Left 'White'-Washes Anti-Semitism

Some time back, I tweeted a Value for Value post by Peter Schwartz which explains how our culture's dominant ethical code, altruism, justifies supporting Hamas over Israel, despite the demands of justice to do exactly the opposite.

Schwartz says in part:

Certainly, a growing anti-Semitism is at work. But the more fundamental explanation is the one provided by a schoolteacher in Atlanta, as reported in the Nov. 5 NY Times ("Across the Echo Chamber, a Quiet Conversation About War and Race"). She posted the following message on Facebook, defending her unequivocal backing of the Palestinians against Israel:

"The actual history of this situation is NOT COMPLICATED. I will ALWAYS stand beside those with less power. Less wealth, less access and resources and choices. Regardless of the extreme acts of a few militants who were done watching their people slowly die."

She is stating the essence of a moral code that is accepted by virtually everyone today: the code of altruism. According to that code, need is the ultimate standard of morality. If others are in need, nothing else matters -- you have a duty to satisfy their needs.

Now that Iran, a nation nearly ten times more populous than Israel, has more directly waged war against Israel, it would be interesting to quiz the above schoolteacher about which side she is on.

I would not expect her allegiance to have shifted, despite the fact that Israel had enough help repelling that attack that it is a fair question whether it could have done so alone.

Absent the ability to ask directly, we can get the answer by consulting a recent Brendan O'Neill article article at Sp!ked. It is titled "How Woke Leftists Became Cheerleaders for Iran," and I think the below is crucial to understanding why we're seeing mass "demonstrations" by people claiming to be in favor of this warmongering regime's "right" to "self-defense:"

The left would say, Don't believe your lying eyes or mind about this evil man. (Image via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

The Western left's blaming of Israel for everything, and its implicit absolution of Iran, is grimly revealing. These people seem to view Israel as the only true actor in the Middle East, and everyone else as mere respondents to Israel's actions. Israel is the author of the Middle East's fate, while the rest of them -- Hamas, the Houthis, even Iran -- are mere bit-part players with the misfortune to be caught up in Israel's vast and terrifying web. This is identitarianism, not anti-imperialism. A new generation of radicals educated into the regressive ideology that says 'white' people are powerful and 'brown' people are oppressed can only understand the Middle East in these terms, too.

The end result is that they demonise Israel and infantilise Iran. The Jewish State comes to be seen as uniquely malevolent while Iran is treated as a kind of wide-eyed child who cannot help but lash out at its 'Zionist' oppressor. Israel is damned as a criminal state, while Iran's crimes against humanity are downplayed, even memory-holed. This is where wokeness leads, then: to sympathy for one of the most backward and repressive states on Earth on the deranged basis that its criminal strikes against Israel represent a blow against the arrogant West itself... [bold added]

The whole idea that all of Israel is Caucasian or that the Islamic world is entirely brown-skinned is nearly as ridiculous as assuming that race determines character or as using white as code for oppressor and brown for needy or oppressed.

If anyone needs disabusing of the notion that the left stands for racial equality or individual rights, what we're seeing unfold -- the use of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories to excuse racially slurring Israelis as white (which is a racial slur coming from the left these days) en route to enabling their extermination -- should take care of that. This should also concern anyone with a grain of rationality or a sense of justice.

By casting the alleged neediness of Palestine and Iran -- and Israel's well-earned strength -- as racial attributes, the left has excused making the mindless siding with terrorists in the name of altruism permanent.

They're coming for the Jews now, and they will come for the rest of West as soon as is convenient. We're all "colonialists" now, according to the left, anyway.

-- CAV