Our Zoom call this week, for paid subscribers, will be at our regular time: Noon EDT.
Our guest will be Abdelnasser Rashid. Abdelnasser is a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, the first Palestinian-American ever to serve in that body. He grew up in the West Bank town of Turmus Ayya, 25 miles north of Jerusalem. And he was in Turmus Ayya last month when it came under attack from settlers. He’ll talk about that harrowing experience, and what the US government should be doing to protect Palestinians, including Palestinian-Americans.
As usual, paid subscribers will get the link this Wednesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Omar Barghouti, Maggie Haberman, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Aparna Gopalan in Jewish Currents on how Narendra Modi’s defenders are crafting a definition of Hinduphobia modeled on the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism.
According to a 2020 Public Religion Research Institute poll, Republicans are more likely to say that white Americans and Christian Americans face “a lot of discrimination” than Blacks or Hispanics
The Supreme Court’s obsession with assaults on the religious liberty of Christians. (Muslims not so much).
When John Roberts said there wasn’t enough anti-Black racism in America to justify continued enforcement of the Voting Rights.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Caroline Morganti asks whether surveys of American Jews really capture their views on Israel-Palestine.
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I interviewed Jonathan Pollak, a Jewish Israeli activist demanding to be tried— as West Bank Palestinians are—by a military court.
A student on Birthright Israel asks uncomfortable questions.
What if Israel had granted Palestinians in the occupied territories citizenship in 1967?
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. Our call this Friday will be with Abdelnasser Rashid. Abdelnasser is a member of the Illinois House of Representatives. He’s the first Palestinian-American ever elected to serve in that body. He’s also a native of the West Bank village of Turmus Ayya, and was actually in Turmus Ayya last month when it came under attack by settlers. He’s gonna talk about that harrowing experience and what the US government should be doing to keep Palestinians, including Palestinian-Americans, safe, and what it’s like to be a Palestinian-American in elected office. So, that’ll be this Friday at noon ET for paid subscribers. And as always, paid subscribers have access to our whole library of previous videos with folks like Noam Chomsky, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Bret Stephens, and others.
I wanted to talk for a minute about something which I think is kind of a fundamental element of political discourse these days, and it’s this. It’s the use of claims of opposition to bigotry to defend bigotry. The use of the language of anti-discrimination to defend systems of group supremacy. And I think we had a couple of really important examples of that last week in the Supreme Court. But I want to try to connect them to a really important Jewish Currents article that came out last week by my colleague Aparna Gopalan. So, Apana’s story is about the way in which Hindu-American groups that are sympathetic to Narendra Modi’s government in India are developing a discourse of Hinduphobia, in which they claim that attacks on Modi’s Hindu nationalism—a Hindu nationalism that is denying Muslims equal rights in India—that those attacks on Hindu nationalism should be classified as Hinduphobia, as bigotry against Hindus.
Now, if this sounds familiar, it should. Because what Aparna shows in her story is that this is being modeled on what establishment American Jewish organizations have done vis-a-vis Israel. So, through things like the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which has been pushed very strongly by the Israeli government and establishment Jewish organizations, the claim is that if you challenge the legitimacy of political Zionism, the legitimacy of a political system that gives Jews legal supremacy over Palestinians, that constitutes antisemitism.
So, for instance, the IHRA uses as one of its examples of antisemitism, “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor.” So, if you’re a Palestinian who says, well, I think Israel is racist because it gives Jews full rights, but it holds millions of Palestinians without citizenship, and even Palestinian citizens don’t have the same rights as Jewish citizens, for instance, in issues of land, for instance. And if you say that Israel is racist because the very idea of a state whose name represents the Jewish people, right, and therefore it kind of embodies the fact that this state has obligations to Jews that it doesn’t have to Palestinians, if you say that that is racist and discriminatory then that itself, that charge is itself an example of antisemitism, of anti-Jewish bigotry.
And so, as Narendra Modi is moving India from being a historically secular state to being one that is a Hindu nationalist state that has a kind of Hindu supremacy built into the way it treats its population, that you see pro-Modi Hindu groups essentially doing something which is modeled on the pro-Israel Jewish groups, and saying that challenging what’s called Hindutva, this Hindu nationalism that Narendra Modi is putting into place, that that constitutes bigotry. So, again, you see this use of the language of anti-bigotry to actually justify a system of institutionalized discrimination of group supremacy.
So, what does this have to do with the Supreme Court? Well, let’s look at two of the key decisions that the Court made last week. The decision on affirmative action and the decision on the right of Christian Americans to deny services to LGBT people. The court decisions are both phrased in the language of anti-discrimination, right? The first is that affirmative action is discriminatory because it favors African-Americans and other people by race. And the second is that it’s discriminatory to force Christian people to provide services to LGBT people who, for instance, want to have a gay marriage and want someone to provide services for the that gay marriage.
But in fact, in both cases, I think what you could argue is that this language of anti-discrimination is actually being used to protect systems of discrimination that exist in the United States, right. So, there are clearly, I think, problems with the way the affirmative action system works in American universities. I think Asian-Americans suffer as the result of a whole series of privileges that exist in the American admissions process. But the favoring of Black Americans is only one of those systems. Most of the systems that are kind of not merit based in American admissions in college actually benefit white people. For instance, legacy admissions, or the preferences to people who give money, or preferences to college athletes, or preferences for people who can just afford to give their kids all kinds of tutoring and other special advantages that make them stronger applicants.
So, it’s striking that in using the language of anti-discrimination, the only thing that the Supreme Court goes after, right, is the one element that’s designed to help Black and Hispanic Americans, groups that have historically been discriminated against in the United States. And all these other privileges that help white people are kind of left in place. And so, in reality, I think what you have is the language of anti-bigotry being used to prevent the redress of this profound bigotry that has existed across American history. Black Americans have only had basic citizenship rights, really, in the United States for the last 50 years. For the vast majority of American history, Black people were either enslaved or held under segregation, didn’t really have the right to vote most of the time.
And so, it is curious that the Supreme Court is using the language of anti-bigotry to prevent the redress of this very profound bigotry that exists in the United States. But it becomes less surprising when you realize that this is a conservative Supreme Court majority that tends to reflect the worldview of a Republican party, most of whose members believe that—and you can see this in polling data—that white people face more discrimination in the United States than Black people, and Christians face more discrimination in the United States than Black people and other religious groups.
And you see this in the other Supreme Court case I wanna mention, which is the case in which people are allowed—based on their religious beliefs—to not provide services to LGBT people. So, again, this is also phrased in the language of anti-bigotry, right, that it would be bigoted, it would be discriminatory, to deny Christian people the right to act according to their religious conscience. But the consequence is that LGBT people, another group that had been very viciously discriminated against throughout American history, that they are discriminated against because they can’t get these services. And so what you have is, in both cases, the language of anti-bigotry used to maintain systems of hierarchy that have been very built into United States. And the Supreme Court has shown that it sees Christians as a more discriminated against group than Black Americans. I think if you look carefully at the way the Supreme Court justices, the conservative ones, talk, that comes through very clearly.
In 2013, for instance, Chief Justice John Roberts in the Shelby v. Holder decision, when the Supreme Court basically said that states that had historically denied Black people the right to vote no longer needed federal government permission to change their voting rights laws, John Roberts justified that by basically saying the discriminate racism against Black people wasn’t a big problem in the United States. And Justice Alito, another key conservative justice, said recently that religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right. So, the claim is that the big problem we have in the United States essentially with bigotry today is not against Black people—we’ve kind of gotten over that. But we have this now huge problem of discrimination based on religion. And if you look at the cases of the Supreme Court, it’s pretty clear that the religious group that these conservative justices are worried about discrimination against is Christians, right? Again and again and again, their cases have been to say that Christians have the right to discriminate against LGBT people, or Christians have the right in the Hobby Lobby case, for instance, to not provide contraception services. When it comes to the religious liberty of say Muslim-Americans, the Supreme Court seems a little bit less concerned given that the conservative justices voted to uphold Donald Trump’s ban on members of people from five Muslim-majority countries entering in the United States.
So, you have a language of anti-bigotry, which I think is basically designed to protect the rights of those people in the United States, white Christians, who actually historically have been legally supreme. Just as you have in the case of the IHRA and now it’s kind of Hindu-American imitators, the language of bigotry against Jews and Hindus to defend systems of Jewish or Hindu supremacy. So, you have this use of this language of anti-bigotry essentially to defend systems of group supremacy. But instead of coming out and saying proudly, we’re doing this because we believe in bigotry, what you do is you turn it around and you say that challenging those systems of ethnic or racial or religious supremacy itself is a form of bigotry. So, efforts at true equality become equated with bigotry. And that’s something that I think is a pattern now of how defenders of ethno-nationalism, whether they be pro-Israel members of the Jewish community, or pro-Modi Hindu supremacists in India, or defenders of white Christian supremacy in the United States, are operating. Again, our call this Friday will be with Abdelnasser Rashid at noon. I hope many of you will join us.
Using the Language of Anti-Bigotry to Defend Bigotry