Antisemitism is rampant in the anti-vaccine community, and it goes a long, long way back. In 1932, an antisemitic magazine published a drawing of a smug-looking Jewish doctor immunizing a baby in a cartoon labeled, "Die Impfung," or "The Vaccination," with a caption reading: "It seems to me that poison and Jews seldom do good things."
I've encountered it time and time again in my passion for vaccine advocacy. People who might otherwise take me seriously latch on to mentions of my cultural background as evidence that I'm being paid by Big Pharma. After I'd seen a post that said that fellow vaccine advocate Dorit Reiss and I were "buddies," I sent her a message for the first time, introducing myself. I mentioned in passing that her maiden name, Rubinstein, is similar to my stepfather's name, Rubenstein, and said we could be distant relatives. Of course, I couldn't help but quip that we were both part of the Jewish shadow government.
It was literally one day later that I received a message from someone telling me that "Everyone knows your Aunt Dorit is feeding you money to peddle her lies." The day after I encountered fellow Jewish vaccine advocate, she was suddenly my wealthy aunt who was funding my advocacy for vaccines.
This is just the painless surface of antisemitism in the anti-vaccine movement. I've seen how ugly-- and how ridiculous-- it gets. Anti-vaccine activists have told me, you see, that it's my fault that my daughter has autism, because my "Jewish genes" from my "tribe" are full of "mental, physical, etc disabilities due to the years/centuries of inbreeding." (Joke's on them, anyway, since autism rates in Israel are half that of the U.S., and my daughter is culturally but not ethnically Jewish.)
They say that our children get special vaccines. One man, based on kids he's seen staring at him in Walmart, as arrived at the brilliant conclusion that Jews get special vaccines and that all other children get poisonous vaccines.
If this were true, I'm a little upset that I missed the part of Hebrew school where I was supposed to learn the secret handshake to let my pediatrician know that I'm Jewish and that my kids should get the vaccines that don't cause them to stare when an antisemitic stranger is creeping on them in Walmart.
It's all part of a Zionist conspiracy, though-- so they say. These people envision a future dominated by militant Jews with Magen Davids and the words "Zionist" written on their uniforms. This Jew-dominated future police state apparently involves vaccine checkpoints where mothers scream and are restrained as their babies are helplessly injected with lethal chemicals.
And this panic over some future Zionist police state seems to bleed into every single discussion they have with Jewish vaccine activists. They tell us that we are just part of a plot.
...Something to do with the "Judaification of America." And they want us to go back to Russia and East Europe. You know, those places were we were slaughtered by the millions.
But they also want us to go back to Israel. They can't seem to make up their minds.
They call us "cockroach."
They call us communist, and in the same breath, call us fascist. They insult our appearance. They call us "mindless, money-driven, greedy heathens."
My, isn't that familiar.
The scary thing is that, the closer and closer anti-vaccine activists get to utter Nazism, the more they begin to claim that they themselves are victims of a modern Holocaust. They flippantly dismiss the actual horrors of the Holocaust-- the brutal deaths of 6 million innocent people by gas, disease, starvation, and labor-- by comparing their experience of refusing to immunize their kids to the experience of being a Jew in Nazi Germany.
"Their doing the same thing to us that they are they jews," one anti-vaxxer screamed, taking the time to edit her comment to eliminate one of her seventeen grammatical errors.
Meanwhile, one of the most popular articles cries, "First, They Came for The Anti-Vaxxers," a reference to a poignant poem about the Holocaust by Martin Niemoller. It implies that the anti-vaxxers are the "Jews" of today, the first victims in what will become a total Holocaust.
Although it was popular, it wasn't the first or only vaccine/Holocaust comparison to go viral. Amy Barajas, an insufferable schmuck of a mommy-blogger, posted an image of herself in Holocaust Chic, wearing a self-imposed anti-vaccine badge and comparing it to the badges my people wore to the gas chambers. The image spread like wildfire among anti-vaxxers with persecution complexes.
Although it was popular, it wasn't the first or only vaccine/Holocaust comparison to go viral. Amy Barajas, an insufferable schmuck of a mommy-blogger, posted an image of herself in Holocaust Chic, wearing a self-imposed anti-vaccine badge and comparing it to the badges my people wore to the gas chambers. The image spread like wildfire among anti-vaxxers with persecution complexes.
Another anti-vaccine activist compared his resistance to vaccines to August Landmesser's refusal to give a Nazi salute. August Landmesser was tortured for years in concentration camps because of his resistance to the Nazi party and his relationship with his Jewish wife. Anti-vaxxers, on the other hand, have yet to even be denied access to public health insurance and public school. Don't worry, though: he "don't mean to be insulting."
The anti-vaxxers know how much it stings when I, as a Jew, am told that they are victims of a modern Holocaust. They exploit this when speaking to me and my fellow Jewish vaccine advocates:
Anti-vaxxers aren't always hateful people. I know that because I used to be one of them. But I come from a culture that values reason. I was taught as a child that the highest mitzvah, or commandment, is to nurture human life-- that it goes above and beyond any other duty we have to ourselves and others. My background plays a role in my vaccine advocacy not because it's part of a global conspiracy, but because it's a culture that prizes science and human life.
All joking and stereotypes aside, it's not a coincidence that a disproportionate number of Jews are drawn to careers in medicine. It's not (despite what some may say) because it's a well-paid career, but rather, because we tend to value science and its role in improving and strengthening the bodies that we're given. We are commanded not to accept human life as short and brutal, but to use our minds, and the minds of those who came before us, to build a better future.
I'm not a "good" Jew. I've got tattoos on both of my forearms, I'm queer as a ten-cent nickel, and my son's still got his foreskin. I have a Christmas tree and I get my daughter a real birthday cake every year even though her birthday tends to fall during Passover. Plus, I can't stand Benjamin Netanyahu or gefilte fish. But I know I'm at least doing one thing right. I'm standing up for the use of science to prolong and protect the lives of my children and others.
Apparently, all other things aside, my vaccine advocacy combined with my Judaism mean that I am an ugly communist fascist money-grubbing Zionist cockroach shill. My reasons for advocating for vaccines are called into question, my children are labeled the defective products of incest, and my opinion is taken with a grain of antisemitic salt.
The anti-vaxxers are right when they say that today sometimes looks suspiciously like 1932. But I think they're wrong about who among us is actually the target of hate.
1. The statement that connects anti-vaxxers with anti-semites smells fishy to me. Why would anti-semites in Germany of 1932 care about individual vaccination damage when the public health effects were so obviously positive? A web search doesn't turn up more than a disdain for vaccinations by Julius Streicher, the editor of the party magazine "Der Stuermer". Streicher's anti-vaxxer organisation, however, was forbidden in 1935, and vaccination were continued. Especially the compulsory anti-smallpox vaccination was continued, despite the relative ease with which Hitler could have stopped it.
ReplyDelete2. That brings me to Goodwin's law - in absence of strong evidence that connects a topic of discussion with the Nazis, mentioning the Nazis is both likely to occur with increasing duration and is an indication of the ideological bankcrupt of the debater who mentions it. Conclusion: anti-anti-vaxxers have it lost here, try better next time, humankind needs you.
Anti-Semitism has always been rooted in the idea that the Jews were engaging in some sort of conspiracy. The Anti-Vaccine Movement believes immunization programs are covering some deeper conspiracy. That many of those that subscribe to one would also believe in the other should come as no surprise.
Delete'Goodwin's Law'?
ReplyDeleteThere are antisemites in every movement, and in every crevice of society. Just as there are racists, fascists, misogynists, homophobes, etc. And we fight them and their sick ideas. The revolution is a society-wide school.
ReplyDeleteBut what's that have to do with a movement that questions infant vaccination in the U.S.?
None -- absolutely NONE -- of the questions and challenges to vaccination, many of which I share, are addressed in this article.
The author writes:
"All joking and stereotypes aside, it's not a coincidence that a disproportionate number of Jews are drawn to careers in medicine. It's not (despite what some may say) because it's a well-paid career, but rather, because we tend to value science and its role in improving and strengthening the bodies that we're given. We are commanded not to accept human life as short and brutal, but to use our minds, and the minds of those who came before us, to build a better future."
Hey, let's hear it for us Jews; we're just so caring (read that with appropriate New York sarcasm, please!), so valuing of science and strengthening our bodies! Implication: No one else cares about that, only the Jews. In writing those (and other offensive) statements here, THIS ARTICLE IS RACIST AND ELITIST.
It's one thing to decry and fight against fascists within our movements, which we do all the time. But here we have pro-vaxxers using some sick historical examples to tar and feather an entire movement, and without ever addressing the concerns those questioning vaccinations have been raising!
Pretty nauseating.
Mitchel Cohen
Brooklyn Greens/Green Party
http://www.mitchelcohen.com
Here's something to add to your condemnation of anti-semitic ideas in the "pro-choice" vaccine movement, and in some racist stupidities in the "back-to-nature" movement. Please note, again, that it is wrong to characterize entire movements with the racism and anti-semitism of some of the people in them, which you can find in all movements, everywhere. Here's an excerpt from my essay against genetic racism and biological determinism that seems apropos (from "Is Violence in Your Genes? Psychology, Racism, & the Violence Initiative Project". This essay was published in 2001 in “Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering,” ed. by Brian Tokar, and in Z Magazine.)
ReplyDeleteThe race-based "biological theory of aggression" is neither new nor scientific. One champion of the Violence Initiative, Dr. Frederick Goodwin, defended the "theory" before the National Health Advisory Council in February 1992:
"If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence ... and, in fact, there are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the same hyperaggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they copulate more and therefore they reproduce more to offset the fact that half of them are dying. ... [M]aybe it isn’t just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be more natural, without all of the social controls that we have imposed upon ourselves as a civilization over thousands of years in our own evolution."(2)
Goodwin follows a long line of proponents of racial supremacy who have traded the Ku Klux Klan’s white sheets for white lab coats. They argue that social problems are caused by biologically defective members of oppressed classes; society can be improved by identifying and eliminating the propagation of these “defectives.” In the 1850s, Louisiana physician Samuel Cartwright described a mental disease of slaves called “drapetomania,” which ‘caused’ its victims to run away from their masters. (The physician could not conceive that slaves would run away as a conscious decision in rejection of the conditions they faced.) A century later, American physicians Vernon Mark, Frank Ervin and William Sweet proposed that urban rebellions were caused by brain damaged individuals who could be cured by psychosurgery (lobotomy). They received almost $1 million in federal funding.(3)
In the 1970s, O.J. Andy, director of Neurosurgery at the University of Mississippi, published reports on invasive surgeries he had performed on children who were said to be developmentally disabled; all were Black. Dr. Peter Breggin describes one of Andy’s subjects, a 9-year-old boy said to be “hyperactive, aggressive, combative, explosive, destructive and sadistic.”(4) Over a three year period, Andy operated on the child on four different occasions and implanted electrodes in his brain. Andy concluded, in a 1970 article, that this “patient” was no longer combative or aggressive. In actuality, Andy had mashed the child’s brain, suppressing intellect and emotion, and disabled the child by turning him into a vegetable. Dr. Andy claimed, according to Breggin, that “the kind of brain damage that could necessitate such radical surgery might be manifested by participation in the Watts Uprising in 1965. Such people,” he diagnosed, “could have abnormal pathological brains.”(5)
Sorry, here are the footnotes .....
DeleteNOTES
1. cf. Richard Herrnstein, quoted in The New York Times, Jan. 31, 1992, p. A1, in which he supports the invented link between genetics and criminality: “These are stunning statistics,” he said, accepting (in Dr. Gerald Horne’s words), “the unproven innuendo of genetic causality.” Gerald Horne, “Race Backwards: Genes, Violence, Race and Genocide,” CovertAction Quarterly, Winter 1992-93.
2. Warren Leary, “Struggle Continues Over Remarks by Mental Health Official,” The New York Times, March 8, 1992, p. 34.
3. Mark, Ervin & Sweet, “Violence and the Brain,” discuss the case of a young white male, Thomas K., who had undergone brain surgery to cure his epilepsy and propensity for violent behavior. They claimed that he was saved by psychosurgery (lobotomy). His mother claimed, on the other hand, that the doctors had turned him into a vegetable. See Barry Mehler, “In Genes We Trust: Where Science Bows to Racism,” Reform Judaism, Winter, 1994.
4. Peter Breggin, “Campaign Against Racist Federal Programs by the Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology,” Journal of African American Men, Winter 1995/6.
5. B.J. Mason, “Brain Surgery to Control Behavior: Controversial Options Are Coming Back as Violence Curbs,” Ebony, February 1973, p.68.
Mitchel Cohen
Brooklyn Greens/Green Party
http://www.MitchelCohen.com
That is very disturbing that people are using slurs to argue against vaccines.
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to point out 11 million people were killed in the Holocost, not 6 million. 6 million were jewish, other groups were targeted including gay people, people with disabilities and gypsies.
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ReplyDeleteI'm noticing this more and more. It's apparent when you look at one of the main sources for the anti-vaxx movement, whale.to
ReplyDeleteWhat Mitchel seems to miss is to take a step back and look at the big picture.
The point here is that anti-Semites think Jews control the pharmaceutical industry. We can speculate as to how they come to that conclusion, but it really doesn't matter. That's really a tangent and not the main point of this as I understand it.
The overlap between anti-semites and the purveyors of the anti-vaccination movement is quite large, when push comes to shove, and it stems from the same strange fears of worldwide conspiracies.