I don’t want to end the year on a down note, I really don’t, but…
The ugly head of anti-Semitism or, giving some of the reaction a more charitable spin, the callousness and lack of sufficient concern for the fate of Israel has been a revelation for me. I’ve never understood anti-Semitism, and being forced to acknowledge that this contagion that once was at the heart of the evil plunging the world into a catastrophic conflict is still thriving came as a shock this year. Over at Simple Justice, liberal (but not progressive) criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield neatly assesses the significance of the anti-Jew and anti-Israel sentiments erupting on college campuses, in the black community, in the Democratic Party and other places where the woke run free. He writes in part (today),
“….the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th and its ensuing war in Gaza has bubbled up the fundamental differences between a liberal democratic nation and the swell of simplistic authoritarianism of the young.
Others in my position have adopted the woke view of the world, some because they needed the validation that comes from espousing the popular views of progressives, and others because they were never quite as serious as I thought. Or hoped. But how many more marches by the young and unduly passionate who justify terrorism and suddenly find rape and murder acceptable when done by those their tribe tells them to favor?
Will 2024 be an inflection point, where people finally come to grips with the fact that they’ve become the enemy they righteously believed they were fighting? At first, it seems there might be an epiphany, a realization that dividing the world into the oppressed and oppressors was an infantile way to deal with the many problems facing society. But since then, it’s become apparent that the young and unduly passionate have fallen back into their tribal ways, enjoying the fresh air of sowing misery on blocked highways for an irrational and destructive cause.
I never would have believed in my old man head that we would be back to open Jew hatred again. Yet here we are, and tens of thousands of people who would claim the mantle of progress fully embrace the end of Jews. Never in its wildest dreams would Hamas have believed that raping and beheading Jews would turn them into progressive darlings, but here we are.
Will this cause young progressives to recognize the error of their ideology? Will they realize that their sudden existential concern for Palestinians when they cared nothing about them until it meant they could openly hate Jews, proves that they are just another flavor of haters, of authoritarians, of racists?”
I can answer that question: No, of course not. The ideology that we have seen run amuck the past few years is incapable of self-reflection or self-criticism, even when their flaws, mistakes and misconduct is brilliantly obvious to others. That segment of the Left opposes racism, but embodies that position by calling almost everything and everyone they disagree with “racist” and engaging in racial bigotry and discrimination themselves, but you know, the good kind.
Yet as horrible and ugly as I found the campus Left’s embrace of “From the river to the sea” and the disgusting failures of so many university leaders to unequivocally condemn it, the discussion of the issues in the Hamas-Isreal war that literally, and I mean literally literally, not figuratively literally, made me shudder was from the political Right, in Tucker Carlson’s glib expression of apathy toward the only democratic nation in the Middle East, our ally, and a nation where so many Americans have ties, friends and family.
During an appearance on “Breaking Points” this week. Carlson was asked by host Saagar Enjeti about conservative pundit Ben Shapiro’s outspoken support for Israel and his criticism of Carlson’s reaction to the Gaza conflict, which can be fairly described as a shrug. Primed by Enjeti, whom I know nothing about, saying that the Israel-Hamas war is “a third world” conflict and comparing the U.S. support for Israel to its support for Ukraine, Carlson said, in part,
“In the case of Israel and the Arab world, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in both and I like both. And I felt terrible for the people who were killed on October 7, I still do. So I had no weird motive, I was just thinking about it from an American perspective: Is this good for us or is it not?”… I said first of all, if the people who live in Gaza who are being moved out are so evil and dangerous that they can’t live in the region, why would you want them to move into my country? I mean those, what are you saying? They can’t live there because it’s too scary to live next to them but they can live next to me? So at that point, I felt very hostile about that because it showed such contempt for me and my family and my neighbors and my country — it is my country — that’s how I feel about it anyway. It’s all of our country. And so I was like disgusted by that and I said so and I don’t know why that’s weird. Why wouldn’t I be offended by that?
“And then it was immediately I’m a hater, a bigot, or something like that. None of that registered with me because, first of all, I’ve been attacked for so long. But attacks that aren’t true. You know if somebody said ‘Wow, you’ve gained some weight this summer’ I’d be like ‘Oh!’ It would hurt my feelings because it’s true! But if someone’s like ‘You’re a hater’ or ‘You hate,’ that’s not true so I don’t really care. But I did think it showed like the level of not just corruption, which I knew, but of like emotional instability and crazy. I mean, there are people — and I stopped reading any of it — but there are people on the “right” who have spent the last two months every single day focused on a conflict in a foreign country as our own country becomes dangerously unstable, on the brink of financial collapse, with tens of millions of people who shouldn’t be here in the country, we don’t know their identities or the purpose of their being here.”
This is exactly the view taken by the United States in the 1930s, by both Republicans and a majority of Democrats including the Roosevelt Administration, that allowed Hitler’s extermination of the Jews to proceed as far as it did, and that stranded Jewish families in Germany and Europe because there were ‘too many problems at home’ to worry about. Carlson is an old school isolationist like the most dangerous segment of the Republican Party, what was once the Pat Buchanan wing. While the aggressive World Police stance of the neocons led the U.S. into assorted disasters, the isolationists’ threat to U.S. long-term security and more important, its ethical values and soul, are far more dangerous. Merging ideologies with the libertarians who would have had the U.S. sit out the Second World War, these conservatives today would have us abandon the role of “The Big Kid on the Block,” the one power that should be counted upon to take the side of democratic principles and to fight against the despots, terrorist and totalitarians when they are on the rise.
It would be nice if the United Nations filled that role as it was originally designed to do, but the lesson should have been learned by now that it does not and will not accept that role. Nor can it be trusted to. The UN has opposed Israel in the latest conflict, and is both thoroughly corrupt and anti-American.
Carlson’s typically smug and grinning demagoguery in asking ” Is this good for us or is it not?” was both reductive and disgusting. Is it good for the U.S. to turn its back on allies, show apathy towards the deaths of Jews once again, and allow the evil in the world to spread and grow powerful before we decide to support democracy, decency, and the rule of law? It is not. Agreed: the moderation of an activist foreign policy is difficult, complex, and fraught with peril, as the U.S. has proven repeatedly: in its battle with world Communism, in Vietnam, in Iran and Iraq, among other tragic stages. It is so much simpler—and irresponsible— to take the Carlson approach of “What’s in it for us?”
What’s “in it” is preserving our own values and culture, and continuing to aspire to more than just narrow self-interest and security.
Israel’s plight and its battle for survival has shined a harsh light on the darkest sides of both the Left and the Right.
Ethics Alarms 
You don’t understand anti-Semitism? You don’t give yourself enough credit. There isn’t that much to understand about it. It’s simple hatred of the other, especially the other who does well. Throughout their 4,000 years or more of history, the Jewish people have always been the other. In ancient days they were the other because they worshipped one god while almost all the other people of the Middle East worshipped several. In the days of the Greek and Roman empires they were the other because they refused to assimilate the way many conquered peoples did. The Greeks tried to impose their own culture on the Jews and got the Maccabean revolt for it. The Romans tried to take the Jews into the firm the way they’d taken many others in. They were never fully successful, and after one revolt too many they dispersed them, creating the province of Palestine. In Christian Europe they were the other partly because of their different faith, partly because they were closed off from most professions and closed themselves off socially. In the Muslim Ottoman Empire they were the other for the same reasons. The majority never likes the “other” much, and it did not help that one of the few businesses the Jews were allowed to engage in was moneylending, and moneylenders are not well liked. It did not help either that the Jews were usually merchants and moneylenders who did better than the European non-noble classes or the Muslims who were mostly farmers and small shopkeepers.
This difference issue finally led to Zionism and the desire to create a national homeland for the Jewish people where they would be the majority and would not constantly have to answer to others. The allies took it upon themselves to do this in the wake of WW2, but certain of the Jews, who had fought on the allied side, mostly those militants known as Irgun, decided that this wasn’t happening fast enough, and resorted to their own campaign of terror against the British Mandate even before the war was over, blowing up British police stations. Prior to that and during the war they did in fact ambush and murder Arabs. Finally, the British decided to turn the problem over to the United Nations, which of course could do little, and that’s when Israel comes into being.
You know the rest. Israel started to achieve great things, from growing orchards of apples and exporting juice we drink here in the US to formulating the antibiotic “Z-pack” that relieves all kinds of infections. Meantime the Arab nations relied on oil and not much else. Israel also repeatedly threw back Arab attempts to destroy it, and quite sensibly refused to allow those Arabs who had walked out of it in 1948 expecting it to be defeated to return.
The Arabs hate the Jews partly because their own scriptures tell them to hate them, partly because the Jews have achieved the democratic success they just can’t seem to, and partly because they resent the fact that their days of empire are over, and the Jews defeated the only post-WWII attempt to bring that empire back in the form of the United Arab Republic, which didn’t last.
So the Arabs, especially the Palestinian Arabs, who no one else wants any part of, claim the mantle of oppressed and cry “oppressor!” against Israel. They justify murder and terror saying that is all they can do to make their voices heard. Understandably the Israelis have no use for this and retaliate with the one thing the enemy understands: force. This only ends one way.
In the meantime, the last generation of college students have been fed a steady diet of oppressed=good, oppressor=bad, people of color=good, white people=bad. So maybe it should come as no surprise that they grab right onto this in the wake of Black Lives Matter, and have made it the latest, greatest popular thing and an excuse to basically throw everything else aside and make general nuisances of themselves. College life as originally envisioned was disciplined and difficult. You were there to learn a subject, maybe a profession, and learn how to function in society. The only folks learning how to be soldiers in any cause were those on ROTC scholarships. Few envision it that way anymore except the engineering and premed students. To the rest, at its most harmless it’s about getting drunk or getting stoned and getting as much sex as you can, at its worst it’s about becoming a destructive activist for the latest leftist cause and throwing any kind of rules to the curb. Why spend hours in the library and go to bed by 11 when instead you can be smashing windows, blocking roads, and hitting strangers over the head and feeling justified for doing it? Why try to weigh the pros and cons of different ideas and try to make a persuasive case, when it’s so much easier to believe, act on your beliefs, and decide that those who don’t share them need to convert, leave, or die, and it doesn’t matter much which?
The thing is, these beliefs and attitudes are nothing new. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the only things that change are the names and the faces. Tyrants always want the same thing by the same means, but in every age they put a new face on it. It’s always about pressing down your will on someone else, by whatever means necessary and giving any reason or no reason for doing it. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that anti-Semitism, something we thought went permanently into the dustbin of history after the horrors of the Holocaust were exposed for public view, has come full circle and is now becoming trendy again. It never really went away, it just became the province of Muslim extremists and racists in the mold of the KKK. Now it’s going mainstream again. It also shouldn’t come completely as a surprise that this nation has gotten to the point where one party is resorting to the same tactics it decried a century and more ago in other countries (read up on the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920) and justifying it. The idea of simply removing a political opponent from the ballot or locking someone thought politically dangerous up on unsupported charges never went away, there were just enough honest people on both sides of the aisle to say “no, we don’t do that here,” and make it stick. Now apparently not only many current leaders but most of the rising generation think it’s perfectly ok, if you hate the other side enough or think it’s enough of a danger.
An old Chinese insult disguised as a pleasantry is “may you live in interesting times.” I think we’re about to head into the most interesting times in a quarter century in the coming year. Cross your fingers, or pray if you are so inclined, that we come out of it with our country and ourselves relatively intact.
That’s all from this neck of the woods. See you in 2024.
Comment of the Year, Steve-O and one of your finest. Happy 2024.
Absolutely agree with you about Steve-O’s comment! COTY is absolutely appropriate.
Happy New Year to all, especially to Jack, who’s been the sponsor of this blog for more years than I know being a recent arrival. I’ll lift a glass to all of you!
MB
Happy New Year, everyone!!
Steve-O,
You have a way of distilling your thoughts that is simultaneously complex and readable.
You have a grasp of history, both in detail and in that “high-level, overarching thematic” scope that makes me green with envy.
You have a way of displaying strong emotion in your writing without making it feel like an unhinged rant.
This response was outstanding…a great way for me to open my year on EA.
Well, I wish Israel well with their struggle with their enemies. I believe they are far more civilized and humane than the Palestinians who wish to conquer their lands. However, I do think we should stay out of it as much as possible. As seen, our government is bound to micromanage the Israelis to their detriment, with talks of ceasefires, demands that they only kill a ‘reasonable’ amount of their enemies in a war, etc.
As for the anti-semitism, I have a hard time having a lot of sympathy. Let me give an analogy. Imagine you are in a bar and you see a man slapping a woman around. You step in and stop the guy. The woman seems grateful, the police come and take the bully into custody. The next week, you are in the same bar and see the same woman there alone. After about an hour, the same guy comes in and grabs her, shaking her. You step in again. Again the police are called. However, this time the police put YOU in cuffs. The woman told the police that they were just minding their own business when you came over and attacked her boyfriend. Luckily, the supervisor shows up and he had been involved with the incident the previous week. He lets you go, cautioning to mind your own business from now on. The week after that, you are in the bar and the man is beating the woman badly in the corner. At this point, what do you do but shrug and go about your business. The woman is the Jewish people and the bully is the left.
The Jewish community in the US has enthusiastically embraced the same kind of bigotry and abuse that Jews suffered throughout history. On college campuses and in protests they have actively worked to demonize large groups of people, even supporting ‘white genocide’ and an end to Christianity with people who have stated that they want the same for Jews. They thought that being part of the approved group would protect them, never considering that once their ‘friends’ became powerful enough, once they had subjugated their enemies enough, those ‘friends’ would turn on them.
As the saying goes:
They said they wanted to get rid of the whites, the Christians, the men, the heterosexuals, Western Civilization, and the Jews. I participated because they were the ‘cool, kind, sensitive, and intelligent’ people and Jews were so far down the list that I thought they didn’t really mean it.
They came for the white people and I participated because I was Jewish.
Then, they came for the Christians and I participated because I was Jewish.
Then, they came for the men and I participated because I was Jewish.
Then, they came for the heterosexuals, and I participated because I was Jewish.
Then they came for Western Civilization and I participated because I was Jewish.
Then, they came for the Jews and I said “How is this possible. How could these kind compassionate people who have been demonizing everyone they said they would demonize me too just like they said they would? How can the white male Christian heterosexual community allow this? The evil conservative white male Christian heterosexual community must be responsible for this anti-semitism!”.
So, what should I do at this point except shrug and go about my business? I have bigger things to deal with than the surprising revelation that the Jew-hating friends of the Jews in America hate Jews. Illinois has committed itself to go door to door and confiscate about 10 million firearms and accessories from previously legal firearms owners and put 2 million people in jail for it. None of these people are causing the shooting deaths in Chicago. They won’t go after everyone, however. They will just go after anyone who speaks out against the tyranny of the left using prosecutorial discretion. Of course, the federal courts have said that is fine.
I think Carlson’s question is apt, and it appears you agree. Like you, we disagree with the answer.
Foreign policy should always be a little self-centered. You will likely make the world worse if you jump into fights in which you have no interest.
Fortunately, at this time, we have an easy point of comparison: Ukraine.
We definitely have an interest in avoiding another full-fledged war across Europe. We also have an interest in not letting Putin grow Russia. There are definite energy concerns implicated here, considering Russia’s energy supplies.
However, Ukraine is not a particular ally of the U.S. And, if the U.S. has an interest in preventing war in Europe, that interest should pale in comparison to the interest that Europeans should have in preventing that war. As for energy, we could solve some of those problems by using our own energy and supplying it to our allies.
Israel is an entirely different situation. I can’t think of a single pertinent metric where our interest in Israel is LESS THAN our interest in Ukraine. Our foreign interests favor Israel over Ukraine. That is not to say that you have to pick one or the other. You could support both, or reject both (I think that is the bad position). But, if you had to pick one to support, it should be Israel.
-Jut
(Adding to what Steve-O-in-NJ, the Jews have always been “others,” but that is kind of by design. Jews have always kind of been outsiders, but, at the same time, everyone else are outsiders to the Jews. They were isolated from the larger society, partly by force and partly by choice. The same is kind of true of the Chinese; it is just that the Chinese are not outnumbered by the outsiders. But, the Jews seemed to do fairly well in the U.S. where: a) unlike in Europe, there is a plurality of ethnicities that more or less get along after they get over their animosities; and b) individual merit ultimately wins out over ethnicity or class.)
But those, like Carlson, who traffic in demagoguery and thus withhold key facts and significant arguments from the public, make no distinctions between Ukraine and Israel at all. Your analysis is valid…if Tucker were a respectable and trustworthy pundit, he’d point out what you did.
“They were isolated from the larger society, partly by force and partly by choice.”
One factor that is rarely noted is that Jewish dietary restrictions could necessitate them having to physically locate in tighter geographic bounds than most other ethnic or religious groups. This was especially true in eras where transportation to even a few miles away from home might be a major undertaking. Catholics and Protestants, Norwegians and Italians, etc., could all go to the nearest butcher or baker for provisions. If Jews wanted to keep kosher, they could only go to limited sources, and there would have to be enough Jews living in one area to establish and support such specialized businesses. That was an additional pressure for self-isolation beyond just being comfortable with neighbors similar to themselves.
Every comment as well as the original post is enlightening as well as evocative.
Steve and Jut’s examination of “othering” is highly instructive.
The “American point of view”?
I would submit that there has typically been a dichotomy as to our view of the world.
One typical American point of view is that we see evil in the world and think we should fix it, or be involved in fixing it. Because it’s just wrong and we see ourselves as the defenders of freedom.
One typical American point of view is that we see the world as evil and we don’t want to be involved in it. It doesn’t really concern us, we have enough to do at home. We save those people X times already and they’re ingrates. Etc.
There are more typical Americans, but they all coexist here. I would submit that the first view was more prevalent after WWII up until perhaps the fall of the Soviet Union, waxing and waning at times.
The latter was more prevalent during the interwar years, and it has reemerged after the fall of the Soviet Union.
After the Holocaust, we said Never Again? Are we now heading towards Never Mind? I sure hope not.
I agree with Jack and Jut on Carlson’s false equivalency of Ukraine and Israel.
The first part of Carson’s remarks included in the post seemed to me to be directed at the resettling of Gazan (Palestinian) “refugees” in our country, a process that I also oppose. Importing wholesale any group that habitually demonizes the West in general, and America in particular, looks to me like an attempt at national suicide. I see no Jew-hatred in that.
I totally reject his assertions that Ben Shapiro doesn’t care about America or Americans.
Carlson’s larger take on the issues is, perhaps inadvertently, illustrative of how the Biden administration’s inept handling of every single major policy area has put our country in this predicament.
With our absurd energy policy, our unsecured border open and allowing God-knows-who to enter unvetted, our shaky economy propped up with inflated currency and poised for collapse, our military preoccupied with woke nonsense and unable to keep the ranks filled with actual “soldier material” recruits, and our public inattentive and distracted, it is not hard to see how we are perceived as weak by our enemies and unreliable by our allies. Biden’s refusal to -or lack of comprehension of the necessity to- reverse course on these issues (indeed, doubling down on them) just further aggravates each aspect of the debacle. I won’t even get into the international perceptions of the senile old Chinese sock puppet himself, or his crooked family. Heck, I’m worried about my country and my family, too.
The weakness of US leadership in NATO (and the world generally) contributed to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. It was folly for the US to jump headlong into “blank-check” support of the Ukrainians without some plan for an attainable and acceptable end-state. Are we to bankrupt ourselves to support Ukraine and its corrupt oligarchs, as their beneficiary Biden and the Ukraine War Hawks in Congress seem to want to do? Ukraine cannot defeat Russia in a ten-year war with or without our support (barring our direct intervention). Our economy cannot support them at the current rate for ten more years. We should be pressuring Ukraine to negotiate a settlement to the war -we should have been doing it for the past year.
I listen to Ben Sapiro regularly, and I have never heard him say anything that would suggest what Carlson asserts. He does point out occasions when the Biden Administration’s support for Israel seems to waver or when they start to lecture Israel on how to fight the war against Hamas. I am a staunch supporter of Israel, and a regular donor to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Force (FIDF). If push came to shove, I would certainly choose Israel over Ukraine. Biden won’t even support a bill to allocate funds to assist Israel without attached assurances for Ukraine.
Ukraine and Israel are not remotely comparable.
Someone opined somewhere recently that Tucker Carlson left Fox assuming his viewership would follow him. Apparently it did not and stayed with Fox. So instead, Carlson has had to embrace ever increasingly bonkers commentary on everything.
And the fact that this was his response illustrates why Fox was right to fire him, regardless of what other factors were behind it.