This Is Not a Drill - The Anti-Semitism Epidemic

by Abigail Shrier December 2023 Commentary magazine

A great article by Abigail Shrier in the magazine “Commentary” - efd

According to a popular meme, “Queers for Palestine” is like “Chickens for KFC”: To sign on to that slogan, you’d have to be suicidal or an idiot. That, at any rate, seems to be the prevailing view in the circles I travel in when it comes to the transgender activists who support Hamas. The climate activists, the feminist extremists, Gays 4 Gaza, and sad-sack members of Jewish Voice for Peace—each of them strikes us as dupes of a regime that would happily jail, repress, or massacre them. Can they really be this self-defeating? Can they really be this gullible and dumb? Well, at the poker table of today’s leftism, if you don’t know who the fool is, more than likely, the fool is you.

Consider Black Lives Matter Chicago, which announced its support for Hamas in the days after the massacre with a gleeful post on X (né Twitter), featuring a Palestinian flag and a silhouette of a paraglider, presumably on his way to rape women and butcher children, as Palestinian paragliders had just done. “I stand with Palestine,” the poster read. Does BLM, an organization whose aim is to “bring justice, healing and freedom to Black people across the globe,” not know how Ethiopian Jews would be treated if they dared visit Gaza?

Similarly, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, called Israel a “white supremacist Zionist project.” Anyone who has ever visited Israel knows this to be absurd on its face. The 100,000-plus Ethiopian Jews are far from “white,” and a majority of Israel’s population—the Mizrahim, or Easterners, who have been living in and around the Middle East since antiquity—could not be and should not be considered any “whiter” than their Palestinian neighbors.

The foolishness extends beyond race. Climate activists like Greta Thunberg took to Twitter to pledge support for Gaza in the days after the massacre—almost as if they didn’t know that the unprovoked war launched by Hamas on October 7 and the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza into Israel will result in both increased carbon emissions and devastation to the local environment.

Meanwhile, gender-studies departments in the United States have sought to “amplify” the call from Palestinian feminists “to join the struggle for Palestinian liberation.” So, in a struggle between an Islamist police state—quite literally, a patriarchy—whose terrorists were encouraged to rape Israeli women on October 7 and a society where women enjoy full rights and serve in the military, Western academic feminists choose the former. And at Columbia University, the queer nonbinary women student group, LionLez, held a movie night: “It’s FREE PALESTINE over here. Zionists aren’t invited.”

Why are the BLM supporters, climate extremists, academic feminists, and trans activists so quick to side with Hamas? Why are those who champion women’s reproductive rights so quick to align themselves with a Hamas-controlled Gaza where women lack the right to drive, let alone get an abortion? Why would they rally to a society where men are encouraged to hit the stray uppity wife? For that matter, why would so many LGBTQ+ groups side against a society that hosts some of the largest Pride festivals worldwide so that they can throw in with another that puts homosexuals to death?

Conservative thinkers James Lindsay and Christopher Rufo have painstakingly traced the Marxist roots of all of these groups, showing that they all branch from the same rotten revolutionary trunk. These groups aim to overthrow the West, and so they support one another. Nests of critical theory fill their interchangeably empty heads.

But I want to suggest a motivation less highbrow and more straightforward. They are all fed by the same polluted water source: hatred, envy, and resentment.

What leads them to show up at the pro-Hamas rallies in remarkable numbers is not ideological commitment. Sure, some may want Marxist revolution, if they even understand what that is. But whatever beliefs they may hold about gender, race, or climate quickly unravel under the clumsy weight of the obvious contradiction of supporting a regime so hostile to these causes.

Which means they are no more motivated by ideology, in other words, than Adolf Hitler was when he allied himself with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arab mufti of Jerusalem, or the Japanese—another race allegedly inferior to whites in his despicable hierarchy—and made war upon the white French and British. Hitler believed Nazi racial theory, of course. But sometimes hatred simply burns brighter and hotter than all other ideological commitments combined.

So don’t bother informing Gays 4 Gaza that same-sex attraction is proscribed by criminal law in Gaza, backed by a penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment, in that very territory they’re so wild about. No need to educate them about the finding by Pew Research that the Palestinian population’s opposition to homosexuality is among the highest in the world; that in 2016, Hamas responded to a senior commander’s homosexual activity with a firing squad; or that gay adoption and gay marriage are strictly forbidden in Palestinian territories.

They already know—and they really, truly don’t care.

You could plead with Greta Thunberg and her dead-eyed friends that Israel leads the world in desalination efforts and technology. You could suggest to any of the climate activists marching for Hamas that if they cared about conservation, they might want to side with the state leading the world in renewable-energy technologies. You could remind them that Israel turned over ecologically advanced greenhouses to Gaza worth $14 million as part of the 2005 disengagement—only to see those greenhouses promptly destroyed by the Gazans. If these activists can’t be moved to care for the women who were raped, the babies and elderly butchered, then perhaps Israel’s remarkable efforts to produce electricity from the ocean and seawalls ought to earn it a shout-out from the climate-change warriors? Nah.

They aren’t stupid, and they aren’t suicidal.

Here’s what they are.

They are LGBTQ+ activists who aren’t primarily motivated by gay rights. They are climate radicals who aren’t principally motivated by concern about the climate. And if there were ever a BLM member sincerely concerned about racial justice, no doubt he has long since left the organization behind. Its remaining rank-and-file are no more committed to their putative causes than Hamas is to improving the lives of ordinary Palestinians.

The postmodern left celebrated Lia Thomas, the mediocre male athlete who swapped genders his senior year in college and won NCAA female swimmer of the year, not because it wants to improve the lives of gay and transgender Americans. Had that been the goal, the left would have accepted a fair and sustainable solution, such as an open category for all gender identities alongside a female-only team, and safe transgender changing rooms.

No, they want to take over women’s teams and women’s restrooms, for the same reason a vandal loves a clean white wall. They enjoy making women afraid. They enjoy deleting girls’ names from the record books. They thrill at seeing average Americans squirm.

When a DEI staffer named Nahliah Webber informs parents and children, “There is a killer cop sitting in every school where white children learn,” that isn’t a statement of values. You don’t glue yourself to the Mona Lisa, as eco-warriors have done, or vandalize the Wellington Arch in central London because you love the earth that much. You do it because you despise the civilization that cradles such treasures, because your desire to inflict pain on those you resent deeply overshadows any aim you may espouse on behalf of Mother Earth.

Same with the tearing down of a poster with an image of a child held in captivity, then laughing at a woman who tries to stop you, crying out for mercy. In videos, those who vandalize the posters rarely even react. Their indifference is chilling. At Boston University, confronted by a man holding a camera phone who tells her she should be ashamed of herself for taking down the posters and allying with movement that spreads anti-Semitism, a woman named Anna Epstein stares him coolly in the face. “Dude, you literally know I’m Jewish,” she says.

The great 20th-century economic journalist Henry Hazlitt once noted that Marxism itself ultimately reduces to highly concentrated envy: “The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are.” Universities may add intellectual arabesque to the expression of this hate. But in the end, when these groups bang their bongo drums, their chants reduce to a single creed: Hate those who have something you don’t.

That is what unites this motley crew of mutually exclusive values. When they cry for genocide of the Jews across America’s campuses—“Intifada Revolution,” or “Glory to Our Martyrs,” as one George Washington University student group did—they simply want to inflict fear and instill chaos in a peaceable civilization they despise.

They are not the dupes of a hideous regime in opposition to their values—racial justice, reproductive rights, women’s liberation, climate awareness. We are the dupes for believing they sincerely held those values in the first place.

Photo: Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images

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Abigail Shrier is the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

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