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The former ADL director called the Biden administration’s policy of isolating the Israeli prime minister “misguided” and “bordering on hypocrisy.”
By JNS
Former ADL director Abe Foxman on Tuesday slammed U.S. President Joe Biden for his “boycott” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In comments to The Jerusalem Post, the American Jewish leader called the Biden administration’s policy of isolating Netanyahu since he took office at the start of the year for his sixth term “misguided” and “bordering on hypocrisy.”
Foxman explained that the White House refusing to extend an invitation to Netanyahu “also sends the wrong message [not only] to Israel’s enemies, but also to its friends and allies. When friends disagree, they need to, and should, meet, speak to each other. This lack of invitation has become a politicized issue.”
He questioned why the White House welcomes to Washington leaders of countries with less democracy than Israel, calling it hypocritical.
“If you will, the president of the United States just welcomed the prime minister of India, a certainly flawed democracy with serious religious and civil rights abuses. He just welcomed Jordan’s King Abdullah to the White House—not exactly the paradigm of a democratic country,” he said.
“If MBS [Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia] indicated that he would want to come to Washington, he would receive a warm welcome. This boycott… undermines the [U.S.-Israel] relationship,” he added.
Foxman called on Biden to invite Netanyahu to the White House to discuss their differences.
Netanyahu confirmed on Tuesday that he will be visiting China next month. Foxman said that the Israeli leader visiting Beijing before the U.S. was probably due to the lack of an invitation from the White House.
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Kyriakos Mitsotakis delivers a speech in front of New Democracy party headquarters on June 25, 2023 in Athens, Greece. (Ayhan Mehmet / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The result was no surprise — but showed how much Greek politics has swung to the right. The conservative New Democracy clinched a definitive victory in the country’s second set of parliamentary elections on Sunday, winning 40.5 percent of the vote and 158 seats. The center-left Syriza and Pasok parties trailed with 17.8 and 12.1 percent of the vote, giving them forty-seven and thirty-two seats, respectively. “People gave us a safe majority,” said reelected prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. “The major reforms will therefore proceed with speed as this is the choice of the Greek people and I will honor it in full.”
But the big story of these repeat elections played out on what might once have been called the margins. Three far-right forces, two of which had never previously entered parliament, won seats. A party called the Spartans won thirteen seats, the ultranationalist Greek Solution won twelve, and the Christian-conservative Victory won ten. Together they garnered 16 percent of votes and thirty-five seats. Even in its postcrisis parliamentary heyday, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn had rang in around 7 percent support. These forces’ combined tally makes clear that, with Sunday’s election, Greece has elected its most right-wing parliament since the end of the military dictatorship in 1974.
The nationalist Spartans gained support especially quickly over the past month. In his first postelection speech, the Spartans’ founder Vasilis Stigkas thanked Ilias Kasidiaris, a historic leader of Golden Dawn, for his backing. Kasidiaris is currently in prison, convicted for his part in the criminal neo-Nazi organization that was found guilty of a murder and racist beatings across Athens. This did not stop Kasidiaris from founding the nationalist Hellenes party from inside Greece’s Domokos prison. After the Hellenes were banned from running in May’s first set of elections due to Kasidiaris’s criminal record, he threw his lot in with Spartans, endorsing them on his popular Twitter and YouTube accounts.
For their part, the Spartans’ platform calls for completely closed borders, “Greek-centric” education, “distancing” from LGBTQ rights, and the return of all ancient Greek artifacts from museums worldwide. Their messaging is nationalist with a specious classical bent: “We are the Greek ‘SPARTANS’ in soul and body! We are the ones who want and claim to be worthy of Leonidas’s 300 by guarding ‘Thermopylae’ again,” claims their website, along with a mishmash of other historical references. Founder Stigkas has ties with several other neo-Nazi parties in Greece and was once leader of Political Spring, a single-issue party opposed to the renaming of North Macedonia on the grounds that Macedonia is Greek alone.
The Democratic Patriotic Movement–Victory, or Niki, had surprised pollsters in May’s election, securing 2.9 percent rather than the predicted 1 percent. This time around it won even bigger and entered the parliament with 3.9 percent of the vote. This Orthodox-nationalist party’s political self-presentation warns that Greece faces a struggle against “hatred of the native Greek and his traditional family, the loss of the sanctity of gender and procreation, economic poverty crushing children and emigrating our young people, and their place being taken not by persecuted refugees but by illegal uninvited settlers.”
Its founder has close relations with many fringe conservative church organizations, as well as the monasteries of Mount Athos. The party is vocally antiabortion, anti-immigration, and opposed to COVID-19 vaccines. “‘Niki’ will mount a real opposition in the coming Parliament,” said party president Dimitris Natsios, in a postelection statement. “With respect for the vote of our fellow citizens and with the fear of God we will march fighting for the victory of Hellenism, the victory of human dignity, the victory of the common people.”
The other far-right party, Greek Solution, will reenter parliament down a few seats from its first entry in 2019, but still alive and kicking. This party often uses the slogan “Greece first, Greeks first.” It calls for Greek “economic sovereignty,” an increased fertility index, reduction of youth unemployment, the “return of illegally entered refugees and immigrants to their home countries,” and “respect” for the Greek culture and religion.
“We thank all Greek men and women,” said the party leader, Kyriakos Velopoulos, as the results came in. “The Greek Solution is too strong to die.”
Greek poll watchers have observed that these elections were not simply a success story for the far right, but also a result of the fragmentation on the other end of the political spectrum. University of London modern history lecturer George Giannakopoulos credited the results partially to “a historic failure of the Left.” He pointed to Syriza’s loss of support — the party has gone from winning the parliament (in a coalition with a small nationalist party) in 2015, to being the main opposition party with around 32 percent of the vote in 2019, to finishing this Sunday’s contest with only 18 percent.
Voters felt Syriza’s messaging was unclear, with many strongly disappointed by the party’s handling of negotiations with Europe and Greece’s creditors in 2015. Some Syriza voters moved toward the center-left stalwart Pasok, some to the far right. Others seeking anti-austerity solutions turned to splits such as MeRA25 (led by Yanis Varoufakis, failing to reenter parliament) or Course for Freedom (led by Syriza’s former parliamentary speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou, which did win seats).
Course for Freedom was also a surprise success story during the May elections, gathering almost 3 percent of the vote. On Sunday it performed about the same and edged just over the line to gain seats in the parliament. The party was founded by Konstantopoulou in 2016 as a splinter party opposed to the terms of the 2015 bailout and austerity. Some have critiqued the party as a cult of personality or, given its nationalist hues, simply “populist” and not leftist. After the vote a triumphant Konstantopoulou promised “an opposition that the Parliament has never seen before.” The other winner of the realignment of the Left was the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), which having fallen to only 5 percent in recent years, recovered to 7.7 percent, in line with its advances in May.
As for Prime Minister Mitsotakis, it remains to be seen how he will deal with this jumble of parties in his parliament. Will he swing even further to the right to appease the far-right voter base and work with them? His ongoing project for a border wall along the entire land frontier with Turkey and anti-immigration rhetoric will certainly find easier support.
The left-wing force MeRA25 did not garner enough votes to enter parliament this term. As the results came in, and it became clear the far-right had won big, its main leader, Varoufakis, regretted: “We were unable to convert the decade-long resistance against the disastrous bailouts into a progressive coalition . . . we failed to prevent the transformation of anger into a far-right movement.”
But the far-right parties who made their way into parliament have picked up on not just anger, but the ideological threads — and sometimes even the personnel — of long-running nationalist and extremist movements in Greece. “Many thought that by jailing the Golden Dawn, the problem with the far-right wing, fascism, neo-Nazism, in Greek politics was over,” said Giannakopoulos. “And that was clearly a mistake.”
Conservatives are sounding the alarm bells about “Marxist influence” on the contemporary right. (Hannelore Foerster / Getty Images)
Writing at the conservative National Review, Bobby Miller sounds the alarm bells about “Marxist influence” on the contemporary right. But what does he mean? Are there people with socially or culturally right-wing views calling for workers control of the means of production? Or endorsing Karl Marx’s theory of history?
Of course not. On the vast majority of economic issues, the paleoconservative “populists” Miller is so worried about are well to the right of the corporate wing of the Democratic Party. Some of them might be skeptical to one degree or another of free trade agreements or foreign policy adventurism, but good luck finding one who supports Medicare for All or wants to make it easier for workers to organize unions. They certainly don’t want to end private ownership of economic enterprises.
While this kind of misuse of the word “Marxism” to denote even the tiniest deviations from the Right’s free-market consensus is amusing, it’s also more than a little sad. Marxism — the real kind — is a powerful tool for understanding how capitalism works and how the working-class majority can act together to create a better society. We should strive to build a socialist movement powerful enough that when the National Review writers lose sleep about “Marxism,” they’re at least worried about the real thing.
Miller’s note in the National Review directs readers to a previous warning about “right-wing Marxism” published by Michael Lucchese at Law & Liberty. Lucchese lumps together “integralism,” “national conservatism,” and those who want to “revive the legacy of failed Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan” in his list of dangerous heretics from the GOP’s Reaganite consensus.
National conservatives, often known to both friends and enemies simply as “NatCons,” reject neoconservative talk of using Western military might to expand individual freedom around the world. It’s not that the NatCons see this rhetoric as a paper-thin justification for a foreign policy that has a lot more to do with protecting the interests of capital than spreading freedom to the people bombed or invaded by those militaries. And it’s certainly not that they’re left-wing anti-imperialists who believe in the international solidarity of the working class. It’s just that they reject universalist ideals about promoting freedom in favor of a focus on “national greatness.”
Leading NatCon intellectual Yoram Hazony devotes a whole chapter of his 2022 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery to fearmongering about the threat of Marxism. Ironically, he uses the word much the way Miller and Lucchese do — as a free-floating signifier of everything to his left that he fears. Liberal identity politics is, in Hazony’s mind, a disguised form of “Marxism.”
Integralists seek to make religious — generally Catholic — teachings the basis of law and public policy. They reject the idea of a pluralistic society where everyone is free to pursue their own vision of the good life. Instead, they want their own vision of “the common good” imposed from on high.
Integralists tend to be very clear on the distinction between their worldview and Marxism. One of integralism’s leading thinkers, Patrick Deneen, just published a book called Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Deneen is more intellectually scrupulous than Hazony about distinguishing between different “progressive” ideologies, but he writes in Regime Change that “classical liberalism, progressive liberalism, and Marxism . . . differ but also overlap.” Ultimately, these are different proposed paths to “transformative progress” but they come together in opposing “the premodern common-good conservative tradition.”
While many Marxists would bristle at being lumped together with our pro-capitalist ideological enemies, there’s an important sense in which Deneen is onto something. The replacement of feudalism and divine-right monarchy with capitalism and liberal democracy — what Marxists call “the bourgeois revolution” — represented enormous historical progress. Socialists celebrate this expansion of human freedom. We “just” want to go further.
Instead of an economy where most people have no realistic choice except to accept jobs where they have to spend all day taking orders from an unelected boss, we want to expand the sphere of autonomy and self-determination to the workplace. And we want to meet everyone’s material needs so they have the ability in practice to live their lives however they want during their nonworking hours.
Under capitalism, people are legally allowed to pursue whichever vision of a good life they believe in, but domination at the workplace and the wildly unequal distribution of resources in society as a whole severely restrict the choices practically available to the majority of the population. Marx objected to this not because he wanted to regress to a premodern condition where Kings, Popes, or aristocrats could tell everyone else how to live their lives, but because he wanted to push forward toward a deeper kind of freedom.
How about the third category of heretics-from-Reaganism identified by Lucchese — the ones who want to “revive the legacy of failed Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan”?
The occasion for his essay is the publication earlier this year of a book devoted to presenting the ideas of this strand of the Right: A Paleoconservative Anthology: New Voices for an Old Tradition, edited by Paul Gottfried, the man who first coined the term “paleocon” to describe Buchanan’s movement. The main thrust of both Lucchese’s essay and Miller’s note in the National Review is calling the paleocons Marxists. And that’s even more absurd than applying that label to integralists or NatCons.
Sometimes politicians who hold real-world power will attend NatCon conferences or write for integralist-influenced publications like Compact. Missouri senator Josh Hawley, for example has done both. And Hawley doesn’t support even modest social democratic proposals like Medicare for All or a $15 minimum wage. He’s not even a cosponsor of the PRO Act, which undo many of the provisions of the hideously anti-labor 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and thus make it at least a little bit easier for workers to organize unions. But it’s true that some of the politically powerless writers and intellectuals associated with integralism or national conservatism have a conception of “the common good” that would lead them to support such things.
Not so for the writers showcased in A Paleoconservative Anthology. “At their core,” Miller claims, the writers in the anthology are “Marxist-influenced thinkers” who only seem right-wing because they “also vehemently despise political correctness.”
But what do these “Marxist-influenced thinkers” actually say?
The first section of the book is called “Founding Fathers” and the very first essay is Murray Rothbard’s Life on the Old Right. It makes sense to give Rothbard pride of place; he was active in “Old Right” politics in the 1940s but in his old age he was an enthusiastic supporter of Buchanan’s proto-Trumpist campaign for president in 1992. “Life on the Old Right” celebrates the version of the Right that existed before William F. Buckley founded the National Review and, in Rothbard’s telling, convinced the Right to abandon its cautious constitutionalism and foreign policy restraint in favor of becoming big-government Cold Warriors.
The foreign policy restraint is one half of the deviation from the Church of St Reagan that has given Lucchese and Miller visions of Marxists infiltrating the conservative movement. The other half, also mentioned by Rothbard, is antipathy to free trade agreements. Rothbard situates the “Old Right” as a reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Rothbard sees Rooseveltian initiatives like Social Security for the elderly as a shocking break from the American traditions of “states’ rights” and limited government. He writes:
There was a wide spectrum of positive views: ranging from pure libertarian decentralization to Hamiltonian reliance on strong government within rigid limits to various wings of monarchists. And in all this diversity and range of discourse, no one would react in shock and horror to any “extreme” views — so long as the “extremism” did not mean selling out the fight against the New Deal. There was also a great deal of disagreement on specific policies that had been open questions in the Old, pre-New Deal, Republic: tariffs vs. free trade; immigration restrictions vs. open borders; and what constitutes a military or foreign policy truly consistent with American national interests.
Rotbard is right to note that opposition to free trade, motivated not by any concern for the working class but by a desire to shelter American business from foreign competition, was a common position in the “Old, pre–New Deal, Republic.” Ultraconservative president William McKinley, for example, was an ultraprotectionist about trade. During McKinley’s lifetime, the idea that the president was a Marxist would have struck both the friends and enemies of Marx’s ideas as very, very funny.
Writing in 1994, Rothbard is still furious that the Republicans who won a majority in Congress in 1946 didn’t act decisively to undo the “Rooseveltian Revolution” and restore the “Old Republic.” In particular, he’s mad about the Taft-Hartley Act, not because it was anti-union, but because it didn’t go far enough. Rothbard wanted to completely repeal the Wagner Act, which allowed for legal recognition of labor unions and collective bargaining. “Politically,” he writes, “repeal might have succeeded, since the public was fed up with unions and strikes in 1946” but it wasn’t to be. While Sen. Robert Taft “was a brilliant man,” he was also “disastrously devoted to compromise.”
In the final essay of the anthology, Sam Francis — whom both Lucchese and Miller single out as a leading source of the “Marxist” infection on the Right — casually lumps together “multinational corporations, giant labor unions, universities and foundations” as sources of progressive, statist influence on society.
If you’ve only read one book by Karl Marx, it’s probably The Communist Manifesto. Cowritten by Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels on the eve of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, it’s a short, stirring pamphlet. You can digest it in an afternoon. And if you’ve read even the opening lines of the first paragraph of the Manifesto, you know that Marx sees class struggle as the engine of historical progress.
In the context of contemporary capitalism, Marx and Engels think that the working class — not the “alienated whites” Sam Francis talks about, but people of all races who have to sell their working hours to a boss to a making a living — is the social force that can overcome the current system and create a better world. As Marx and Engels correctly saw way back in the 1840s, the working class was on its way to becoming the majority of society. And the working class has a collective interest in extending democracy into the economic sphere.
Conservatives who don’t even like it when workers band together to win higher wages and benefits within the existing system could hardly be further from signing onto that vision. Far from wanting to redirect the hoarded wealth of the capitalist class to meet everyone’s material needs, as Joseph Scotchie notes in his introduction to A Paleoconservative Anthology, one of the policy goals of the “Old Right” is “privatizing Social Security.”
As I said, it saddens me that Lucchese and Miller have so little fear of real Marxism that they don’t bother distinguishing it from people who share most of their worldview but not their unbridled enthusiasm about free trade agreements and endless war. But, seen from a different angle, there’s something encouraging in it.
It’s good that some memory of Marx’s ideas continues to haunt the Right’s nightmares — however mangled and misunderstood their impression of those ideas might be. Going forward, though, they should be reminded of the specifics.
“What’s next, a demand to purge Jewish prayer books of age-old prayers chanted daily for 2,000 years that emphasize the dream of a People yearning to return to Zion and Jerusalem?”
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
South African politicians and Jewish groups have slammed a call by a local parliamentarian earlier this month to deregister a Jewish school because it is pro-Israel.
Wearing a keffiyah, Aishah Cassiem, a member of the the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a South African pan-Africanist and Marxist–Leninist political party, called for the local Herzlia High School’s removal from the education system on June 15 during a parliamentary debate in the Western Cape Provincial Legislature.
Her demand followed an interview given by Herzlia’s director of Jewish identity and community, Geoff Cohen, to an Israeli television station. Cohen discussed the Zionist education that his students were receiving and said that 22% of the school’s graduates visit Israel after graduating, adding that some also serve in the IDF.
This was unacceptable to Cassiem, who claimed during the debate that the school “is aligned to the apartheid state of Israel and encouraging learners to partake in apartheid” activities “and inhumane practices” by “encourag[ing]” students to join the IDF after completing 12th grade.
Herzlia was allowed to be Jewish, but not Zionist, she said.
Cassiem’s call did not go unchallenged in the plenum. During the debate, Ferlon Christians of the rival African Christian Democratic Party said, “It’s absolutely shameful that a question like this was posed in this house. This school, Herzlia, is doing exceptionally well, with 100% pass rate and more than 95% of its students obtaining university exemption. The (ruling African National Congress party) ANC will stoop so low to bring [the school] to this house. Why?”
“Don’t use schoolchildren for your political agenda,” he added. “You have no right. I had the privilege to visit the school not so long ago, and I’ll go back and learn from them how we improve our education system because they are an example.”
Cape South African Jewish Board of Deputies (Cape SAJBD) Chairperson Adrienne Jacobson said her organization was “deeply concerned by the EFF’s latest public attack” and would not “stand by and allow this political grandstanding to continue…. This is just the latest unsuccessful attempt by anti-Israel lobbyists to intimidate the Cape Town Jewish community.”
She then called on government and religious community leaders “to condemn the continuing attacks” on the community.
Others labeled Cassiem’s attack as antisemitism, including the country’s Zionist Federation head.
“It’s a travesty that antisemites are again finding ways to target people of the Jewish faith in South Africa under the thin veil of anti-Zionism, and it’s shameful that they are singling out a Jewish school to promote their hatred,” said National Chairman Rowan Polovin.
“Instead of uniting and building bridges across all racial and religious groupings in South African society, these extremists wish to divide. Herzlia, as a Jewish school, promotes religious tolerance, non-racialism, understanding, and charity – the very antithesis to what these groupings are about,” he said.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s associate dean, Abraham Cooper, called Cassiem “another bigot who tries to hide her antisemitism under the banner of anti-Zionism. What’s next, a demand to purge Jewish prayer books of age-old prayers chanted daily for 2,000 years that emphasize the dream of a People yearning to return to Zion and Jerusalem?”
David Maynier, Education Member of the Legislature’s Executive Council, had a different take on Cassiem’s demand. He charged that the call was “an attempt to use a school” in a “disgraceful attempt to deflect attention from [ANC’s] support of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.”
“We confirm that the school won’t be deregistered,” he told the South African Jewish Report.
The post South African lawmakers call to deregister Jewish school because it’s Zionist appeared first on World Israel News.