My name’s not Naomi, but Doppelganger, the cultural critique of Naomi Wolf by Naomi Klein, revealed parallels between our careers as cultural critics. Sometimes one, sometimes the other share a milestone, but this one’s a triple bagger. You could call us Drittegangers.
We three have been tarred by the anti-semitic gestapo for criticizing Israel’s actions. There was a time when that wasn’t defined as hating Jews, only their settler sins. Edward Said compared Israel/Palestine with colonial methods and ideology, yet still professed at Columbia University.
Back then we could criticize Israel as a lamprey on the shark of empire without censure. Americans were and are paying for them, one way or another. After 9/11, past was prologue, crescendoing in the Oslo exculpation of Israel’s original and ongoing crimes, along with American imperialist actions stirring up roosters coming home. Ward Churchill was canned from U of Colorado for quoting Malcolm X’s karmic explanation for JFK’s assassination. (X was muzzled by Elijah Mohammed for synthesizing this meme on national tv, precipitating their split and his assassination by Black Muslim zealots).
I didn’t heed the postmodern memo that both were beyond the pale in my obsessive coverage of 9/11’s conspiracy culture and the neo-colonial cons spinning the Axle of Evil. Criticizing U.S. actions rapidly became kosher in liberal circles because Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their neocon pals were welcomed targets, but factually reporting Israel’s connections with the Attack on America got me doxxed as antisemitic.
So were the Naomis for different facts at different times. Got to admire them for that, as journalist gadflies. Better than a Tsetse fly.
Reported Israelis’ arrest on 9/11 for filming themselves in New Jersey across the Hudson River, cheering and dancing with the Burning Twin Towers in the background. A concerned American called them in. Their Israeli owned Urban Moving System’s white van was searched and they were jailed, rounded up with hundreds of suspicious Muslims in that initial sweep. Threatened with charges from Black Humor statutes.
The leaked DEA dossier on Israeli art student/spies apprehended scouting sensitive sites around the country was the front cover story that got me swatted. Over 100 IDF vets/ fine art grads were arrested in a year long spree.
Not for selling shabby screenprints of “modern art”, like the Israeli hustlers in Mill Valley’s plaza in my lede for local color.
Found out I was doxxed when a Jewish friend from journalism school emailed me. ADL, JDL, SMA (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego), talk about foreign spy agencies) We caught up. He’d become a lawyer. Without a remunerative future some zionist billionaire could bury in his spare change, didn’t seek counsel. https://stephensimac.medium.com/deep-state-blues-everybodys-doing-it-1b7c187f8d31
Klein got doxxed for her first critique of Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian in the First Intifada (1987-93), in her Canadian college paper. “Nothing was ever as intense as that firestorm when I was 20”, including defunding her student newspaper. Coastal Post advertisers were boycotted as antisemitic, not because of criticizing GWOT.
Klein “backed off” until the Second Intifada in 2008, when she came out for BDS. That boosted her to the top of the self hating Jew list. She’s serving on the board of Jewish Voices for Peace, so it hasn’t deterred her from sniping at Israel and western ennabling of its ongoing crimes. My last cultural critique of our American/Israel bond was about VP Joe Biden’s afternoon with Bibi in 2010. Became hyper focused on anti-vaxx conspiracy facts as parallel lines converge.
Even though she’s anti-zionist, proud communist, promotes BDS, uses settler colonial metaphors and devotes several chapters in Doppelganger contextualizing Zionism and Jewish identification with Israel, her book is still kosher. She hasn’t been blocked from the liberal publishing world or hounded at book signings by rabid zionists, although this was virtually ignored by the media reviewers. Only one interviewer asked her about it.
Wolf became a pariah when she criticized another of Israel’s unrestrained wars on Gaza on her FB page in 2014, (when you could post critiques like that). She had lived in Israel, spoke Hebrew, favored an eventual two state solution, with no real urgency. Wolf was so horrified by women and children being killed with indiscriminate bombing and targeted shooting that she publicly decried their violation of Jewish values.
Stood up for Palestinians as others should have stood up for Jews in Germany, calling it the primary lesson of the Holocaust. She featured Palestinian citizen journalists reporting live, showing the human face of the unrelenting attack as a “vital source of information. Every law of war and international law is being broken by the targeting of civilians in Gaza.”
Wolf went beyond the pale, calling it a genocide. That’s still verboten, even after the ICJ affirmed Israeli intentions. A prominent rabbi vowed to take her down with billionaires’ bullion. Pressured Barnard College to revoke her professor position. Sacked her because “they were not comfortable with my politics.” Zionist trolls made death threats and rape promises. She met her husband, a former US special forces officer when she hired Striker Pierce Investigations.
Wolf lost Jewish friends, family members and colleagues who turned on her for betraying the tribe. She had been a liberal Zionist, buy them out, don’t bomb them out, but hesitance over Israel’s methods for reclaiming the ancestral homeland sentenced her to “walk the plank.” Jewish critics of Israel are the biggest threat to the Zionist project according to Klein. “Goyim critics can always be pawned off as ancient hatred” resurfacing. Scapegoating semites once again.
She wonders if Wolf’s experience “caused the final unhingement”, becoming an anti-vaxx prophet and right wing internet star. This “public excommunication” untethered Naomi Wolf. She became “unmoored, losing her political home” in the liberal media. Alas, (for today’s theme), Naomi Klein reveals it was actually for conflating homosexuality with pedophilia in Edwardian England, if inadvertently through loose historical research.
*Nothing is lost on the internet, they say. No links to my CP 9/11 GWOT series were found, but I still have the hard copies. Buried out back.
Always a pleasure to read your substacks, Steve. And no I don't think that I'd seen the notifications, someone must have ultrasounded your 9/11 stash of hard copies out the back and got Hamish to put you on restrictions.
I think my last banning on Twitter was due to the ADL. I was dissing them a little....