The war from over here, part 6
"Students for Justice in Palestine" is not a campus organization, it's a weapon.
Following on the censure of antisemitic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, more good news has come in. Apparently, action has finally been taken against the pro-terrorist hate group Students for Justice in Palestine, including at Columbia University—normally a hotbed of anti-Israel racism.
Obviously, shrieks of “free speech” and “academic freedom” will be heard, and many people—some well-meaning, most not—will echo them. There are several reasons, however, not to take them seriously.
First, as I have written elsewhere, incitement is not protected under the First Amendment, and SJP engages in nothing but incitement. Incitement is the reason it exists. Its views are openly genocidal and its ultimate goal, stated without reservation, is to annihilate an entire country. This is explicit incitement to mass murder and a direct threat to the lives of millions of people. If there is any speech that the First Amendment was not designed to protect, it is this kind of speech.
As for the “academic” side of the argument, I merely note the redolent hypocrisy. America’s institutions of higher education are semi-totalitarian when it comes to speech of which they disapprove, even when that speech clearly is protected under the First Amendment. They would never allow an organization that supports the genocide of black or Hispanic Americans—or indeed anyone else—to take root on their campuses. Nor should they. They are simply being called upon to consistently apply the standards to which they claim to be devoted. This ought to be a fairly simple matter. The fact that it isn’t says a very great deal.
Finally, SJP is not, in fact, a campus organization. It is now quite clear, if it was not already, that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations view their supporters abroad and their capacity to menace and murder Diaspora Jews as a strategic weapon. They wield it not only in service of their genocidal racism, but also as a deterrent against Israel. Come after us, they are saying without saying it, and we will strike at your brethren abroad. In this context, SJP is less a campus group than the activist equivalent of a suicide bomber. It is, in other words, a weapon. Anyone with the power to do so is morally obligated to neutralize such a weapon by any and all legal means at their disposal.
In regard to this, there is a trap we are all prone to fall into, though I admit I have seen refreshingly little of it so far. It is the claim that, since the antisemites seem obsessed with Israel, it is Israel that is causing antisemitism.
This claim has been made since the dawn of the Zionist movement and it is certainly a tempting one. It has the virtue of irony, which people always enjoy, and provides a simple and rational explanation for something that, while it may be simple, is terrifyingly irrational. It also offers hope. After all, it implies, if Israel simply changed its behavior, there would be no antisemitism.
Looked at with a critical eye, however, it quickly becomes clear that the claim is monstrous.
First, since Israel is a Jewish state, the claim quite obviously blames the Jews for antisemitism. Besides being morally repulsive, this is also absurd. It is the collective equivalent of blaming a rape victim for wearing a short skirt. It is not just irrelevant, it is an attempt to exonerate a criminal who has committed a horrific atrocity. It is not just amoral, it is anti-moral.
More to the point, however, it denies something the world has long sought to deny, but remains no less true. It is the radical notion that antisemitism is the fault of antisemites. That is, it is the personal choice of every antisemite to embrace hate and to act on it, and thus they and they alone are morally responsible for that choice.
This raises an issue that, remarkably, usually goes completely unmentioned: Israel’s opponents could protest against Israel without being antisemitic, they simply choose not to. This is why the perennial question, “But you can criticize Israel without being antisemitic, right?” is ridiculous. The issue isn’t that they can, it’s that they don’t. They have decided that they enjoy hate and violence more than civil debate, and they act accordingly. If they want to criticize Israel without being antisemitic, they should stop being antisemitic. But this, of course, they are unwilling to do.
My latest JNS column has just been published. It follows up on the issue of Jewish self-defense and concludes that the only way to form an effective nationwide self-defense organization is for the Israeli government to get involved in organizing and training it. I think the fact that Palestinian terrorists use antisemitism as a strategic weapon—as mentioned above—gives the issue particular urgency for Israel.
On a lighter—sort of—note, I’ve been reading a few of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches, and I’m constantly amazed by how well people wrote back then. I don’t think Lincoln even went to the equivalent of a high school, yet he wrote things like this:
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? … Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.
That is simply extraordinary prose. And from a man who, by all rights, should have been illiterate.
Obviously, there’s numerous reasons for the degradation in our basic ability to write English—television, the internet, the imperial decadence of the higher education system, etc.—but there’s no doubt that it’s a profound tragedy.