February 11, 2006

WAR OF IDEAS: EDWARD ALEXANDER VS. JUDITH BUTLER

        Judith Butler is a superstar of academia. She is known primarily for her role in the development of ‘Queer Theory’. She has led the Post-Modern attempt to undermine the significance of the biological difference between the sexes. Butler proposes as attainable a utopian world in which gender identity—male or female—is disconnected from biology and therefore infinitely malleable. These bizarre ideas have had real world consequences. Butler and her allies are part of the leftist assault on reality—the reality of Capitalism, freedom and America as a force for good in the world. Once the basic biological bedrock is no longer determinative of who we are, anything becomes possible through proper social engineering. The unfairness of life, the existence of differences—of talent, character, looks, and accomplishment---can be abolished and egalitarian paradise achieved. Thus is the failed dream of Communism kept alive, by grafting onto Marxism a biological fantasy. Of course, reality stands in the way of utopian yearnings, and scapegoats are needed to explain the failure. It is not enough to blame “the patriarchy” or Capitalism. To really get the juices flowing, blame the Jews, Zionism and the state of Israel. Even better, have a self loathing Jew, a Chomsky or a Judith Butler do the blaming.
        We are in a war of ideas, ideas with real world consequences. Professor Edward Alexander has been a courageous warrior in the struggle to bring reason and sanity back to our universities. His scholarly efforts have exposed frauds and psychopaths, from the rock throwing Edward Said to Hillary Clinton's guru, Michael Lerner, and now he does the same with Judith Butler. Professor Alexander is the author of many scholarly books, among them, Irving Howe--Socialist, Critic, Jew (Indiana University Press, 1998) and Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition (Transaction Publishers, 2002). He has recently written on the literary friendship between Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling. Our own friendship with Professor Alexander goes back to the days in Trilling’s and F.W. Dupee’s classes when we were introduced to the great novels, now disdained as the product of mostly dead white patriarchal males. Professor Alexander has continued ever since, defending civilization from encroachments by the new intellectual barbarians. Horsefeathers strayed from the battlefield into the field of psychoanalysis, another way of trying to apply reason to the irrational, only to return these many years later to find our old friend still at the ramparts. The creed of Horsefeathers: Fighting Folly, Ignorance and Cant, is the most apt description of the following essay on Judith Butler.
--Stephen M. Rittenberg

“No, It’s Not Antisemitic”: Judith Butler Vs. Lawrence Summers
        Few contemporary literary critics have placed so much emphasis on the power of language as Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric and literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She has insisted that “Language plays an important role in shaping and attuning our common or ‘natural’ understanding of social and political realities.” Invoking Marxist thinkers, she has asserted that critics of “postmodern” style understand “only the word coined by commerce,” the “commodified” truisms of the capitalist system.
        It is against this background of Butler’s intensely political approach to language as well as her general attitude (often complained of by other feminists) that linguistic gestures are an adequate substitute for, if not actually a form of, political action, that we should examine her recent forays into the campus struggles against Israel.
        Prior to the autumn of 2003 she was, like many members of Berkeley’s “progressive” Jewish community with which she habitually identifies herself, somebody who defined her “Jewishness” (not exactly Judaism) in opposition to the State of Israel. She was mainly a signer of petitions harshly critical of the Jewish state. She was, for example, one of the 3,700 American Jews opposed to “occupation” (Israeli, not Syrian or Chinese or any other) who signed an “Open Letter” urging the American government to cut financial aid to Israel; later she expressed misgiving about signing that particular petition - it “was not nearly strong enough... it did not call for the end of Zionism.” In autumn of 2002 she requested honorary membership in the Campus Watch organization’s listing of Middle East specialists polemicizing in their classrooms on behalf of Radical Islam and against Israel and America. In June 2003 her name could be found on the ubiquitous “Stop the Wall Immediately” petition. The wall, signatories alleged, was “supposed to block ‘terrorist attacks’ but certainly won’t prevent missiles and helicopters from hitting their human target.” Suicide bombings, lynchings, pogroms, and roadside shootings were not terrorist attacks but only “terrorist attacks,” whereas Israeli response to those so-called “terrorist attacks” injured real human targets.
        But deeper currents were also stirring in Butler. She had undertaken some research into the history of Zionism and discovered that there had been “debates among Jews throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries as to whether Zionism ought to become the basis of a state.” From this she swiftly concluded that demanding an end to Zionism in 2003, that is, calling for politicide, was no different from taking a debater’s position against Zionism fifty years before the state existed.
        By August 2003 Butler was belatedly moved to a classic utterance by a speech given at Harvard a year earlier, a speech that touched in her a raw nerve of anger that not even Ariel Sharon’s attempts to keep suicide bombers from blowing up Israelis had been able to inflame. Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard’s president, delivered to the Harvard community on September 20, 2002 a speech deploring the upsurge of antisemitism in many parts of the globe: he included synagogue bombings, physical assaults on Jews, desecration of Jewish holy places, and (this with special emphasis) denial of the right of “the Jewish state to exist.” But his most immediate concern was that “at Harvard and... universities across the country” faculty-initiated petitions were calling “for the University to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university’s endowment to be invested.”
        One of the Harvard faculty, Ruth Wisse, described the divestment petition as “corrupt and cowardly” in offering its reasons for calling on the U. S. government to stop military aid and arms sales to Israel and upon universities to divest both from Israel and from American companies selling arms to Israel. “The petition,” wrote Wisse, “requires that Israel comply with certain resolutions of the UN - the terms of which it distorts to say what those resolutions do not mean”; she also pointed out that the petition says nothing of the fact that all the Arab states remain in perpetual violation of the entire UN Charter, which is based on the principle of mutual respect for the sovereignty of member states, which are to settle disputes by peaceful means.
        Butler had herself signed the same divestment petition at its place of origin, Berkeley, where it had circulated in February 2001. She therefore found Summers’ remarks not only wrong but personally “hurtful” since they implicated Judith Butler herself in the newly resurgent campus antisemitism. She could hardly have failed to notice that the Berkeley divestment petition had supplied the impetus for anti-Israel mob violence on her own campus on April 24, 2001, a few weeks after it had been circulated, and for more explicitly anti-Jewish mobs at San Francisco State University in May of the following year. Slander of Israel has provoked physical violence on many campuses, especially those (like Wayne State in Detroit or Concordia in Montreal) with a large Arab presence.
        Summers, aware of how ubiquitous in anti-Israel discourse is the straw man called “the defender of Israel who decries any criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitism,” went out of his way in his address to separate himself from this (conjectural) figure: “I have always throughout my life been put off by those who... conjured up images of Hitler’s Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel.” Nobody has ever discovered just who these conjurors might be, but if Summers thought he would separate himself from them by this disclaimer he was mistaken.
        Despite the large role played in promoting the divestment campaign by people like Noam Chomsky, Summers chivalrously went out of his way to say that “Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” To annihilate this distinction between intentional and effective antisemitism is the primary aim of Butler’s counter-attack. Her strategy is what logicians call the tu quoque (i.e., you too, or you’re another) argument: Summers’ accusations, says Butler, are “a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not intent.” His words have had “a chilling effect on political discourse.” No evidence is (or could be) adduced for the allegation. Of one thing we can be sure: the chill did not take hold at Harvard itself, which would soon (in November) play host to Oxford’s Tom Paulin, who had urged (in yet another “criticism of Israeli policy”) that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead,” or at Columbia, where Paulin continued merrily through autumn semester as a visiting professor, or at the New York Review of Books, which in October 2003 would publish Professor Tony Judt’s “Israel: The Alternative,” a call for an end to the state; neither did Summers dampen the fires of Israel-hatred at the London Review of Books itself, which in January 2003 published another 133 lines of Paulin doggerel called “On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card,” a versified rehearsal of Butler’s “No, It’s Not Anti-Semitic.” If Summers’ speech had a chilling effect on antisemitic clarion calls, including incitement to raw murder, one would not want to know what the fully heated versions would sound like.
        Butler perfunctorily assented to Summers’ recommendation that - as she artfully restated it - “every progressive person ought to challenge anti-semitism vigorously wherever it occurs,” but she seemed incapable either of recognizing it in such (to her) mild “public criticisms” as economic warfare against the Jewish state or calls for its dismantling or assaults on Zionism itself or opposing any effort Israel might make to defend her population against suicide bombers. Indeed, she made it clear that she saw no difference between Jews intentionally murdered by suicide bombers (and their sponsors and despatchers) and Arabs accidentally killed by Israeli efforts to repel would-be murderers. She presented herself as offering Jews a salutary warning against crying wolf: “if the charge of anti-semitism is used to defend Israel at all costs, then its power when used against those who do discriminate against Jews - who do violence to synagogues in Europe [synagogues and Passover seders in Israel are not mentioned], wave Nazi flags or support anti-semitic organizations - is radically diluted.”
        In trying to confute Summers’ distinction between intentional and effective antisemitism, Butler calls it wildly improbable that somebody examining the disinvestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had done), as condoning antisemitism. She therefore poses this conundrum: “We are asked to conjure a listener who attributes an intention to the speaker: so-and-so has made a public statement against the Israeli occupation, and this must mean that so-and-so hates Jews or is willing to fuel those who do.” But Summers was perfectly correct in stating that one need not “hate Jews” in order to perform actions or utter words that are “antisemitic in their effect if not their intent.”
        Let us take a well-known case: when Dickens wrote Oliver Twist he harbored no hatred of Jews and had no programmatic or conscious intention to harm them. Indeed, he said of his character Fagin that “he’s such an out and outer I don’t know what to make of him.” The reason for Dickens’ puzzlement was that, in an important sense, he did not indeed “make” Fagin, and therefore didn’t know what to make of him. Fagin was ready-made for Dickens by the collective folklore of Christendom, which had for centuries fixed the Jew in the role of Christ-killer, surrogate of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence, corrupter of the young; to which list of attributes Butler and her friends would now add “Zionist imperialist and occupier.” Has Oliver Twist been antisemitic in its effect? Of course - or does Butler think that it is for their interest in Bill Sikes and Nancy and the plight of the homeless in early Victorian England that Arab publishers have long kept cheap paperback translations of the book in print?
        Butler also uses the tu quoque “argument” in rebutting the charge of selectivity that Summers had made. Why, among all the nations on earth, has Israel alone been singled out for punishment and pariah status by the advocates of disinvestment and academic boycott? Where was their advocacy of disinvestment in China until China withdraws from Tibet, or from Morocco until that country ceases to occupy Western Sahara, or from Zimbabwe until it ceases persecuting its white citizens, or from Egypt until it stops building tunnels for the smuggling of arms to Palestinian killers? Could the singling out of Israel possibly have anything to do with the fact that it is a Jewish country? Despite the inordinate length of her essay, Butler cannot find space to answer this question. Instead, she accuses Summers himself of biased selectivity. “If we say that the case of Israel is different, that any criticism of it is considered as an attack on Israelis, or Jews in general, then we have singled out this political allegiance from all other allegiances that are open to public debate. We have engaged in the most outrageous form of ‘effective’ censorship...”
        Her ultimate use of the tu quoque strategy is to make Summers, the critic of antisemitism, himself guilty of what he attacks. Why? Because he assumes that Jews can only be victims, conflates “Jews” with Israel, and writes as if all Jews were a single, undifferentiated group.
        Apparently the 1,135 Israelis murdered and the nearly 10,000 mutilated (in a Jewish population of under five million) by Arab terrorists between September 27, 2000 and the time Butler published her essay were not sufficient to meet her stringent requirements for (Jewish) victim status. But if Israelis are not the victims of Palestinian aggression in the latest round of the Arab nations’ 56-year old war to eradicate the Jewish state, why is it that Jewish schools in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem must be protected by armed guards while Arab schools in Nazareth or Ramallah require no such safeguards? Why is it that getting on a bus in Jerusalem or going to a cafe in Haifa is a form of Russian roulette, a far more dangerous activity than prancing about as a “human shield” for Yasser Arafat?
        As for the argument that nothing is antisemitic which does not explicitly target every single Jew in the world, it is jejune. After all, insists Butler, not all Jews are committed to Israel: “Some Jews have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches.” But does she really think that when Josef Pfefferkorn, whose distinction between “good” and “bad” Jews became the paradigm for Jewish self-haters, urged his countrymen (in the 1520s) to “drive the old Jews out [of Germany]” he had himself in mind? When Karl Marx excoriated Jews as “the filthiest of all races,” did he really mean to include himself? Do the operators of Nazi websites have trouble making “exceptions” for the writings of Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein? Indeed, Butler’s requirement of total inclusiveness would have allowed Hitler himself to say (had he so wished) of his racial policy: “No, it’s not antisemitic.”
        Although Butler’s essay is a loose, baggy monster, what it leaves out is even more blatant than what it includes. It omits history altogether, torturing a text and omitting context. Did it never occur to Butler that the divestment effort is the latest installment of the 50-year old Arab economic boycott of Israel, one prong in the endless Arab campaign to destroy the Jewish state? Equally egregious is the omission of context that is de rigueur among all those who have made the “Palestinian cause” the touchstone of campus progressivism. The “occupation” which they constantly bemoan did not precede and cause Arab hatred and violence; it was Arab hatred and violence that led - in 1967 as in 1993 - to the occupation.
        But the crucial omission from this essay by somebody who has relentlessly insisted on the political implications of language is - the political implications of the language of the advocates of divestment. Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly Der Zeit, has succinctly defined the linguistic difference between “criticism of Israeli policy” and antisemitism:
Take this statement: “Demolishing the houses of the families of terrorists is morally wrong because it imputes guilt by association, and politically wrong because it pushes more people into the arms of Hamas.” Such a statement is neither anti-Israel nor anti-Semitic; it might even be correct. By contrast, “the Israelis are latter-day Nazis who want to drive the Palestinians from their land in order to realize an imperialist biblical dream” inhabits a very different order of discourse, ascribing evil to an entire collective and, in its equation of Israelis and Nazis, revealing an obsessive need for moral denigration."
        The Harvard/MIT divestment petition that Butler champions against Summers was promoted at MIT by Noam Chomsky, a person who would be rendered almost speechless on the subject of Israel if deprived of the epithet “Nazi”; it was promoted at Harvard by Professor Paul Hanson, who called Israel the “pariah” state. Butler was herself one of the “first signatories” of a July 28, 2003 petition that uses the Israeli-Nazi equation beloved of nearly all denigrators of the Zionist enterprise (going back to British official circles in Cairo in 1941) in asserting that “concrete, barbed wire and electronic fortifications whose precedents... belong to the totalitarian tradition” were transforming the Israel “‘defense forces’” (again the rhetorical quotation marks) and indeed “Israeli citizens themselves into a people of camp wardens.”
        And so it would seem that, for Butler, “Language plays an important role in shaping and attuning our... understanding of social and political realities” except when it happens to be the antisemitic language that demonizes Israel as the Devil’s own experiment station.
---Edward Alexander