The Volokh Conspiracy

Rush Limbaugh made comments on his radio show (scroll down–if you find this post of great interest, you should probably read the whole three-paragraph monologue, which makes the relevant context abundantly clear) suggesting that Pres. Obama may be subtly appealing to anti-Semitism through his attack on “bankers” and “Wall Street,” and that Jewish voters, in return, may be abandoning Obama.

Abe Foxman and the ADL then issued a press release:

Limbaugh told his listeners: “To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting?  He’s assaulting bankers.  He’s assaulting money people.  And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.”

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement:

Rush Limbaugh reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote.

Limbaugh’s references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate.  While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans.  His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

When he comes to understand why his words were so offensive and unacceptable, Limbaugh should apologize.

Now compare the bolded “quotation” from Limbaugh’s show with what he actually said:

Look, folks, there are a lot of people who when you say “banker,” people think “Jewish.”  People who have prejudice is the best way to put it. They have a little prejudice about them. So for some people, “banker” is code word for “Jewish,” and guess who Obama’s assaulting?  He’s assaulting bankers.  He’s assaulting money people, and a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish.  So I wonder if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.

Note that that the ADL press release intentionally cut off the italicized material above in which Limbaugh made it clear that prejudiced people associated “bankers” with Jews.

I find Limbaugh’s comments, even with the full context, to be foolish: I don’t think there is any evidence–and Limbaugh provides none–that Jews even perceive Obama to be appealing to anti-Semitism, nor that Jews in particular are, as Limbaugh suggests, abandoning Obama at a rate greater than other voters.  Charitably, Limbaugh’s remarks were a lame attempt to find a topical reason to plug Norman Podhoretz’s book, Why are Jews Liberals?

But the fact that Limbaugh made a foolish comment unsupported by any evidence hardly makes his comment “borderline anti-Semitic.”  How, exactly, is attacking the other side for allegedly appealing to people’s anti-Jewish prejudices anti-Semitic?

I’d like to give the ADL and Foxman the benefit of the doubt here, but the fact that their press release cuts off the relevant two lines about prejudice argues strongly against it. [I also don't see anything in Limbaugh's remarks that would support Foxman's claim that his is propounding the "notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans," beyond the obvious (and I assume uncontroversial) point that Jews are less likely to vote for someone that they perceive as exploiting prejudices against them.]

Fact is, while leftist types go on and on about the “right-wing” ADL, the core donor base of the ADL is Jewish liberals, and Foxman and company need to go after a conservative or two every once in a while, sometimes with the flimsiest of reasons, to keep their donors happy.

Unfortunately, and perhaps not surprisingly, the same left-wing bloggers (e.g.; and note the irony that this blogger accuses Limbaugh of being an anti-Semite, yet his blogging seems to attract a fair number of blatantly anti-Semitic commenters) who like to call Foxman out when they think he’s being too harsh on critics of Israel are perfectly willing to back him up on this one.  How many of them actually bothered to take the approximately 45 seconds I needed to look up the full transcript of Limbaugh’s remarks (none seem to quote the “prejudiced” lines), I don’t know, but the line between reckless slander and intentional slander isn’t that fine.

Podhoretz, meanwhile, responds here.

An especially pernicious common fallacy is the assumption that if a given group is overrepresented in some field, that must mean that they dominate it, and are using their supposed “domination” to promote the group’s interests. My better half quotes this example described by historian Paul Johnson in his book Modern Times:

Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia [of the Nazis about Jews] was the belief that Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed, was not the entire regime a Judenrepublik? There was very little basis for this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories that Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist network.

In the 1920s, Jews were indeed overrepresented (relative to their percentage of the general population) among both Bolshevik leaders and international capitalists. At the same time, non-Jews still greatly outnumbered Jews in both groups. A closely related fallacy was the assumption that overrepresentation in a field proved that the Jews involved in it were using it to promote some specifically Jewish interest. In reality, Jewish capitalists tended to behave much like gentile ones, focusing primarily on maximizing their profits. Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky were brutal totalitarians. But their gentile counterparts, such as Lenin and Stalin, were much the same. There was no real evidence that either Jewish capitalists or Jewish communists were promoting specifically Jewish interests in any systematic way. Indeed, Jewish communists in the USSR actually supported the regime’s suppression of Jewish culture and religion.

At this point, readers may be tempted to say that the crude errors of 1920s anti-Semites don’t have any relevance to us. After all, we are a lot smarter and more sophisticated than they were. Perhaps so. But similar fallacies in modern discourse aren’t hard to find, and are certainly not limited to a few anti-Semitic extremists. For example, some 25% of American gentiles believe that “the Jews” deserved at least “a moderate amount” of “blame” for the financial crisis. This view is likely based in large part on extrapolation from the overrepresentation of Jews among prominent bankers and financiers.

Similarly, as co-blogger David Bernstein points out, many people (including prominent scholars such as Mearsheimer and Walt), believe that neoconservatism is a Jewish movement that promotes specifically Jewish interests. As David explained, this belief is primarily based on fallacious deductions from the overrepresentation of Jews among neocon intellectuals. He correctly emphasizes that it ignores key facts: that the views of Jewish neoconservatives differ little from those of gentile ones, that neocon hawkishness on the Arab-Israeli conflict is just one facet of their hawkishness on other foreign policy issues unrelated to Israel (and therefore not likely to to be a specifically Jewish agenda), and that the overrepresentation of Jews among neocons is similar to that in many other intellectual movements (including plenty that were opposed to neoconservatism on most issues). As in Weimar Germany and early 20th century Russia, Jews tend to be overrepresented in numerous intellectual movements because a higher percentage of Jews than gentiles are intellectuals. It’s hard to find a major intellectual movement of the last 100 years where Jews were not overrepresented relative to their percentage of the general population, with the obvious exception of movements that were anti-Semitic or centered around a non-Jewish religion such as Catholicism. For similar reasons, Jews tend to be overrepresented in many occupations that require higher education and intellectual skills, which helps explain why they were and are overrepresented among finance capitalists.

In sum, the fact that Jews are overrepresented in a given field does not prove either that they dominate it or that they are using their supposed domination to advance specifically Jewish interests. No doubt, one can find similar examples involving groups other than Jews. The more general lesson is that such logical fallacies are not limited to Nazis and other long-discredited extremists, and that we should take more care to avoid them.

Here’s the way the New York Times describes an ongoing controversy over whether the Berkeley Daily Planet is obsessively anti-Israel and perhaps anti-Semitic:

For the last six years, The Berkeley Daily Planet has published a freewheeling assortment of submissions from readers, who offer sharp-elbowed views on everything from raucous college parties (generally bad) to the war in Iraq (ditto).

But since March, that running commentary has been under attack by a small but vociferous group of critics who accuse the paper’s editor, Becky O’Malley, of publishing too many letters and other commentary pieces critical of Israel. Those accusations are the basis of a campaign to drive away the paper’s advertisers and a Web site that strongly suggests The Planet and its editor are anti-Semitic….

Still, she says she has no intention of stopping the publication of submitted letters, citing a commitment to free speech that is a legacy of the city where the Free Speech Movement was born in the 1960s….

Ms. O’Malley denies any personal or editorial bias, and bristles at the suggestion that she should not publish letters about Israel ….

“I have the old-fashioned basic liberal thing of believing that the remedy for speech you don’t like is more speech,” said Ms. O’Malley….

The paper has published unpopular opinions on other subjects, including a commentary from a local activist arguing that the murder of four Oakland police officers — none of whom were black — by an African-American parolee in March was “karmic justice” for past police killings of civilians. But such pieces are in a section of the paper that clearly states they “do not necessarily reflect the views of the Daily Planet.”

I’ve never heard of the Daily Planet, much less the relevant controversy, but the Times’ piece seemed so one-sidedly favorable to the Planet and its editor that it prompted me to look at John Gertz’s dpwatchdog.com (referenced in the article) to see what the fuss was about.  The site is somewhat rambling and unprofessional, and unfortunately does not generally link to the full text of the op-eds, editorials, and letters it quotes from.

Nevertheless, if the Times is going to cover the controversy, you would think its reporter could at least be bothered to figure out what the controversy actually revolves around.  Below are some of the allegations I learned from the site that I didn’t learn from the Times, allegations that show, specifically, that the controversy is not, as the Times has is, about the Planet publishing uncensored letters to the editor that “do not necessarily reflect the views of the Daily Planet.”

“Becky O’Malley used to claim that, being a free speech absolutist, she publishes everything she receives.  The lack of pro-Israel pieces merely reflected the fact that she received very few.  This was a flatly false statement at the time she was making it, since we have seen quite a number of pro-Israel pieces, which were sent to O’Malley but which she declined to publish.

Then she changed her story.  She called some pro-Israel pieces “Islamophobic,” and she refused to run them for that reason.  She also claimed that pro-Israel articles would “bore” her readers…. When she does publish pro-Israel letters, she has been known to edit their most important sections out.  All of this is thoroughly documented elsewhere on this website.”

“The Berkeley Daily Planet’s own employees share an obsession with Israel, starting with O’Malley herself.  Contrary to O’Malley’s assertion that she does not write about Israel, to date (September 2009) the Berkeley Daily Planet has published 24 editorials written with Becky O’Malley’s own hand and which concern the topic of Israel or the Jews.  She has written on virtually no other part of the world, except, very occasionally on Iraq.”

“Conn Hallinan writes a regularly appearing foreign affairs analysis column for the Berkeley Daily Planet, under the byline, “Dispatches From the Edge.”  Hallinan is in fact from the very edge of the American body politic, being a lifelong Communist.   He is a contributor to various anti-Israel websites, such as PalestineThinkTank.com.  At least 15 of his columns to date entirely or mostly concern Israel, while many more bring Israel into articles written chiefly on other topics.”

Managing editor, Justin DeFreitas has published at least 13 cartoons concerning Israel or the Jews, but only a small handful about all the other situations in the world.  Additionally, there have been numerous “news” articles concerning Israel…. By admission and implication, the Berkeley Daily Planet, while obsessed with Israel, is only interested in one side of the story.

“O’Malley placed an anti-Israel article by well-know anti-Israel activist Henry Norr in the news section instead of in the commentary section where it belonged (August 30, 2005).”

“Both Becky O’Malley and Conn Hallinan (we will consider Hallinan in depth elsewhere) equate Israel and its supporters with the Nazis.  This in itself is a very strong indication of anti-Semitism, while Daily Planet cartoonist, Justin DeFreitas, has used imagery in depicting Israel that is indistinguishable from Nazi and neo-Nazi propaganda.”

Gertz also claims that despite its claimed commitment to freedom of speech, the paper has special rules that apply to Jews and Israel only, such that pro-Israel Jews (but no other ethnic groups) may be slurred on ethnic grounds in the paper. (The Times notes that Gertz was attacked in a letter to the paper for wearing the “funniest looking yarmulke,” but fails to note that Gertz points out that he doesn’t wear a yarmulke, making the remark not just a juvenile insult, but a juvenile insult of the sort someone who hates Jews would make, like saying “Obama wears the funniest looking dashiki I have ever seen”).  Gertz also suggests that the paper has a special letters to the editors policy re Israel, so that anti-Israel and even blatantly anti-Semitic letters from readers outside the Bay Area (one of which is noted in the Times) are published, but pro-Israel letters from local residents are “censored.”

In short, Gertz alleges not that the Planet is too indulgent in publishing crankish letters to the editor, but that it has an official editorial policy, adhered to by its editors, columnists, and reporters,  that is obsessive about and extremely hostile to Israel, to the extent that it sometimes crosses the line into overt anti-Semitism.

Again, I had never heard of the Planet, or O’Malley, or Gertz.  But it does strike me that if the Times thinks that the controversy over the Planet’s coverage of Israel and Jews is worth reporting, it should report both the allegations and O’Malley’s defense, not take the line that O’Malley is under seemingly unfair attack for adhering to free speech principles.

UPDATE: Bizarrely, two commenters below seem to think that my block quotations from Gertz’s site mean that I’m endorsing both his general attack on the Planet and all of the specifics in those block quotes.  I should think that it’s very clear that I’m just reporting, not endorsing, his allegations, because I think the Times’ story did not fairly portrary those allegations, and it’s easy to show that this is true by just reprinting them.  But just to be even clearer, the point of my piece is that the Times’ only provided O’Malley/the Planet’s side of the story, and failed to accurately portray Gertz’s allegations.  I did not address whether those allegations are sound in general, much less endorse any or all of Gertz’s specific language. (Further update: perhaps this will clear up the source of the confusion: the block quotes, including internal links, are all Gertz, no me).

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: I do not meet to imply that the author of this article, San Francisco bureau chief Jesse McKinley, is motivated by hostility to Israel or Jews.  Rather, I suspect a combination of sloppy, lazy reporting and the tendency of Times reporters to portray any case in which a media outlet is being criticised as involving trogrlodytes who don’t understand the value of free speech, and treating editors under attack as beleaguered heroes, almost without regard to the merits of the underlying controversy.

Monday’s New York Times has an interesting article about the forthcoming English edition of Emmanuel Faye’s book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935.  In brief, Faye argues that Heidegger’s pro-Nazi views were not incidental, but were at the core of his life’s work. Accordingly, suggests Faye, libraries should remove Heidegger books from the “Philosophy” section, and place them in the “History of Nazism” section. From what I know of Heidegger (he’s discussed in my forthcoming book Aiming for Liberty) his intellectual influence on the 20th century was highly pernicious. Heidegger, like Hitler, wrote books addressing the question of what it means to be a “German,” and came to similar conclusions. Both writers were verbose; Heidegger was superior in the fabrication of elaborate philosophical constructs, while inferior to his hero is writing comphrensibly. Given Heidegger’s own dedication to Hitlerism, it seems that Heidegger himself might have considered it appropriate for his books to be shelved next to Mein Kampf.

This kind: Helena Cobban is on the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division.  In a recent blog post, she took exception to the Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb criticizing her because “she likes to compare Israel to Hamas.” (H/T: Richard Landes)

Cobban was offended not because Goldfarb was wrong, but because in her opinion any rational person knows that Israel is comparable to (or perhaps, judging by her tone, worse than) Hamas:

So here’s the thing that Michael Goldfarb and people of his ilk really don’t seem to understand: For the vast majority of the people on God’s earth today, Palestinians are just as fully human as Jewish people, and just as deserving as Jewish people of our compassion and our understanding.

(She later suggests that Gaza’s Hamasistan dictatorship is just as “democratic” as Israel.)

And who are Michael Goldfarb’s “ilk”?  Jews who support Israel and/or criticize Human Rights Watch (you tell me if the following individuals have anything else in common)!

But the Michael Goldfarbs, the Norman Podhoretz’s, the Alan Dershowitz’s, and Robert Bernsteins of this world truly don’t get this. They truly think there is something so “special” about Jewish people and their experience in the world that somehow the [sic] (and especially the allegedly “Jewish” state, Israel) deserve to be given a free pass on the application of any neutral standards of behavior, such as would be applied to anyone else.

So there you have it.  Among other Jews, Robert Bernstein, the founder, longtime president, and now critic of Human Rights Watch is not merely mistaken when he accuses HRW of anti-Israel bias, he is mistaken because he thinks Jews should be held to different, lower standards than everyone else because he thinks Jews are “so ‘special.’”  Damn Jews just think they are better than everyone else, and should be exempt from the moral standards that the civilized Christian (Cobban is a Quaker) world adheres to.  We’ve heard such sentiments before, but not generally from “human rights activists.”  [And as for her bizarre reference to the "allegedly 'Jewish' state, Israel," Noah Pollak notes that "her writing is so sloppy that it’s impossible to discern what specific slander she has in mind."]

And, in case there was any doubt, Cobban of course fails to link to any statement by any of the individuals she names suggesting that Israel should  “be given a free pass on the application of any neutral standards of behavior, such as would be applied to anyone else.”  (She does link to R. Bernstein’s op-ed on HRW, but that op-ed doesn’t say anything remotely resembling Cobban’s “interpretation.”) The reason, of course, is that none of these people have said such things, nor is there any reason, beyond the ugly sentiments implicit in Cobban’s post, that they believe that.

If Human Rights Watch was a decent organization, it would ask for Cobban’s immediate resignation from its board.  But it isn’t, and it won’t.

UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Cobban’s post attracted much more blatant and overt anti-Semitic comments, such as “There is some sort of weird Jewish psychological issue … The Inner (Screeching) Jew Incarnated may help elucidate the behavior of Goldfarb and his ilk.” When some other commenters objected, Cobban responded, “Yes we do have some anti-Israeli statements here that are stronger than usual.”

You might have missed this, assuming that, unlike me, you don’t comb the NYT sports pages for odd little items like this. According to a report in Saturday’s paper, Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, a “a fixture at Yankee Stadium for years with his stirring rendition of God Bless America” during the 7th inning stretch, was supposed to sing at Friday’s opening game of the ALCS but was disinvited by the Yankees because of some unfortunate comments he was reported to have made the day before. Apparently, a real estate agent was showing Tynan and apartment and, jokingly, referred to other inhabitants of the building by saying “Don’t worry — they’re not Red Sox fans,” at which point Tynan responded: “I don’t care about that — as long as they’re not Jewish.”

The quintessentially New York remark – combining the Irish, the Jews, the Yankees, the Red Sox — and real estate!!

The outcry was loud and predictable. But in all seriousness – what’s really so terrible about what Tynan said? I happen to be Jewish myself (and a New Yorker to boot), and I think my antennae for serious anti-Semitic remarks are pretty well-tuned. But Tynan doesn’t like Jews – what’s the big deal when he says so? Unless you deny that Jews have any distinguishing characteristics — and no Jews I know (especially no New York Jews, for goodness sake, would say such a thing) then one has to expect that some folks aren’t going to like those characteristics — we’re too intellectual, too noisy, too argumentative, too this or too that. Tynan doesn’t want to live around us – bully for him (though he’s going to have a helluva time finding an apartment in NYC!). I know lots of people who aren’t crazy about Italians, or Irish, or African-Americans – that too is part of the American stew, and I wish we were all a little less sensitive about the whole thing. I know that terrible, terrible things have happened in the name of anti-Jewish (and anti-Irish, and anti-black, etc.) sentiments – but we really have come a fair way from all that, and I wonder if we’re overdoing it a little with our sanctimony. Maybe we could all use a dose of good old-fashioned harmless prejudice – God Bless America!

Not a Jew.

I pointed out previously that persons of Jewish descent in anti-Semitic societies sometimes become openly anti-Semitic themselves to prove their lack of loyalty to the Jewish community.  The flip side is that people with no Jewish descent (e.g., with very high probability, Hitler) are often alleged by their political enemies to really be Jews, an allegation that fits in with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Jews run the world via stealth.  To take an absurd example, neo-Nazi websites were circulating a phony genealogy last Fall claiming that Sarah Palin’s ancestors were Jews.

This could just be disinformation, but if true it explains a lot.  Note that some of the worst anti-Semites in history, including Torquemada and Karl Marx, were of recent Jewish descent, and used anti-Semitism to ingratiate themselves with their non-Jewish constituencies.

Ha’aretz: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s scathing attacks against Israel and his repeated denials of the Nazi Holocaust could be motivated by a desire to conceal his own Jewish roots, an Iran expert told The Daily Telegraph on Saturday.

The British newspaper examined the Iranian leader’s identity card which he displayed in public during his country’s elections in March 2008.

The ID card bears his family’s original surname, Sabourjian, which is a Jewish name that means cloth weaver, according to The Daily Telegraph.

The Sabourjians have historically been concentrated in the same region of Iran where Ahmadinejad was born, according to the report.

Ahmadinejad’s identity papers indicate that his family changed its name and converted to Islam after he was born, the British newspaper said.

Iranian observers suggested that the president’s constant verbal assault against Israel and Jews may be an attempt to prove his loyalty to Shia Islam while making every effort to hide his Jewish past.

UPDATE: Here’s the original Telegraph story.
FURTHER UPDATE: Admittedly it’s possible that Torquemada, et al., were just sincere anti-Semites, despite their Jewish descent.  But from medieval Spain until twenty-first century America (see War, Iraq), it’s been common for powerful persons of Jewish descent to be accused of using their power to further a secret Jewish agenda, whatever their expressed motives.  One way of trying to preempt such criticism is to get a reputation as a vociferous critic of Jews.

To get into more controversial territory, it’s certainly interesting that many leftists of Jewish descent who have no other connection with Judaism or the Jewish community feel the need to be outspoken “Jewish” critics of Israel; the better to prove their leftist, universalist bona fides?