Thread by @YousefMunayyer

What's the best lens through which to understand & combat bigotry; particularlism or universalism? This is not a new question though the debate around this, particularly as it relates to antisemitism, is heightened today. History offers warnings about how it can be manipulated.

This week @BernieSanders made an argument for the universalist approach; ie we can’t fight any form of oppression, including antisemitism, in isolation. Others objected, demanding a particularist approach.

jewishcurrents.org/how-to-fight-a…

This debate has run through many “controversies” that have afflicted activism or activists on the left in recent years. But that dynamic is not new either and it has reminded me of an episode I came across in research worth sharing.

Another moment in history when the right was in power while there was also a resurgent left was the late 1960s. The US, led by Nixon, was at war in Vietnam and “law and order” race politics and the southern strategy was its MO at home.

But a rising left was growing to challenge these policies in the US and abroad and it was connected to an internationalist politics and those in power hated that, saw it as a threat and wanted to put an end to it.

One way the state went after the left then was through COINTELPRO, a program of the FBI led by J. Edgar Hoover, that initially was set up to disrupt communist party activism but grew into a weapon against civil rights groups, anti-war activism and other elements of the New Left.

When the FBI looked at activism on the left they saw very diverse groupings. They saw blacks & whites and all people of color, marxists, socialists, nationalists, civil rights activists, anti-war activists, anti-imperialists, pacifists, church people and yes, they saw Jews too.

These formations and alliances were a threat to the politics of a white dominated society favored by the right.

They also understood one way to divide & destroy the left was to wedge off these groups by forcing them to put their particularism ahead of their universalism, pitting them against each other. The wedge they tried to use to split Jews from the New Left was Israel & antisemitism.

The FBI thought that particularly after the 1967 war, Israel and antisemitism could serve as a useful wedge to drive Jews away from left spaces. We are seeing a lot of this today from Trump and company.

One way they fed this tension then was by fabricating stories, starting smear campaigns and straight up lying to get groups to fight each other, trying to pit Jews against African-Americans, Jews against Leftists.

Here's a striking example from that era. In this memo, the FBI special agent in charge in New York was writing to HQ for approval for a “counter-intelligence” scheme. He wanted to feed info into the Jewish community in NY to instigate a fight between the Jewish & Black community.

The perfect person to send this information to, he thought, was Meir Kahane, the head of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), and a writer at the Jewish Press at the time. The JDL was also demonstrating a growing willingness to engage in terror at this moment.

They were hoping to develop a relationship with the JDL and push them to fight the Black Panther Party in New York but they didn’t think they could accomplish this without “some embellishment.” So they fabricated a story. These are the "deep fakes" of that era.

The FBI wrote a letter to Kahane pretending to be an anonymous tip from a pro-Jewish African-American father whose Black Panther son trained with Arabs in north Africa and was planning with his black panther friends to extort Jewish store owners to send the money to the Arabs.

Seriously, you have got to read this letter, it is wild. Apparently the agent thought introducing misspellings in the letter from a black man would make it appear more authentic.

Would HQ approve such a scheme?

Of course, they loved it, but wanted New York to be sure they covered their tracks.

This was far from an isolated instance, rather it was the point of the program. Smear campaigns, misinformation, aimed at dividing the left including through using Israel and antisemitism as a wedge. We see a lot of this today.

The point of sharing this is that whatever side of the debate you fall on regarding universalist vs. particularist approaches, know that there are going to be bad faith right wing forces looking to use the wedges of particularism to divide people up...

not out of genuine concern for antisemitism or other oppression but to divide opposition to right-wing politics however they can to keep that oppression going unchecked in the US, Israel and beyond. /End