Why do pro-Palestine martyrdom fetishists suddenly abhor cancel culture?
A subculture built on censorship suddenly has to lay in the bed they made
Synopsis
Concerned Jewish parents are waking up to the full reality of college campus radicalism aimed at their children as representatives of Israel.
Pro-Palestine activists are grappling with high powered opponents fighting them economically and calling it censorship. . . after decades of themselves using the same tactics.
Much of the “activism” practiced by the pro-Palestine groups is not speech at all, but violence, vandalism or material threats.
"I don't want to send any of my kids to college." This was an exclamation made to me by a family member, at one of his kids' birthday party this past Sunday. He had seen enough after two weeks of "solidarity" demonstrations across the US and in particular by college students in support of Gaza and the cause of Palestine in general. I don't blame him, because as someone who has raised multiple children to be proudly and thoroughly Jewish in every aspect of their lives, I don't expect him to know how to tell them to either conceal it or risk harassment and ridicule in order to go into debt for a four year degree. We've seen the social rot on college campuses for years now, at least those of us that have paid attention, and a lot of it had nothing to do with the current war between Israel and Gaza. In 2017 students at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA ran amok and even attempted to track down two professors for not affirming their "day of absence", an incident that they euphemistically called a "needs assessment". In April transgender activists cornered and trapped female swimmer Riley Gaines in a San Francisco State University classroom for daring to speak about men swimming in women's sports competitions. Those like my relative or Bill Maher who is taking up the "don't go to college" mantle have finally woken up, but why?
The answer is that a second reaction is crystallizing at the same time, one that cries out against the "cancel culture" of those like UC Berkeley law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon who encouraged law firms not to hire pro-Palestine activists who expressed approval of the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas of civilians in Israel. To which I respond by asking, "who were the pioneers of 'cancel culture' before it was cool?" Let's not forget the Palestinian cause in the USA and throughout the world is tied strongly to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement founded by Omar Barghouti. Barghouti, a Qatari Palestinian who married an Arab Israeli and resides in Israel, called BDS a "rights-based" movement as opposed to "solutions based", meaning that Israel must be compelled to abide by preconditions in order to bring a just solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. These preconditions, to include yielding control of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians and allowing the Right of Return for all Palestinian refugee descendants, would be the end of Israel's Jewish character.
BDS holds that activists around the world can end Israeli rule on historical Palestine nonviolently by undertaking the following: refraining from business with Israel and Israeli companies or hiring of Israelis for open positions (B), pressuring companies to pull their investments from Israeli companies (D), and encouraging the world to isolate Israel through state restrictions on trade (S). All of these are hallmarks of "cancel culture", namely a non-violent but ultimately coercive way to delegitimize and ostracize someone from the rest of society. As an example, Israeli-American BDS activist Miko Peled in 2010 called upon Australians to boycott the Max Brenner chain of dessert restaurants because it sponsors Israeli military units. But it didn't work, as Australians voted with their taste and not their politics (although the restaurants did experience a financial crisis later). A central flaw of the BDS strategy, and Palestinian activism as a whole, is that their nonviolent tactics nevertheless lead to coercion and harassment. In 2015 Jewish reggae artist Matisyahu was asked by the Rototom reggae festival in Spain to clarify his positions vis a vis Zionism and Israel-Palestine, and when his answers were deemed insufficiently critical of Israel he was dropped. This is compelled speech, something I've criticized when applied to pro-BDS performers like Roger Waters. Matisyahu then called out the festival organizers, claiming they were bowing to BDS's bullying tactics and was successfully reinstated. Are these tactics meant to persuade or intimidate?
BDS also failed according to Foreign Policy columnist Steven A. Cook as several Arab nations had up until the attacks agreed to or were considering formally normalizing ties with Israel. Many of the nations that took a hard line against Israel like Syria, Lebanon and Iraq are at this point deeply tied or dependent on Iran for support and security. It's a far cry from September 1967 when the Arab League resolved in Khartoum that there would be "Three No's": No peace, no negotiation, and no recognition of Israel. The peace developments, which accelerated in 2019 with the Abraham Accords, created a crisis for terror groups. If the Arab world and potentially the Muslim world at large would engage with Israel - and in their minds abandon Palestine's final status as a pre-condition, then their relevance would disappear. Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept, one of the most pro-Palestine cheerleading websites in the media, wrote as much recently blaming Joe Biden's continuation of Donald Trump's Abraham Accord efforts for goading Hamas into attacking Israel.
Who else was troubled by the peace efforts in the Middle East? Numerous activist groups both on and off campus. I know because I followed and investigated several of them years ago such as IfNotNow, the Sunrise Movement, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Some of these organizations engage in an organizing method known as "momentum movements", seeking to win the narrative on a given issue by generating crowds to capture the public square and create the impression that they are spontaneously expressing the mood of the culture, when in fact they have been preparing for an opportunity the whole time. In January 2022 JVP's political action committee JVP Action issued a press release speaking for themselves and a coalition of 50 organizations against the Abraham Accords. All of these groups fully justified the actions of the Oct. 7 attackers who encountered civilians and willfully assaulted, raped, slaughtered and mutilated them, reportedly while they were doped up on the stimulant captagon. They even blamed Israel for the attacks on its own people, and picketed the home of US Sen. Charles Schumer in order to urge the US to stop supporting Israel. The members of this coalition consider themselves "anti-Zionist", meaning that they oppose what they consider imperialist and racist policies of Israel and seek to rectify them by forcing Israel either to change its current Jewish character or be dissolved and replaced.
Much of the coverage since Oct. 7 has been dedicated not only to the horrific acts committed by the terrorists, but the responses to it, in particular those of pro-Palestine activists endorsing the acts as well as pro-Israel voices calling for merciless retribution. As a consequence some have been sacked from their jobs or seen offers withdrawn. There are cases, like that of British writer Michael Eisen who was removed as the editor of a science journal for retweeting an Onion satirical article, where I feel this is an overreaction and completely counterproductive. However, the Daily Beast's Jay Michaelson has responded by saying that right-wingers are betraying their principles by embracing cancel culture. Michaelson's cites a number of examples and I'll repeat them here:
Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman demanded the names of students declaring support for the terror attacks and vowed to never hire them.
High powered law firm Davis, Polk & Wardwell withdrew offer letters for three law school students from Harvard and Columbia over their signing of the same letter.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, well-known as a pro-Israel stalwart, has taken the extraordinary step of ordering state universities to disband chapters of the SJP over its purported support for terror groups.
An administrator with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) of the Dept. of Homeland Security has been suspended over inflammatory anti-Israel conflicts and past work on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
As you know I have written this newsletter in its current form to focus on freedom of speech and the 1st Amendment, and as such I've defended the rights of many repulsive people to say horrible things. This is not cancel culture. Ackman, the law firm, and CIS all have the right to factor in these opinions when it comes to employment decisions. Their constitutional rights remain the same, and I would add that any attempts to censor them on social media are wrong, but not illegal. Cancel culture would mean that there is a mob of people demanding that an employer axe a worker due to certain statements they find offensive. For example in 2018 a cancel mob came after Villanova University basketball player Donte Divincenzo because he had retweeted the lyrics to a rap song that contained the "n-word" from when he was a mere 14 years old. It had little effect as he has had a successful professional career since then, but the point is that he was targeted for an offense by activist journalists seeking to pin his hide to a wall in their pursuit of moral purity. This is a far cry from Bill Ackman concluding that he is not comfortable having college students that justify gleeful acts of barbaric cruelty join his organization.
Some are saying that it is a youthful indiscretion for these bright eyed and bushy tailed college kids to don their keffiyehs and hoist placards while yelling phrases like "glory to the martyrs!" at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Some claim they were yelling "murders", although the distinction is merely between the act and its perpetrator). I have a different take. This should be a learning opportunity, and very few of these students realize that they're wandering into Palestinian activism, a phenomenon that has a long blood-soaked track record. Many have repeated the Palestinian slogan "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", however another common but less famous one goes like this: "With our souls and our blood we will redeem you O Palestine". This is a common refrain during riots and disturbances when crowds are whipped into a frenzy and a declaration of one's willingness to sacrifice himself for the cause. If these western activists, many of them self-identified Jews yelling "not in our name" at Israel's actions, are truly committed to the cause of "justice for Palestine" then shouldn't they be glad to sacrifice career advancement in its name? Or is their commitment to this cause only surface level? Gad Saad, a Lebanese Canadian and Jewish professor of evolutionary psychology has analogized their behaviour to crickets that have been infected by parasite worms causing them to engage in steadily erratic and ultimately suicidal behaviour.
The cause of Palestine is not necessarily all about hate. Certainly there are those out there that as a matter of conscience, sympathy for Palestinian Arabs, or criticism of the policies of Israel. But if this is all about ending the occupation and restoring the rights of Palestinians then why do the following incidents occur?
In April, long before the current violence, the "from the river to the sea" slogan was spray painted on a Barcelona synagogue twice. Similar graffiti was daubed on a synagogue in the Portuguese city of Porto this month.
In May a shooting at an ancient synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba killed five people. It had previously been the target of an Al-Qaeda attack in 2002 that killed 20.
A crowd of pro-Palestine demonstrators picketed a location of the Jewish-owned Café Landwer in Toronto this October. The business, which originated in Germany during the interwar period, fled to Israel during the rise of the Nazis and has opened branches in North America.
In Germany raucous street protests have also given way to explicit attacks against Jews, including the Oct. 18 firebombing of a synagogue in Berlin.
A synagogue bearing posters of the hostages held by Hamas had a window smashed in the Balboa Park district of San Diego.
On October 25 a group of pro-Palestine activists went even further, chasing Jewish students at Cooper Union college in Manhattan and forcing police to shelter them in a library before they could be safely evacuated.
A pro-Palestine protest at a pro-Israel event in Skokie, Illinois devolved into chaos, with two pro-Israel attendees arrested and one charged with a hate crime for deploying pepper spray. Another pro-Israel supporter fired his handgun in the air, supposedly under duress.
Skokie is well-known as the site where the neo-Nazi National Socialist Party of America attempted to march in direct provocation of the town's large population of Holocaust survivors, a controversy that resulted in the landmark NSPA v. Skokie Supreme Court ruling that affirmed free speech for hatemongers. If this is about Palestine, why vandalise places of worship in Spain and Portugal, two nations that expelled their Jewish populations in 1492 as part of the Spanish Inquisition, or Germany where such events in 1938 preceded the eventual genocide of Europe's Jews, or in the very same Chicago suburb where Jew haters gathered forty years later to rub it in the faces of the survivors of that genocide? Ironically one consequence of such actions would be that Jews that were once inclined to feel safer outside of Israel may decide to move there, even with the new outbreak of violence. Every American has the right to free speech, and I endorse other nations doing the same, but they don't have the right to be believed at face value. The pro-Palestine movement is permeated with bona fide anti-Jewish sentiments that overwhelm any supposed the benign motivations of its individual supporters and best advocates like Glenn Greenwald or Cornel West.
Finally, I've grown bored of the line that I hear from critics of Israel and the Jewish community who argue censorship of their cohorts is possible because "Jews stick together". Firstly, the claim that criticism of Israel is being censored should be juxtaposed with the fact that jihadist gunmen were able to use social media to livestream their psychotic violence to the world. Secondly, in some cases people are simply voicing their own response to pro-Palestine supporters. Dave Chappelle's recent stand-up set in Boston is an excellent example: He decided to inject his serious opinion on a sensitive topic into a comedy show, so some people heckled him, others walked out and still others stayed. That's not censorship, and while comedians have a right to air controversial comments people don't have to listen to him. What is even more ludicrous is this myth of Jewish cohesion in the face of adversity. I can assure you that if you ever have the experience of going to a Jewish wedding or worship service that all you will hear are raucous and sometimes unruly arguments.
Furthermore not only are Jews not "sticking together" over Israel and Palestine, but one could hardly stand in a rowboat and hurl a stone into the pond without hitting a hardcore Jewish opponent of Israel like George Soros, Aaron Maté, JVP and IfNotNow activists, Norman Finkelstein, Peter Beinart, Medea Benjamin. . . I could go on, but you get the point. There is also a small but growing contingent of American Jews including me who support the goal of ending foreign aid to Israel in the interests of allowing it to have operational independence. I have to admit, recent events make that goal almost impossible. There are also those like Alan Dershowitz who still insist that the "two-state solution" is the only peaceful outcome for the conflict, even after thirty years of trial and error. Between these options there are many other varying Jewish perspectives. We're not a monolithic throng of cheerleaders who support and endorse Israel's every action or its leaders.
In the Boston area alone attempts to rally a united response to the Oct. 7 attacks have been a failure. Workers' Circle (formerly Workmen's Circle), a Yiddish-language heritage society, has withdrawn from the Jewish Community Relations Council because of a disagreement over condemnation of the attack from Gaza. “The Boston JCRC has decided that at this moment, it is worthwhile to spend time expelling a founding member and dividing the Boston Jewish community, ensuring that an important voice is no longer at the table,” said the group's executive director. But her group's choice to criticize Israel in the wake of the attacks had already divided the community, and the group's national leadership had already broke with other Jewish organizations over what they deemed insufficient criticism of Israel. At Brandeis University, founded in 1948 by Jews as a response to sectarian discrimination at Ivy League Schools, a student senate resolution to condemn Hamas failed by a wide margin.
I don't know what the world is going to look like at the end of this episode of the long bloody Arab-Israeli conflict, but I remain committed to defending the First Amendment rights of everyone, even people that are idiotic or repulsive, including opposing anti-BDS laws and tech censorship of "hate speech". I hope some of the pro-Palestine activists now screaming about "cancel culture" have turned a new leaf and will change their attitude towards people like me, but I wouldn't hold my breath. So what has to be done? Peaceful demonstrations, even if they involve objectionable messaging, are the cornerstone of First Amendment protected free speech. However, universities must expel those whose actions involve physical violence or threats thereof like what happened at Cooper Union. Prosecutors must also press charges on crimes such as the vandalism that occurred in San Diego. But in the absence of either of these measures Jewish Americans, and others worried about similar behaviour on other issues, should do exactly what Bill Ackman and others are doing: Vote with your wallets by withholding donations. Discourage your kids from attending these schools, they're clearly not reflecting what you would want taught anyway and are not going to change until they feel real material consequences for their failures. It's up to YOU to be the fulcrum moving this boulder.