Anatomy of a Moral Panic (jewishcurrents.org)
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Anatomy of a Moral Panic
The repressive machine currently arrayed against campus protests follows a
familiar pattern.
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The repressive machine currently arrayed against campus protests follows a
familiar pattern.
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Anatomy of a Moral Panic
Analysis · Adam Haber and Matylda Figlerowicz
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| The repressive machine currently arrayed against campus protests follows a
familiar pattern. |
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Ever since Columbia University sent in the New York Police Department to clear
its student Gaza solidarity encampment on April 18th, pro-Palestine student
encampments have proliferated around the country—and have frequently been met
with violent force. State troopers were called to the University of Texas at
Austin; Atlanta police used tear gas and rubber bullets against the protesters
at Emory. On Tuesday night, rows of New York City riot police stormed Columbia
University and City College New York, arresting 300 people. Yet even as these
scenes recall the violent police response to student antiwar protestors in
1968—and as students in Gaza, whose universities have all been destroyed, thank
them for speaking up—the mainstream media has frequently justified these
crackdowns as a necessary defense against lawless mobs who pose an antisemitic
threat to the university.
These claims build on recent attempts to paint pro-Palestine activism as a
source and expression of a novel form of antisemitism. An emblematic example is
a February cover article in Time magazine by Harvard legal scholar Noah
Feldman, which announced the arrival of “The New Antisemitism.” The article
urged readers to pay attention to a recent surge in antisemitism and its
supposed new source: the pro-Palestine left. According to Feldman, despite
antisemitism historically being a right-wing phenomenon, “the most perniciously
creative current in contemporary antisemitic thought is more likely to come
from the left.”
Ironically, this article proclaiming its identification of a “new” phenomenon
shares its exact title—and much of its argument—with a work from 50 years ago.
In 1974, Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein of the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL) published the book The New Anti-Semitism, warning of a novel form of
anti-Jewish animus emerging from the left, and singling out particular groups,
such as Arabs and Black Americans. Their argument conflated anti-Zionism and
antisemitism. In the intervening years, over a dozen books and articles with
“new antisemitism” in their title have been published. The main argument is
consistent: there is a new increase in antisemitism, which has a new
source—leftist social movements. Typically, the concept is revived each time
Israel’s repression of Palestinians leads to another wave of international
criticism: For instance, texts on the “new antisemitism” proliferated around
the turn of the millennium after Israel’s reprisals following the Second
Intifada prompted a global outcry and a fresh mobilization of diasporic Jewish
dissent.
Despite this long history, each time, pieces like Feldman’s present the “new
antisemitism” as though the term has just been coined. Indeed, they barely
quote or acknowledge each other: Of pieces we reviewed on the “new
antisemitism” by 40 different authors published since the turn of the 21st
century, we found no references to the 1974 book. The result is a mystification
of history and context—in this case, the “new antisemitism” conceals its own
genealogy as a concept and thereby constructs a sense of urgency. It depends,
as well, on other ahistorical accounts, such as the omission of the
longstanding tradition of the anti-Zionist Jewish left. In this worldview,
history is being constantly restarted, and leftist movements are posited as an
ever-emerging threat.
This kind of attempt to ahistorically cast a dynamic as “new” is a common
feature of a “moral panic,” a phenomenon long theorized by scholars. In fact,
much of the “new antisemitism” conversation maps onto the classic features of a
moral panic. The sociologist Stanley Cohen, who articulated the first theory of
“moral panics” in the late 1960s, summarized their main elements in the
introduction to the 2002 third edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics:
They are new (lying dormant perhaps, but hard to recognize; deceptively
ordinary and routine, but invisibly creeping up the moral horizon)—but also old
(camouflaged versions of traditional and well-known evils). They are damaging
in themselves—but also merely warning signs of the real, much deeper and more
prevalent condition. They are transparent (anyone can see what’s happening)—but
also opaque: accredited experts must explain the perils hidden behind the
superficially harmless (decode a rock song’s lyrics to see how they led to a
school massacre).
The discourse around the “new antisemitism” shares this three-part structure.
First, the theory’s proponents acknowledge that antisemitism has a long history
as a mode of hatred and discrimination. Yet there is an explicit attempt to
present it as new, modifying its meaning so it can be specifically marshaled to
support the Israeli state. Secondly, this “new antisemitism,” the argument
goes, is bad in itself, but it is also a warning sign of other social ills—most
of all, of the dangerous radicalization of the left, and of the impending rise
of other forms of hate. And, finally, the rise of antisemitism is posited as
self-evident, clear for anyone to understand; yet the source of antisemitism is
presented as opaque, such that expert analysts of the “new antisemitism” are
required to reveal the purported threats of left-wing movements.
This script recurs again and again in moments when Israel faces increased
international criticism for its violence against Palestinian people. Like other
moral panics, this one is a sign of a crisis—in this case, the crisis of
Zionism, but also US imperialism more broadly. Now that an unprecedented number
of people have joined the movement protesting US support for what many experts
have classified as genocide in Gaza, it’s no surprise that the wheels of the
“new antisemitism” narrative machine are furiously turning. The theory of moral
panics can help us understand its mechanisms of repression.
For an analysis of how moral panics serve political functions, we can look to
the 1978 book Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order by the
British cultural theorist Stuart Hall and several co-authors, which examines
the rising fear of mugging in 1970s Britain. At the time of their writing,
“mugging” was a new word—imported to the UK from the US—applied to an age-old
phenomenon of a person being stopped in the street and robbed. Hall and
co-authors argued that for the urban white middle classes, mugging was a
concise concept that encompassed a series of fears caused by “the changing
class and ethnic composition of the cities and a shift in the whole flavour and
ambience of ‘urban living.’” These changes “precipitated not only a sense of
panic but also the steady movement of whites out of the city . . . and the
adoption of a whole series of protective and defensive moves.” The moral panic
around mugging played on an underlying racist fear already embedded in British
culture combined with a newly activated feeling of threat among the white
people who fled to the suburbs. A similar structure underlies the moral panic
of the “new antisemitism.” This panic draws its power from the existing lore of
the “Red Scare,” as well as multiple racialized stereotypes that demonize Arabs
and people of color. And it is re-activated each time the Zionist project
experiences an international crisis of legitimacy, which ignites a fear that,
in the short term, support for Israel may evaporate.
Since moral panics require framing an already existing phenomenon as a newly
emergent danger, they depend on an infrastructure of data manipulation, which
is mobilized to provide ironclad evidence of the disturbing new trend. As the
authors of Policing the Crisis put it:
Statistics––whether crime rates or opinion polls––have an ideological
function: they appear to ground free floating and controversial impressions in
the hard, incontrovertible soil of numbers. Both the media and the public have
enormous respect for “the facts”––hard facts. And there is no fact so “hard” as
a number.
The ADL is chief among the producers of facts undergirding the “new
antisemitism.” Beginning last October, the ADL released widely broadcast
visualizations and maps that purported to show a “nearly 400-percent increase”
in antisemitic incidents. Yet, these maps appeared to be comprised mostly of
pro-Palestine marches. Indeed, the ADL had adopted an explicit new policy that
all Palestine solidarity activism would be included in its tallies of
antisemitic incidents, even if there were no signs of anti-Jewish sentiments at
the rallies or they were organized by Jewish-led groups. Even some of the ADL’s
own staffers rejected this conflation of anti-Zionist protestors with the white
supremacist groups responsible for the vast majority of antisemitic
violence—with a senior employee labeling the reports “dishonest,” according to
Slack messages obtained by The Guardian. But the damage was done: The ADL’s
reports were already ubiquitous, contributing to a public sense of an explosion
of antisemitism spearheaded by left-wing, Arab, and Palestinian movements.
To give the impression of “hard facts,” traditional and social media sources
have also used exaggeration and falsehood, often misconstruing or outright
misstating the rhetoric that is deployed at pro-Palestine rallies. For example,
in separate incidents at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania in October,
protestors were accused of calling for “Jewish genocide”; the chants in
question were, actually, “We charge you with genocide,” directed at Israel.
While media sources eventually concluded that the protests were peaceful and
not antisemitic, the reports had already incited panic. This month, as campus
protesters call on US universities to divest from Israel, the same pattern is
already visible. Last week, a Jewish Zionist student at Yale—editor of the
campus’s right-wing newspaper—claimed that she was “stabbed” in the eye by a
Yale encampment protestor with a flagpole; video of the incident appeared to
reveal that the protestor had walked by waving a Palestinian flag and bumped
her as she pressed up against a line of marching demonstrators. Soon after,
there were reports that protestors at the Northeastern University encampment
had called to “Kill the Jews,” but the phrase was quickly revealed to have been
chanted by pro-Israel counter-protestors. In addition to maligning the
protestors, these distortions risk emptying the word antisemitism of any
meaning, and seriously hinder opportunities to analyze and discuss genuine
threats to diasporic Jewish communities.
The publication of these “hard facts” sets in motion what the authors of
Policing the Crisis described as a “signification spiral”—a process that
culminates in calls for the group demonized by the panic to be policed. The
authors explain “signification” as a process by which events are given social
meaning—for example, reporters labeling an event as a “mugging” signify that a
street robbery in Britain is a continuation of a law-and-order crisis in the
US. This process, which “both assumes and helps to construct society as a
consensus,” can take the form of a “self-amplifying sequence,” in which each
wave of news about a moral panic becomes news itself: The articles point to
each other, gathering steam and amplifying each other’s alarming message. The
authors defined the key stages of these “signification spirals”:
(1) the identification of a specific issue of concern;
(2) the identification of a subversive minority;
(3) “convergence,” or the linking, by labelling, of this specific issue to
other problems;
(4) the notion of “thresholds” which, once crossed, can lead to an escalating
threat;
(5) the prophecy of more troubling times to come if no action is taken;
(6) the call for “firm steps.”
In the case of the “new antisemitism” discourse, once statistics conjure a
specific threat coming from the “subversive minority” of leftists and people of
color, we see a “convergence” where readers are warned that these groups
threaten the current social order more generally. For example, Feldman’s piece
links to an article by Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL, which not only connects
campus protests to support for terrorism, but also identifies them as a broader
threat to society. To apply Hall’s framework, Greenblatt’s argument holds a
“prophecy” (“We must act because . . . at some point the golden era [of Jewish
safety] can end”) and calls for “firm steps” (“We need a ‘consequence culture.’
We must hold them accountable . . . America is different, and we must fight to
make sure it continues to be.”) All in all, this spiral recasts social
movements calling for liberation of Palestinians, together with other
anti-racist and anti-colonial movements, as a threat to the current liberal
democratic order.
The result is a turn to repressive law-and-order measures. We’ve seen the
effects of these crackdowns: The spurious antisemitic chanting incident was
explicitly invoked by Northeastern University administrators to justify calling
in Boston police who then arrested 108 student protestors, and New Haven Mayor
Justin Elicker said the aforementioned dubious flagpole incident was part of
Yale’s request to the city for police intervention on its campus, resulting in
the arrest of 48 students.
In addition to producing calls for law and order, this panic serves to
reinforce the dominant ideology in manifold ways. Most people, aware of the
horrors of antisemitism, rightly dread contributing to anti-Jewish racism. If
told they risk perpetuating antisemitism, they may opt out of engaging with the
Palestinian cause altogether. For Jewish people, the “new antisemitism” panic
creates a sense of imminent peril, and when people are afraid, they are more
likely to endorse forms of violence and injustice that they would not otherwise
support. A diasporic Jewish community afraid for its own safety may be one more
likely to offer unconditional support for the genocide of Palestinian people in
Gaza.
By demonizing a subversive racialized minority, moral panics offer comfort to a
mainstream morality in crisis. Anyone who pays even minimal attention to the
utter horror of Israel’s attack on Gaza, and keeps on supporting the state of
Israel has good reason to worry about their complicity. Thus, it can be
reassuring to hear that those who claim we need radical change are not only
wrong, but also immoral, and that we need to stick to the established
structures.
In the process, the recurring emergence of the “new antisemitism” mounts an
active attack on Jewish history and memory, insisting that Jewish history
happens on a timeline that constantly needs to be restarted. It is also
detached from the rest of world history—the texts fomenting the “new
antisemitism” panic attempt to suppress much of the shared, internationally
developed language for describing injustice. For example, they consistently
dismiss analyses of Israel as an apartheid and settler colonial state, or the
current documentation of genocide in Gaza. The combination of the severed
timeline and suppressed vocabulary creates an increasingly short and narrow
perspective from which to understand the present.
Policing the Crisis reveals moral panics to be symptoms of a sudden fear that
the state cannot properly rule—what Antonio Gramsci called “a crisis of
hegemony,” caused either by the ruling class failing to achieve some critical
aim, or the sudden emergence of a mass movement that resists the state’s
actions. Hall and co-authors stressed that these panics are surface-level signs
of this underlying crisis and at the same time illuminate how dissent is
suppressed. In this case, the “new antisemitism” reveals a series of deepening
crises faced by Israel and US imperialism, as well as the interplay between the
ideological institutions of the state (the media or think tanks and advocacy
organizations, such as the ADL), and its repressive institutions (campus
security, police, and the threat of the National Guard). Yet as they are put
into high gear, these systems reveal their violent nature, and so they risk
igniting further resistance faster than they can quash it—a dynamic that has
exploded in recent weeks, after the initial mass arrests of Columbia students
inspired an ever-expanding wave of encampments across the US and around the
world. They emerge from organizations painstakingly built over the last
decades—Palestinian Youth Movement, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish
Voice for Peace, graduate student worker unions, and so on.
It is increasingly clear that resistance to Israeli oppression, in Palestine
and abroad, is too strong to be silenced. We may be seeing, as the Israeli
historian Ilan Pappé has said, that “the Zionist project is entering . . . the
beginning of the end.” Hall et al. emphasized that analyzing institutions of
state power and how they produce popular consent is an essential starting point
for fighting back—but, they warn, “we should not mistake a proto-political
consciousness for organized political class struggle and practice.” In other
words, the only way to challenge and overcome the ideological panic is to fight
together as part of an organized political movement.
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