Baraka, 4000 Israelis, and Antisemitism

        A number of comments I have read defending Amiri Baraka suggest that the recent criticism of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America” are due to the fact that he somehow challenged the political establishment and is now being punished for it.  In particular, he is celebrated by supporters as one who courageously challenges the policies of Israel.  They insist that it is only right-wing defenders of Israel who cry “antisemitism” whenever anyone criticizes Israel and that the goal of these apologists for Israel is to silence Baraka.

        If a criticism of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians were all that is at stake, I wouldn’t be troubled, since I myself remain quite critical of many of the policies of the current Israeli government.   Indeed, I have written letters and protested against them.   However, to regard the questionable lines in Baraka’s poem  as merely a critique of Israeli policies is an utterly unpersuasive defense.   To be sure, it is an attack on Israel, but one based on irrational conspiracy theories typical of antisemitism for at least a century.

          Who set the Reichstag Fire

          Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
          Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
             To stay home that day
          Why did Sharon stay away?

        Baraka accepts as fact the allegation that 4000 Israelis stayed home from their jobs in the World Trade Center on 9-11 because they were tipped off by the Israeli government, which knew in advance the exact day and location of the attack.   Anyone who still buys into the myth of the 4000 Israelis being warned about the 9-11 attacks at best indicates an enormous dose of gullibility and a considerable predisposition to the kinds of conspiracy theories that flourish among those on the extreme left and extreme right.   In an age of innumerable Internet rumors and hoaxes, this one began shortly after 9-11 and spread quickly.

        Baraka says his poem was written on October 1, 2001, just a few weeks after 9-11.  He claims he read about the 4000 Israelis on the Internet.   Perhaps one could excuse his acceptance of this myth as an unfortunate error in the confused aftermath of the tragedy.  Nonetheless, the notion that 4000 Israelis worked in the World Trade Center at all, that the Israeli government would warn its own citizens but no other people, that all 4000 would be contacted in time without a word about it slipping out to anyone else, and that noone would be able to locate a single one of these 4000 people to verify that they either worked in the WTC or were home on 9-11 is so ridiculous–regardless of one’s politics–that it’s hard to believe that it was taken seriously.

        The myth was most enthusiastically embraced by the Arab press [originating from a Lebanese TV report] and the "Arab street," many of whom remain convinced that Israel, not Osama bin Ladin, was the true force behind the attacks and benefitted most from them.  The shifting of blame for the crucifixion of Jesus from the Romans to the Jews as an early example of antisemitism was mentioned earlier in our discussion.   The myth of the 4000 Israelis operates with the identical dynamics.   It is understandable that many in the Arab world are content to deflect responsibility for 9-11 from a radical group of Muslim Arabs to Israel, the ultimate source of all evil in the world, in their view.

        A fairly good history of where the myth came from was already available by the end of
November 2001 [http://www.nocturne.org/~terry/wtc_4000_Israeli.html]  And a variety of Internet hoax services quickly put it on their lists of false rumors
[http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/wtcisraelis.htm
http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/israel.htm#pravda ]

        As the controversy over his poem unfolded, Baraka could have said he still despises Israel but regretted repeating what any reasonable person can now recognize as a nasty unfounded rumor.   It would not have damaged his criticism of Israeli policies and would have represented an admirable sense of intellectual integrity.   As my Psychology of Religion class recently studied, however, the response of devout believers to evidence disconfirming their beliefs is rarely to abandon those beliefs.   Rather, as Leon Festinger and others have shown, there is more likely an intensification of the original belief and closing ranks with fellow believers.    And this is precisely what happened with Baraka.   His response to criticism about his reference to the “4000 Israelis” myth, written a full year later on October 2, 2002,  is almost as telling as the lines themselves.  http://www.amiribaraka.com/speech100202.html  

        He totally refuses to apologize for the lines, or even reconsider their accuracy.   Rather he reaffirms his conviction that the Israeli secret service knew about the attacks on the world trade center in advance.   Here he quotes Michael Ruppert, a popular government conspiracy monger.   He now adds new myths about the Israeli companies that left the WTC. (also easily shown to be hoaxes, if one investigates).  Aside from large numbers of people in the Arab world who rapidly bought into the idea that the "4000 Israelis" myth proved Israel was behind the attacks, the main proponents of the story in this country presently are various neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. [Check out David Duke’s website.]   These groups also rail against the evils of Zionism, not to mention the “Zionist” control of the American media and government.    Everyone on the radical right knows that “ZOG” [Zionist Occupation Government] is really running Washington.   Of course, for these groups it is quite obvious that Zionist and Jew are interchangeable terms.

        It is striking that one thing the extreme left and extreme right seem to agree on is that Jews/Zionists are the biggest threat to world peace.  Both extreme fringes of the political spectrum appeal to the same classic myths of the incredibly dangerous power of Jews and Israel to manipulate world events.   Baraka insists that he never said Israel was behind the attacks, just that it knew about them and benefitted from them.  Yet there is something very intellectually dishonest here, typical of much conspiracy theory.   Baraka suggests that both Israeli and US intelligence picked up signals that some kind of attack was being planned by Al Qaida terrorists.  This is all common knowledge, something that the U.S. and other government intelligence sources themselves admit.   But from there Baraka goes on to assume that Israel had specific information about the exact time and place of the attack.   Depending on the depth of the conspiracy theory he is proposing, either Israel withheld this information from the U.S., its staunchest and most powerful ally, for its own selfish reasons, or else the Bush administration shared the same precise information and chose to do nothing about, because they also wanted (or even orchestrated) the 9-11 attack to justify their own attack on civil liberties and oil-rich Muslim countries.   Baraka says as much in explaining how the Nazis used the fire in the Reichstag, which they may started themselves, as a pretext for attacking their enemies and taking over German society.

        Conspiracy theories are virtually impossible to disprove and attempting to do so only makes believers think you are part of the conspiracy and that the plotting goes even deeper than they suspected.    Conspiracies in which Jews are the major conspirators have a long antisemitic history, the most famous, of course, being the century-old “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which allegedly describes the hidden plot of the Jews to enslave the world.   The fact that scholars have definitively shown this to be a forgery (and a plagiarized one at that) has done nothing to reduce its popularity among antisemites and many so-called anti-Zionists around the world.

        Underlying this accusation against Israel is an even older tradition of regarding Jews as dangerous traitors, an idea that stretches from the story of Judas in the New Testament to the Dreyfus affair in modern France.    Indeed, if it were true that 4000 Israelis and their government had saved themselves but allowed the thousands of other victims to go unwarned and unprepared, how else could they be regarded than as deceitful traitors?  And the loyalty of the major supporters of Israel, American Jews, is by implication likewise thrown into doubt.

        The Anti-Defamation League, a major American Jewish organization, was in the forefront of criticism of Baraka’s poetry, documenting his long history of hostility to Jews and Israel.  It is a fairly conservative organization and I don’t agree with all that they posted and many of their policy positions.   However, I found Baraka’s tirade against them quite revealing, especially his demand to know (expressed in a recent interview) "why the Anti-Defamation League is not registered as an agent of a foreign power."   So it is quite clear that Baraka’s anti-Zionism spills over onto many American Jews who may defend Israel from some of the pervasive distortions and attacks on Israel.   If Israel and the Israelis living among us have behaved treacherously and American Jews in organizations like the ADL and others are tantamount to its “foreign agents,” isn’t their loyalty, in Baraka’s view, also questionable?  (Again these kinds of innuendo are not new, as can be seen in charges from earlier eras that American Catholic were really more loyal to the Pope than to their country.)

        Today, Baraka insists that he has left his antisemitic past behind and is now merely an anti-Zionist.   As we all saw in the Trent Lott affair, what might seem like an isolated unfortunate comment is often the tip of the iceberg.   I won’t dwell on the history of Baraka’s attitudes toward Jews, from his seven-year marriage to a Jewish woman in the late 50s and and early 60s to his most nasty antisemitism in the 60s and 70s, when he reasserted his loyalty to radical black nationalism by penning such memorable lines as: “I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured” and romanticizing violence against Jews.   I find Baraka’s apologies about as convincing as Trent Lott’s.   What he seems to have apologized for is that he should have been using the term “Zionist” instead of “Jew,” but aside from that he feels he has nothing much to apologize for.   He can't be an antisemite because, he reasons,  it's Zionists he hates, not Jews.   The fact that he seems to regard most Jews as Zionists is a minor detail.   This hair-splitting about the term antisemite is a common defense in many quarters.   [Arabs sometimes claim that they can't be anti-semites, because Arabs themselves are Semitic.]

        It is indeed unfortunate that many Jews regard any criticism of Israel as antisemitic and use that as a way of ignoring legitimate political protest against the errors and abuses committed by Israel.   As a frequent critic of Israeli policies myself, I certainly don’t assume that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic.  However, I also believe that in many cases "Zionist" is simply a fashionable substitute for the term "Jew" and that the complaints are less intelligent criticism than a recycling of classic antisemitic theories about Jewish conspiracies to control the world.   If one looks honestly at Baraka’s words and record, the historical context of his ideas and images, and the list of other people who share his belief in a conspiratorial myth, I think one finds a deeply flawed and problematic figure rather than the persecution of an innocent and righteous man.   Let us choose our heroes more carefully.

Professor Stuart Charmé
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Rutgers University
scharme@camden.rutgers.edu