Debating "Antisemitism" with Josh Mitteldorf

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Check out Josh Mitteldorf’s Unauthorized Science Substack.

Is “antisemitism” a thing? Both sides seem to think so. Netanyahu, the ADL, and the rest of Organized Jewry won’t shut up about it. Meanwhile, more and more people are expressing negative views of Jews—sometimes reasonably and intelligently, other times not so much. That makes Organized Jewry (OJ, a.k.a. “The Juice”) work even harder to censor anyone who doesn’t like the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza…which in turn makes people hate OJ even more. And all that hate spells big bucks for the ADL.

Is there a way out of this mess? Today’s guest Josh Mitteldorf, like other reasonable people, argues that we should distinguish sharply between Jews and Zionism, and attack the latter while sparing the former. Josh obviously has a point, as more and more Jews rise up and denounce Zionism and/or genocide. A recent Washington Post poll that set off alarm bells in Israel showed that 61% of American Jews believe Israel is committing war crimes, and 40% say it is committing genocide. Then again, as the Times of Israel remarked, “94% of respondents accuse Hamas of committing war crimes against Israelis.” In other words, the American Jewish community as a whole apparently believes that the side that is committing tens of thousands of times more war crimes than its enemies is less blameworthy. That belief system is criminally insane. (And regarding what constitutes a war crime: Under international law, occupied peoples have the right to use violence to resist occupation, and settlers may be targeted whether or not they are in uniform.)

But if the American Jewish community (like the non-Jewish one that gets its information from Jewish-dominated media) is criminally insane, what does that make the Israelis? The overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews supports the genocide. And they are still running around proclaiming themselves “the Jewish state.” And that claim has not been decisively rejected by world Jewry. On the contrary, it is still widely accepted.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that Organized Jewry (OJ) i.e. the Jewish nation is on the whole a highly problematic group and a force for evil in the world. It’s equally reasonable to say the same thing about the American nation. These claims can be debated. But stigmatizing them is unacceptable. The notion that there are limits on how harshly we may criticize the world’s most-powerful-per-capita ethnic group, or the world’s most powerful nation—and that anyone who does so will be insulted as “antisemitic” or “anti-American”—is an abomination.

I think the whole notions of antisemitism and anti-Americanism are pernicious myths. I think the problem is not that there is too much harsh criticism of the Jewish and American nations, but too little. If people are fed up with these two groups, it is for very good reason. Unfortunately, both groups dominate big media and have succeeded in brainwashing the world into putting up with their crimes. That needs to end, and soon.

Josh Mitteldorf has a different perspective. But one thing we agree on is that individuals can and should rise up against the evils committed by their nation, and that there are plenty of heroic Jews and Americans who have done so…with more on the way, insha'Allah.

[The antisemitism debate begins around the 36 minute mark.]

Excerpts:

Josh Mittledorf: So I would introduce this by saying I’m in two ostracized camps. One is the conspiracy theorists who talk about 9/11 and assassinations in the 1960s, about COVID being a mass deception, and the CO2 narrative. That’s maybe the most contentious of them. And on the other hand, I’m in this group of people who promote parapsychology research and believe, of course, it’s been demonstrated many times beyond a reasonable doubt. And the interesting thing is that there’s no overlap between those two groups.

And I talk about the Gelman effect. Murray Gelman, the famous physicist from Caltech, picks up the newspaper and he’s reading the Tuesday New York Times science section and they talk about physics. And he’s just: “What are they talking about? This is not just incompetent. They’re making simple things harder. They are... It’s almost like they’re deliberately distorting the truth.” And he can’t believe it. He throws away the science section. He turns back to page one and he takes everything that he reads completely seriously. They must have it right.

So I see that on both sides. The people who are so skeptical about science reporting assume that the political reporting is on the up and up. And if anything, the politics of science is really bad, but the politics of politics, that’s much worse.

Kevin Barrett: Yeah, I believe the science section of the New York Times more than the page one…I’m just not educated enough about science to really debate it. You guys who are actual scientists, you probably find both of them equally ridiculous.

Josh Mitteldorf: Not equally ridiculous. I think as I go down different rabbit holes, I see that the picture of the world that’s painted in the mainstream media just has so little to do with…It’s a fictional world that we’re convinced to believe in. And what would happen if we had more contact with reality? What would happen if our culture absorbed these things? And I think the nature of the world is more psychical than physical. And the implications of that are beyond politics. They’re really profound, perhaps starting with the fact that death isn’t permanent, that we don’t know what happens after death. Maybe some people come back reincarnated. Maybe that’s the normal thing to do. Maybe there are thousands of years between incarnations and we’re doing something else during that time. But I’ve become convinced really only in the last 10 or 15 years of my life that it’s pretty certain that our awareness, our consciousness does not depend on a physical brain and has a life of its own. You can’t, keep people enslaved if they’re not afraid to die.

Kevin Barrett: Well that’s one of the problems that the materialist post-enlightenment west has had as it tries to plunder the Islamic world. There are a lot of people who are less afraid to die here. All of this threatening Hamas that’s going on right now, as Trump is blustering about “we’re going to do terrible things to Gaza if you guys don’t surrender.” What are you threatening? Terrible things to Gaza? It’s already been completely flattened and they’ve murdered a couple hundred thousand people and so on.

And then you see these Zionists getting on, debating, including on some pro-resistance platforms here in the Arab world—I’m watching all my news in Arabic these days—and saying, “oh, the problem with you guys is you just don’t surrender. You have to surrender! You have to be just like the Germans after World War II! You have to be just like the Japanese after we nuked them! You have to surrender!”

They’re never going to surrender, you know, because they know that death isn’t the end.

Josh Mitteldorf: I hadn’t heard that. It is a kind of courage that’s beyond... what I know in Western world and Western wars.

Josh Mittledorf: And I read your book, blogs, I listen to your podcasts and you’re really down on the Jews. And I would say two things. One is that some of the most effective outspoken voices against the genocide in Gaza and against the the Israeli project of the erasing the Palestinian people and taking over their land. Some of the most outspoken people are Jews. I’ve known Vera Sharoff for several years. I had a chance to meet her in person for the first time at a gathering a few weeks ago. She’s a Holocaust survivor and absolutely outspoken about this. She has a movie called Never Again is Now Global and it’s very much about the evils of Zionism.

Norman Finkelstein, before any of us was even aware of Gaza, was documenting, was going in there and documenting that the whole place is a giant prison city. Medea Benjamin, one of the founders of Code Pink, as a hero of mine, the most effective peace advocacy organization in the world. Glenn Greenwald has just hammered away at this issue. Max Blumenthal has been on top of it.

Kevin Barrett: Max Blumenthal’s gotten better and better. He’s amazing.

Josh Mitteldorf: So I’m saying it’s not Jews. The Jews... For better or worse, So I’m saying it’s not Jews. The Jews... For better or worse, we Jews are greatly overrepresented in every field and world leaders for the better and for the worse in science and music. How many of the great musicians in the world are Jewish? I mean, probably a quarter of them or something. A quarter of the Nobel Prize winners in science are Jewish or something of that order. And we’re a fraction of the percent of 1% of the people worldwide. So it’s not surprising that some of the people doing the most horrible things in the world are Jewish, but also some of the people doing the most heroic things in the world are Jewish.

And I want you to stop tarring the Jews and talk about how bad the Zionists are. Talk about how bad Netanyahu is. Talk about the crimes committed by the state of Israel. And even the legitimacy of the state of Israel. I no longer buy that Israel has a right to exist. I think they’ve sacrificed their right to exist by their behavior. The people, of course, have a right to freedom like any other people.

So the last thing I want to say about this is... Israel’s only line of defense, the only thing they can say in defense of the horrific things that they’re doing, is that if you oppose them, you’re anti-Semitic. They’re trying to lump the Jews and the Israeli crimes into one big category. And don’t help them with that. The Jews are this diverse force. And like any other category of people…there are good Jews and there are bad Jews.

Stop decrying the Jews. Focus your anger where it needs to be focused, which is on the crimes of the state of Israel and not on Jews as a whole.

(Read the whole transcript by clicking transcript above the video image at my Substack.)

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