As has already been noted on this blog, Richard Dawkins has recently remarked that Jews 'more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see'. And as has also been noted elsewhere, there have been remarkably few protests about what Dawkins said from mainstream writers or commentators, including those on the liberal left as well as those on the conservative right. Nor, as far as I know, has there been much in the way of dissociation from his remarks by Dawkins's many admirers. It's as if such remarks have become normalized, unexceptionable - as if there's been a collective outbreak of what can most charitably be called, in the felicitous formulation of a correspondent, 'a kind of tone-deafness with respect to anti-Semitism's tropes'.
The thought that something more alarming than tone-deafness may be at work among those who make, and also those who overlook, remarks such as Dawkins's is... well, alarming. But some evidence to justify that alarm is coming in from the UCU debate about instituting an academic boycott of Israel, which debate has continued well after the collapse, on legal advice, of the union's pursuit of the boycott proposal. (The legal advice was that the proposed boycott would be unlawful because discriminatory.) Those union activists who are concerned about the boycott, both for and against, have been arguing about it at red heat (and very tedious length) all summer. Recently, other union activists, whose interest in the boycott issue is tepid to non-existent, made the suggestion that the debate about it should be hived off on to a separate e-list for the sake of those who wanted no further part of it. One of the pro-boycotters announced his hostility to that suggestion in these words:
Issues of Palestine are now determining tenure issues in the States. Can we expect the Zionist lobby to go the same way here[?]... Bread and butter issues cannot be neatly compartmentalised so that we have separate arrangements for what is "safe" (and does not threaten Zionism) and "not safe" (in what actively opposes Zionism).This remark, which implies that academics can only be safe if they don't threaten Zionism, and will be unsafe if they actively oppose it, was announced to the approximately 700 people who are signed up to that list. And the most striking feature of the remark was not that it was made by a pro-boycotter, nor that it reeks of classic anti-Semitic thinking about the power of Jews as a collectivity to actively threaten the safety of everyone, and especially those who oppose them. It wasn't even that none of the pro-boycotters disowned this remark or spoke out against its being made, though that was indeed the case. No, the most striking aspect of the whole event was that not one single person, from all of those relatively unengaged UCU activists who read the remark, found anything worth objecting to in it. None of them protested about it. Such things have indeed become normalized, unexceptionable, unworthy of remark - and this in an academic sub-culture which prides itself, as the UCU vociferously does, on its anti-racist commitment.
There is the shadow of a dying rat in the corner of the room, and people don't remark on it. It's not polite - in fact it's offensive, insulting - to mention the matter.
One does not talk of rats at table... It's unthinkable - everyone knows that [the plague] has ceased to appear in Europe.If the plague bacillus rouses up its rats again and sends them forth to die in a happy city, there are many people, including some of our self-avowed anti-racists, who will not recognize them for what they are. (Eve Garrard)