a thousand people turned out for high holiday services organized for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

The “few Jew-baiters,” wrote Michelle Goldberg, “are marginal, particularly compared to the large numbers of Jewish activists taking part.” She wrote that ECI’s accusation was “dishonest and deceptive.” It’s worse: If it weren’t such a serious subject — Marc Tracy calls the accusation “highly irresponsible” — labeling the whole movement as “anti-Semitic” would be laughable. Dan Sieradski of Occupy Judaism, which is seeking to rally Jewish supporters to the 99 Percent movement, dismissed the “couple of jerks and idiots” and noted that a thousand people turned out for high holiday services organized for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

By Ali Gharib on Oct 19, 2011 at 9:00 am

Protester with 'hashtag' symbol

The attack unleashed mostly by the neoconservative right on the 99 Percent Movement for alleged pervasive anti-Semitism reached absurd new heights over the weekend and early this week. An ad launched last week by the Bill Kristol-led Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) — whose hedge fund bankroller happens to really hate financial regulation reform— made the rounds of the mainstream media, getting picked up by Politico‘s Ben Smith and the Washington Post‘s neoconservative blogger Jennifer Rubin.

The ad, which was largely ripped off from a pseudonymous Israeli neocon blog (whose author proclaims to be a “friend” of ECI’s executive-director-in-title-only Noah Pollak), portrayed anti-Semitic sentiments in videos of two people — one of them an admitted petty thief and apparent camera-hungry provocateur — and a photograph of a sign-holder. And other websites posted a woman expressing anti-Semitic sentiments on a Reason video apparently at L.A.’s protest. That’s four people out of hundreds of thousands worldwide that have participated in 99 Percent protests. The “few Jew-baiters,” wrote Michelle Goldberg, “are marginal, particularly compared to the large numbers of Jewish activists taking part.” She wrote that ECI’s accusation was “dishonest and deceptive.” It’s worse: If it weren’t such a serious subject — Marc Tracy calls the accusation “highly irresponsible” — labeling the whole movement as “anti-Semitic” would be laughable. Dan Sieradski of Occupy Judaism, which is seeking to rally Jewish supporters to the 99 Percent movement, dismissed the “couple of jerks and idiots” and noted that a thousand people turned out for high holiday services organized for the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Despite the seriousness of the charge — and the consequences of deploying it frivolously — it’s difficult not to snicker at the continuing far-right attacks on the 99 Percent Movement as anti-Semitic. Commentary launched a factually-challenged attack on New York’s Occupy Wall Street protest movement. And Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government site said that staunch Israel supporter Rep. Steve israel (D-NY) supported an “anti-Israel/anti-Semitic” cause.

But the most ridiculous attack, by far, came from the far-right Pajamas Media website. A writer going by the name “Zombie” — whose put up some of the most raucously funny attacks on the 99 Percent Movement (“Commies and Kooks,” etc.) — had a doozy of a post on Monday.

Organizers at Denver’s 99 Percent Movement rally had taped a hashtag symbol — the pound signwhich is now used in Twitter to tag a word — on their shirts. The mark was supposed to make the organizers easy to identify in a crowd, but Zombie saw a much more nefarious force at play: National Socialism!

"Zombie" wrote:

Don’t these people see an echo of the swastika in their new power symbol? Don’t they realize that the early Nazi Party was (among other things, obviously) also overtly anti-capitalist?… Don’t they know that the early Nazis tried to garner sympathy with street rallies and marches?

When informed in the comment section of the post that the symbol was merely a Twitter symbol — and not a “bizarre neo-swastika” — Zombie continued to insist the 99 Movement has Nazi tendencies:

As a commenter notes, the symbol may have derived originally from the Twitter “hashtag,” but that in no way diminishes its creepiness. It may “just” be a rotated hashtag, but that doesn’t lessen its significance as a power symbol.The swastika, after all, was “just” a Buddhist good luck marking before the Nazis adopted it and started using it to indicate something else.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the mainstream media’s self-appointed final arbiter of who is and isn’t a Nazi and what is and isn’t anti-Semitic, has proclaimed that “Occupy Wall Street Is not anti-Semitic.” The mainstream media should take heed of his judgment and let the meme die, leaving it to the far-right symbologists and conspiracy theorists.

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