JazzVibe

LAST month I used my Jewish Get-Out-Of-Proselytisation-Free card. I was on the National Mall in front of the Air and Space Museum, and a heavyset Southern fellow with a white beard and folk guitar had set up a tent with a generator-powered PA system; he was playing Christian rock tunes and pausing to tell passersby that America was being punished for turning away from Jesus. I didn't feel like being harangued, and went up to the fellow to ask him who'd given him permission to do so, but the question came out rather politely and we ended up in a short conversation about how to register with the National Park Service to set up a tent for public messaging purposes. (Apparently there are 18 spots in Washington where anyone can do this. I consider this a potentially more effective alternative to blogging.) Anyway, he then asked me whether I was a believer, and I said, well, I'm Jewish. He said, hey, that's great! And he went back to playing Christian rock, and I went to a lunch meeting.

This, of course, was a bit of a cheat. I'm a non-believing but occasionally practicing Jew, and in terms of the question that guy was asking, I'm pretty sure it would have been more honest for me to say, "No, I'm an atheistic secular humanist." But at this moment in American history, giving a proselytising evangelical Christian that answer sets you up for an adversarial interaction, while saying you're Jewish gets you off with a friendly wave. (In Pakistan, I imagine I would probably take the reverse course.) Things haven't always been this way. In the 1940s or 1950s, I wouldn't have been terribly comfortable telling an evangelical Christian, who had just stated that America was being punished for turning away from Jesus, that actually I was Jewish. Like the Rothschilds, and the Rosenbergs.

This week's Mother Jones has an interview with Bob Inglis, the Republican congressman from South Carolina who just lost his primary to a tea-party-backed candidate despite having a 93% rating from the American Conservative Union. Mr Inglis, a former right-wing firebrand from the GOP's Class of 1994, says he lost his seat because he simply couldn't go along with the kind of radical conspiratorial rhetoric required to remain viable in Republican politics today. He tells the story of a meeting with tea-party activists that took place shortly before the primary.

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks. I have this look like, "What the heck are you talking about?" I'm trying to hide that look and look clueless. I figured clueless was better than argumentative. So they said, "You don't know this?! You are a member of Congress, and you don't know this?!" And I said, "Please forgive me. I'm just ignorant of these things." And then of course, it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff. And now you have the feeling of anti-Semitism here coming in, mixing in. Wow.

The Bilderberg strain of conspiracy theory isn't as directly anti-semitic as the Christ-killers or Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion strains; it runs through allusions to Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller, and also includes a weird obsession with the royal Dutch House of Orange. But Mr Inglis isn't wrong to have gotten that "feeling of anti-semitism". The Anti-Defamation League condemns the Bilderberg conspiracy theory, as well. (Oddly, the ADL item on the theory seems to have gone down since the Mother Jones story went up.) It would obviously be silly to suggest that tea-partiers are broadly anti-semitic; at this point, Jews and Israel seem to be firmly on the "good" side of the ledger for most of the far right. The point rather is that what's wrong with a lot of hard-right tea-party rhetoric today is the same thing that's wrong with a lot of anti-semitic rhetoric: an anti-rationalist, conspiratorial, apocalyptic, xenophobic mindset. It's not so much that I'm scared of this kind of thinking because it's likely to involve bigotry against me. It's that I'm scared of this kind of thinking because I know it, and I know it because I've heard it coming from the mouths of people who were bigoted against me. The fact that my religious identity doesn't seem to be its target at the moment doesn't make it any less scary.

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