Human Rights and Anti-Semitism after GAZA VII 2/Grosfoguel-FM.pdf · 90 R AMÓN G ROSFOGUEL H UMAN A RCHITECTURE: J OURNAL OF THE S OCIOLOGY OF S ELF-K NOWLEDGE, VII, 2, S PRING 2009

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ISSN: 1540-5699. © Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press) and authors. All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

This article discusses the consequencesof the latest Israeli massacres in Gaza in re-lation to its global consequences for HumanRights and Global Anti-Semitism today.The first part is a discussion of the conse-quences of Gaza towards Human Rights.The second part is a discussion of the conse-quences of Gaza towards global anti-semit-ism. The last part is a discussion aboutFundamentalism in the world today.

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Any discussion of Human Rights todayneeds to acknowledge the following threepostulates:

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Postulate: Human Rights in the mid20th century is a continuation of the WesternGlobal/Colonial designs of Rights of People inthe 16

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century and Rights of Man in the 18

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century.

As part of its global/colonial designsthe West built over several centuries di-verse global/colonial discourses thatshifted overtime.

First, the Rights of People in the 16

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century was Vitoria’s, Sepulveda’s and LasCasas’ problem as part of the Spanish em-pire’s colonization of the Americas. Theirproblem was how to define the people theyencounter in the Americas. The debate overRights of People was inside the ecclesiasti-cal elites of the Spanish empire withoutever considering the colonial subjects’ willand points of views. However, it becamethe main discourse of the European colonialexpansion during Spanish hegemony of theworld-system in the 16

th

century. The dis-course about Rights of People was from thebeginning tied to a Universalist project de-fined provincially from a Christian-centriccosmology.

Ramón Grosfoguel is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a SeniorResearch Associate of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. He has published on the political economyof the world-system and on Caribbean migrations to Western Europe and the United States. His most recentbook is Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (University of California Press, 2003). Most recentlyhe was co-editor, with Eric Mielants, of a special issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology (Vol. 47,Aug. 2006) on Minorities, Racism and Cultures of Scholarship. Eric Mielants is Assistant Professor in Sociologyin the College of Arts and Sciences at Fairfield University. He has written articles and essays on racism, socialtheory and contemporary migration issues. His book, The Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’, is forth-coming from Temple University Press.

Human Rights and Anti-Semitism after GAZA

Ramón Grosfoguel

University of California, Berkeley––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

[email protected]

Abstract: This article discusses the consequences of the latest Israeli massacres in Gaza in rela-tion to its global consequences for Human Rights and Global Anti-Semitism today. The first partis a discussion of the consequences of Gaza towards Human Rights. The second part is a discus-sion of the consequences of Gaza towards global anti-semitism. The last part is a discussionabout Fundamentalism in the world today, in particular on the hegemonic, silent and pervasiveform of fundamentalism: Eurocentric fundamentalism.

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Second, once Rights of People was de-fined, Rights of Man became the new glo-bal/colonial design in the new secularEnlightenment project of the 18

th

century.The Enlightenment’s Rights of Man contin-ued the Western-centric and patriarchalconcept of the Human that began withRights of People. Women of all colors andnon-Western peoples where not included inthe concept of Rights of Man. As Eze (1997)and Mignolo (2000) have discussed at greatlength, the Kantian project of the transcen-dental subject and Rights of Man becamemore clearly stated in Kant’s Anthropolog-ical writings. Kant conceived the White raceas superior to the other races and the onlyone with access to reason. Behind the doorof Kant’s transcendental subject, hides aWhite Man. A few centuries later, HumanRights emerged in the mid-Twentieth Cen-tury as a new discourse under US hege-mony in a context where overt forms ofcolonialism where already defeated by anti-colonial struggles in the Third World. Hu-man Rights continued and combined ele-ments of the Rights of People and Rights ofMan in the new developmentalist project ofthe post-colonial era inaugurated by therise of US hegemony in the World-System.The first article of the 1948 UN UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights says:

All human beings are born free andequal in dignity and rights. Theyare endowed with reason and con-science and should act towards oneanother in a spirit of brotherhood.

The concept of “human beings” usedhere like the concept of people and man be-fore had Universal pretensions but provin-cially defined and narrowly applied.Without decolonizing the concept of the“human” from a Western-centric patriar-chal gaze and without decolonizing the glo-bal coloniality of power from the hegemonyof Euro-American White Supremacy as theleading country of the postwar Western Im-

perialist United Front, it was simply impos-sible to have a more cosmopolitan andmulti-epistemic concept of human rightsand to even implement the present hege-monic concept of human rights in a fair andcoherent way. From the Korean War in theearly fifties to the most recent Iraqi War, hu-man rights were always a privilege of theWest and only mobilized in non-Westernspaces whenever the national state wascontrolled by enemies of the West.

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Postulate: The notion of “human dig-nity” in the first article of the UN Declarationof Human Rights is a Western-centric notionthat privileges the individual over community-based definitions.

Non-Western concepts of human dig-nity are excluded from the UN Declaration.This is a continuation of the epistemic rac-ism that characterized Western global/co-lonial designs from the Rights of People toRights of Man and Human Rights—all de-fined from within the Western tradition ofthought in exclusion, subordination and in-feriorization of non-Western epistemolo-gies. The epistemic hierarchy of the world-system with its epistemic racist claim ofWestern epistemic superiority over the restis a crucial determinant in the constructionof human rights discourse under US hege-mony after Second World War.

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Postulate: Human Rights rhetoric wasalways applied against enemies of the WesternImperialist United Front and overlooked whendealing with friendly regimes.

Friendly dictators were always pro-tected from accusations of Human Rightsabuses while enemies where accused of vi-olation of Human Rights. This created theparadoxical situation where some regimeswith awful human rights records are pro-tected from being denounced as violators ofHuman Rights while some regimes withbetter human rights records are denounced.This double standard was there from dayone of the December 10, 1948 UN GeneralAssembly approval of the Universal Decla-ration of Human Rights.

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Today with the “war for empire” betterknown as “war against terrorism,” the colo-nial continuities and inconsistencies of Hu-man Rights discourse have become moreovert and perverse. State terrorism and itscoloniality of power are justified by accus-ing resistant movements of “terrorism.”State atrocities, violation of Human Rights,and even genocidal crimes are now legiti-mated in the name of fighting terrorism todefend freedom, democracy and liberty.Gaza is the most visible example of the co-lonial consequences of the “War againstTerrorism” used today as the main mecha-nism of state terrorism around the world tofight liberation movements. Apartheid pol-icies and ethnic cleansing, which were al-ready there since the formation of the stateof Israel in 1948, are now overtly justifiedwith the new rhetoric of fighting terrorism.

Gaza represents the end of an era. It isthe simultaneous end of three processes:

1-It is the final blow to an imperialist inter-national Human Rights regime under US hege-mony.

Although the end of Human Rightswas announced before—such as in the ex-cellent book by Costas Douzinas (2000) en-titled

The End of Human Rights

—Gazarepresents the final blow, the death of thecredibility of the Human Rights interna-tional regime. This order was already in cri-sis and de-legitimated with the Bushadministration’s invasion of Iraq withoutUN approval and the imperial atrocities wehave seen since then including war criminalAriel Sharon’s massacres and destruction ofthe West Bank since 2002 in the name offighting terrorism. For many people aroundthe world, the illusion was that these atroc-ities are due to the Bush administration anda Republican controlled Congress, but thatwith a new US administration led by theDemocratic Party these policies will beeradicated. However, GAZA is the end ofthis illusion.

The response of the US Democratic-controlled Congress to GAZA was a blow

in the face of the Human Rights interna-tional regime. US Congress came out al-most unanimously in support of Israel’sright to self-defense against terrorism andno word was mentioned about Israeli stateterrorism such as war crimes, ethnic cleans-ing or genocidal policies. Peres, Barak,Livni and Olmert, widely accused of hav-ing committed war crimes in Gaza (Gray-Block 2009), can do all kind of atrocities,Nazi-like crimes (such as “Sophie’s choicemethods” towards Palestinian mothers,massive killings of civilians and evenbombing UN buildings with Palestinianrefugees inside) and pretend to be justifiedby the claim that they are fighting terror-ism. Moreover, Obama’s declarations in fa-vor of Israel without mention of itsatrocities committed in GAZA fosteredrapid world disillusionment with the newUS administration. The symbolic closure ofGuantanamo and the end of an overt policyof torture (I said overt because torture wasalways and continues to be in the US an un-dercover operation), as important as theyare, are not enough to do what is needed toregain legitimacy. These declarations fromtop Democratic Party elites in the US, repre-sent a serious blow to the possibility of in-ternationally re-legitimating the globalHuman Rights regimes after eight years ofBush Administration. As Noam Chomskysays in response to Obama position on Is-rael:

It’s approximately the Bush posi-tion. He began by saying that Isra-el, like any democracy, has a rightto defend itself. That’s true, butthere’s a gap in the reasoning. Ithas a right to defend itself. Itdoesn’t follow that it has a right todefend itself by force. So we mightagree, say, that, you know, the Brit-ish army in the United States in thecolonies in 1776 had a right to de-fend itself from the terror ofGeorge Washington’s armies,

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which was quite real, but it didn’tfollow they had a right to defendthemselves by force, because theyhad no right to be here. So, yes,they had a right to defend them-selves, and they had a way to doit—namely, leave.

Same with the Nazis defendingthemselves against the terror of thepartisans. They have no right to doit by force.

In the case of Israel, it’s exactly thesame. They have a right to defendthemselves, and they can easily doit. One, in a narrow sense, theycould have done it by accepting theceasefire that Hamas proposedright before the invasion… a cease-fire that had been in place and thatIsrael violated and broke. (Choms-key 2009)

In sum, the US justification of Israeliatrocities in GAZA is rapidly closing thedoors to the world-wide illusions with theObama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress. Few global illusionsare left in place for US hegemony and fewpossibilities to re-legitimate its world lead-ership is possible after GAZA unless thereis 180 degree change in policies and that isvery unlikely to happen. This representsthe end of an era. As Immanuel Wallerstein(2003) and Giovanni Arrighi (1995) havebeen arguing now for more than 15 years,we are at the end of US hegemony in theworld-system. We are now in a chaoticworld order and at the beginning of a newGreat Depression with no hegemon able toprovide order to the global system.

2-GAZA is the end of Zionism’s innocence.

There are right-wing Zionism and left-wing Zionism. The left-wing Zionists al-ways played innocent and naïve blamingright-wing Zionists as the bad guys and re-sponsible of all the atrocities towards Pales-

tinians. If left-wing Zionists lost theirinnocence in Palestinian eyes long time ago,after GAZA, Zionists of all tendencies andpolitical views lost their innocence in theeyes of the international community. Zion-ism is now overtly identified and/or dis-cussed as a racist, apartheid, settlercolonialist project resorting to ethniccleansing and Nazi-like atrocities. Zioniststoday can no longer claim to be, nor canthey anymore play, innocent and naive afterGAZA.

3-GAZA marks the end of the Westernizedimperialist, mythical project of supposedly ex-porting democracy as part of a rhetoric of hu-man rights.

Similar to African-Americans until1964, the Palestinians did not have the rightto vote. They conquered this right onlythree years ago. But when they democrati-cally elected a government that the Westand Israelis did not like, the response waspunishment.

4- GAZA is a radical questioning of the he-gemonic narratives of US hegemony and itscharacterization of the Second World War andthe end of its reductionist claims to victimhood.

The simplistic identity politics of theHolocaust hegemonic narrative that essen-tialized Jewish identity as homogeneouseternal victims and always intentionally in-nocent ended with GAZA. There is nodoubt that Jewish people were colonial sub-jects and victims of all kinds of atrocitieswithin Christian Europe over a period ofseveral centuries, from their expulsion to-gether with Muslims from Catholic Spain in1492 to their extermination during the NaziHolocaust in Second World War. However,this led to an essentialist and simplistic un-derstanding of Nazism and to an essential-ized view of Jews.

From Judeophobia to Judeophilia, frometernal evil to eternal victim, Eurocentricracist thinking could not think of Jewishidentity outside essentialist binaries. Thesesimplistic and reductionist narratives aboutthe Holocaust and Jewish identity were ex-

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ploited by the Zionists for the last 60 yearsto legitimate their fundamentalist Jewishstate built upon the practices and methodsof settler colonialism against Palestinians.After Gaza, the legitimation of this rhetoricended. As Hannah Arendt once said aboutEisenman’s trial in Jerusalem, Nazi crimi-nals show the banality of evilness. Anyonewho practices colonialism and whose imag-ination is infected by racism, has the poten-tial of ethnic cleansing and becoming a warcriminal and this statement includes all hu-man beings including Jewish people.

5- Gaza raises once again the questionsabout: “What is Hitlerism?”

This is a question that was raised byEmmanuel Levinas and Aime Cesaire longtime ago and that comes back to hunt uswith the recent events in GAZA. If AimeCesaire is right about his characterization ofNazism as a continuation of colonialism,that is, as the “boomerang effect” of colo-nial methods coming back to hunt Europe-ans—as Nazis doing to Europeans whatEuropean colonialism was doing to the restof the non-Western world for 400 years—then, Hitlerism is an integral part of West-ern subjectivity. There is a Hitler in the psy-chic and imagination of every Westernerincluding its most liberal humanist intellec-tuals, affirms Cesaire in his

Discourse on Co-lonialism

. If this is the case and ifdecolonizations of power, being andknowledge were not solved with the end ofcolonial administrations (as Peruvian intel-lectual Anibal Quijano’s concept of coloni-ality always remind us), and if thedehumanization of the non-Western major-ities of the world continued as usual afterthe Second World War, then we need to re-think the hegemonic narratives about theresults of the Second World War.

The hegemonic idea is that Hitler lostthe war. This is true in the most ordinaryand obvious form of military analysis. Butthe important question is whether Hitler-ism, understood in a Cesairean form as acolonial/racial idea and ideal of the mod-

ern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system, lost the Second World War. Thisquestion requires a different answer and isa question that once again is raised by therecent events in GAZA. As stated by NelsonMaldonado-Torres (2008), for the Wretchedof the Earth, for the “damnes,” for the mostinferiorized and superexploited non-West-ern majorities of the world, Hitlerism con-tinues to manifest itself in the post-SecondWorld War—but, I will add, incarnated inthe new institutional international regimeorganized by the postwar hegemonic su-perpower: the United States of America.

What is the difference between Nazi’smassive bombardment of civilian popula-tions and the Nixon/Kissinger indiscrimi-nate bombardment of Laos, Viet-Nam andCambodia? How do we characterize the USpolicies of organizing, financing and delib-erately encouraging military coups in theThird World that tortured, disappeared andwiped out a whole generation of people inLatin America, Africa, Asia and the MiddleEast? How many million civilians werekilled in the CIA military coups of Indone-sia, Chile, Guatemala, Congo, and Iran?How to characterize the US support to mil-itary dictatorships that practiced Nazi-likemethods of torture and murder such asMobutu, Pinochet, Videla, Duvalier,Sukarno, Marcos, the Shah, Somoza,Batista, Trujillo, etc.? What is the differencebetween the GAZA ghetto and the Warsawghetto? How different is the ethnic cleans-ing of Palestinians from Hitlerism? GAZAis today the equivalent continuity of theWarsaw ghetto.

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It is simply impossible to talk aboutanti-semitism these days without a discus-sion about the history of Christian Europe,Zionism and the formation of the state of Is-rael in 1948.

For centuries, Jewish people were the

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victims of Christian Europe’s anti-semit-ism. Before and after 1492, anti-semitismwas linked to Islamophobia. Anti-semitismhas had two components from its begin-ning: “anti-Jewish anti-semitism” and“anti-Arab-Muslim anti-semitism.” Spain’sChristian Monarchy as one of Christian Eu-rope’s frontiers with the Muslim world,fought a battle to conquer the Islamic sideof Spain better known as Al-Andalus(Kennedy 1997). In early 1492, when theSpanish Christian Monarchy finally de-feated the forces of Al-Andalus, they ex-pelled Jews and Arabs from the IberianPeninsula not without its pogroms andmassacres (Baer 1993; Gerber 1992, Bresc2001). Anti-semitism in those years

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Arab Muslims. Semitic people where char-acterized as coming from what we call to-day the Middle East and that includedArabs and Jews.

After the Christian Monarchy’s con-quest of Islamic Spain, Andalucian Jewswere exiled in North Africa and the Otto-man empire as refugees from the CatholicMonarchy’s atrocities in Al-Andalus. It isimportant to say that Andalucian Jewsfound a home in these

Muslim territories

.Similar to Al-Andalus in the Southeast partof what we call Spain today (Melocal 2003;Lowney 2005), most of the existing Muslimregimes at the time recognized Jewish mi-nority rights and treated them with dignityas opposed to Christian Europe (Ernst 2003;Kramer 2006). Without assuming a roman-tic view of the past, at least until the forma-tion of the state of Israel in 1948, Arabs andJews lived in peace together for centuries inArab lands and Al-Andalus is praised as amoment in history of peaceful co-existencebetween Jews and Muslims. Although con-flicts were not absent from this history, itwas not a history of anti-semitic extermina-tion or pogroms (Stillman 1979). Anti-semitic pogroms, extermination, tortureand massacres against Jews where funda-mentally a Christian European problem. AsCarl W. Ernst states:

Jews and Muslims typically hadmuch more positive relations witheach other in pre-modern timesthan either group had with Chris-tians; it is really only since the es-tablishment of the state of Israelthat Jews and Muslims have be-come antagonistic. (Ernst 2003: 13)

Christian Europe’s Final Solutions

TheSpanish Christian Monarchy began the Eu-ropean colonial expansion in 1492, the sameyear they expelled Arabs and Jews from Al-Andalus (Dussel 1994). The colonization ofindigenous peoples in the Americas and theenslavement of Africans in the NewWorld’s colonial plantation economy inau-gurated what is known as the ModernWorld. It was on the shoulders of a colo-nial/racist configuration of anti-black andanti-indigenous racism that a new interna-tional racial division of labor was formedand that modernity was founded (Quijano2000). Indigenous and African peopleswhere placed below the line that defines theHuman (Maldonado-Torres 2005, 2006,2008). They were treated and characterizedas sub-humans or simply non-humans(Quijano 1991, 2000; Dussel 1994; Gordon2008). With the emergence of the new racialeconomy, anti-semitism and Islamophobiaas a particular form of discriminationagainst semitic people in Europe acquirednew connotations. If before 1492 “anti-Jew-ish anti-semitism” and “anti-Arab/Muslimanti-semitism” were defined on the basis ofreligious discrimination (“praying to thewrong GOD”) or on theological interpreta-tions of Christ, with the anti-Indigenousand anti-Black racism in the Americas theseold forms of discrimination acquired newmeanings (Maldonado-Torres 2005, 2006,2008). Anti-Black racism became part of thefoundation of modernity and affected thesituation of all non-European subjects at thetime (Gordon 1995). With the colonial “boo-merang effect” (Cesaire 2001), colonial rac-ism in the Americas came back to Europe

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and redefined old forms of discriminationsagainst Arabs, Gypsies and Jews turningthem, like Blacks and Indigenous peoples,into sub-human or simply non-human(Grosfoguel and Mielants 2006). For centu-ries Jews in Europe lived the nightmares ofanti-semitism. They were repressed, tor-tured, killed and persecuted.

The Holocaust represents one of themost extreme forms of European FINALSOLUTIONS, but was not by far the onlyone existing at the time. Another anti-semitic “FINAL SOLUTION” contem-plated early on by the Nazis, but developedby the British Empire, was to transfer Euro-pean Jews out of Europe (Segev 2001).Given the British Empire’s colonial controlof the sacred land of Jews, Christian andMuslims in Palestine, they began after the1917 Balfour Declaration and with the sup-port of the European Zionist movement tomassively export huge numbers of Euro-pean Jews to what is defined by thesemonotheistic religions as the Holy Land(Segev 2001; Gerber 2006; Pappe 2006). Thisbegan a process of settler colonialism whereZionism as a form of Jewish nationalism inEurope turned into colonialism (Piterberg2008).

European Jews reproduced in Palestinewith the blessings of the British Empire theclassical forms of European settler colonial-ism. Palestinian Jews who enjoyed plentyof rights when the Ottoman Empire con-trolled Palestine (Greber 2006), were abso-lutely opposed to the British Empire’soccupation of Palestine and to EuropeanJews’ Zionist aims of forming a Jewish-onlynation-state in Palestine (Hart 2007a). TheZionist project of forming a Jewish statewas basically a European-Jews project thatbrought European colonial methods of set-tler colonialism to Palestine. The formationof the state of Israel was done on the shoul-ders of racism and massacres against Pales-tinians (Christian and Muslim) to displacethem from their land (Masalha 2005; Hart2007a; Piterberg 2008).

“Ethnic cleansing” is the term used bya new generation of Israeli historians to de-scribe Israeli policies towards Palestinians(Pappe 2007). Paraphrasing Aime Cesaire’s(2001) Discourse on Colonialism, Hitlerism asa continuation of colonial racist ideologycame back to hunt Palestinians this time atthe hands of European Jews who ironicallywere escaping from the Nazi Holocaust. Is-rael was founded as a settler colonialistproject with an “anti-Semitic anti-Semit-ism” discourse. European Jews establisheda racist/colonial discrimination againstPalestinians. Similar to the North Americansettler colonialism against Native-Ameri-cans, Israeli elites, the new identity of Euro-pean Jews, violated every treaty and keptover the last 60 years a systematic forceddisplacement of Palestinians from theirland to conquer and settle Jewish coloniesin these territories (Masalha 1992; Hart2007b; Pappe 2007).

The incorporation of European Jews as“Whites” in most of the Western metropoli-tan centers after the Second World War(Brodkin 2000) and the use of Israel as aWestern pro-imperialist military bastion inthe Middle East (Chomsky 1999), incorpo-rated the Israeli colonial project directly atthe center of US hegemony and globalWhite supremacy. A triple global alliancewas built between White European andWhite Euro-American elites with Euro-American and European Jewish pro-Zionistelites in the West and European and Euro-American Jewish settlers in Palestine. West-ern blessings to Israel, legitimated, financedand gave green light to Israeli settler colo-nialism and its atrocities in Palestine.GAZA today is the tragic consequence ofthis colonial history.

GAZA AND GLOBAL ANTI-SEMITISM

It is also impossible to discuss anti-semitism today without taking into account

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the transformation of European Jews fromracialized subjects into “Whites” in bothWestern Europe and North America andwithout taking into account the transforma-tion of Palestine into a Jewish-only settlercolonialist state. With the incorporation ofEuropean-Jews as White there is an impor-tant reduction of “anti-Jewish anti-semit-ism” in the West and the world at large. Incontrast, other forms of racism such as“anti-Arab/Muslim anti-semitism” is partof ordinary common sense in the West. Therecent incorporation of European-Jews andEuro-American-Jews into whiteness hasimportant consequences (Ernst 2003: 11-12).

Can we imagine what would be the re-action in the West today if any Arab statewould do to Jewish people what Israel isdoing to Palestinians today? What wouldbe the reaction if an Arab state would mas-sacre Jews, the way Israel massacres Pales-tinians in Gaza today? What would be thereaction of Israel, the European Commu-nity and the United States if any Europeancountry names a Minister similar to Israel’sLieberman who calls for the expulsion ofPalestinians from Israel and calls for the ex-pulsion of all Jews from their country? Bythe way, it is important to say that Palestin-ian-Jews under the Ottoman Muslim em-pire had more political, democratic andcivil rights (see Gerber 2006) than what Pal-estinian Muslims and Christians had dur-ing the British colonial occupation ofPalestine and under the 60 years of the Is-raeli state settler colonialism. Moreover, aJewish only state is closer to an apartheidrepublic than to a real democratic republic.

However, neo-conservative elites in theUSA and Western Europe (Taguieff 2002;Iganski 2003) define “Judeophobia” and“anti-Jewish anti-Semitism” as the hege-monic forms of racism in the West today inorder to blame, in a perverse way, Arabsand Muslims and to hide the hegemonicforms of White racism which are nowmostly “anti-Black racism” and “anti-Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism.” Given Ar-

abs/Muslims’ critical views of Israel andthe Israeli state’s association of critiques ofthe Zionist state with anti-Semitism, Whiteracist elites in Europe and North Americadeveloped a strategy of “bad faith” (Gor-don 1995) where the main victims of racismnow are accused of being the major perpe-trators of racism. This is perverse, to say theleast, in a context where White racism ismanifested primarily as “anti-Black rac-ism” and “anti-Arab/Muslim anti-Semit-ism.” The same perverse logic happenstoday in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,where Israeli colonizers accuse Palestiniansof anti-Semitism while Zionist “anti-Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism” is silenced.

Some pro-Zionist Euro-American-Jew-ish and European-Jewish elites enjoying theprivilege of “Whiteness” in the racial/eth-nic hierarchies of the West use their powerposition to mobilize uncritical support fromthe West towards Israel and to achieve im-punity for its crimes. Jews from all over theworld can come to Palestine and get accessto land while Palestinian refugees cannotreturn and those living in Palestine are sec-ond-class citizens or simply pariahs in theirown land. The critique of “anti-Jewish anti-semitism” and the Holocaust was alwaysmanipulated, abused and instrumentalizedby the Israeli settler colonialist state from itsfoundation in 1948 until today to justify itscolonial domination, expansion and terror(Finkelstein 2008). The Israeli state is themain agency responsible for banalizing thecritique of anti-semitism while they accuseall critiques of the Zionist state as equiva-lent to anti-semitism (Balibar, Brauman,Butler, and Hazan 2003; Finkelstien 2008).This intrumentalist argument trivializedreal situations of anti-Semitism and re-duced the credibility of anti-racist dis-course against anti-Semitism world-wide(Ibid.).

Since when criticism of state policieshas become equivalent to being racistagainst its population? Since when criticiz-ing American state militarism and imperi-

HUMAN RIGHTS AND ANTI-SEMITISM AFTER GAZA 97


alism is equivalent to being anti-American,or criticizing the Mexican state is regardedas being anti-Mexican? This discursiveequivalence between state identity and itspopulation is typical of every nationalism.What is particular of Zionist nationalistrhetoric is the attempt to associate critiquesof Israel not only to an anti-national, anti-Is-raeli sentiment (which is what every na-tionalism does) but also to racist rhetoricvia the establishment of a discursive equiv-alence of critiques of the Israeli state withanti-semitism. Israel banalized anti-semit-ism by developing a systematic accusationof anti-semitism to any critique of the Is-raeli state. This has created a complex andperverse situation where “anti-Jewish anti-semitism” is banalized by some and exag-gerated by others, while “anti-Arab anti-semitism” is permited, acceptable and en-couraged in the West in the name of oppos-ing violent, terrorist anti-semitism.

If we understand anti-Arab racism as aform of anti-semitism, the main ideologuestoday of this “anti-semite anti-semitism”are pro-Zionist intellectuals, both Israeliand non-Israeli (Masalha 2007; Spector2008; Finkelstein 2008). This has created asituation where real expressions of “anti-Jewish anti-semitism” are banalized bymany people and where old forms of “anti-Jewish anti-semitism” are recycled to de-scribe Israeli atrocities. For example, slo-gans such as “Hamas, Hamas: Jewish to thegas” in anti-Zionist demonstrations in Eu-rope today should be of concern to anti-co-lonial, anti-imperialist and anti-racistmovements. It is true that this is a minoritywithin the anti-Zionist movement. How-ever, we cannot underestimate the return of“anti-Jewish anti-semitic” racism. Old anti-semitism is coming back with a force in re-action to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Pales-tinians. “Anti-Jewish anti-semitism” iswrong no matter from where it is comingfrom and what the causes for its return are.A minority of White Christian Europeansare once again repeating old anti-semitic

racism and oppressed groups such as Ar-abs, even if in small numbers within theirown communities, are also reproducing oldstereotypes about Jewish people.

However, there is a fundamental differ-ence between Jewish people and the Zioniststate. On the one hand, Zionist pretensionto represent all Jewish people is false andconstitutes a political manipulation. Butthat does not justify the use of racist rheto-ric even if the groups are oppressed groups.On the other hand, Zionist justification ofNazi-like ethnic cleansing and crimesagainst humanity by Israel in Palestine andmost recently in Gaza using “anti-Arabanti-semitism” and accusing the critics ofIsrael to be “anti-semites” has created a glo-bal outrage and in some minority cases“anti-Jewish anti-Semitic” reactions. More-over, US Congressional resolutions backingIsrael’s right to self-defense while the Is-raeli butchery of Palestinians was on-goingcontribute to Israel’s impunity to reproducethe overt racism against Palestinians aspeople whose right to exist is questioned byracially placing them in what Fanon de-fined as “living in hell” or the “zone of non-being” (Gordon 2006).

Israeli atrocities are justified under theclaim of fighting Islamic fundamentalismtoday. The recent massacres in GAZAwhere justified in the name of fighting Ha-mas. With Sadam Hussein killed and Iraqunder the US occupation, the new enemy ofZionism today is Iran. Hizbullah (orHezbollah) and Hamas are seen simply asunilateral creations of Iran. The role playedby Iran in the rise and/or continuity ofthese organizations is certainly not anymore significant than the role played by theWest in the creation and continuing supportof Israel as a settler-colonial state. Iran sup-ports but did not create Hizbullah nor Ha-mas. They both arose as a result of Israelicolonialism in the region.

Now, the question is: What is funda-mentalism?



III. FUNDAMENTALISM AND EUROCENTRISM

A foundational basis of contemporarydiscussions on political Islam and on the so-called “War on Terrorism” is what WalterMignolo (2000) conceptualized as“epistemic racism.” Epistemic racism is theinferiorization of non-Western epistemolo-gies and cosmologies to privilege Westernepistemology as the superior form ofknowledge and as the only source to definehuman rights, democracy, citizenship, etc.This is grounded in the idea that reason andphilosophy lie in the West while non-reasonlies in the “rest.” As Lewis Gordon said:

The notion that philosophy was apeculiarly European affair logical-ly led to the conclusion that therewas (and continuous to be) some-thing about European cultures thatmakes them more conducive tophilosophical reflection than oth-ers…. The notion of Europeans’ in-trinsic connection to philosophy is,in other words, circular: it definesthem as philosophical in the effortto determine whether they werephilosophical…. To conclude thatthe kinds of intellectual activitythat were called philosophical inthe past and have joined the fold inthe present were thus limited toone group of people, most ofwhom were artificially lumped to-gether to create false notions ofunity and singular identity, re-quires a model of humanity thatdoes not fit the facts (Gordon 2008,6)

Epistemic racism is a foundational andconstitutive logic of the modern/colonialworld. European humanists and scholars inthe 19th century such as Ernst Renan “… ar-gued that Islam was incompatible with sci-

ence and philosophy. He based hisreasoning on the claim that Islam was an es-sentially Arab religion and that Arabs be-long to the Semitic race, which has an‘atomistic’ mentality that is incapable ofphilosophical synthesis… Renan remainedfirmly convinced that Semites (meaningArabs and Jews) did not have this capac-ity…” (Ernst 2003: 20-21).

This epistemic racism is manifested indiscussions about human rights today.Non-Western epistemologies that definehuman rights and human dignity in formsdifferent from the West, are simply ex-cluded from the conversation. This is linkedto the contemporary discussions about“fundamentalism.” According to the “bornagain Neo-con,” Christopher Hitchens:

…the very definition of a ‘funda-mentalist’ is someone who believesthat ‘holy writ’ is… the fixed andunalterable word of God. (Hitch-ens 2009: 74)

This specific definition, which is the he-gemonic definition used in the West today,hides what is fundamental of all fundamen-talisms, that is, the belief in the superiorityof their own epistemology and the inferior-ity of the rest. The first premise of Hitch-ens’s definition is that a fundamentalist hasto be necessarily religious. In this defini-tion, so-called secular views are excluded apriori from being fundamentalist. Theproblematic secular/religious Western bi-nary is reproduced here. Accordingly, a sec-ular perspective cannot be fundamentalistunder the logic of this definition. Second, isthe premise that the only possible funda-mentalism is about any doctrine that does a“literal,” “dogmatic” interpretation of a“sacred text.” The premise is that a “sacredtext” can only be a religious text. To treat asecular text as “sacred” is not considered aspart of the definition of fundamentalism.Secular forms of fundamentalism such asStalinism as a Marxist fundamentalism or



Positivism as form of scientific fundamen-talism, are excluded from the hegemonicdefinition.

In sum, this definition hides the mostimportant form of fundamentalism in theworld today: Eurocentric fundamentalism.It is so powerful that it is used as the“norm” and the hegemonic “commonsense” to define what is democracy, what is“terrorism,” what is “economy,” what arehuman rights, what is the environment,and who is a fundamentalist. Eurocentricfundamentalism is the “sacralization” ofthe Western tradition of thought and the in-feriorization of non-Western epistemolo-gies and cosmologies. It is founded onepistemic racism. Its universalism is actu-ally that of a particular defining the univer-sal for the rest—that is, a global/imperialdesign. If we break with the secular/reli-gious binary split, what is shared by all fun-damentalisms in the modern/colonialworld is “epistemic racism.”

A major consequence of the Europeancolonial expansion and its epistemic racismis what Boaventura de Sousa Santos hascalled epistemicide against non-Westernepistemologies. The invisibility and evenextermination of other epistemologies areat the root of Eurocentric fundamentalism.Moreover, the hegemonic role of Eurocen-tric fundamentalism is manifested in thatmany of what are called today Third Worldfundamentalisms such as Islamic funda-mentalism, Afro-centric fundamentalismand indigenous fundamentalism, are in-verted forms of Eurocentric fundamental-ism. They are inversions of the Eurocentricfundamentalist binaries. If the West definesitself as inherently and naturally demo-cratic, in favor of women’s rights, humanrights, democracy, freedom, etc., the non-West is defined as inherently and naturallyauthoritarian, patriarchal, etc. This Euro-centric binary which is at the foundation ofepistemic racism is not displaced but in-verted by what are called third world fun-damentalisms.

So, what I want to emphasize here isthat third world fundamentalisms such asIslamic fundamentalism or Afro-centricfundamentalism are derivative forms ofEurocentric fundamentalism. They just in-vert the Eurocentric binary and affirm theopposite side of the binary and leave intactthe hegemonic binary itself. For example,they will affirm patriarchy or authoritarianforms of political authority leaving in thehands of eurocentrism the image of beingdemocractic and feminist. Hitchens’s defi-nition of what fundamentalism is hides theunderlying assumption of all fundamental-isms: the ethno-centric idea that only theirown epistemology is superior and the restare inferior.

It is from diasporic and border thinkersthat challenges to Eurocentric fundamen-talism and its derivative forms of eurocen-tric Third World fundamentalism areemerging. Islamic Feminist, Afro-Carib-bean philosophers, the Marxist-Tojolaba-lism of the Zapatistas, the “ayllu” ofAymara thinkers, etc., are examples of tra-ditions of thought that have developed in-stitutional forms and concepts of non-Western democracy, ecology, feminism andhuman rights beyond the Eurocentric fun-damentalist binaries.

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Documents

Human Rights and Anti-Semitism after GAZA VII 2/Grosfoguel-FM.pdf · 90 R AMÓN G ROSFOGUEL H UMAN A RCHITECTURE: J OURNAL OF THE S OCIOLOGY OF S ELF-K NOWLEDGE, VII, 2, S PRING 2009