Trump History X

Originally published before the election on Cambridge's 'Varsity' website: http://www.varsity.co.uk/culture/11105

“We need to open our eyes. There are over two million illegal immigrants bedding down in this state tonight! This state spent three billion dollars last year, on services for those people who have no right to be here in the first place. Three billion dollars! 400 million dollars just to lock up a bunch of illegal immigrant criminals… Our border policy’s a joke! So, is anybody surprised that south of the border, they’re laughing at us? Laughing at our laws?”

Donald Trump made this speech a few weeks ago at one of his infamous rallies, where black people are spat on and Mexicans are considered the scum of the earth. To rapturous applause from his supporters, Trump went on to talk about “decent, hard-working Americans falling through the cracks” because of “a bunch of people who aren’t even citizens of this country!” Typical Trump, right?

Well, I’m afraid I have a confession to make: this speech wasn’t actually made by Trump. These are the words of Derek Vinyard, the neo-Nazi protagonist of Tony Kaye’s cinematic masterpiece, American History X. The film tells the story of Derek Vinyard’s gradual realisation that the bigoted beliefs he has held for most of his adult life are mistaken. He then tries to prevent his little brother Danny from following in his footsteps and becoming embroiled in the race-related gang-violence that was rife in parts of the US in the 1990s.

The film’s 18th Anniversary falls on the 30th October, and yet it couldn’t be more relevant to our current political climate. We only have to look at Trump’s rabble-rousing rhetoric to see how closely related his sentiments are to the type of white supremacist vitriol that Vinyard preaches during the film. 

Trump has branded all Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists; he called for a ban on Muslim immigration to the USA; he refused to rule out special forms of identification for Muslims living in the States; he wavered in his condemnation of a retired KKK leader; he claimed the Chinese made up global warming; he argued that Obama wasn’t a US citizen; the list goes on. And on. And on.

I know what you’re thinking: we’ve heard it all already. Just another article about what a terrible man Trump is and how we should all be very scared. But that Donald Trump and Derek Vinyard espouse almost exactly the same attitudes calls for some more reflection. Before his transformative time in prison, Vinyard believes that white people are intrinsically superior to every other race. He thinks black people are inherently drawn to crime because of the colour of their skin. He has a swastika tattoo and he hates Jewish people.

I’m not trying to say that Trump is sworn to Hitler and that he believes in a supreme Aryan race. He also doesn’t go around trashing Mexican supermarkets and curb-stomping African Americans, as Vinyard does in the film. But the ethnocentric and isolationist parallels, and similar style of rhetoric, between Trump and an imagined character in the realm of American political fiction is cause for concern. It highlights how Trump plays on the same fears and prejudices as neo-Nazi Mein Kampf readers. Many of his supporters are just Vinyards reincarnate, sucking up the predictable patriotic platitudes that spew forth from Trump’s gob as if they’re the words of God. 

It’s unlikely that Trump will win the election, and even if he did he’d struggle to get much through Congress. But that’s not the point. Indeed, the parallels between the pair’s rhetoric at the beginning of this article show how most of the damage has already been done. Trump’s campaign has already polluted the political landscape of the States and other countries. Over the last few months, he has succeeded in proliferating his xenophobic and bigoted discourse, espoused with all of the same demagogic rhetorical questions and casual slurs as his fictional counterpart. 

Vinyard-esque remarks are now a part of the mainstream. There no longer seems to be a clear divide between white supremacists and the Republican party – their beliefs may not be the same but, as American History X shows, they share a dialogue of hatred and intolerance. Racial slurs and sexist insults now seem acceptable in the political arena, and if Trump does somehow win on the 8th, they may even become the norm.

Worryingly, it’s not just trump. The Kippers spread the same sort of racial hatred. Andre Lampitt, the star of UKIP’s European Election TV campaign, once said that “most Nigerians are generally bad people”. Joseph Quirk, a former UKIP candidate, said he reckons dogs are “more intelligent, better company and certainly better behaved than Muslims”. This is the party that 3.9 million people voted for in 2015.

And so it seems the important message of American History X, that “hate is baggage” and that “life’s too short to be pissed off all the time”, has been forgotten by many. The politics of division are thriving across the world, and we will all suffer for it.

In Defence of Anti-Zionism

Perhaps I ought to start this article by saying that this is not a defence of Ken Livingstone, Naz Shah, Malia Bouattia (the new NUS President), or any other public figures recently accused of anti-Semitism. Rather, I simply hope to defend my own position: that of opposing the policies of Israel and the ideology of Zionism in its current form. Through this article, I want to demonstrate that, despite what many suggest, my views do not in any way equate to anti-Semitism.

I’ll start by outlining my basic objections to Zionism. I was having a conversation recently with a friend of mine about the state of Israel and the role of the Holocaust in its foundation: “No wonder they want a homeland,” she argued, and she had a point: we must sympathise with the desire for a group of people to found a homeland and form a nation, particularly a group of people that have, throughout history and throughout the world, been persecuted. I recently visited Auschwitz Concentration Camp and I was harrowed by the brutal suffering of those who lived and died under Nazi rule.

But one question ultimately arises: where will this homeland be founded? Well, when Zionism began as an ideology in the late 19th century, Palestine was the obvious choice: it was the birthplace of Judaism, once controlled by the Israelites, and referred to in the Torah as the ‘Promised Land’. But according to the Ottoman census of 1878, there were over 400,000 Muslims living in Palestine during this period, comprising 87% of the population. Jews, on the other hand, comprised only three or four per cent. What is more, Justin McCarthy estimated that by 1946 there were 1,339,763 non-Jews living in Palestine. Despite what many Zionists claim, Palestine was not an uninhabited land.

Now, though, Arabs only constitute 18.5% of Israel’s population, and an astonishing one in three refugees worldwide is Palestinian. In 1947, Israel was given 56% of Palestine and since then the state has expanded to over 80% of what was once Palestinian land. What is more, there are almost half a million Jews living in occupied territory, and there are 121 settlements officially recognised as illegal by the United Nations. It seems that Israel is determined to continue its expansion indefinitely, hence Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent announcement that the Golan Heights will forever remain under Israeli sovereignty.

Now, I’d like to pose a few questions to the reader. If a homeless family want a home, of course that desire should be fulfilled; but would you be content with that homeless family kicking your own family out of your home and killing one of your children in the process? Let me pose another question: if a book was “found” that said the UK belonged to the Mormons, would they be justified in taking over our country and forcing so many of us to flee? Of course not, and it worries me that the absurd it-says-so-in-the-Torah argument is used by Zionists so frequently.

This Zionist ideology of settler-colonialism has led to constant violence and brutality in the region, stemming also from the desire to ethnically cleanse Palestine, hence the 1948 Nakba which saw 700,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes and hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages destroyed. Since then, though, things have only grown worse: Gaza, described by many as “the world’s largest open-air prison”, has been reduced to piles of rubble, and as bombs go off in Palestinian land, Israelis cheer and applaud (literally applauding: watch the video here). The Israeli Government say that they act in self-defence, but between 2000 and 2013, a Palestinian child was killed every three days on average - did these children pose a threat? You only have to look at the death tolls to see who is most in the wrong: in 2014, for example, 86 Israelis were killed compared to 2262 Palestinians.

Perhaps, though, one could argue that Israel is in fact fighting in self-defence. After all, Hamas militants do often fire missiles over the border into Israeli territory. But not only does Hamas support a two-state solution in accord with international consensus, they also agree to and respect ceasefires over and over again. As Noam Chomsky writes, "The regular pattern is for Israel, then, to disregard whatever ceasefire is in place, while Hamas observes it - as Israel has officially recognised - until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer [Israeli] brutality." So in reality, Israel seems to be acting less for self-defence and more for their ideology. This is why, on July 9th 2014, about two thirds of those killed were innocent women and children and only a few Hamas targets were hit - the idea that this was 'self-defence' bemuses me.

Arabs are discriminated against in every branch of life, and from an early age many Israeli children are encouraged to see their Arab counterparts as “other”. In her book “Palestine in Israeli Schoolbooks: Ideology and Propaganda in Education”, Nurit Peled-Elhanan states that in Israeli schoolbooks Arabs are only represented as “refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists” and that, in “hundreds and hundreds” of books, there was not one photograph that showed an Arab as a “normal person”. A shocking 36% of Jews believe that non-Jews in Israel should have no right to vote.

Indeed, many have drawn parallels between the way in which Palestinians in occupied territories are treated and the way in which black people were treated in South Africa during apartheid. To an extent, the Israelis control the lives and movement of all those living in the West Bank through a system of ID cards, military checkpoints, and the West Bank barrier. What is more, around some settlements there are separate roads for Palestinian citizens, and in occupied territories, Palestinians are discriminated against in terms of infrastructure, legal rights, and access to land and resources. Perhaps this is why in 1975, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 (now replaced by later resolutions), which concluded that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” epitomised by the racist annexation wall. Though Zionism itself may not be a racist ideology, the policies that stem from it certainly are. 

So it's not just the fact that Palestinians have been driven from their homes and their countries, it's also that they are still subject to violence and discrimination. But does the suffering of the Jewish people in the past justify the suffering of the Palestinian people in the present? The answer is, unequivocally, no. This quotation from Jewish anti-Zionist Norman Finkelsteinshould suffice to defend my position:

“My late father was at Auschwitz concentration camp, my late mother was at Majdanek concentration camp. Every single member of my family, on both sides, was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my parents taught me and my two siblings, that I will not be silent when Israel commits its crimes against the Palestinians. And I consider nothing more despicable than to use their suffering, and their martyrdom, to try to justify the torture, the brutalisation, the demolition of homes, that Israel daily commits against the Palestinians.”

And that brings me to my next point. This week, many Zionists have claimed that those who oppose Zionism also oppose Judaism: they say that anti-Zionists are anti-Semites, and the word Jew has simply been replaced by the word Zionist. Does that mean, then, that those Jews who oppose Zionism are anti-Semitic? Ilan Pappe, Norman Finkelstein, and all those Jewish men and women who turn up to pro-Palestinian rallies – are they anti-Semites too? Or do they, as I do, simply oppose the brutality of Zionist ideology?

I hope I have outlined here my reasons for opposing the state of Israel in its current form: because its actions are racist, violent, and, perhaps most importantly, illegal. I could give hundreds more examples about violence and discrimination against Palestinians, but I don’t want to bore you. The facts and statistics I have given speak for themselves and are, I hope, representative of the whole. I’m sure that many will call me a terrorist-sympathiser and all that, so I ought to say that I condemn all unnecessary violence (whether it is Israel, Hamas, or Hezbollah), even if it is for a cause that I believe in.

I was surprised and shocked to be called an anti-Semite and a racist this week, despite having consistently and unequivocally opposed all forms of racism throughout my life. I cannot speak for everyone who supports Palestinian rights and opposes Israel, but I can say with certainty that being anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic are not one and the same – the two must not be conflated. Opposing Zionism, as I do, does not in any way make you an anti-Semite.