Horror and shock aren’t the same. Something can be horrifying without being shocking, because shock is horror plus surprise. By that definition, the savagery of the October Seventh attack on Jewish civilians was horrifying, but it wasn’t shocking. Ethnic violence is to be expected when you have several generations deliberately raised on a diet of hatred.
More shocking has been the reaction of many on the left. When the news first started coming out, it didn’t occur to me that people who considered themselves to be “persons of goodwill” would instinctively side with the attackers, who had made it absolutely clear from the start that they were attacking these people specifically because they were Jews. It was not old-fashioned terrorism, but a literal pogrom. An attack by people who openly favor the extinction of Judaism worldwide.
Any of the signs in the picture could be reasonable in certain circumstances. But this was an outpouring of sentiment the day after one of the biggest pogroms in history, when there was little in the news other than horror stories of indescribably savage murder and sexual violence.
If a person is confronted with the mass murder of children and women, grotesque sexual violence out of a slasher film, and burning whole families alive, and the first things that comes to their mind are trite identity politics platitudes to excuse it, then you might be tempted to call it merely ordinary callousness carried to an extreme.
But I don’t think it is ordinary callousness. It is a matter of national psychology.
It is shocking coming from Americans because in this country, mass murder of people because they are Jews is universally known as the signature crime of the Nazis, and in America, the Nazis, of all political groups, are regarded as being uniquely and irredeemably evil.
If you asked 100 random Americans who was the most evil person who ever lived, probably 90 or more would automatically say Hitler. The photos of mountains of bodies, of smoking chimneys, of crates of wedding rings and mountains of shoes burned that notion into the brains of a generation. Images of the camps in countless movies like Sophie’s Choice, X-Men, and Schindler’s List carried it to another generation. Until recently, to cheer for a pogrom would have placed you truly beyond the pale, in the company of Aryan Nation types, Holocaust deniers, and Nazis.
Of course, if you know anything about history, you know that the Nazis never really owned that territory. Antisemitism was always a glorious, multicultural affair. The history of antisemitism on the left would be better known if Hitler hadn’t so completely made killing the Jews his brand (https://www.inss.org.il/publication/antisemitism-left/) Yet, it’s always been there; WW2 just gave us a holiday.
To be clear, we’re not talking about long ago, Stalin-era policies in the Soviet Union. We’re talking about continuously, right up to the present, here in the USA and Europe. Ironically, these days, open antisemitism on the right is largely confined to the obviously lunatic fringe, and tends to be treated by other conservatives like the opinions of your drunk buddy who won’t STFU at the bar.
On the left, however, it’s newly respectable and out in the open.
Respectable ideologues will tell you that being anti-Israel doesn’t mean you are antisemitic. And logically, that’s true. It is indeed possible for a person who is not antisemitic to be anti-Zionist. But in practice, Israel is a lighting rod for the old fashioned Jew hatred that became embarrassing to express because of the excesses of the Nazis. It remains intact under the covers. It is still not socially acceptable to rail against “the Jews”, but if you swap in “Israel” the primitive fury is exposed.
That’s a bold claim. Is there anything to back it up?
The imbalance of response gives it away. Any mention of Israel among a large subset of the left brings immediate, passionate outrage over the mistreatment of the Arab Palestinians. There is a legitimate case to be made for Palestinian grievances, but without going into that tar pit, let’s first recall just a few of the horrors inflicted on or by various Muslim populations in recent history. The epic slaughter of Muslim civilians in Syria by the Syrian government and Russia. The slaughter of the Kurds in Iraq, or of the Houthi rebels in Yemen by the Saudi-backed government, or the mass killings in Chechnya by Russia. Or the nightmare of Darfur, where the government right now is committing genocide against the non-Moslems.
I’ve rarely heard one of my liberal peeps express heartfelt concern over these things, or even mention any of them. Universities don’t empty into the streets. It’s true that nobody in the West gives these things the attention they should get, me included, but somehow, the outrages of Israel–and even what is alleged by their worst enemies is mild in comparison–literally make people go purple in the face.
The purple-faced seem to be people who (in my experience) rarely have even a rudimentary knowledge of the history behind the conflict or how it got that way. It is impossible to prove that the fury rides on a tide of antisemitism; all you can do is look and compare the relative response. The murderous ethic cleansing of Muslims in the Balkans in the 90’s by Orthodox Christians wasn’t that long ago. It was just ordinary news–horrible, but students didn’t take to the streets over it. How can a reasonable person explain the vast imbalance of fury against the Israelis when the only thing that sets them apart is being Jews?
It is all the more striking because the Islamist/Jihadist movement is utterly opposed to everything that has characterized liberalism since the dawn of the Enlightenment. It is driven by an even more virulent, racially-oriented nationalism than that of the movements that nearly extinguished liberalism in Europe two generations ago; only its religiosity sets it apart. Islamic/Jihadist nationalism champions theocratic government with absolute power to enforce religious conformity, which it does with ferocity unmatched in Europe since the the Medieval period. Islamism has no concept of freedom of speech. There is no habeas corpus. Homosexuality, let alone being transgender, will get you tossed off a bridge or a roof. It demands a radical restriction of women from public life and endorses honor killings for behavior that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in the West. Genocide is routine (see below.)
How can the lionizing of such a movement be explained by anything other than the ancient principle that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend?” And who is the enemy in that formulation?
Yet any general criticism of revolutionary Islamism is shouted down on with cries of Islamophobia, racism, etc. If the words of the Islamists themselves are not enough, look at the recent history of any of the countries affected by Islamist nationalism. A full list would be tedious, but these five are pretty representative. Jews have become all but extinct in almost all of the countries that have seen Islamist or Arab nationalist movements.
In Lebanon, the Jewish population was approximately 20,000 at the time of Israel’s founding. Now it’s about 29.
In Syria, the Jewish population was approximately 40,000 at the time of Israel’s founding. Now it is believed to be four.
In Iran, the Jewish population was approximately 100,000 at the time of Israel’s founding. Now it is about 9,000.
In Egypt, the Jewish population was approximately 75,000 at the time of Israel’s founding. Today, it is a single-digit number.
In Afghanistan there were 5,000 Jews. The number today is uncertain, but it is believed to be between zero and two.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-treatment-of-jews-in-arab-islamic-countries
As small as population of Jews in these countries are, the overall populations have more than doubled in this time period, making the absolute numbers a substantial understatement of the relative population loss.
I’m so ashamed of my supposedly liberal brothers and sisters. Regardless of one’s sympathies with the plight of Palestinians, the actions of Hamas are inexcusable. A “progressivism” that allies with a movement, or is silent about it loses all legitimacy. Where is the line for people who won’t speak out in the face of a pogrom, a pogrom the perpetrators of which swear they will repeat as often as necessary?
Time and Material 