The incomparable Dexter Van Zile wrote an
excellent piece about how the current spreading campus culture of
censorship and violent intimidation to enforce ideological conformity had its
origin in the ways Israel and her friends have been treated on college campuses
for more than a decade.
To understand the full impact of what Dexter is talking
about, it’s worth considering his insight in the context of another phenomenon
first articulated by the late Senator and former UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick
Moynihan which he called “defining deviance
down.”
When Moynihan first introduced the concept, he was referring
to mainstreaming behaviors once considered taboo.
Clearly not all changes to societal norms should be
considered bad. Replacing contempt for
women, minorities and gays with open mindedness and respect represents obvious
improvement, for example. But toleration
of other behaviors (like drug use and casual sex), while liberating for the
individual, have personal and societal consequences (addiction, AIDS, etc.)
which are hard to even discuss (lest one come off as “reactionary”) before
their full negative consequences emerge.
With regard to campus shout downs and censorship, the
targeting of Jews with those tactics clearly preceded their current much-wider
expansion. But correlation does not mean
causation. So might we be able to
identify a mechanism (and historical precedent) whereby starting with one group
(the Jews) served as a similar warm-up act for a much wider (and sinister) agenda?
Because the BDSers are such a reactionary bunch, it’s easy
to dismiss any progress they make as the result of ruthlessness and
relentlessness vs. innovation. But this
would be a mistake. For the community of
which the BDSers have always been a part has proven itself to be remarkably inventive
when it comes to thinking of ways to either seize power or get others to
relinquish power to them.
Seizing control of human-rights machinery created to make
the world a more peaceful place and turning it into a weapon of war, while
ghastly and immoral, is also a remarkable breakthrough in propaganda
“technology,” as is the rhetoric needed to convince progressives that
supporting a repressive society (the Palestinians and their Arab allies) aligns
with their principles better than supporting an open one (Israel).
The Prophetess Ruth Wisse, in her analysis of anti-Semitism
as a political ideology vs. one of many forms of bigotry, identifies the reason
why totalitarians first targeting the Jews on their way to terrorizing and
ultimately controlling or destroying everyone else.
As described in this
piece (which is part of this longer series),
the gap between Jews’ perceived power (or omnipotence, in the eyes of the
anti-Semite) and their highly limited actual power (and willingness to use what
power they have) becomes an open invitation to the would-be tyrant. For if you want to convince the public that
you are arming yourself against an all-powerful threat with near 100% certainty
that this “threat” will not hit you back, your best choice of target are the
Jews.
We’ve seen this kind of behavior with the last century’s
totalitarian movements. Think of Hitler
arming his supporters and organizing secret police forces to ferret out the
Jews controlling the planet, creating machinery that was later used to set that
planet ablaze. Or Saddam Hussein who
hung Jews in the public square to demonstrate his resoluteness with regard to
this urgent Zionist “threat,” after which he got around to placing that noose
around the neck of the entire nation of Iraq.
So what we have seen over the last several years is not just
an attempt to shut down voices of just one opinion (support for Israel) but an
experiment to see how far the system can be pushed in allowing a small, loud
minority to control discourse and, eventually, the campus as a whole. And because not enough people did anything
when the problem was just “the Jews” the brutes have now come for all of us.
With that in mind, the one place where I diverge from
Dexter’s commentary is his use of the phrase “canary in the coal mine,” an
image that comes up frequently in discussions on this topic. For the coal-mine canary (which alarms miners
of deadly gas by graciously dying before humans can be harmed) is just an early
warning system. In contrast, the role we
Jews play in this ugly game of tyrants is that of experimental lab animal.