IF JEWS = SMART, BIGOTS CHOOSE STOOPID

IF YOU ASSOCIATE REASON AND LOGIC WITH JEWS, BEING A QUEER FOR PALESTINE MAKES SENSE. IT IS AS WHOOPASS A SLAP IN THE FACE AS YOU COULD PROBABLY MUSTER AGAINST BASIC HUMAN INTELLIGENCE.

Mama says, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

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.

Envy, jealousy and resentment play a huge role in antisemitism. These emotions probably play a role in many forms of racism. But they are at the absolute core of antisemitism.

Stemming first from misrepresentations of the theological concept of Jews as the “Chosen People,” jealousy has played an incendiary, fatal role in anti-Jewish bias and behaviors.

In their book, Why the Jews, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and Dennis Prager contend that there are very specific reasons — Jewish reasons — for antisemitism. Observable Jewish successes in various fields, which are a consequence of very specific Jewish traits, such as dedication to learning, hard work and mutual support, evoke envy among less successful people.

Envy has long been recognized as an accelerant in antisemitism. But envy itself has another byproduct.

Think of something you really desperately wanted as a kid. Then the kid next door got one and (if you were the snotty brat this parable presupposes) you told them that the desired object (the Cabbage Patch Kid or nipple piercing or whatever) was passé.

This is a step beyond envy. It is overcompensating for envy by casting aspersions on the desired object.

This is how antisemitism takes envy to the next level. Not only do antisemites abhor Jews, they direct their hostility at the things they associate with Jews — even if they secretly desire them.

One of the most enduring knocks against Jews is that they are “smart” or “clever.”

So the same impetus that leads people to hate Jews because “Jews are smart” — and this is just a theory, but gawd is it ever brilliant — leads people, by extension, to hate the concept of intelligence itself. The very idea of being “smart” becomes stigmatized in the mind of the anti-Jewish bigot.

When the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels triumphantly declared Aryan supremacy, look at how he formulated it: “The era of Jewish intellectualism is over.” It was a sign, in 1937, that not only were the Jewish people the object for annihilation, so were reason and logic themselves.

Fast-forward 80 years.

When the haters come for the Jews, where do they start? On campus. They target Jewish students and professors. And they launch what they call “academic boycotts” — the 21st-century version of what we used to call book-burnings.

That’s why the academic boycott of Israel has such an appeal to Jew-baiters. It kicks the Jew where they are sure it will hurt the most: Right in the books.

Of course, the perpetrators of academic boycotts don’t care about the damage they are doing to themselves and society. Antisemitism has always been a self-destructive phenomenon for the perpetrator — just as “pro-Palestinianism” is about the worst thing that ever happened to Palestinians.

Israel is one of the world’s most fertile intellectual environments, with several of the world’s foremost universities, much of the advanced research in areas of science and medicine, and about a billion other examples of positive contributions to humanity.

Boycotting the universities and thinkers that produce much of the world’s research, including some of its most lifesaving innovations, is obviously a massively self-destructive idea. Albert Einstein, a founder of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, would have been boycotted and canceled by these morons.

This antipathy to smarts, this stigmatization of thinkiness, defines antisemitism in general and anti-Zionism in particular.

Aside from academic boycotts, consider some of the likewise irrational examples of anti-Israel activism.

You can hardly fathom anything stupider than “Queers for Palestine.”

As much as we like to imagine that the extremists who run what pass for governments in Gaza and the West Bank do not represent the majority of people who live in those places (I’ll leave that larger issue aside for now), every scrap of evidence indicates that Palestinians — “ordinary” Palestinians, that is — are among the most homophobic people on the planet.

One survey indicates that 5% of Palestinians believe that homosexuality is morally acceptable. The same survey indicated that 8% think that “honor killings” are morally acceptable.

Put bluntly, according to this survey, more Palestinians believe it is morally acceptable to kill a homosexual than to be a homosexual.

Now, you might declare that your worldview and values prioritize the national self-determination of Palestinian people above the rights (even the life) of people like me who happen to live in Palestine. (I have actually heard queer people justify their support for Palestinianism in precisely these words.) Fair enough, I suppose, if you are an unbelievably fanatical nutjob.

But it all makes sense if you understand that antisemitism goes hand-in-hand with hatred for what Jews represent in the minds of the haters: Cleverness. What seems like a completely irrational position — “Chickens for KFC” is how some of my friends describe Queers for Palestine — is a surprisingly rational position if you understand the mutant ideological worldview from which these activists have oozed.

A comment on my Substack yesterday exemplifies the intellectual level of the opposition.

If you associate reason, logic, wisdom and basic smarts with Jews — and thanks to your envy, you take it a step further and adopt a hostile attitude toward these traits themselves — then being a Queer for Palestine makes sense. It is as whoopass a slap in the face as you could probably muster against basic human intelligence. It is also, like Chickens for KFC, profoundly self-destructive. But if all you care about is sticking it to the Jews, well, spitting on smarts because you associate it with that group of people makes something close to sense in your capsized worldview.

Because you associate reason, logic and intelligence with Jews, then behaving in the most irrational, idiotic, counterintuitive way makes a perverted form of sense.

The Queers for Palestine example is just the most obvious one. Across the Western world, leftists, feminists, trade unionists, liberal Christians, peace activists and a whole bunch of others defile every value they claim to venerate in order to endorse Palestinianism. They sign onto a movement that crushes women’s equality, spits on minority rights, entrenches Muslim supremacy, slaughters gays and prioritizes force, violence and war above coexistence, peace and nonviolence.

It is stupidity incarnate. And they know it. That is literally why they do it.

Accuse them of being irrational, self-destructive and, well, plain dumb and they will proudly carry that banner. In an ideological asylum where smart = Jewish, being decidedly, demonstrably, performatively stupid as a stick carries a certain cachet.

I’m not saying this is a conscious thing. But what these activists are saying to Jews and others is that, if Jews represent intellectualism, reason, rational thinking and intellect, we’ll show them we don’t subscribe to that thinky bunkum.

And haven’t they just?