Rosenberg vs the man with a gun

Primo Levi once said:

When a man with a gun says he's going to kill you, believe him.

Well, MJ Ronsenberg doesn't. Believe, that is. On the contrary, in his recent article in the Huffington Post, he's trying to convince the rest of the world not to believe these words, using a rather unorthodox mix of arguments.

Of course, true to his own obsessions, he begins by attacking AIPAC over something that they didn't do:

The drums of war with Iran will be beating loudly in the three months leading up to AIPAC's policy conference early next March.

I almost expected to spot a picture of Michael J. Fox, maybe a short video clip with a promo for the next generation of "Back to the future" movies.

Rosenberg then goes on to his next favorite target:

As I noted in a column a few weeks ago, the Iran war claque is comprised almost entirely of neoconservatives/right-wing "pro-Israel" activists and opinion leaders (from AIPAC and its associated organizations) joined by politicians seeking campaign contributions.
For a politician, being an Iran hawk can be very lucrative while favoring diplomacy is a sure ticket to AIPAC purgatory.

Because, you know, this is all about groveling to the right-wing Jewish lobby. It has nothing to do whatsoever with Iran celebrating a "Death to America Day". It's class warfare. Iran is nothing but the providential instrument fate provided to show us all the light at the far-left, AIPAC-free end of the tunnel. An aside thought: isn't "favoring diplomacy" what recently brought an attack on the British embassy in Tehran?

And again this very tired argument about Netanyahu and his right-wing government bringing disaster upon Israel:

Every major Israeli city is within range of Hezbollah's missiles and it has tens of thousands of them. How many innocent Israelis would die in a missile onslaught produced by Netanyahu and Barak's obsession with maintaining Israeli hegemony? How many is it worth?

May I respectfully remind Mr. Rosenberg that the last missile onslaught with Hezbollah's signature on it has occurred  not so long ago during the reign of the left-wing government led by Olmert?

As if making the Iranian problem a left-wing versus right-wing issue wasn't surrealistic enough, Rosenberg goes on to throw the rest of the blame on...well, Jews. He links to a post by Gary Kamiya on Salon with the not so subtle title The boys who cried "Holocaust".

The Holocaust mind-set has led Israel into self-destructive policies. And its promiscuous invocation has helped ensure that Israel maintains a stranglehold over America’s Mideast policy. That stranglehold has always been harmful to America, but it is now actually dangerous.

If one wishes to follow this line of thought (though I can't imagine why), one is bound to come to the conclusion that the real threat is not Iran's aggressive pursuit of nuclear weapons or long range missiles. Nope. It's Jews' will to live, you see, that threatens innocent Americans. Kamiya completely ignores the simple fact that the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust is flourishing in the Muslim world maybe even more than in nazi Germany then. Wouldn't the same cause be likely to produce the same results?

But the brightest gem is yet to come:

I have been reading Israel’s best newspaper, Ha’aretz, for more than 10 years, and I have never seen a possible war with Iran taken so seriously by its journalists.

Right. More than ten years of Ha'aretz might be too much even for the best of us.

Journalists like Rosenberg and Kamiya are in fact using the Iranian issue as choice weapon in their petty quarrels, while Iran is building an arsenal of real weapons. I'm not an apologist for a war with Iran - for any war actually, I leave that to politicians - but burying one's head in ideological sand isn't going to make the problem go away, is it?

In light of the widespread controversy on this subject, it would be fair to ask Iranians what do they think of their country being attacked by western powers:

Even though we have been wronged by the West, as with the CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, we have gotten over our grudge, especially after 30 years of indigenous rule have shown that sometimes homegrown tyranny is worse than "imported influence."

To understand the new generation of Iranians and this new sentiment toward the West, one must shed the grammar of the traditional left, something that many of us who eagerly took part in the 1979 Revolution find hard. But post-Islamist Iranians no longer see the West or Americans as their enemies. Having had anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism shoved down their throats, they have come to love Israel and the United States.

Not quite what the likes of Rosenberg and Kamiya would have expected, I reckon. Unlike them, I believe the man with the gun when he says he wants to kill me:

"As a Jew" explained

The term “asaJew” is a marker of identity politics. It says that I, the speaker, have some special authority to say what I’m going to say because of my identity. Usually identity politics is adopted by people who claim to speak for their collectivity. The “asaJew” says that non-Jews should pay special attention because they are raising an issue which is more easily seen from a Jewish point of view. So an “asa Jew” might say that Jews are able to sense or sniff antisemitism when a non-Jew might have been unaware. Jews might be sensitive to certain attitudes, figures of speech, images, to which a non-Jew might not be.

Jewish anti-Zionists give their identity politics a strange twist. Instead of claiming to represent the opinion of most of their fellow Jews, they mobilize their identity “asaJew” in order to give their oppositional view more legitimacy. They are saying to non-Jews that this or that might seem to them as though it was Antisemitic, but I, the Jew, am happy to reassure you that it isn’t.

But if the thing which the anti-Zionist asa Jew is trying to inoculate against is a thing which most Jews do find troublesome, then they employ another little twist. They claim that their Jewish identity is authentic in some way that most Jews’ identities are inauthentic. So the anti-Zionist "asaJew" may be in a tiny minority but she is claiming that she, nevertheless, is the real Jew. The ethical Jew. The critical Jew. The anti-nationalist Jew. The courageous Jew. The far-sighted Jew. And the other Jews, the herd, are actually not such real Jews; their Jewishness has been subverted by Zionism and Islamophobia and a secular unconcern with Jewish ethics.

There are two possible critiques of the “asaJew” rhetoric. One is the critique of identity politics in general, which says that you should just say what you think to be true, you should present evidence and argument, and hope that people listening will be persuaded by that – those who do this prefer to leave the claims to particular identity-based authority behind.

The other possibility is that somebody might accept that Jews in general, or Jewish communal bodies, for example, might speak with some added legitimacy. This might come from either their particular standpoint or from their claims to represent the collective. So you might think that these ways of speaking “asaJew” are more legitimate than that of the anti-Zionist Jew.

The anti-zionist Jew says “asaJew” in order to turn opinion against the majority of her fellow Jews. She wants to say that because she doesn't find something to be antisemitic, for example, and she is a Jew, and she speaks as a Jew, then they should accept that it isn't antisemitic. Because if a Jew says something isn't antisemitic then it can’t be. Right?

This is a guest post by SlingshotKiller.