Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, y'all, on the line, I got Sheldon Richman, my partner at the Libertarian Institute.
And every Friday, he writes, TGIF, the goal is freedom.
And today's column, I got a lot of tabs open here.
Today's column is called Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism, the invidious conflation.
Wow, what a cool new vocabulary word I learned today.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, Sheldon?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Always good to be with you.
Yes, I'm hoping I contributed a phrase to the culture of the English language.
I think it's badly needed.
People have said the same thing in slightly different ways, but I'm hoping if that's a catch, ends up as a catchphrase, good.
Alright, well, so explain it, Mr. Phrase Coiner.
Well, the conflation is helping people to think and doing everything you can to help them think that criticism of Israel, both its founding and its continuing injustice against the Palestinians, is, you know, in essence, anti-Semitic.
And there's no separation of the two.
That's a conflation.
A conflation is sort of like a melting together, a melding together.
It doesn't mean the same thing as confusion.
I think the people who promote this conflation know exactly what they're doing, but they do create a confusion.
So it's invidious because it does harm.
It will generate resentment and other bad results.
And that's the intention.
The bad results are supposed to be bad feelings toward critics of Israel, because they've left the impression that anybody who criticizes Israel is really anti-Jew, meaning anti-Jewish individual, and also anti-Jewish and anti-Judaism and all those related things.
In other words, if you criticize Israel, you're criticizing the whole kit and caboodle.
And I and many other people, including you, are working to keep those separate because they deserve to be separate, which is what I've been writing about in recent weeks.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, and again, it's the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act now before Congress.
And explain again what this would do.
Yeah, and it's a follow up to that article.
You can see it as part two.
I could have put this all in the first one, but that would have made it very long.
Well, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, ASAA it's been called, is a bill that was introduced to the House and Senate in May by Republicans.
And although it has Democratic backing in both houses, and it's currently in the committee, still not quite sure why it's been in committee since May, because maybe other things have been taking precedent or they're just disorganized or whatever, or they have First Amendment concerns.
Anyway, this bill would sort of put flesh on the bones of a Department of Education policy that says discrimination that looks like religious discrimination on its face, but it actually ends up being discrimination against, you know, people of a certain ethnic group or race or national origin or something like that.
In other words, it's not only religion, but it's also rooted in one of those things I just named.
That sort of discrimination violates, on college campuses now, because it's the Department of Education that generated this, on campuses and schools and, you know, just educational programs, that sort of discrimination violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Article 6.
Article 6 doesn't mention religion.
It mentions race and ethnicity, national origin, stuff like that.
So this is a way of getting religion into it without, by saying, well, it's not really religion in a lot of cases, it's actually discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity.
So that's fine.
I mean, I won't say it's fine.
It did that, but it didn't get very specific.
So then Congress came along, they actually tried to do this in 2016 under, well, it was still Obama, because the same bill was introduced, essentially.
And that said, well, we need to help out the DOE, we need to flesh out the DOE, because they didn't say very much.
And so we proposed to adopt a, what they call a definition, and I'll say something more about that, it's not strictly a definition, a definition of anti-Semitism that has been promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which is a worldwide group that includes 31 countries, including the United States.
This was a, okay, so this so-called definition is not really just a definition, it's what they call a definition, although it's extremely vague and unhelpful, plus 11 potential, and I stress this word, potential examples of anti-Semitism.
So it's not just a definition.
They call the 38 words of it a definition, and then they give 11 what they call examples that may be manifestations.
Even they say maybe.
In other words, they don't have to be.
But 7 of the 11 are about Israel, not about hating Jews, you know, for whatever stereotype reason people have for disliking Jews.
So it goes beyond that, and 7 of 11 are about criticizing Israel.
So this, by implication, is adopted in the bill.
All that language is not in the bill, but it embraces a State Department fact sheet from also 2016, the end of the Obama administration, which openly embraces, with some modification, the IHRA definition and examples.
So what I try to show in this article is that if this gets passed, it would be enforced by the Office of Civil Rights of the Education Department.
And Trump's head of that has a very bad record from the private sector, plus he was in the Bush administration at the same office and also at the Civil Rights Commission, of pushing, of going after anti-Israel statements and activities on campuses, college campuses, on the grounds that they're anti-Semitic and they therefore create a hostile atmosphere for Jewish students and therefore violate the Civil Rights Act.
I should say one more thing.
The reason it didn't get passed in 2016, it was passed unanimously in the Senate, but it never got out of committee in the House.
And the reason is there was a huge amount of objection to it, including by the author of this definition plus examples, who said it would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and free inquiry on the campuses.
He said, do not adopt this.
I never intended it for that purpose.
So that's why it didn't get out of the House in 2016.
Maybe that's what's holding it up because the ACLU is against it.
Maybe that's what's holding it up today in the two committees of the Congress.
Who's Kenneth L. Marcus?
Kenneth Marcus is Donald Trump's assistant secretary of education for civil rights.
So he would be running this OCR, Office of Civil Rights, in the DOE.
And he worked in that, actually had, I guess he was sort of like an acting director.
He had authority under the Bush administration, but he didn't have the title in the same office.
He used to run, I believe he's also the founder of what is known as the, I guess it still exists, the Brandeis Center, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.
And a hasten to that, it's not affiliated with Brandeis University, I want that made clear.
And when he was running that, he brought actions very frequently against, he filed complaints with the OCR, the Office of Civil Rights, against universities for permitting what he said was a hostile atmosphere to Jewish students.
And in the cases he brought, they were things like showing a movie, a documentary about the bad treatment of Palestinians or having a pro-Palestinian speaker.
It was all stuff like that.
It wasn't like someone was painting swastikas on dorm rooms or doors or beating up Jewish students.
It wasn't that sort of thing.
It was basically speech and inquiry, the kind of things that are supposed to go on on campuses.
That's Kenneth L. Marcus.
All right.
Now, so obviously you're not motivated by anti-Semitism, but there's sort of this companion argument for people who are interested in criticizing Israeli policy, besides that you must be an anti-Semite.
That's the only motive you could possibly have for criticizing Israel.
And that is that, okay, well, maybe you're not, but you're helping those who are, because those who are really anti-Semitic, they like to criticize Israel too.
And they might cite someone like you coming up with critical things to say.
So what about that?
Well, okay.
I guess I could make, what is it, three points about this.
Number one, the people like that are not terribly influential anyway, because anti-Semitism really is confined to the fringes of U.S. society.
Bad, ill feeling toward Jews when they poll this, like Pew and Gallup and all that.
Always find that it's a very small number, and it's not been growing.
So there's not some growth in anti-Semitism.
So those people, I don't believe, would have very much influence.
Number two, they don't need my help.
They're perfectly capable, and they do read history and read the news and observe what goes on.
So they don't need my help.
To my knowledge, my name isn't ever cited.
I'm glad about that.
And number three, even if it were true, I'd feel very bad about that.
I certainly don't want to contribute to somebody like David Duke or people like that.
I think they're terrible people.
But if the point is that therefore I should not be writing and saying these things, my question back to that person would be, so are you saying that I should sacrifice the value of universal justice, which is supposed to be a Jewish value, universal justice, and sacrifice the Palestinians who suffer every day?
To that consideration, that just makes no sense to me.
As a moral agent, I can't see sacrificing the Palestinians because some bad person may take my words, even attach my name, and use them for that person's bad purposes.
That makes zero sense to me.
How could I look a Palestinian in the face and say, I'm not going to say anything about the monstrous treatment you and your kinsmen face because I don't want to give any help to anti-Semites.
I couldn't say something like that to someone, and I can't believe anybody would ever ask me to do that.
Yeah.
Well, you really hit on the key there that we're not talking about poor little Israel, nice little Israel, just minding its own business and trying to be a nice guy and constantly picked on by all of its neighbors for, again, this giant begged question of Israeli innocence.
It couldn't be anything that they did or are doing that has anyone oppose them at all.
Not that virtually all their neighbors aren't compliant at this point anyway.
Well, right.
What I'd say back to the person who accuses me of giving even comfort to anti-Semites, hey, you want to stop giving even comfort to anti-Semites?
Tell Israel to cut it out.
Start treating all people justly and stop conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Israelism, which is a term, by the way, out of the Brandeis Center.
They use the term anti-Israelism.
Is that different than anti-Zionism?
I think they mean that.
Just any criticism of Israel, sure, which constitute a criticism of Zionism.
I guess there are a lot of definitions of Zionism, so that can get complicated.
But that's my answer.
You're the one giving aid and comfort.
Stop it.
And also tell Israel to not declare that it's the state of every Jew everywhere in the world, regardless of where he was born, regardless of where he's today living, and regardless of where he intends to live in the future.
Stop saying you represent that person.
Then you'll take a lot of ammunition away from anti-Semites.
You're the ones, not you, Scott, but you, the person I'm speaking to here, are the ones who tell the world that Zionism is Judaism and Judaism is Zionism.
So you're giving aid and comfort to the David Dukes of the world.
Cut it out, I'd say.
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Well, and so back to the point here about who's really being targeted here is Palestinian students.
They're the ones most interested in supporting BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, and supporting these campaigns to highlight the Palestinians' plight.
And they're the ones who are being targeted.
They're to be run off a campus in the name of hurting the feelings of Jewish students who themselves have been propagandized, that no one would ever criticize Israel unless it was because they woke up in the morning just hating Jews, because that's how they are.
That's right.
And Kenneth Stern, to be distinguished from Kenneth Marcus, Kenneth Stern was the lead author of the IHRA notion.
I say notion because here I'm combining the definition plus the examples.
He wrote that or certainly was the leader of the team.
He says, if that is a quote from a letter he wrote to the house in 2016, if the definition is so enshrined, it will actually harm Jewish students and have a toxic effect on the academy.
It will.
It will.
Why do you want students thinking, oh my God, or professors, oh my gosh, we can't even talk about the sort of the Nakba, the catastrophe that befell the Palestinians, the ethnic cleansing in 1948, because the Jewish students are so sensitive.
If we even say that, which is factually based, if we even say that, you know, they're going to be traumatized.
We can't even do that.
How does that create goodwill towards Jewish students?
And as Stern notes, it will be harmful to students, to Jewish students, as well as harmful to the whole academic community, because it will chill open discussion, which is what the academy is supposed to be about.
It doesn't always live up to it, but that's what it's supposed to be about.
Yeah.
Well, and it's funny too, because I like the way the dynamics play out here where, you know, the side of social justice and political correctness and all that really is on the side of the Palestinians.
And so you actually have a lot of young Jewish students who are on their side and supporting BDS and that kind of thing.
And you have, you know, the right wing coming in here and saying, you know, this is our safe space.
You can't talk about this stuff around us and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
And the hypocrisy here is that on almost every other issue, those same people that you just mentioned, or, you know, when the left seems to be interfering with free speech and at times they have on campus, then they're screaming all over the place.
What about free speech?
Come on.
Why can't we bring Charles Murray onto our campus without protest or without interruption?
Why can't we bring Milo, whatever the hell his name is, on campus?
There's no limit for free speech, except on this one thing.
The fact is that the people who seem to hate, who say they hate political correctness so much, the original political correctness was this, you can't criticize Israel.
I mean, I'm talking going back to the 50s.
You can't criticize Israel because it's anti-Semitic.
That was the original political correctness.
And the right seems to have no problem with that form of political correctness.
And by the way, you know, it's not only Marcus and this center, this Brandeis Center, which is guilty of this stuff.
We have the Canary Mission, which is up till now has been an anonymous website that goes after and smears professors.
And then we have, it's less anonymous now because there have been revelations through undercover journalism about who funds it and all that.
I have a link in my article.
But David Horwitz has a thing called the Freedom Center, gosh, of all names, which he calls a school of political warfare, which has a project that, again, smears professors and Palestinian students.
We also have, I guess that's, we have a bunch of assorted individuals.
The person I singled out is Barry Weiss.
Barry Weiss is now a New York Times writer and editor who, by the way, won Reason's Bastia Prize for devotion to free speech.
And she was writing articles against, you know, the left squelching free speech.
But if you look at her career as a Columbia University student, not that long ago, she was doing the very same thing against pro-Palestinian and actually professors who were Palestinian or of Palestinian descent going after them for creating a hostile atmosphere.
She did this at Columbia, at Barnard College and a few other places where they tried to stop people from getting tenure because they were sympathetic to the Palestinians and were Palestinian themselves in some cases.
So the hypocrisy just, you know, stinks to high heaven.
Yep.
All right.
Now, so about this invidious conflation, you and I talk about this virtually every week now, and you've been writing this great series of articles here for the Libertarian Institute, and then they're republished by Mondo Weiss and Antiwar.com and Counterpunch and all over the place, which is very nice and good.
But so, and, you know, I guess it's come up in at least one or more of these conversations that you were raised Jewish, and you're an atheist now.
So you don't identify as Jewish anymore, because you refuse to accept that it's any kind of ethnicity.
But instead, it's a set of religious beliefs that you don't share.
So there's that.
But obviously, you know, that's just goes to show how not anti-Semitic you are.
So if you have this obsession, and people have accepted it as severely as you and I both know that they have, then what explains your, perhaps, you know, quote, obsession with this issue?
Why do you care about it so much if it isn't that you're an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew, or something like that, Sheldon?
Well, I actually addressed this.
We talked about this once a few, just a few weeks ago in an article called Why Palestine Matters.
So if people want a little more detail, they can, they can find it there.
Yeah, I want the elevator speech or the in the in a nutshell here, because we're almost out of time.
I'm interested in it, at the personal level, because I was once a defender of Israel.
I started writing critical things in the late 80s.
So I've been at this for a while, but up till then, and I'm old enough to have been an adult before the late 80s.
So I, you know, I was, I was still writing and I was writing back then and active.
I was, even even as an atheist, I was entirely sympathetic to Israel.
It was before, but I'll say it was before I looked into the facts.
I mean, I will say that openly.
I was speaking a lot of like a lot of people do.
I was speaking prematurely.
So that's one reason it matters to me.
It matters to me personally.
It matters for other reasons, too.
The Middle East has long been regarded as a potential flashpoint for a very wide war that goes beyond the region because of the US wanting to have, you know, basically a monopoly on the oil and concerns about Russia, I don't believe justified, but concerned about Russia, now concerned about Iran in recent years.
And so there, so there's that reason.
And I just care about justice.
And I don't like that this group, this group, the Palestinians have been kind of erased.
It's changed a little bit recently, but for the longest time, you never, Americans never learned anything about Palestinians.
They never saw a Palestinian.
They rarely saw a spokesperson for the Palestinians.
And so they had, and all they heard was basically sympathetic stuff to Israel.
Even when there was criticism, it was extremely mild, you know, and that's true today when Israel, you know, basically turns Gaza into rubble, which is an essentially defenseless population that's penned in, in what Jewish Israelis have called, or not just Israelis, but Jewish writers have called a ghetto or a concentration camp.
Those aren't my words, but I accept them.
When Israel has, in a sense, leveled Gaza, which has 2 million people, you know, more densely populated than Tokyo, and killed many, many people, and half the population is under 18, kills many, many people, and then it gets, the worst criticism is the force was disproportional.
Or they say things like the defenders of Israel, of all religions and non-religions, say, look, Israel has the right of self-defense.
I totally agree.
But this force was disproportional.
That's very mild, if you think about it.
First of all, what do you mean you have the right of self-defense against the group that you've penned up, and that you, that Israel controls, you know, land, sea, and air access to?
In other words, they live completely at the mercy of Israel, the residents of Gaza.
So what does it mean you have a right of self-defense against them?
They have no means of offensive force.
Yeah, some of the groups there, the more extreme groups, which of course are encouraged by Israel's policies, have what are called rockets, but are really, as Norman Filchstein likes to say, basically glorified fireworks.
They are not really capable of doing very much damage.
So that's what they have a right to defend against.
So just to call it, to damn it as a disproportional force is really a way to say, look, Israel's basically on the side of the angels.
Maybe they just went a little too far here.
And I don't buy that.
Yeah.
Well, good.
I think you set a really great example.
You do great work, all these articles that you've written and all these great interviews that you've done.
And I know, as you said, going back generations here, a lot longer than this latest series for the Libertarian Institute.
But it is really good stuff.
And it is important for all those reasons that you say and more.
And so, yeah, that's good.
And I think a lot of people have said to me that these interviews and your articles have really meant a lot to them and that they've learned a lot and changed a lot of minds already on this kind of thing.
So I really like that.
And I'm sorry that I got to go, but I got to interview this guy about Yemen.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks very much, Sheldon.
Great stuff.
All right.
Talk to you soon.
Okay.
All right, you guys, that's Sheldon Richman.
He is, of course, Executive Editor, Managing Editor, Executive Editor, some kind of editor.
He's my partner at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
And it's called Anti-Israelism and Anti-Semitism, the invidious conflation, TGIF.
And you'll be able to find it also on antiwar.com next week, too.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
