The Berlin International Center for the
Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)
BICSA Working Paper Series, No. 5, August 2022
Ukraine, Holocaust trivialization, transphobia and tolerating the “American Nazi Party” in the pro-Israel scene?
A new research center on contemporary antisemitism in London, Fathom Magazine, Kathleen Hayes and the anti-intellectual „Intellectual Dark Web“ …
By Clemens Heni, Ph.D.
Published in August 2022
Series Editor: Dr. Clemens Heni, Director, The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA)
www.bicsa.org
c/o Edition Critic
Sophie-Charlotten-Str. 9-10
14059 Berlin
Germany
Mail: bicsa[at]bicsa.org
Read the PDF version of this working paper.
Table of Contents
Ukraine. 3
The London Conference on Antisemitism in September 2022. 10
The British Magazine Fathom.. 14
Quillette, the „Intellectual Dark Web“, the New Right and the American Nazi Party. 17
The case of Kathleen Hayes. 20
Hope: Gad Granach’s Zionism.. 24
Endnotes. 28
Ukraine
The new “London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism” led by the sociologist David Hirsh has announced a conference on antisemitism for September 2022. It is important and very timely to engage critically with the various facets of antisemitism in the 21st century.
It is important to commemorate 9/11, which is part of the conference. In 2011, I published a big study about 9/11, Islamism and antisemitism, I know about the relevance to deal with jihad, Islam, Islamism, anti-Americanism and 9/11.[1] Professor Robert S. Wistrich invited me to speak at Hebrew University on December 18, 2002, about contemporary German anti-Zionism after 9/11.[2]
My talk included remarks about Holocaust distortion and the accusation by the West, that Serbia was organizing a “new Auschwitz” against Kosovo. That was a lie, of course, a grotesque Holocaust distortion. It was common, though, in Germany in 1999 in order to affirm the NATO War against former Yugoslavia. This kind of Holocaust distortion is now in full swing when it comes to Ukraine in 2022.
Therefore, it is striking that at the event in London in September 2022 the talk is almost exclusively about anti-Zionist antisemitism in many different forms – postcolonial, Islamist/Muslim, left, right, etc. Topics such as rejection of Holocaust memory in Ukraine by naming streets, squares or football stadiums after antisemites and Nazi collaborators – you won’t find at that London event.
One of the most blatant forms of antisemitism in the 21st century is naming squares and streets after the perpetrators of the Holocaust. One could also extend this to the downplaying of the Holocaust via the red-equals-brown ideology in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary or Western countries, such as to the supporters of the Prague Declaration of 2008 – like the last President of Czechoslovakia from 1989–1992 Vaclav Havel or former German President Joachim Gauck.[3]
When five Eastern European states recently called on the European Union to preserve “historical memory” and wrote that the aim should be to promote the “European platform for memory and conscience” based on the 2008 “Prague Declaration”, then the Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff from Israel could only laugh bitterly. He writes in the Times of Israel, which praises his blog as particularly worth reading:
Several days ago, I was shocked to learn that five heads of state from Lithuania, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, and Poland, all post-Communist Eastern European countries, had recently beseeched the leaders of the European Union to step up efforts to “preserve historical memory.” It was addressed to the European Council president, European Commission president, and the Czech prime minister, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency.
For the past three decades since their transition to democracy, these countries have excelled in grossly distorting their own respective histories of the Holocaust. Yet the quintet of leaders now maintains that the Kremlin “is seeking to rewrite history and use it to justify its aggression against sovereign states.” Thus, they urge the bodies of the EU to take a leadership role in “preserving historical memory and preventing the Russian regime from manipulating historical facts.” They contend that this concern “is particularly relevant in light of Russia’s intensive use of history for propaganda purposes in the context of the war in Ukraine.”
These heads of state know how to deal with this problem of rewriting history.[4]
The governments of these countries know how to rewrite history – Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Estonia, Latvia. For years they have been playing down the Holocaust by whitewashing or even celebrating their own antisemitism and by glorifying their own Nazi perpetrators and, in a second step, by equating the unprecedented crimes of the Shoah with the crimes of Stalinism, referred to here as „crimes of communism“ and would continue to this day. It is no less antisemitic when Ukrainian President Zelenskyi compares the start of the current war in Ukraine to the day the NSDAP was founded in 1920 and babbles about a “final solution” in Ukraine. This antisemitism didn’t go down well in Israel in the Knesset, where he delivered via internet one of his foul propaganda speeches.[5]
In 2010, I wrote about the “Memorial to the Victims of Communism” in Washington, D.C. Their new homepage and opening is now linked from this site Zuroff criticizes in his Times of Israel piece, which purports to keep European memory and conscience alive.[6] On March 15, 2010, I spoke at an international conference in Riga, Latvia, on Eastern European and Western antisemitism and the rewriting of history:
Look at www.victimsofcommunism.org memorial site in the US: they are saying that Communism was the “deadliest ideology in human history”: this is an antisemitic obfuscation of the Shoah![7]
The site „victimsofcommunism“ honestly pushed its ideology at the time, writing on its site that „In October 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution gave birth to the deadliest ideology in human history – Communism.“ This is blatantly an antisemitic denial of what truly was the deadliest ideology in human history: Nazi eliminationist antisemitism. The homepage no longer has this antisemitic sentence on its page, but the intention of the creators is the same as before.[8]
Zuroff stresses that countries that are themselves rewriting history in antisemitic ways should be the last to accuse Russia of antisemitism. Of course, Russia is also lying when it talks about a “genocide” in the Donbass, when there is no genocide in the Donbass. And there is also not at all a Russian “war of annihilation” in Ukraine. In particular, in Germany, the country of the perpetrators of the Shoah, the Second World war and the “War of Annihilation” (“Unternehmen Barbarossa”, “Vernichtungskrieg”) against the Soviet Union from June 22, 1941 until 1944, one has to be reluctant to use the phrase “War of Annihilation”. Why then did the somewhat left leaning political scientist Lars Rensmann, who is now teaching at the University of Passau in Bavaria and who is associated with Hirsh’s new institute in London, invite his colleague Herfried Münkler of all people to an event on the war in Ukraine in mid-July (the event was then cancelled, but there will probably be an „alternative date“ as the University of Passau happily announces on its homepage)?[9]
After all, Münkler is notorious for applying the term “war of annihilation” to the Russian war in Ukraine, thus playing down the Holocaust.[10] There is no „war of annihilation“ in Ukraine, anyone who claims otherwise is simply lying or wants to clear the Germans of their guilt, because of course it is very convenient for the Germans to accuse one of the victims of World War II, Russians and Soviets, of crimes of the same magnitude as those committed by the fathers and grandfathers of the Münklers of this world.[11]
This is what research calls “secondary antisemitism”, a term Rensmann is familiar with, as he dealt a lot with that post-Auschwitz ideology in Germany.[12] Why then did he invite Münkler, who is invoking that kind of secondary antisemitism when applying the term “War of Annihilation” to the very typical war Russia is waging in Ukraine? Compare the Russian war in Ukraine to the Iraq War 2003, to the US led War in Afghanistan, the Vietnam War or the ongoing and compared to the War in Ukraine much more murderous War in Yemen by Saudi-Arabia and other Islamist warmongers and you find that the Russian War in Ukraine is a typical war. A typical war is horrible enough. But the war in Ukraine is not at all comparable to the unprecedented War of Annihilation by the German Nazi Army Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union and the Jews.
Is it possible that Münkler and Rensmann, who has a Ukrainian flag with the slogan #StandwithUkraine as a header on his Facebook account, have much in common when dealing with the current war and situation in Ukraine?[13]
This speaks for little political science differentiation. Is he also behind the streets in Ukraine that have been named after Holocaust perpetrators and antisemites in recent years? A left anti-militarist position would never post #StandwithUkraine or #StandwithRussia, but would oppose arms deliveries to both sides, it would decode NATO’s clear complicity in Putin’s process of fanaticism – keywords #notoneinch, Putin’s idea many years ago that Russia should be admitted to NATO which was greeted with laughter and most recently the peace plan of Putin and the Russian Federation of December 17, 2021, which was ignored by the US.
On the other hand, the US Congress was already planning war on Russia by Ukraine on January 3, 2022 and passed a billion-dollar program for military and other support a few weeks later in February, even before Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine on February 24.[14] BEFORE the war began, the US was already financing Ukraine and sending support and weapons.
On the other hand, it is typical of the time and scene for the conference in London in September 2022 that several lectures on
Soviet anti-Zionism and antisemitism are announced there,
but not one lecture on today’s antisemitism in Ukraine, which is evident there through honors, monuments, stamps, football stadiums, streets, avenues, etc., which were named after Nazi collaborators, antisemitic agitators or murderers of Jews such as Roman Shukhevych, Yaroslav Stetsko or Stepan Bandera in recent years. Or take the antisemitism of the neo-Nazi Azov Brigades, which were part of the Ukrainian army before they were militarily defeated in Mariupol – no lecture on that either.
A campaign is currently underway against David Hirsh at the University of London, where he teaches sociology at Goldsmiths College. He had criticized post-colonial and apparently pro-BDS tweets and actions by students and activists and was then aggressively defamed as a „white supremacist“.[15]
Hirsh deserves support in his fight against this kind of antisemitism in the UK.
But sometimes Hirsh also writes some very strange things about antisemitism. A quick look at David Hirsh’s Twitter account shows how unscientific and vulgar behavior is sometimes being used there, which seems to be typical of this anti-social medium and not a personal quirk of Hirsh’s. As a personal description, Hirsh writes about himself (as of August 07, 2022):
Russian warship go fuck yourself
Founder LCSCA @centre_as
Arsenal, women and men.
ADHD http://EngageOnline.org.uk http://gold.ac.uk/sociology/staf…
In other words, in vulgar terms, he opposes the Russian war against Ukraine. In a tweet dated August 7, 2022 at 6:28 p.m., he then writes the following:[16]
Listen carefully to what antisemites say. They’re not telling you about Jews, but they’re telling you about themselves. They’re telling you what, in their imagination, evil and cunning people would do in a particular situation: their own fantasies, their own intentions.
Who does David Hirsh mean by “antisemites”? He means the Russian mission in Geneva, from which he posts a message under his tweet that that embassy-like mission had posted on Twitter. What is this Russian tweet about? The Russian tweet refers to mainstream media, which could not help but state that Ukraine often hides and positions weapons and artillery in schools or hospitals and Russian attacks would then appear as attacks on civilian targets. Then, the world attacks Russia for “war crimes”. Attacking civilians in such a way would indeed be a war crime. But what if Ukraine intentionally uses civilian infrastructure for their own soldiers and weapons to provoke Russia to attack theses civilian facilities?
Firstly, what could be antisemitic about the statement by the war party Russia? Why does David Hirsh, the sociologist and antisemitism expert from England, write that you should listen carefully to what the antisemites are saying and underneath is this tweet that reflects the current Russian line? What’s antisemitic about that?
Because that is exactly what is happening, as a report by Amnesty International, quoted by the Austrian daily Der Standard on August 5, 2022, shows:[17]
Amnesty International accuses Ukraine for breach of international law.
According to this, the Ukrainians are cynically and inhumanely positioning weapons and artillery in residential areas, and when the Russian side bombs them, it looks like a targeted attack on civilians, a war crime. The Ukrainians deliberately put their own population in this danger. Incidentally, a tactic that the pro-Israel scene or David Hirsh should know, as it has been used by the Islamist Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others in the Gaza Strip for years to discredit Israel.[18]
At the beginning of July 2022, the German Second TV Channel ZDF also quoted a UN report that Ukraine was deliberately using civilian locations such as a nursing home to station soldiers there. Survivors of a Russian attack spoke of the Ukrainian soldiers in the nursing home.[19]
According to Hirsh’s logic, the United Nations and the Second German Television (ZDF) also argue antisemitic. Is he serious?
However, there is current antisemitism in Russia. For example, when the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov recently perfidiously accused Hitler of “Jewish blood”, for which Putin unofficially apologized to Bennett in Israel, as the BBC reported from England.[20]
The UN report on civilians as human shields, though, emphasizes that both sides, the Ukrainians and the Russians, use this perfidious tactic of civilian shields and the instrumentalization of civilians.[21]
The reports from Amnesty International and international media coincide with the UN report and the tweet from the Russian mission in Geneva. But what David Hirsh fantasizes here as antisemitism, using the example of an empirically verified tweet from the Russian mission in Geneva, is not antisemitism.
When he builds his new institute – with dozens of experts on the Advisory Board, as you can see on the homepage – for the analysis and criticism of current antisemitism in the 21st century on such Twitter delusions – and there is a lot to be said for it, because he also for his new center has set up a Twitter account[22] –, then he can immediately stop the undertaking. Because this tweet from the Russian Mission in Geneva is not antisemitic and has nothing remotely to do with Jews or antisemitism. It is perfidious that, according to the UN, both sides are using this inhuman tactic, Russians and Ukrainians alike. Of course, the Russian mission in Geneva makes no mention of its own similar tactics. But that’s not antisemitic, and Hirsh doesn’t seem at all aware of the facts that Ukraine is using these cynical military tactics.
Russia’s war is a criminal war of aggression that violates international law and must end immediately. But more weapons for Ukraine will prolong this war and cause many more deaths in Ukraine. And the US and Germany want more people to die and the war to continue, otherwise they would not continue to supply Ukraine with weapons and ammunition. What about complicity in the war through NATO’s decades of aggression? This includes NATO’s eastward expansion, although US Secretary of State James Baker promised Gorbachev and the Soviets in February 1990 that NATO would itself in the event of a possible reunification Germany not expand “one inch eastward”.[23]
NATO maneuvers in Ukraine in recent years have been an intolerable provocation, as every reasonably trained political scientist and conflict researcher (m(ale)/f(emale)/d(iverse)) will confirm. But how does David Hirsh come to the conclusion that the obviously factual position of the Russian mission in Geneva that Ukraine is using civilian shields is antisemitic? This is an inflationary use of the accusation of antisemitism where it is not recognizable at all.
Are these good prerequisites for a new center for antisemitism research when the founding director David Hirsh introduces himself so vulgarly in the anti-social Twitter world and then posts tweets that have nothing to do with reality? What does he mean by antisemitism when the Russians only repeat what the daily Standard in Austria or Amnesty International, the UN and the German Second TV Channel (ZDF) also report? Are they all antisemites when they show empirically that Ukraine sometimes deliberately accommodates its own army, soldiers, weapons, ammunition and artillery in residential areas, schools, old people’s homes or hospitals?
In addition, are there good prerequisites for a new center for antisemitism research if Hirsh and his team right from the start equate the eliminatory antisemitism of National Socialism with Stalinist antisemitism, which was in no way comparable to German antisemitism?
It is not accidental that antisemitism was associated with both National Socialist and Stalinist totalitarianisms.[24]
Why is he not mentioning that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz? Soviet antisemitism was bad enough, but not at all comparable to the Shoah and German or Nazi antisemitism. To equate Nazi and Soviet antisemitism rather sounds a lot like the 1997 French “Black Book of Communism,” and historian Jeffrey Herf is also a supporter of this Holocaust-belittling black book,[25] and he will be part of the September 2022 conference in London as well as a Board Member of Hirsh’s new center.[26]
Maybe the above quoted phrase from Hirsh’s new center is just an unfortunate formulation that insinuates an analogy, but the obsessive Russian hatred that Hirsh shows on Twitter could point to deeper ideologemes. In addition, as quoted, he seems to ignore the categorial difference between Auschwitz and Stalinist antisemitism. This fear is there.
The London Conference on Antisemitism in September 2022
In addition to the usual speakers and very important and current topics such as anti-Zionism, 9/11, hostility to Israel, e.g. among leftists in Norway, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Muslim antisemitism, there are also obscure but very trendy topics such as Holocaust trivialization by critics of the medically irrational mask mandates. The mask mandates are probably not seen as medically irrational and democratically disastrous. This is not negating the disgusting Holocaust comparisons; some critics of the mask mandate might occasionally use them – even if I am not yet aware of such a comparison of masks and the Holocaust. There are indeed too many other antisemitic tropes in the scene critical of Corona politics, about which I reported in detail in a working paper of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA) in January 2021.[27]
Be that as it may, the announcement of Czech researcher Zbyněk Tarant’s presentation about „Holocaust Appropriation in Anti-Mask Protests – A New Challenge to IHRA Definition?“ at the London conference in September 2022 reads as follows:
To our misfortune, antisemitism develops more quickly than our legal and scholarly definitions of it. Its fluidity was again aptly demonstrated during the anti-mask and anti-vaccination protests across Europe. Along with the antisemitic conspiracy myths, such as ‘plandemic’, or the belief that vaccines are meant to sterilize the world population, there were cases of abuse of Holocaust-related symbolism and iconography by the protesters, such as wearing yellow Stars of David, comparing epidemiological measures to Nuremberg laws and comparing vaccine mandate to the Nazi genocidal program. My presentation will explore the ideological and quasi-religious background of these myths, many of which have roots in the scene of Western Esotericism. As my presentation will argue, these incidents stretch our current definitions of antisemitism and some are not even covered by them. For example, the IHRA definition has no provision that would recognize such cases of Holocaust Appropriation in anti-vaxxer discourse as antisemitic, despite their harmful impact on Jewish life and tendency to banalize the horrors of the Shoah. Is it time to update the IHRA definition?[28]
It is significant that problematic tendencies in the anti-vaccination scene are discussed and probably presented far beyond their relevance, but the author does not say a word about the anti-democratic character of the entire vaccination discourse. He does not mention in his announcement the international Corona regime and the totalitarian arrogance of countries like Australia, New Zealand or the US to this day not allowing people to enter the country if they are not vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 or have undergone gene therapy. Gene therapy? Yes, since it is well known that a representative of the pharmaceutical industry from BAYER said at the Global Health Summit in October 2021 in Berlin, beaming with joy and perfidiously, with a mischievous laugh, that the „vaccination“ was a „gene therapy“ and that Corona was a huge stroke of luck for the pharmaceutical industry and the acceptance of genetic engineering, since by the end of 2019 some 95 percent of the population, at least in Germany, had been clearly opposed to genetic engineering. That’s exactly what Stefan Oelrich from BAYER said, you can watch the video of the Berlin event.[29]
THIS is the scandal of our time, Holocaust comparisons by marginal, extremist, esoteric and other groups critical of the Corona regime are bad and antisemitic, but just: marginal compared to the totalitarian vaccination policy of many (leading) countries in the world and the WHO.
There are enough examples of esoteric clumsy nonsense, comparisons of the Corona pandemic that play down the Holocaust and other problematic ideologemes, such as the case with the lawyer Füllmich, about whom and his Corona investigation committee and other problematic protagonists of the anti-Corona policy scene in the international context I have reported.[30] But addressing masks and antisemitism and thus covering the whole topic of Corona seems intentionally obscure and it is not to be expected that a differentiated criticism of the catastrophic and totalitarian Corona policy in the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, US, UK etc. will occur at this talk.
Furthermore, I fear that many important features of the Corona regime are negated at all like mask mandates, lockdowns, vaccination apartheid,[31] social isolation and economic catastrophes around the world because of a completely irrational and intentional anti-democratic panic policy. I also fear that there will be no mention of the intentional use of panic by politicians around the world – see for example the so-called “panic paper” by Horst Seehofer, then German minister of the Interior, by then chancellor Merkel, vice-chancellor and today chancellor Olaf Scholz and the German government from March 2020.[32]
Criticism of the mask fetish should be a central topic today – and not a core topic for an antisemitism conference. That seems grotesque and may at best serve to defame any criticism of the mask mania. This is intended to present individual obscure mask mandate critics, presumably as an example for the whole ’scene‘ of critics of the epidemiologically, medically and democratically highly questionable Corona policies.
But what will the conference say about the many Jewish and Israeli medical professionals who have vehemently opposed Western and Israeli anti-democratic Corona policies, like Dr. Tomer Cooks of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics at the University of Ben-Gurion School of Medicine in the Negev? Like the professors Udi Qimron, Ariel Munitz, and Motti Gerlic and almost 150 other doctors and researchers in Israel, as early as December 2020 he was a signatory to a „Common Sense Model“ that campaigned against lockdowns and for a rational Corona policy.[33]
In October 2020, a number of Jewish and Israeli epidemiologists and medical professionals were the first to sign the legendary Great Barrington Declaration, which is committed to protecting vulnerable groups. That Declaration wanted to prevent the millions of dead people in the countries of the Global South who have been subject to the lockdown policy since March 2020 and to this day caused. Or at least from October 2020, when the declaration was written and published, they wanted to minimize this „collateral damage“ of the Corona policy of Merkel, Boris Johnson, Trump, Biden & Co. in the future. Among the signatories were the following people, most of whom signed both the Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020 and the specifically Israeli Common Sense Model of December 2020:
Dr. Ariel Munitz, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel, Dr. Eitan Friedman, professor of medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, Dr. Motti Gerlic, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel, Dr. Uri Gavish, biomedical consultant, Israel, Dr. Udi Qimron, professor of clinical microbiology and immunology, Tel Aviv University, Israel.[34]
How antisemitic and anti-Israel will a Corona policy-critical scene staffed by leading Israeli researchers in the field of medicine be? It is therefore to be feared that the criticism of the Corona policy at this conference in London will only appear as part of today’s antisemitism, which would be a deliberate distortion of the facts if that were to happen.
In any case, what stands out extremely strangely at the announcement of the September 2022 London conference on contemporary antisemitism is the following lecture by an author who has hardly appeared in the public eye:
Kathleen Hayes “Punch a TERF’ and ‘Smash the Zionists’: Misogyny and Antisemitism“.
The author thus suggests that transphobic radical feminists are victims like Zionists. As an enlightened critical antisemitism, right-wing extremism and democracy researcher, one becomes skeptical. TERFs are known to be “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists”. Now you have to know that in 2021 more trans people were murdered worldwide than ever before since these acts of violence have been registered.
In 2021, 375 transsexuals were murdered worldwide, 70 percent of them in South America, 30 percent in Brazil alone. When I see Syrian or Iraqi refugees in Germany, for example, downtown, who stare at and threaten transsexuals, then I know how close these migrants and the New Right are, but also some traditional left and liberal feminists on issues of religion, family and gender.
In many countries there is increasingly anti-gender legislation and rhetoric, as in Poland, Hungary or even in the oh-so-western, enlightened Brexit Great Britain, as Forbes Magazine reports:
Meanwhile, a global recession in trans rights continues, with countries from Hungary, Poland and even the U.K. seeing rising transphobia, anti-LGBTQ policies and rhetoric.
Vice Magazines writes:
In the U.K., transphobic hate crime reports have quadrupled over the last six years.
This is the backdrop against which Hayes will speak in London in September 2022.
The British Magazine Fathom
In July 2022, Kathleen Hayes published an article in the British journal Fathom. Fathom is edited by Alan Johnson.[35] Her piece is called:
Fathoming the Intellectual Revolution of our Time (1) | ‘Punch a Terf’ and ‘Smash the Zionists’: Misogyny and Antisemitism in the Contemporary Western Left.[36]
That sounds very grand. So the „intellectual revolution of our time“ should be „explored“: „Let’s box a TERF and hit the Zionists: misogyny and antisemitism in the present left in the West“. For Fathom’s editor Alan Johnson, the article is part of an „intellectual revolution of our time“. Hayes presents poststructuralism in an extremely abbreviated manner and without any deeper knowledge:
A few decades back, without a vote being taken, a handful of intellectuals decided to roll back the Enlightenment. Holding hands and chanting ‘Down with grand narratives,’ they dismissed as hubris the paradigmatic Western belief that it was possible to know anything approximating truth. Equating the Enlightenment with slavery, colonialism and women’s subjugation, they declared positivism the greatest sin and announced they were post everything.
All of the groundbreaking critique of prison rule, of surveillance, of the prison-style clinic by thinkers like Michel Foucault—who was also pro-Israel—is swept away with the silly stroke of a pen by a no-name author. In the following, Hayes does not discuss that positivism is in fact a dangerous ideology of domination, even today. The mere description and rubrication is a core element not only of capitalism and patriarchy, but also of Corona politics, for example. A dialectic view, Marxist, Adornite, even critical-theoretical and post-structuralist, would proceed differently.
It would analyze the connections between the capitalist world market, the breaking away of supply chains and the jobs of hundreds of millions of day laborers especially in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the irrational panic of a virus that can primarily attack very old and sick people.[37] Based on data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the UK, Dr. John Campbell has shown that only 12 per cent of the official Covid deaths in the UK died only from Covid-19.[38]
To attack Foucault, as Hayes does here without naming him, as a typical postmodernist (she does not mention that he was a gay man) who would have pitted the particular against the universal, is remarkably reductionist and shows surprisingly little knowledge of the history of post-structuralism or postmodernism. But to Hayes‘ credit, she was active in an antisemitic cult from 1987 to 2016 and didn’t read much.
Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari and whatever their names are, post-structuralism as a whole was against the enlightenment and that’s how Judith Butler came to her pro-Hamas position, Hayes insinuates. One can criticize a lot and substantively in post-structuralist ideology, but Hayes wants to exorcise spirits here, since she herself exorcised the antisemitic spirit in herself in 2016 or thinks she has exorcised it. This has nothing to do with a serious scientific analysis of post-structuralism, despite all the Heideggerian and highly problematic tendencies in post-structuralism. Michel Foucault’s criticism of power – especially of the police, prisons, surveillance, punishment, clinic and medicine – is outstanding and of the greatest importance for our time.
Much like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (Republicans), Hayes opposes gender education in children:
In the US, for instance, many bills aim to prevent ‘transwomen’ from participating in women’s sport (while allowing them in other categories); some seek to end the teaching of gender woo to young children in public schools. These are legitimate goals although the devil, as always, is in the details.
So that’s not in a brochure by the right-wing extremist Germany party in the Bundestag, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), no. This is a quote from Hayes article in Fathom Magazine. Certainly there are antisemitic tendencies in the areas of feminism, intersectionality, multiculturalism and anti-racism.
But as Hayes argues here, the starting point of Judith Butler’s gender studies today is the problem, i.e. the emphasis on social gender – and not just her anti-Zionist drive which became public since the early 2000s. That the post-Auschwitz Marxist tradition did not engage with left-wing antisemitism, as Hayes claims,[39] is utterly grotesque when one looks at the scholarly literature of the last few decades.
The work „Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky“ by Robert S. Wistrich from 1976 alone is an example. Ever since[40] and even before that there is a wide range of research on the Left and Jews as well as on left antisemitism and also from the Left, i.e. not only from anti-communists who only want to see their own prejudices confirmed. Immediately after the Six-Day War in June 1967, for example, in the leading intellectual weekly Die Zeit, the left-wing writer Wolfgang Hildesheimer wrote about the new left-wing anti-Zionist antisemitism and criticized his colleague Peter Weiss.[41]
In 1976, Jean Améry published an influential article criticizing left-wing and “respectable” antisemitism.[42] In 1980, the journalist Henry M. Broder published a reckoning with the left-wing antisemitism of his former friends and comrades. In 1986 he wrote a bestseller – “The Eternal Antisemite” – which dealt with all possible green and left-wing facets of antisemitism.[43] As is well known, Broder later became a conservative publicist with the “axis of the good” (an online Homepage called “Achgut”), which is open to the far right and gives the AfD a boost, for which he also spoke in the Bundestag.
In January 2001, i.e. before 9/11 and before the beginning of what we have been calling a remarkable, audible and activist pro-Israel scene since 2002 not only in Germany but internationally, as part of a radical left-wing autonomous group I myself wrote a brochure criticizing the left-wing anti-Zionism published by the Revolutionary Cells.[44] In 2010, the British jurist, lawyer and literary scholar Anthony Julius published a standard work on the history of antisemitism in England, which also deals with left-wing antisemitism today.[45] Of course, Kathleen Hayes missed all of that, since she was antisemitic herself until 2016.
Finally, Hayes also opens up a relationship between critical theory and postmodernism such as transsexualism, which would no longer know any truth; in a completely abstruse way, she constructs a mini-small group of transsexuals to be the actual gatekeepers and rulers of discourse. For them there is a direct relationship between antisemitism and transsexualism, neither is committed to the truth:
And yes, I’m aware the Frankfurt School played its own role, however ambivalently, in indicting the Enlightenment itself as leading inexorably to Auschwitz: a deeply pessimistic conclusion that paved the way for postmodernism, with its extreme scepticism towards material reality and truth. In a sense, reality and truth are ‘all’ that’s at issue here: the ability to recognise—and the right to say—that two plus two make four; the Earth is not flat; and a man is not a woman, no matter how artful his eyeliner.
In the last paragraph of her Fathom pamphlet, Kathleen Hayes then opens up a monstrous analogy that downplays the Holocaust and writes:
Once truth is up for grabs, all truths are up for grabs. A mind persuaded to reject the reality of biological sex is one unlikely to recognise basic facts about the Holocaust, or about living Jews.
So anyone who rejects their biological gender and does not see themselves as male or female tends to be a Holocaust denier. And with this essentialist doctrinal talk, Kathleen Hayes also feels like a trendsetter, being published both in the ‚liberal‘ Fathom Magazine and elsewhere, as we shall see, all in 2022, when Fathom is starting its two-year „Intellectual Revolution,“ as Alan Johnson, a dude of David Hirsh, writes.
Kathleen Hayes was an antisemitic activist in a Trotskyist party from 1987 to 2016, which she reports on in another 2021 Fathom article. She was a left-wing fanatic and has been a renegade for a few years, that is, an anti-left activist.
Quillette, the „Intellectual Dark Web“, the New Right and the American Nazi Party
Claire Lehmann, on the other hand, was never a leftist. She is an assimilated, middle-class woman from Australia, whose first text as an author in 2013 praised the marriage and dull childbearing penned by the then pregnant women. Like family ideologists from the AfD or other right-wing extremists, she lamented that criticism of the petty-bourgeois family idyll would cause serious damage to society. In 2015 she founded the new-right or far-right platform Quillette, which is considered a central medium of the „Intellectual Dark Web“. The inventor of the term „Intellectual Dark Web“, the equivalent of the „Dark Web“, which oscillates between gun sales, prostitution, terrorism and violence, is Eric Weinstein, who is a central figure in Quillette.
Of course, this is a purely linguistic misunderstanding, because right-wingers, conservatives, anti-feminists, patriots and nationalists, anti-gender ideologues and anti-political correctness rabble-rousers are anything but intellectual. We should remember what makes an intellectual. I wrote about this in 2006 in my dissertation on the critique of the welcoming into the salon of the New Right at the University of Innsbruck:[46]
Since the 1970s, German conservatives and nationalists have increasingly tried to rehabilitate German history and in no way assumed a pre-modern epoch, but did not deny the Nazi past, but rather looked for and found connection points. The social philosopher Hauke Brunkhorst commented on this in a 1987 study.[47]
‘Mandarins, a term commonly used in Europe for the high Chinese officials of the Imperial Era, defined the German scientific scene from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century with a deeply anti-intellectual resentment. However: ‚The classic role of philosophers, priests and prophets, mandarins and shamans is over.‘ ‘[48]
Then: ‚The Mandarin stands above the parties: ‚If we do not succeed in putting the cause of the nation back above the cause of the party, then we are lost.‘ [Eduard Spranger, C. H.]‘.[49]
A German Mandarin does not have anything that characterizes an intellectual:
‚Intellectuals should not allow themselves to be seduced into compromises with supposedly deep-seated metaphysical needs. ‚Without a model‘ (Adorno), without higher legitimation, they should insist on the ‚unrestricted use of their intellect‘, and that means nothing other than the power of the negative and the right to negative, destructive criticism. This claim, which ‚is against innate and‘, as Kracauer expressly emphasizes, ‚acquired nature‘, cannot be given to intellectuals: ‚to at least tentatively override nature as far as possible. The intellect is nothing other than the instrument for the destruction of all mythical stocks in and around us.‘ [50]
In this respect, of course, there are family ideologues, anti-gender agitators, nationalists and new right-wing protagonists who see white supremacy as endangered. They indulge in racism or promote antisemitic conspiracy ideologues like Alex Jones and the whole Trump environment, Trumpism. These people like the authors at Quillette are not intellectuals. Their intention is not, as Kracauer defined the very term intellectual, “the destruction of all mythical stocks in and around us”. On the contrary, they embrace myths, like patriotism, nationalism, or traditional family values and a binary world, based on men and women, black and white, good and evil. They are counter-intellectuals or anti-intellectuals like Claire Lehmann, the Dark Intellectual Web and Quillette.
They are all defenders of bourgeois rule, who do not shy away from classifying neo-Nazis as mere „conservatives“ such as those of the American Nazi Party and thus making them socially acceptable, as we will see shortly.
In May 2019, the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) published a hymn of praise for the anti-intellectual „Intellectual Dark Web“ by right-wing publicist Milosz Matuschek.[51] He could have known what was circulating on the „Intellectual Dark Web“: Because in February 2019, the post-doc at Columbia University Richard Hanania wrote a very typical text for these counter-intellectuals of the „Intellectual Dark Web“ on Quillette:
It Isn’t Your Imagination: Twitter Treats Conservatives More Harshly Than Liberals.
This is the usual whining from the Far Right that the mainstream would dismiss them. However, this text shows much more, namely the abysses of the talk of “free speech”. The Quillette article is about Twitter users who have been blocked due to hate speech or other reasons, i.e. whose Twitter accounts have been permanently or temporarily blocked.[52] The thesis is that Twitter reacts much less harshly to leftists compared to „conservatives“.
In the article, Quillette author Hanania linked an Excel spreadsheet that he worked on with a team. In doing so, they listed prominent cases of “conservatives” that mainstream media have reported being blocked by Twitter. There are 43 people or organizations. What Quillette now understands by „conservatives“ knocks the bottom out of every barrel.
The 43 people and groups include British far-right, convicted thug Tommy Robinson, Gavin McInnes, founder of the neo-Nazi terrorist group Proud Boys, who were also banned from Twitter, and who later played a leading role in the attempted Capitol coup in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 and are notorious for beating up Antifas and other leftists. There are also the conspiracy mythologist Alex Jones and his site Infowars, the neo-Nazi and founder of the term „Alt Right“ Richard Spencer, the racist and Holocaust denier David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Finally, and most shockingly, Quillette also lists the „American Nazi Party“ as part of those „conservatives“ whose Twitter account was suspended.
Also in May 2019, the extreme right-wing publicist and at times a lecturer at the University of Augsburg as well as a speaker at an event of the German conservative Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation, Eoin Lenihan, published an anti-Antifa article. In it, he described “networks” of journalists on Twitter working on Antifa and right-wing extremism, and their alleged or actual relationship with Antifa activists examined in a study. Some of these journalists were named and defamed. He announced his „study“ on May 15, 2019 on Twitter, on May 29 it was published on Quillette.[53]
One of the journalists who was attacked later reported how a few weeks later neo-Nazis, such as those from “Stormfront”, uploaded videos to YouTube with images of mass shootings, where the faces of journalists repeatedly appear in the middle, including pictures of herself, all people which Lenihan had denounced in his anti-Antifa article on Quillette.[54]
In July 2019, Quillette published another article opposing the blocking of antisemites, neo-Nazis, New Rightists, misogynists, transphobes, sexists, etc. pp. The author takes the antisemitic conspiracy mythologist Alex Jones as an example, who was included in the list of „conservatives“ who were blocked by Twitter in February 2019. His ban on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Spotify and other a-social media would only have increased his popularity. What these bourgeois anti-bourgeois „Free Speech“ protagonists ignore and thereby affirm is the violence emanating from guys like Alex Jones.
Until recently, he denied the Connecticut shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. He fantasized like a madman that the parents of the children killed were actors. The parents of one of the murdered children have now won a lawsuit against Jones in Austin, Texas. The court sees it as proven that Jones‘ conspiracy myths generate a huge fortune – up to 300 million US dollars a year. The parents suffer from particularly severe post-traumatic stress disorders, similar to those of war victims or soldiers. The Austin court fined Alex Jones $49.3 million to pay these parents. There will also be further trials in Texas and Connecticut. The lawyers had previously called for a particularly high penalty to be imposed so that it would have a deterrent effect.
One of the new-right agitators of the anti-intellectual Dark Web is Dave Rubin. He, the „comedian,“ neuroscientist Sam Harris, and mathematician Eric Weinstein, met with anti-left, pro-New Right activist at The New York Times, Bari Weiss, who wrote about it in May 2018 in the New York Times. Weiss is no longer with the New York Times, but her agitation for more traditional values and more conservatism went viral. She found it somehow super exciting that Rubin also invited the antisemite and conspiracy mythologist Alex Jones to his show. Jones runs the “Infowars” site and has already spoken to Trump there. Weiss can write any number of books against antisemitism and is a super-star in the pro-Israel camp, but with texts like those in the NYTimes she has massively encouraged hatred of Jews and support for the New Right, since irrationalism and delusions of conspiracies are essential ingredients for antisemitism. Dave Rubin, like Weiss, is Jewish, so that doesn’t mean anything – irrationalism and obsessive hatred of leftists has nothing to do with it. Criticism of sexism and conventional family models, and specifically criticism of natalism, are concepts of the enemy of the New Right. Quillette is the flagship of the anti-intellectual “Intellectual Dark Web”. Bari Weiss opened them up to the mainstream via the New York Times.
Why am I going into such detail about Quillette, about those super exciting, oh so cosmopolitan New Right people and the „intellectual dark web“, i.e. a playground for authors who follow the thugs of the Proud Boys and provide intellectual legitimacy?
The case of Kathleen Hayes
Well, on Quillette, a page, it cannot be stressed enough, where the American Nazi Party is portrayed as poor “conservatives” who have been banned from Twitter, on May 19, 2022, the same Fathom author Kathleen Hayes writes an anti-gender piece. The same Hayes who will now appear in London in mid-September 2022 at the new antisemitism research think tank around the „leftist“ David Hirsh and who was published in July 2022 by the liberal, left-wing or left-liberal magazine Fathom with the same anti-gender tropes.
In May 2022, Hayes publishes her article “Gender Ideology’s True Believers. I spent 25 years in a cultish political sect. Trans activists are giving me déjà vu“ with the new-right magazine Quillette.
Only after that, in July 2022, will her similar, longer article appear on Fathom, so Fathom knew that she wrote for the far-right journal Quillette just a few months prior. In her May 2022 Quillette text, she links to another text of hers in the July 2021 Fathom Journal, where she reckoned with her left-wing antisemitic Trotskyist past, which lasted from 1987 to 2016.
In her autobiographical text in Fathom 2021, Hayes emphasizes that two groups were particularly hated in her Trotskyist splinter party: feminists and Zionists. She has easily carried her hatred of gender theories into the present day. The problem that Kathleen Hayes – like many right-wing extremists, new rightists and family ideologists worldwide – has with Judith Butler is not primarily her anti-Zionism, but rather her gender theories. That there is indeed a biological gender and a social gender, as Butler analyzed in her seminal 1990 book “Gender Trouble”, is denied or ridiculed here. Accordingly, we are not born as girls or boys, but are made into such primarily through socialization, without necessarily denying our biological gender. With this, Butler leaned on Simone de Beauvoir, as German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk recalled:
The American philosopher Judith Butler has prominently demonstrated that this supposedly natural order is neither as natural nor as orderly as claimed: her book Gender Trouble has become a classic in gender research. Exactly 30 years ago it was published in the US, just a year later in German under the title ‚The Unease of the Sexes‘.
In it, Butler deals with Simone de Beauvoir’s work ‚The Second Sex‘, above all with a famous thesis: ‚One is not born a woman, one becomes one.‘
The fact that since then, especially after the second Intifada since autumn 2000, after September 11, 2001 and the founding of the anti-Israeli boycott movement BDS in 2005, Judith Butler has taken a terrible Jewish anti-Zionist position based on Hannah Arendt is another matter.[55]
Butler’s criticism of sexist attributions and patriarchal patterns was and is groundbreaking. Not so for Kathleen Hayes, who, in addition to a few greasy lip-services that trans people are somehow also human beings, describes the trans movement primarily as a „cult“. This reminds her of her own authoritarian cult past as an antisemitic and anti-feminist Trotskyist. Hayes does not mention what kind of anti-gender ideology she herself is invoking at Quillette and beyond. She mentions billionaire Harry Potter novelist J.K. Rowling, who has also come out as TERF and is part of the UK’s Gender Critical Feminists.[56] She has received death threats for her anti-trans positions. Such threats and acts of violence are terrible.
But what Hayes doesn’t say is who very often actually gets murdered because of their gender. In addition to women who are murdered by their husbands or lovers, transsexuals were murdered more often in 2021 than ever before since this has been recorded statistically. But Hayes writes just like the AfD in Germany or the New Right in the UK, the US or Australia when she formulates in Quillette:
Gender ideology is drilled into children from a young age at school; media, charities, and public institutions echo the line; critics are hounded and dismissed.
If that’s the ideology of David Hirsh and his super awesome new London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, since Kathleen Hayes, who published this new-right rubbish, is supposed to speak at his inaugural conference in mid-September 2022, then there isn’t one difference to organized right-wing extremism and the New Right.
Hayes is no longer concerned with specific problems that men who define themselves as transsexuals and women can very well emanate from using women’s toilets to agitation in anti-social networks or on the street may well be fueled by pro and anti-trans people. No, Hayes is concerned here with “gender ideology” as such.
Her language is from the New Right. She fantasizes that children are indoctrinated with „gender ideology“ from a young age. This is Far Right ideology, in the US it is intoned by Trumpism and in England by the corresponding anti-left and anti-gender circles, which apparently also includes the pro-Israel magazine Fathom.
Current academic texts criticizing the New Right and its relationship to capitalism and neoliberalism deal with the ideology of the „Intellectual Dark Web“ and its wide circles of YouTubers with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers and New Right networks of all kinds. The British Political scientist Alan Finlayson criticizes the New Right, the Intellectual Dark Web and analyses:
A range of ideological currents – conservatism, nationalism, ethnonationalism, libertarianism – share a critique of the liberal state which gives to it a cultural and intellectual rather than economic class character. That critique emphasises the linguistic and discursive power of ‘new class’ intellectuals, exercised through institutions of culture, communication and legal regulation, oppressing or victimising those with contrary cultural, political and ethical orientations.
Today this analysis is the basis of a broad-based systematic challenge to the technocratic politics of third-way neoliberalism and globalisation. The new class is the common enemy, under a variety of names: ‘the establishment’, ‘the swamp’, ‘the blob’, ‘the cathedral’.
Because followers can characterise members of these groups variously as bureaucrats, intellectuals, civil servants, climate scientists, gender theorists, feminists, public sector workers, journalists, screenwriters, specific ethnic groups and so on, this antagonism sustains an otherwise unlikely alliance of Trump supporters, online ‘Men Going Their Own Way’, Christian Identity militias, radical libertarians, ethno-nationalists, anti-feminists, American paleoconservatives, ‘race realists’, anti-Muslims, anti-communists.[57]
Accordingly, the New Right agitates against a „new class“ that is dominated by the „cultural Marxists“. This is reminiscent of the propaganda from the Springer group in Germany and their daily Die Welt and its agitator Don Alphonso.[58] Finlayson writes:
That class is figured as the ‘Cultural Marxist’. This label for a range of perspectives in social and political theory predates the internet. Its origins lie in paleo-conservative writing from where it has developed into a conspiracy theory, holding that acolytes of the Frankfurt School are enacting a plan to undermine America by promoting feminism and anti-racism (Jamin, 2014). Online the idea has taken on new life (Richardson, 2015; Manavis, 2019), becoming shorthand for the argument that claims to racial or gender equality are a spurious invention of those with a sinister hidden ‘agenda’ (Peterson, 2017; Murray, 2019).
The Cultural Marxist is a jargonising guru mesmerising impressionable students, exploiting them financially while covertly and calculatedly destroying Western culture by encouraging immigration. The idea has been taken up by Members of Parliament and circulated in magazines such as The Spectator (Walker, 2019). (…) [T]he figure is central to a political rhetoric which has emerged from the fusion of offline and online reactionary spaces, the inhabitants of which see themselves as involved in a war for hearts and minds, teaching others to see the invisible left-hand behind events, and to learn how to protect themselves by becoming part of the cultural, intellectual and moral resistance.
Jordan Peterson, for instance, advises school students to leave their classes if teachers begin discussing diversity, inclusivity or equity, to video it and post it to YouTube (Peterson, 2018). Such awareness and resistance are most powerfully conveyed through the rhetoric of ‘the red pill’.[59]
Finlayson aptly addresses Foucault’s critique of the „entrepreneurial subject,“ which fits squarely with the rule of neoliberalism and the New Right. I would add, against more typical Guardian writers like Finlayson, that the Corona pandemic showed how the atomized people were being made into their ostensible saviors: panic-induced self-masking, isolating, and „segregating“ (“Absonderung”, a Nazi word, executive directives read exactly as they did in 1933 or 1938).
The state is no longer responsible for a functioning health system, which has been systematically underfinanced for decades due to capitalism, the greed for profit of politicians, health insurance companies and hospital companies, but the individual is responsible for not getting sick! In an infectious disease where no human – no human! – can know where to get infected and how.
So either everyone is locked up (2020) or the vaccination apartheid is executed (2021/22) and since April 2020 all people have been forced to mask themselves – in public local and long-distance transport in Europe this regulation has only applied in Germany since spring 2022. The disastrous effects of the medically irrational masking in hospitals and retirement homes cannot be estimated – tens of thousands of inmates or patients will have died earlier or died at all, because as a human being you cannot live without empathy, i.e. without seeing other people and to feel. But these collateral deaths were readily produced by politicians, the media and society.
In any case, the bottom line is that in 2020 and 2021, without any lockdown and without any mask mandates, Sweden had less than half as much excess mortality than Germany, according to a study by the World Health Organization (WHO).[60] Another text criticizing the New Right deals exclusively with the Intellectual Dark Web flagship Quillette:
In its political and socioeconomic dimensions, Quillette might therefore be said to further destabilize contemporary and long-held dichotomies between liberal democracy and far-right politics, variously engaging both with tenets of liberalism and exhibiting far-right and neo-fascist elements.
Some Quillette writers’ various embrace of neoliberalism, along with their excuse or promotion of racism, radical traditionalism, and affirmation of pseudo-scientific hierarchies, demonstrate Landa’s observation that, far from representing liberalism’s primary antagonist, fascism can variously serve to reinforce the supremacist, elitist, and exclusivist premises of the (neo)liberal order. Liberal democracies, as demonstrated so dramatically in the 2020 US presidential election, can also provide for the emergence of far-right violence.[61]
Hope: Gad Granach’s Zionism
The pro-Israel scene, on the other hand, has been dominated for many years by conservatives and the New Right. One example is the neoconservative English bestselling author and anti-immigration activist Douglas Murray, whose books, such as one on “The Strange Death of Europe. Immigration, Identity and Islam” was liked to be read by far-right Hungarian President Victor Orbán, who posted a picture of himself while reading the Hungarian edition of Murray’s book on Facebook.[62]
On her new Twitter account, on July 20, 2022, Kathleen Hayes promotes and is very enthusiastic about Douglas Murray. On July 28, 2022, she is touting the London Conference on Antisemitism in September 2022, where, as shown, she is not only a participant, but will be a speaker, as she euphorically emphasizes.[63]
Using the example of Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia, pro-Israel activist and former Donald Trump administration official and representative of the US pro-Israel camp, Kenneth S. Marcus, and publicist Henryk M. Broder, I have criticized these new-right tendencies in the pro-Israel scene in recent years.[64] I also experienced this myself when, because of my left-wing criticism of Trump’s right-wing extremism and sexism, the board of directors of the (NGO) Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, which I had co-founded in 2007 in Berlin, unanimously dismissed me in 2017, which is an honor. I don’t want anything to do with people like that anymore.
Israel deserves better than support from the New Right and from people who until a few years ago were antisemitic themselves for decades – like Kathleen Hayes – and today agitate against gender theories and publish on sites like Quillette that considers the American Nazi Party as „Conservatives“ who were blocked by Twitter. Resocialization matters, also for former “cult” followers such as Hayes – but as hateful as Kathleen Hayes agitates against the „gender ideology“, she should perhaps think about it for a few years before posing as a pro-Israel activist and author, who primarily harbors resentment against transsexuals. On the other hand, she is of course right, she finds similar agitators ideologically friendly to the New Right or the transphobic Left and feminist circles in the self-proclaimed pro-Israel scene.
Of course, the conference by Hirsh and his allies will have a few lectures about the danger deriving from the Right like in the US. But as along as someone like Kathleen Hayes, who writes for the New Right journal Quillette, appears at the conference, this is nothing but a farce.
What kind of world is this? What kind of pro-Israel scene is meeting in London in September 2022? Doesn’t it fit today’s Israel, where a right-wing extremist, religious fanatic and anti-Palestinian agitator like Itamar Ben Gvir might get up to 13 seats, which would mean the third-largest faction in the next Knesset elections with the party „Religious Zionism“ at the beginning of November? A Ben Gvir who, as a 19-year-old, agitated against Prime Minister Rabin in 1995, damaged his state car and warned that Rabin would soon be attacked personally – and a few weeks later Rabin was murdered? The Times of Israel reports on this in a long critical feature on Ben Gvir. Ben Gvir was also one of the organizers of anti-LGBTQ rallies:
Additionally, the far-right Religious Zionism party, which now controls six seats in the Knesset, has three members openly hostile to LGBT rights: Avi Maoz, leader of the Noam faction, and Itamar Ben Gvir and leader MK Bezalel Smotrich, organizers of the 2006 “beast march” in Jerusalem, in which religious opponents of the Pride March walked with donkeys.
There is more anti-gender and transphobic activism in Israel, analyzed by the site Pinknews from the UK and illustrated with an LGBTQ-flag, including a star of David, used by Zionist protesters in Israel:
Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party and self-described “proud homophobe”, helped to organise the 2006 anti-LGBT+ “beast parade” when World Pride came to Jerusalem.
The “beast parade” saw right-wing activists trace the Pride parade route with donkeys and goats, claiming the animals were above LGBT+ people because they hadn’t “sinned”. Other Knesset members under the Religious Zionism alliance umbrella include Itamar Ben-Gvir, who leads the Otzma Yehudit party, and Avi Maoz, founder of the anti-LGBT+ party Noam. Ben-Gvir has celebrated the killing of Palestinians, has previously been convicted of inciting violence and supporting a terror group, and believes the “Arab enemy” must be “expelled” from Israel. Maoz’s Noam party has compared those who fight for LGBT+ rights to Nazis and suicide bombers, and was founded solely to oppose LGBT+ rights.
Unfortunately, Quillette’s, Fathom’s and Kathleen Hayes anti-gender rabble-rousing fits with such agitators as Ben Gvir.
What wonderful times those were when Zionists like Gad Granach (1915–2011) wrote about their life in Israel:
In any case, I am of the opinion that these so-called ’settlers‘ should be left to dry out, simply ignored, neither supported nor protected. (…)
That would be a short process if the ’settlers‘ on the West Bank were simply left to their own devices (…). Incidentally, what does ’settlers‘ even mean? Have they ever done anything for the land they ’settle‘ on?
They haven’t planted a single bush yet. The day before yesterday they were still in Brooklyn, today they want to explain to me what Zionism is. In 1936 I settled on Arab soil that we bought from the Arabs, but we worked it and we actually built. Avodah Yehudi, Jewish work, was very important at the time, and rightly so. No Arab built our houses, as is customary today. There’s the story of the Israeli who strolls through the streets of Shabbes with his son. He says: ‚You see, that house over there, I built that. And here’s the road, I built that too when I was young. And I laid the water pipes over there‘. Then the little son says to his father in astonishment. ‚When you were young, were you an Arab?‘[65]
The new London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism around David Hirsh certainly has the very important intention of fighting today’s anti-Zionist antisemitism. But with his inflationary talk of antisemitism regarding Russian tweets, which only reflect – based on mainstream media reports – how inhumane Ukraine is also using civilians as protective shields in this war, Hirsh completely discredits himself as an antisemitism researcher.
Notably by inviting Kathleen Hayes to speak at this conference, who publishes with the “Intellectual Dark Web” magazine Quillette, which presents the American Nazi Party as “conservatives” blocked by evil Twitter, Hirsh loses credibility as a critical researcher.
Finally, Hayes‘ announced talk, based on her two articles on Quillette and Fathom, reflects an increasingly transphobic climate in the UK. Her perfidious statement that people who would not take biological sex for granted would also be open to denying the truth about the Holocaust is egregious and transphobic. This is also an inflationary use of the accusation of antisemitism. Such individuals are invited by the London Center for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, but not a word is heard about the very real Ukrainian antisemitism and street naming after perpetrators of the Holocaust and antisemitic ideologues, who paved the way of the Shoah in Ukraine. And that speaks volumes.
Criticism of antisemitism in London will be left-wing and anti-fascist, or it will not be.[66]
Endnotes
[1] In the following endnotes original German quotes (like from newspapers or other sources) are translated by the author. Titles of articles and books are quoted in the original with a translation following in brackets. Clemens Heni (2011): Schadenfreude. Islamforschung und Antisemitismus in Deutschland nach 9/11 [Schadenfreude. Islamic Studies and Antisemitism in Germany after 9/11], Berlin: Edition Critic.
[2] Clemens Heni (2002): German Political Culture: The Relationship to Anti-Zionism and Jihad before and after 11 September 2001, published online with the page hagalil on December 17, 2003, https://www.clemensheni.net/german-political-culture-the-relationship-to-anti-zionism-and-jihad-before-and-after-11-september-2001/. I also criticized Heidegger and Foucault in my talk, by the way. The German Embassy, a co-sponsor of the event, run riot after my talk. The audience and the host, Wistrich’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), though, were very supportive. As a doctoral candidate, I became a Felix Posen Fellow at SICSA in 2003 and 2004.
[3] Clemens Heni/Thomas Weidauer (Ed.) (2012): Ein Super-GAUck. Politische Kultur im neuen Deutschland [A Super-GAUck. Political Culture in the new Germany], Berlin: Edition Critic, darin Clemens Heni (2012a): Die Abwehr der Erinnerung an den Holocaust und die komparatistische Obsession [Rejecting Holocaust Memory and the Comparative Obsession], ibid., pp. 7–42. One of the contributors to this anthology is the Holocaust historian, publicist and professor of Yiddish Dovid Katz from Vilnius in Lithuania. He has been a critic of Putin and Putinism for many years. In March 2022 he wrote, among other things, about the war in Ukraine:
„What is the upshot? That just as elsewhere in pro-Western Eastern Europe, a small but disproportionately powerful coterie of far-right pseudo-patriotic history rewriters, among them highly educated and sophisticated historians, politicians and state apparatchiks, all Holocaust revisionists in their passion to have as national heroes Hitler collaborators, have done so much harm to their own countries. It’s enough to peruse Defending History’s sections on Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and more (see Countries). Incidentally, the motivation of these small, overly influential elites is (mis)guided by two forms of racism: inability to concede their nations’ leaders acted wrongfully during the Holocaust (what country’s history has no dark spots?), and the demented desire for a (supposedly) ethnically pure country (in other words, quiet satisfaction with the results of accomplished ethnic purification).
Each time a ‘Bandera Street’ is inaugurated in Ukraine, glorifying the World War II fascist, whose hordes murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles of all ages and both genders on an ethnic basis (i.e. genocide), Ukraine and its prestige are dealt an unfair and undeserved blow”, Dovid Katz (2022): Ottawa Citizen & N.Y. Times Break Media Silence on Self-Damage of Eastern NATO/EU Democracies by Public-Space Adoration of Holocaust Collaborators, March 20, 2022, https://defendinghistory.com/ottawa-citizen-n-y-times-break-media-silence-on-self-damage-of-eastern-nato-eu-democracies-by-public-space-adoration-of-holocaust-collaboratorsce-on-self-damage-of-eastern-nato-eu-democracies-by-pu/109618.
[4] Efraim Zuroff (2022): 5 EU countries that shouldn’t be throwing stones. Accusing Russia of rewriting the Holocaust for its current propaganda is fair – but not when you’ve always whitewashed the Holocaust for your own purposes, 27. Juli 2022, The Times of Israel (Blogs), https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/5-eu-countries-that-shouldnt-be-throwing-stones/.
[5] „Israeli lawmakers outraged after Zelensky compares Ukraine war to Holocaust“, March 20, 2022, https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hjn3nxbf5; „Zelensky compares Kremlin’s actions to Nazi ‘final solution’ in Knesset speech“, March 21, 2022, https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/zelensky-compares-kremlins-actions-to-nazi-final-solution-in-knesset-speech/: „Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been criticised by some Israeli politicians after delivering a speech to the Knesset in which he compared the actions of the Kremlin with the Nazi ‘final solution’. In a 12 minute-long speech, in which he referenced the ‘people of Israel’ several times, Zelensky also drew flack after saying: ‘Ukrainians made their choice 80 years ago, we saved Jews, and there are among us righteous gentiles.’ After Sunday’s speech – the latest in a series of pleas made by Zelensky to politicians across the globe including the UK’s parliament – one Likud MK Yuval Steinitz said the president’s message ‘borders on Holocaust denial.’”
[6] https://www.memoryandconscience.eu/; https://www.memoryandconscience.eu/2022/06/11/opening-of-the-new-museum-of-the-victims-of-communism-in-washington-dc/.
[7] Clemens Heni (2010): Against the equation of National Socialism and Communism – Fight the Prague Declaration, conference presentation on March 15, 2010, article online March 21, 2010, https://www.clemensheni.net/against-the-equation-of-national-socialism-and-communism-fight-the-prague-declaration/. The original post read: „In October 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution gave birth to the deadliest ideology in human history – Communism.“ That is Holocaust denial, anti-Communist style. On Dec. 8, 2009, this was on their site, as the wayback machine documents, https://web.archive.org/web/20091208161141/http://www.victimsofcommunism.org/history_communism.php.
[8] https://victimsofcommunism.org/.
[9] https://www.uni-passau.de/internationales/ukrainehilfe/vortragsreihe/.
[10] „Judith Heitkamp: A definition of the term war of annihilation says that in such a war ‚all physical and psychological limitations are lifted‚. If one follows the news about the Russian warfare, does one have to speak of a war of annihilation by Russia against Ukraine?
Herfried Münkler: I do believe that it can be done. In any case, it is not recognizable that the usual restrictions and limitations of international warfare law, which were developed in the late 19th and over the course of the 20th century, have a relevant position in this war. In principle, it is a question of independent military action in which assumed military requirements dominate and the restrictions of wartime law take a back seat,“ „Herfried Münkler über Kriegsführung in der Ukraine. Warum Russland einen Vernichtungskrieg führt“, 14.04.2022, https://www.br.de/kultur/gesellschaft/interview-herfried-muenkler-ukraine-russland-vernichtungskrieg-mariupol-kriegsverbrechen-100.html.
Well: In the Second World War from September 1, 1939 and in the German and Wehrmacht war of annihilation from 1941 to 1944, six million Jews and 27 million Soviets were murdered, thousands of villages were completely wiped out and Jews and Soviet commissars were deliberately murdered, Hannes Heer/Klaus Naumann (1995): Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Nothing even remotely comparable has happened in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Even the neo-Nazis of the Azov Brigades, who had holed up in a steelworks in Mariupol for weeks, were not murdered with carpet bombing, but ultimately surrendered to the Russian army and the pro-Russian units on the ground. No war of annihilation anywhere. War is terrible enough! The word „war of annihilation“ has an exclusively propaganda and NS-trivializing function.
The historian Hubert Brieden said about Münkler in a program for Radio Flora from Hanover: „Münkler, mass media and politicians claim that Russia’s war against Ukraine is a war of annihilation. The leader of the Greens, Ricarda Lang, justified the German arms deliveries to the Ukrainian government a few days after the start of the Russian attack on Ukraine with a „war of annihilation“ allegedly planned by the Russian government. At that time, the Ukrainian government reported 352 civilians killed.
In Germany’s war of annihilation, at least 27,000,000 people died in the Soviet Union, 14,000,000 of them civilians. An integral part of this war of annihilation was the systematic murder of the Jewish population. In the further course of Russia’s war against Ukraine, there were no indications that Russia wanted to systematically exterminate the Ukrainian population or parts of it for racist reasons. It is a war with bombing and rocket attacks, street and house fighting and consequent destruction and deaths – that’s bad enough – a war like in Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria etc. but it is not a war of annihilation. The association with the Nazi genocide program serves to justify supplying arms to a war zone and an armament program unprecedented since 1945.
This type of war propaganda works on the same pattern as Josef Fischer’s Auschwitz lie in the war against Yugoslavia. Andriy Melnyk, the Ukrainian ambassador who has since been recalled, never tired of talking about Russia’s war of annihilation. At the same time, he downplayed the involvement of Ukrainian nationalists led by Stepan Bandera in the Holocaust. About 1.6 million Jews were murdered by the Germans and their local allies in what is now Ukraine. Shortly after taking office, Melnyk, who has been Ukrainian ambassador to Germany since January 2015, laid flowers at the grave of one of the main people responsible for the mass murder of Jews and Poles in Ukraine.
His belittling of Bandera led to protests by the Israeli and Polish embassies in 2022 and ultimately to his dismissal,“ Hubert Brieden (2022): “ … wow, wir stehen nicht nur auf den Schultern von Joschka Fischer, sondern auch auf denen unserer Großväter.“ Deutsche Kriegspropaganda: Verharmlosung des NS-Vernichtungskrieges und des Holocaust, Radio Flora, 18.07.2022, https://radioflora.de/wow-wir-stehen-nicht-nur-auf-den-schultern-von-joschka-fischer-sondern-auch-auf-denen-unserer-grossvaeter-deutsche-kriegspropaganda-verharmlosung-des-ns-vernichtungskrieges-und-des-holo/.
[11] The network „Remembrance + Future in Hanover e.V.“ shows the inflationary talk of „genocide“ in a very exemplary way when it wrote in a newsletter at the end of March 2022:
„Here with us, many are disturbed and stunned by the fact that the Russian ruler has now followed up the numerous announcements and actions of recent years that he wants to restore the former Russian-Soviet great power with further aggressive military actions. Stunned that a mafia-like, power-obsessed nomenklatura led by a Chekist who rules with murder, manslaughter and genocide is destroying years of self-suggestion.” Putin is an autocratic, anti-liberal and brutal ruler, but he has not committed genocide. What are these networkers in Hanover talking about? Which genocide?
[12] Lars Rensmann (2004): Demokratie und Judenbild [Democracy and the perception of Jews in Germany], Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
[13] https://de-de.facebook.com/lars.rensmann (as of August 8, 2022). Some ex-authors of the only left popular monthly magazine in this country – Konkret – are particularly insidious – such as Lars Quadfasel, Tom Uhlig, Alex Feuerherdt, Ramona Ambs, Elke Wittich, Olaf Kistenmacher, Marit Hofmann, Leo Fischer, Jan Süselbeck, Elke Wittich, Lothar Galow-Bergemann and others –
https://kontrast-mittel.org/2022/06/30/warum-wir-nicht-mehr-fur-konkret-schreiben/ –, who now no longer want to write for Konkret because Konkret does not want to become a member of NATO and the ‚Western community of values‘ – the pseudo-left agitators* put right-wing extremist journals like Compact with Konkret on the same level in relation to the Russian Ukraine war:
“For us, the authors of Konkret, a red line has been crossed with the editorial course on the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. We don’t want to and can’t continue to publish in a magazine that is close to the AfD, the volkish wing of the Party of the Left or with Jürgen Elsässer’s [right-wing extremist] Compact Magazine, Henry Kissinger, Klaus von Dohnanyi or the lobby groups of German industry on this issue.“
German industry, by the way, rejoices at the 100 billion that Scholz & Co. want to spend on the Bundeswehr in view of the historical possibility of finally being able to kill Russians again, albeit indirectly via Ukrainian soldiers, but with German tanks, howitzers and other things should use murderous tools instead of politics employing diplomacy and skill.
Just as perfidious is an online Journal called „Kritiknetz“ by the former lecturer at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences Heinz Gess, who also puts Compact Magazine and Konkret Magazine in the same line; Heinz Gess (2022): Stinkender Misthaufen? Zur Querfront in Putins Krieg [Stinking dung heap? To the transverse front (Querfront) in Putin’s war], in: Kritiknetz – Zeitschrift für Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft, https://www.kritiknetz.de/images/stories/texte/Gess_Misthaufen.pdf. The editorial staff of Konkret had already taken a clear stance against Putin and the war on February 24, the day Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine began
„We do have no concrete understanding of Moscow’s power-political ambitions and the Russian push to smash the ‚Vladimir-Iljitsch-Lenin-Ukraine‘ (Vladimir Putin), nor is a commitment to the free-democratic world order of the West to be expected from this magazine, a Western world which always discovered his great love for peace when the West itself had not just started a war of aggression.” A “long version” of a statement (which came as a short version in issue 8/22) on the Konkret homepage also says:
“The discussion will be continued in the next issue – including an article on the development of Russian foreign policy over the past 20 years and on the question of how and when Vladimir Putin, who was trying to get closer to the West, became a chauvinist warlord. (…) 3. But why did the authors of the call for a boycott, although they were invited, not take part (anymore) in the discussion? They give two answers to this question – one untrue and one childish. The untrue:
‚In his (Lars Quadfasels) view, there has been less and less room for controversy and exchange lately. For the March issue, Quadfasel wrote a critical article on the subject. After that it shouldn’t have been possible anymore‘, he said on the Twitter page of the NDR media magazine ‚Zapp‘ in the context of an interview that ‚Zapp‘ had conducted there with Quadfasel. Konkret has obtained a cease-and-desist declaration against the NDR because of this obvious untruth (up to and including the May issue, Quadfasel published articles on the Ukraine war in Konkret); the broadcaster has removed the passage from the network. (…) Finally, one more thing: The Konkret boycotters have put the motto on the homepage on which they published their ‘declaration’ (contrast-medium.org): ‘Contrast medication are medicines that are not intended to cure or alleviate serve illnesses, but help to identify them.’ The metaphorical use of the term ‚illness‘ to label unpopular (political) opinions, and thus the pathologization of the political opponent, is fascist idiom“, Editorial Heft 8/22, Langfassung, https://www.konkret-magazin.de/727-editorial-heft-8-22-langfassung.
[14] For all these topics see the book by Gerald Grüneklee/Clemens Heni/Peter Nowak (2022): Nie wieder Krieg ohne uns… Deutschland und die Ukraine, Berlin: Edition Critic [Never again War without us… Germany and Ukraine], which was published in late July 2022.
[15] „Goldsmiths asks student union to begin antisemitism probe over Jewish lecturer slurs“, 19. Mai 2022, https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/university-opens-anitisemitism-probe-as-jewish-academic-called-far-right-supremacist/.
[16] https://mobile.twitter.com/DavidHirsh.
[17] „Amnesty International wirft Ukraine Völkerrechtsbruch vor. Die Unterbringung von Truppen in Wohngebieten habe die Zivilbevölkerung gefährdet, heißt es. Russische Medien instrumentalisieren den Bericht ihrerseits“ [“Amnesty International accuses Ukraine of violating international law. The accommodation of troops in residential areas has endangered the civilian population, it is said. Russian media exploit the report for their part”], August 5, 2022, https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000138043310/amnesty-international-wirft-ukraine-voelkerrechtsbruch-vor.
[18] „Hamas‘ use of human shields is a war crime“, May 13, 2021, https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/teich-hamas-use-of-human-shields-is-a-war-crime.
[19] „Bericht zu Pflegeheim-Angriff : Tote Zivilisten: UN machen Ukraine Vorwürfe“ [Nursing home attack report: Dead civilians: UN blames Ukraine], July 9, 2022, https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/kriegsverbrechen-zivilisten-un-bericht-ukraine-krieg-russland-100.html.
[20] „Putin sorry for Lavrov’s claim Hitler was part Jewish – Israel PM“, May 5, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-61339749.
[21] „OHCHR is concerned that in the course of hostilities, both Russian armed forces and affiliated armed groups as well as Ukrainian armed forces took up positions either in residential areas or near civilian objects, from where they launched military operations without taking measures for the protection of civilians present, as required under IHL.16 OHCHR is further concerned by reports of the use of human shields, which involves seeking to use the presence or movement of the civilian population or individual civilians to render certain points or areas immune from military operations. The use of human shields is specifically prohibited by article 28 of Geneva Convention IV and article 51(7) of additional protocol I”, June 29, 2022, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/ua/2022-06-29/2022-06-UkraineArmedAttack-EN.pdf.
[22] https://mobile.twitter.com/centre_as.
[23] I dealt with documents about the “not one inch” offer by James Baker, the Americans and Germany, Clemens Heni (2022): “Not one Inch”, Ukraine und NATO-Osterweiterung im Kontext oder: Amerika plante 1959 91 Atombomben auf Ost-Berlin zu werfen” … und die UdSSR wurde im Februar 1990 von Baker, Bush sen. und Kohl “ausgetrickst” [„Not one inch“, Ukraine and NATO eastward expansion in context or: America planned to drop 91 atomic bombs on East Berlin in 1959 … and in February 1990 the USSR was tricked out by Baker, Bush sen. and German chancellor Kohl], February 13, 2022, https://www.clemensheni.net/not-one-inch-ukraine-und-nato/; Jonathan Guyer (2022): “How America’s NATO expansion obsession plays into the Ukraine crisis. The post-Cold War debates shaping the current standoff with Russia“, January 27, 2022, https://www.vox.com/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-expansion; Svetlana Savranskaya/Tom Blanton (2017): Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner. Slavic Studies Panel Addresses “Who Promised What to Whom on NATO Expansion?”, December 12, 2017, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early; Mary Elise Sarotte (2010): Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO Enlargement in February 1990. Diplomatic History, 34(1), pp. 119–140, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24916036; Mary Elise Sarotte (2021): Not One Inch. America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
[24] https://londonantisemitism.com/about/.
[25] „‘The authors of The Black Book of Communism are part of a welcome change in the moral-philosophical landscape in Paris, and one hopes elsewhere, as a result of which liberal and left-of-center intellectuals, scholars and politicians judge the crimes of communist regimes with the same severity they’ve applied to those of Nazism and fascism.’—Jeffrey Herf, The Washington Post Book World”, reads the blurb by Herf for the book on the homepage of the publisher, Harvard University Press, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?content=reviews&isbn=9780674076082. For criticism of the Holocaust distorting Black Book of Communism see Jens Mecklenburg/Wolfgang Wippermann (Hg.) (1998): Roter Holocaust? Kritik des Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus [Red Holocaust? Criticism of the Black book of Communism], Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag.
[26] It is very common to ignore Holocaust distortion via the Red equals Brown ideology, I dealt with it in the first issue of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism: Clemens Heni (2017): Antisemitism in the Twenty-First Century, Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1–9, here p. 3. DOI: 10.26613/jca/1.1.1, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.26613/jca/1.1.1/html?lang=en.
[27] Clemens Heni (2021): Antisemitismus im Zeitalter von Corona (BICSA Working Paper, Januar 2021 – Jubiläum, 10 Jahre BICSA) [Antisemitism in the Age of Corona], January 31, 2021, https://www.bicsa.org/allgemein/antisemitismus-im-zeitalter-von-corona-bicsa-working-paper-januar-2021-jubilaeum-10-jahre-bicsa/.
[28] https://londonantisemitism.com/conference-21st-century-antisemitism/.
[29] „KEY 01 – Opening Ceremony – World Health Summit 2021“, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJFKBritLlc. See the discussion about that video and Corona gene therapy in Clemens Heni (2021a): Corona-Panikorchester in großen Nöten: ARD-Faktenfinder – “Gentherapie” – Ivermectin – Spotify – Onchozerkose [Corona panic orchestra in great need: ARD fact finder – „gene therapy“ – Ivermectin – Spotify – onchocerciasis], 02. Februar 2022, https://www.clemensheni.net/corona-panikorchester-in-grossen-noeten-ard-faktenfinder-gentherapie-ivermectin-spotify-onchozerkose/.
[30] Clemens Heni (2021b): Jenseits der Agitation im Tagesspiegel: Antisemitismus als einigendes Band? #allesdichtmachen, die CDU (Maaßen) und die “Schwarmintelligenz” der BASIS [Beyond the agitation in the daily Der Tagesspiegel: Is antisemitism common ground for critics of Corona policies, like #allesdichtmachen, including remarks about Far Right politician Maaßen and the new party Die BASIS], 12. Mai 2021, https://www.clemensheni.net/jenseits-der-agitation-im-tagesspiegel-antisemitismus-als-einigendes-band-die-cdu-maassen/.
[31] Since 2021 we know that vaccinated people against SARS-CoV-2 are exactly as long and as intense contagious as not vaccinated people, as a major study of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US and the US Ministry of Justice have shown: “Transmission potential of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in a federal prison, July—August 2021“, November 19, 2021, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.12.21265796v1.full-text. Every single differentiation between vaccinated and not vaccinated people is an Apartheid rule and has to end immediately. Since 2021 most people who died with or from Covid-19 were vaccinated.
[32] „Schwerer Vorwurf an Horst Seehofer (CSU): Politische Vereinnahmung von Forscher:innen in Geheimdokument?“[„Serious accusation against Horst Seehofer (CSU): Political appropriation of researchers in a secret document?“], 09. Februar 2021, https://www.fr.de/wissen/schwerer-vorwurf-an-horst-seehofer-csu-politische-vereinnahmung-von-forscherinnen-in-geheimdokument-90197291.html; „Wie bekommen wir Corona in den Griff?“ Internes Papier aus Innenministerium empfahl, den Deutschen Corona-Angst zu machen“ [„How do we get Corona under control?“ Internal paper from the Ministry of the Interior recommended making Germans afraid of Corona“], 11. April 2020, https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/aus-dem-innenministerium-wie-sag-ichs-den-leuten-internes-papier-empfiehlt-den-deutschen-angst-zu-machen_id_11851227.html.
[33] „Lockdown policy ‚madness:‘ Israeli scientist tells i24NEWS“, 31. Dezember 2020, https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/coronavirus/1609424065-lockdown-policy-madness-israeli-scientist-tells-i24news; Clemens Heni (2021c): Hope is in the air: the Israeli ‘Common Sense Model’ for Corona in context, 02. Januar 2021, The Times of Israel (Blogs), https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/hope-is-in-the-air-the-israeli-common-sense-model-for-corona-in-context/.
[34] Clemens Heni (2020): Yes, we can: Celebrate the End of Trump, November 8, 2020, The Times of Israel (Blogs), https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/yes-we-can-celebrate-the-end-of-trump/.
[35] https://fathomjournal.org/about-us/.
[36] https://fathomjournal.org/fathoming-the-intellectual-revolution-of-our-time-1-punch-a-terf-and-smash-the-zionists-misogyny-and-antisemitism-in-the-contemporary-western-left/.
[37] As early as May 2020, world leading epidemiologist Professor John P.A. Ioannidis from Stanford University in California, estimated the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid-19 at 0.23 per cent. His study was submitted on May 13, 2000, a revised version resubmitted on September 13, 2000 and the paper was then accepted on September 15, 2020. The study was published as a WHO Bulletin on October 14, 2020, John P.A. Ioannidis (2020): Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data, https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/340124/PMC7947934.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Compare this to the IFR of the Influenza epidemic in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1969/70, which was at 0.29 per cent, see a study by co-workers at the now infamous Robert Koch-Institute (RKI) in Berlin, Udo Buchholz et al. (2016): Todesfälle durch Influenzapandemien in Deutschland 1918 bis 2009 [Deaths by Influenza pandemics in Germany 1918 through 2009]. Bundesgesundheitsblatt 59, pp. 523–536 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00103-016-2324-9. Not one of the useless and antidemocratic measures such as lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccination apartheid, isolation, quarantine, stop of international supply chains etc. were used and enforced in 1969/70. In August 2022, in Germany the Case Fatality Rate is 0.13 per cent, which is two to ten times higher than the epidemiologically important Infection Fatality Rate, as most people do not realize that they have Covid-19, do not see a doctor and have not really a serious problem with their cough, sniff or sore throat. The average age of death from (or with) Covid-19 from the beginning was 80+ years, it was even 82,5 years in 2021 in the UK, which is above life expectancy. A huge amount of official Covid deaths did not die because of the virus, but only with a positive test, while there were other reasons for the death, comorbidities for example.
[38] John Campbell (2022): Freedom of information discussion, January 20, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UHvwWWcjYw; ONS Report (2022): COVID-19 deaths and autopsies Feb 2020 to Dec 2021, January 17, 2022, https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/covid19deathsandautopsiesfeb2020todec2021.
[39] In Fathom she writes: „The admonition for Jews to reject Zionism, remain in Europe and fight for socialist revolution ended in horrific ‘special Jewish sorrows’. That the Marxist movement’s dogmatic universalism left a terrible legacy has never been acknowledged by subsequent generations of leftists—and has left a deep reservoir of unexamined guilt“ (emphasis by the author).
[40] In addition to articles and book chapters, historian Robert S. Wistrich (1945–2015) published the following books on the topic of the Left and antisemitism, including the relationship of universalism and particularism: Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky (1976); Trotsky: Fate of a Revolutionary (1979); Socialism and the Jews: The Dilemmas of Assimilation in Germany and Austria-Hungary (1982, on Marx and antisemitism ibid., pp. 25–26); From Ambivalence to Betrayal. The Left, the Jews and Israel (2012). See also Julius Carlebach (1978): Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, London, Henley and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Edmund Silberner (1949): “Was Marx an Anti-Semite?,” Historica Judaica, 11 (April 1949); Robert Misrahi (1972): Marx et la question juive, Paris: Gallimard; for a discussion of Marx, antisemitism and the Left see in addition Clemens Heni (2013): Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon. Holocaust Trivialization – Islamism – Post-colonial and Cosmopolitan anti-Zionism, Berlin: Edition Critic, pp. 89–92, including a take on Marx and Bruno Bauer.
[41] Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1967): Denken auf eigene Gefahr. Ein Offener Brief an Peter Weiss über den Nahost-Konflikt [Think at your own risk. An open letter to Peter Weiss about the Middle East conflict], Die Zeit, July 28, 1967, http://www.zeit.de/1967/30/denken-auf-eigene-gefahr; Wolfgang Hildesheimer (1999): Briefe [Letters]. Herausgegeben von Silvia Hildesheimer und Dietmar Pleyer, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. On Hildesheimer’s criticism of Peter Weiss‘ Anti-Zionism see Clemens Heni (2018): Der Komplex Antisemitismus. Dumpf und gebildet, christlich, muslimisch, lechts, rinks, postkolonial, romantisch, patriotisch: deutsch [Complex antisemitism: dumb and educated, Christian, Muslim, left, right, post-colonial, romantic, patriotic: German], Berlin: Edition Critic, pp. 649–658. There I also quoted postcards that Adorno and Hildesheimer wrote to each other in August 1967, the first came from Adorno, where the critical theorist warmly thanked Hildesheimer for his criticism of Peter Weiss’s anti-Zionism in Die ZEIT, ibid., p. 654.
[42] Jean Améry (1976): Der neue Antisemitismus [The new antisemitism], Tribüne. Zeitschrift zum Verständnis des Judentums, Vol. 15., No. 59, pp. 7010–7014.
[43] Henryk M. Broder (1980): Danke schön. Bis hierher und nicht weiter [Thank you very much. Up to here and no further]. Mit Beiträgen von Detlef Hartmann, Ulrich Klug, Uwe Maeffert, Ulrich Vultejus, Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag; Henryk M. Broder [1980]/(1982): Zur Demokratie angetreten – ein Volk macht Dienst nach Vorschrift [Stand still for democracy. A people embraces it’s call of duty], in: Lea Fleischmann (1982), Dies ist nicht mein Land. Eine Jüdin verläßt die Bundesrepublik. Mit einem Nachwort von Henryk M. Broder [This is not my country. A Jew leaves the Federal Republic. With an afterword by Henryk M. Broder] , 4. edition, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe Verlag, pp. 251–272; Henryk M. Broder (1986): Der Ewige Antisemit. Über Sinn und Funktion eines beständigen Gefühls [The eternal antisemite. On the meaning and function of a constant feeling], Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
[44] „We don’t like your love-song. Kritik des Antizionismus der Revolutionären Zellen – und anderer Linker heute“, January 2001, a scan of the brochure can be found here: https://clemensheni.net/wp-content/uploads/We-don-t-like-your-love-song-linker-Antisemitismus.pdf.
[45] Anthony Julius (2010): Trials of the Diaspora. A History of Antisemitism in England, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
[46] Clemens Heni (2007): Salonfähigkeit der Neuen Rechten. ‚Nationale Identität‘, Antisemitismus und Antiamerikanismus in der politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1970–2005: Henning Eichberg als Exempel [Welcoming the New Right into the Salon. ‚National Identity‘, antisemitism and anti-Americanism in the political culture of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1970–2005: Henning Eichberg as an example], Marburg: Tectum, pp. 87–88. [doctoral dissertation, University of Innsbruck, Austria, July 2006].
[47] Hauke Brunkhorst (1987): Der Intellektuelle im Land der Mandarine, Frankfurt a. M. (Suhrkamp; edition suhrkamp)[Intellectuals in the Land of the Mandarin]. Meanwhile, Brunkhorst has mutated into an irrational ZeroCovid-Professor, he supports the fanatic ZeroCovid movement: Clemens Heni (2021d): Das Untier wird politisch – “zwei Epidemien”: “Corona und Coronarr”. Ulrich Horstmann attackiert den Coronawahnsinn [The beast becomes political – “two epidemics”: “Corona and Corona maniac”. Ulrich Horstmann attacks the Corona madness], 23. Juli 2021, https://www.clemensheni.net/das-untier-wird-politisch-zwei-epidemien-corona-und-coronarr-ulrich-horstmann-attackiert-den-coronawahnsinn/.
[48] Brunkhorst 1987, p. 2.
[49] Ibid., p. 77.
[50] Ibid., p. 10.
[51] Milosz Matuschek (2019): Voltaires Erben 2.0 oder Warum das Intellectual Dark Web so sehr fasziniert. Intellektuelle Nonkonformisten um Dave Rubin und Joe Rogan haben eine alte Tugend neu entdeckt: Endlosgespräche mit furchtlosen Zeitgenossen über kontroverse Themen, Thesen und Trends zu führen. Live und ungeschnitten, also unverfälscht. Das neue Format kommt an [Voltaire’s Legacy 2.0 or why the Intellectual Dark Web is so fascinating. Intellectual non-conformists around Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan have rediscovered an old virtue: having endless conversations with fearless contemporaries about controversial topics, theses and trends. Live and uncut, so unadulterated. The new format is cool], NZZ, 16.52019, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/intellectual-dark-web-wieso-voltaires-erben-faszinieren-ld.1481641. The openness towards the New Right or left-wing conspiracy myths is typical of an appeal by Matuschek and his colleague, the YouTuber (WHAT a word and what a business model) Gunnar Kaiser, „Appeal for free debate spaces“, to which dozens of people then signed, which often appear in the mainstream media, on television or radio and at events, among the first signatories are also conspiracy ideologues on 9/11 such as Mathias Bröckers, https://idw-europe.org/; https://idw-europe.org/liste-der-unterzeichner/. For criticism of Bröckers see Ivo Bozic (2011): Mossad, wer sonst? Verschwörungstheorien zu den Anschlägen finden immer größeren Zulauf. Je absurder, desto beliebter [Mossad, who else? Conspiracy theories about the attacks are becoming increasingly popular. The more absurd, the more popular], 05. September 2011, Jüdische Allgemeine, https://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/politik/der-mossad-wer-sonst/:
“The conspiracy theorists are not only dependent on obscure esoteric publishers, such as Kopp-Verlag, which is particularly ambitious on the subject of September 11th, they also publish their books in well-known houses such as Piper, Westend and Knaur. And they always make it onto the bestseller lists, also because the book by Mathias Bröckers is hyped up in the German arts pages and by television magazines such as ‚Titel, Thesen, Temperamente‘ (ARD). Conspiracy theories about 9/11 are not only a phenomenon of left and right enemies of America and antisemites, but have firmly established themselves in the middle of society. They are all the more dangerous.”
[52] See also interesting information about Quillette here: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quillette. The German Mainstream online cultural magazine „Perlentaucher“ (Pearl diver) obviously finds the New Right style agitation of Quillette rather thrilling, and the magazine reported several times enthusiastically about Quillette and quoted the New Right platform, https://www.perlentaucher.de/9punkt/2018-11-13.html?highlight=Quillette#a69378, like on November 13, 2018: „Ideas. Amelia Lester tells politico.com what the ‚Intellectual Dark Web‘ (IDW) is all about, a loose association of intellectuals and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who oppose left-wing identity politics and claim values to advocate for enlightenment. Her favorite magazine is Quillette (from which The Pearl Diver has quoted several times), run by editor Claire Lehmann: This magazine ‚has at times received a massive repercussion on social media. Its authors have been thrown at everything from ‚clown‘ to ‚crypto-fascist‘. But fans of the site include pop psychologist Jordan Peterson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Harvard psychology professors Steven Pinker and New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, and columnists such as David Brooks, Meghan Daum and Andrew Sullivan.“
[53] Eoin Lenihan (2019): It’s Not Your Imagination: The Journalists Writing About Antifa Are Often Their Cheerleaders, May 29, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190529172934/https://quillette.com/2019/05/29/its-not-your-imagination-the-journalists-writing-about-antifa-are-often-their-cheerleaders/. Lenihan posted a video about an anti-Corona policy rally in the city of Ulm in the south-west of Germany in February 2022 on YouTube – „Spaziergang/Demonstration Ulm”, Germany – 25.2.22“, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZopHQQXuKqs; as long as this scene does not distance itself from right-wing extremists or the New Right of any kind, something like this happens again and again, although of course people can always be present at a public demonstration or rally who, if they are not exactly as well-known as Jürgen Elsässer from the right-wing extremist Compact Magazine or convicted Holocaust denier Horst Mahler etc., run along unnoticed and then take over the action for themselves.
[54] „The day after it was published, the article made its way to notorious white supremacist forum Stormfront, and I soon found out what was meant by ‘further study.’ A few weeks after Lenihan had his big day out at Quillette, I got a message from a friend warning me about a weird video that had just popped up on YouTube. As the Columbia Journalism Review describes, the video showed ‘imagery of mass shooters intercut with images of the reporters mentioned by Lenihan under the heading ‘Sunset the Media.’ ’ My face was there, next to those of a dozen other writers, activists, and friends”, Kim Kelly (2019): Quillette’s “Antifa Journalists” List Could’ve Gotten Me Killed. What a harassment campaign reveals about a darling journal of the intellectual dark web, June 14, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/154205/quillettes-antifa-journalists-list-couldve-gotten-killed; Jared Holt (2019: Right-wing publications launder an anti-journalist smear campaign, June 12, 2019, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/quillette-antifa-journalist-smear-campaign.php. A supposedly equidistantly but de facto supportive article by Cathy Young about the New Right, Quillette and Lenihan’s baiting, Cathy Young (2019): Antifa, Quillette, and Media Bias. Who got smeared?, July 3, 2019, https://medium.com/arc-digital/antifa-quillette-and-media-bias-a6fa7652d38a shows the embarrassing journalism of our time. A week later Young had to admit that she had played down the right-wing role of Lenihan, but her focus was on the „extremism of Antifa“.
[55] I wrote a book about the pro-Israel stance of the original Marxist Critical Theory, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, and the anti-Zionist Erich Fromm, including chapters on Judith Butler’s anti-Zionism, Clemens Heni (2014): Kritische Theorie und Israel. Max Horkheimer und Judith Butler im Kontext von Judentum, Binationalismus und Zionismus [Critical Theory and Israel. Max Horkheimer, Judith Butler, Jewry, Bi-Nationalism and Zionism], Berlin: Edition Critic.
[56] For a scientific analysis and criticism of Rowling and the current transphobic discourse among left and liberal feminists, see a master’s thesis at the FU Berlin in sociology from December 2021: Braedyn Ezra Simon (2021): IT ISN’T HATE TO SPEAK THE TRUTH”: ANTI-TRANS (GENDER) POLITICS IN THE UK AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GENDER CRITICAL FEMINIST MOVEMENT. A critical look into the colonial remnants of gender discourse, December 2, 2021, https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/32780.
[57] Alan Finlayson (2021): Neoliberalism, the Alt-Right and the Intellectual Dark Web, Theory Culture Society, Special Issue „Post-Neoliberalism?“, pp. 1–24, here p. 11.
[58] Clemens Heni (2020a): Die geistigen Brüder des Neonazis in Hanau: AfD, Merkelhasser, Don Alphonsos Agitation gegen „Kulturmarxismus“ [The spiritual brothers of neo-Nazis in Hanau: AfD, Merkel haters, Don Alphonso’s agitation against „cultural Marxism“], 20. Februar 2020, https://www.clemensheni.net/die-geistigen-brueder-des-neonazis-in-hanau-afd-merkelhasser-don-alphonsos-agitation-gegen-kulturmarxismus/.
[59] Finlayson 2021, p. 12.
[60] WHO (2022): „Global excess deaths associated with COVID-19 (modelled estimates)“, May 5, 2022 (Update), https://www.who.int/data/sets/global-excess-deaths-associated-with-covid-19-modelled-estimates.
[61] Imogen Richards/Callum Jones (2022): Quillette, Classical Liberalism, and the International New Right, in: A. James McAdams/Alejandro Castrillon (Hg.), Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy, London/New York: Routledge, pp. 121–148, here p. 145. In the text, the two authors characterize Nietzsche in a typically vulgar Marxist tradition and contrary to empiricism as anti-enlightenment and right-wing. In fact, Nietzsche was an anti-German and friend of the Jews. Imogen Richards has also written a scientifically questionable text on neoliberalism and the Corona pandemic that is just as little empirical as his false characterization of Nietzsche, where he factually misrepresents Sweden and speaks badly about the rational response in that Scandinavian country, Imogen Richards (2022a): Neoliberalism, COVID-19 and conspiracy: pandemic management strategies and the far-right social turn, Justice, Power and Resistance • vol 5 • no 1-2 • pp. 109–126, here p. 114. The fact that Sweden has less than half as much excess mortality as Germany, a heartland of the ZeroCovid madness, precisely because of its more liberal, epidemiologically more sensible policy, is of course not mentioned in this text.
[62] Murtaza Hussain (2018): The Far Right Is Obsessed with a Book About Muslims Destroying Europe. Here’s What It Gets Wrong. Rather than declaring the continent “dead,” it might be worth considering that every generation faces unique challenges, 25. Dezember 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/12/25/strange-death-of-europe-douglas-murray-review/.
[63] https://mobile.twitter.com/renegade_kathy.
[64] Clemens Heni (2017): Jews should stop supporting the Alt-Right and the enemies of the Jewish people, The Times of Israel (Blogs), November 18, 2017, https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jews-should-stop-supporting-the-alt-right-and-the-enemies-of-the-jewish-people/; Clemens Heni (2018): Kenneth L. Marcus’ Oxymoron: Trump and Civil Rights, March 12, 2018, The Times of Israel (Blogs), https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/kenneth-l-marcus-oxymoron-trump-and-civil-rights/; Clemens Heni (2019): Why is Germany’s Best Known Jewish Journalist Giving Speeches to Its Holocaust-Downplaying, Far-Right Party? February 4, 2019, Tablet Magazine, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jewish-journalist-defending-german-far-right. Clemens Heni (2019a): “Please give me some latkes before you kill me”: Jews and neo-Nazis in Germany, February 11, 2019, https://www.clemensheni.net/please-give-me-some-latkes-before-you-kill-me-jews-and-neo-nazis-in-germany/: “Our climate is in trouble. Both the climate and climate change as well as the political climate, the political cultures of our societies. My piece about journalist Henryk M. Broder on Tablet Magazine on Monday, February 4, has created some noise among the Far Right. That is no surprise and indicates the importance of the article.“
[65] Gad Granach (1997)/19985: Heimat los ! Aus dem Leben eines jüdischen Emigranten. [Without homeland. The life of a Jewish emigrant], recorded by Hilde Recher, Augsburg: Ölbaum Verlag, pp. 147–149.
[66] In times of the Corona pandemic and the pandemic turn, the Antifa movement in Germany has proven to be particularly aggressive, irrational and totalitarian – slogans like „we vaccinate you all“ testify to their willingness to use violence. Whether the Antifa movement acted similarly irrationally internationally, in Australia, the US, UK, France etc. would be worth a closer examination; Clemens Heni (2021e): “Wir impfen euch alle!” – Berliner Antifa zeigt ihr wahres Gesicht – ECHTE Antifas sind entsetzt [“We vaccinate you all!” – Berlin Antifa shows their true colors – real Antifa people are appalled], March 14, 2021, https://www.clemensheni.net/wir-impfen-euch-alle-berliner-antifa-zeigt-ihr-wahres-gesicht-echte-antifas-sind-entsetzt/.
