This is a guest post by Ben Cohen of Z Word
Before today, I hadn’t come across the name of Brian Cloughley. But he’s writing for online rag Counterpunch – which stubbornly insists upon its leftist credentials despite being a fount of antisemitism – in terms that are indistinguishable from Klansman David Duke.
In defending his nationalist friends in Serbia, Duke has written of “the cadre of Jewish globalists who control American foreign policy.” Spurred to anger by the voice of a British rabbi, whom he doesn’t name but who defended Israel’s operation in Gaza in a BBC interview, Cloughley sounds just like Duke when he declares: “There are thousands like him in the UK and the US. They unconditionally promote Tel Aviv’s plans and policy and wield amazing influence over politicians and businesses. Killing Palestinians is Israeli policy, and these people spare no effort to justify it.”
That final flourish – “these people” – could have been written just as easily by someone satirizing antisemitism as by someone promoting it. At any rate, Cloughley couldn’t be clearer: the US and the UK are littered with wealthy Jews peddling influence on behalf of Israel.
These rootless cosmopolitans cannot be expected to be loyal citizens of the motherland. The offending rabbi, says Cloughley, “isn’t really British. He is an Israeli religious propagandist of British citizenship whose main allegiance is to Israel.” Just as the Soviet Communist newspaper Pravda, in 1949, railed against “profiteers with no roots and no conscience…non-indigenous nationals without a motherland.”
Soviet propagandists became experts in conjuring up euphemisms for the term “Jew.” So, in its own modest way, has Counterpunch. With both, the point is the same: Jews aren’t really like other people. They are disloyal, slippery and much too powerful.
When it comes to their own history, Jews are forever learning the wrong lessons. Elsewhere on Counterpunch, the musician and producer Brian Eno asserts: “By creating a Middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they’ve forgotten it.”
The “Jews-should-know-better” line is one we come across frequently. In terms of the tropes available to anti-Zionists, it is becoming more unoriginal with every passing day. Which is why it’s a shame to see someone like Eno, who has created music of stunning originality, sounding tiresomely like your average concerned celeb. And doing so in a journal that hates Jews to boot.