PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Anti-Semitism and Racism are Alive and Well in the American Political Left
by Yassar Datsmibebe Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2003 at 12:14 PM

Anti-Semitism and racism have become an accepted part of the political philosophy of the American Left. Left leaning media, reporters adn commentators are regularly given to insidious anti-semitic adn racist remarks without ever being called to account for their offensive conduct. A Republican Senator will be forced from a position of power for an off-handed gesture to a retiring senior politician. But the Left will never hold their own to a similarly high and strict standard. The recent message of Gregg Easterbrook of the New Republic is just the most recent in a continuing saga of Leftist Elitism and Racism.

Last Monday, Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor of The New Republic, posted an essay on TNR's Web site panning the Quentin Tarantino film "Kill Bill" for excessive violence. Easterbrook concludes:

�Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice. But history is hardly the only concern. Films made in Hollywood are now shown all over the world, to audiences that may not understand the dialogue or even look at the subtitles, but can't possibly miss the message--now Disney's message--that hearing the screams of the innocent is a really fun way to express yourself.� http://www.tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml?pid=844

So Gregg Eaterbrook reiterates, in the New Republic, the offensive historical prejudice and demeaning stereotype that Jews are greedy, money-grubbing selfish louts. Easterbrook goes on to blame Jewish Hollywood executives as being partly responsible for today's real-life violence. And what is Easterbrook�s nonsense that because of the Holocaust, Jews should know better than to allow films that depict mindless violence to be made on their watch? And is he actually implying in that last sentence that Jewish film executives are partly responsible for Muslim terrorism?

Soon the New york Times -- http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/17/national/17REPU.html?ex=1066968000&en=7944cab1103887f3&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE -- was on the case, as was the Los Angeles Times which carried an opinion piece by media writer Tim Rutten, titled "If It Sounds Like Anti-Semitism, Maybe It Is." -- http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-et-rutten18oct18,1,4041661.story --

The critcal attention brought upon Easterbrook by his comments, and the denunciations from the ADL and the L.A. Times, came after he posted an apology:
�Nothing's worse, as a writer, than so mangling your own use of words that you are heard to have said something radically different than what you wished to express. Of mangling words, I am guilty. . . . I'm ready to defend all the thoughts in that paragraph. But how could I have done such a poor job of expressing them? . . . Looking back I did a terrible job through poor wording. It was terrible that I implied that the Jewishness of studio executives has anything whatsoever to do with awful movies like Kill Bill. . . . What I wrote here was simply wrong, and for being wrong, I apologize.� http://www.tnr.com/easterbrook.mhtml?pid=868

Nice try Mr. Easterbrook, but this mea culpa is far from sufficient. Instead of making a clear apology and a rejection of anti-Semitic stereotypes, Mr. Easterbrook says he 'wrote poorly' and was misunderstood. Mr. Easterbrook's remarks reflect either absolute ignorance or total bigotry. It may be difficult to discern bigotry from the far more popular and acceptable leser form of liberal prejudice, though still insidious, which is more accurately described as �liberal condescension.� This sentence from Easterbrook�s apology reveals all: "How, I wondered, could anyone Jewish--members of a group who suffered the worst act of violence in all history, and who suffer today, in Israel, intolerable violence--seek profit from a movie that glamorizes violence as cool fun?"

"Members of a group": This is the language of liberal identity politics. And note that this is a philo-Semitic prejudice, not an anti-Semitic one. Easterbrook's premise is that the suffering of the Jewish people ennobles Jewish individuals--or should--even if those individuals have not themselves suffered. Thus he presumes to hold Jews to a higher moral standard by virtue of their Jewishness--though in fact all he's doing is asking them to agree with his highly debatable opinion (does it really make any sense to liken stylized Hollywood violence to the Holocaust?).

Ideologically, Easterbrook's earnest criticism of Jewish studio executives is of a piece with Maureen Dowd�s racist rant against Clarence Thomas. Because Thomas is black, Dowd, like other liberals, expects him to conform to liberal orthodoxy and thus treats his conservatism as a far greater offense than that of, say, Antonin Scalia. -- http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00F15F9385F0C768EDDAF0894DB404482 --

This kind of prejudice may not lead to pogroms and lynchings, but it's divisive and often ugly all the same. And it is commonplace among the American Left who so willingly accept this conduct.

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