dear jenna and friends in UCU,

i'd like to communicate my own take on the unfortunate citation that was made from david duke's website.

one thing to say is that we should be ever-wary of the notion that 'the facts are speaking for themselves'. facts don't speak for themselves. they need to be assessed, interpreted and understood. they always emerge as part of a discourse. what constitutes a 'fact' is itself a site of political contestation. awareness of the disputed character of what are and are not facts is the bread and butter of intellectual and political life.

a basic lesson is to check our sources before we circulate them as truths. it seems to me that this is always necessary but particularly obligatory when a) we are using notoriously unreliable web sources and b) when we use them to denounce other people or another people. if we don't check our sources, we are at risk of doing what so many have done in so many different fields - i.e. simply re-circulate falsehoods or partial truths that someone once invented and are now taken as gospel.

one positive outcome of this episode for me and doubtless many others is that we have now had the unpleasure of perusing david duke's website. i knew of him as an american nazi demagogue but never before did i read what he has to say. what strikes me as significant about his hyperbolic anti-israel and antizionist polemics is that some elements of his discourse (certainly not all) are not a million miles away from those of left wing and antiracist critics of israel.

david duke himself is of course explicitly antisemitic as well as racist. in itself this indicates that UCU's stated policy that 'criticism of israel is not as such antisemitic', while not literally wrong, fails to address the claim that some criticism of israel and zionism is antisemitic and rightly felt to be antisemitic by many people within and without our union.

even more to the point the convergences that are apparent between david duke's discourse on israel and that of antiracist and left critics of israel - convergences that led to this unfortunate citation in the first place - should at least make us self-aware that what now passes as 'critical' ways of speaking and writing about israel may be more problematic than their authors acknowledge. the excesses of current antizionist polemics, includiing those that have underwritten the boycott calls of israeli academe within our union, are visible in david duke's rantings - albeit in a cruder form of expression.

it may be noted, by the way, that one reason david duke is so keen to represent 'israel' as murderously racist toward palestinians and the US establishment as collusive in this racism is to denounce their hypocrisy and legitimate the racism toward black people in america he stands for. duke exemplifies why it is so necessary to read 'the facts' in their context and consider the interests of those who participate in the politics of denunciation.

the point is not just to say sorry about inadvertently circulating nazi propaganda but to learn something about the language some members of this union are using in their eagerness to denounce one particular nation among nations. any student of antisemitism in the past would know that one of the most important political functions of antisemitism has been to construct a bridge between the left and the right. is it too much to ask for some recognition of this history alonside the anti-israeli enthusiasm of some of our members?

a final point i want to make is that anger with the messengers (those who experience and articulate antisemitism in the union's deliberations and policies over israel and in their own treatment by fellow members of the union) is a failure to recognise what this incident reveals.

best, robert fine
warwick UCU