Now THAT’s anti-Semitism!
Since he asked: Why yes, Alan Garber who is the interim president of the Harvard until a permanent replacement for Claudine Gay is selected, holds Harvard professorships in health care policy, economics, and public policy. As the school Provost, he was the obvious choice to step in. Funny, it didn’t even occur to me that he is Jewish.
Youseff’s credentials are here.
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Pointer: Campus Reform
Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day was almost the last comment on this blog in 2023, and is an appropriate first COTD in 2024. I called it the “Comment of the Year” in my initial response, and though I haven’t done the homework to go back through all the year’s Comments of the Day to make that an official decision, his opus is certainly worthy of that honor.
Don’t waste your time with my introduction: Steve’s post is long, but both perceptive and a useful guide to some of what lies ahead.
Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Scary and Unethical Reactions to the Hamas-Israel War on the Left and Right.”
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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 worshiped one god while almost all the other people of the Middle East worshiped 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 trying. 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 the Romans 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. 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.
Fairfax County, just a short trip from my home in Alexandria, Virginia, is supposed to be one of the elite public school systems in America. Consider that, as you ponder this story.
Above is a photo taken of two Fairfax High School students during a meeting of the county’s Langley High School Muslim Students Association, in which they hold up a crude drawing in which the stars on the American flag are replaced with swastikas, and the message “Free Palestine!” is written in between the squiggly stripes. This took place on school property, in a sanctioned extra-curricular activity. [Supplementary questions I’d like to see answered: 1) Why are there religion-segregated activities in a high school? Isn’t allowing that inherently divisive? 2) Where is the faculty advisor?] An Asian American student leaked the photo to the public on social media, thus allowing the community to see what a bang-up job Langley was doing educating its young charges. The inflammatory image inspired pro-Palestine ( that is, pro-Hamas) students to stage a “walkout” on November 10, as students chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Rep. Tlaib’s lie to the contrary, that slogan is a call for Israel to be wiped off the map.
I did not see this coming, but perhaps I should have. After all, they have been telling us that they hate whites, males, and Americans for years.
This has been an ugly month for Democrats and progressives, if anyone is paying attention and not soaked with denial. America’s campuses, after decades of indoctrination, are erupting with open anti-Semitism, and the Left’s captive media has spread terrorist propaganda. The Associated Press told its reporters not to call Hamas killers “terrorists” after they massacred civilians, raped women, and took a couple hundred hostages from Israel on October 7. The Voice of America issued instructions to avoid calling Hamas “terrorists.” On October 12, Yale’s campus newspaper censored what it called “unsubstantiated claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men” from a pro-Israel article by a student. (Yale professor Nicholas Christakis asked, “Are the hostage-taking, murder of children in their beds, burning of people alive, and parading of nude captive women in the street also ‘unsubstantiated’?”)
After Cornell students posted messages to university websites sewing sentiments like “If i see a pig male jew i will stab you and slit your throat,” “eliminate jewish living from cornell campus,” and an especially ominous, “gonna shoot up 104 west,” the kosher dining hall on campus, the school boldly advised Jewish students to avoid that dining hall.
Silly me: I thought this Babylon Bee story was satire.
…revealing the virulent anti-Jewish bigotry beneath.
I suppose I sort of understand how so many progressives and Democrats get seduced by the “Palestinians are oppressed people” myth, and go from there to virulent anti-Semitism, or more accurately, Jew Hate. Leftism is an ideology that routinely ignores facts and history to reach convenient conclusions: the history of the Israel-Palastinian conflict does not support the narrative, so either the knee-jerks deliberately remain ignorant (contrived ignorance, which is unethical) or just pretend what has happened didn’t. The Left also likes bad analogies, and since “oppressed groups,” real or imagined, form the heart of the progressive coalition, sloppy thinking and bad history make the Jews (that is, Israel) the equivalents of those evil whites, and the Palestinians stand-ins for blacks, Native Americans, women, and LGTBQ+ victims, though Arabs are no less “white” than Israelis are. The intersectionality obsession makes one stupid, and this is a prime example.
The history is complicated, but the ethics reality is clear: the Palestinians have refused to accept that the nation of Israel is a legitimate nation and have rejected multiple opportunities to be granted a separate sovereign state if it would reject that hateful and hostile position and act accordingly. They have now relied on violence and terrorism for multiple generations to the point that its entrenched hatred can probably never be fixed, and so Israel’s refusal to trust the residents of Gaza–who elected a terrorist organization as their government—is fair, responsible and a matter of self-preservation.
The Palestinians, in short, blew it. They have oppressed themselves. Blindly supporting their position—which has automatically meant supporting violence against Jews—can only be explained by three things, individually or in various combinations: bigotry against Jews, ignorance, or cynical political posturing.
When I was growing up (and before I had researched the history), I assumed that anti-Semitism was entirely the obsession of the political Right. There were the Nazis, of course, and the American Nazi Party. Jews were primary targets of the Red Scare and McCarthyism, and associated with Communism, the Right’s boogeyman. The KKK hated Jews; so did the John Birch Society. Later, I found out how much anti-Jewish sentiment infected the administration of the Democratic Party’s most revered President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and FDR himself. Though the reliably Democrat-voting Jewish community soft-pedaled the truth, it is now clear that many thousands of Jewish Holocaust victims would have survived if there were not so many powerful anti-Jew voices with Roosevelt’s ear. Oh, there were plenty of Republican anti-Semites in office too, make no mistake about that. But the narrative assumes that conservatives are bigots.
I have long been fascinated that no Democratic Presidential candidate has been Jewish. The only ethnic Jew to run was a Republican, Barry Goldwater, whose grandparents were both Jewish though his parents raised him as an Episcopalian. Democrats have ostentatiously nominated the first female candidate and the first black candidate, but have never nominated a Presidential candidate from the group that has been as influential on U.S. politics as either. The closest any Jew has come to the Democratic nomination was Bernie Sanders, and the party rigged the process to make sure he couldn’t prevail over Hillary Clinton. All of this could be mere happenstance, but watching so many Democrats and progressives react to a terror attack on Israel by arguing that it was justified and seeking to deny Israel its necessary response, I have to wonder. The degree of hostility towards Jews and Israel in the bastions of progressive advocacy—the educational establishment and journalism—as well as the Democratic Party itself has become blazingly apparent since the Hamas attack.
As to that revelation, good. The truth is out, the mask is off. In Part 2, I’ll review exactly how ugly what we now can see is, and some of the reactions to it.
That’s yesterday’s Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, titled “Some Theme’s Missing,”, above. Does the pattern of the letter squares remind you of anything? Given that December 18 is the first night of Hanukkah, many found the resemblance of the puzzle to a Nazi swastika…disturbing. Sinister even.
Republicans pounced. New York Times-haters pounced. Donald Trump Jr. pounced, on Twitter. Israel’s Israel National News thought it notable that the swastika crossword was published following what it deemed an anti-Semitic op-ed by the Times the day before, warning that Benjamin “Netanyahu’s government…is a significant threat to the future of Israel — its direction, its security and even the idea of a Jewish homeland.”
The publication also posted a poll asking readers if the puzzle’s design was “intentional Nazi imagery or an unfortunate coincidence?” Of the 440 votes, nearly 85% deemed the symbol to be deliberate.
Boy, there are a lot of horrible, unqualified, inept Republicans running for office! In Georgia, Senate candidate Herschel Walker continues to make little sense while mangling facts every time he opens his mouth. Carl Paladino, the New York GOP’s candidate for Congress who already declared that Adolf Hitler was a “doer” and the kind of leader we needed today, recently said the US attorney general should “probably be executed.” After people had a problem with this for some reason, Paladino swore he was just joking. He’s a funny guy!
In Pennsylvania, where the Democratic candidate for on open U.S. Senate seat is suffering the after-effects of a stroke and still has trouble speaking (though his party’s President has lowered the bar on that score considerably), the GOP is running TV doctor and Oprah acolyte Mehmet Oz because Republican primary voters just can’t resist unqualified celebrities (See Walker above). Oz made his honesty an issue when he was asked an easy question: “How many homes to you own?” Dr. Oz’s reply: “Well I, legitimately, I own two houses. But, uh, one of them we’re building on; the other ones I rent.”
Translation: “Huminahuminahumina…” As a little research rapidly demonstrated, the former TV doctor actually owns ten residential properties (plus as many as eight commercial ones). After this was pointed out by his opponent, Oz “clarified” by resorting to the Clintonesque tactic of distinguishing a house from a home. Obviously Oz wouldn’t give an honest answer because it would make him look like what he in fact is: someone who is, by average American standards, wildly wealthy…not that there’s anything wrong with that.
And now we arrive at Kari Lake, another Trump-endorsed Republican candidate, running for Governor of Arizona. She’s attractive! She’s female! She’s conservative!
She endorsed a raging anti-Semite!
Wow. Here I was expecting to be reading nasty post-mortems on the despicable Harry Reid before his corpse was cold, and instead a wave of negative punditry appeared about, of all people, revered Desmond Tutu, whose body is only slightly cooler. The controversy? Nobody doubts that he played a major role in ridding South Africa of apartheid. In 1984, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (whatever that’s worth). However, as the Times of Israel sees it, “underneath the godlike humble appearance was an insidious anti-Semite and anti-Israel vein that throbbed and surfaced in writings, public speaking, and conversation.”
In the U.S., the opposition to honoring Tutu was joined by lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who told Fox News that by the standards the U.S. was now holding its metallic and rock honorees to, Tutu is unworthy. He said on the air,
The world is mourning Bishop Tutu, who just died the other day. Can I remind the world that although he did some good things, a lot of good things on apartheid, the man was a rampant anti-Semite and bigot?…When we’re tearing down statues of Jefferson and Lincoln and Washington, let’s not build statues to a deeply, deeply flawed man like Bishop Tutu. Let’s make sure that history remembers both the goods he did and the awful, awful bads that he did as well….He didn’t talk about the Israel lobby, he talked about the Jewish lobby. He minimized the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust. He said that getting killed in gas chambers was an easy death compared to apartheid. He said that Jews claimed a monopoly on the Holocaust. He demanded that Jews forgive the Nazis for killing them…[Tutu] encouraged others to have similar views and because he was so influential, he became the most influential anti-Semite of our time…The bottom line is that at a time when people are reckoning with the careers, of people with mixed legacies, whether it be Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and others, we have to include in a reckoning of Tutu his evil, bigotry against Jews, which has existed for many, many, many years.
I don’t care to dispute the fairness or accuracy of the case that Tutu was an anti-Semite. His worshipers are already doing that; I note that Wikipedia, which, like every other information source today, just can’t play it straight, shaded its article about Tutu this week to note his support for the Palestinians while adding that he professed a “simultaneous belief in Israel’s right to exist.” (The two positions are impossible to hold “simultaneously.”) It doesn’t matter; for the purposes of the ethical analysis, I will accept that Tutu was as much of an anti-Semite as Dershowitz says. Continue reading
1. This Morning’s Grovel: A white Seattle hairdresser apologized profusely for daring to wear dreadlocks. The key quote: “I have come to understand—far too belatedly—that my hairstyle is harmful.”
To lightly paraphrase Orwell: ‘She loved Big Brother.’
It’s hard to work up any sympathy for people like Irene—weak, ignorant, unwilling to stand up for basic human rights, like being able to wear your hair any damn way you want to. This is yet another of the one-way “rules” that are being delivered by edict as an alleged remedy for “systemic racism”: Blacks can do anything they want to, whites are severely limited. The hair rules: black women can straighten their hair, dye it blonde, adopt any style the choose as a method of self expression, but a white woman who chooses dreadlocks has “harmful hair.”
Those who won’t stand up for their own liberties deserve to lose them. Irene is a fool, and betraying the values of her country. Continue reading
This is the kind of story that makes me doubt my own cultural literacy. Until the controversy involving Nick Cannon, I had never heard of the guy, and wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into my living room. Yet he’s been around for 20 years as a juvenile TV star, a rapper, comic, actor, producer, director, the TV host of all sorts of shows I didn’t watch, and since 2012 he’s had his own show on MTV called “Wild and Out.” He also has a podcast.
The news that ViacomCBS had fired Cannon resonated throughout the popular media, and qualifies, apparently, as a Big Deal. In the June 30 installment of Cannon’s podcast, “Cannon’s Class,” he interviewed Professor Griff, a rapper who was a part of the group Public Enemy before being forced out after he said in an interview with The Washington Times, “The Jews are wicked. And we can prove this.” He also said that Jews were responsible for “the majority of wickedness that goes on across the globe.”
“I’m hated now because I told the truth,” Griffin told Cannon, who was immediately sympathetic. “You’re speaking facts,!” Cannon said. “There’s no reason to be scared of anything when you’re speaking the truth.”
After referring to Dr. Griff as a “legend,” Cannon said he wished that Louis Farrakhan, the anti-white demagogue with a long history of anti-Semitic comments, had not been blocked by Facebook.
Then Cannon endorsed Griffin’s contention that six dominant media companies were controlled by Jews, comparing it to the power of the Rothschilds, the banking family at the center of various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. “I find myself wanting to debate this idea and it gets real wishy and washy and unclear for me when we give so much power to the ‘theys,’ and ‘theys’ then turn into illuminati, the Zionists, the Rothschilds,” Cannon said later in the podcast.
Got it. He’s an anti-Semite. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 