What Occupy Wall Street Was Not
The one charge against OWS that seemed to have some shelf life was the claim, initiated by the neoconservative Emergency Committee for Israel and amplified by a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, that OWS was thick with anti-Semitism. It must have seemed to these groups, along with the scores of others on the right who parroted their claims, an easy case to make. After all, it’s an ancient canard that Jews control the banks that OWS is protesting.
The brunt of their attack came in a video the Emergency Committee shot in New York. It shows a man holding a “Hitler’s Bankers” sign and shouting, “Jews control Wall Street.” Another shot shows someone shouting at a Jewish man, and a third shows someone suggesting that the media is controlled by Jews. Separately, a YouTube video of a woman making anti-Semitic remarks at a California OWS protest was promoted for days on a whole array of far-right websites.
That’s it. There is no other “evidence” of anti-Semitism in the OWS movement. As a matter of fact, as has been repeatedly pointed out, much of the OWS movement is Jewish and hundreds of Jews joined Jewish religious celebrations at the New York OWS encampment. The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, while condemning anti-Semitism, pointed out that the movement is not about Jews and the videotaped comments did not represent its “larger view.”
But evidence has never hindered the likes of radio heavyweight Rush Limbaugh, who noted that the 1 percent of Americans being criticized by OWS is equivalent to “roughly the percentage of Jews in the population.” Limbaugh went on to suggest that this might mean that “this group is being organized and paid for by a bunch of anti-Semites.” With that kind of incredibly dimwitted logic, of course, Limbaugh could have accused OWS of practically anything at all.