A movement’s genesis

Editorial

It is with an ambivalent sense of local pride that we note the global “Occupy” movement, which began as Occupy Wall Street and spread worldwide last weekend, has a Vancouver genesis.

Kalle Lasn, founder of Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine, is credited with inspiring the movement. For those who are not aware, Lasn is author of the 2004 article “Why won’t anyone say they are Jewish?,” in which he lists Jewish neo-conservatives and claims that closeted Jews obliquely control American foreign policy. In response to another Adbusters article that asked, “Does the Israeli tail wag the American dog?,” this page noted (“That old, familiar lie,” Jewish Independent, April 13, 2007) the comical idea that people with names like Abrams, Perle, Peretz, Cohen, Kaplan and Goldberg are somehow hiding their Jewish identity.

Given the prevalence of such attitudes and the fact that Jews are also often accused of controlling the banks, media, what have you, it will likely come as no surprise that there are antisemitic voices among the Occupy movement to which Commentary magazine has attributed an “antisemitism problem.” In a blog, Commentary writer Abe Greenwald cites a few examples of blatant antisemitism, including a “conspiracy theorist who laments that ‘Jewish money controls American politics,’” the protester “who yelled, ‘You’re a bum, Jew’ at his yarmulke-wearing interlocutor” and the “placards scapegoating Israel, Zionism or ‘Hitler’s bankers.’”

However, as concerning as these comments are, they do not, in and of themselves, suggest an intrinsic antisemitism in the movement. What will make this determination is how the movement develops, which voices rise to the top and how its participants respond to these isolated incidents; whether they deny, encourage, excuse or condemn them.

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