There’s an interesting piece over at Unherd about how the word ‘Globalist’ has been seen by some to have anti-Semitic undertones. My view, based on experience of the sort of social media which often has a higher nutcase quotient than others, is that there are a minority of individuals who use this word as a code word for ‘Jews’. However there are many many more who don’t use this word in this way and use it to describe a particular social, political and economic ideology and those who support such an ideology.
The Unherd piece, based on comments and inputs by Israeli academic and political philosopher Yoram Hazony who studies the phenomenon of nationalism, has its good and bad points but what caught my eye was one of the comments below the line. The commentator mentioned that there has been a knee jerk reaction from some Jewish communal groups and Jewish NGO’s about the use of the word ‘globalist’ and who appear to have made statements about how the use of the word reflects the anti-Semitic canard that Jews are not loyal to the country they live in. Whilst I acknowledge that such false beliefs about Jews and loyalty do exist and that should be called out when they occur, such calling out needs to be selective. Call out the things that need to be called out and don’t scream about every little thing negative or assumed to be negative thing no matter how minor. There’s a massive difference between speaking up about a genuine problem such as someone casting aspersions on for example the loyalty of Jewish Britons in HM Armed Services and someone using the word ‘globalist’ to describe a politician whether that politician be Jewish or not. The first is speaking about an injustice whilst the second is something perilously close to censorship.
I thought that it would be interesting to know what particular Jewish groups have kicked off over this word and I found from a Guardian article that it was the head of the Board of Deputies (BOD), a group that has drifted to the left in recent years and the Community Security Trust (CST) a group that I believe is both too close to government, too close to certain iffy Islam-centred groups and which in my view has lost much of its independence of word and action since accepting money from the Government for its running costs*. These groups are all hot under the collar because Nigel Farage referred to Grant Shapps, now the new Home Secretary and who is Jewish, as a ‘globalist’. This comment in my view is not one aimed at Shapp’s Jewishness but at his political allegiances. There are of course some Jews, as with some non-Jews who have an overtly internationalist outlook on the world but there are also many other Jews and non-Jews who do not.
Whilst I recognise and mourn the millions of Jews over hundreds, no thousands, of years who have died because of mobs incited by bullshit claims of well poisoning, blood libels and lunatic claims that ‘Jews control the world’, I can also see that Jews have done better both materially and communally in countries where there is freedom of speech. For example: Would you rather be a Jew in America today where you are free to practise your religion in almost any way you choose and speak freely about it than be Jewish in Stalin’s Russia, Francoist Spain or pre-revolutionary France, or those parts of modern Europe where being Jewish is, although not as potentially lethal as it was in the past, still precarious? For the record there are parts of modern day London where I hold my child’s hand very tight indeed when visiting and take care to not look identifiably Jewish as precariousness has unfortunately come back to Britain’s capital. Personally I’d rather the CST and the BOD take more interest in the sort of Jew hatred that is growing in places like East London at present than in words that have more than one interpretation like ‘globalist’.
It is my strong belief that Jews are safer and do better and are more free where both the Jew and the Gentile are free to speak. Yes some of the language will be ugly, just as some individuals are ugly in personality and appearance, but sometimes ugliness needs to be tolerated because it is the cost of freedom.
On the subject of freedom of speech I’ve long been of the opinion that it does the image of Jewish communities no good whatsoever to be seen as being on the side of censorship or controls on speech. Such behaviour doesn’t do away with Jew hatred of either the overt or the covert kind, it just drives it underground where I cannot see it and cannot use knowledge of it in order to prepare to defend myself and my family against it. As I’ve said many times on here. I want to know who my enemies are. I want to know what they are saying, where they are saying it, who they are saying it to and is what they are saying having any real world effects? Free speech gives me a voice that I can both lift up to heaven in praise to the Eternal One and which I can use in order to warn others of potentially lethal nutbaggery.
What I’ve got to say next may be to some quite controversial but doing as the CST and the BOD are doing and jumping up and down about everything and anything that some take to be based in Jew hatred is not a good look. Jewish communal groups who do this make the whole community look censorious and this is especially worrying in a country like the UK which doesn’t have many Jews and where most people rarely if ever encounter a real live Jew in the wider community. Without a personal contact with Jews it is easy for non-Jews to look at statements that either directly call for censorship or are censorship adjacent and see a group that doesn’t want and will not permit criticism and which is hostile to freedom of speech. It is never a good look for any group whether religious, social, cultural or political to be seen on the side of unwarranted speech controls
This sort of censorious conduct is, as the commentator on the Unherd piece said, a good way to feed nonsense conspiracy theories about Jews.
This is what the commentator said:
R Wright
It always slightly baffles me that those claiming to represent the Jewish community seem to instinctively lash out when terms like this are used, which ends up feeding the very conspiracy theories they are subject to. If you want to avoid giving the impression that a Jewish cabal runs the planet from a space station shaped like the star of David, demonstrating your ability to criticise and censor people at a whim for using ‘dog whistles’ is not the best way to do it.
I believe that Jewish communal groups should speak up when necessary about threats to the community but a scattergun approach where every use of every questionable word is targeted might end up being counter productive. I’d hate to see us arrive a situation where claims of Jew hatred become blasé and repetitive and as common and as lacking in grounding as the often specious accusations of ‘racism’ and ‘fascism’ are dished out by the political Left. The end result of the overuse and inappropriate use of the words ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ has been to denude these words of both power and meaning. I very rarely take seriously many of the claims of ‘racism’ and ‘fascism’ made by the Left these days as they have become ‘snarl words’, used primarily to stop debate when the debate might not be going in the Leftist’s favour.
There is much truth in Mr (or is it Ms) Wright’s comment. Jumping up and down over what are minnow incidents both feeds anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and makes it much more likely that a future genuine claim of much more concerning Jew-hatred might not be believed or cared about by the general population. It is right for Jews to make a fuss when idiots make threats to kill or harm, Jewish history after all is replete with stories of mobs killing Jews because some idiot said that the Jews had cursed their farmland/well/cow etc and one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that when people threaten to kill you then you’d damn well better believe them.
However making a fuss over relatively minor issues such as the word ‘globalist’ where the word can have both a minority and a majoritarian meaning, just makes the whole community look bad and censorious. In my view Jews should not be on the side of censorship or be hostile to freedom of speech as it makes the community as a whole look to outsiders as if we Jews are trying to silence others. Jews have benefited, as Western society benefited from freedom of speech and such freedoms should be protected, even for those with whom I vehemently disagree.
*When my family had a lifecycle event for our child a few years back we decided that we would not call on what I believe is a compromised CST for the sadly necessary security. We dipped into our own pockets to hire a licensed local security guard instead, such was my growing concern at the time about the CST’s links and ability to act independently of government.
