CiFWatch continues its theme from yesterday (previous post). Today they show how Steve Bell at CiF and one of the neo-Nazis at Stormfront have almost the exact same commentary to make on the 20th anniversary of the breaching of the Berlin Wall. The thesis, in case you can't guess on your own, being that Israel's separation barrier is worse than the Berlin Wall. So the question: do these folks read each other, perhaps?
Perhaps. But not necessarily. And even if so, it doesn't have to prove anything. I read the Guardian, and Richard Silverstein, and Mondoweiss, and all sorts of strange people, but that doesn't mean I'm like them. It merely means I take them seriously enough to want to know what makes them tick. It seems to me CIF Watch is on to something more important than who reads whom. They seem to be demonstrating how the Jew haters of the Left and the Jew haters of the Right are coalescing in the way they see the world. They don't need to copy from each other, if their processes of cognition have converged. It is that convergence which is significant.
Of course, the fact that extremes can end up resembling each other is not a surprise; it's a well known and oft repeated phenomenon. Sometimes the similarities even lead to active collaboration. The anti-democrats of Left and Right in the last years of Weimar Germany are merely the most famous case where extremes hated the center more than each other and worked together to destroy it. The service CiF Watch is doing right now is to document how the same is happening again today. This is a phenomenon worth watching.
In biology it's called convergent evolution.
ReplyDeleteThat's quite frightening; you write about it with some sort of academic detachment, like oh well, history in the making... Don't you think there is reason for very serious concern about what kind of history in the making you're watching?
ReplyDeleteI pointed out on the CiFWatch thread to this Bell cartoon that Bell has repeatedly shown a fascination with blood in his cartoons, a tendency I associate with the extreme right wing (Hitler was obsessed with the subject).
ReplyDeleteMoreover, Seth Freedman, a frequent commentator who seems to spend his waking hours looking for new ways to bash Israel on CIF, frequently used Nazi analogies and references to blood - "a virus coursing through their veins" - in attacking Israel.
There is no doubt in my mind that supposed "left-wingers' like Bell have actually gone full circle in their anti-Semitic views to join up with the neo-Nazi right.