Israel at War—Rhetorical Inversion
It's said that history doesn't repeat ... but it sure does rhyme. I have lived through at lease 4 major Arab/Islamist conflicts with Israel and at least 3 or 4 less significant ones. In each case, Israel took a hit, lost civilians and military, regrouped and them moved against people who wanted to annihilate it. In 1967, 1973, 2006, Israel had their foot on the neck of their enemies as the West—leaders, activists, and all of the left-wing media—criticized a lack of "proportionate response" and demanded that the Israelis stand down. Israel listened, and instead of breaking the neck of groups/countries that wanted its elimination, it backed off, leaving its enemies to fight another day.
There is absolutely no question in my mind that as Israel begins to dismantle Hamas, cries of "proportionality" and "humanitarian crisis" will fill the air (in fact, they already do, and Israel hasn't even begun to move against Hamas in any significant way). The question is: Will Israel learn from history or repeat it?
Pro-palestinian activists, with emphasis on leftists (both students and more than a few faculty at elite Universities in the U.S.) are among many who have finally removed their virtue masks and are saying the quiet part out loud—'it's okay if Israel ceased to exist and it's okay if Jews are annihilated to achieve that goal because ... <fill in the dishonest, counter-historical, propaganistic claim>.
As more leftists and their trained hamsters in the propaganda media begin to edge toward direct statements of 'the quiet part,' Robert Sterling (@RobertMSterling) notes that they're inverting "every rhetorical device they've used since 2020." He's lists a number of examples of their rank hypocrisy:
2020: Silence is violence.2023: People can’t be expected to comment on every situation. It’s okay to just keep silent, especially while events are still unfolding.2020: If you’re nitpicking small details instead of focusing on the big picture, you’re doing so to avoid your complicity in atrocities.2023: 40 babies weren’t actually beheaded. 40 babies may have been killed, and some of them may have been beheaded, but that’s not the same as 40 getting beheaded. Details matter.2020: Universities must proactively take a stand and speak out in opposition to racism. “Academic freedom” is a false concept used to enforce oppression.2023: Universities need to maintain neutrality and ensure that they do not make any statements that jeopardize the principle of academic freedom, which is a paramount virtue in the realm of scholarship.2020: You must immediately and forcefully condemn an attack, even if investigations are ongoing.2023: You can’t expect us to release statements opposing an attack within four days, when the facts are still being discovered. Israel hasn’t even allowed UN investigators at the scenes of these “alleged massacres.”2020: People are responsible for their words, even if they are just working-class teenagers in small towns. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.2023: Graduate students at the most prestigious university in the world are just kids and cannot be held accountable for statements they sign. This is cancel culture.2020: Believe all women.2023: Where is the physical evidence of these “alleged rapes”?2020: It’s not enough to be non-racist. If you are not actively anti-racist, it means that you are, in fact, racist.2023: How dare you question whether I support terrorists just because I haven’t actively spoken out against Hamas freedom fighters.2020: We don’t get to tell people in affected communities how to deal with their pain in the aftermath of violence.2023: It is Israel’s responsibility to ensure that violence doesn’t escalate.2020: Anything that disproportionately affects one group of people is oppression and must be condemned.2023: Settlers—a term that includes all Israeli Jews—are not civilians and are therefore all valid targets for attacks.
"But Israel is a colonizer," chant the "activists.
"But what about oppression?" scream the activists.
"But there's a humanitarian crisis," the trained hamsters intone.
These beliefs are not marginal for either group. They are foundational, and they are profoundly opposed to each other. Still, the two groups have formed a long-standing alliance. How do they deal with these profound differences? And why are they allied?
They deal with differences very simply: They never mention them when they act jointly, primarily against Israel and its supporters across the world. [emphasis mine] They have joined together to form a more powerful coalition against shared enemies. They would destroy that partnership by raising issues where they differ.
Far better to focus on their agreement, which goes beyond hating Israel to claim Western capitalism has oppressed, degraded, and ruined the world. Since the U.S. is now the world’s greatest power, it is tagged as the main source of that malignancy, at home and abroad. As they see it, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America are poor because they have been oppressed by capitalist nations and their corporations. If they have terrible governments, they have them only because the West has installed and sustained them.
This critique is based on a shared, but muddled, ideology. The heart of that ideology is its illiberalism. Both groups are fundamentally opposed to the forbearance of individual differences, including very different views and goals, that are essential to Western constitutional democracies.
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