In Defence of Michel Chossudovsky: A Cup of Cool Reason for the Ottawa Citizen's Fevered Brow

This essay was first published at the now-defunct website of the Canadian Action Party (10 September 2005); it was also published online at eight other websites in 2005.

In Defence of Michel Chossudovsky: A Cup of Cool Reason for the Ottawa Citizen's Fevered Brow by Michael Keefer

During the past two weeks Professor Michel Chossudovsky, an economist, political analyst and human rights advocate of international reputation who teaches at the University of Ottawa and directs his own Centre for Research on Globalization and its widely admired website www.globalresearch.ca, has become the object of a strange campaign of defamation.

Chossudovsky's website makes available writings on worldwide political issues by a wide range of academics and journalists. It also offers open forums on which members of the public can discuss and debate the issues raised by the scores of articles published each week.

But that, it seems, can be a risky business.

Discovering recently that anti-semites had managed to insert their noxious drivel into a discussion thread hosted by Chossudovsky's website, B'nai Brith Canada did not simply alert him to the fact, so that he could take the obvious step of removing the hateful messages. Rather, with the eager assistance of the Ottawa Citizen, this once universally-respected organization made the event a pretext for a campaign of character assassination.

On August 20, the Citizen published an article (Pauline Tam, “U of O Professor accused of hosting anti-Semitic website”) the tone of which can best be described as scurrilous. Conflating the toxic invasion of his website with Chossudovsky's own editorial work and with his own writings, the article insinuated that anti-semitism and denial of the Shoah feature prominently in both of them. A follow-up article (Alex Hutchinson, “Controversial site 'not an issue' for university,” August 21, 2005) wondered at the University of Ottawa's failure to take disciplinary action.

There are some obvious ironies here. Michel Chossudovsky is widely regarded as a leading interpreter and critic both of globalization and of the structural violence and military aggressions it has entailed. His life's work as an economist and political analyst has been a finely articulated series of reproaches to injustices of all kinds, including the foulness of racism. And as it happens, members of his immediate family died at Auschwitz.

By a further irony, the best brief introduction to his work is a profile published some years ago by none other than the Ottawa Citizen (Juliet O'Neill, “Battling mainstream economics,” January 5, 1998). This article offered a sympathetic account of Chossudovsky's “defiance of mainstream economic scholarship in which 'critical analysis is strongly discouraged',” and also of his studies of “the purposeful impoverishment of people in dozens of countries” through IMF/World Bank interventions. It mentioned in addition his criticisms of major financial institutions for a “hidden agenda” involving criminal complicity in drug-money laundering as well as in the social and economic collapses prompted by the IMF—criticisms that have since been confirmed by the revelations of former “economic hit-man” John Perkins and of Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

But B'nai Brith and the Citizen now want this distinguished public intellectual to carry the leper's rattle of the anti-semite. The August 20 article quotes Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B'nai Brith Canada, as complaining that the website's materials are “full of wild conspiracy theories that go so far as to accuse Israel, America and Britain of being behind the recent terrorist bombings in London. They echo the age-old anti-Semitic expressions that abound in the Arab world....” A second-year University of Ottawa student worries “other students will stumble on the site,” where they presumably risk contamination by Chossudovsky's ideas. B'nai Brith's human rights lawyer Anita Bromberg is quoted as piously hoping that pressure can be exerted on his university “to hold him to a certain standard of acceptable civil discourse.”

And finally, a purportedly sympathetic political scientist who specializes on the use of the internet by terrorists declares himself disturbed by “a conspiratorial element” in Chossudovsky's writings, and finds “not much that resembles” them in recent work on retail or anti-state terrorism.

This dismissive conclusion is not quite the coup de grâce the author of this article evidently meant it to be. Political scientists who have some acquaintanceship with current scholarship on development economics and on state (as opposed to retail) terrorism might be less likely to think Chossudovsky's work marginal or eccentric.

And while the weather-beaten axiom that power elites would never dream of engaging in conspiratorial behaviour may still hold a certain faded charm for journalistic Howdie Doodies and pundits of all kinds, the clear function of the taboo against “conspiracy theory” in present-day public discourse is to shut down critical inquiry into matters of what Gore Vidal has called “unspeakable truth.”

What, one wonders, did the seven leaked “Downing Street memos” reveal, if not that the American and British governments conspired between 2001 and 2003 to launch what they knew to be a criminal war of aggression against Iraq? And what did Congressman John Conyers' minority judiciary committee report on electoral irregularities in Ohio reveal, if not that the Bush Republicans conspired in 2004 to steal the presidential election?

Michel Chossudovsky has shown courageous persistence in exposing zones of unspeakable truth to principled analysis. Ironically again, his chief offence against orthodoxy appears to have been his refusal to racially delimit his opposition to human rights abuses. Articles published on his website have criticized not just the horrors of the Iraq occupation, and Canada's and the UN's grotesquely hypocritical participation in the overthrow of democracy in Haiti, but also the state of Israel's shameless violations of human rights, international law and common decency in its treatment of the Palestinians.

B'nai Brith and CanWestGlobal (which owns and controls the Ottawa Citizen) would like to enforce “a standard of acceptable civil discourse” that effaces any distinction between criticism of Israel and anti-semitism. But as is made clear by an editorial in which the Citizen returns to the attack (“The right to be wrong,” August 26, 2005), they want not merely to silence critics of Israel, but also to regulate and restrain free critical thought in a much wider sense.

Behind a pallid pretence of defending Chossudovsky's academic freedom, this editorial sets about ensuring that his exercise of it will, as the Citizen charmingly says, “have consequences.” His “exotic opinions” are mocked as arising from a procedure of “throw[ing] facts into a pot and hop[ing] conspiracies boil out.” The editorial describes as particularly absurd one of his recent articles, which drew attention to parallels between an anti-terrorism exercise run in London on the morning of July 7 that scripted bombings in the same three underground stations that were actually attacked, and CIA and military anti-terrorism exercises in the US that shortly preceded or coincided with the 9/11 attacks. We are told that B'nai Brith shares this view, objecting not just to the discussion-thread postings inserted by anti-semites into Chossudovsky's website, but also “to the tone of the site more generally. One of the scraps Mr. Chossudovsky's piece on terrorism exercises throws into the cauldron is that Israel's former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in London during the July 7 attacks.”

The editorial's tactic of ridiculing Chossudovsky by attributing to him its own feeble treatment of facts and arguments as disconnected bits and pieces is childishly obvious. But any chain of discourse can be made to seem silly if one snips it into bits and shakes them in a hat. (If I sang it badly enough, I do believe I could make “God Save the Weasel” sound like “Pop Goes the Queen.”)

The Citizen's editorial urges Chossudovsky's “colleagues and bosses” to “make a point of explaining why he's wrong.” Let's pause for a moment, then, over the article that has aroused such a flurry of contempt (Michel Chossudovsky, “7/7 Mock Terror Drill: What Relationship to the Real Time Terror Attacks?” Centre for Research on Globalization, www.globalresearch.ca, August 8, 2005).

Readers of the Citizen who take the trouble to look up this article may be surprised to discover that it is cautious and tentative rather than accusatory in tone. It confines itself to a sober gathering of information from mainstream media sources. And it concludes by recommending against the drawing of “hasty conclusions” and by calling for “an independent public inquiry into the London bomb attacks.”

So why the complaints? Bibi Netanyahu indeed gets a mention: Chossudovsky quotes from that wild and exotic source, the Associated Press, a report from Jerusalem according to which Scotland Yard gave the Israeli Embassy in London advance warning of a bombing attack, thanks to which Netanyahu was able to cancel a meeting scheduled in a venue close to the site of one of the bomb blasts.

Does that sound troubling to you? Do you think Michel Chossudovsky may have been right to suggest that “The issue of foreknowledge raised in the Associated Press report also requires investigation”? Or should we just shoot the messenger and be done with it?

There is, to conclude, one point at which I find myself in agreement with the Ottawa Citizen's editorial writer: I think a controversy of this sort should indeed “have consequences.”

I believe the Citizen's editorial team, together with Frank Dimant and Anita Bromberg of B'nai Brith, should bow their heads in shame.

I think they should offer a public apology to Michel Chossudovsky and make a serious effort to avoid disgracing themselves in future by any repetition of this kind of sordid campaign of defamation.

Perilous Venture: A Jew in the Medici Court

[First published in Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 37.2 (2014): 171-73.]

Perilous Venture: A Jew in the Medici Court by Michael Keefer

Review of Edward Goldberg, Jews and Magic in Medici Florence: The Secret World of Benedetto Blanis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).

The materials available for the historical reconstitution of lives and mentalities in the Jewish communities of early modern Europe are sparse in the extreme. Living under the hostile gaze of church authorities, these communities' habitual responses to historical change took the form (as Gershom Scholem observed many decades ago) of midrashic developments from existing texts and commentaries. They thus tended neither to produce chroniclers nor to preserve writings of any kind once they had passed out of use (except in genizot, repositories for discarded texts or fragments containing the name of God that have sometimes proved, as in the famous Cairo genizah, to be precious resources for historical scholarship).

Edward Goldberg's fascinating and compulsively readable study of Benedetto Blanis, a learned Florentine Jew whose birthdate falls midway between those of Shakespeare and Descartes, is all the more remarkable for the vividness with which he is able to reconstitute the life and thought of this ambitious and troubled man. Together with its companion text, a superbly edited volume of The Letters of Benedetto Blanis Hebraeo to Don Giovanni dei Medici 1615-1621, the present study arises out of Goldberg's decades of research in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze and other archives and collections.

The patron to whom Blanis addressed the treasure-trove of more than two hundred letters that Goldberg discovered, and whom Blanis saw as offering him a ticket out of the economic and social marginality of the Florentine ghetto and into employment of various kinds in the Medici court, was himself a somewhat marginal figure. Don Giovanni dei Medici, a legitimized son of Cosimo I, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his mistress Eleonora degli Albizzi, was of the princely family, but of course stood outside any main line of inheritance.

In 1587, at the age of twenty, Don Giovanni began a military career that would involve service in the armies of Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Venice, as well as diplomatic service on behalf of Florence. General, military engineer, architect, musician, art collector, and voracious reader, Don Giovanni had, in addition, a passionate interest in alchemy and occultism—and it was for this reason that he extended his patronage to Blanis, as someone from whom he could learn Hebrew, kabbalistic secrets encoded in the “Sacred Scripture,” and other esoteric arts as well.

The appeal of occultism to members of the aristocratic elite was as much political as spiritual. A century earlier, the Benedictine abbot and magus Johannes Trithemius had evoked keen interest from the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Elector Palatine, and the Emperor Maximilian through his claims that the arts he could impart, including ciphering and its occult form, steganographia, as well as natural and spiritual magic, would be of high value in statecraft. During the second half of the sixteenth century, figures including Philipp Melanchthon and André Thevet felt it necessary to refute claims that the occult knowledge of Henricus Cornelius Agrippa had contributed to the military victories of the Emperor Charles V. And as Ioan Couliano has observed, some aspects of Giordano Bruno's magic invite comparison with the more socially manipulative features of the contemporary social sciences.

Don Giovanni dei Medici may have hoped for material as well as spiritual benefits not just from the alchemical laboratory he maintained, but also from the “curious and prohibited books” he gained access to through the young Jewish tradesman and scholar to whom he was offering advancement (Blanis was in his mid-thirties as the time of their first contact).

Any Jew invited, as Blanis was, to give instruction in Hebrew to young members of a princely family faced a number of potential problems, of which the likelihood of non-remuneration for his services was by far the least. The normal dangers posed by the jealousies, intrigue, and back-biting of court life were exacerbated for Blanis by hostile surveillance from ecclesiastics on the watch for signs of religious contamination, and still further heightened by the fact that members of the court asked him to traffic in occult texts regarded with dark suspicion by the Inquisition.

Additional complications were provided by the fact that Don Giovanni, who had been in the service of the Venetian republic since 1610, established his household in a Venetian palazzo in 1615—and that household included a mistress, Livia Vernazza, aged nineteen when Don Giovanni met her in 1609, but as Goldberg writes, “already burdened with a husband and a history of public prostitution in Lucca and Florence.” His marriage with Livia in 1619, over the vehement objections of the Medici court, resulted after his death in 1621 in a dénouement loosely parallel to what unfolds in the last act of John Webster's near-contemporaneous tragedy The White Devil.

Blanis, who at the time was already imprisoned by the Inquisition on a separate accusation of having attempted the reconversion of Jewish conversos, was scripted by the Medici-Inquisitorial clean-up operation following Don Giovanni's death into the role of a corrupting influence. The fact that he managed by 1623 to secure his release from prison, and the 'favour' of exile from Florence, testifies to a most unusual courage and resilience: under repeated torture, he had refused to make any confession of guilt.

Benedetto Blanis died in 1647, aged nearly seventy. The career of this extraordinary man, brilliantly reconstituted by Edward Goldberg, makes compelling reading.

Antisemitism in Renaissance England: Marlowe's Jew of Malta

[First published in Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 36.3 (Summer 2013): 193-95.]

Antisemitism in Renaissance England: Marlowe's Jew of Malta by Michael Keefer

Review of Mathew R. Martin, ed., The Jew of Malta. Christopher Marlowe (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2012)

The Jew of Malta is one of a group of late-Elizabethan texts in which—strangely for a country in which no significant Jewish community had been permitted for fully three centuries—ideas about Jewishness, most of them antisemitic, are strongly foregrounded. Mathew Martin's new edition of the play, with its wide-ranging and thoughtful introduction and four substantial appendices, provides critical guidance and a well-chosen array of primary contextual materials which readers of all kinds will find useful in making sense of a controversial play-text that also remains, in its vicious hilarity, eminently stage-worthy.

Harold Bloom claimed, misleadingly I think, that The Jew of Malta pushes antisemitic tropes so far into farce and absurdity that they are effectively de-fanged. But contextualizing analyses of the kind this edition will encourage should permit a more nuanced understanding of the matter.

In his first appendix, Martin excerpts two scenes from Robert Wilson's Three Ladies of London (1584) in which Mercadorus, a London-based merchant who speaks a generically 'foreign' English, seeks in Turkey to cheat the Jew Gerontus out of the large sum he owes him by converting to Islam (which by Turkish law would free him from prior debts). Rather than see even so crooked a Christian commit apostasy, the humane Gerontus forgives the debt, and shows no resentment when Mercadorus gloats over having “cozened de Jew.”

Marlowe's Barabas (whose only offence, beyond an arrogant narcissism, has been the greed that motivates him to enclose “Infinite riches in a little room”) is similarly cheated by dishonest Christians, who after seizing his property in order to pay the tribute owing to the Turks, keep it even once they've decided to refuse the tribute. The play devolves into a sequence of farcical acts of revenge and cover-up, but the notion that Christians are ethically inferior to Jews remains in circulation: Barabas may outdo in malice the Christians who have robbed him, but he is scarcely their equal in hypocrisy. The Jew of Malta, in short, is antisemitic, but its antisemitism is, at least in part, a means of leveraging a satirical onslaught against Christian mores.

A comparison with the vehemently antisemitic passages excerpted by Martin from Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) may be instructive. In Nashe's text, Dr. Zacharie intends to bleed the captive protagonist to death (thus parodying kosher rules and evoking the blood-libel), while another Jewish villain, Zadoch, plans an orgy of violence involving a cluster of antisemitic tropes: well-poisoning, slaughtering children (and feeding galley-slaves with their pickled flesh), poisoning the hosts used in holy communion, and spreading plague. In contrast, the crimes Barabas boasts of to his slave Ithimore include only two with a specifically antisemitic tone (well-poisoning, and driving people to suicide with usury), while the murders dramatized in the play—poisoning Isabella and her nunnery, strangling one friar and framing another, and poisoning Ithimore, Bellamira, and Pilia-Borza—all follow from Barabas's attempt to conceal his responsibility for the deaths of Lodowick and Mathias. The blood-libel is alluded to in the play, but only in Friar Jacomi's question: “What, hath he crucified a child?” (III.vi.49).

Martin rather oddly includes in his first appendix a six-page excerpt from Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia epidemica refuting the antisemitic trope of the foetor judaicus. But this trope occurs in the play only in inverted form, as a foetor christianus—alluded to by Barabas when he tells Lodowick, “Tis a custom held with us / That, when we speak with gentiles like to you, / We turn into the air to purge ourselves” (II.iii.45-7); and again when he notes the arrival of the two friars by saying, “I smelt 'em ere they came” (IV.i.19-20). It might have been of greater value to include material related to Jonathan Gil Harris's telling perception that Barabas's action in leading the invading Turks into Malta through its sewers amounts to a violation of the social body by its abjected other—especially since this would link up to what Martin himself says about abjection in the excellent and well-informed discussion of early modern antisemitism in his introduction.

The materials in Martin's other appendices—on European-Ottoman relations, Machiavellianism, and Marlowe's reputation—are all stimulating, though more could perhaps have been made of the fact that accusers like Robert Greene and Richard Baines appear to have regarded Marlowe's Machiavellianism, 'atheism', and scepticism as components of a single toxic brew. But here one is perhaps only asking for more of a good thing than the format of the Broadview Editions is able to accommodate.

The sustained excellence of Martin's introduction is marred by two small errors. It is surely misleading to say that a BA degree entitled Marlowe “to style himself 'Sir Christopher Marlowe'” (11). (Constance Kuriyama, whose 2002 Marlowe biography Martin follows here, is referring to a not-for-export academic title, an English equivalent to the Latin “Ds.” or “Dominus”—but in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the faux-cleric Sir Topas is not in anyone's estimate the social equal of a knight or baronet like Sir Toby Belch or Sir Andrew Aguecheek.) Secondly, it seems uncalled-for to describe as “conspiracy theories” the analyses that have led to the conclusion that Marlowe's death was a political murder, rather than the result of “a quarrel over lunch” (13): one can take issue with the views of scholars like David Riggs, but labelling of this kind is not the way to do it.