Dec 10, 2023·edited Dec 10, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
Good luck with that, Mr. Graboyes.
The turn hasn’t been sharp, of course. It takes a long time to move a culture. The ability to deny it with any integrity whatever has been lost sharply. So much the worse, in the main, for integrity.
It usually takes a long time to move a culture. Once in a while, something happens that does cause an abrupt change. One example is the anti-war sentiment that was strong in the US during the early years of WWII--until Pearl Harbor. Once that happened, things did change. It may be that the events this fall will spark a similar change, and may do a lot to discredit the far left in the eyes of most Americans (and possibly many Europeans). I have been wondering for some years how long the Democrats can keep their coalition together. Effectively kicking out Jews is going to cost them a lot financially. Some feminists and lesbians are upset over the transgender craze, especially its effect on women's sports. I think we may see more of this.
One minor quibble: I would not count Bari Weiss as a conservative voice (yet, anyway). She seems to be a traditional liberal who has finally learned what Ronald Reagan meant when he said "I didn't leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me." She is one liberal writer that I often read. along with Joel Kotkin, Matt Taibbi, and a few others.
The major Democratic Jewish donors (I assume some exceptions) have neither acted nor spoken like they feel pushed out.
Being Jewish cover for Jew-hatred has always been prestigious and usually profitable in the diaspora (and in occupied Eretz Israel before the State)—and, alas, there has never been a shortage of volunteers.
Dec 10, 2023·edited Dec 10, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
I agree that most Jewish Dems and Leftists will not abandon the Democrat party. They are, for the most part, marginally Jewish and won't abandon the other political "truths" they live by. And, the Republicans "are evil."
One never knows. Reagan got 39% of the Jewish vote vs 45% for Carter. British Jews were heavily Labour till Corbyn. Then, the Tories got 67%. We live in strange times.
Dec 10, 2023·edited Dec 10, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
> One example is the anti-war sentiment that was strong in the US during the early years of WWII--until Pearl Harbor.
Well, memories of WWI weren't particularly distant. A lot of Americans had been anti-war then too, wanting to keep our country out of what was commonly seen as an exclusively European issue. They elected Woodrow Wilson on campaign promises to do exactly that, only to have him turn around and get us knee-deep in the war he lied about keeping us out of, with direct commitments of American troops to the front lines to "make the world safe for democracy." A lot of people didn't like how that turned out and didn't want to see it happen again.
That much is pure, indisputable fact. This next bit is conjecture; I've seen arguments for it that are at least somewhat persuasive, but I wouldn't say I believe it entirely. It's an interesting thing to think about, though: did American involvement in WWI bring about WWII?
If it hadn't been for us tipping the scales, the argument goes, the war, which was getting bogged down in a bloody stalemate, would have ground to a halt and ended exactly that way. With no clear victory of the Entente over the Triple Alliance, there would have been no Treaty of Versailles. Without that treaty's ruinous reparations imposed upon Germany, there would have been no Weimar hyperinflation, no rise of the Nazi Party to power as a reaction to it, and no war of conquest by the Nazis.
There's no good way to test a theory like that, but it at least makes you think, doesn't it?
Thank you for this interesting statement. The last three paragraphs are indeed conjecture but the Treaty of Versailles certainly was bad for Germany and for the winning side, either.
I've long thought that. An entire century was ransacked because the grandchildren of one woman (Victoria) were prone to ugly squabbles and had large armies to throw at their unruly relatives.
Paradoxically, the world might have been better off with a Hohenzollern on the throne instead of the doddering President Hindenburg. But yes, it's a good argument against royalism.
I agree on Bari Weiss, and it's only a formatting error that made it look otherwise. That was not supposed to be a bullet--only an introduction to the bullets below. Somehow, I accidentally turned it into a bullet. Her suggestion to look outside one's bubble. I have now fixed that error.
Well, perhaps we are all quibbling over terms, but the 2024 Bari Weiss, if indeed she is not fully a “conservative”, is no longer a liberal. Well, since ”liberal” can mean different things to different people, to remove any more doubt, she is no longer left of center.
I'm reminded of something written by the great Lewis Thomas many years ago (in a different context):
"If I were sixteen or seventeen years old and had to listen to that, or read things like that, I would want to give up listening and reading. I would begin thinking up new kinds of sounds, different from any music heard before, and I would be twisting and turning to rid myself of human language."
I'm actually the world's best sleeper. :) I'm just pretty efficient once I wake up. I will have to chase down that quote. (Actually, I just found it.) My thinking on healthcare and on life were profoundly influenced by my reading of THE FRAGILE SPECIES 30 years or so ago.
Alas, that experiment has been tried, for over sixty years now. In the main it has contributed to the problem by popularizing the woke (for lack of a better word) view of the world.
> The Anti-Defamation League reported that: “Fringe-Left Groups Express Support for Hamas’s Invasion and Brutal Attacks in Israel,”
The more this happens, the less appropriate the adjective "fringe" looks in that sentence.
> In 2018, a shooter invaded the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people and wounding 6, and he appears to have been influenced by alt-right publications produced by groups like those described in the previous section.
Can we please not include stuff like this on the Right side of the ledger? There's a reason they called themselves "alt-right," and it's because the weren't the Right and they knew full well the Right wouldn't have them, so they tried to set up an alternative version thereof.
The term "alt-right" was coined by white supremacist Richard Spencer to describe the way he and a group of like-minded individuals felt they had found a new home in conservative politics now that the media assured them that then-Presidential nominee Donald Trump was "one of us." A few years later, once Trump had shown himself to be not much of a racist at all, an embarrassed Spencer claimed, in a transparent attempt to save face and not admit he'd been deceived by media slanders of Trump, that Trump had "betrayed" white supremacist principles, and that his followers shouldn't vote for his reelection, endorsing Joe Biden instead. Amusingly enough, that was pretty much the precise moment when the mainstream media stopped using the term "alt-right," now that it was no longer politically useful to them.
I agree. In the article, I alluded to your "Can we please not include stuff like this on the Right side of the ledger?" bit when I noted that far-right and far-left rather blend together in their incoherence.
When I was a high school student my teacher said that instead of thinking of the right and left as two poles like hands stretched out think of them as hands close together over one’s head. They are far apart if you travel down the arms but the fingers are in fact close.
Well, in fairness I feel like at the original time of those appellations (the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution), they were pretty clearly distinct.
If you sat on the left, you were a populist, communist, anarchist, democrat -- someone who believed in direct rule by The People, which is pretty much everyone with a pulse. You hated kings, dictators, bishops, and the church generally. If you sat on the right, you were a monarchist, supporter of the Strong Man Who Could Make The Trains Run On Time, thought dictators had their uses and everyone ought to know his place. You despised the mob and anarchy, prized settled law and tradition, and thought according every man's vote equal weight was idiotic.
It seems to me modern re-interpretations of those terms that have muddled them up, in part because it turns out to be impossible to run anything larger than a family or farm on purely communitarian principles -- the most populist of ideologies apparently always still need a Strong Man to get stuff done -- and in part because of the evaporation of the influence of Christianity (or Judaism), with its notions of a settled social heirarchy being a good thing, a reflection of the heavenly order -- which means even the most conservative of ideologues always claim to be acting according to the will of The People, nobody ever says I and my equestrian friends should rule because we're better than you ignorant peasants, who'd just fuck things up.
Dec 10, 2023·edited Dec 10, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
Well said if true—which I suspect but don’t know. You might want to cite sources for doubters.
After all, you have people like me going around asking opposing writers to cite sources—and being called fascists for our trouble by both the left and the alt-right.
Later edit: for reasons given by Mr. Graboyes I withdraw my suggestion.
I believe you're responding to Bob Frank here, but I'll note that I made sure that every bullet contained enough info to send a reader to the source with a simple Google search. I originally had a link for each bullet, but they caused the thing to exceed Substack's size limit. Deleting them was the only way I could make the document small enough to transmit.
Oh ... I wasn't correcting you. I agreed with what you said. I was just noting that dropping the links was not my preference, but that I went through every link to make sure that anyone can verify anything there.
> and being called fascists for our trouble by both the left and the alt-right.
Further support for my thesis that they're the same thing. The natural home of white supremacy has always been on the Left.
But if you want sources for the claim, Googling "Richard Spencer endorsed Joe Biden" brings up plenty of results. Mainstream media bias being what it is, virtually all of the articles decided to make the story about the Biden campaign rejecting the endorsement, but... well... they couldn't have rejected the endorsement without an endorsement to reject. Here's one of the few that didn't focus on that particular slant: https://gazette.com/opinion/editorial-a-racists-endorsement-of-biden-comes-as-no-surprise/article_4058411e-e6f8-11ea-a8d2-633192d81b82.html
I’m disappointed to see your turning this into an attempt to attack Democrats, or leftists or socialists or whatever term you want to use to denigrate nearly half of the population. The point to be made here is that antisemitism is bipartisan or, perhaps more accurately, nonpartisan. Generalizing and stereotyping are easy traps to fall into, even for the best of journalists; but they are tools used by the ignorant and I think it’s beneath you to apply them to this important discussion. Tlaib deserved to be censured and she doesn’t represent me nor my values and opinions any more than Trump or the Freedom Caucus represent your perspectives on a dozen issues. This article, mainly the manner in which it’s presented, does not foster the kind of dialogue between and among the sensible moderates on the left and right, which is what you have said you are trying to do. Please don’t lapse into the trough that people like George Will inhabit, the one in which brilliant and articulate scholars and journalists spend so much time disparaging their “enemies” that their wisdom is diminished by their audience declining to include only those who are already in agreement with them.
> The point to be made here is that antisemitism is bipartisan or, perhaps more accurately, nonpartisan.
That's not the point being made here at all. The point is that it is *not* a "both sides" problem, and that it looks very, very different on the Left, where it is mainstream and often treated as respectable, and on the Right, where it barely exists and those who endorse it quickly find themselves marginalized.
This article grew out of a series of conversations I had with smart, interesting, reasonable left-of-center friends who insisted that antisemitism is almost the exclusive domain of the right. ... There's a reason that I started this off with bullets of Democrats and others on the left sounding the alarm on this phenomenon. There's a reason I referred to the target audience as "friends." And a reason that I noted that I do vote Democratic with some regularity. Since the millennium began, I've voted for both Republicans at the presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial levels. I really am a swing voter. But denial of left-wing antisemitism and failure to recognize the ideological sources is a deadly, deadly problem, and it has metastasized over the past two months. As I noted several times, I neither deny nor minimize the danger of right-wing antisemitism. But at this moment in history, thankfully, they tend to be powerless weirdos, not potent forces in society. The more dangerous agglomeration is the one whose very existence gets denied.
Dec 11, 2023·edited Dec 11, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
There really isn't "left wing anti-semitism", at least not in the way you bandy it about.
There is a lot of true anti-semitism among non-whites, whether amongst black race hustlers or amongst the Arab immigrants that the west has mass imported to its detriment.
But most of what you see amongst UMC and elite white people at Harvard, etc is simply the same old anti-whiteness woke ideology that's been around for some time. These people aren't "antisematic". They are fiercely "anti-racist". Jews simply got moved from the "oppressed" category to the "oppressor" category. This shouldn't come as a shock, Jews are visibly white and incredibly rich (privileged). It was only a matter of time before anti-whiteness got applied to Jews.
True learning on the part of Jews would involve a recognition that the ideology is the problem, not the fact that Jews are recently waking up to the problem that they might be on the wrong side of that hateful ideology. If all that comes of this is an effort to leave the ideology intact while getting Jews back inside the big tent it will not represent progress.
Dec 15, 2023·edited Dec 15, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
I consider the woke to be fellow travelers of the antisemites. That is, they present themselves as anti-Israel rather than anti-Jew, and believe that makes a difference. But the reality is that it doesn’t. They have allied themselves with evil.
As others here have noted (as do I), "left" and "right" are highly flawed descriptors. I am convinced that, as is so often the case, generalized hateful philosophies tend to find a special place for Jews. Nazism was generalized eugenics in action, but Jews acquired a special place in their pantheon of hatreds. Jews, by the way, are not all "white," as you you suggest. Most Israelis are of Middle Eastern descent and "white" only if Arabs are also "white." Not to mention Ethiopian Jews, etc. I would argue that the most effective way to instill learning on these topics among Jews is first to demonstrate the effects it has on them, personally--and from there work on an understanding of the problem of racial essentialism in general. It's usually easier to make someone aware of a danger when THEY are the targets, rather than someone else. Shades of Martin Niemoller.
"generalized hateful philosophies tend to find a special place for Jews"
Middle man and other minority groups that are either especially successful or especially unsuccessful have always been a target in every society. I could list a dozen others that have played the same role as the Jews in other times and places.
You don't even need a philosophy. You just need a bad harvest.
"Jews, by the way, are not all "white," as you you suggest."
But the Jews everyone cares about, the ones that are in the west and are super successful and make up a huge chunk of the billionaire class, are white.
"Nazism was generalized eugenics in action"
Everyone in the Second World War was a raving eugenicist. You think Winston Churchill or the British empire had views on race and eugenics fundamentally different than Hitler?
Literally the only major participant in WWII that believed in total genetic equality of peoples and races was Joseph Stalin. It didn't do much to stop the killing, nor protect the Jews.
Anyway, this is a digression.
Philosophies and governments and movements have goals. When they fail to meet those goals they need scapegoats. As Hitler once said, "if the Jews didn't exist, we'd have to invent them."
What we might call "wokeness" has a lot of goals, most completely unachievable even in concept, and with essentially no track record of making things better for anyone. So they need scapegoats. They've been plowing through scapegoats with the fire of a thousand suns. Eventually, Jews were going to be one of those scapegoats.
I agree with you that getting someone afraid for their own welfare is the best way to galvanize action, but if we want that action to be productive we need them to understand the evil nature of the philosophy and how the revolution inevitably devours its own children. A lot of Jews gave wokeness a pass because it claimed to speak for the oppressed and they saw themselves as oppressed.
Indeed! In the 1980s, I did work in and on Sub-Saharan Africa. Lebanese, Indian, and Pakistani merchants were the Jews of that region. Nigeria planned a currency changeover in December 1983 that was quite brilliantly constructed to wipe out those merchants, but not Nigerians—who had extended family networks to handle the logistics of swapping large quantities of old bills for new. (The foreign merchants also kept stores of Nigerian cash in bank vaults in neighboring countries—which was, in fact, illegal to do.) And yes, practically everyone was a eugenicist—except the Catholic Church and one convert to Catholicism in particular: G.K.Chesterton (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/blessed-chesterton). I agree with your final paragraph. The task is to crawl, walk, and run with these ideas, in that sequence.
Unfortunately, Joe, nearly half the population is implicated, to varying degrees, in each party. It violates individualism that you be implicated by your representatives, or I by mine, but (a) to a degree this follows from democracy, and (b) collective guilt is increasingly the tenor of our times, in both parties.
I may add that specific blame must attach to the meaning-creating institutions—the academy, the media; and with trivial exceptions they are Democratic.
“ It violates individualism that you be implicated by your representatives, or I by mine”
No, it does not violate individualism if *after* knowing that they are contributing to evil you continue to vote for and fund said representatives. [yes, of course ex ante, what you say is true.]
The “lesser of two evils” calculus changes completely when one side is allied with and actively changes policies to appease those who cheer on and support terrorists (Hamas) who seek the extinction of the Jewish state, which is where the Democrat Party in the U.S. today is.
Alas, in this fallen world, whichever representative you vote for, if elected, will contribute to evil, and most do so even if not elected. The question is which and how much—and abstention has its own moral problems. One side contains people who support Hamas, the other contains (a smaller proportion of) people who are actual heil-Hitlering Nazis.
When you’re as critical of the bad actors on your own side of the aisle as of those on the other, your moral condemnation of the voters may carry more weight.
Respectfully sir, the bad actors on the right HAVE. NO. POLITICAL. POWER.
The bad actors on the left have quite a bit.
So your claims of moral equivalence don’t hold up. See, unlike leftists, I have not in the past criticized leftist politicians as wrong simply for the sin of having terrorist sympathizers clearly part of their coalition. But I most certainly condemn them now for political actions designed to appease that faction, now that they are taking those actions.
As evidenced by Schumer’s recent speech on the Senate floor telling the Israeli people they’d better have a new election and they’d better vote out Netanyahu or there will be consequences from the U.S.
As evidenced by the disgraceful decision by the Biden administration this past week to abstain in the most recent U.N. resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza without tying it to the release of all hostages.
Later edit: before anything else: your heart is obviously in the right place, and your head is (if I am right) very nearly in the right place. Welcome, Mr. G. It’s an honor to know you.
First , I never said anything about, or entailing, equivalence. That there is fault on both sides doesn’t mean that there is equal fault on both sides.
Hamas-lovers on the left are not in power either; but they are influential, which is plenty bad enough. Do you really contend that Steve King and Nick Fuentes are “Ye” and all their like together are uninfluential? Less influential than the Hamas-lovers of the left; but still influential.
Respectfully, I don’t know who Steve King is, and I only heard of Nick Fuentes for the first time last week.
I’m not trying to quibble about the existence of fringe “influencers” on the right.
But I reject the assertion that they have power in government. Or at least power with GOP pols even remotely detectable compared to the levels we are seeing very clearly now in the Dem party’s actions.
And if the question is back solely to whether anyone on the right has any power whatsoever at the national level in terms of explicitly antisemitic actions, I will actually state that it is zero, yes. If you disagree with this assertion, please provide even a single counterexample. I’ll even give you half credit for U.S. state-level examples
Dec 10, 2023·edited Dec 10, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
This article is simply setting the record straight. It factually reports the reality and disparity of the size, influence, and danger regardless of side. I would suggest better to inform those who might find this biased than to miss the signs and not address the problem where it really needs to be addressed before it erupts full scale.
Dec 11, 2023·edited Dec 11, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
Anti-semitism on the Left is its own thing. It is built into woke ideology, a feature, not a bug. Theories around intersectionality that dominates everything DEI demands it. The binary view of the world as oppressor vs. oppressed makes it inevitable. It follows an entirely immoral logic. Oppressors are ipso facto evil and can do no good, the oppressed good, and can do no evil. All whites are racist, cannot be otherwise, and blacks cannot be racist, no matter how racist they are. Jews are hit with a double whammy, being both Jewish and now designated 'white' or 'white adjacent' or 'hyper-white'. This means the problem on the left is NOT just some fringe members who happen to hold conspiracy theories about Jewish control of finance or whatnot. That is on the right. No. The whole of what leftism has become has been shown up to be morally bankrupt by everything we see. The Democrats are captured by this moral rot. It would be there with or without the Jews.
You rest a lot on an implicit definition of "bipartisan" or "nonpartisan." What we are probably all comfortaby saying (and with which Graboyes agrees) is that examples of antisemitism can be found among many, perhaps even all, political parties and political and social ideologies. So if that's all you mean by "bipartisan" (or "nonpartisan") then you actually have no substative disagreement with the author.
However, one suspects this is *not* what you want to mean by those words. It sounds like what you want those words to mean is that antisemitism is found *equally* among all ideologies, or at least is not better nourished by one ideology over another.
But there the author, it seems, disagrees with you. He is making the argument that at least the most potent forms of antisemitism are found to a greater degree on the political left, and are better nourished by the ideologies of the political left. And he has laid out the argument for why he thinks so, including assorted references to observable facts.
If you want to make your side of the case, it would be reasonable to, first, be clear about what you mean: you cannot substitute "anti-semitism is not correlated with ideology" for "there are anti-semites among all ideologies," because the former does not logically follow from the latter. All people sometimes eat too much -- it does not follow that we are all equally overweight. All universities contain some really poor and some really outstanding students -- it does not follow that all university student bodies are equally competent (or incompetent). Some journalists are honest -- it does not follow that all or most are. And so on.
To fail to make this distinction clear leaves you open to the credible accusation that you are purposefully obfuscating the issue -- that you *want* to imply that provided at least one anti-semite can be found anywhere, it follows that they are equally everywhere, and there is no point to discussing whether some communities are more tolerant, or more nurturing, of this toxin than others. This would be classic whataboutism.
But secondly, I would suggest that to disagree substantively with the author's point, you would need to either adduce the same number and distribution of examples of antisemitism among the standard conservative ideologies, or at least make a rational argument for why leftist ideologies, which tend to judge people as members of a class first, and individuals second, would not naturally be more prone to capture by class, race, sex, religious et cetera prejudice than more conservative (or libertarian, or classical liberal) ideologies that stress judgment as an individual first.
Indeed, it doesn't really seem that far a step from a culture that thinks it's OK to say "Police as a class are unfair and violent towards blacks, " or "white as a class exert unearned privilege not available to blacks or browns as a class" to say "Jews as a class are untermenschen." All class judgments are rather of a kind, and it's not hard for me to see that people who are credulous about sweeping class judgments are naturally less resistant to mistaken or malignant class judgments.
Dec 10, 2023·edited Dec 10, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
I posted this comment a day or so ago in the WSJ in response to "The True Face of the Anti-Israel Movement:"
Part of the problem is that so much focus of Antisemitism has been on the comparatively small number of White Supremacists, while ignoring the comparatively gargantuan number of Islamist and Leftist Antisemites. Not only in numbers but also money pouring in. White Supremacist groups rich??? Billions going to Islamists and hundreds of millions going to the Left.
Islamist for religious reasons. Leftists for twisted Marxist oppressor/oppressed/colonialist reasons to gain power.
The ADL since Obama's Jonathon Greenblatt took over has been complicit in this misdirection.
Your article is exceptionally complete and well sourced. Thank you. Will be sharing.
While I agree that greater power is the through line of leftist striving, and no other item is permanently in their platform, nevertheless the individual leftist only rarely experiences himself as seeking power. He truly believes in either the cause of the moment—Gaia! Women! Antiracism!—or something more general and utopian (the revolution, the movement), or sometimes both. He believes. Never doubt it.
But belief that approaches religious veneration in its intensity and weight is so strongly correlated with a desire for absolute authority that they are in practice nearly synonymous: if you and I disagree about whether algebra should be taught in the 7th or 8th grade, there are many ways in which we can compromise over this issue, or even just live with each other. We are each unlikely to insist on having absolute power to dictate his beliefs to the other. We might easily be friends who just agree to disagree -- the issue is simply not that important.
But if you and I disagree over whether the vial of antidote to the venom of the snake that just bit us both (or more potently both our only sons) contains enough antidote for both or just one of us (or them), then compromise is likely to be impossible, the struggle as bitter as it can be, and we are likely to throw out any Marquess of Queensberry fiddle-faddle about fighting fair or giving the other guy a chance. We will indeed avidly seek unlimited authority to impose our will on each other. When the issue is existential, the drive for power has no a priori limit.
Of course, one can readily ponder the chicken-and-egg problem: among quasi-religious fanatics whose drive for unlimited power is unlimited, did the fanatical belief spur the desire for power (as in my example above), or are we talking about people who are driven by interior demons or inherent character deficits to seek unlimited power, who find their drives can only be socially acceptable (and maybe even acceptable to interior pangs of conscience) if coupled to a Life Or Death Angels Versus Devils struggle?
Of course I'd personally like to believe the former, as it says much nicer things about us as a species, but I can't help but wonder whether a coolly-rational and uninvolved Vulcan xenobiologist, studying the future fossil record of H. sapiens, might rate as quite plausible the hypothesis that our species just has a wired-in urge to push others around, and we specialize in rationalizing these fratricidal urges by readily adopting Manichean viewponts, indeed inventing them with singular creativity and gusto if reality is so uncooperative as to leave them naturally scarce.
Hmm, a good point. I should probably have chosen a less extreme example, such as the dviniity of Jesus Christ, Emacs v. vim, who should rule Arrakis, and whether the boy Arthur should be king...
The first of my post-October 7 essays dealt with the motivations behind such ideologies. https://graboyes.substack.com/p/intellectual-tyrants-beget-true-believers. Perhaps the most relevant quote from the book discussed in the essay is this: "“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.” Not so much a quest for power as it is a sad quest for some tangible reason to wake up each morning and breathe.
Interesting. But the regularity Mr. Seeker points to, and not he alone by any means, still requires explanation. My phrasing is, as above, “greater power is the through line of leftist striving.”
(There is an exception: the voluntary commune movement, notably the kibutzim. But over time they are unstable.)
One of the first libertarians I met, around 1981, said to me one day that he found no incompatibility between libertarianism and socialism. We were intrigued and asked him to elaborate. He said, "You can go have your socialist community, and I'm fine with it as long as you don't make me pay for it or live in it." The kibbutz--at least in theory--is probably the closest thing on earth to what he meant.
I agree strongly with half your claim, and disagree strongly with the other half.
I agree that the individual leftist believes in the cause, and might believe in something more general and even utopian.
I disagree that most individuals leftist don't believe in the "to gain power" point. Above and beyond the fact that leftists in general believe in using the monopoly violence power of government to achieve the ends they consider just, the modern young leftist woke/DEI/... ideologue believes in the oppressor/oppressed theory and that the oppressed are justified in any action they take to overcome the oppressor.
Being a friend of the "oppressed", they consider it not just moral, not just something preferable they should use their free speech rights to try to influence, but actually their *duty* to use the power of government to deliver their brand of social justice.
Young DEI believer leftists are very different from older "liberals". To deny that they have been taught and believe that it is both proper and necessary to use government as the means to their righteous ends is to not understand what they are about at all.
While I belong to a fairly liberal congregation (Friends) with ties to Ramallah Friends School, I know a great many evangelicals. My sense is virtually all of their support for Jews is not "Red Heifer", nor "Book of Revelations", but rather something to do with the Holocaust (and in my time, 1972 Munich). The most common reason I've heard is that it seems right for Israel to exist as a country. A few introduce politics, saying having a democracy in the middle east is good. I know of very few kooks about Israel. I am sure they exist, but in very small and scattered numbers.
Also, I've heard the term "horseshoe theory" used to describe the common areas of agreement between the far right and far left.
I also note when voicing concern about pro-Hamas support, progressives quickly say "the Squad" are mere backbenchers, with no influence. I'd say they have far more influence than the five groups you listed (two I didn't recognize).
On mature consideration, the congressional testimony of then-Harvard-president Christine Gay recur to me: she had no objection to acknowledging the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish country, so long as she omitted the word “Jewish.” You aren’t there, are you?
I’ve heard that in the Middle East there is a saying: Jews on Saturday and Christians on Sunday. We (both confessions) face very trying times ahead, I believe, and need to look to God for help and guidance more than ever before!
We have a saying: you can save more people with God’s help and guidance and a Merkava tank than you can with God’s help and guidance alone. He helps those who help themselves.
The version I heard is a bit more broad: "God will never do anything for you that you are capable of doing for yourself. Do everything you can, and when that's not enough he will make up the difference."
Arab Christians traditionally refuse to let their Moslem counterparts out-Jew-hate (or out-Israel-hate) them, which famously lead Ted Cruz into an awkward public contretemps, notwithstanding that Israel is the only safe place for them in the Middle East.
I appreciate your clarity of research and writing, and the logical conclusions you reach. The actions of a large segment of the liberal political class, in order to establish a longer term grip on power, have been playing a deadly game of divide constituents into racial classes, and present absurd talking points to pit American against American, with a goal of maintaining their electoral majority. This gross quest for power has consequences. The current wave of antisemitism is but one. Walking blindly into regional wars is another. And flying to Taiwan in order to poke China in the eye, while squandering our Treasury on useless DoD programs associated with DEI, shows how stupidity and education are not mutually exclusive. You sir are providing leadership with your writing. Our political and elite class are not providing leadership.
A beautifully written and devastating indictment of the left showing its true colors. That this degree if antisemitism still exists in this country is very dismaying. As with racism, I do not believe that the opinions of a few elites, e.g. the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, represent those of the average American. The video of the German Vice-Chancellor was so uplifting. I shared with a German-American friend. He should be proud. If only we had someone so eloquent in the White House.
“ That this degree if antisemitism still exists in this country is very dismaying”
As someone else in this thread has indicated, I don’t believe that the word “still” is accurate here.
The largest amount and the driving force of today’s leftist antisemitism is their DEI/woke/CRT/intersectionality… oppressor/oppressed ideology. The polls confirm that it is overwhelmingly the young leftists who are doing this “Back Hamas” evil, not the older ones, who generally remain appalled at Hamas. Seek out the October and December Harvard-Harris polls if you want to see the details yourself.
I have known progressives who came of age in the 1930s when eugenics were in vogue and the National Socialists weren't just a curiosity but a state that progressives could get behind until the next decade when in subsequent years the National Socialists somehow became "associated" with the so-called "right". I think William Shirer would have disputed that theme. The allies of the National Socialists under the Grand Mufti of Palestine stayed on side and one could safely say that of the 1.9 billion Muslims on the planet today, more than a few still share their "Judenhass" which is a modern spin on the preceding 1300 years since Mohammod set the same tone. The left of today encompasses the entirety of the institutions "marched through", a dominance in more than post Christian, post modern nihilist cultural Marxism. The seemingly warm and forgiving relationship between the progressives and Islam is the more curious development given the progressives normal revulsion to the western historical legacy of Christian theocracy (of which I share). Tragically, though not one of moral relativism, this ugly war is in actuality a war of two theocracies.
Israel is no theocracy. It’s a social-democratic parliamentary democracy upon a European plan. It has an official religion—but then, so does England, which is no theocracy.
I've had occasion to note this in the past and suggested that whomever I'm speaking to count the number of national flags that have crosses, crescents, etc. Funny that the UK theocracy has a Hindu prime minister--or that the Israeli theocracy has a host of Arabs in high positions, as well.
Something of an inversion of Niemoller’s quote. In America the Left through academia and the Democrats went after Evangelicals with a gusto which birthed their support for Republicans. Catholics finally responded in 2016 when the abortion issue swayed many. Now the Left has no more use for Jewish Democrats with the rise of the Nones and other victim classes to replace them. The ride on the back of the tiger appears to be ending. I just hope we don’t see another NeoCon moment for the RNC out of all this.
Back in the forties most of the American Evangelical support for the creation of Israel did in fact come from a desire to help usher in the end times. Many of the early zionists supported them in this view as they saw the advantages of it. I have to admit immediately following two wars to end all wars the end of time was probably looking pretty promising.
Today’s evangelicals support Jews generally because there is a sense of shared values and culture, and because they are called to love others. Evangelicals support Israel because of God’s promise to Abram that He will bless those who blessed his descendants and curse those who curse them. There is a very strong feeling that supporting Israel means continued blessings from God and abandoning Israel would mean the withdrawal of his blessings.
Second question: is it right to label those of us who are sympathetic towards Palestinians, who are experiencing a genocide, as antisemitic when Palestinians themselves are semites?
Third question: who awarded Jews a copyright on semitism?
1) Jews are whatever color racist taxonomists wish them to be at any given moment. Recently (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/entomology-as-public-policy) I discussed the past century’s machinations over this question. Various taxonomists considered Jews to be “white,” “Negro,” “something other than white,” “white-adjacent,” “hyper-white,” or whichever other terms allowed said racist taxonomists to most easily screw us over.
(2) By no definition other than that of incendiary propaganda are Palestinians experiencing a genocide. One can surely criticize many aspects of Israel’s interactions with Palestinians, but the use of “genocide” is simply rank demagoguery. Hamas, on the other hand, has never hidden the fact that its central ambition is, in fact, the murder of every Jew on earth—which actually is “genocidal.” That goal has been in Hamas’s charter since the group was founded, and they’ve never changed that document. And they specifically refer to “Jews,” and not to “Israelis” or “Zionists”—all three of which have different words in Arabic.
(3) The “copyright” on applying the word “antisemitic” to Jews and Jews alone belongs to the hate-filled bigot who invented the word and the Nazis who reiterated and clarified the point during their alliance with Arab groups before and during WWII. The original term in German was “Judenhass”—“Jew-hatred.” At a time when eugenicists were slathering scientific-sounding names over garbage ideas, a couple of German writers decided that “Judenhass” was a bit too crass for some ears, so they adopted the “scientific-sounding” neologism “antisemitism” as a passive-aggressive euphemism for precisely the same concept. The word is most closely associated with journalist/politician Wilhelm Marr, who is most responsible for popularizing the term in his book in 1879. Over the years, Arabs and others wondered whether the term applied to Jews alone or to Semitic peoples in general. They were repeatedly assured that it referred only to Jews. As part of the clarification process, the German government in 1936 declared that the antisemitic Nuremberg race laws applied only to Jews, and absolutely not to Arabs—about whom Hitler expressed his admiration. From the initial use of the word through the Nazi regime, it was made clear time and again that the word referred only to Jews. That didn’t stop some disingenuous commenters to throw some motte-and-bailey ambiguity at any criticism of antisemitism—the dishonest question “How can Arabs be antisemitic when they’re semites.”
Anyone who questions Jewish behavior is denounced as an antisemite. Yes, the banality of antisemitism. Personally I don't categorize myself as such, given I don't have sufficient time in my busy schedule to devote to hating an entire group of people. Besides, not all Jews are bad. In fact, my first mentor was Michael Savage. I also have the latter work of Phil Roth on muh bookshelf. And every year around this time of the year I listen to Phil Spectors phenomenal Christmas album. Merry Christmas! 🎅
Dec 19, 2023·edited Dec 19, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes
Not for the reasons he mocks; but he manifestly is.
(1) Who but a racist cares if Jews are white, and who but an antisemite pretends to ignorance that some are and some aren’t?
(2) Only antisemites pretend to believe (or wonder whether) the Palestinians are experiencing genocide while their numbers rapidly increase.
(3) Only an antisemite “doesn’t know” (since Google will explain) that “antisemitism” is a euphemism for political Jew-hatred concocted by a self-described antisemite—Wilhelm Marr.
Good luck with that, Mr. Graboyes.
The turn hasn’t been sharp, of course. It takes a long time to move a culture. The ability to deny it with any integrity whatever has been lost sharply. So much the worse, in the main, for integrity.
It usually takes a long time to move a culture. Once in a while, something happens that does cause an abrupt change. One example is the anti-war sentiment that was strong in the US during the early years of WWII--until Pearl Harbor. Once that happened, things did change. It may be that the events this fall will spark a similar change, and may do a lot to discredit the far left in the eyes of most Americans (and possibly many Europeans). I have been wondering for some years how long the Democrats can keep their coalition together. Effectively kicking out Jews is going to cost them a lot financially. Some feminists and lesbians are upset over the transgender craze, especially its effect on women's sports. I think we may see more of this.
One minor quibble: I would not count Bari Weiss as a conservative voice (yet, anyway). She seems to be a traditional liberal who has finally learned what Ronald Reagan meant when he said "I didn't leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me." She is one liberal writer that I often read. along with Joel Kotkin, Matt Taibbi, and a few others.
The major Democratic Jewish donors (I assume some exceptions) have neither acted nor spoken like they feel pushed out.
Being Jewish cover for Jew-hatred has always been prestigious and usually profitable in the diaspora (and in occupied Eretz Israel before the State)—and, alas, there has never been a shortage of volunteers.
I agree that most Jewish Dems and Leftists will not abandon the Democrat party. They are, for the most part, marginally Jewish and won't abandon the other political "truths" they live by. And, the Republicans "are evil."
I’m not sure that most Jews won’t be thrown out of the left. But the big donors won’t.
Jews on the left just might be willing to act as "Dhimmi" to the Left and/or the Islamists.
I'm not using this as an insult, just a way to illustrate.
And it's an excellent and appropriate illustration.
One never knows. Reagan got 39% of the Jewish vote vs 45% for Carter. British Jews were heavily Labour till Corbyn. Then, the Tories got 67%. We live in strange times.
> One example is the anti-war sentiment that was strong in the US during the early years of WWII--until Pearl Harbor.
Well, memories of WWI weren't particularly distant. A lot of Americans had been anti-war then too, wanting to keep our country out of what was commonly seen as an exclusively European issue. They elected Woodrow Wilson on campaign promises to do exactly that, only to have him turn around and get us knee-deep in the war he lied about keeping us out of, with direct commitments of American troops to the front lines to "make the world safe for democracy." A lot of people didn't like how that turned out and didn't want to see it happen again.
That much is pure, indisputable fact. This next bit is conjecture; I've seen arguments for it that are at least somewhat persuasive, but I wouldn't say I believe it entirely. It's an interesting thing to think about, though: did American involvement in WWI bring about WWII?
If it hadn't been for us tipping the scales, the argument goes, the war, which was getting bogged down in a bloody stalemate, would have ground to a halt and ended exactly that way. With no clear victory of the Entente over the Triple Alliance, there would have been no Treaty of Versailles. Without that treaty's ruinous reparations imposed upon Germany, there would have been no Weimar hyperinflation, no rise of the Nazi Party to power as a reaction to it, and no war of conquest by the Nazis.
There's no good way to test a theory like that, but it at least makes you think, doesn't it?
Thank you for this interesting statement. The last three paragraphs are indeed conjecture but the Treaty of Versailles certainly was bad for Germany and for the winning side, either.
And some there knew it at the time. Unfortunately, in 1856, a preacher's wife in Virginia gave birth to Woodrow Wilson.
I've long thought that. An entire century was ransacked because the grandchildren of one woman (Victoria) were prone to ugly squabbles and had large armies to throw at their unruly relatives.
The final argument against royalism.
Paradoxically, the world might have been better off with a Hohenzollern on the throne instead of the doddering President Hindenburg. But yes, it's a good argument against royalism.
I agree on Bari Weiss, and it's only a formatting error that made it look otherwise. That was not supposed to be a bullet--only an introduction to the bullets below. Somehow, I accidentally turned it into a bullet. Her suggestion to look outside one's bubble. I have now fixed that error.
Well, perhaps we are all quibbling over terms, but the 2024 Bari Weiss, if indeed she is not fully a “conservative”, is no longer a liberal. Well, since ”liberal” can mean different things to different people, to remove any more doubt, she is no longer left of center.
Most likely. If you can keep people guessing where you lie on the spectrum, you’re ahead of the curve in my book. :)
Wow, Dr. Graboyes. Do you not sleep?
I'm reminded of something written by the great Lewis Thomas many years ago (in a different context):
"If I were sixteen or seventeen years old and had to listen to that, or read things like that, I would want to give up listening and reading. I would begin thinking up new kinds of sounds, different from any music heard before, and I would be twisting and turning to rid myself of human language."
I'm actually the world's best sleeper. :) I'm just pretty efficient once I wake up. I will have to chase down that quote. (Actually, I just found it.) My thinking on healthcare and on life were profoundly influenced by my reading of THE FRAGILE SPECIES 30 years or so ago.
Alas, that experiment has been tried, for over sixty years now. In the main it has contributed to the problem by popularizing the woke (for lack of a better word) view of the world.
> The Anti-Defamation League reported that: “Fringe-Left Groups Express Support for Hamas’s Invasion and Brutal Attacks in Israel,”
The more this happens, the less appropriate the adjective "fringe" looks in that sentence.
> In 2018, a shooter invaded the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people and wounding 6, and he appears to have been influenced by alt-right publications produced by groups like those described in the previous section.
Can we please not include stuff like this on the Right side of the ledger? There's a reason they called themselves "alt-right," and it's because the weren't the Right and they knew full well the Right wouldn't have them, so they tried to set up an alternative version thereof.
The term "alt-right" was coined by white supremacist Richard Spencer to describe the way he and a group of like-minded individuals felt they had found a new home in conservative politics now that the media assured them that then-Presidential nominee Donald Trump was "one of us." A few years later, once Trump had shown himself to be not much of a racist at all, an embarrassed Spencer claimed, in a transparent attempt to save face and not admit he'd been deceived by media slanders of Trump, that Trump had "betrayed" white supremacist principles, and that his followers shouldn't vote for his reelection, endorsing Joe Biden instead. Amusingly enough, that was pretty much the precise moment when the mainstream media stopped using the term "alt-right," now that it was no longer politically useful to them.
I agree. In the article, I alluded to your "Can we please not include stuff like this on the Right side of the ledger?" bit when I noted that far-right and far-left rather blend together in their incoherence.
When I was a high school student my teacher said that instead of thinking of the right and left as two poles like hands stretched out think of them as hands close together over one’s head. They are far apart if you travel down the arms but the fingers are in fact close.
Many different possible geometries--all of which miss certain subtleties.
Well, in fairness I feel like at the original time of those appellations (the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution), they were pretty clearly distinct.
If you sat on the left, you were a populist, communist, anarchist, democrat -- someone who believed in direct rule by The People, which is pretty much everyone with a pulse. You hated kings, dictators, bishops, and the church generally. If you sat on the right, you were a monarchist, supporter of the Strong Man Who Could Make The Trains Run On Time, thought dictators had their uses and everyone ought to know his place. You despised the mob and anarchy, prized settled law and tradition, and thought according every man's vote equal weight was idiotic.
It seems to me modern re-interpretations of those terms that have muddled them up, in part because it turns out to be impossible to run anything larger than a family or farm on purely communitarian principles -- the most populist of ideologies apparently always still need a Strong Man to get stuff done -- and in part because of the evaporation of the influence of Christianity (or Judaism), with its notions of a settled social heirarchy being a good thing, a reflection of the heavenly order -- which means even the most conservative of ideologues always claim to be acting according to the will of The People, nobody ever says I and my equestrian friends should rule because we're better than you ignorant peasants, who'd just fuck things up.
Well said if true—which I suspect but don’t know. You might want to cite sources for doubters.
After all, you have people like me going around asking opposing writers to cite sources—and being called fascists for our trouble by both the left and the alt-right.
Later edit: for reasons given by Mr. Graboyes I withdraw my suggestion.
I believe you're responding to Bob Frank here, but I'll note that I made sure that every bullet contained enough info to send a reader to the source with a simple Google search. I originally had a link for each bullet, but they caused the thing to exceed Substack's size limit. Deleting them was the only way I could make the document small enough to transmit.
Point taken. I stand corrected.
Oh ... I wasn't correcting you. I agreed with what you said. I was just noting that dropping the links was not my preference, but that I went through every link to make sure that anyone can verify anything there.
You might consider posting an index of your sources referring to the pertinent sections of your original post.
Could you elaborate? Write me at rfg.counterpoint@gmail.com if you like.
> and being called fascists for our trouble by both the left and the alt-right.
Further support for my thesis that they're the same thing. The natural home of white supremacy has always been on the Left.
But if you want sources for the claim, Googling "Richard Spencer endorsed Joe Biden" brings up plenty of results. Mainstream media bias being what it is, virtually all of the articles decided to make the story about the Biden campaign rejecting the endorsement, but... well... they couldn't have rejected the endorsement without an endorsement to reject. Here's one of the few that didn't focus on that particular slant: https://gazette.com/opinion/editorial-a-racists-endorsement-of-biden-comes-as-no-surprise/article_4058411e-e6f8-11ea-a8d2-633192d81b82.html
Thank you, Mr. Frank.
Add to it that "right" and "left" originally was more of a way of demarcating various flavors of socialists.
I’m disappointed to see your turning this into an attempt to attack Democrats, or leftists or socialists or whatever term you want to use to denigrate nearly half of the population. The point to be made here is that antisemitism is bipartisan or, perhaps more accurately, nonpartisan. Generalizing and stereotyping are easy traps to fall into, even for the best of journalists; but they are tools used by the ignorant and I think it’s beneath you to apply them to this important discussion. Tlaib deserved to be censured and she doesn’t represent me nor my values and opinions any more than Trump or the Freedom Caucus represent your perspectives on a dozen issues. This article, mainly the manner in which it’s presented, does not foster the kind of dialogue between and among the sensible moderates on the left and right, which is what you have said you are trying to do. Please don’t lapse into the trough that people like George Will inhabit, the one in which brilliant and articulate scholars and journalists spend so much time disparaging their “enemies” that their wisdom is diminished by their audience declining to include only those who are already in agreement with them.
> The point to be made here is that antisemitism is bipartisan or, perhaps more accurately, nonpartisan.
That's not the point being made here at all. The point is that it is *not* a "both sides" problem, and that it looks very, very different on the Left, where it is mainstream and often treated as respectable, and on the Right, where it barely exists and those who endorse it quickly find themselves marginalized.
This article grew out of a series of conversations I had with smart, interesting, reasonable left-of-center friends who insisted that antisemitism is almost the exclusive domain of the right. ... There's a reason that I started this off with bullets of Democrats and others on the left sounding the alarm on this phenomenon. There's a reason I referred to the target audience as "friends." And a reason that I noted that I do vote Democratic with some regularity. Since the millennium began, I've voted for both Republicans at the presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial levels. I really am a swing voter. But denial of left-wing antisemitism and failure to recognize the ideological sources is a deadly, deadly problem, and it has metastasized over the past two months. As I noted several times, I neither deny nor minimize the danger of right-wing antisemitism. But at this moment in history, thankfully, they tend to be powerless weirdos, not potent forces in society. The more dangerous agglomeration is the one whose very existence gets denied.
There really isn't "left wing anti-semitism", at least not in the way you bandy it about.
There is a lot of true anti-semitism among non-whites, whether amongst black race hustlers or amongst the Arab immigrants that the west has mass imported to its detriment.
But most of what you see amongst UMC and elite white people at Harvard, etc is simply the same old anti-whiteness woke ideology that's been around for some time. These people aren't "antisematic". They are fiercely "anti-racist". Jews simply got moved from the "oppressed" category to the "oppressor" category. This shouldn't come as a shock, Jews are visibly white and incredibly rich (privileged). It was only a matter of time before anti-whiteness got applied to Jews.
True learning on the part of Jews would involve a recognition that the ideology is the problem, not the fact that Jews are recently waking up to the problem that they might be on the wrong side of that hateful ideology. If all that comes of this is an effort to leave the ideology intact while getting Jews back inside the big tent it will not represent progress.
...woke ideology is exclusively on the left.
I consider the woke to be fellow travelers of the antisemites. That is, they present themselves as anti-Israel rather than anti-Jew, and believe that makes a difference. But the reality is that it doesn’t. They have allied themselves with evil.
As others here have noted (as do I), "left" and "right" are highly flawed descriptors. I am convinced that, as is so often the case, generalized hateful philosophies tend to find a special place for Jews. Nazism was generalized eugenics in action, but Jews acquired a special place in their pantheon of hatreds. Jews, by the way, are not all "white," as you you suggest. Most Israelis are of Middle Eastern descent and "white" only if Arabs are also "white." Not to mention Ethiopian Jews, etc. I would argue that the most effective way to instill learning on these topics among Jews is first to demonstrate the effects it has on them, personally--and from there work on an understanding of the problem of racial essentialism in general. It's usually easier to make someone aware of a danger when THEY are the targets, rather than someone else. Shades of Martin Niemoller.
"generalized hateful philosophies tend to find a special place for Jews"
Middle man and other minority groups that are either especially successful or especially unsuccessful have always been a target in every society. I could list a dozen others that have played the same role as the Jews in other times and places.
You don't even need a philosophy. You just need a bad harvest.
"Jews, by the way, are not all "white," as you you suggest."
But the Jews everyone cares about, the ones that are in the west and are super successful and make up a huge chunk of the billionaire class, are white.
"Nazism was generalized eugenics in action"
Everyone in the Second World War was a raving eugenicist. You think Winston Churchill or the British empire had views on race and eugenics fundamentally different than Hitler?
Literally the only major participant in WWII that believed in total genetic equality of peoples and races was Joseph Stalin. It didn't do much to stop the killing, nor protect the Jews.
Anyway, this is a digression.
Philosophies and governments and movements have goals. When they fail to meet those goals they need scapegoats. As Hitler once said, "if the Jews didn't exist, we'd have to invent them."
What we might call "wokeness" has a lot of goals, most completely unachievable even in concept, and with essentially no track record of making things better for anyone. So they need scapegoats. They've been plowing through scapegoats with the fire of a thousand suns. Eventually, Jews were going to be one of those scapegoats.
I agree with you that getting someone afraid for their own welfare is the best way to galvanize action, but if we want that action to be productive we need them to understand the evil nature of the philosophy and how the revolution inevitably devours its own children. A lot of Jews gave wokeness a pass because it claimed to speak for the oppressed and they saw themselves as oppressed.
Indeed! In the 1980s, I did work in and on Sub-Saharan Africa. Lebanese, Indian, and Pakistani merchants were the Jews of that region. Nigeria planned a currency changeover in December 1983 that was quite brilliantly constructed to wipe out those merchants, but not Nigerians—who had extended family networks to handle the logistics of swapping large quantities of old bills for new. (The foreign merchants also kept stores of Nigerian cash in bank vaults in neighboring countries—which was, in fact, illegal to do.) And yes, practically everyone was a eugenicist—except the Catholic Church and one convert to Catholicism in particular: G.K.Chesterton (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/blessed-chesterton). I agree with your final paragraph. The task is to crawl, walk, and run with these ideas, in that sequence.
Unfortunately, Joe, nearly half the population is implicated, to varying degrees, in each party. It violates individualism that you be implicated by your representatives, or I by mine, but (a) to a degree this follows from democracy, and (b) collective guilt is increasingly the tenor of our times, in both parties.
I may add that specific blame must attach to the meaning-creating institutions—the academy, the media; and with trivial exceptions they are Democratic.
Thanks. This is a central point of the whole article.
“ It violates individualism that you be implicated by your representatives, or I by mine”
No, it does not violate individualism if *after* knowing that they are contributing to evil you continue to vote for and fund said representatives. [yes, of course ex ante, what you say is true.]
The “lesser of two evils” calculus changes completely when one side is allied with and actively changes policies to appease those who cheer on and support terrorists (Hamas) who seek the extinction of the Jewish state, which is where the Democrat Party in the U.S. today is.
Alas, in this fallen world, whichever representative you vote for, if elected, will contribute to evil, and most do so even if not elected. The question is which and how much—and abstention has its own moral problems. One side contains people who support Hamas, the other contains (a smaller proportion of) people who are actual heil-Hitlering Nazis.
When you’re as critical of the bad actors on your own side of the aisle as of those on the other, your moral condemnation of the voters may carry more weight.
Respectfully sir, the bad actors on the right HAVE. NO. POLITICAL. POWER.
The bad actors on the left have quite a bit.
So your claims of moral equivalence don’t hold up. See, unlike leftists, I have not in the past criticized leftist politicians as wrong simply for the sin of having terrorist sympathizers clearly part of their coalition. But I most certainly condemn them now for political actions designed to appease that faction, now that they are taking those actions.
As evidenced by Schumer’s recent speech on the Senate floor telling the Israeli people they’d better have a new election and they’d better vote out Netanyahu or there will be consequences from the U.S.
As evidenced by the disgraceful decision by the Biden administration this past week to abstain in the most recent U.N. resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza without tying it to the release of all hostages.
Later edit: before anything else: your heart is obviously in the right place, and your head is (if I am right) very nearly in the right place. Welcome, Mr. G. It’s an honor to know you.
First , I never said anything about, or entailing, equivalence. That there is fault on both sides doesn’t mean that there is equal fault on both sides.
Hamas-lovers on the left are not in power either; but they are influential, which is plenty bad enough. Do you really contend that Steve King and Nick Fuentes are “Ye” and all their like together are uninfluential? Less influential than the Hamas-lovers of the left; but still influential.
Respectfully, I don’t know who Steve King is, and I only heard of Nick Fuentes for the first time last week.
I’m not trying to quibble about the existence of fringe “influencers” on the right.
But I reject the assertion that they have power in government. Or at least power with GOP pols even remotely detectable compared to the levels we are seeing very clearly now in the Dem party’s actions.
And if the question is back solely to whether anyone on the right has any power whatsoever at the national level in terms of explicitly antisemitic actions, I will actually state that it is zero, yes. If you disagree with this assertion, please provide even a single counterexample. I’ll even give you half credit for U.S. state-level examples
P.S. There are multiple Hamas lovers in the House of Representatives, are there not?
This article is simply setting the record straight. It factually reports the reality and disparity of the size, influence, and danger regardless of side. I would suggest better to inform those who might find this biased than to miss the signs and not address the problem where it really needs to be addressed before it erupts full scale.
I agree with every well-articulated word here except “before it erupts full scale”.
It already has…
I mean there is a problem here. Don’t you see it?
Perhaps you would like to indicate to *which* problem you allude, Mr. or Ms. Anymore.
Anti-semitism on the Left is its own thing. It is built into woke ideology, a feature, not a bug. Theories around intersectionality that dominates everything DEI demands it. The binary view of the world as oppressor vs. oppressed makes it inevitable. It follows an entirely immoral logic. Oppressors are ipso facto evil and can do no good, the oppressed good, and can do no evil. All whites are racist, cannot be otherwise, and blacks cannot be racist, no matter how racist they are. Jews are hit with a double whammy, being both Jewish and now designated 'white' or 'white adjacent' or 'hyper-white'. This means the problem on the left is NOT just some fringe members who happen to hold conspiracy theories about Jewish control of finance or whatnot. That is on the right. No. The whole of what leftism has become has been shown up to be morally bankrupt by everything we see. The Democrats are captured by this moral rot. It would be there with or without the Jews.
You rest a lot on an implicit definition of "bipartisan" or "nonpartisan." What we are probably all comfortaby saying (and with which Graboyes agrees) is that examples of antisemitism can be found among many, perhaps even all, political parties and political and social ideologies. So if that's all you mean by "bipartisan" (or "nonpartisan") then you actually have no substative disagreement with the author.
However, one suspects this is *not* what you want to mean by those words. It sounds like what you want those words to mean is that antisemitism is found *equally* among all ideologies, or at least is not better nourished by one ideology over another.
But there the author, it seems, disagrees with you. He is making the argument that at least the most potent forms of antisemitism are found to a greater degree on the political left, and are better nourished by the ideologies of the political left. And he has laid out the argument for why he thinks so, including assorted references to observable facts.
If you want to make your side of the case, it would be reasonable to, first, be clear about what you mean: you cannot substitute "anti-semitism is not correlated with ideology" for "there are anti-semites among all ideologies," because the former does not logically follow from the latter. All people sometimes eat too much -- it does not follow that we are all equally overweight. All universities contain some really poor and some really outstanding students -- it does not follow that all university student bodies are equally competent (or incompetent). Some journalists are honest -- it does not follow that all or most are. And so on.
To fail to make this distinction clear leaves you open to the credible accusation that you are purposefully obfuscating the issue -- that you *want* to imply that provided at least one anti-semite can be found anywhere, it follows that they are equally everywhere, and there is no point to discussing whether some communities are more tolerant, or more nurturing, of this toxin than others. This would be classic whataboutism.
But secondly, I would suggest that to disagree substantively with the author's point, you would need to either adduce the same number and distribution of examples of antisemitism among the standard conservative ideologies, or at least make a rational argument for why leftist ideologies, which tend to judge people as members of a class first, and individuals second, would not naturally be more prone to capture by class, race, sex, religious et cetera prejudice than more conservative (or libertarian, or classical liberal) ideologies that stress judgment as an individual first.
Indeed, it doesn't really seem that far a step from a culture that thinks it's OK to say "Police as a class are unfair and violent towards blacks, " or "white as a class exert unearned privilege not available to blacks or browns as a class" to say "Jews as a class are untermenschen." All class judgments are rather of a kind, and it's not hard for me to see that people who are credulous about sweeping class judgments are naturally less resistant to mistaken or malignant class judgments.
Brilliant analysis, Carl. As always, in your calm, methodical style.
I posted this comment a day or so ago in the WSJ in response to "The True Face of the Anti-Israel Movement:"
Part of the problem is that so much focus of Antisemitism has been on the comparatively small number of White Supremacists, while ignoring the comparatively gargantuan number of Islamist and Leftist Antisemites. Not only in numbers but also money pouring in. White Supremacist groups rich??? Billions going to Islamists and hundreds of millions going to the Left.
Islamist for religious reasons. Leftists for twisted Marxist oppressor/oppressed/colonialist reasons to gain power.
The ADL since Obama's Jonathon Greenblatt took over has been complicit in this misdirection.
Your article is exceptionally complete and well sourced. Thank you. Will be sharing.
Thanks for the encouragement! -- Bob
I disagree in one respect: “to gain power.”
While I agree that greater power is the through line of leftist striving, and no other item is permanently in their platform, nevertheless the individual leftist only rarely experiences himself as seeking power. He truly believes in either the cause of the moment—Gaia! Women! Antiracism!—or something more general and utopian (the revolution, the movement), or sometimes both. He believes. Never doubt it.
I agree with your clarification. But I still want to emphasize that the Leftist Movement's goal is to gain power. Overwhelming power.
But belief that approaches religious veneration in its intensity and weight is so strongly correlated with a desire for absolute authority that they are in practice nearly synonymous: if you and I disagree about whether algebra should be taught in the 7th or 8th grade, there are many ways in which we can compromise over this issue, or even just live with each other. We are each unlikely to insist on having absolute power to dictate his beliefs to the other. We might easily be friends who just agree to disagree -- the issue is simply not that important.
But if you and I disagree over whether the vial of antidote to the venom of the snake that just bit us both (or more potently both our only sons) contains enough antidote for both or just one of us (or them), then compromise is likely to be impossible, the struggle as bitter as it can be, and we are likely to throw out any Marquess of Queensberry fiddle-faddle about fighting fair or giving the other guy a chance. We will indeed avidly seek unlimited authority to impose our will on each other. When the issue is existential, the drive for power has no a priori limit.
Of course, one can readily ponder the chicken-and-egg problem: among quasi-religious fanatics whose drive for unlimited power is unlimited, did the fanatical belief spur the desire for power (as in my example above), or are we talking about people who are driven by interior demons or inherent character deficits to seek unlimited power, who find their drives can only be socially acceptable (and maybe even acceptable to interior pangs of conscience) if coupled to a Life Or Death Angels Versus Devils struggle?
Of course I'd personally like to believe the former, as it says much nicer things about us as a species, but I can't help but wonder whether a coolly-rational and uninvolved Vulcan xenobiologist, studying the future fossil record of H. sapiens, might rate as quite plausible the hypothesis that our species just has a wired-in urge to push others around, and we specialize in rationalizing these fratricidal urges by readily adopting Manichean viewponts, indeed inventing them with singular creativity and gusto if reality is so uncooperative as to leave them naturally scarce.
i.e., hard-wired Hobbesians.
I am struggling with my priors. I find it hard to understand someone who thinks Algebra should not be taught before the seventh grade.
Hmm, a good point. I should probably have chosen a less extreme example, such as the dviniity of Jesus Christ, Emacs v. vim, who should rule Arrakis, and whether the boy Arthur should be king...
https://youtu.be/KOC6b2n68DU?si=negGu9FGnxWCvzPA&t=185
No, gvm, the Lords Kynes, and no of course not what a dope. See? That was easy.
The first of my post-October 7 essays dealt with the motivations behind such ideologies. https://graboyes.substack.com/p/intellectual-tyrants-beget-true-believers. Perhaps the most relevant quote from the book discussed in the essay is this: "“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.” Not so much a quest for power as it is a sad quest for some tangible reason to wake up each morning and breathe.
Interesting. But the regularity Mr. Seeker points to, and not he alone by any means, still requires explanation. My phrasing is, as above, “greater power is the through line of leftist striving.”
(There is an exception: the voluntary commune movement, notably the kibutzim. But over time they are unstable.)
One of the first libertarians I met, around 1981, said to me one day that he found no incompatibility between libertarianism and socialism. We were intrigued and asked him to elaborate. He said, "You can go have your socialist community, and I'm fine with it as long as you don't make me pay for it or live in it." The kibbutz--at least in theory--is probably the closest thing on earth to what he meant.
I agree strongly with half your claim, and disagree strongly with the other half.
I agree that the individual leftist believes in the cause, and might believe in something more general and even utopian.
I disagree that most individuals leftist don't believe in the "to gain power" point. Above and beyond the fact that leftists in general believe in using the monopoly violence power of government to achieve the ends they consider just, the modern young leftist woke/DEI/... ideologue believes in the oppressor/oppressed theory and that the oppressed are justified in any action they take to overcome the oppressor.
Being a friend of the "oppressed", they consider it not just moral, not just something preferable they should use their free speech rights to try to influence, but actually their *duty* to use the power of government to deliver their brand of social justice.
Young DEI believer leftists are very different from older "liberals". To deny that they have been taught and believe that it is both proper and necessary to use government as the means to their righteous ends is to not understand what they are about at all.
Thank you for writing this.
While I belong to a fairly liberal congregation (Friends) with ties to Ramallah Friends School, I know a great many evangelicals. My sense is virtually all of their support for Jews is not "Red Heifer", nor "Book of Revelations", but rather something to do with the Holocaust (and in my time, 1972 Munich). The most common reason I've heard is that it seems right for Israel to exist as a country. A few introduce politics, saying having a democracy in the middle east is good. I know of very few kooks about Israel. I am sure they exist, but in very small and scattered numbers.
Also, I've heard the term "horseshoe theory" used to describe the common areas of agreement between the far right and far left.
I also note when voicing concern about pro-Hamas support, progressives quickly say "the Squad" are mere backbenchers, with no influence. I'd say they have far more influence than the five groups you listed (two I didn't recognize).
I think the harassment of
I like to hope that the lessons of Munich 1938 are not totally forgotten either.
Ideological theme song, "Don't know much about history ..."
Thanks. I very much agree with your observations.
On mature consideration, the congressional testimony of then-Harvard-president Christine Gay recur to me: she had no objection to acknowledging the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish country, so long as she omitted the word “Jewish.” You aren’t there, are you?
I’ve heard that in the Middle East there is a saying: Jews on Saturday and Christians on Sunday. We (both confessions) face very trying times ahead, I believe, and need to look to God for help and guidance more than ever before!
We have a saying: you can save more people with God’s help and guidance and a Merkava tank than you can with God’s help and guidance alone. He helps those who help themselves.
The version I heard is a bit more broad: "God will never do anything for you that you are capable of doing for yourself. Do everything you can, and when that's not enough he will make up the difference."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_drowning_man
Love it
Love this quote.
Arab Christians traditionally refuse to let their Moslem counterparts out-Jew-hate (or out-Israel-hate) them, which famously lead Ted Cruz into an awkward public contretemps, notwithstanding that Israel is the only safe place for them in the Middle East.
I wonder what God’s guidance is on that.
"Arab Christians traditionally refuse to let their Moslem counterparts out-Jew-hate (or out-Israel-hate) them"
Do you have evidence of this? Are you referring to Arb-Israeli Christian citizens, or some other group?
Hi Robert
Happy Sunday
Unfortunately I see mini Kristalnacht''s happening. Which could lead to more extreme acts .
Unless there is a ground swell of support from people world wide , this evil and hatred will only get worse.
Yup
I appreciate your clarity of research and writing, and the logical conclusions you reach. The actions of a large segment of the liberal political class, in order to establish a longer term grip on power, have been playing a deadly game of divide constituents into racial classes, and present absurd talking points to pit American against American, with a goal of maintaining their electoral majority. This gross quest for power has consequences. The current wave of antisemitism is but one. Walking blindly into regional wars is another. And flying to Taiwan in order to poke China in the eye, while squandering our Treasury on useless DoD programs associated with DEI, shows how stupidity and education are not mutually exclusive. You sir are providing leadership with your writing. Our political and elite class are not providing leadership.
Thanks so much for the supportive words.
Bob,
A beautifully written and devastating indictment of the left showing its true colors. That this degree if antisemitism still exists in this country is very dismaying. As with racism, I do not believe that the opinions of a few elites, e.g. the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, represent those of the average American. The video of the German Vice-Chancellor was so uplifting. I shared with a German-American friend. He should be proud. If only we had someone so eloquent in the White House.
Rick
Thanks much, Rick. Hope your German-American friend enjoyed the video.
“ That this degree if antisemitism still exists in this country is very dismaying”
As someone else in this thread has indicated, I don’t believe that the word “still” is accurate here.
The largest amount and the driving force of today’s leftist antisemitism is their DEI/woke/CRT/intersectionality… oppressor/oppressed ideology. The polls confirm that it is overwhelmingly the young leftists who are doing this “Back Hamas” evil, not the older ones, who generally remain appalled at Hamas. Seek out the October and December Harvard-Harris polls if you want to see the details yourself.
I have known progressives who came of age in the 1930s when eugenics were in vogue and the National Socialists weren't just a curiosity but a state that progressives could get behind until the next decade when in subsequent years the National Socialists somehow became "associated" with the so-called "right". I think William Shirer would have disputed that theme. The allies of the National Socialists under the Grand Mufti of Palestine stayed on side and one could safely say that of the 1.9 billion Muslims on the planet today, more than a few still share their "Judenhass" which is a modern spin on the preceding 1300 years since Mohammod set the same tone. The left of today encompasses the entirety of the institutions "marched through", a dominance in more than post Christian, post modern nihilist cultural Marxism. The seemingly warm and forgiving relationship between the progressives and Islam is the more curious development given the progressives normal revulsion to the western historical legacy of Christian theocracy (of which I share). Tragically, though not one of moral relativism, this ugly war is in actuality a war of two theocracies.
Israel is no theocracy. It’s a social-democratic parliamentary democracy upon a European plan. It has an official religion—but then, so does England, which is no theocracy.
I've had occasion to note this in the past and suggested that whomever I'm speaking to count the number of national flags that have crosses, crescents, etc. Funny that the UK theocracy has a Hindu prime minister--or that the Israeli theocracy has a host of Arabs in high positions, as well.
Something of an inversion of Niemoller’s quote. In America the Left through academia and the Democrats went after Evangelicals with a gusto which birthed their support for Republicans. Catholics finally responded in 2016 when the abortion issue swayed many. Now the Left has no more use for Jewish Democrats with the rise of the Nones and other victim classes to replace them. The ride on the back of the tiger appears to be ending. I just hope we don’t see another NeoCon moment for the RNC out of all this.
Very clever take!
I do hope we see a neoconservative moment—indeed, a neoconservative century—and that if we do not, our country may not survive.
Possibly our different opinions arise in part from different understandings of the concept “neoconservative.”
I wrote earlier today that I wondered how long the Dem coalition could hold together. This article at American Thinker goes into that problem. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/the_end_of_allyship.html
Interesting piece.
Is it possible that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has painted itself into a corner?
FWIW - I've been in several parts of the Protestant movement, from radical to conventional. None of them would tolerate anti-semitism.
One might hope for such a paint job. And my sense of Christian movements accords with your observation.
It is not likely, I very much regret to answer. Who or what will take their offices or influence from them?
Back in the forties most of the American Evangelical support for the creation of Israel did in fact come from a desire to help usher in the end times. Many of the early zionists supported them in this view as they saw the advantages of it. I have to admit immediately following two wars to end all wars the end of time was probably looking pretty promising.
Today’s evangelicals support Jews generally because there is a sense of shared values and culture, and because they are called to love others. Evangelicals support Israel because of God’s promise to Abram that He will bless those who blessed his descendants and curse those who curse them. There is a very strong feeling that supporting Israel means continued blessings from God and abandoning Israel would mean the withdrawal of his blessings.
Excellent comments.
First question: are Jews White?
Second question: is it right to label those of us who are sympathetic towards Palestinians, who are experiencing a genocide, as antisemitic when Palestinians themselves are semites?
Third question: who awarded Jews a copyright on semitism?
Easy answers:
1) Jews are whatever color racist taxonomists wish them to be at any given moment. Recently (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/entomology-as-public-policy) I discussed the past century’s machinations over this question. Various taxonomists considered Jews to be “white,” “Negro,” “something other than white,” “white-adjacent,” “hyper-white,” or whichever other terms allowed said racist taxonomists to most easily screw us over.
(2) By no definition other than that of incendiary propaganda are Palestinians experiencing a genocide. One can surely criticize many aspects of Israel’s interactions with Palestinians, but the use of “genocide” is simply rank demagoguery. Hamas, on the other hand, has never hidden the fact that its central ambition is, in fact, the murder of every Jew on earth—which actually is “genocidal.” That goal has been in Hamas’s charter since the group was founded, and they’ve never changed that document. And they specifically refer to “Jews,” and not to “Israelis” or “Zionists”—all three of which have different words in Arabic.
(3) The “copyright” on applying the word “antisemitic” to Jews and Jews alone belongs to the hate-filled bigot who invented the word and the Nazis who reiterated and clarified the point during their alliance with Arab groups before and during WWII. The original term in German was “Judenhass”—“Jew-hatred.” At a time when eugenicists were slathering scientific-sounding names over garbage ideas, a couple of German writers decided that “Judenhass” was a bit too crass for some ears, so they adopted the “scientific-sounding” neologism “antisemitism” as a passive-aggressive euphemism for precisely the same concept. The word is most closely associated with journalist/politician Wilhelm Marr, who is most responsible for popularizing the term in his book in 1879. Over the years, Arabs and others wondered whether the term applied to Jews alone or to Semitic peoples in general. They were repeatedly assured that it referred only to Jews. As part of the clarification process, the German government in 1936 declared that the antisemitic Nuremberg race laws applied only to Jews, and absolutely not to Arabs—about whom Hitler expressed his admiration. From the initial use of the word through the Nazi regime, it was made clear time and again that the word referred only to Jews. That didn’t stop some disingenuous commenters to throw some motte-and-bailey ambiguity at any criticism of antisemitism—the dishonest question “How can Arabs be antisemitic when they’re semites.”
Q.E.D..
You’re an anti-Semite. QED
Anyone who questions Jewish behavior is denounced as an antisemite. Yes, the banality of antisemitism. Personally I don't categorize myself as such, given I don't have sufficient time in my busy schedule to devote to hating an entire group of people. Besides, not all Jews are bad. In fact, my first mentor was Michael Savage. I also have the latter work of Phil Roth on muh bookshelf. And every year around this time of the year I listen to Phil Spectors phenomenal Christmas album. Merry Christmas! 🎅
Not for the reasons he mocks; but he manifestly is.
(1) Who but a racist cares if Jews are white, and who but an antisemite pretends to ignorance that some are and some aren’t?
(2) Only antisemites pretend to believe (or wonder whether) the Palestinians are experiencing genocide while their numbers rapidly increase.
(3) Only an antisemite “doesn’t know” (since Google will explain) that “antisemitism” is a euphemism for political Jew-hatred concocted by a self-described antisemite—Wilhelm Marr.