EXTREMISTS ALONG FOR THE (P)RIDE

WHEN WE MARCH FOR PALESTINE, GAYS, WOMEN AND MINORITIES MAY NOT UNDERSTAND WHERE THAT PARADE IS HEADED.

There’s no vegetarianism without turducken.

It’s Pride Month — and I will be devoting some attention to topics of homophobia and LGBTQ+ rights in the context of my usual subject, antisemitism and Jewish rights. This is the first in an occasional series throughout the month. Stay tuned. It’s going to be fabulous.

In my previous post, I talked about how the “family values” folks of the 1970s and ’80s ironically damaged the thing they claimed to be respecting. Their redefinition of “family values” into something ugly, intolerant and hateful literally made “family” — the entity they declared the very foundation of society — sound like a bad thing.

The same thing is happening now. It’s what the “pro-Palestinian” movement has done to words like “justice,” “freedom” and “human rights.”

There is hardly a cause in the world today that is less about justice or human rights than Palestinianism — whether it is Hamas in Gaza, the “moderate” Fatah in the West Bank or the marching mobs of millions chanting for blood worldwide.

A “free Palestine” would be one of the least free places on earth. The Palestinian “liberation” movement doesn’t even pretend to support the things Western progressives used to endorse. In the most Orwellian sense imaginable, when “pro-Palestinian” activists chant for peace, freedom, liberation and human rights, they are advancing a cause that is violent, totalitarian, repressive and detests the freedoms we exercise ourselves. For me, and for probably almost all my Jewish friends, now when I hear the term “social justice” I wish I’d bought a house with an attic.

A few decades ago, “family values” was a distraction. The antigay movement of the 1970s and ’80s may have hated the queers, but their real goal was to distract millions with culture wars so they could enact a panorama of policies that had nothing to do with gender or sexuality — deregulating capitalism, crushing unions, taxing the middle classes to fund the wealthiest, attacking civil rights. This is stuff many would not have voted for if it had not been sugarcoated with homophobia.

In a society where it was becoming unacceptable to overtly hate women and minorities, gays were the last legit target — and that opened the door to exploit them for a range of nefarious objectives.

Today, Israel and “Zionists” play the same role. Those who march on the streets against Israel may genuinely hate Israel (and Jews). But the folks organizing the parades have bigger fish to fry. Eliminating Israel is a happy goal for them, sure. But their ultimate goal is something more.

Like “family values” was a distraction then, Israel is a distraction now.

So you have to ask yourself: Who benefits? What might you be missing as you sign on to this movement? What all is in the user agreement you mindlessly signed so you could get to the fun part of swanning around in keffiyehs and chanting death threats to Jews? Does the friendly stranger who recruited you have an agenda beyond Palestine?

It may be still a tad frowned upon to overtly hate Jews (depends on the company you keep, clearly) but do the old Zio-Jew-Switcheroo™ — call a Jew a Zionist — and instead of calling on authorities to lock you up and throw away the key, people celebrate when you shoot Jews on the street or set them on fire.

But, if there is a hidden agenda berhind this hate … what’s the agenda?

Well, if you had asked me two years ago, I would have said it was the destruction of Israel.

“Pro-Palestinian” activists — the ones who wanted to maintain any legitimacy, anyway — used to pretend that Palestinianism was a movement to create a Palestinian state, not a movement to annihilate the Jewish state. They’re not pretending anymore.

“From the river to the sea” is a call for rivers of Jewish blood — and if that statement evokes any skepticism in you, you haven’t looked into the eyes of the people chanting that slogan. The “pro-Palestinian” movement has never been about building a Palestinian state — they’ve had a succession of opportunities for statehood handed to them on silver platters. What part of yes do they not understand? The movement is a nihilistic one in every sense — destroying Israel is their end and destroying Palestinians individually and collectively through eight decades of hopelessness and martyrdom is their means.

So that is the obvious part. It’s totally out in the open now. It’s not the quiet part anymore.

So what is the quiet part?

As an aging lefty, I have always had resistance to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” motif. It sounds like a conspiracy theory.

I realize now it is a conspiracy — but it’s not a theory.

And I’m not the only one who has bought into Huntington’s ideas. The ultra-left has swallowed the clash of civilizations 100%. They recognize it’s us-against-them.

When they chant “Globalize the intifada,” they’re acknowledging it’s us against them. But they’ve decided “We’re for them.”

It is a self-abnegating, collective lunacy. They hate Western civilization (even as they revel in everything it permits) but they want to flatten it and start over, creating a new society in their own tattooed and pierced image. At its most obvious, it’s Queers for Palestine — a literal death wish by people who march under a banner of pride but carry such submerged self-loathing that they literally endorse those who would kill us. The far right and “family values” movements of the past had their self-loathing gays, too. Queers for Palestine are the modern descendants of Roy Cohn.

And don’t get me started on Independent Jewish Voices and the assorted hate-Israel Jews. (Do not call these people “self-loathing,” though. If you have ever interacted with any of them, you will encounter people with the highest level of self-regard you have ever witnessed.)

Ask yourself this: How is it that no one seems to react to the Soviet flags at “pro-Palestinian” rallies and the placards and handouts from revolutionary communist movements that permeate these events? We seem to assume these are fringe figures showing up as an afterthought. They’re not. They are the core of the Palestinian movement in the West. They are not hangers-on at these events, they are very often the organizers, sometimes under various names.

If that sounds paranoid, like I’m seeing communists under every bed, carry on with your day. But it would be hard to get hundreds of thousands marching behind the hammer and sickle. Raise the watermelon standard of Palestine, however, and mobs come out of the woodwork to join the throngs. That’s something the reds realized before the rest of us. (Of course, nothing to do with Jews, you understand. Although, if you’ve read Marx’s The Jewish Question — and most of these wingbats have, probably many times — you understand perfectly.)

The reds are only part of the equation. It’s the greens who are better organized and funded. Not the “greens,” as in Green Parties in the West — although they’re mostly on board too. Green is the symbol of Islam, as well as Islamism. (These are two separate things but, like antisemitism and anti-Zionism, they are not as separate as some would have us believe.)

The third stripe on the extremist flag is black. The color of fascism — as in blackshirts.

Communists and fascists like to pretend they are opposites. Anyone who has lived under regimes of either stripe knows this is mostly an intellectual exercise. I subscribe to the horseshoe theory, that the political spectrum is not a straight line but a curve that bends to the extremes where, pushed far enough, fascists and communists collide. And their main point of agreement is upending our society as it currently exists and their tactic is — one guess — targeting that most dependable of scapegoats.

What comes after they have destroyed our civilizaiton may be a point of disagremeent. A bloodbath of disagreement, probably, but we’ll blow up those bridges when we come to them.

Will they succeed in implementing their agenda for communist/fascist/Islamist rule in North America and Europe? Maybe not in our lifetimes (although they certainly seem to have carved out some extrajudicial Jew-free homelands in a few neighborhoods and campuses).

But their strategies have seen some successes.

As we have seen in the celebrations around the killings of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, if we can dehumanize “Zionists,” we can start killing Jews on the streets and elicit support, not revulsion. (In an earlier post, I referred to the couple as “Messianic Jews.” This may not have been accurate. I apologize if I misrepresented them. But the larger point is clear.)

I raise again the Brian Thompson / Luigi Mangione case. By desensitizing us to violence and convincing swaths of people that some people deserve to die, we move the Overton window significantly. When people celebrate the killing of a healthcare CEO or a pair of Zionists, ever more people look at the options open to them to make their political case with a gun. Will they succeed in, say, introducing communism to America or making France adopt Sharia law? Maybe not. But it might move it a step closer and, besides, that question is irrelevant to the victim dead in the streets.

All of this is the ultimate end-goal of an instrumentalization of trauma and inequality. If we conclude that the interests of the marginalized and victimized is served by killing the privileged and the perceived oppressors, the perps are already part of the way to their goal of upending the status quo. It may still be a long way to the red flag flying over the Peace Tower, but it’s definitely a start.

It doesn’t really matter what the end-goal is, in a sense. If the masterminds behind the movements can whip up hysterical mobs against Israel, they can certainly channel that energy into other things. A mass of rage-addicted aimless drifters and lost souls (and among a generation raised by video games and TikTok, that’s a large target audience) whipped into a frenzy against Israel can certainly be redeployed to rage against, say, women who refuse to cover up.

Am I unreasonable? Well, as the old saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get you. You may think that 21st-century communists are a joke and that North Americans would never go for ayatollahs or fuehrers telling us what to do.

You’re right. And the communists, Islamists and fascists understand this better than you do.

That’s why they drape themselves in keffiyehs, wave a Palestinian flag and smirk as the useful idiots come piling out of their parents’ basements and into the streets to march alongside.