A dangerous trivialization of antisemitism
Svante Weyler, the chairman of the Swedish Committee Against Antisemitism, SKMA, has in an article in Dagens Nyheter (9/11-19) added fuel to the media fire that for over a year has tried to turn a clinic at Karolinska Hospital into a hotbed for antisemitic harassment and helped to put the clinic on the list of the ten worst antisemitic incidents in 2018.
The committee's formal undertaking in this context was to assess whether four images shared on Facebook were antisemitic or not. But in doing so, it also effectively interfered with the question of whether a senior physician at Karolinska Hospital, Inti Peredo, had antisemitic motives for relocating a doctor with a Jewish background from one position to another. In any case, the SKMA's assessment of the photos came to play a central role in substantiating the relocated doctor's claim that this was the case, i.e. that he had been harassed in his work at the clinic because of his Jewish background.
Even after an extensive external investigation into the matter had shown that this was not the case, that there were plenty of other explanations for the internal conflicts at the clinic, mainstream media continued to convey the image of antisemitic persecution as the core of the conflict. When the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles unequivocally endorsed the complaining doctor's version of the conflict, the facts of the case no longer seemed to matter. Instead, the complainant and the Wiesenthal Center launched a campaign to discredit and disavow the external investigation as biased. In a letter to the hospital management from the Wiesenthal Center's Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the investigation was described as "a slap in the face of every Jew."
The SKMA (through Svante Weyler) was also critical of the external investigation, in a letter to the hospital management describing it as "a character assassination" of the complainant, again showing that the SKMA had engaged in something much more than the assessment of four pictures relating to this matter. The character assassination of Inti Peredo, by possibly false or unsupported allegations, does not seem to have concerned Weyler or the SKMA as much.
The fact remains that besides the complaining doctor's version of events, the four pictures were the only tangible evidence for the accusations against Inti Peredo. The external investigators were unable to find any other, and so far no one else has been able to do so either.
In the current affairs program on Swedish Television, "Uppdrag granskning" (Mission Investigation) I was asked to evaluate the four pictures. They were all shared at the time of the war in Gaza in the summer of 2014, and they were all to be seen as strongly critical comments on Israel's role and actions in the war.
And here we come to the difference between my assessment of the pictures and Svante Weyler's. Svante Weyler claims that an anti-Semitic picture is an antisemitic picture regardless of background and context. My view is that the background and context may nevertheless be relevant to the assessment. It is true that there are images which are unambiguously antisemitic in character, and that the person who publishes them, in whatever context, can reasonably have no other intention than to incite hatred against Jews. But there are also images where the anti-Jewish intent is less obvious, or at least images where the stated intent is to criticize Israel. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility that the intention is to incite hatred against Jews and that the criticism of Israel is merely a cover for Jew-hatred, but to determine this sometimes requires more than just looking at a picture.
This brings us to the difficult question of the boundary between criticism of Israel and antisemitism.
Of the four pictures presented to me, three of them, as far as I could tell, had no unambiguous anti-Jewish intent, no classic anti-Jewish symbols and codes, but they all expressed, in cartoon form, a strong criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza and of the indifference of the outside world. In a different context, where it would have been more clearly understood that the target was the Jews and not Israel, my assessment would probably have been different.
In the fourth image, a uniformed Israeli female soldier is juxtaposed with a uniformed female Nazi under the text "Nazi Germany 1941, Zionist Israel 2014", and the message is unmistakable; today's Israel is comparable to yesterday's Nazi Germany. Thus, it is an image with a seemingly clear anti-Jewish intent since the purpose of such a comparison is usually to whitewash Nazism and "normalize" the Holocaust. Although a deeply problematic image, certainly, I nevertheless tried to assess it in its context. Here, for example, was the fact that the same person who had shared that image on Facebook, had also, during roughly the same period, shared images and articles that could rather be described as anti-antisemitic. On 10 May 2015, an anti-Nazi photo collage entitled "Victory against Nazism!!!" and the text "Never again". On 27 January 2015 an interview in Dagens Nyheter with Holocaust survivor Hédi Fried under the headline "The survivors tell: Afraid it will happen again".
It was against this background that I suggested that the sharing of the problematic image could be perceived as an expression of ignorance (of the image's antisemitic charge) rather than of antisemitism.
This brings us to the difficult question of the boundary between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. There are strong forces today that want to broaden the concept of antisemitism to include more and more forms of criticism of Israel, such as the boycott of Israel advocated by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. The same Simon Wiesenthal Center that was undoubtedly prepared to label doctor Inti Peredo an antisemite was also prepared to label two female US Congressmen, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as unapologetic antisemites because of their support for BDS, and to applaud Israel's decision to refuse them entry into the country. The Simon Wiesenthal Center also applauded Donald Trump's decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and has repeatedly highlighted its support for Israel's settler policy. The Center has also labeled a Corbyn-led government in the UK as "an existential threat to Jews", putting Jeremy Corbyn on the same top ten list of antisemitic horrors in the world as the Karolinska Hospital.
All of this is both absurd and dangerous. We live in a time when antisemitic ideas and stereotypes are spreading rampantly online. When openly antisemitic parties and movements unashamedly speak the same language as Hitler and Nazism once did.
But also at a time when accusations of antisemitism have become a political cudgel to discredit and disempower political opponents; for example, in the hands of Trump's Republicans in the US (whoever votes for the Democrats votes for the enemies of the Jews) and Boris Johnson's Conservatives in the UK (whoever votes for Corbyn votes for the enemies of the Jews).
In this context, even an infected and complicated staff conflict at Karolinska Hospital seems to have not been too small to fall victim to what has been termed the weaponization of antisemitism.
Unfortunately, by de facto endorsing one person's version of the conflict, and thereby de facto supporting the political agenda of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Svante Weyler and the SKMA have played fast and loose with both their factual and moral authority.
As far as the matter has been investigated, we now know that the accusations against Inti Peredo of antisemitic harassment have remained unsubstantiated or completely unfounded. I therefore trust that he will receive the redress he deserves as soon as possible. And that the institutions and media that uncritically conveyed and reinforced a deeply one-sided picture of a staff conflict at Karolinska Hospital, thereby de facto contributing to a dangerous dilution of the concept of antisemitism, take their responsibility and critically examine both themselves and this whole affair.