Silence in the face of global antisemitism isn't an option anymore
What people of conscience must begin doing when such events happen is for the entire community to identify as Zionists or Jews, as the case may be.The Photo-Negative Ideology
Communities need to realize that these attacks, while seemingly catalyzed by Israel’s war against Hamas, have relatively little to do with Jews or Israel. Rather, the people who are probably well remunerated to organize these scenarios are actually attacking Western values using antisemitism as a convenient excuse to do so. After all, as was noted at so many of the recent university encampments, the shouting often turned from antisemitic vitriol to chants of “Down with America” and its values, which seems to be the real driving force behind this latest manifestation of the world’s oldest hatred.
In 1994, the citizens of Billings, Montana, then a town of 80,000 with less than 50 Jewish families, rose up in unison against spreading antisemitism. After a spate of incidents leading up to Hanukkah, when several Jewish homes bearing visible holiday markings had their windows broken by Jew haters, the local paper printed a picture of a Hanukkiah so that the entire community could place the picture in a window of their respective homes, in effect saying to the antisemites, as did Master Sgt. Edmonds in 1945: “We are all Jews.”
Jewish communities under threat need to engage urgently with non-Jewish community leaders and mount a well-organized campaign to educate the greater community about the danger to everyone if antisemitism goes unchecked.
Community organizations, religious communities, the press, and the entertainment industry need to get on board to project the message that hatred of a single group will not be tolerated. History is replete with sorry examples of communities where the non-Jewish population looked the other way and eventually found themselves, too, locked in the vise of hatred and prejudice. That cannot be allowed to happen again.
It is still not too late to respond. Those people in the subway car who remained silent last week should be ashamed for letting themselves be cowed by a gang of masked people who represent the worst of America. Hopefully, they will not one day also have to pay a price for their silence. But continuing the silence makes them complicit in the crime.
Elie Wiesel, humanity’s conscience for the last 80 years, said: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
It would seem that the world has not yet learned this lesson.
The woke take America’s foundational “city on the hill” mythos and reverse it—creating a photo-negative version of our national fable grounded in the same exceptionalist and Zionist mythos. In the new woke myth, America is no longer the global savior or promised land. Instead, America is responsible for everything bad in the world. There would be no human tragedies if not for Judeo-Christian “settler colonialists.” If it wanted to, the U.S. government could fix all contemporary injustice and even historical wrongs—the legacy of slavery, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, you name it. All it must do is wave its imperial magic wand and bring global misfortune to an end—starting in Gaza.Qanta Ahmed: The devastating reframing of Israel’s just war against Hamas
Wokeness, or whatever you choose to call it, is a photo-negative ideology that merely inverts the country’s old Ku Klux Klan-style ethnopolitical mythos and updates it for today’s secularized—pseudo-multicultural and self-hating—era of Anglo American liberal culture. In wokeness’s new mythic ideal, no longer should the dreaded “white working class” MAGA Trump supporters be on top; rather, they should be on the bottom (double entendre intended), while their opposite-world enemies—Black, trans, handi-capable, antifa sex workers—should instead receive institutional preferences via DEI and whatever more aggressive social engineering project is planned next.
Wokeness represents modern American culture’s inability to come to grips with the failure of the country’s greatest LASP myth—the “American dream.” A mythos that denies the importance of socioeconomic class and tells us everyone can live in their own liberal-individual “success” bubble; occupy a home bubble with an individual fenced in yard; arrive at work in a protected individual metal automobile bubble. Watch personalized entertainment and, at all times, have a fully liberal-individual experience—judged entirely on its own personal merits. In the end, wokeness represents the post-liberalism of the fools. For, it recognizes the indelibly unfair outcomes of liberal capitalism but—as with the “socialism of the fools” that antisemitism so often represents—wokeness scapegoats its way toward a new system of racial stigmatizing as the solution. Instead of all non-Anglos and non-Protestants being the source of inferiority, a photo-negative KKK mythos has erected from the frustrated minds of academics disgusted with their own society. A wannabe multicultural nativism where “deplorable” “straight white men” are the source of all cultural backward inferiority and, therefore, everything wrong with the world. In the end, wokeness is not a true rebellion but merely a bizarro redrawing of old American ethnopolitical prejudices.
Yet bizarro Superman is still Superman. All the distinguishing aspects of the character remain recognizable even when artists draw his color scheme differently and reverse the giant “S” on his chest. The same principle applies with wokeness’s photo-negative, white supremacy mythology, which consists of the LASP-exclusivist bigotries of the Klan now inverted to target “white people.” Key to photo-negative thinking is its attempted reversal of the postwar Judeo-Christian alliance, which features radical Islamists—not as backward terrorists—but as the progress parade’s lead baton twirlers. At the core of the Marxist paradigm lies something scholars call the “labor metaphysic.” The phrase connotes the idea that only the working class can bring about true revolutionary change—not the peasants, nor the farmers, nor the bourgeoisie. In wokeness’s new revolutionary metaphysic, Marx’s beloved proletariat has been replaced with a progress-flag collage of morally superior, third world “people of color” and they/them nonbinary heroines. The discordance of queer activism with Palestinian activism is ignored by the woke because to acknowledge that Islamist political culture is violently anti-queer destroys their QTPOC revolutionary metaphysic, which the woke must believe is actionable for the rest of their photo-negative fantasy to hold. As with Marx’s folklore of all the workers of the world uniting to overthrow capitalism, global “decolonialization” can arrive only when all non-European “persons of color”—and “LGBTQ2SIAA” non-heterosexuals—unite and lead humanity to the intersectional Shangri-la.
Here the Palestinians play a central role. Palestinians—as reigning intersectional grand champions—represent the “true Jews” of the bizarro America that the woke wish to manifest into existence. And if, as prophesied in Deuteronomy, Jews must return to their homeland for Christ’s second coming then, through photo-negative logic, the Palestinians—as bizarro Jews—must have a state, which will be the true Israel. Then, and only then, can the day of true global liberation finally arrive.
While wokeness daguerreotypes old-fashioned white supremacism, there’s no “reverse racism” here. To label wokeness’s photo-negative thinking this way is to concede the argument—seeing ethnic prejudice as something that’s only existed historically in the pro-European and pro-Christian sense, as if each continent and country has not witnessed a kaleidoscope of racial and religious bigotries over time. Along with the new mythology of “only Europeans have ever been racist historically,” the woke must also insist on a new matching, present-focused mythology. It looks something like this: Today’s people of non-European “color” can never be racist, for racism entails “institutional power.”
Correct ICC legal procedure, according to Zimeray, takes into account the concept of complementarity. When a nation has a functioning judiciary, the ICC no longer has jurisdiction, so the nation itself is responsible for the investigation, prosecution and sentencing of any war crimes, crimes against humanity, or other violations of international human rights.
Where such organizations are lacking, the ICC lawfully steps in.
ICC Chief Prosecutor Khan and his team were due to arrive in Israel to assess Israel’s judicial capacity concerning exactly such complementarity when the ICC team abruptly changed course and delivered their decision regarding Israel.
True, no one is above the law, including Israeli leaders, but this latest move bears a political dimension. By deliberately choosing to establish a symmetry between Israel and Hamas in the announcement, the prosecutor creates an equivalence between the two camps. Now we know how this also plays into Hamas’s overall strategy. The more Israel is delegitimized the more Hamas is legitimized.
Add to this that Jews historically have been subjected to false accusations which served as excuses to attack them with diabolical consequences, the projected symmetry becomes incendiary.
Many vilify Israel, and many more remain silent on the Hamas atrocities. This silence is perhaps the most powerful weapon in Hamas’s arsenal. In the 1992 treatise, ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,’ psychoanalyst Dori Laub observes the fundamental betrayals of trust in humanity. One example was when the world witnessed the Holocaust for years in plain view, yet allowed it to continue unwitnessed.
It is this aspect of denial that is devastating to so many in Israel. It has fundamentally ruptured the sense that the lives of Jews and all Israelis, including Druze, Muslims and Christians, matter.
While a conclusion of this war in Gaza is necessary and a new war may be unfolding in the North, just as vital, perhaps more so, is a more just framing of the injustices to the Jewish people.