A MONTH ago, the Financial Times gave us a heads-up on the status today’s climate conference enjoys among the global capitalist elite.
The CEOs of Bank of America, Blackrock, Standard Chartered Bank and Deutsche Bank said there was no point in going unless everyone was going.
By everyone, they do not mean you, me, or the heads of state of the many nations who attend in a triumph of hope over experience that measures to mitigate the climate emergency might result.
No sooner had the conference commenced than demonstrators protested both against the role of British Petroleum in the climate emergency and Israel’s genocide.
In these controversies, British Petroleum (BP) stands as a signifier of the entire fossil fuel industry and especially the oil and gas monopolies in their lobbying to ensure that any international agreement to mitigate climate change does not impede their rush to profit.
BP occupies a special position in the hierarchy of climate change catalysts. And no-one in Baku is innocent of its origins as the Anglo Persian Oil Company or of its merger with Amoco, the US oil company born of Standard Oil.
Winston Churchill and US president Eisenhower cooked the plan to overthrow the Persian nationalist Mohammad Mosaddegh when he disobligingly nationalised Iran’s oil.
The anti-Mosaddegh plan, code-named Operation Ajax by the CIA and Operation Boot by MI6, resulted in a 1953 coup which established a pro-Western regime under the Shah, who graciously allowed the renamed Anglo Iranian Oil Company to return, whereupon it transformed itself into BP.
The present regime in Iran is equally disobliging to foreign oil company profits and thus is the target of every Western state where energy monopolies exercise decisive power in governments.
Such is its status as the gendarme of Western capital that every public manifestation in the region automatically assumes an anti-Israel stand. Lest anyone think this is a special Middle Eastern phenomenon, reflect on the events at the weekend in Amsterdam.
Israeli fans were reported to have vandalised a taxi. According to Amsterdam police chief Peter Holla, Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters attacked the taxi and set a Palestinian flag on fire in Dam Square.
Inevitably, locals responded, and the Maccabi fans retired hurt. The Times of Israel today reported that footage has been posted on social media showing Maccabi Tel Aviv fans chanting racist slogans against Arabs upon arriving at Ben Gurion airport, in a reprise of their away play in chanting death to Arabs and attacking anyone, including cab drivers, unfortunate enough to look vaguely Arab in Athens.
The significant thing about this episode is firstly that the police immediately banned pro-Palestine demonstrations and second that local politicians immediately branded the events as anti-semitic, a theme immediately taken up by Netanyahu and our servile political class.
The problem with this political device is that it makes actual anti-semitism almost impossible to deal with.
For rational political discourse and, not least for Jewish people, a significant longer-term problem arises. By enfolding criticism of Israel within the category of “anti-semitism,” the strategic aim of the zionist right and the present Israeli ruling coalition is accomplished.
With 80 per cent of British Jews holding an unfavourable opinion of Netanyahu, eliding the distinction between criticism of Israel and anti-semitism means British Jews critical of Israel and its government are, without their consent, made answerable for Israel’s actions.
In this forced coupling, the actual anti-semites who see all Jews as an undifferentiated mass speak the same language as those who conflate opposition to Israeli genocide with anti-semitism as such.
Left unchallenged, the result is the term “anti-semitism” emptied of meaning.
