Editorials

Wrapping yourself in the flag: it’s a hoary cliché. Usually, it implies using phony patriotism to disguise nefarious aims. There’s a quote mistakenly attributed to Sinclair Lewis which has been turned into a popular bumpersticker: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” Wikiquotes thinks the source was Harrison Salisbury’s characterization of Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here: "Sinclair Lewis aptly predicted in It Can't Happen Here that if fascism came to America it would come wrapped in the flag and whistling 'The Star Spangled Banner.”

But neither Sinclair Lewis nor Harrison Salisbury, nor anyone else for that matter, could have anticipated that fascism would come to the South Berkeley Senior Center on a Sunday night in November 2010 in the person of a middle-aged lady wrapped in an Israeli flag with the Star of David on her back. If I hadn’t seen it on video, I might not have believed it. 

As it happens, among the spectators at the meeting, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, were a couple of low-key respectable people I know pretty well, and their accounts confirm what the video shows and JVC’s subsequent press release claims. One of them, a neighbor, someone I knew only as a planning advocate, forwarded a link to me with JVP’s video of the event, with the comment “what a mess!” What a mess indeed. 

Even better, veteran journalist Gar Smith, who has been writing for the Planet lately, also was in the audience. His first person account is in today’s issue.  

The woman who is shown wrapping herself in the flag seems to have gone on to pull out a can of pepper spray which she directed against those who were trying (non-violently) to prevent her from photographing audience members against their will. It’s not at all clear to me how this act, which seems to me to be simple assault, if I correctly remember the definitions from my criminal law class thirty years ago, didn’t get her arrested by the police who were reported to be present.  

Fascism. That’s a heavy-duty label, and one that didn’t occur to me as applying to misguided ultra-Zionists until I saw the picture of the woman wrapping herself in the flag. I remember very little of my serious undergraduate Government course entitled “Communism, Fascism and Democracy”, and anyway, that was in the late fifties and I suspect the analyis is somewhat different now. So I availed myself of that excellent memory-substitute, Wikipedia, from which I extracted this footnoted quote:  

“Fascists believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong.^[16] They claim that culture is created by the collective national society and its state, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus they reject individualism.^[16] Viewing the nation as an integrated collective community, they see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety.^{[17][18] .”}  

There’s much more to the definition, of course, and it would be unfair to brand the whole nation of Israel with the actions of its craziest defenders, the people who have been attacking Middle East peace advocates like JVP all over the Bay Area in the past few months. But if wrapping yourself in a flag and attempting to shut down a peaceful meeting by shouting isn’t the way fascism shows itself, what is it?  

Also seen in the video produced by Jewish Voice for Peace, the organizers of the meeting where this took place, was one Dan Spitzer, who has made a career, in the best fascistic style, of bullying anyone who has the temerity to disagree with the policies of the current government of Israel. At the Planet, we’ve gotten many reports from terrified small businesses of his appearances on their premises making scenes in front of their customers, with the intention of persuading them to cancel their ads.  

After seeing this video, I realized that Spitzer was also the man who used the question period of a panel discussion at U.C.’ s School of Journalism several years ago to launch a gratuitous verbal attack on me and on the paper, just because I happened to be in the audience. The timid newsies and academics on the panel and in the audience that night, by and large, didn’t speak up, just sat there as if they were stuffed. 

Until recently, it has been possible to stifle any criticism of Israel or its advocates like these with the threat that critics would be labeled as anti-Semites, as I have been, simply because I published such criticisms. But now it’s time and past time for Berkeley’s civic leaders to speak up about the vicious tactics which have been used here against JVP and other organizations by self-styled friends of Israel. Someone in authority in city government ought to be asking why the Berkeley police stood idly by as someone commited an assault before a score of witnesses with a bogus claim of self-defense.  

Would it be possible for the Berkeley City Council (which has taken positions on bullying everywhere else in the world, Darfur, Tibet, you name it) to condemn those who attacked attendees at a peaceful meeting on city property in the city of Berkeley? How about Berkeley’s numerous religious citizens and their leaders, the priests, ministers, rabbis? Granted, few of them spoke up when the Planet was attacked, but hasn’t the time come now to take a stand?  

Now for the good news: three cheers, and three cheers more, for the brave members of Jewish Voice for Peace, who are not at all afraid to speak up. Some (though not all) of them, are young, and it’s hard to challenge the mistakes of your elders, especially if you generally respect their opinions.  

The young people who carried out the New Orleans protest remind me of the young members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee back in the heyday of the civil rights movement in the United States. Some of SNCC’s elders urged caution, but the young folks realized that it was time for direct action and just did it.  

I’d even wager that a pretty sizeable percentage of the older people attending the convention in New Orleans knew that the young activists who unfurled banners at Netanyahu’s speech were justified in their criticisms of the government of Israel—even if the elders lacked the courage to join the protest. It’s hard to pin the anti-Semitic label on brave young Jews like these. Anyone, Jewish or not, who is genuinely concerned for the survival of Israel as a democratic and tolerant state should thank them for pointing the way toward peace with justice.