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Everyone is expected to sing from sheet music prepared in Tel Aviv and in Western capitals, and if you dare resist, you’re an anti-Semite.
Introducing our columnist
Ismail Lagardien is an internationally recognised political economist and writer. He was educated at the London School of Economics, and holds a PhD in International Political Economy from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. His main interests are in global political economy, global finance and historical capitalism, and he has designed and taught a course in Islam and the Muslim World in International Relations.
THIS is the first of hopefully many columns that I will write for Muslim Views.
I write at a time of great danger to the global political economy; perhaps a greater danger for the countries of Western Asia and, to be sure, the greatest of dangers for the people of Palestine who are being killed in masses; their houses taken from them; their homes, families and community destroyed, and their religious and cultural institutions being erased.
The brutality and wanton cruelty of the Israeli army is a reminder of the earliest of holokauston, defined by the Greeks (sometime between 300 BCE – 600 CE) as systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder – and including ‘sacrificial offering to god’. The Israeli explanation for the mass slaughter is defended, precisely, as part of a biblical injunction and utterances by its leadership imply that the God they pray to sanctions the brutality and cruelty. And the West provides the arms.
It is probably unsurprising that Israelis have the support of the European world. We should probably include those countries like Singapore, and communities such as Hindu fundamentalists, that have close ties with the USA, and who support Tel Aviv directly or indirectly.
What this group, a veritable historical bloc – a configuration of societal groups, economic structures and sensibilities – has achieved, besides arming the Israelis and responding violently to protestors in support of Palestinians (people who oppose what is fittingly described as a genocide), and deflecting critical examination of wanton destruction, is to set the boundaries of criticism, commentary and analyses that do not fit tidily into the single-story narrative.
This is simply the belief that everything that the Israelis do is good and necessary, and anyone who disagrees is an anti-Semite. What the US, in particular, has done is elide ‘American national interests’, with Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’.
Policing the boundaries
There is nothing conspiratorial about the West’s response to people who speak out against genocide. The US has thrown its full support behind the Israelis and has detained academics and activists who were (spuriously) accused of being anti-Semitic – an accusation from which there is no return. The accusation of anti-Semitism, in the current phase of the Palestinian resistance that started with the Nakba, in 1948, is abused.
While there is and always has been rampant racism and bigotry against religious groups, against black and brown people, women and indigenous peoples in the Americas and the Antipodes (and anyone who is considered to be deviant) the charge of anti-Semitism has provided a shield for unbridled cruelty and injustice that is underway in Palestine.
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Responding to American journalist Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now August 2002 interview about accusations of anti-Semitism against Israel’s critics, the country’s former Minister of Education, Shulamit Aloni, said: ‘It is a trick we use. When from Europe somebody is criticising Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country [the USA] people are criticising Israel, then they are anti-Semitic.’
I am not conspiratorial, so I will not indulge the statement that ‘the American Jewish establishment’ controls the USA. What I will do is refer to expressed claims by Western historical bloc intellectuals, some of whom have said that charges of anti-Semitism have been exaggerated to shield Zionists from criticism, and it has been weaponised. These terms – ‘exaggeration’ and ‘weaponisation’ – were part of Anya Schiffrin’s riposte to wilful, expedient and quite manipulative claims of anti-Semitism, among other.
Schiffrin, Director of Columbia University’s Technology, Media and Communications programme, was talking to Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber, respectively the former editors of The Guardian and the Financial Times, on the April 10 edition of their podcast, Media Confidential. Between the three of them there is hardly a leftist, nor a radical cotton strand… I am a great admirer of Rusbridger, but we should not lose sight of the fact that they are actually intellectuals organically tied to the historical bloc that is spoiling for wars and regime change in countries like Iran.
As it goes, Tehran is in the crosshairs of the USA.
Right now, and since the current fightback against Zionism gained momentum on October 7, 2023, we are ‘witnessing the worst of humanity in all ways’ and ‘language is being hijacked’, wrote Karen Attiah of The Washington Post (again, not a radical or anti-establishment figure),
I often turn to the example of newspaper publishers and editors in Nazi Germany, who were never policed (directly) by Adolf Hitler’s goons; they simply knew what to say – if they wanted to remain in business. The media landscape (globally) has never been policed as heavily it is today. Everyone is expected to sing from sheet music prepared in Tel Aviv and in Western capitals, and if you dare resist, you’re an anti-Semite.
- This article was first published in the April 25, 2025 print edition of Muslim Views.
