SO MUCH FOR PINK T-SHIRTS

ANTI-BULLYING LESSONS SEEM TO HAVE BACKFIRED. LIKE REPRESSING OTHER HUMAN IMPULSES, THIS ONE SEEMS TO COME OUT IN PERVERTED WAYS. AND GUESS WHO GETS TARGETED?

And the kids say … naaah.

I am someone who tends to believe that human beings are going to be human beings.

That is, we can self-importantly declare ourselves “antiracist” but secretly admit that, as “Avenue Q” brilliantly puts it, “Everyone’s a little bit racist.”

We can say we don’t believe in God but the millennia of tradition around expiating our guilt by projecting our sins onto an empty vessel (it’s called scapegoating, but theologians use terms like “substitutionary atonement”) are not as easy to abandon as announcing we don’t believe in a skydaddy. As I wrote on Easter, old habits die hard.

We can wear pink T-shirts and declare ourselves dedicated to the cause of anti-bullying. But put a high school diploma in their hands, free them from the constraints of high school and watch Gen Z join the oldest and most successful harassment crusade humankind has ever known.

And here is my point: Have you noticed that the absolute core tactic and goal of “pro-Palestine” rallies and the larger movement is bullying and terrorizing Jews? It’s not freeing Palestine. It has no obvious, positive end-goal that would help Palestinian people. It is all about blocking Jewish students on campuses, chanting outside Jewish community centres, and cancelling Jews who refuse to carry the torch and join the chanting mob against their own people.

If you have any misgivings about this last statement, you’re not paying attention. The so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement in the West has little or nothing to do with advancing the well-being of Palestinians. It seems, from every scrap of evidence, to be a movement determined to make Jews in our countries feel isolated, vilified and unwelcome.

The most obvious example of this bullying is the terrorizing of Jews by coopting their tragic history and turning it against them in the most savage, sadistic manner.

The core messaging of the “pro-Palestinian” movement equates Israelis with Nazis, likens Palestinians with Jews in the Holocaust, employs terms from Jewish history (“concentration camps,” “genocide,” “Ubermenschen” and on and on) and uses tried-and-true antisemitic tropes (dual loyalty, manipulative, devious and powerful, and on and on) against Israelis, Zionists and Jews.

Messaging like this has no constructive goal. It is salt in Jewish wounds. It is pure sadism with no possible constructive objective.

Have you noticed also the core demographic of these rallies and the larger movement? It’s young people. The same young people who came up through the school system in the era of Pink Shirt Day and official anti-bullying proselytization.

And what is the first thing they do when set free from high school, land on postsecondary campuses, are unfettered from parental and teacher constraints? Turn on the Jews with the most ferocious bullying, employing the cruelest terminology, signing on to the most sadistic narratives intended to cause maximal pain to Jews.

It’s as if all the bullying impulses that have been pushed down during their public school education have come out in the most distorted ways imaginable. I have written about how natural sexual impulses, when oppressed, will sometimes ejaculate into violence, as in the case of terrorists who are literally dying to get laid thanks to the promise of 72 virgins in the glorious (and weirdly orgiastic) afterlife.

My point is not that we humans are incapable of controlling our impulses. Just that it takes more than simply saying we’re not racist or we’re not bullies to actually be not racist or not bullies.

A generation that grew up on anti-bullying catechisms acts out as if in some sort of volatile response to repression of humanity’s cruelest impulses.

There is nothing constructive in their approach — they must know this. Their strategy of shrieking slogans and demonizing Jews (because I’m done equivocating about the fake barrier they contrive between “Israelis” and “Jews”) is not going to work, it’s not going to change minds, and it sure as hell isn’t going to “free Palestine.”

But that’s not their goal. Their goal is to blow off steam (perhaps built up over a lifetime of repressing bullying tendencies). And the most powerful way to do that is to stick it to the Jews.

That’s no coincidence. If they learned anything about history between their anti-bullying seminars and pronoun sensitivity training, kids today might have gleaned a little something about how bullying and othering on a massive scale led to the Holocaust. Dara Horn has written about how Holocaust education may have some unintended consequences. Perhaps this is an example. At its most extreme, bullying can lead to the mass murder of Jews. If we’re going to rebel against the oppressive anti-bullying lessons we learned in stupid, boring high school, what better way to act out than to celebrate October 7?

There’s a little more to it, no doubt. Not least the fact that, since 1945, there was, among polite society, a bit of a cordon sanitaire (far from impermeable, I’ll acknowledge) against rampaging against Jews. If young folks today are going to reject the repressive ideology of tolerance (even while performatively advocating it when it comes to groups they actually care about), why go for half-measures? Head straight to the very people whose historical experiences led to the very concept of contemporary human rights. If the face tattoos failed to shock Grandma, how about posting yourself on Insta celebrating the strangulation of a Jewish baby?

There is something big going on here, and it’s beyond my capabilities to explain. Teams of psychiatrists probably couldn’t decipher it all. But it is also no coincidence that it is often teachers — the very ones empowered to teach anti-bullying and enforce its dictums in classrooms and on playgrounds — who are inciting the anti-Jewish bullying. We hear endless reports of public school classrooms festooned with Palestinian flags, watermelons and “Free Palestine” paraphernalia. Again, it’s not freeing Palestine. But, gee, does it ever make the Jewish kids in class squirm. And that is precisely the point.

So what is at play? Obviously something deeply troubled in the human psyche.

The manner in which the anti-Israel movement unites progressive, feminist, leftwing, nonviolent, LGBTQ+ activists with the most regressive, violent, misogynistic, homophobic, intolerant forces on the planet is proof positive that something irrational — even supernatural — is at play. The alliance is so devoid of reason or explanation that it must be verging on psychosocial disorder.

As I wrote at Easter, the insistence by atheists that they simply do not believe in God anymore does not preclude the distorted manifestation of casting sins onto an empty vessel in perverted ways. Likewise, all the anti-bullying lessons cannot seem to suppress the human need for othering and so that need comes oozing out in activism against the one group that has been history’s most dependable, go-to target for othering.

Curmudgeons who complain there’s not enough of the three Rs in school and too much frou-frou feel-good stuff in today’s education system can take some weird solace in the fact that the gratuitous stuff like anti-bullying doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact on the next generations.

In the old days, kids whined to their algebra teachers, “When am I ever going to use this in the real world?”

It seems they have taken the same approach to anti-bullying lessons.