Antisemitism Is A Topic For Adults Of Good Will To Be Disturbed By - Confirm Deborah Lipstadt Now Or Admit Holding Her Up Is An Act Of Antisemitism

THE DESERVEDLY EMINENT HISTORIAN who is most famous for exposing the liar, more than neo-Nazi friendly, famous (formerly lauded) historian David Irving and triumphantly winning when he sued her for libel, Deborah Lipstadt is a victim of Republican-fascists holding up her confirmation for   the U.S. State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.  Or, rather, we are all victims of her nomination being held up.  

The reason she is being blackballed by Republican-fascists is that she has always monitored and combatted antisemitism. 

It was a Republican congressman, Chris Smith of New Jersey, who, in the wake of a series of deadly antisemitic attacks, wrote the law creating the U.S. State Department Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, in 2004. It was Smith who worked to upgrade the office’s special envoy to the rank of ambassador.

But now some of his fellow Republicans are holding up confirmation of Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt, who was nominated by President Joe Biden to serve in that post.

Eminently qualified and highly respected, Lipstadt would seem a shoo-in for the job. She has served two terms on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. She famously won the libel lawsuit brought against her in 2000 in the U.K. by fellow historian David Irving, whom she called a Holocaust denier for, among other things, his specious claim that the Nazis hadn’t gassed Jews.

I have been critical of some of Lipstadt's activities, especially those surrounding the badly thought out effort to come up with a standard definition of that very real and dangerous moral and mental disorder. antisemitism, but holding up her confirmation is such an outrageous an act of Republican-fascist neo-Nazi enablement that it more than overrides any disagreements on the details.

The reason some Senate Republicans are preventing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from scheduling Lipstadt’s confirmation hearing is that she has tweeted criticism of members of their party for various reasons, including her judgment that some had co-opted the Holocaust for political purposes.

In a particularly acerbic comment last spring, she called out Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson for tweeting that he “wasn’t concerned” during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, but would have been concerned had the participants been “Black Lives Matter and Antifa protesters.”

“This is white supremacy/nationalism. Pure and simple,” wrote Lipstadt.

She hasn’t been a wallflower with regard to Democrats’ excesses either. In 2019, she charged that some of Democratic U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments about Jews’ support for Israel were “textbook anti-Semitism.”

“I am like an umpire,” she told Jewish Insider of her bipartisan slaps. “I call balls and strikes as I see them.”

Most egregiously, though, at least to some Republican members of Congress, she dared to call a foul against then-candidate Donald Trump back in 2016.

She rejected the claims of some that Trump is an antisemite, noting that “This is a man who is exceptionally proud of his daughter, a traditional Jew who is giving her children a solid Jewish education. His son-in-law … is an Orthodox Jew. This is not the profile of an anti-Semite.”

But, she continued, Trump “may be what I call ‘the inadvertent anti-Semite’ — the person who, while not a hater of Jews, has internalized some of the most pernicious stereotypes about Jews.”

Last year, Lipstadt defended a 30-second get-out-the-vote ad from the Jewish Democratic Council of America that juxtaposed imagery from 1930s Germany with footage of neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia; Trump speaking at a rally; and the Pittsburgh synagogue where 11 Jews were massacred in 2018. A shul defaced with graffiti was presented alongside photos of 1930s graffitied Jewish shops.

She explained that she was not comparing the former administration to Nazis. “Had the ad contained imagery of the Shoah,” she said, she would not have defended it. But, she averred, “I would say in the attacks we’re seeing on the press, the courts, academic institutions, elected officials and even, and most chillingly, the electoral process, that this deserves comparison. It’s again showing how the public’s hatred can be whipped up against Jews.” 

I disagree with her over Ilhan Omar's statements which were provocative but not over any line I'd have drawn.  I think Deborah Lipstadt's  and some of her colleagues' attempt to define criticism of Israel's government and SOME of the actions of its supporters here "antisemitism" is wrong and unsustainable.  I am totally opposed to that use of the effort to come up with a supposed standard definition of antisemitism.   

But instead of me disagreeing with her on that leading me to claim she is disqualified, what  she did in all of that was prove her enormous qualification for the position she was nominated for.   No position that important and serious should ever come without the holder stirring things up in a serious and important way.

One of the most tragic features of the popular media presentation of the Shoah, especially in the last decade of the 20th century is that it turned it into something less important for serious work in the future in considering how we are to live now and forever more. It turned it into something you teach for a few days in 4th grade and have children write poems about, not something that is one of the most serious and hard of moral issues that human beings and Western culture have generated.  WHAT IS THAT OFFICE, THAT POSITION SUPPOSED TO BE THERE FOR?  FOR MAKING NICE SPEECHES AT GALLERY OPENINGS AND OPENING PARTIES FOR BROADWAY MUSICALS? 

That her confirmation is being held up because of her comments about current American politics proves that she's got the courage and moral substance for the job that a lesser person would turn into a useless expenditure of public funds. 

Deborah Lipstadt is exactly the right person for that position because such a position should never be quiet and passive and  uncontroversial, they should never, ever be a mere decoration, part of the District of Columbia Cotillion that shows up for reasons of appearances and because "that's nice."   The positions should be to shake the moral conscience of the nation, not for any lesser purpose.

The memory and use of the Shoah has been cheapened by show-biz and Hollywood and popular novels, it has certainly been cheapened by its introduction into the stand-up routines of unfunny comedians.  It is to be expected that with that would come its diminution as effective moral information that makes a difference in the real lives of real people even now as some of the direct witnesses of it are still able to tell us what they saw and experienced.  If someone doesn't do something about that now, things will go even more tragically wrong than they are now.