Dr. Frank's What's-it

How to decide whether the "Volfovitz" intuition is substantive when, instead of clarifying it, Hitchens clouds it with amateur psychoanalysis and stacked characterizations? Theoretically I've learned: (a) that there's cause for alarm, (b) that Wolfowitz can be quite sexy when not in motion.

Point of comparison-- http://www-csli.stanford.edu/%7Enunberg/index.html

Great new site!

...too many "increase your manhood" pop-ups, imo.

Simply.

Its my experience that a great number of people today count on MY (OUR) courteous desire to be polite, in order to mask many rather nasty habits, anti-Semitism being one, but anti-Black, anti-Arab, anti-women, anti-white... and when I (one) catch them on it, or comment on the 5th little, tiny facial twitch in a row or the 7th nasty s.l.u.r., then its "Oh, no! You're PROJECTING your own fears and bigotries onto poor li'l me..."

No, I'm not. BBC has a problem, and anti-Semitism is one aspect of it, and I've observed anti-Americanism, anti-US-military, anti-American-efforts-against-Saddamites, and other repeated, counter-productive 'anti-' efforts on the part of the Beeb. I didn't project them, they were there AND observed, over time, in the discrete and in the aggregate, by others.

Football culture in England is another outlet for latent anti-semitism to manifest itself. It's a truly bizarre phenomenon to hear progressive britons sing 'A jew is an animal in funny black clothes/ He's got a beard and a great big nose,/ He's got lot's of money and he won't spend his cash/ And he won't invest in British Gas,/ So if you chop of your foreskin when you are a kid
You might grow up to be a yid...
Yiddo, yiddo, yiddo. "
Or "Chim chimmery, chim chimmery, chim chim charoo, Klinsmann was Nazi but now now he's a jew
(Gazza was a Geordie but now he's a jew)"

But if course this isn't anti-Semitism; these are merely anti-Zionist chants against that great bulwark of Zionism, Tottenham Hotspur. Of course.

Marc,

Come on, you're pulling my leg. Are you?

Could these possibly be actual football chants, that you've actually heard? If so it goes a bit beyond "latent."

Good Lord.

It's true. I support Tottenham, and often heard references to the 'Yid army'. I didn't know what the hell people were talking about - I thought there was some old player whose name started with Yid or something. My wife explained that Tottenham supporters came from an area of North London that encompassed the orthodox Jewish enclave of the city, so that's where the reference comes from.
I knew quite a few Chelsea fans as well, so that's where I heard a number of these chants. I've asked some about the whole 'Yid Army' thing and many will smile and then break into one of these chants. The thing is, they're not generally anti-semitic. I keep thinking they must be, but as they themselves say, Chelsea also comes from a Jewish neighborhood and has more Jewish supporters. THAT makes no sense whatsoever. People hasten to add that the National Front supplied the lyrics to a number of the songs, which is quite likely, and that they were used to make Spurs supporters uncomfortable - a goal that was so important that normal boundaries of taste and propriety could be crossed at will.

There's a whole list of chants here:
http://www.nicholas.harrison.mcmail.com/cfcsong3.htm
I haven't heard most of them, but I've heard a few. I love the guy's insistence that these were chanted by Chelsea's non-orthodox jews at Tottenham because of the intolerance of the Orthodox. Yeah. That must have been it.

"not generally antisemitic"?? Marc, are you serious? I can't imagine you are; such lyrics are about as stereotyping as one can get.

Let me add a thought to the "antisemitism vs. anti-Zionism" discussion. Of course, as has been pointed out endlessly, criticizing Israel, or its government, is not in itself antisemitic. One comes close to crossing the line, however, if one cannot bring oneself to say ANYTHING good about Israel. (Come on, force yourself. Don't they export nice oranges?)

In individuals, this manifests itself as someone who will insist on criticizing Israel, even if the issue is one where Israel stands head and shoulders above its neighbors. (There are many such issues -- women's rights, fair and open elections, standard of living, education, and so forth.) At the national level, we can see something analogous. This happens when a country cannot bring itself to conduct policy favorable to Israel, but is neutral at best and hostile at worst.

This has been the official attitude of the British government toward Israel, since 1948, with hardly a pause for breath. (Britain was willing to use Israel as a blunt instrument in 1956; awfully kind of them. But Britain has never hesitated to criticize Israel whenever anyone else did, and has often been willing to go it alone. On the other hand, has Britain helped Israel when she needed it? Hardly, if at all.)

That such a British foreign policy toward Israel has remained, decade in and decade out, through successive changes in government, implies a common British attitude toward Israel. As I said earlier, such an attitude is not itself an indication of antisemitism; but when that attitude NEVER CHANGES, you have to wonder.

Daniel

Daniel,
This is the hardest part about this whole phenomenon to understand. Think of it as a corollary to Herr Doktor's confusion about the left/anti-semitic nexus in Britain: "I throw up my hands and confess my failure to make heads or tails of the recurrent British Left/anti-Semitism puzzle: that's pretty weird."

At least in my experience, these chants and songs are seen as okay because football is so distinct, so separate from life that normal boundaries don't apply. Progressive, educated Labourites didn't make up these chants, but at a football game, they'd sing along. People who would cheer at calls to increase spending on the police will still yell 'Kill Kill, Kill the Bill (the police)' at football matches. I don't get it - it makes no sense, and while deep-seated racism/lust for violence would explain it, that would mean that large fractions of the English population are simply high-functioning psychopaths. More likely, it's classic crowd behavior. A few national front guys start a chant and, because it's football (and because it drives the opposition fans crazy), everyone starts singing along.

I dunno, Marc -- what you're describing sounds awfully like a herd mentality to me. "Yes, I have my opinions, and yes, I know what antisemitism and racism are and why they're wrong... but when I go to a football game I like to shut my brain off and yell what everybody else is yelling."

Maybe one needs to have been born-and-bred British to understand. But I still don't buy it... and I don't have to like it either. (I'll confess: I don't like it when people habitually shut their brains off, no matter WHAT the reason.)

Let me add -- I agree with you that, in the minds of many British football fans, there might seem to be no connection to antisemitism, and as such the issue doesn't come up. "Yes, we call them Yids, but we don't mean that in a derogatory way, and we don't mean by that word what you do."

I can easily buy that as a reasonable-sounding excuse... but it still doesn't hold water. Some of those football slogans, suitably translated, would have been very much at home as WWII-era Nazi marching songs. It was not that long ago that such sentiments terrorized Jews across an entire continent. Is it so easy to ignore this, and to remember that the same Nazis were mortal enemies of the British, too?

And doesn't it say something about (possibly subconscious) British attitudes toward antisemitism, that this isn't perceived as a problem, even after it's pointed out?

I wonder what the reaction would be to a more "personal" song, one with lyrics like these. (This is slightly modified from something at the http://www.nicholas.harrison.mcmail.com/cfcsong3.htm site, off the top of my head).

"Kill the Yids!
Kill the Yids!
Hitler was right, kill all the Yids!
We don't care if you bring on the Blitz,
Go ahead and blow us to bits,
As long as you kill the all @$#%ing Yids!"

Are there any British volunteers, willing to go to a Tottenham game and try a chant like that? Who knows, it might just wake some people up...

(Or start a new round of "football hooliganism"...)

Let me apologize in advance to any who might find my previous comments offensive. Yes, they ARE offensive; I intended them to be that way, to make a point. And if anyone is sensitive enough to recoil from such offensive words, thank you -- that's part of the point I was trying to make.

Freedom of speech has its limits. One doesn't shout "fire" in a crowded theater; one doesn't tease a battered and frightened child with suggestive humor. And one shouldn't co-opt Nazi slogans and claim to be civilized... certainly not for a bloody FOOTBALL GAME.

I trust Dr. Frank's readers are perceptive enough to distinguish an antisemitic tirade from a discussion about the tirade.

Daniel

Daniel,
You're right - the chants are abhorrent, and 'herd mentality' and 'crowd behavior' go hand in hand. But there's also something else going on here that's quite bizarre - Tottenham fans (and players) are now synonomous with Jews. Of course this is ludicrous; all of this is ludicrous. But there's something very strange going on when gentile Brits scream 'We are the Yids! We are the Yids!' (a pro-Tottenham chant) and the opposition fans scream the insults seen above. Why would Tottenham fans grab the insults and make them a part of their identity? Why would Chelsea fans (stereotypically middle class) chant third reich-era slogans at a team from a few miles away in London? None of it makes sense, not Charlton fans singing about burning Crystal Palace fans on a bon fire, not Arsenal fans making hissing noises (to simulate gas chambers). The whole thing is fucked up. But yet I can't bring myself to say that Britain, as a whole, seethes with barely contained racism. There are racist elements in British society, just as there are anywhere else, but I don't think it will do to say that the chants proves that the British are racist to the core. It's bizarre and ugly, but they've created an outlet for hatred that's kind of safe, because it's so obviously made up. While some in the crowds truly are psychos, I don't think most people actually want to burn opposing fans or kill police officers. They chant for the frisson of saying the unthinkable, to get the opposition fans riled up, and they know the only place it works is in the stands. The enmity between clubs (that stretched back generations - it has nothing to do with recent results) provides a direction, a target. In this case, the enmity between local clubs has taken on the trappings of traditional anti-semitism. Does it matter that the 'targets' in this case are 99% non-Jewish? Maybe not, but it means this is a very distinct, very weird sort of thing.
I'm just glad they don't do this in the US.

must blocks int. of.