[Marxism] The alleged anti-semitism of the oppressed

[Ozleft <Ozleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Broadly based movement of Arabs in Australia against Israeli-US state 
terror in Lebanon and Palestine carefully opposes attacks on Jews

By Bob Gould

Maybe we're a bit provincial in Australia, but it's very striking that 
the substantial movement of Arab communities against Israeli and 
US-backed state terror deliberately and carefully avoids attacks on Jews 
as such and concentrates its fire on state terror. In this they display 
much greater realism than Joaquin Bustello.

It's bizarre, politically reactionary and counter-productive for 
Bustello to be deliberately praising instances of backwardness towards 
Jews, and even to talk about condemning the whole Jewish population of 
Israel. What became of proletarian internationalism?

In Australia there is a substantial number of people of Jewish 
background who vigorously oppose Israeli state terror and they're pretty 
well received by the Arab mass movement.

It's particularly unpleasant and reactionary of Bustello to pass off 
peddling of the myths in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as 
relatively unimportant.

As a bookseller for 30 years or so I'm not infrequently asked for this 
booklet, and my standard response has always been that I exercise very 
little censorship and I only refuse to carry things such as child 
pornography, snuff movies, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and 
similarly racist publications that present themselves as historical fact.

I usually piss off Anglos who ask for the Protocols of the Elders of 
Zion with a modest diatribe, although I sometimes try to educate them a 
bit by telling them it's a Zionist secret police concoction, and 
sometimes I quietly say the Protocols gets it completely wrong anyway, 
that in Australia in proportion to population, fewer Jews own big 
capital than Presbyterians, and if there is a problem it's the 
Presbyterians who are the owners of capital and disproportionately in 
positions of power.

With people of obviously Arab background who ask for the Protocols I 
adopt a more pedagogic and courteous approach, but I tell them exactly 
what I think of the Protocols and demonising Jews. I usually get a 
rational response from Arabic people. One young bloke who came into my 
shop 10 or 15 years ago as a young law student, who I made my point 
about the Presbyterians to, is now a successful lawyer and a 
considerable figure in the Arab community campaigning against Israeli 
aggression. He said to me recently, with a bit of a laugh, that I was 
right about the Protocols, the big problem is the crazy Christians, like 
Bush.

Bustello's pandering to anti-Jewish backwardness is unprincipled, very 
bad tactical politics and offensive to serious Arab and to Jewish 
activists on the left, who have often lost relatives in the Holocaust or 
survived the Holocaust themselves, but nevertheless still oppose Israeli 
policy and practice.

Bustello is imposing his own reactionary perspectives on a mass movement 
of resistance of the Arab peoples, which is quite unlikely to follow the 
direction that he would impose on it from his Olympian, self-constructed 
anti-imperialist heights.


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