James Petras footnotes

 This paragraph has been removed from the Wikipedia page for retired American professor James Petras, so am pasting it here:

In 2011, Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism in the UK, wrote an article in the left-wing magazine Dissent saying that Petras' works "present a conspiracy theory that... fits resoundingly with the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century socialist linkage of Jews with capitalism, now updated and repackaged for twenty-first-century anti-capitalist discourse."[30] In 2014, Marxist scholar Werner Bonefeld described Petras as exemplary of a current of antisemitism on the anti-imperialist left: "The Jews [in Petras' work] have not only conquered Palestine; they have also taken control of America, or as James Petras sees it, the current effort of 'U.S. empire building' is shaped by 'Zionist empire builders.'"[31] Similarly, author and researcher Paul Bogdanor, writing in an academic book published by Indiana University Press, focusing on the same texts as Gardner, described Petras as "articulat[ing] his theory of the organized American Jewish community as a 'Zionist Power Configuration' (ZPC)—an acronym that he apparently developed as a substitute for the neo-Nazi term 'Zionist Occupation Government' (ZOG)... and cautions against 'the role of the Zionist/Jewish Lobby in promoting future US wars.' None of this material is readily distinguishable from contemporary neo-Nazi propaganda."[32]

We previously encounted Petras in 2006 when he claimed Mossad was secretly responsible for provocative cartoons in Denmarkin 2007 in relation to his terrible take on socialism in Cubain 2009 in relation to his Second Camp position on the revolution in Iran, and in 2011 in relation to his support for both Holocaust denial and forcing Cuban dissidents into labour camps.

Notes:

  1. 30.  Mark Gardner, Routledge's Journal of Contemporary Leftist Anti-SemitismDissent, May 5, 2011
  2. 31. Werner Bonefeld Antisemitism and the Power of Abstraction From Political Economy to Critical Theory, in Marcel Stoetzler, ed, Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology, Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1 Jul 2014, p.316
  3. 32. Paul Bogdanor Manifestations of Antisemitism in British Intellectual and Cultural Life, in Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives[dead link], Indiana University Press (Series: Studies in Antisemitism), 2013, pp.77-78

 

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