The Company They Keep: Antisemitism's Fellow Travellers
The Soviet analogy
The first fellow travellers were the early supporters of the Bolshevik revolution. [3] They were non-Party progressives who had, in Trotsky's phrase, "turned their eyes eastwards" [4] (though over time that came to include China - and then they turned westward, to Cuba). In the main, they were intellectuals. The term did not at first have pejoratives overtones; many progressives were happy to describe themselves as fellow travellers. [5] The fellow travellers of the Soviet Union ("FTSUs") share many traits with those new anti-Zionists who are also antisemitism's fellow travellers ("FTASs"). [6]
- "There, but not here" advocates FTSUs tended to find the one-party state acceptable "there," i.e., in Russia, but not here, i.e., in the West. In the received sentiment, it was a solution for them, not for us; we do not need, or even want, it for ourselves; we are different here. Similarly, FTASs tend to find violence against Jews acceptable in Israel, but not here. Indeed, not just acceptable, but justified.
- Terror-apologists To the FTSUs, the indiscriminate murder of the kulaks was a necessary harshness. Violence inflicted either in defence or in pursuit of the revolution, and repression in the name of worthy ends, was worthy of endorsement. Similarly, to the FTASs, the indiscriminate killings of Jews by Palestinian suicide bombers are taken to be necessary protests, appropriate retaliations.
Indeed, for some these acts of murder are not crimes, but sanctified acts of resistance. [7] They demand respect, not condemnation. We are invited to find a language free of condescension that will allow us to understand why in a world of rampant inequality and injustice people are driven to do things we hate. [8]
Antisemitic anti-Zionism is so much part of the zeitgeist, it is reasonable to assume that many of the people who draw upon its tropes do so without reflection
Suicide bombing is not an act of injustice, it is a response to injustice. Indeed, it is an involuntary response ("driven") - "when life is a living hell what's wrong with going to heaven in a ball of fire? ... The wonder is that there are not more such acts of self-immolation, not that they occur at all." [9] These FTASs reject the proposition that setting out to destroy random members of a culture one finds unacceptable is an indefensible project. [10]
And when the arguments are exhausted, even the most puerile, [11] there is always the straightforward lie to be given a respectful reception. Madeleine Bunting, for example, interviews Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, reporting his statement that Palestinian suicide bombing is targeted at combatants, merely pausing to note that this is "something his critics would strongly dispute." Qaradawi is then allowed to continue, "'Sometimes they kill a child or a woman. Provided they don't mean to, that's OK, but they shouldn't aim to kill them. In every war, mistakes are made and non-combatants get killed ...'"[12]
- Reality-deniers The FTSUs romanticised; they propagandized; they misled. They sent despatches from Russia intended to dispel hostile impressions; they colluded in "conducted tours," when shown only what Party-minders presented. Famines, mass deportations, show trials, slave labour camps, killings, - all were suppressed or excused.[13] Russia only wants peace, whereas the Western democracies are warmongers and imperialists. The FTASs perform similar services for Ahmadinejad,[14] Hezbollah and Hamas. They deny the reality of antisemitism in the West; they regard it as either invented to suppress criticism of Israel, or else a misnamed European Muslim indignation. They deny the reality of antisemitism in the Middle East; they regard it as no more than a polemical extravagance.
- Adulators of the West's enemies Consider, for example, the Dean of Canterbury, writing in 1942: "Stalin was calm, composed, simple. Not lacking in humour. Direct in speech, untouched by the slightest suspicion of pomposity. There was nothing cruel or dramatic ... about Stalin's face. Just steady purpose and a kindly geniality."[15] Similarly, provided that the leader's anti-Israel credentials are solid, anything else will be excused. There is even a certain sycophancy shown towards antisemitic tyrants and party leaders.
- Indifferent to oppositionist intellectuals David Caute writes, "Both the Western communists and the fellow-travelling intellectuals deepened the despair of the non-official Soviet intelligentsia during the years of persecution and terror. In their darkest hours they heard themselves condemned by their own kind, by foreigners who shared their own idealistic traditions and whose immunity from imprisonment or death was due solely to the accident of nationality."[16] Similarly, there is no championing of reformists in the Arab / Muslim world. On the contrary. Tariq Ali's attacks on the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya (a "quisling", a "fraudster" and a "mountebank"), are typical, and recall, in their baroque vituperativeness, the Stalinist rhetoric of abuse. [17]
- Denunciators of "Red baiting," of "McCarthyism," of Islamophobia The characterisation of every criticism of the Soviet Union as "Red-baiting," and of supporters of the Soviet Union as "McCarthyism," resonates in the characterisation of every criticism of any Islamist position as "Islamophobia."
FTSUs were indifferent to Soviet antisemitism; FTASs are indifferent to contemporary antisemitic tropes mostly derived from the Soviet precedent. The connection between FTSUs and FTASs is thus more than merely analogical.
