By Matthias Küntzel · Friday, September 29, 2006 This is part two of Matthias Küntzel’s article “Confronting Anti-Semitism — But How?” which appears in Telos 136 (Fall 2006). Part one appeared on Thursday, and part three will appear on Saturday. Click here to purchase the full issue. The German version is available on Matthias Küntzel’s website, www.matthiaskuentzel.de
Enlightenment against Anti-Semitism
I will not be concerned in the following with the societal parameters (politics, media, culture) that more strongly shape the anti-Semitic consciousness than pedagogical endeavors can ever counteract. I also do not want to speak about those who no longer allow themselves to be educated or changed, those who have become unapproachable for enlightenment. For them, Adorno’s motto remains unchanged: “[T]he instruments of power, which really are at one’s disposal, must be applied without sentimentality, certainly not out of the need for punishment or in order to avenge oneself against these persons, but rather in order to show them that the only thing that impresses them, namely real social authority, is in the meantime, actually really against them.” And Adorno repeats, “Anti-Semitic utterances should be confronted very energetically: they must see that the one who confronts them is not afraid.” Today more than ever, these must be the criteria in schools, universities, and other educational institutions—independent of the question of whether the carriers of the anti-Semitic stereotype have a Muslim or a non-Muslim background. It is therefore absolutely right (and deserves emphasis during professional education) that, based on accepted work jurisdiction, trainees are to be let go without notice in response to anti-Semitic or racist comments.
However, here I am not concerned with those stubborn characters but rather with subjects capable of being enlightened, whom I can and want to influence through pedagogical methods. Unfortunately, it is not possible to present to this clientele recipes for success. Instead I will try to show, by means of three case studies from my field of occupation, how the confrontation of anti-Semitism at any rate does not work.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Thursday, September 28, 2006 This is part one of Matthias Küntzel’s article “Confronting Anti-Semitism — But How?” which appears in Telos 136 (Fall 2006). Parts two and three will appear on Friday and Saturday. Click here to purchase the full issue. The German version is available on Matthias Küntzel’s website, www.matthiaskuentzel.de
During my preparations for this lecture, I realized that the German Coordinating Group had already sponsored a lecture with the title “On the struggle against Anti-Semitism today” in 1962. [1] At that time they invited a more prominent speaker—a person whom I esteem and admire, Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s suggestions for combating anti-Semitism remain relevant today, a point to which I will return later. Anti-Semitism itself, however, which at that time Adorno attributed to an “excessive nationalism,” has changed its form of appearance. First of all, hostility against Jews today is directed less against the Jewish minority in Europe and more toward the Jews in Israel and the United States. Second, we find the most radical propagandists for eliminatory anti-Semitism today not in Europe but in the Islamic World.
Ahmadinejad’s Final Solution
Recently, the newly elected president of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, declared that his country wanted to “eliminate” Israel through force of arms. Since the wording of his speech was hardly noticed by the German media, I would like to quote a few of its key sentences.
The speaker marks the obliteration of Israel as a stage in a war that began long before the founding of Israel. Ahmadinejad said, “We are in the process of an historical war that has been going on for hundreds of years.” He continues, “The current war in Palestine is the forward front of the Islamic world against the world of arrogance.”Apparently the Jews are only the first targets, since the characterization of the enemy as the “world of arrogance” undoubtedly means the whole of the West. Furthermore he states that he has “no doubt that the new wave that has begun in our dear Palestine and which today we are witnessing in the Islamic world is a wave of morality that has spread all over the Islamic world. Very soon, Israel, this stain of disgrace, will be purged from the center of the Islamic world—and this is attainable.” The Iranian president places under the term “wave of morality” the repression of sensuality and sexuality, as is prevalent in his country, whereas Israel is regarded as a “blemish” because there, for example, homosexuality is not only not punishable by death, but is allowed.
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By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, September 27, 2006 Too often the descriptions of contemporary cultural conflicts draw distinctions between a European or Western “openness” and prevalent illiberalism in the Islamic world, marked by the extensive absence of liberal democracies. This observation then turns quickly into a binary discussion of “western” values in contradiction to the presumed underdevelopment of similar perspectives elsewhere. Not surprisingly, on closer scrutiny, the picture is more complex: there are plenty of reformists and democrats in Iran, Turkey or in the Arab world—and these are the dissidents to whom the western press ought to pay more attention (while western anti-imperialists regularly celebrate the most reactionary elements, because of their uncompromising rejectionism and authoritarianism). Meanwhile, the capacity for illiberalism in the heart of the West becomes more evident every day. Via a dogmatic multiculturalism, the liberal left reverts to what was once called “repressive tolerance,” ending up advocating for illiberal measures in the name of a misunderstood liberalism. This is the shape of the dialectic of enlightenment today: (self)-censorship in modern Europe, enlightened debate in Turkey.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, September 26, 2006 This Sunday’s NYT included an article in the “Week in Review” section poking fun at the term “Islamo-fascism.” The author, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, had a jolly time gloating over the trajectory of the term: ” . . . no phrase has crashed and burned as fast as the president’s most recent entry into the foreign policy lexicon.” It’s an amusing little sneer at presidential rhetoric, the implication being: he doesn’t know what to call it because it’s not really there. It must have made for a great read and lots of hoots over brunch on the Upper West Side.
Stolberg’s sniping at rhetoric demonstrates the degradation of journalism: it’s no longer about just the facts, Ma’am, it’s about the terms and the words and the rhetoric. And how journalists report on other journalists. And how the battle to separate news from opinion was lost long ago. Postmodernism has morphed into media liberalism at its most giddy. What a gas. (Of course Stolberg fails to mention that the administration probably backed off from the term due to explicitly political pressure from Islamic pressure groups in the US: Mr. PC multiculturalism goes to Washington.)
The problem is, though, that there may really be an enemy out there, as much as the NYT would like to stick its ostrich head somewhere more to its taste. The media that want to see no evil have become complicit with the evil-doers (a term, by the way, which Stolberg picks up, sniffs, and rejects). “Journalism” has dwindled into partisan battle, and since reporting on the miserable lives of those condemned to live and die under Islamo-fascist regimes would probably score no points against the current administration, that suffering is condemned to the black holes of newsprint oblivion. If it doesn’t hurt Bush, it’s just not newsworthy.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, September 25, 2006 European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso is no Islamophobe. Initially criticized for being slow to comment on the controversy around the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, he was eventually able to muster a stalwart defense of freedom of speech and the right to publish the caricatures. At the same time, he tried to keep lines of dialogue open with the Muslim world: thus a New York Times report of February 15, 2006, culminates with Barroso’s comment that “Islam is part of Europe. . . . We have a very important Islamic heritage.”
That’s fine and indicates a nicely capacious understanding of the European cultural legacy. It is in any case more than standard multiculturalism because Barroso simultaneously gave an explicitly positive and ambitious description of a specifically European culture defined against its own repressive past:
. . . the European Union’s chief executive said today that Europe had to fight for its core European values, including freedom of speech.
“We have to stick very much to these values,” said José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission. “If not, we are accepting fear in this society.”
Referring to his youth during a totalitarian regime in Portugal, Mr. Barroso, a former Portuguese prime minister, said in an interview that Europe had to defend its right to have in place a system that allowed the publication of the cartoons.
And, as if his point was to draw a line in the sand, or rather, through the Straits of Gibraltar, he reportedly added:
He said European society was based on principles that included equality of rights between men and women, freedom of speech and a clear distinction between politics and religion.
Where do they not hold?
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By Aryeh Botwinick · Saturday, September 23, 2006 A very cogent point of departure for assessing the competing nationalisms of the Israelis and the Palestinians is provided by two of the key architects of philosophical liberalism—Thomas Hobbes and David Hume. Both Hobbes and Hume emphasize that linking the legitimacy of nations to the circumstances of their origin will not bear critical scrutiny. Most nations are born in the throes of engagement in acts of violence against other people—indigenous populations, neighboring states, distant powers with imperialistic ambitions, etc. If the group seeking to establish hegemony over a certain territory emerges triumphant in its confrontation with any one of these (or similar) adversarial forces, it immediately dresses-up its successful assertion of “might” as “right,” and begins to see itself and to address others in the idiom of national self-determination. It rationalizes conquest and suppression as justice—and re-starts its history under the auspices of a transformed national identity.
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