fascism

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“Indeed, both Jews and Arabs are the Children of Abraham; Jews descended from his second son Isaac (peace be on him) and Arabs from the first son Ishmael (peace be on him). To Moses, God Almighty revealed the Torah, as He revealed to Jesus (peace be on him) the Gospel.” – Shahul Hameed, onislam.net

Some very tragic events took place over the past few weeks. Several people were killed in a Kosher supermarket in the suburbs of Paris. A shooting took place around a synagogue in Copenhagen. Following these, a video titled “10 Hours of Walking in Paris as a Jew” appeared, which, considering the neo-conservative ties of the journalist who shot the video, was a nothing more than a PR stunt for those who absolutely want to promote the Aliyah of European Jews.

And the tragic news kept on coming. A Jordanian pilot slain by ISIS, increased ISIS presence in Libya, the murder of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, the ongoing civil war in Syria, and the ever-present situation in Gaza… The only glimmer of hope came from Oslo this weekend, where Muslims and Jews joined hands in a very mediatized show of solidarity. In the face of all this madness and insanity, some have responded with even more madness and insanity.

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The witch hunt that started in France against those were identified as “enemies of secularism,” and the birth of “radical” secularism – which in fact isn’t secularism at all, but just xenophobia in disguise –  are just a couple of examples of the “madness” that is in the air. The madness culminated in its apex yesterday in a report by the president of le Conseil répresentatif des institutions juifs de France (CRIF). In the report, the supposed voice of the majority of French Jews stated that Marine LePen – the leader of the fascist Front National, the most anti-Jewish of all French political parties – was herself irreproachable, that the only problems were caused by “some members of the FN,” and that, in fact, most violence perpetrated against the French Jewish community were the acts of “Young Muslims.”

Recently, the so-called peak in ‘extremist religious’ violence has allowed “anti-terrorism” legislations to be passed throughout the world, at the cost of civil liberties and of democratic rights. On the other hand, this violence has also empowered fascistic sections of Canadian and Quebecois society, allowing bigoted and xenophobic discourses to go unopposed, and garner mainstream coverage.

The same has happened within the Jewish community, as well. The violence perpetrated against people of Jewish descent, or of Jewish faith, has empowered a scary xenophobic discourse, which doesn’t draw a line between Islamism and Islam; between a fundamentalist minority that receives much more attention than the fundamentalist segments of other religions, and the overwhelming peaceful majority of Muslims. On the 70th anniversary of the Shoah, of the liberation of Auschwitz, we must stand firm against such kind of discourse – it’s a moral duty.

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French Jewish Defense League activists demonstrating in Paris, 2011. (Ligue de Defense Juive)

 

This, in no way, excuses anti-Jewish discourse or actions – they are despicable and must be fought. But those who perpetuate the most prevalent anti-Jewish discourse today, claim to to be the defender of our faith, and consider themselves the sole voice of the Jewish people. The political consequences of this is slowly showing itself, even here in Montreal, not more than a few blocks away from where I am writing this piece. The Jewish Defense League (JDL), considered to be a terrorist organization by Israel, the EU and the United States, and whose slogan, ironically, is “never again” has set up shop in Montreal this past week. To those in the JDL who stress the motto “never again” and the need to “defend the Jewish community from the Islamist threat” I have but one thing to say: The antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s is the Islamophobia of today, and if we really want “never again” to be more than a slogan, we must fight discrimination against any and every minority. We must fight discrimination in every shape and form.

The JDL’s discourse and the true notion of “never again” are antithetical. “Never again” is a universal call for tolerance, acceptance, solidarity, peace, and, most importantly, resilience against the horrors of xenophobia. Thus, if we truly want to follow the creed of “never again,” we must make sure we fight the presence of the JDL. We must fight all those who resort to a discourse that uses violence as a justification to perpetuate even more violence, that tries to justify one form of racism with yet another. It’s a discourse of hatred that disseminates itself in the disguise of religion, or of some higher moral ground, or in the drapes of secularism. It’s a discourse that is prevalent within the neoconservative movement across the globe right now. It’s a discourse that is at the backbone of the hatred that fuels ISIS, and other such Islamist organizations. It’s the ideological foundation of fascism and of fascist movements. It’s this discourse that links them all together.

We are all sisters and brothers. Either we fight together, or we will perish together as fools!

A luta continua.

News

It is an understatement to say that, during this past summer, tensions have been high. The Israeli carpet-bombing of Gaza exacerbated tensions all around the world. The other day, I overheard a conversation, which went a little bit like this: “You’re Jewish?” The answer was “Yes.” “Well you must be a Zionist then?” was the follow-up.

Jewish communities around the world are affected by the actions of the Jewish state. For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, because of the continuous tension between Arab nations and the new state of Israel, many Jews were forced out of their countries – countries, which they had inhabited for hundreds, if not for thousands of years.

Israel was supposed to be the refuge for the toiled masses of Eastern European Jews escaping the horrors of the Second World War, but from the outset of its creation, Israel came to be identified as the banner carrier, the symbol, and the sole defender of the entire Jewish culture and creed. Thus Zionism, which in itself was a relatively marginalized ideology within Jewish communities up until the end of WWII, became conflated with Judaism as a whole.

Pseudo-intellectual generalizations of the sort, supposedly “common knowledge”, are very slippery slopes indeed. Today the general knowledge — at least based on my few interactions within the past few months — is that all Jews are Zionists. There is quite a stark parallel to be drawn between this intellectual fallacy and the myths, for example the protocols of the elders of Zion, which were at the forefront of anti-Jewish propaganda at the dawn of the 20th Century. Such generalizations were, and still are, the breeding grounds on which fascist, nationalist and xenophobic groups lay their eggs of hate.

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In France, for example, the Front Nationale is trying to create bridges between themselves and the Muslim youth, who are rightfully revolted by the events in Gaza. This is a recurring event throughout Europe in this day and age. The French comedian and political activist Dieudonné and his highly controversial gesture “La Quenelle” are but part of a cultural trend that manifests the rise of a new anti-Jewish sentiment, whose slogan is “Every Jew is a Zionist” and whose fuel is the civilian casualties in Gaza.

Subsequently, anti-Zionism, as a result of these neo-fascist movements, becomes synonymous with anti-Judaism, thus allowing the Israel hawks or the right-wing Jewish diaspora to categorize any criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish, or anti-Semitic, which is a term I prefer not to use, because not all Semites are Jews.

On the one hand, every thing that is Jewish is seen as Zionist, and on the other everything that is anti-Zionist is seen as anti-Jewish. Even left-wing figures have been caught in this dreadful trap. George Galloway, leader of the British Respect Party, was caught equating all Israeli citizens with Zionists; although he must know very well, that there is a strong anti-Zionist intellectual contingent within Israeli academia and Israeli society at large.

Such intellectual shortcuts are dangerous, and there’s only one way to deal with them: going on a journey down memory lane. In most situations, in order to find solutions for the problems of today, we must dig into a past that has been, more often than not, purposefully omitted.

Before Zionism had the prominence and the global notoriety that it now has, it was a marginal ideal within the Eastern European Jewish community. Its main rival and anti-thesis was embodied by the Bund.

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The General Jewish Labor Bund of Lithuania, Poland and Russia was founded in 1897 in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was a socialist labor organization in the vein of the workers’ organizations sprouting-up throughout Europe at the time. Bundism — as it would be called — ideologically differed from other labor organizations, in the sense that it had the specific objective of uniting all of the Jewish workers within the Russian Empire, but its core principals and ideology were still based on the struggle to create an international workers movement that would uproot capitalist exploitation.

Bundism, was thus the nemesis of Zionism, because no dimension of Bundism appealed to any sense of ethnonationalism. The “Bundist” belief was that Judaism could be an internationalist creed, and thus the combination of international socialism and Judaism was a perfect match.

No wonder why, that, today, the Bund is all but forgotten, swiped under the rug. Zionism is a nationalist movement; a movement for the return of the Jewish people to the holy land. Parallels can be drawn between this ethnocentrism, which is at its foundation, and the ethnocentrism that serves as the foundation for the majority, if not the totality, of contemporary Western nationalist movements.

With the mounting xenophobia throughout the world, we are on the brink of a catastrophic head-on collision. Bundism is needed now, more then ever. A strong, inclusive, and tolerant Jewish alternative movement might be the dearly needed vaccination for our world’s predicament; not only for Jews, but for people of all walks of life. It is certainly needed in the current context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where the media is constantly saturated with close-minded Zionist rhetoric.

The antidote to dislodging the nationalist fear mongering, and avoiding a deluge of hatred, is going back to the roots of an internationalist interpretation of Judaism.

ArtsFilmFriday Film Review

The following is an in-depth analysis of the themes and subtext of Singham and Singham Returns, and as such contains Spoilers.

Lavish Bollywood spectacles, even more so than American action and genre movies, are a genre built on shallow, banal entertainment (and I say that with nothing but genuine love for shallow, banal entertainment) and as such, seem to come at us ready to deflect any attempts at in-depth analysis of their underlying themes and subtexts. The response one usually gets when one attempts a thoughtful deconstruction of something as superficial as a Bollywood film is something along the lines of “It’s just entertainment, man. Just turn off your brain and enjoy it.”

Well firstly, I can’t turn off my brain. If I could, I’d be a Zen monk and I’m not about to become one, robes do nothing for my figure. And secondly, the kinds of dangerous, destructive attitudes found in films like the ones I’m discussing here today are at their most dangerous when they come packaged in a way that makes them easy to brush off or ignore. There’s no situation, and I mean none, where it’s ok to watch something you find morally reprehensible and go “no big deal”, and yes that does include fiction. Because the more we get used to looking past things we know to be wrong, the closer we get to overlooking them not when they’re projected on a movie screen, but when they’re happening right in front of our faces.

Singham 1 posterSo, Singham, then. Singham is a duology of Bollywod action films starring Ajay Devgan and directed by Rohit Shetty, the second of which hit theaters recently. The first Singham is, for the most part, a fun enough bit of over the top Bollywood enjoyment, the story of a hard-nosed, incorruptible country cop who comes up against big city crooks and meets them with slaps, lion sound effects and the odd belt-beating. It’s all silly and theatrical and perfectly enjoyable, like all good Bollywood films in this vein ought to be. But then the ending comes along, and takes a shotgun to the kneecaps of our enjoyment. In the film’s climax, the heroic Singham, backed into a corner by a mob boss with every politician and bigwig in his pocket, brutally shoots his cowering foe in a staged suicide, with most of his fellow officers looking on in approval. It’s the kind of ending I would have read as satirical or tragic in any other movie, a sudden turn from silly action to a profound and troubling statement about the loss of incorruptibility in an increasingly corrupt world. But it’s played with such sincerity and Singham is painted as such a hero even after his morally questionable turn that any thoughts that this may be a statement against this kind of action are hard to justify. It’s an unsettling turn to say the least, a sudden gear shift from pure, dumb enjoyment to the realization that there are some seriously problematic subtexts going on behind all the tan shirts and mustaches.

Then I saw the sequel, and “problematic” became “terrifying” and “subtext” became “supratext”. In the finale of Singham Returns, when the cult leader/politician villain continues to manipulate the system and goes free after overwhelming evidence of his guilt comes to light, Singham and the rest of the police force dramatically remove their police shirts, casting off their “restrictive uniforms” and descend on the villain’s compound as a mob of white shirted, club-wielding vigilantes to violently beat their enemies into confession before executing them. In broad daylight. And even after Singham’s hand is stayed from killing the cult leader and his politician cohort by someone (rightfully) pointing out that they must be made to stand trial to show that law, order and due process must be seen to hold sway, the film ends on Singham covertly killing the two in a fiery car crash. Irony and satire are nowhere to be seen, and the transformation of the Mumbai police force into a vigilante mob is treated with all the celebration and glorification of any superhero movie.

The subject of police violence is on a lot of people’s minds lately, with the current events in Ferguson showing more and more of the terrifying nature of an increasingly militarized and brutal police force. But even without the Ferguson riots in the back of my mind, seeing a film that glamorizes police vigilantism, violence and out and out fascism to this degree is still terrifying.

Singham 2 poster

Fascist overtones in action movies, and glorification of police violence in particular, is nothing new to movies. Some of the most revered staples of action movie canon are pretty unseemly once you start looking under the hood. The Dirty Harry films, a series I’ll readily admit to enjoying, are a pretty blatant example of Reagan-era reassertion of the white male hero, who guns down “dirty hippies” and minorities with such fervor that one gets the sense that the entirety of the sixties themselves, with their movements toward equal rights and social change, are the real “bad guy” that Harry wants to introduce to his .44 Magnum.

But the Singham movies may be the first time that an action movie has genuinely frightened me with its politics, with its glorification of mob rule with a patriarchal, supposedly morally righteous hero at its front. These films present the ideal policeman not as a custodian of a balanced system of law and order, but a sanctified murderer who “heroically” takes the law into his own hands and installs himself as judge, jury and executioner, a choice celebrated by the film (and presumably the film makers).

Christ, even Dredd cast an ironic shadow on the actions of its masked hero, using high-framerate slow motion to turn the “kill shots” into grotesque spectacles whose disturbing nature cannot be ignored, and setting the film in a dystopian future, where this new system of law and order can be seen as just another symptom of a society on the brink of death. Singham seems to imply with full sincerity that the methods taken by its mustachioed protagonist would be a positive step in the fight against crime, that the solution to the problems of society is state sanctioned violence, and that the perpetrators of that violence should be seen as heroes and role models.

And the fact that all this comes in the form of a glitzy, ostensibly family friendly action romp that most will brush off as “just a movie” is almost as frightening as the contents of the film itself. People are going to watch this and not think critically about what they’re watching, and the kind of fascistic police brutality that is HAPPENING IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW will become just more entertainment to them. No, this is not “just a movie”. Someone wrote this, filmed this, and most likely believed that what they were saying was morally right.

That scares me. That scares the shit out of me. And I sure as hell hope I’m not the only one.

 

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In 1941 at the height of the Second World War on an island in many ways similar to Lampedusa, the island of Ventotene, two leaders of the resistance movement against fascism and members of the Italian Communist Party Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi, were held captive. Their captivity in many ways resembled what thousands of North Africans, Sub-Saharan Africans and Middle Easterners live on a daily basis in one of the hundreds of identification and detention centers that populate the European coastline.

Spinelli and Rossi would write one of the most influential documents  in favor of Pan-Europanism, The Ventotene Manifesto. The manifesto would be illegally smuggled on to the continent and distributed throughout the Italian resistance. The ideal of a socialist federal union of European peoples became a central idea to many resistance movements throughout the European continent, the hope and the aspirations of a war-torn generation of Europeans would be embodied within the manifesto.

While captive on the island of Ventotene, Spinelli and Rossi vowed to rid the peoples of Europe of the chains of poverty and misery, to liberate Europe from the grips of fascism, but also build a society in which “never again” would the European social and economic situation allow for the flourishing of Nazism or Fascism. Fast forward 72 years later. The remote Mediterranean island of Lampedusa is a pearl, home to what Trip Advisor acclaimed as the world most beautiful beach in 2013, it’s a corner of paradise within a sea of hell.

Since 1988, within the waters and washed-up northern shores of the Mediterranean, almost 20 000 migrants have lost their lives. Lampedusa has become infamous throughout the world as the ‘Guantanamo of Europe.’ In the past two months Lampedusa has become, even more so than it already was, the center-stage of a continual tragedy that is the European Union’s blatant disregard for human rights, their disregard for the situation of thousands of migrants that brave horrible conditions in the hope to find a better life in Europe.

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Lampedusa shipwreck victims (Image: Noborder network via Flickr, Creative Commons licence)

On the 3rd of October of 2013, 359 bodies were recovered from the worst recorded migrant shipwreck in recent history, several other bodies were never found. A mere two months later, Lampedusa was rocked by another tragic event, this time concerning the treatment of the detainees at the identification and detention center for illegal migrants on the island.

Hidden video footage surfaced throughout the internet showing several detainees having to strip and be ‘hosed down’ by security guards. This is not the first time that Lampedusa and the European immigration boarder security under the hospice of Frontex have been openly criticized for their treatment of migrants.

Frontex was founded in 2005 as a semi-private organization with the mandate to help the several different member-state boarder security coordinate their operations, on paper. In reality, Frontex is a paramilitary organization that functions in parallel to all other European security organizations and is accountable to no one, under only nominal surveillance from European elected officials and after several scandals has shown no will in upholding any basic standard of human rights.

The creation of Frontex, the privatization and militarization of Europe’s boarders, is a clear indication of the rise of neo-liberalism within Europe. And in reaction to neo-liberalism, an almost equal rise of xenophobia and extreme right-wing groups.

The first is the neoliberal, fostered by right-wing movements within the European Union, that have pushed for the deregulation of the labour market, of the banking system and the downsizing of the social state. On the other hand this same neo-liberal movement has pushed for the destruction of all barriers to ‘free-trade.’

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Frontex is the perfect metaphor of the rampant neo-liberalism that has infected Europe.  Under the mantel of ‘austerity’ the European right-wing has tried to recraft the European ideal from its original purpose, embodied in the Ventotene manifesto, that of building a common European society based on protecting the dignity and the social and economical well-being of all.

The reaction provoked by the  rise of neo-liberalism in Europe is the undeniable rise in extreme right-wing rhetoric unknown on such a scale since the pre-WWII period.  The economical fluctuations that have left so many Europeans in misery was produced by the same neo-liberal ideal that made the “Mediterranean a cemetery” in the words of the Maltese prime minister.

In a recent meeting in Brussels, the leaders of the European Community joined forces to continue persecuting migrants at sea instead of addressing the issues of lamentable conditions within the detention centers or actually create a more ‘humane’ policy for migrants upon their arrival in the Shengen zone. As per usual, with every conference in Brussels the outcome is more austerity, austerity on the land, austerity on sea.The fight against austerity must then be one conducted on land and by sea.

Lampedusa is our Ventotene, Lampedusa is the embodiment of everything that has went wrong on the path of European construction. The EU is currently a prison, a financial one, one in which the will of the markets trumps the will of the people. Xenophobic, racist and nationalist discourses are on the rise, neo-fascist paramilitary groups are once again flourishing.

These fascist for many offer an alternative to the establishment, to neo-liberalism. Unfortunately they are the armed-wing of neo-liberalism, the armed-wing of corporatism.

The European left must stand with the migrants of Lampedusa and others scattered throughout the Mediterranean, we must re-appropriate the European ideal and build in this day and age a society that fulfills the principals of the Ventotene manifesto. Lampedusa is a major crack within the walls of Fortress ‘neo-liberal’ Europe, time to tear down the walls.