The Big Story
Faced with Jewish students, faculty members, and donors enraged by the outpouring of support for Hamas on campus, Harvard President Claudine Gay announced in an email on Thursday several steps the university was taking to combat campus antisemitism. These included developing a “robust program of education and training for students, faculty, and staff,” increasing awareness of the “anonymous reporting hotline for incidents of bias,” and convening “community support sessions” through the Harvard Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging. Gay also distanced herself from the phrase “From the river to the sea”—named in a critical letter posted to X by billionaire hedge fund manager and Harvard donor Bill Ackman over the weekend—which Gay said “engender[s] both pain and existential fears within our Jewish community.” In essence, Gay was offering Jews the protection of the campus DEI (sorry, EDIB) bureaucracy.
Better than nothing, perhaps. But don’t declare victory yet. The scenes coming out of Harvard and other elite colleges since Oct. 7 are only particularly morbid symptoms of a much larger problem. That problem, recently described by David Samuels in Tablet, is the moral and intellectual collapse of nearly every leading institution of American life over the past decade. The causes of this collapse are legion and include the effects of social media on the human brain, the hollowing out of the independent press through technological change, the concentration of economic and political power into the hands of a new oligarchy, and the widespread embrace of third-world blood libels that seek to explain reality in terms of an invisible conspiracy by malevolent light-skinned oppressors to rob and exploit BIPOCs, AAPIs, LGBTQIAs, demisexuals, and other subaltern “communities” recently invented by activist scholars and federal bureaucrats. In the respectable version of this conspiracy theory, the oppressor is the disembodied abstraction of “whiteness,” or perhaps straight white men, or white men, or white people. In the unrespectable version, it’s the Jews. But as we are seeing now, party-line progressives do not need to hate Jews as Jews to find themselves cheering their murder. It is enough for them to believe that those Jews are oppressors, settlers, colonists—i.e., white, literally and metaphorically.
The DEI bureaucracy, which initially emerged on college campuses but has since spread into private- and public-sector employment as well as primary education, is the institutional face of this collapse. Its role is to promote the conspiracy theory described above not as revolutionary dogma but as a tool of bureaucratic management, leveraging the alleged sensitivities and “traumas” of “underrepresented” and “minoritized” groups into a wide-ranging program of behavioral regulation and modification under the direction of credentialed diversity technocrats, whose ultimate loyalty is to the system that produces and sustains their power. This system is ugly, boring, and anti-American—both literally, in the sense that it views the United States as defined by the oppression of the subaltern groups the system claims to protect, and in the deeper sense that it is hostile to the traditions of individual and communal liberty that have traditionally defined the self-conception of Americans of all faiths and backgrounds. It is also, as we see now, quite incapable of moral clarity on an issue like Israel’s war with Hamas, in which both sides—Islamist terrorists and Jews—can stake a claim to being victims, which, in the moral universe of DEI, relieves them of all agency and responsibility. Confronting such a contradiction, the system short-circuits, remains silent, or turns against whoever it regards as the greater oppressor, defined in the terms of the conspiracy theory.
Gay’s announcement, in effect, is a fig leaf: an offer to officially designate, by administrative fiat, Jews as a protected victim group rather than as oppressors—a question about which there is apparently some confusion on Harvard’s campus. In our opinion, however, the students chanting “From the river to the sea” and expressing their solidarity with Hamas have a better grasp of the logic of the DEI system than Gay does. Jews are not “underrepresented” in culture or in prominent professions or among the wealthy, and Israel really is stronger than Gaza, in large part because it is a functioning democratic society that focuses its energies on the normal things that functioning democratic societies do, rather than on plotting revenge and murder. In a worldview that equates strength and success with evil and holds that all “overrepresentation” is the result of theft and exploitation, it is rational to conclude that Israel—and the Jews—are a problem. This worldview is not a mistake or misinterpretation that can be cleared up by designating Jews as a protected category; it is the ideological core of the DEI enterprise.
That means, as Bari Weiss argued in Tablet earlier this week, that the whole system has got to go.
Read more here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/end-dei-bari-weiss-jews
And here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/what-now#elites
IN THE BACK PAGES: Oliver Traldi argues that when activists denounce “white people,” they’re usually talking about Jews
The Rest
→A few updates to yesterday’s Big Story on the Gazan photojournalists.
In the aftermath of Honest Reporting’s revelations, two Israeli politicians—war cabinet minister Benny Gantz and former U.N. representative Dani Dayan—called for the Gazan journalists to be treated as terrorists.
Honest Reporting named four Gazan photojournalists who it suggested might have had advance knowledge of the attack: Hassan Eslaiah, Yousef Masoud, Ali Mahmud, and Hatem Ali.
The New York Times said that Masoud denied any foreknowledge of the operation and that his first photos were published 90 minutes after the attack began.
Reuters announced that two Gazan photojournalists not named in the Honest Reporting story, Mohammed Fayq Abu Mostafa and Yasser Qudih, did not publish their first photos until 45 minutes after Israel publicly acknowledged the attacks.
The AP and CNN both cut ties with Eslaiah. After the Honest Reporting story appeared, social media users surfaced both a photo of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar kissing Eslaiah on the cheek and a video of Eslaiah inside Israel on Oct. 7, riding on a motorcycle with several other men and holding a grenade.
→Hamas announced Friday that the IDF has reached the outskirts of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, believed to contain Hamas’ Gaza headquarters. Shifa is Gaza’s largest hospital and has been sheltering an estimated 50,000 Palestinian civilians, who began evacuating today. A video circulating on social media showed a large group of civilians coming under fire while trying to leave the hospital compound on Friday; Israeli sources blamed Hamas, although The Scroll has not found any independent corroboration as to the source of the gunfire. Israel has long believed that the hospital is also home to Hamas’ command center in Gaza, a claim that Hamas denies. As Tablet explained in a 2014 article on Shifa:
The Israelis are so sure about the location of the Hamas bunker… not because they are trying to score propaganda points, or because it has been repeatedly mentioned in passing by Western reporters—but because they built it. Back in 1983, when Israel still ruled Gaza, they built a secure underground operating room and tunnel network beneath Shifa hospital—which is one among several reasons why Israeli security sources are so sure that there is a main Hamas command bunker in or around the large cement basement beneath the area of Building 2 of the Hospital, which reporters are obviously prohibited from entering.
The IDF announced late Friday that its death toll in the Gaza operation had risen to 37.
Read more here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/top-secret-hamas-command-bunker-in-gaza-revealed
→The Palestinian Authority told the Biden administration that it is open to a role in governing Gaza after the current war, but only if the United States commits to a two-state solution, The New York Times reported Thursday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded Friday by saying that the IDF would control Gaza after the war, rather than handing it over to external forces, “to ensure there is no longer a threat from Gaza to Israeli civilians.” Later in the day, Netanyahu clarified his statement in an interview with Fox News: “We don’t seek to conquer Gaza. We don’t seek to occupy Gaza. And we don’t seek to govern Gaza.” He added that Israel will “have to find a civilian government.” Netanyahu may be understandably loath to involve the PA, but if Israel does not want to occupy Gaza, it is hard to imagine an alternative. That gives the PA a good deal of leverage, which it now appears to be using.
Read more here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/world/middleeast/palestinian-authority-gaza.html
→Quote of the Day
Peace and glory to the martyrs and freedom fighters who fight for all our freedom. There is nothing higher nor more glorious than a martyr, and so we say, glory to all the martyrs wherever they may be! Allahu Akbar!
I am an attorney. Today we filed a notice and demand to the members of Congress, letting them know that they will be prosecuted in criminal courts all over the world, … The days of just speaking have ended. … And we remind the mainstream media that Joseph Goebbels, the genocide propagandist, was to face trial at Nuremberg before he shot himself. And we intend to prosecute every media outlet that has mobilized our genocide. We will dismantle every institution of Zionist violence in the world, from New York to Palestine.
That’s Palestinian American “human rights” attorney, BDS activist, and former Council on American-Islamic Relations board member Lamis Deek speaking to a large crowd at last weekend’s Free Palestine rally in Washington, D.C. In the past, Deek has praised Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Iranian Quds Force as “freedom fighters” against “global apartheid.” In a 2012 interview on Egyptian television, she claimed that Bugs Bunny cartoons were part of Western/Zionist plot to demonize Muslims.
→What’s the matter with Montreal?
A Montreal imam led a public prayer calling on Allah to kill all “Zionist aggressors” at an Oct. 28 “Stop the Genocide” rally. Now, Canada’s National Post reports that Canadian authorities had previously linked the man to al-Qaeda and ISIS. Adil Charkaoui, a native of Morocco, was identified by Canadian intelligence in 2003 as a potential al-Qaeda sleeper agent, after police observed him committing credit card fraud to fund overseas jihadist groups and intercepted a phone call in which two of his associates discussed “Adil’s” plans for a chemical attack on the Montreal subway. He has since reinvented himself as an anti-Islamophobia activist and was quoted in a 2014 Reuters article as an expert on “anti-Islamic bullying.”
Also in Montreal, two Jewish schools were hit by gunshots overnight Thursday. No injuries were reported and no arrests have been made.
On Wednesday, three people were injured and one person arrested after pro-Palestinian protestors at Montreal’s Concordia University attacked a table displaying photos of Israeli hostages. University of Montreal lecturer Yasine Arab was captured on video telling a Jewish student, “Go back to Poland, whore.”
→The Washington Post published and then deleted a cartoon mocking Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields on Wednesday, after readers and staffers complained the cartoon was racist. The cartoon, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez, can be seen here:
The Post deleted the cartoon and issued an apology after left-wing pundits criticized the cartoon on X as “racist” and “dehumanizing.” Apparently, there was internal resistance, too. On Wednesday evening, Executive Editor Sally Buzbee sent an email to Post staffers, obtained by The Washington Free Beacon, acknowledging their “many deep concerns and conversations” about the cartoon.
Read more here: https://freebeacon.com/media/wapos-buzbee-in-internal-memo-says-paper-took-down-hamas-cartoon-amid-staffers-deep-concerns/
TODAY IN TABLET:
From Hostage to Pop Icon, by Dana Kessler
On Oct. 7, Rachel Edri was held hostage by Hamas terrorists. One month later, the Israeli grandmother’s image appears on everything from T-shirts to tattoos, cartoons to TikTok videos.
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.
This essay first appeared in Tablet on November 8, 2023.
Snowflakes for Hamas
It turns out that ‘white people’ often means Jews
by Oliver Traldi
For years it has been a commonplace that progressives, and especially progressive college students, are fragile, overemotional snowflakes who live in fear of being offended or giving offense themselves, especially when it comes to people’s “identities." A joke that lands wrong, a too-quick assumption about what pronouns someone uses, a microaggression about mental health, being “othered”: We’ve long had the impression that these sorts of transgressions are capable of causing deep and lasting harm, and that, in acknowledgment of this fact, the new progressive culture would be one of softness, solicitude, and self-silencing.
No surprise, then, that many people are confused by the present moment in American progressive politics, especially the politics of America’s largely left-wing college campuses. For if being careful about causing offense around issues of identity were a paramount progressive concern, why would Jewish students at Cooper Union have to hide in the library from a chanting mob? Why would a Columbia professor call Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians “awesome”? Why would a Cornell professor declare he was “exhilarated” by it? Why are the words “glory to our martyrs” being projected onto the outside of the library at George Washington University? Why would a Stanford professor single out Jewish students, telling them that colonialism killed more innocents than the Holocaust and sending them to stand together in the back of the room? Why would Harvard students sign a petition saying that responsibility for the Israeli dead lies with Israel—and, crucially, with Israel alone? Why would an essay in the literary magazine n+1 scoff at “smarmy moralizing about civilian deaths”? Why would a Black Lives Matter social media account advertise the image of a paraglider with a Palestinian flag, after Hamas terrorists parachuted into a gathering in Israel and murdered partygoers?
On Twitter, the sociologist Bradley Campbell recently wrote of this confusion: “People keep acting surprised by these sorts of things because they keep making the same mistake. They think the campus activists are concerned abstractly with hurt feelings. But they’re not, and they haven’t claimed to be ... What matters is the identities of the people involved—whether they’re part of what’s considered an oppressor or victim group in relation to one another.”
While a therapeutic, feelings-over-facts approach—a focus on safe spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings, and so forth—is certainly one of the favored methods of America’s new diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, it’s clearly not an inherent part of the woke gestalt. Rather, proclaiming one’s personal or group hypersensitivity and fragility is a technique to gain control of particular spaces by hijacking the language of America’s preexisting therapeutic culture, with the goal of forcing opponents into silence.
The animating force behind this schizophrenic rhetorical divide is the practice of dividing up the world into teams based on notions of who has “power,” which comes in a set number of forms: being wealthy, being able-bodied, being male, being “cis.” More than any other source, power comes from being “white.” In other words, it’s fine if we burn you or your children alive, or cheer on those who do; if you criticize us, that’s an inherently unjust and damaging exercise of power, because we have defined you as being “white.”
Like any coalition, the progressive coalition has always had fault lines. Like any ideology, progressivism is rife with contradictions. The most obvious has always been that progressives speak and behave, aggressively and self-assuredly, in explicitly racist ways, despite deploring racism as the most unspeakable evil of modern times.
The same progressives who place anti-racism at the center of their worldview seem to leave enough room for quite a bit of racism, too. The word “white,” and the abstract theoretical construct “whiteness,” are important for progressives in delineating just who the appropriate targets of racism are. Recent events have made obvious what many of us suspected: Such targets include Jews. The targeting of Jews as a subset of “white people” could also be derived from a more general observation: Those for whom whiteness is valued consider Jews nonwhite; those for whom whiteness is denigrated consider Jews white.
However, it’s not just a matter of the silly, maybe even meaningless question of whether Jews are white—which I am happy to leave to true believers in 19th-century racial pseudoscience. Both Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones got their starts as anti-white conspiracy theorists; a straight line connects them to the antisemitism of the Women’s March, Kanye West, and Kyrie Irving. As conspiracy theories, “white supremacy” and antisemitism have similar structures, and are animated by similar forms of paranoid illogic, which makes it easy to move from one to the other, and then back again. Therefore, despite the fact that “antisemitism” is sometimes listed next to more on-trend forms of bigotry like ableism or transphobia, Jews are targets, not comrades-in-arms or beneficiaries, of the “critical race theory” propounded in America’s woke madrassas.
After the Oct. 7 attacks, over a hundred thousand people approved of a tweet, by a writer who’s not worth naming, which read: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers.” This way of framing the issue is telling for a number of reasons. First, there is this notion of “decolonization,” with which it’s assumed we’re all familiar. But there’s apparently been some sort of misunderstanding: Some people might get the idea that decolonization is simply something to discuss in “papers” and “essays,” meaning that it’s something we might take seriously in an academic context, but only as far as that context goes. These people are, according to the tweet, wrong: Decolonization is really about (one assumes) killing; such killing is (again, according to the tweet) good, and only losers can’t stomach it. This is the flip side of the injunction to “abolish whiteness,” which is sometimes excused as a matter of technical terminology in the sociology of race. Here a seemingly anodyne, scholarly term turns out to have violent resonances when applied to everything from statues, to private property, to people.
It is therefore no surprise that the same academy that protects scholars who speculate on whether it might be politically acceptable or even necessary to murder white people will have a lot of trouble motivating itself to care about widespread approval of the murder of Jews. My friend Liam Bright, a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, wrote a paper about the culture wars called “White Psychodrama.” His thesis was that much of the culture wars can be understood as white people’s divergent strategies of processing various feelings of guilt, shame, cognitive dissonance, and so on, regarding the racial situation in the United States and in the West more broadly. I had a few objections to this, one of which was that much culture war discourse takes places among us Jews (or half-Jews, in my case). Of course, we have differences of principle, and sometimes different opinions about the facts on the ground when it comes to political issues. But there is a different kind of dispute that seems to simmer beneath the surface of Jewish political disagreement: Who is most likely to actually try to kill us? Is it “white supremacists,” in whatever guise, or the people who talk about “ending white supremacy”?
The stakes of this debate were clear in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election. Trump drew some support from the feeling that Islamist terror was on the rise, especially in Europe, and such terror was often antisemitic; for instance, an Islamist terrorist slaughtered four people at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in 2014. Videos of street attacks against Jewish men began to go viral, and commentators discussed the slow exodus of Jews from countries like France and Germany. On the other hand, Trump himself was associated, rightly or not, with the burgeoning alt-right movement, many of whose enthusiasts believed in antisemitic conspiracy theories (“Jews will not replace us!”). The gunman in the 2018 Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue massacre was an alt-rightist. Antisemitic incidents were often accompanied by a kind of anxiety about which team of extremists would turn out to be ultimately responsible. Fervor about threats against Jewish centers and cemeteries in 2017 took a strange turn: The two people jailed for making such threats turned out to be Juan M. Thompson, a Vassar College dropout and failed progressive journalist who was trying to frame a former lover, and Michael Ron David Kadar, an Israeli American with no clear motive.
I don’t mean to suggest that the debate this undercurrent represents has been resolved one way or another, at the level of who is more likely to walk into a synagogue with an AK-47 and start murdering congregants. But if the letters and statements from Jewish donors to college presidents are any sign, many Jews—however they feel about Israel or the alt-right—have plenty of concerns about the American left, which they might not have had even a month ago. These concerns center on the idea of Jews being made out to be “white,” among—but almost exclusively among—the very people who see whiteness as the proper object of ethnic essentialism, conspiracy theorizing, and collective hatred.
It is therefore hard to avoid the perception that "white people," when the term is used to express vitriol and racism, typically means Jews.
I believe the whole DEI , oppressor/oppressed program being pummeled into the mush brains of college students - and anyone else jumping on that train - is nothing but a mask for their ultimate aim which is to eventually be able to justify the cultural annihilation, up to and including murder, of anyone whom they deem “the enemy”, and that can be anyone at any time.
Color doesn’t matter: many a black man or woman who holds a conservative viewpoint is labeled a racist. So it has nothing to do with color really, “white” or “oppressor” is just their catch-all phraseology.
The students caught tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis, when confronted, and asked to explain why they are doing so, can barely articulate their reasoning behind their actions. Instead, they just stand there like a deer caught in headlights, spout rote phrases they’ve obviously been programmed to believe but clearly don’t comprehend, squirm around, or devolve into ad hominem attacks, whenever they receive push back.
They have been - and a continue to be - “softened” through this constant repetitive drumbeat on college campuses into automaton soldiers for an increasingly dangerous and malevolent movement, cloaked under the umbrella of DEI.
The entire enterprise of DEI, is not just stupid, wrong and crazy. It is dangerous, violent, and deadly.
'white' oppression in blm usually means/includes/diversifies 'jews'...as part of 'traditional oppressors of blacks' 'running the slave trade' (not the current ones of course run by ????), et al.