Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism and Syria

The popular comprehension of the Syrian revolution is grossly distorted by the way we think and talk about about Israel.

About that massive project for the Free Press

Lots of responses, follow-ups and fallout from my opus in the Free Press this past week: The Explosion of Jew-Hate in Trudeau’s Canada. I’ve done interviews with radio stations and podcast hosts in Toronto, New York and Tel Aviv, and there’s more to come. But closer to home, here’s a conversation about it all with my pal Bob Mackin, Vancouver’s foremost independent journalist.

In my coverage of this phenomenon I do hope I’ve haven’t paid inordinate attention to the sources of lurid “anti-Zionism” within the activist circles among Canada’s Muslim immigrants. The much more significant locus of the sociopathology is situated in Canada’s public institutions, and what you could call the popular culture, where an unmistakably antisemitic antipathy to Israel has become deeply entrenched.

In other words, it’s much less a problem of the mosques than of the faculty lounges, and you’ll never get your heads around that without understanding the trajectory of “left-wing” antisemitism in Canada. Having more or less come from the “left” myself, I’ve had my eye on the Left-Islamist convergence, with increasing dismay and revulsion, for the past 20 years or so.

In the Canadian context, it’s possible to follow the footprints of these unseemly ideological and organizational collaborations back to their origins. I’d strongly suggest reading this newsletter from October 14 last year (How could this be happening?) under the subhead The Blueprint.

For a broader sweep, I’d highly recommend Fathom Journal editor Alan Johnson’s extended interview with Susie Linfield, author of The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky.

Alan has been similarly paying attention to the Left’s abandonment of its bedrock principles for a long time. Which reminds me. The tragic degeneration of “progressive” politics was chronicled brilliantly and in real time by the late, great Manchester University professor Norm Geras, and Alan and I contributed the opening and closing essays to an anthology of his essays, The Norm Geras Reader, edited by Eve Gerrard and Ben Cohen. A handy resource.

How all this influences our comprehension of the Syrian revolution

The popular influences of the anti-Zionist milieu that came to occupy all the places where the Left used to be ended up radically distorting the public understanding of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow in 2003 and its aftermath, the NATO intervention in Afghanistan and the Arab Spring uprisings. This state of affairs persists in the case of the Syrian revolution.

Jubilation in the ruins of Assad’s Syria: The Butcher of Damascus is gone.

In recent weeks, there’s been a great deal of this sort of thing making the rounds: Meet the right-wing Canadian influencers accused of collaborating with an alleged Russian propaganda scheme. Fair enough, too. But pro-Kremlin and Assadist “influencers” of leftish pretentions have been far more effective, except it’s impolite to say so out loud.

Just one comical example was Eva Bartlett, who used to cover Israel for the official pamphlet of the Canadian Left: the undead Rabble webzine. Bartlett was famous for explaining the reasons why millions of Syrian refugees were fleeing Assad’s paradise this way: “NATO/Saudi/Zionist death squads.”

For background on the Canadians leading a lethal global network of pro-Assad, Putin-friendly conspiracy theorists, this should be useful: The Zombie Apocalypse That Wasn’t, which also deals with the largely imaginary threat of far-right crazies in Canada.

You want crazies? There’s the purportedly “left-wing” Greyzone media galaxy, Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, Aaron Maté, and Scott Ritter, Vanessa Beeley and sundry other “left-wing” media celebrities, most of whom I honestly can’t accurately situate because they’re indistinguishable from characters on the far-right fringes of Trumpworld.

My favorite case of bitterness over the jubiliation of hundreds of thousands of Syrians celebrating in Damacus, Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and so on over the past couple of days: the British demagogue George Galloway, icon of the Canadian “anti-war” movement and former CBC regular.

Infamous for routinely praising Assad as the last bastion of Arab dignity, this is what Galloway is saying now: "The Arab world is now dead to me. The Syrian Arab Republic was its last gasp."

Poor George.

So many Syrian stories, so little time

One of the most astute observers of the Left’s descent into dementia, specially on the Syrian question, is Yassin Al Haj Saleh, a leading intellectual among Syria’s revolutionary democrats. This is from way back in 2015, a piece I wrote for the National Post.

Saleh: “I am afraid that it is too late for the leftists in the West to express any solidarity with the Syrians in their extremely hard struggle. My impression about this curious situation is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us at all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate. So they do not really need to know about us …

“Rank-and-file Syrians, refugees, women, students, intellectuals, human rights activists, political prisoners, do not exist.”

This “curious’ situation” persists even now. It’ indistinguishable from the “right-wing” imbecilities making the rounds about the Syrian revolution, and about the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham coalition that led the final push to smash Assad and hiss allies among the Russians, the IRGC and its mercenaries, and the elite gangsters from dead man Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah.

I’ll have a great deal to report in the next couple of days about the historic events unfolding in Syria and the Greater Middle East, in the National Post and here. I will do my best to provide a compendium of links to necessary background information and various resources.

You’ll want to pay attention, because what is happening at the moment is every bit as significant as the Solidarnosc uprising in Poland in 1981 and the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade later. Perhaps more significant. In any case, our grandchildren will be talking about this.

So watch this space.