Many good people - exposed daily for nearly two years to
media images of a war zone, accompanied by a consistently biased narrative - can’t
help but view Israel as a killing machine indifferent to human life. Lately,
that perception has intensified, with scenes of civilians scrambling to obtain
food for their starving families from designated distribution points - accompanied
by a media narrative that says dozens or more are killed every day by the IDF
while doing that.
These images, and that rhetoric that masquerades as balanced
reporting, take a serious toll on public opinion. It’s why so many Americas –
many Jews among them - have become sharply critical of Israel’s actions in
Gaza.
But it is far from clear that the media knows what it is
talking about. It relies heavily - if not exclusively - on sources stationed in
Gaza, made up almost entirely of individuals and international organizations
with a long history of anti-Israel bias.
When Israel attempts to present its side of the story (on
the rare occasions the media even bothers to report it), the tone of the
coverage often makes it sound like lies being spouted by war criminals. Such is
the way of the world. If one fails to understand the impact this has on public
opinion, then there is little more to say.
None of this is new. I’ve said it all before. But it bears
repeating now, in light of a seminal piece on antisemitism and its intersection with socialism - by Jonathan
Rosenblum. His assessment is brilliant, and I fully agree with it. But I felt
compelled to add this additional dimension to his otherwise comprehensive overview
and analysis.
With that in mind, I’m going to do something I rarely do:
excerpt what I believe is the most pertinent portion - the first half - of his
article. I believe it is unassailable and well worth reading. In fact, I
challenge anyone who disagrees to explain why. It follows.
After punk rock duo Bob Vylan led tens of thousands of
concertgoers in chanting “Death, death to the IDF” at the Glastonbury Festival
in Great Britain, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote an incisive piece in the Free Press
describing what is going on. “What happened at Glastonbury... is part of a
coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people. Not just against
the Israeli military. Not just against Israel. Not just against Zionism.
Against Jews.”
The goal, she avers, is not just to erase Israel from the
river to the sea, but to erase “the Jewish people from the moral map,” by
painting “Israel as the nexus of evil and every Jew who does not loudly
denounce it as complicit.” Jews are the oppressor and must either sacrifice
their dignity or be driven from polite society.
Hirsi Ali describes this insurgency as a weird amalgam of
“Islamism soaked in Maoism weaponized for the social media era.” Zohran Mamdani
serves as the poster boy for that implausible alliance of Islam and Maoism.
“Islamism brings the fire — holy rage, the fixation on
martyrdom, and a visceral hatred of Jews that predates the State of Israel,”
according to Hirsi Ali, who grew up as a Muslim in Somalia. “Maoism brings the
strategy, the long march through institutions, the cultural struggle session,
the rewriting of history, the reframing of reality through social media.”
Maoist frameworks like “decolonization” and “privilege”
provide the ideological cover — abstract enough to sound academic, blunt
enough to justify destruction. Islamic fervor supplies the moral justification
for violence.
And this effort to delegitimize the very existence of Israel
has been astoundingly successful. Democrats in America, for instance,
sympathized more with Israelis than Palestinians by 13 percent in 2017. Now,
it’s Palestinians by 43 percent. Young Democrats, who have recently passed
through the universities, now favor Palestinians by 57 percent. In 2017, they
favored Israelis by 14 percent.
What have the Palestinians done to justify that newfound
favor besides slaughter and violate innocent Jews on October 7, and reject in
absolute terms every proposal to divide the land in any fashion put forth over
the last 100 years?
As Julian Epstein, who served as Bill Clinton’s leading
counsel in his impeachment trial, put it recently, “[Democrats] have become
captive of a pagan religion of sorts, a messianic delusion whose meta-narrative
is that Democrats are liberators of oppressive Western traditions.” Those
“oppressive” traditions pretty much track what one would learn in university
“decolonization” studies.
The long march through the institutions of Western culture
described by Hirsi Ali did not start yesterday. Renowned political scientist
Seymour Martin Lipset described in the New York Times in 1971 how
anti-Semitism had become the “socialism of fools.” Whereas anti-Jewish politics
had traditionally been associated with the right, “the current wave is linked
to governments, parties, and groups which are conventionally described as leftist....
As the war in Vietnam peters out, the various incarnations of the extreme left
new and old have reoriented their international emotional priorities to
identify the heroes as the Arab terrorists and freedom fighters, and the
villains as Israel and its American ally....”
Around the same time, Aaron Wildavsky, another famed
political scientist, noted presciently how Jews had lost their identity as a
minority: “Jews were all of a sudden taken for imperialists. Actually, it was
more like guilt by association. Jews, you see, were identified with Israel,
which was defeating Arabs, who resorted to guerrilla warfare, however
inefficacious, which somehow gave them membership in the Third World, so that
Israel, ipso facto, became an imperialist oppressor, and domestic Jews ceased
being a minority.”
Steven Hayward, who originally called my attention to Lipset
and Wildavsky, describes how views once limited to a radical fringe were then
“mainstreamed on college campuses, in Middle East studies departments, often
funded from Arab sources like Qatar,” in which “post-colonialism” is often the
dominant ideology.
No one had as malign impact on the treatment of Israel and
Jews in academia as the late Columbia professor of literature Edward Said.
His Orientalism is the Ur-text of every Middle East studies
department. He argued that European orientalists viewed Middle Easterners as
inferior. From there it was but a short leap to labeling Zionism — which,
according to Said, was of European origin — as racism. That would make the
Zionists the bad guys, no matter what, and, by the same token, the Palestinians
the good guys.
Said taught the following syllogism. Europeans are racist in their view of Middle Easterners. Zionists are Europeans. Therefore Israel is a racist enterprise. Even the factual premises are wrong — most Jews living in Israel today are of Middle Eastern descent and as dark-skinned as local Arabs. And the idea that right and wrong are determined simply by who is labeled racist or an oppressor is a uniquely modern one. As the aforementioned Julian Epstein puts it, the anti-Western dystopic view ignores, among other things, that the West did more than any other civilization to lift humanity out of poverty and to usher in the concept of individual rights and liberties.
