Andrew Pessin: When the anti-racists are racists
What exactly do you think could possibly justify such barbaric cruelty? To babies, children, disabled people, grandmothers?WSJ Editorial The Global War on the Jews
When the Nazis showed up at Polish towns and forced all the Jews to strip and walk miles into the woods and dig their own graves and then shot them, mothers holding their babies, would you stop and say, “Wait a minute, I need to hear the Nazis’ perspective on this before I reach a judgment?”
Who watches little girls raped and then dismembered alive (yes) and says, “Well, I need to learn more before making a judgment”?
Who watches a mother and a father and their three small children tied up together and then burned alive (yes) and says, “Well I need to hear the other side before I make up my mind”?
When nine black people were gunned down in South Carolina in 2015, did anyone say, “Wait until we get the gunman’s point of view”? Or in regard to the 2019 mosque shootings in New Zealand in which 51 Muslims died?
Is there any other identity group whose massive slaughter is met with the search for justification, with the “need to learn more”?
Closer to home, when talking about your activism for important causes, you also said, “The George Floyd affair was about the daily police brutality black Americans have faced for centuries and the continued oppression of folks of African descent across the diaspora.”
Imagine someone responded to you and said, “Well, you know, that situation is actually extremely complicated. After all, black people do commit a lot of crime and have a lot of police interactions. And anyway, let’s hear from David Duke and the Proud Boys before we reach any conclusions.”
Do I need to go on to imagine how you would feel, and how pretty much everyone we know in academia would erupt against such a response, which would instantly be branded racist?
1,400 mostly unarmed Jews—babies, children, teenagers, pregnant women, grandmothers—were just slaughtered in the most sadistic manner possible by the members of an openly genocidal group. Their founding charter literally endorses the murder of all Jews on earth. They literally posted footage of the atrocities so everyone could celebrate it. And you need to “learn more”?
But you didn’t stop there.
Given the “complexity” of the conflict, you then endorsed the (otherwise surely laudatory) view that we needn’t play the “Oppression Olympics,” that “we must oppose all oppression, have empathy for every suffering person, etc.”
Of course. But when certain people responded to the Black Lives Matter campaign so dear to you by pointing out that, in fact, “all lives matter” and “unarmed white people are also shot by police,” well we know how that was received, not least as evidence of their racism. Yet when 1,400 Jews were slaughtered in the most cold-blooded manner possible, you responded, “Well, all lives matter.”
You literally just “all lives mattered” every Jewish person on earth.
Jews are under attack not only in Israel and not only by Hamas. The weeks since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel have witnessed physical assaults on Jews the world over, including in the U.S. and Europe.Are We Tipping into a New World War?
The Islamist group and its Western enablers are pursuing or justifying a genocidal war against Jews, not merely a territorial dispute with Israel.
This weekend hundreds of rioters in Dagestan, Russia, stormed an airport in search of Jewish travelers. Germany has witnessed a spate of anti-Semitic incidents. Two Jewish schools in London closed for a period over safety concerns. A crowd in Sydney, Australia, chanted "gas the Jews" after the Hamas attack.
Americans like to believe such things couldn't happen in the U.S. They have. The Anti-Defamation League reported a 388% increase in anti-Semitic incidents from Oct. 7-23 compared with the same period a year ago. The ADL tally counts 109 anti-Israel rallies that featured support for Hamas or violence against Jews in Israel.
The West spent the decades after the civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust vowing never again to allow itself to slide into such barbarism. What we see now in the attacks on Jews is how that slide began.
Before there was a Chancellor Hitler in 1933, there were roving bands of Brownshirts inflicting political and anti-Semitic violence on the streets of Germany. They too often went unchecked by police, prosecutors and politicians who didn't understand the menace.
A Western society that can't or won't muster the will to defend its Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens won't be able to defend itself.
A “world spinning out of control.” Those were the words Wall Street Journal Global View columnist Walter Russell Mead used to describe the latest geopolitical developments when Bari interviewed him on the latest episode of Honestly this week. And it’s not hard to see why.
In the past 48 hours alone:
Houthi fighters fired at Israel from Yemen.
An Israeli air strike hit Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, killing a senior Hamas commander as well as Palestinian civilians.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray warned senators that the Israel-Hamas war has increased the chances of a terrorist attack against Americans in the United States to “a whole other level.”
Israel vanished overnight from maps on the Chinese search engine Baidu.
Egyptian prime minister Mostafa Madbouly said Egypt was “prepared to sacrifice millions of lives to ensure that no one encroaches upon our territory,” dismissing requests for the settlement of Palestinian refugees in Egypt.
On the podcast, Walter explains why the “pre-war era” we’ve been in for a while is “moving quickly and at an unpredictable pace” toward “something big and something bad.”
Let Walter give you the lay of the land. I can’t promise that it will be reassuring. But it will be clarifying.