“God never spoke to an Arab.”
— Benjamin Disraeli, 1847
“Remembrance is, so to speak, interwoven with forgetfulness. That is why the Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi has pointed out that the opposite of “forgetfulness” is not really “remembrance” but “justice”.
— Carlo Ginzburg
“We don’t care who will win the election, Palestinian or Israeli. We don’t care; at the end of the day they are all Semitic, they are Semitic and they are cousins.”
— Muammar Qadafi, interview with BBC, 2007 (discussing his proposal for one state solution)
“Some preliminary psychological studies reveal that the character structures of anti-Semites are much more alike than the character structures of Jews·”
— Max Horkheimer (1948)
There seems to be a deeply engrained identification in the U.S. with capital. I see this most recently with the growth of antisemitic narratives regards Iran. The trope runs that the U.S. is the dupe of Israel, or is sleepwalking (sic) into war, or that somehow the ruling class and defense complex are just unwittingly being led into conflict with Iran. As they were, apparently, with Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan. Now I call this antisemitic because what this rhetoric is doing is to absolve the U.S. The fault lies with Israel — and by extension (and this is articulated openly) with the Jews. Not even the Zionists anymore. Western capital is innocent, in a sense. It is the wily and nefarious Jews. Now, on one…