Blaming the victim for anti-Semitism

by Asaf Romirowsky and Richard Cravatts, JPOST

Of late we have witnessed a new methodology used to suppress those who speak out against anti- Semitism in academia. Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, a Hebrew lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, and Ronnie Fraser, a lecturer in mathematics in London, have respectively taken on their schools and unions with regard to how anti-Semitism has infected their organizations and caused an uncomfortable, even hostile, environment based on the politics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

In Fraser’s case, he took on Britain’s University and College Union (UCU), claiming that the union had created a hostile environment for him as a Jewish member by engaging in anti-Semitic conduct. He argued that the behavior of the UCU, which included not only speech but also acts and omissions, was due to a prevailing culture and attitude in the union which was fed by contemporary anti-Semitism. Fraser lost the case, and the judgment revealed troubling issues about how some view those who try to identify, and expose, anti-Semitism as it currently exists in institutions of higher education.

The tribunal in the Fraser case not only found against the math instructor, but seemed to suggest in its ruling that Fraser got what he deserved, that he knew, or should have known. As the tribunal put it, that Fraser “is a Campaigner.

He chooses to engage in the politics of the union in support of Israel and in opposition to activists for the Palestinian cause… ,” and “a political activist accepts the risk of being offended or hurt on occasions by things said and done by his opponents….”

But this disingenuous decision is based on the defective view that an educational union should be acting in the first place as a political advocacy organization for the Palestinian cause; that it is appropriate that it obsessively and with vitriol attacks any union members who support Israel and accuse them of being racists, and that when a Jewish union member then feels that his Jewishness and personal morality are being attacked because he does not share the general anti-Israel sentiments shared by the UCU membership, he is merely “engaging in a political debate that is bound to excite strong emotions.”

The reality is that by the standards of the EUMC working definition of anti-Semitism (a definition this union, tellingly, had previously decided to reject completely), the union’s actions often times could be construed as slipping from mere advocacy of the Palestinian cause to what could certainly sound like, and, to a Jewish person, feel like, anti-Semitism.

Whether or not the union feels it is being anti-Semitic is not relevant; anti-Semites rarely admit to their behavior.

And the tribunal also weakened the ability of the victim here by asserting that attachment to Israel itself was not intrinsic to Jewishness, and that even if the union had chronically slandered, libeled and attacked Zionism and Israel, Fraser’s Jewishness was not, and should not, be an element in that debate. In other words, the fact that he was Jewish was only incidental to the debates in the UCU about Israel and the Palestinian cause.

“The tribunal’s decision is troubling because it asserts that a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel cannot amount to a protected characteristic. It is not intrinsically a part of Jewishness,” Fraser said. “For the court to say that as Jews we do not have an attachment to Israel is disappointing, considering we have been yearning for Israel for 2,000 years and it has been in our prayers all that time.”

The tribunal’s scolding of Fraser for even having brought the case forward in the first place was also consistent with a pattern that David Hirsch of Engage in England has termed “the Livingstone Formulation,” part of which is “the counter-accusation that the raisers of the issue of anti-Semitism do so with dishonest intent, in order to de-legitimize criticism of Israel. The allegation is that the accuser chooses to ‘play the anti-Semitism card’ rather than to relate seriously to, or to refute, the criticisms of Israel.”

So not only did the tribunal reject Fraser’s claims of endemic anti-Semitism within the UCU, it also found that Fraser’s very efforts to expose that anti-Semitism were not legitimate but merely an attempt to promote his own, pro-Israel agenda.

Hirsch notes that the tribunal, therefore, not only denies Fraser’s claim of the existence of anti-Semitism, but accuses him of using the anti-Semitism charge in bad faith; that “It is not possible to ‘use’ ‘the accusation of anti-Semitism’ in order to delegitimize criticism of Israel, without dishonest intent.”

On the other side of the ocean, Rossman-Benjamin has now come under fire for accusing the Muslim Student Association and Students for Justice in Palestine for having ties to terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. All are actively taking part in the international campaigns to demonize Israel.

And those same activist student groups who have been spreading virulent anti-Israelism, often morphing into anti-Semitism, throughout the California public university system – and who have done so obsessively and without sanction – are now accusing Rossman-Benjamin of being a racist in identifying anti-Semitism at her own university and elsewhere. She is now being branded a purveyor of hate speech and Islamophobia because she revealed the corrosive speech of Palestinian activists.

Rossman-Benjamin has been tirelessly campaigning for years against what she describes as “an advanced anti- Israel and pro-Palestinian discourse [that] has really dominated the campus square for over a decade, negatively affecting perceptions of literally hundreds of thousands of California university students,” and, more specific to this discussion, creating a hostile environment on California campuses for Jewish students and others who support Israel, or are assumed to, based on their Jewishness.

But the tactics and arguments used against Rossman- Benjamin are the same as were raised in the Fraser case – namely, that in each instance once the victim of anti- Semitism tried to reveal the sources and nature of that animus, they themselves were vilified for having brought up the topic in the first place.

If actual victims of anti-Semitism are never allowed to point to instances when this hatred occurs, if whenever someone is victimized and seeks redress they are accused of playing the “anti-Semitism card” to deflect criticism of Israel, actual anti-Semites will be immune from criticism or censure and the victim will be blamed once again.

Asaf Romirowsky holds a PhD and is the acting executive director for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), and Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, is the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews, and presid

April 22, 2013 | 7 Comments »

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  1. This is identical to RAPE crimes. The victim is guilty of “exhorting” the rapist … . It took thousands of years to realize that. Yet as we see all over the world, rape occurs everywhere and I MEAN everywhere and in the so called advanced societies too. It is probably the most common crime committed in every country.

  2. Where to begin? To state facts does not imply that they are well understood. Unfortunately, the conclusions reached by UCU are consonant with a worldview that we have yet to properly acknowledge here on Israpundit or on most other pro-Israel blogs. Jews, blacks and gays are seen as protected groups by the Left. Their existence is never an issue. Jews who support Israel, Blacks who support conservative causes and candidates, and Gays who refuse to be stereotyped by their sexual orientations are indeed grist for the mill for those on the Left. In fact, historically death has not been too harsh a punishment for members of these protected groups if their views varied from the accepted dogma of the Left. What is that overriding dogma?

    Let me deal here only with Jews who support Israel. Nationalism of any sort is chauvinism that blocks the ultimate removal of physical borders and psycho-social boundaries between all peoples. It is fully accepted among well-indoctrinated Leftists that small cultures and their unconverted followers will have to die in order to bring about Utopian order in the world. It is unfortunate, but the deaths of the individuals who support other cultural standards and practices than is implied in the imagined Universalism of Mankind is to be expected and even sought after. This view can never be questioned, modified or researched. The implication is that the deaths of Jewish infants and children at the hands of Muslims who seek the establishment of the Caliphate, which eliminates national boundaries, is to be accepted as a natural consequence of the Revolution. Showing the faces of the dead Jewish children to true Leftists yields indifference, acceptance, or even glee as the goals of the Revolution are being realized. Thus, it was possible for Leftists to continue to support Stalin even as he was engaged in starving millions of Ukrainians or purging Jews from the Communist party through the use of firing squads. Leftists, then, represent a social pathology that justifies the destruction of individuals for the sake of humanity – a perfect rationalization that only cracks at a time of crisis. These crises may have been engendered by personal experience, upon being thrown into a Gulag, or revelatory insights while holding the hand of a relative of friend as his life ebbed away after being crushed by the military arm of the The Party.

    In the end the UCU is no different in attitude than Stalin, the murderer of millions, who was able to kill the Jews who remained even marginally interested in the welfare of their brethren, while he wrote glorious condemnatory statements of Antisemitism as unacceptable in the People’s Utopia.

  3. The fatuous ruling by the Brits, applied to any other people, would be viewed as racist.

    Imagine if gays were being discriminated against and the court ruled that discrimination is okay because those who were subjecting them to hate were calling them “homos,” not gays.

    What if blacks were told by the court that they have no right to take action against the KKK who want to do them harm because the court had to consider the fact that the KKK used the term “Negros,” and not Blacks, and so the intent was not there and the case thrown out using sleight of hand semantic manipulation to justify the ruling?

    Add to that the insult of saying that Blacks (or Gays) were trying to somehow manipulate the public and infringing upon the free speech of others by being so self-centered and concerned only about one’s self-preservation when other Blacks may or may not not support you, and you have a snapshot of the true nature of this ruling against Jews.

  4. “it also found that Fraser’s very efforts to expose that anti-Semitism were not legitimate but merely an attempt to promote his own, pro-Israel agenda.”

    Yeah, let’s leave it to the anti-Israel groups to fight against anti-Semitism. This is how the academia and the Western justice systems perpetuate anti-Semitism: by sophisticating the issue into a matter of freedom of speech. Unrestricted vilification of Zionism is permitted in Western societies as though it were not an integral part of Judaism, as though such vilification is not a blanket condemnation of the Jewish people. It’s as Primo Levi said, “So our nights drag on.”

  5. Jews have always been blamed.

    In the past, Jews were blamed for not giving up on Judaism; today Jews are blamed for not giving up on Zionism.

    Nothing Jews do can ever win over anti-Semites and its high time Jews stopped apologizing to them for the things they have justifiably done as well as for the things they have not done.

    Jews are not at fault no matter what others think of them.