Middle East

Antisemitism

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Having lived in South Texas since the 7th grade, antisemitism was not something I encountered in my social environment while growing up. That marked the heyday of All in the Family; at least as far as Jews are concerned Archie’s prejudice didn’t go beyond ethnic/religious snobbery and not-always-negative stereotypes (good with money, holiday dedicated to eating young kippers). The signature antisemitism of that decade revolved around Palestinian terrorism. The Holocaust was a subject of history lessons, and the miniseries that aired weeks before my high school graduation.

I didn’t find antisemitism in my adult social circles, either, only in news stories and news commentary – the since-forgotten politician or two whose membership in a country club not allowing Jews drew controversy, the Crown Heights riots, Jewish conspiracy tropes, more Middle Eastern terrorism, sporadic David Duke sightings, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, the alt-right subculture, and so on. I get the impression that a lot of folks treat antisemitism as a single phenomenon and not several. The following is probably not an exhaustive list.  

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Rage

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So a month and a bit after the Oct. 7th pogrom in Israel, the streets of American and European cities, and university/college campuses are filled with rage, and a disgusting display of Jew-hate. It’s as if none of them ever read Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” or had the slightest clue about what happens when the survivors of a genocide have the chance to pay back the perpetrators of mass murder the wholesale murder of kin, friends, and coreligionists with appropriate coin. But mostly … rage. By coincidence, the hand-scribbled ravings of the Covenant School transsexual murderer were leaked to a media outlet it looks like some local police officers are believed to have been the conduit for the leakage. Because what comes clear about the girl who wanted to be a boy was the pure, white-hot insane and murderous rage, which somehow became focused for whatever reason on the kids, kids who were of a privileged enough background that their parents could send them to a religious-sponsored private school. I wonder if the rage grew out of frustration. The kids had something that Audrey Hale felt that she lacked a secure sense of self in the world, comfort within their own skin, innocence and trust, parental approval whatever. They had all that or some other quality and she didn’t and it wasn’t fair and so she was consumed with rage, a rage which could only be assuaged by lashing out.

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Edward Said

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Many professors at Columbia University are dismayed that a campus culture with a long history of demonizing Israel as a barbaric imperialist state, and little to no history of criticizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians in the past, now actively embraces such attacks against Israelis today. “We are horrified that anyone would celebrate these monstrous attacks or, as some members of the Columbia faculty have done in a recent letter, try to ‘recontextualize’ them as a ‘salvo,’ as the ‘exercise of a right to resist’ occupation, or as ‘military action.’”

This attitude toward Israel is an outgrowth of the modern leftist doctrine that the West is history’s greatest aggressor. The sum of the West’s interventions in non-Western lands is automatically regarded with cynicism, including the post-WWI nation-building in the former Ottoman provinces – and especially the formation of Israel. Anti-Zionist leftists blindly trust the Arab side of the story, that the Israelis and not the Arabs instigated the 1948 war. Many if not most of this group – certainly the loudest – reject the notion that Jews have rightful claims to any of the territory west of the Jordan River; it was Arab-ruled before the Turkish occupation (albeit under governments headquartered outside of the region), it should be Arab-ruled again.


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Consequences

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So, looking at the actions of pro-Hamas demonstrators on university campuses and in the streets of major blue-tinged cities over the last few weeks, we really don’t have to ask as Dorothy Thompson did, in mid-1941 who goes Nazi? College students suckled on the sour teat of DIE-addled academicians with delusions of intellectual grandeur, for a certainty, and recent immigrants who have brought their unfortunate old habits of hate with them. Still, when it comes to that first group, it has been amazing and disheartening to observe that sheltered twentysomethings driven to hair-trigger meltdown by the alleged presence of misogyny, the faintest hint of racism, and microaggressions so tiny as to be invisible to the naked eye have enthusiastically aligned themselves with genocidal Jew haters from Gaza. Students and academics didn’t even pause for a split second, before cheering on indiscriminate random slaughter, torture, repeated rape so violent that it left pelvic bones broken, burning families alive in their own homes, looting and hostage-taking.

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