. The only reference to the Holocaust -something that really can’t be ignored in a discussion of Zionism- was to claim that it was a myth that Israel’s existence was necessary to prevent another Holocaust.

Further, he continually referred to his own book as “banned.” That was a blatant lie. In fact, his book was on sale at that very shop. The truth is that distribution of his book was suspended while the University of Michigan Press reviewed it’s relationship with Pluto Press. It was Pluto Press which published Kovel’s book, but using UM Press’s name. UM Press decided Kovel’s book was terrible and that they needed to sever their relationship to Pluto Press in order to protect their own reputation. However, when they reached that conclusion, they continued publishing Kovel’s book, citing academic freedom. So, rather than banning the book, UM Press continued to publish what they saw as an obviously inferior work. In his narcissistic rant about being let go from Bard, he continues to refer to the episode as “book burning.”

Although he never used words like “conspiracy” or “cabal,” Kovel’s version of history also contained many, many details that strongly suggested a conspiratorial worldview. For instance, he attributed US support for the creation of Israel monocausally to Jewish funding for Truman’s presidential campaign. Never mind that Truman had been a vocal ally to Zionism long before running for President.

Given the similarity between his organization’s name, The Committee for the Open Discussion of Zionism (CODOZ), to the blatantly antisemitic Committee for the Open Discussion of the Holocaust (CODOH), I find it difficult to ignore the possibility that these were intentional dogwhistles. Perhaps he’s really that ignorant of antisemitism that he doesn’t know to avoid such things (like Juan Cole’s recent advocacy for an America First movement), but then I think it’s still a revelatory Freudian slip. His sense of victimization and the hands of some powerful, vaguely defined (but constantly growing) group supposedly out to silence him is the same category of mistake -is the same funtionally- as antisemitism.

So, had Bard actually dismissed Kovel for his views -not his advocacy of a one-state solution, but his (borderline?) conspiratorial views on the power of Zionists- I’d probably support them in that. But they didn’t. They cut him to save money.”

That’s most of the post, but go there anyway.

According to student harassment advisor and Green Andrew Collingwood, who played with allegations of antisemitism as part of his political campaigning about Palestine.

He can’t have noticed that most campus antisemitism today emanates from anti-Zionists and their Palestine solidarity campaigns. Campaigning on behalf of Palestinians doesn’t have to be like that, but in Britain it often is.

In common with many people who are accused of racism, Andrew Collingwood is deeply upset and offended that he’s been called racist, and views it as an attempt to smear him on account of his Palestine Solidarity Campaign work.

But even some members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign think that the PSC is too comfortable an environment for antisemitism – it has been for years. The cartoon wasn’t out of the ordinary.

One student in the comments:

“If something racist were to happen to me on campus, I honestly feel there would be no one I could go to.”

Many others want the people with concerns to get over it. But if you’re going to ask people who feel themselves subject to racism to get over it, you may as well write off the racism part of the harassment advisory service.

Nobody has to turn a blind eye to this, do they.

Update: And nobody should turn a blind eye to hate mail received by Andrew Collingwood. Sending hate mail is deplorable, futile, self-indulgent, and often extremely frightening for the recipient. Andrew Collingwood does not deserve hate mail. He deserves to be argued with, straight. Send hate mail and not only have you lost the argument but you’ve given up on persuading somebody.

The declaration authored by international delegates at the London Conference on Combatting Antisemitism:

Preamble

We, Representatives of our respective Parliaments from across the world, convening in London for the founding Conference and Summit of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism, draw the democratic world’s attention to the resurgence of antisemitism as a potent
force in politics, international affairs and society.

We note the dramatic increase in recorded antisemitic hate crimes and attacks targeting Jewish persons and property, and Jewish religious, educational and communal institutions.

We are alarmed at the resurrection of the old language of prejudice and its modern manifestations – in rhetoric and political action – against Jews, Jewish belief and practice and the State of Israel.

We are alarmed by Government-backed antisemitism in general, and state-backed genocidal antisemitism, in particular.

We, as Parliamentarians, affirm our commitment to a comprehensive programme of action to meet this challenge.

We call upon national governments, parliaments, international institutions, political and civic leaders, NGOs, and civil society to affirm democratic and human values, build societies based on respect and citizenship and combat any manifestations of antisemitism and discrimination.

We today in London resolve that;

Challenging Antisemitism

1. Parliamentarians shall expose, challenge, and isolate political actors who engage in hate against Jews and target the State of Israel as a Jewish collectivity;

2. Parliamentarians should speak out against antisemitism and discrimination directed against any minority, and guard against equivocation, hesitation and justification in the face of expressions of hatred;

3. Governments must challenge any foreign leader, politician or public figure who denies, denigrates or trivialises the Holocaust and must encourage civil society to be vigilant to this phenomenon and to openly condemn it;

4. Parliamentarians should campaign for their Government to uphold international commitments on combating antisemitism – including the OSCE Berlin Declaration and its eight main principles;

5. The UN should reaffirm its call for every member state to commit itself to the principles laid out in the Holocaust Remembrance initiative including specific and targeted policies to eradicate Holocaust denial and trivialisation;

6. Governments and the UN should resolve that never again will the institutions of the international community and the dialogue of nation states be abused to try to establish any legitimacy for antisemitism, including the singling out of Israel for discriminatory treatment in the international arena, and we will never witness – or be party to – another gathering like Durban in 2001;

7. The OSCE should encourage its member states to fulfil their commitments under the 2004 Berlin Declaration and to fully utilise programmes to combat antisemitism including the Law Enforcement programme LEOP;

8. The European Union, inter-state institutions and multilateral fora and religious communities must make a concerted effort to combat antisemitism and lead their member states to adopt proven and best practice methods of countering antisemitism;

9. Leaders of all religious faiths should be called upon to use all the means possible to combat antisemitism and all types of discriminatory hostilities among believers and society at large;

10. The EU Council of Ministers should convene a session on combating antisemitism relying on the outcomes of the London Conference on Combating Antisemitism and using the London Declaration as a basis.

Prohibitions

11. Governments should take appropriate and necessary action to prevent the broadcast of explicitly antisemitic programmes on satellite television channels, and to apply pressure on the host broadcast nation to take action to prevent the transmission of explicitly antisemitic programmes;

12. Governments should fully reaffirm and actively uphold the Genocide Convention, recognising that where there is incitement to genocide signatories automatically have an obligation to act. This may include sanctions against countries involved in or threatening to commit genocide or referral of the matter to the UN Security Council or initiate an interstate complaint at the International Court of Justice;

13. Parliamentarians should legislate effective Hate Crime legislation recognising “hate aggravated crimes” and, where consistent with local legal standards, “incitement to hatred” offences and empower law enforcement agencies to convict;

14. Governments that are signatories to the Hate Speech Protocol of the Council of Europe ‘Convention on Cybercrime’ (and the ‘Additional Protocol to the Convention on cybercrime, concerning the criminalisation of acts of a racist and xenophobic nature committed through computer systems’) should enact domestic enabling legislation;

Identifying the threat

15. Parliamentarians should return to their legislature, Parliament or Assembly and establish inquiry scrutiny panels that are tasked with determining the existing nature and state of antisemitism in their countries and developing recommendations for government and civil society action;

16. Parliamentarians should engage with their governments in order to measure the effectiveness of existing policies and mechanisms in place and to recommend proven and best practice methods of countering antisemitism;

17. Governments should ensure they have publicly accessible incident reporting systems, and that statistics collected on antisemitism should be the subject of regular review and action by government and state prosecutors and that an adequate legislative framework is in place to tackle hate crime.

18. Governments must expand the use of the EUMC ‘working definition’ of antisemitism to inform policy of national and international organisations and as a basis for training material for use by Criminal Justice Agencies;

19. Police services should record allegations of hate crimes and incidents – including antisemitism – as routine part of reporting crimes;

20. The OSCE should work with member states to seek consistent data collection systems for antisemitism and hate crime.

Education, awareness and training

21. Governments should train Police, prosecutors and judges comprehensively. The training is essential if perpetrators of antisemitic hate crime are to be successfully apprehended, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced. The OSCE’s Law enforcement Programme LEOP is a model initiative consisting of an international cadre of expert police officers training police in several countries;

22. Governments should develop teaching materials on the subjects of the Holocaust, racism, antisemitism and discrimination which are incorporated into the national school curriculum. All teaching materials ought to be based on values of comprehensiveness, inclusiveness, acceptance and respect and should be designed to assist students to recognise and counter
antisemitism and all forms of hate speech;

23. The OSCE should encourage their member states to fulfill their commitments under the 2004 Berlin Declaration and to fully utilise programmes to combat antisemitism including the Law Enforcement programme LEOP;

24. Governments should include a comprehensive training programme across the Criminal Justice System using programmes such as the LEOP programme;

25. Education Authorities should ensure that freedom of speech is upheld within the law and to protect students and staff from illegal antisemitic discourse and a hostile environment in whatever form it takes including calls for boycotts;

Community Support

26. The Criminal Justice System should publicly notify local communities when antisemitic hate crimes are prosecuted by the courts to build community confidence in reporting and pursuing convictions through the Criminal Justice system;

27. Parliamentarians should engage with civil society institutions and leading NGOs to create partnerships that bring about change locally, domestically and globally, and support efforts that encourage Holocaust education, inter-religious dialogue and cultural exchange;

Media and the Internet

28. Governments should acknowledge the challenge and opportunity of the growing new forms of communication;

29. Media Regulatory Bodies should utilise the EUMC ‘Working Definition of antisemitism’ to inform media standards;

30. Governments should take appropriate and necessary action to prevent the broadcast of antisemitic programmes on satellite television channels, and to apply pressure on the host broadcast nation to take action to prevent the transmission of antisemitic programmes;

31. The OSCE should seek ways to coordinate the response of member states to combat the use of the internet to promote incitement to hatred;

32. Law enforcement authorities should use domestic “hate crime”, “incitement to hatred” and other legislation as well as other means to mitigate and, where permissible, to prosecute “Hate on the Internet” where racist and antisemitic content is hosted, published and written;

33. An international task force of Internet specialists comprised of parliamentarians and experts should be established to create common metrics to measure antisemitism and other manifestations of hate online and to develop policy recommendations and practical instruments for Governments and international frameworks to tackle these problems.

Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism

34. Participants will endeavour to maintain contact with fellow delegates through working group framework; communicating successes or requesting further support where required;

35. Delegates should reconvene for the next ICCA Conference in Canada in 2010, become an active member of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition and promote and prioritise the London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism.

Lancaster House, 17 February 2009

On Comment is Free, Peter Tatchell says:

“It is therefore disturbing that significant sections (not all) of the left are flirting with Hamas. During the January protests in the UK against Israel’s barbaric bombardment of Gaza, there were frequent pro-Hamas chants and placards. “We are all Hamas now!” some marchers yelled. At one rally in Hyde Park, speakers on the main stage urged “Victory to Hamas!” and received tumultuous cheers of approval (with only a few boos).

I am tired of hearing leftwingers defend Hamas on the grounds that it was democratically elected. So what? The Israeli leaders are democratically elected but that does not make their war in Gaza right. A democratic mandate is not, by itself, sufficient to secure legitimacy for the government in Gaza – or anywhere else. If democratically elected governments violate human rights they forfeit their legitimacy, as in the case of Britain when it was torturing and assassinating Irish republican suspects in the 1970s and 80s.”

…

Another favourite left and liberal justification of Hamas is that it is less corrupt than its Palestinian rivals in Fatah and that it organises social programmes for the poor. You could say the same about the Nazis, compared to the indulgence and incompetence of some Weimar Republic leaders. No, a few good works do not exonerate Hamas. Yes, their critique of Fatah nepotism, pocket-lining and thuggism has some truth. But the alternative they are offering is far worse.”

Read it all.

(It’s not as if Peter Tatchell is the only one and he’s not constructing an argument to end Israel’s existence it’s not so worrying, but… for those diminishing few of us who aren’t international law experts it would be helpful if when calling Israeli military leaders war criminals, authors would to link to the articles of the Geneva Convention in question and to trustworthy commentary on how Israel’s actions relate to these. I haven’t seen this, to date. Regretting civilian deaths is one thing. Saying they were needless is another. Saying they were war crimes is very serious indeed. And calling them war crimes as confidently as most people are doing makes a trial kind of redundant…)

This Independent piece from Howard Jacobson sums up comprehensively what ‘criticism of Israel’ has come to be characterised as today.

“And Israel? Well, speaking on BBC television at the height of the fighting, Richard Kemp, former commander of British Troops in Afghanistan and a senior military adviser to the British government, said the following: “I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare where any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of civilians than the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) is doing today in Gaza.” A judgement I can no more corroborate than those who think very differently can disprove.

Right or wrong, it was a contribution to the argument from someone who is more informed on military matters than most of us, but did it make a blind bit of difference to the tone of popular execration? It did not. When it comes to Israel we hear no good, see no good, speak no good. We turn our backsides to what we do not want to know about and bury it in distaste, like our own ordure. We did it and go on doing it with all official contestation of the mortality figures provided by Hamas. We do it with Hamas’s own private executions and their policy of deploying human shields. We do it with the sotto voce admission by the UN that “a clerical error” caused it to mis-describe the bombing of that UN school which at the time was all the proof we needed of Israel’s savagery. It now turns out that Israel did not bomb the school at all. But there’s no emotional mileage in a correction. The libel sticks, the retraction goes unnoticed.

But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is criticism of Israel, pure and simple.

…

But my argument is not with the Palestinians or even with Hamas. People in the thick of it pursue their own agenda as best they can. But what’s our agenda? What do we, in the cosy safety of tolerant old England, think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? Do those who blithely make these comparisons know anything whereof they speak?“

Read it all.