What Happened Today: February 2, 2023
U.S. beefs up bases; Merck makes mutants?; Palestinian diplomat refuses to condemn attacks
The Big Story
In a move that seems geared toward strengthening the defense of Taiwan, the United States will expand military operations to four new outposts in the Philippines, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Thursday while meeting with his Filipino counterpart, Carlito Galvez Jr. Under the 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, the United States already occupies five bases across the island that it can use for building facilities, maintaining aircraft, and storing equipment. This new agreement will bring the total to nine and likely include one outpost near the northern island of Luzon, 300 miles from the independent island of Taiwan, which China claims as part of its sovereign territory.
The expansion of the U.S. military presence in close proximity to Taiwan takes place as tensions continue to ratchet up over China’s ongoing threat to invade the island nation. “My gut tells me we will fight in 2025. Xi secured his third term and set his war council in October 2022. Taiwan’s presidential elections are in 2024 and will offer Xi a reason,” U.S. General Michael A. Minihan wrote recently in a memo leaked last week to NBC News. Meanwhile, the United States and United Kingdom have pledged nuclear submarines to Australia by 2040, further strengthening the Western presence around the Asia Pacific, just as Indian and U.S. officials announced this week new military collaborations that include the joint development and production of jet engines, maritime security, and the promotion of defense “start-ups.”
Speaking to news site Nikkei Asia during his trip to Tokyo, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg capped off the week of Indo-Pacific announcements: “Any attempt by China to try to change the status quo by the use of military force will have severe consequences for East Asia. But it will also have consequences for NATO allies and for global security.”
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-philippines-strike-military-base-deal-11675315003
In the Back Pages: The Queering of Anti-Semitism
The Rest
→ Financial markets remained shaky leading up to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s Wednesday press conference before they shot off into the stratosphere as a “dovish” Powell explained, “I don’t see us cutting rates this year, but if we do see inflation coming down more quickly, then that will play into our views.” In spite of many analysts saying that we’re currently in the worst and most widely distributed bubble in history, and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon saying last year that an “economic hurricane” was coming, the markets have been indefatigable. Like the wise man once said, it’s never a bubble until it pops.
→ A new preliminary study from a group of England’s top biomedical researchers suggests that the widespread use of Merck’s anti-COVID-19 pill Lagevrio (molnupiravir) may be spawning new COVID-19 variants from patients who use the drug but are unable to fully clear the pathogen. Lagevrio might have other long-term risks for patients as well—including, potentially, cancer. Raymond Schinazi, the world-renowned creator of a leading HIV treatment, wrote in a 2021 paper that the same features that the drug uses to supposedly neutralize COVID-19 could be “mutagenic to mammalian cells.” Translation: Merck’s drug doesn’t just cause mutations in the virus; it could, by the same mechanism, cause mutations in you.
→ Robin Hood has crossed the Channel! Last Thursday, across France, energy operators doled out free power to schools and low-income households in solidarity with the widespread protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s recent austerity move to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64. Dubbed “Robin des Bois” in homage to the mythic British character, the energy distribution has been backed by even France’s largest union leaders. “If the government doesn’t retract its retirement reforms, we will continue and we will make energy free for everyone who doesn’t have access to regulated tariffs, whether they are public establishments or businesses,” Frédéric Probel, a leader of the French CGT trade union alliance, told Franceinfo.
→ An outpouring of sympathy and remembrances has appeared on social media after a beloved, up-and-coming New Jersey politician was shot and killed outside her home on Wednesday. Republican Councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour, 30, of Sayreville Township was found dead in her car after neighbors reported gunshots around 7:30 in the evening. “Her career of public service was just beginning, and by all accounts she had already built a reputation as a committed member of the Borough Council who took her responsibility with the utmost diligence and seriousness,” Gov. Phil Murphy said in a statement. So far, police have not announced any arrests in the case.
→ “Objectivity” appears to be yesterday’s news, according to a recent survey of several leading national newsrooms conducted by former executive editor of The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News president Andrew Heyward. “More and more journalists of color and younger White reporters, including LGBTQ+ people, in increasingly diverse newsrooms believe that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting informed by their own backgrounds, experiences and points of view,” Downie Jr. wrote in a summary. As if you needed more reasons to keep reading Tablet.
→ In The Last of Us, HBO’s new zombie adventure show, a scientist comes on-screen to tell viewers what keeps him up at night: heat-adapted fungi that could spark an untreatable pandemic. In The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, some scientists are suggesting this could very well become our new reality thanks to global warming. “As fungi are exposed to more consistent elevated temperatures, there’s a real possibility that certain fungi that were previously harmless suddenly become potential pathogens,” Peter Pappas, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the Journal. For example, two fungi—Coccidioides and Histoplasma—that were once considered rare in the United States have been spreading geographically, and infections that were once confined to certain regions are now reported nationwide.
→ Number of the Day: 30,000 liters
Because of Canada’s quota system for dairy farmers—intended to protect prices and domestic producers—a lot of milk gets wasted. We mean a lot. In this video, one farmer from Ontario says he’s dumping 30,000 liters—equivalent to about 7,900 gallons—every month. The People’s Party of Canada calls the policy “a government-imposed cartel that keeps the prices of dairy, poultry, and eggs artificially high through the control of production, the banning of imports, price fixing, and the prevention of competition in the market.” It also cites a study from the University of Manitoba that estimates that the practice adds $339 in costs per year to the poorest 20% of Canadian households.
→ He said, she said, Google said. Former Google managing director of food, beverage, and restaurants, Ryan Olohan was fired by the company in August for being “‘non-inclusive,’ and comment[ing] on employees’ walking pace and hustle, which [Google] considered ‘ableist.’” But Olohan is suing the company, claiming that instead he was pushed out for accusing a female colleague of sexual harassment at a company party. A lower-level employee, Tiffany Miller, supposedly rubbed Olohan’s stomach and told him he had “such a nice body,” then proceeded to behave aggressively, though not sexually, toward him in future interactions. When Olohan filed a complaint with HR, they did nothing but supposedly told him if the tables were turned, and she was complaining about him, they would have. Meanwhile, while Olohan was fired for allegedly being non-inclusive, he runs an ice cream shop with his family that specifically employs people with Down syndrome. Google says of Olohan’s lawsuit, “This employee was terminated with cause after a thorough investigation of complaints by numerous employees.”
→ Video of the Day:
Speaking to Britain’s Sky News on Wednesday, Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian Mission to the United Kingdom, refused to condemn the Friday slaughter of Israeli civilians in Jerusalem. Here are some choice quotes Mr. Zomlot dropped in this stunning two-minute distillation of all the reasons why the conflict seems bound to continue forever:
“No one works for a non-violent solution to this more than us.”
“I condemn the origin of all this; that’s what needs to be condemned.”
“The Palestinian people and leadership have been doing that (sending condolences to Israelis) all along and have been expected not only to do that, but to provide protection to our own jailors.”
“The people the Israeli Army killed in Jenin (the terrorists plotting an attack and one civilian caught in the crossfire) are already refugees.”
“The new Palestinian generation [must be] born without occupation and colonization and apartheid and segregation and sheer racism that comes our way from this new government and all the governments before it.”
The Palestinian Authority of course has an official policy of paying welfare to the families of those who carry out terror attacks on Israel.
→ The West Wing is coming to Broadway! Early 2000s Jewish icon Joshua Malina—aka the charming and articulate Will Bailey—is set for a role in 20th-century Jewish icon Tom Stoppard née Straussler’s new hit play Leopoldstadt, which traces the fate of a Viennese Jewish family from the fin de siecle to after WWII. In what may be Stoppard’s final—autobiographical—play, he was inspired by his own Jewish family’s story, which he did not learn of until later in life. As of March 14, Malina will take over the role of Hermann; the play runs through July 2.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Israeli Democracy Is Fine, Thank You for Asking by Gil Troy
Attempts to run the anti-Trump playbook against Bibi ignore the deep differences between Israel’s resilient democratic culture and America’s polarized partisan mess
On Putin and Babyn Yar by Vladislav Davidzon
An exclusive Tablet interview with Ilya Khrzhanovsky
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Queering of Anti-Semitism
How an unlikely alliance between LGBTQ Studies and anti-Zionism conquered American universities
By Corinne Blackmer
Some years ago, I was the target of a series of antisemitic, homophobic, and anti-Zionist hate crimes on the campus of Southern State Connecticut University, where I teach. Aside from the death threats and property defacement, what troubled me most was how authorities and colleagues only acknowledged the homophobic part of the crime. Despite my protestations, the anti-Zionism was erased and the antisemitism, which was not subtle—a swastika drawn on my car with mud—was severely minimalized. On college campuses these days, LGBTQ concerns (as well as racial ones) always count. Anti-Zionism never does, and antisemitism only when it occurs alone—not in relation to other forms of social animus.
This series of hate crimes against me took place—in a way I have never found coincidental—during one of the periodic eruptions of hostilities between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Several days later, I again found my office door defaced, and death threats left on my office telephone. One faculty member I knew who had read about the hate crime on the front page of The New Haven Register rushed to empathize, calling me the victim of “the homo-hating patriarchy.” I winced at my colleague commiserating with me in an ideological language that I knew targeted me in other ways.
As a lesbian Zionist academic, I have felt my once solid alliances shatter, and my beloved communities of belonging descend into warring camps. Over the past few decades, as the academic field of Queer Studies has become more visible and influential, some of its leading proponents have pushed the idea that opposing Israel’s existence is a natural position for gays and lesbians to adopt. But, of course, it is not at all obvious why the progressive academics I once considered allies, who see themselves as champions of LGBTQ rights, have come to regard Israel—which has a sterling record of civil rights for gay people, ranging from housing and workplace protections to adoption and inheritance rights—as the “hetero-patriarchal,” homophobic, and “homo-nationalistic” enemy of queers.
The fact that the academic notion of queerness and hostility to the Jewish state are now virtually synonymous is largely the accomplishment of a small group of postmodern leftist scholars, the most prominent of whom is Judith Butler. It is therefore worth examining the ideas expounded by Butler and others in her camp, and the effects they have had on universities and the broader political culture of the left, to understand my own sense of vulnerability and isolation.
According to my former allies, Israel’s protections for gay people and its thriving gay culture in cities like Tel Aviv should not be thought of as positives, but are in fact evidence that the country is guilty of “pinkwashing” its sins. Israel gives gays and lesbians rights, these critics contend, only as a means of deflecting attention from the country's mistreatment of Palestinians. Moreover, Israel’s queer critics claim that touting the country’s liberal record on gay rights is a form of racism and Islamophobia used to paint Arabs as homo-hating barbarians. In stunning contrast, these same progressives regard Arab countries, which inflict state sponsored, culturally accepted horrific punishments on queer people (lengthy prison sentences, honor killings, or death sentences) as subaltern allies.
When I pointed out to my colleagues that gay Saudi Arabian men were in fact flogged, and Iranian homosexuals hanged from cranes in public for the crime of homosexuality—and offered proof from human rights organizations—I was treated with condescending disdain. According to my colleagues, I had bought into the “Zionist narrative”—the pro-Western, pro-Israel, pro-settler colonialist, and, above all, Islamophobic media propaganda that represented Islamic countries as barbarous.
My colleagues’ responses introduced me to the post-factual, Alice in Wonderland mindset of the academic left. First, I was Islamophobic for daring to broach the subject, since I had “no right,” as a “colonizing Westerner,” to speak critically about Islamic cultures. Second, I was told that most of the videos and still photos showing the hangings, floggings, and other brutal punishments were somehow forgeries or “fake news.” Third, supposing some of the representations were accurate, the “victims” were punished not for being gay but because they were anti-Islamic and pro-Western collaborators, out to “corrupt” and “destroy” their cultures—in other words, according to these enlightened progressives, they had it coming. Fourth, and relatedly, I was told that Arab countries resorted to homophobia only because of Western colonialism. Thus, even if these men were targeted for torture or death, they were partially at fault because they had courted danger by imitating “foreign fashions,” following the “Western model” of coming out of the closet. By this torturous logic, identifying themselves as gay or homosexual in public made these men accomplices of Western imperialism which meant, once again, that they should be seen as responsible for their own victimization.
These deplorable arguments did not, however, originate with the self-styled progressive academics I found myself debating. Rather these arguments originated in the work of three popular postmodern intellectuals: Joseph Massad (Columbia University), Jasbir Puar (Rutgers University), and, above all, Judith Butler (U.C. Berkeley). In Desiring Arabs (2007), Massad argues that "Western male white-dominated" gay activists, under the aegis of the “Gay International,” have undertaken a "missionary" endeavor to impose the binary categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality onto cultures where no such subjectivities exist. According to Massad, the Arab world is actually more “gender fluid” and tolerant of sexuality differences that do not express themselves in a Western fashion. Puar, the most antisemitic and anti-Zionist of the bunch, takes this logic even further, arguing in Terrorist Assemblages (2007) and The Right to Maim (2017) that Arab queers have more “sophisticated and nuanced” perspectives on sexuality than their Western counterparts, not to mention a “healthy skepticism” about Western identity classifications. Moreover, in a twist on the pinkwashing allegation, she argues that the Israeli government, which is pro-natalist, gives gay and lesbian Israeli Jews civil rights only because, as parents, they will become “incorporated” into the Israeli “national project” and produce offspring who will maim or otherwise incapacitate Palestinians.
But the most influential of these postmodern critics is Judith Butler, a founding figure in Queer Studies who developed the now-ubiquitous concept that gender is a “performance” and that individuals perform their identities against a natural state of “gender fluidity.” Butler has been at the helm of the fields of Queer and Gender Studies since the publication, in 1990, of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, which helped earn her an academic position at Berkeley. In the years since, Butler has become one of the few genuine celebrities of the postmodern academic left and a hero of sorts for the small clique of anti-Zionist Jews in America who wield an outsized influence in the academy and media landscape.
In Gender Trouble, which remains her most famous book, Butler rejects the idea that there are two biological sexes. Rather, she defines gender and sex as “essentialist” (a dirty word) concepts imposed on humans who are in fact “gender fluid.” Butler thus hones in on sex and gender as socially constructed performances. People who call themselves heterosexual mistakenly believe that their behaviors reflect an underlying truth and thus engage in coerced gender performances, made up of the gestures, language, and social signs conventionally associated with “masculinity” or “femininity.” Through myriad institutions, they enforce such performative illusions as if they were real in some foundational, preconscious, or biological sense. Relatedly, heteronormative people demean or punish performances outside these policed boundaries as unnatural, perverse, immoral, or inferior.
Such arguments undergird Butler’s fight against heteronormativity. However, like other postmodernists, she overstates the role of language in fashioning the human sense of reality. These same problematic claims about the inordinate power of language end up playing a crucial role in her fervently anti-Zionist work, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2014), where she (like Puar), is loose and inventive with the facts. One example can be found in comments Butler made during a 2006 teach-in held at Berkeley to address the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Butler was asked whether the left’s hesitation to support terrorist groups due to their use of violence hurts Palestinian solidarity. Here was her response: “Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.” Hezbollah and Hamas are both explicitly fundamentalist, religious organizations with charters that are reactionary—to say the least—in their attitudes towards woman, gays, lesbians, and religious minorities. Yet Butler confidently declares them a part of the left, as if the statement itself is more important than the material realities of life under Hamas and Hezbollah rule.
Deepening the absurdity, Butler claims that she opposes the Jewish State because of her allegiance to a personally invented tradition of Jewish ethics which, according to Butler, not only repudiates “state-sponsored violence” but also enjoins Jews to live as benevolent “cohabitees” with the Other. According to the Jewish ethical “tradition” Butler spins in her intellectual Mixmaster, Jews should abjure having their own nation-state to avoid marginalizing the Other—meaning the Palestinians, who are supposedly indigenous inhabitants who were displaced by Jewish “settler colonialism.”
Although Butler herself lives in a nation-state that exterminated and displaced indigenous peoples, she insists that Jews unwind the spool of history and dissolve their state, which she interprets as an errant project based on a misreading of the lessons of 19th century European nationalism and the Holocaust. Although she never says so, Butler implies that in response to the Holocaust, Jews need to recognize the terrible nature of all nation-states, and they should take their chances living in others’ states despite their historical experiences with persecution and mass destruction. Unlike Butler, most Jews believe that having their own imperfect home is far preferable.
In place of a Jewish homeland, Butler argues for a single “state” which would end the Right of Return for Jews, dissolve current borders, and eliminate the institutions and symbols of Jewish sovereignty. Jews would “integrate Palestinian identities” into their own “personality-identities.” What Butler means exactly remains tantalizingly and perhaps deliberately vague, for this concept is phantasmatic. It is unclear how this scheme would work in an actual political framework, or how such people would form viable modes of institutional, economic, or social exchange. If history and the geopolitics of the Middle East are any guide, the situation in a bi-national “state” would swiftly dissolve into mayhem and destruction. Lebanon, on Israel’s northern border, provides a useful example to people who actually live in that part of the world, though it may be hard for Butler to see the facts on the ground from her office in California.
Despite these and other fatal problems with her bi-nationalist (or bi-ethnic) fantasy fiction, academic audiences living far from the realities and complexities of the Israel/Palestine conflict greet her ideas with enthusiastic gratitude. At last, an ideal solution to an intractable problem that privileges the “victimized Other” while returning Jews to their traditional “ethical” (if marginalized) positions as disempowered (if indispensable) “middlemen.” Further, since a world-famous Jew endorses this plan, it cannot possibly be antisemitic. Despite her objections to the concept of authenticity, Butler performs the role of the “virtuous Jew” for her audiences.
And that performance, it must be said, has been something of a success. In universities today, Butler’s doctrines are repeated like religious dogma. Occasionally, there are quips about her inscrutable prose or whispers about her intellectual and ethical misadventures, but she is mostly embraced as a Queer and Jewish intellectual icon. Her canon has become something that wields such power in the humanities and, increasingly, in the social sciences, that it threatens academic freedom and intellectual innovation. As I have observed and have been told, graduate students, particularly Jewish ones, are regularly subjected by “woke” professors to harangues about Jews (and Israelis) that they would never contemplate with other minorities. Those who object to the singling out and demonization of Israel are often treated coldly, given bad grades, or refused letters of recommendation should their identities or alliances become known. Jewish undergraduates are assailed in their professors’ and adjuncts’ offices with posters reading END THE OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE, or maps that erase Israel.
Nor is this limited to university campuses. Dyke marches in Chicago, Washington D.C., and other cities across the country have banned the Israeli flag from their parades on the grounds that these are anti-Zionist events, and displaying the Jewish star of David might “make people feel unsafe.”
Jewish and Zionist allies are getting the message that they are despised and unwanted. In Queer and Women’s studies programs, the topic of Palestine is regularly inserted into the most unlikely contexts, to the extent that one student in a class about queer history told me that they discussed nothing but Palestine. The bitter irony is that by ostracizing and marginalizing Jews in the name of a postmodern ideology of queerness, actual queer people are made less safe. I would know: I am one of them.
What Happened Today: February 2, 2023
““More and more journalists of color and younger White reporters, including LGBTQ+ people, in increasingly diverse newsrooms believe that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting informed by their own backgrounds, experiences and points of view,” Downie Jr. wrote in a summary. As if you needed more reasons to keep reading Tablet.”
Lol. You guys are great.