Denouement

And now the denouement.

Indymedia UK has decided to create a third category of posts, disputed posts.

A disputed post is one over which the collective is clearly deadlocked, with at least one editor recommending hiding and at least one editor against hiding. Going to the post instead presents a page with the following disclaimer: “Disputed Article — The UK Indymedia collective does not have consensus on the status of this article; one or more admins would like it hidden, while one or more would like it displayed normally.”

Then follows a link from which you can see — but cannot comment on — the disputed post.

How it looks.

Under the circumstances, I think that this is a good second-best solution, in that it indicates that the Indymedia UK collective has marked the anti-Semitic post out for a special sort of quarantine, rather than simply treating it as if it were as valid as any other post. If Indymedia UK continues to do the same for Atzmon’s writings, it’s not an unbearably bad outcome.

The best solution of course would be for the Indymedia movement — and the Palestinian Solidarity movement in general — to rid itself from anti-Semites of the Atzmon style altogether. But this proved impossible for such a short meeting.

Indymedia UK is to be thanked for dealing with a thankless topic, and for recognizing that their internal deadlock should not force the collective to leave a racially offensive post up unremarked upon.

A note on vocabulary

Some of the vocabulary related to this discussion isn’t completely satisfactory, but it’s not necessary to get bogged down in endless Socratic debate over dictionary definitions when it should be quite clear what I’m talking about.

The definition of “anti-Semitism” in the dictionary on my Mac — based on the Oxford Concise — is unambiguous: “noun; hostility to or prejudice against Jews.” That is the definition in its entirety; it’s also what I mean by it.

It is argued sometimes that the word is unsatisfactory because Arabic is also a Semitic language and Arabs are therefore also Semites. This is simply another way of saying that the anti-Semitic pamphleteer Wilhelm Marr, who gave the world the term in his popular anti-Jewish (but not anti-Arab) screed “Antisemitizmus” in 1877, made a stupid category error when casting about for a scientific-sounding euphemism for “Damn I hate the Jews.” I am unpersuaded that there is any serious contention about what the word “anti-Semitism” means in this regard, and note in particular that the same dictionary I mentioned above does not even have an entry for what we’re sometimes told should be the preferred circumlocution, “Judeophobia.” By excluding Arabs from the definition of “anti-Semitism” I don’t mean to imply that they too are not victims of prejudice, just that there’s another perfectly acceptable and widely accepted word for it: “Islamophobia.”

When I call anti-Semitism “racism,” I don’t mean to say that I consider the Jews a race per se, but that I consider prejudice against Jews to be so analogous to racism that the term is, if not a perfect fit, certainly not a very wrong one. One sometimes hears “Anti-Semitism isn’t really racism because the Jews are not a race” — and it has the distinct timbre of at worst a straw man and at best a largely irrelevant one.

Neither, however, is it absolutely wrong to consider the Jews *not* a race. The peculiar nature of Jewish history — survival in exile through most of recorded history — makes the usual markers of identity problematic. Jews are and are not a race; they are and are not a religion; they are and are not a cultural tradition; and so on. One can become a Jew by converting to Judaism, for example (Marilyn Monroe did), but there are also genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs highly correlated with Jews. I don’t think it’s a useful exercise to demand that anyone come down on one side of the line or the other on any of these terms, since on whichever side you choose, there are substantial reasons to chose the other side as well.

I think we all know what these terms mean with sufficient clarity to proceed without substantial confusion, and I especially don’t see absolute, chapter-and-verse agreement on these terms as a necessary precursor to discussion anti-Semitism.

Who am I?

In case you are wondering.

Because this discussion has devolved so frequently into the bitterest kind of personal attacks, I have decided to remain anonymous, in order to keep the focus where it should be: on Indymedia UK editorial policy and its current inability to keep the site free of anti-Semitism (but not other forms of racism).

I will also particularly note, since this is likely to be the accusation, that I am in no way working with or coordinating with Tony Greenstein or any other member of JAZ. Although opposition to Atzmon is loudest from JAZ, they do not (as Atzmon likes to imply) represent the totality of the opposition to his anti-Semitism. I think some of Greenstein’s arguments are good, some not so good, but that his better arguments were lost in the counterproductive noise of his frontal assault on Indymedia UK. There is more at stake here than the long interpersonal battle between the anti-Zionist Greenstein and the anti-Semite Atzmon, and it’s a important not to simply retreat to a “pox on both your houses” response to being dragged into such a long and bitter squabble.

The question it all comes down to is this: Is Indymedia UK truly an anti-racist site, or is it a place where anti-Semitism — when properly coded, of course — is welcomed? If Gilad Atzmon’s anti-Semitism is clear (and it certainly is) then he should be given no platform at Indymedia. It’s as simple as that.