Attacks by an Anti-Zionist Bully

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press
 

Readers of the Charlottetown Guardian on Prince Edward Island, the largest newspaper in the province, are aware that I was the victim of unremitting attacks for some six weeks from September to November by one Richard L. Deaton, who recently retired to Stanley Bridge, PEI after a career as a trade union official in Ottawa with the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

Apart from my teaching and scholarship, I write (unpaid) opeds for the paper, on a variety of issues and countries. In a Guardian article entitled “Hear No Evil, see no Evil,” published Sept. 21, Deaton publically attacked me, out of the blue, for NOT writing critical articles about Israel. 

“When it comes to Israel, Professor Srebrnik’s silences are deafening,” he wrote. He listed, among others, my so-called “silences” regarding the nuclear deal with Iran; the death of a Palestinian boy; Israel doing nothing to help Syrian refugees; and not mentioning Jimmy Carter’s book accusing Israel of “apartheid.”

“Given these examples, we are entitled to ask whether Professor Srebrnik is a pitchman for Israel. Has he ever written an article critical of Israel?,” Deaton concluded. 

Actually, I have written articles criticizing Israel, but not, of course, to the point of recommending that the state be destroyed.

Deaton, on the other hand, would prefer this. He mentioned that he belongs to Independent Jewish Voices, a supporter of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, which seeks to weaken Israel economically and politically, as a means to eventually replace it with a non-Jewish state. He has been involved with many other anti-Israeli and radical pro-Palestinian groups.

He launched the attack on me because I am Jewish, and it appears essential to him to insist that any Jew who writes for publication must prove he is a “good” Jew by attacking Israel:  otherwise, why did he single me out in his initial attack?  What differentiates me from any other regular contributor to the Guardian? 

Deaton makes things up out of thin air – in one screed, “Smoke and Mirrors Sticks and Stones,” published Oct. 1, he smeared me by seeming to imply that I was similar to “learned rabbis” (his words) who allegedly said it was fine to kill Palestinian babies because their lives were worth less than those of Israelis. These are tactics worthy of Joe McCarthy. 

In that same piece, he also castigated me for my choice of topics. “Are the politics of Upper Volta or Outer Mongolia really more important? If Srebrnik really thinks so, then he takes the readers of this newspaper for fools.”

He targeted me personally – he wrote in “The Big Lie and Sounds of Silence,” Oct. 15, that “Henry’s C.V. is available on line, including the fact that he studied at a well-known U.S. Jewish university” (I got one of my four degrees at Brandeis University near Boston) – as if this were obviously something shameful. 

In a letter to the editor in the Guardian, “Dyer Speaks Out in Critical Article,” Nov. 2, referring to an article by journalist Gwynne Dyer regarding Israel published by the paper a few days earlier, Deaton sneered that “certain academics will begin their usual chorus of yelling ‘Wolf’, or ‘anti-Semite.’” 

The “certain academics” refers, of course, to me (despite it being plural). But how does Deaton know what I think of Dyer’s article? So he was again attacking me for what I have NOT written.

He congratulated the newspaper for being brave enough to publish the article – though Dyer is a syndicated columnist who appears in the Guardian regularly – because in Deaton’s fevered imagination, an all-powerful Zionist cabal tries to prevent anyone from speaking out against Israeli policies.

Deaton called me a “right-wing Zionist,” for him a term of opprobrium, of course. It simply refers to anyone not as anti-Israeli as he is.

Deaton has also made light of the Holocaust, stating that the fact that my parents were survivors of a Nazi concentration camp in Poland, and their entire families killed, to be nothing special, since millions of other people also died during the war (“The Big Lie and Sounds of Silence,” Oct. 15). 

Like others of that ilk, he always claims that the “Zionist lobby” tries to silence people like him – though he seems to have carte blanche at the Guardian and elsewhere and has no trouble publishing his tirades.

The past president of the PEI Jewish community, Leo Mednick, complained in a letter to the editor protesting Deaton’s callous remarks concerning the Holocaust, but he, on the other hand, was not published. 

Mednick also alerted the community about Deaton: “He has a history of writing very hostile articles about Israel and lately he has turned his nastiness against a member of our community Henry Srebrnik because Henry does not choose to write against Israeli policies. It is important that we support Henry as well as not sit by and let Richard Deaton become the voice for our community.”

While Deaton is clearly obsessed with Israel, to the exclusion of almost anyplace else, the newspaper served as an enabler in his campaign of calumny and character assassination.

Deaton is Jewish by birth, and is one of those people who claim Zionism is a perversion of “true” Judaism. In reality, he has minimal Jewish education and does not participate in any of the very small PEI Jewish community’s activities. He only parades his Jewishness to demonstrate that he therefore “can’t be an anti-Semite.”

Deaton describes his background in the foreword to the book Confronting Gouldner: Sociology and Political Activism, by James J. Chriss, published earlier this year. He had no Jewish education as a child, that the family did not observe Jewish holidays, and that he had not had a bar mitzvah. In fact, they used to have a Christmas tree. 

Indeed, Deaton himself comes from anti-Zionist “royalty.” His father, Alvin W. Gouldner, was a prominent American sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He earlier taught at the University of Illinois and at Antioch College in Ohio.

Deaton called his father an “angry outsider and intellectual street fighter” who was both “feared and respected.” The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, published in 1970, was his major work.

Native New Yorkers, both Gouldner and his first wife were members of the American Communist Party until the 1950s. I mention this because the CP throughout almost all of its history was a staunch opponent of a Jewish state in what became Israel.

While Deaton, who himself has a PhD in sociology and a law degree, had a famous academic father, my parents were in Nazi concentration camps in Poland, and later poor immigrants in Montreal, not on university campuses, during the same period.