4. Delegitimization and Dehumanization
We turn now to the next result from a full stop “no” answer to (Q): we are compelled to examine exactly how it has come to pass that so many on our campuses can find themselves answering “yes” instead.
Let’s begin with this
observation from Vassar College professor of Russian history Michaela Pohl from 2016:
The atmosphere at Vassar … is troubled. I am not Jewish, but even I have experienced an increase in hostility and strained silences among students and colleagues … I have been called a “f--king fascist,” “Zionist” and “idiot” for speaking out against Vassar’s BDS resolution and speaking up for Israel and for US policy. I have seen Jewish students profiled and singled out at a BDS meeting. I have felt the icy silence that reigns in some departments … Academics who suggest that Israel is harvesting organs … earn [approving] tweets and clicks—and deal in hate speech … It is speech that angers and mobilizes and that relishes its effects but denies that the effect was ever the intention.
As for the long-term effects of such an environment, Pohl noted that “students look down at their desks when I say things about Jewish emancipation [in Russia] … [there are] embarrassed silences in class while discussing Jewish history.”
This may be America in 2023, but what we’re seeing is an old story, dressed up fresh for the 21st century Western world.
Years of lies, fertilizing the soil, all deliberately designed to delegitimize and dehumanize the Jew, to label the Jew as inhuman, demonic, pure evil. Once you are convinced that the Jew represents evil, then persecuting Jews, even killing Jews, becomes not only acceptable but even obligatory. If the Jew is evil, then you in turn must be a very good person in persecuting and killing him. The ancient and medieval Christians did this for centuries, portraying the Jew as the fleshly embodiment of evil for their rejection and crucifixion of Jesus. The Germans and the Nazis did this for decades in racial terms, inspired and justifying their actions by the antisemitic forgery
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, even developing a whole academic discipline to demonstrate the evils of the Jews and thus inspiring the book title, as apt today as ever,
Hitler’s Professors. After some decades of this program, killing actual living Jews isn’t merely easier but becomes an act of virtue.
The newer lies, now also several decades old, are merely superficial variations on the older lies, aiming to better reflect the specific evils of today. The charges of “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “settler colonialism,” “apartheid,” and more recently, right out of Goebbels’ playbook, “Jewish supremacy”—not to mention probably every single thing most people believe about Gaza—all of these are
lies, in fact easily documentable and demonstrable lies for anyone who takes a few minutes to honestly evaluate them. (Many people for example don’t know that rather unlike most “open air prisons” or “concentration camps” Gaza has four-star hotels and restaurants, luxury cars, ritzy malls, affluent neighborhoods, fancy beach resorts, and an obesity problem, not to mention a massive military infrastructure.) These charges don’t have to be true, they just have to be widely circulated, widely repeated, and widely believed, so that the Jew becomes the embodiment of whatever is considered most evil today.
And this is what the Palestinian movement, along with its many “progressive” allies, has successfully accomplished.
After almost twenty years of the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) movement against Israel, orchestrated on campus by the more than 200 chapters of SJP, their short-term goal, that of damaging Israel economically, was a bust; but the long-term goal, the real goal, has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Whether or not a particular BDS resolution passes or fails on a given campus, the campaign itself soaks the campus in all the lies above for weeks on end, year after year. Most students don’t really follow the details, but come away thinking, man, those Jews with their genocide, apartheid, and supremacy, must really be pretty evil.
And now in 2023 no one blinks when SJP asserts boldly, baldly, as if factually, on their recent social media celebrating the slaughter of 1200 mostly Jews, that
every single Israeli Jew is a "settler"—even the ones who live within the internationally recognized borders of the U.N. member State of Israel, even the ones whose lineage in that land might well trace back to Biblical times. In today’s campus vernacular the label “settler” is a slur rivalling in evilness the slur “Nazi” (which they also repeatedly sling against Israelis). If every Israeli Jew is a settler, then every Israeli Jew is evil, and therefore legitimately murdered. That includes the babies, and the grandmothers, and the unarmed dancing teenagers, and by the way it also justifies torturing them and raping them before you murder them.
(full article online)
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