Racism and the reporting of anti-semitism

Michel Foucault has written at length about the birth of modern systems of power. He has argued that zonal or compartmental – ised spatial systems have evolved from the surveillance mechanisms of state and corporate power. Regimes have developed that police and regulate the meanings given off from the bodies of those victimised by power, including their many ethnic differences. These regimes can vary from space to space, identity to identity. Or sometimes, in order to ensure the maintenance of power, the methods employed to regulate different identities in differing social spaces can be identical, but the localised meanings according to status, culture and/or relationship to authority may differ. This makes power more internal and localised to such an extent that in certain contexts even ‘protest’ can become a competitive manifestation of power. At present we live in a world where killed Muslim civilian populations are edited from media consciousness, where pro-Israel anti-semitism narratives jostle with international ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaigns for cultural space. Groups struggle to articulate the uniqueness of their identities and the specifics of their oppressions. At the very least this means ‘some oppressions are more equal than others’, and very often convenient racist double standards on the comparative value of human life become accommodated. The ‘war on terror’ has left us with competing narratives of victimhood. The narratives favoured by power are shouted loudly from its media. Other unendorsed narratives of victimisation are left to seep unbidden into cultural spaces, like blood from some Foucauldian corpse.