Tuesday, November 26, 2019
Elder of ZiyonHilton engages in one of those progressive tropes that sound reasonable but in fact is not true at all:
If we truly want to root out ant-Semitism [sic], we must fight Islamophobia, xenophobia and all other forms of racism along with it. ...The best way to fight anti-Semitism is through building solidarity with those who are also on the frontline of fighting racism...It sounds like it should be true, right? Bigotry is bad no matter whether the victims are Jewish, black, Muslim or women, and it stands to reason that they should be fought the same way.
It isn't true.
People who identify as people of color generally don't look at Jews as their fellow victims. They look at Jews as their oppressors. The only coin of the realm of identity politics and grievance studies is perceived victimhood, and all victims have oppressors. In the US at least, Jews do not have the obstacles that people of color or women have.
Unlike every other victim of bigotry, Jews are hated in modern times because they are perceived to have too much power.
Fighting racism and sexism is a struggle for gaining a fair share of power; fighting antisemitism is not. It is a fight against pure, illogical, unbridled hate often disguised as a fight for fairness and equality. The two types of bigotries are not only different - they can be perceived as contradictory.
Some 30% of blacks and Hispanics in America are antisemitic. How, exactly, can racism and antisemitism be tackled together when the victims of each consider the other to be the oppressors?
"Progressive" spaces like the women's movement have their own problems with antisemitism, disguised as solidarity with Palestinians under the rubric of intersectionality, which consciously excludes Jews from its list of victims of bigotry. When a "progressive" group like Women's March excludes liberal Zionists but includes bigots from the Nation of Islam, it loses any claim to care about antisemitism.
Whether we like it or not, the tools and methods to fight antisemitism are completely different than those to fight other bigotries. And when the fight against other types of bigotry helps enable antisemitism, then the methodology being used is immoral.
When the methodology is victimhood, the implication is that every victim of bigotry has an oppressor who is immoral for doing that to them. When you look at the world through that lens, Jews - especially Zionist Jews - are always perceived to be the oppressors. As such, within the context of a grievance culture, Jews are deserving of punishment, and cannot ever be considered victims in their own right. The grievance and victimhood mentality subtly encourages antisemitism.
What is needed is an overhaul of how bigotry is fought. The yardstick cannot be victimhood, but equality. Everyone should treat everyone else with respect and judge them to the same standards as everyone else. There can no divide between victims and oppressors because the victims in one context can be oppressors in another. People need to concentrate on what they can do, not how they were wronged.
This would require a complete overhaul on how bigotry is fought. Then, and only then, can antisemitism be fought at the same time as racism, xenophobia, ageism, sexism and other bigotries.
Since the current cult of victimhood is not going away any time soon, antisemitism must be fought on a different playing field than other bigotries. No one is immune from the disease of Jew-hatred, including Jews themselves.
Claiming that antisemitism is just another bigotry ends up too often not only making Jews into the victims, but justifying it.
