As might have been predicted, Spiked sees the whole Anelka story as a storm in a teacup. Tim Black appears to treat the issue of antisemitism with deliberately obtuse flippancy.
“ While no one who actually saw it at the time recognised it as such, so byzantine was its symbolism, Anelka’s ingenious gesture was actually part of an attempt to incite Jew hate, invoke Holocaust denial and inspire an anti-Semitic lynching. Or something like that.
…
The reason for the current focus on Dieudonné in France, and the prompt for Anelka to roll out the gesture to mark a goal, is that Dieudonné was last week accused by the public prosecutor’s office of ‘incitement to racial hatred’, which, as in the UK, is longstanding legalese for ‘you can’t say that’.”
The first comment the article attracted, from ‘Un Faux Prêtre’, sums up the problems inherent in this kind of nonchalance.
By contrast, this excellent article in The Tablet attends seriously to the workings of antisemitism, and analyses exactly why this hateful meme has gained traction:
The quenelle is an even more perfect manifestation of this logic. In a year that crowned the selfie as its most au courant word, the quenelle works so well not only because it encourages its aficionados to post photos of themselves performing it, but also because it’s a meta-meme, one whose success depends not just on dissemination but also on imitation. Assuming that you aren’t a professional basketball player with a very good career-long field-goal average of .495, if you’d like your take on the quenelle to go viral, you have to set it up against some interesting backdrop, like a poster of Anne Frank or the front of the Toulouse school where those Jewish kids were shot not too long ago. Whereas the Shoananas, say, merely invites you to pass it along, the quenelle demands that you become part of the play. It’s interactive, and that is what makes it all the more dangerous. And it lives on social media platforms, where it can continue to spread without need for context or qualifications.
Whereas Tim Black frustratingly refuses to engage with the way symbols acquire – and change – their meaning, Liel Leibowitz is fully alert to these processes and to the way in which something innocent, or simply banal, may become a powerful vector for hatred.
This BBC sketch about the Israeli embassy has a much clearer meaning than the Quenelle, obviously, but its precise impact may also be dependent upon context. It features two actors, dressed as workmen, explaining to confused Londoners that their shops will have to be bulldozed in order to make way for an extension – a new conservatory – to the Israeli embassy. For me, the context included the messenger. I saw it being tweeted approvingly by Ben White – not a good start. I wondered if part of my dislike was due to my sense of how the sketch would be received rather than its actual content. Satire on the policies of the Israeli government shouldn’t be off limits. But although hyperbole is a mainstay of satire, exaggeration/misrepresentation of Israel’s actions is so widespread that jokes about building settlements on the moon may not seem so droll. One of the things I particularly baulked at was the workmen’s accusation (which is then repeated) that the confused or resistant Londoners are antisemitic. These foundless charges recall the ‘Livingstone formulation’ as defined by David Hirsh:
This formulation is a defensive response which deploys a counter-accusation that the person raising the issue of antisemitism is doing so in bad faith and dishonestly.
But I responded rather differently to this satirical animation, brought to us in 2011 by Michael Ezra even though it covers similar material at greater length and perhaps in a rather more abrasive style.
Yet watching something produced by and for this blog is rather different from watching a BBC3 sketch which is making one’s antagonists chortle and which is likely to be watched by people who think any expressions of anxiety about Israel-themed antisemitism are made in bad faith and who probably think Tim Black of Spiked has it about right.
Hat tip: FormerCorr
