Always Wrong in the Same Direction
On "Structural Anti-Semitism"
The Soft Bigotry of Divergent Expectations
I was listening to a podcast recently when one of the guests was complaining about repeatedly getting ripped off by cab drivers in foreign countries who would always shortchange him. “If they were merely bad at math,” he said, “you would think that sometimes their mistakes would work out in my favor; yet they never do.” It’s a phenomenon that we see in many areas of life, where what appears to be random or unintentional actually reveals a bias.
Jonah Goldberg brings this up in the context of “structural anti-Semitism,” as a corollary to the concept of structural [or “systemic” or “institutional”] racism. Now a lot of people on the right bristle at the idea of structural racism, and I get it, because a lot of the people who use the term “structural racism” do so in bad faith to discredit and smear their political opponents. But anyone even nominally informed on American history should be able to concede that there are many instances of disproportional impact on racial minorities, even where no racial animus exists. One of the easiest examples to explain is in our transportation infrastructure. As our country industrialized, expanded, and modernized, that required building highways, train tracks, power stations, water treatment facilities, etc. And many of those projects involved the government procuring private land or at least getting permission from the community to build that infrastructure, and it was simply easier to do so in communities that lacked the political wherewithal to oppose such measures. No one wants to live next to the highway or train tracks, but somebody’s gotta, and that’s usually the people with the least political power [which, in America — and you might want to sit down for this — has historically been poor black communities]. So even if no one using that infrastructure today has any racial animus, and even if we assume that the people who developed the infrastructure decades ago had no ill intent [which is a much shakier assumption], it was still borne out of a willingness to mistreat [or at the very least inconvenience] racial minorities.
Similarly, in international politics there’s an historical tendency [let’s call it] to treat the world’s only Jewish nation state differently from all the others. Over the last 10 years, a supermajority of United Nations resolutions have condemned Israel. That’s 173 out of 251, if you’re scoring at home. In second place is Russia — who is, you might remember, currently engaged in an unprovoked war of conquest and war crimes against its neighbor — with a mere 27 resolutions of condemnations. Israel is often and repeatedly accused of war crimes and atrocities that, if engaged in by most any other country, would be viewed as justifiable self defense. And it is this special treatment of the world’s sole Jewish state, even in the absence of affirmative Jew-hatred, that leads to anti-Semitic outcomes. [And that’s being charitable in assuming that most of the people who have such opinions about Israel aren’t basing it on simple Jew hatred, which we can’t say for everyone.]
The most recent example of this “structural anti-Semitism” is in the accusations surfacing this week that Israel is intentionally starving the people of Gaza in the conduct of their war against Hamas — which would be a literal war crime. There was a big writeup in the New York Times last week about how Gazans are dying of starvation, including this now-infamous picture:
The picture itself is obviously distressing, purporting to show a child so malnourished that his spine is protruding through his skin. But British journalist David Collier revealed over the weekend that the photo is misleading and leaves out some important context — the child in question actually suffers from multiple medical disorders including cerebral palsy and hypoxemia [abnormally low blood oxygen], among others. Perhaps most notably, the child has a three year old brother who is not obviously malnourished:
This is not to dismiss the obviously dire humanitarian circumstances in Gaza, but it’s notable when media organizations choose to leave out such important context in such an emotionally-charged story [again, if it were merely human error, you’d think there’d be mistakes in both directions, not merely in the direction that portrays Israel most negatively].
This is actually a microcosm of the broader situation on the ground in Gaza, in which Israel is portrayed as solely [or, at best, chiefly] to blame for the civilian crisis. But let’s think about those accusations and what they actually imply. At the most basic level, Israel is being blamed for the situation of Gazan civilians, a group of people over which it has no political power. That distinction lies with Hamas, the entity that decided to brutally start a war with Israel nearly two years ago. Hamas purports to be the government of the people of Gaza, therefore it should be their responsibility to care for Gazans in times of crisis. But it’s as if everyone just accepts the fact that Hamas takes no responsibility for the wellbeing of the Gazan people, and never has, because the suffering of the Gazan people is useful in their actual goal [both stated and revealed by their actions], which is the elimination of the state of Israel [and the Jewish people generally]. Hamas has a long and well-documented history of using the Palestinian people as human shields and propaganda props, and it works on a certain type of Western political creature. It’s a version of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Hamas, who everyone at least tacitly admits is a terrorist group masquerading as a government, has no intention of ensuring the wellbeing of their own people. So somehow that responsibility then falls to Israel, who is trying to ensure the wellbeing of their own people by removing the threat of Hamas. Think about that for a second: Israel is being asked to ensure the wellbeing of a population currently engaged in war against it, while hostilities are still ongoing. In a war Israel didn’t start, by the way. Some people have compared it to post-WWII Berlin where the allies engaged in an airdrop to help feed the civilians of Berlin who had been blockaded by the Soviet Union, but even that occurred after the war had ended. This is basically like asking the allies to engage in the Berlin airdrop while Berlin is still controlled by the Nazis. What other country would be asked to do something so…schizophrenic?
The fact remains, as it always has, that if Hamas laid down its arms and surrendered today, there would be no crisis. Aid could flow into Gaza unrestricted, the people of Gaza could be well-fed and begin the long and arduous process of rebuilding their communities. And every day, Hamas chooses not to do that [and why would they, given that a large part of the international community is so eager to absolve them of their wrongdoing and instead shift that blame onto Israel, their mortal enemy?].
Similarly, one of the chief reasons that there is such a humanitarian crisis in Gaza is because Egypt, the only country other than Israel that shares a land border with Gaza, refuses to open its border with Gaza to allow civilians to evacuate. Yet Egypt receives barely a fraction of the ire aimed at Israel for their contribution to the humanitarian crisis, which I suppose is another “soft bigotry of low expectations” sort of moment, because we couldn’t possibly expect a Muslim country to engage in a humanitarian effort when they could choose instead to use human suffering as a cudgel against the Jewish state.
I have a lot of liberal friends who post about politics on social media, but it’s usually relegated to domestic politics. But on the infrequent occasions when they venture into foreign affairs, it’s exclusively to condemn the state of Israel, which is…well, noticeable. It sticks out. And I understand that Benjamin Netanyahu is an object of scorn for most anyone who isn’t a well-considered Zionist, but that anger [particularly among Americans, more particularly among American Jews] causes a certain sort of blindness to the facts. Facts such as: Both Hamas and Egypt could, today, take actions to greatly alleviate the suffering in Gaza, and will choose not to. And yet it’s Israel who will continue to be the object of virtually all of the scorn. That’s weird when you think about it, right? What makes Israel so uniquely disfavored among the world’s nation states?
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced yesterday that the U.K. will recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September unless Israel meets various demands, including “substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree[ing] to a ceasefire and commit[ing] to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution.”
That’s a weird way to go about creating a nation-state, isn’t it? As punishment to the Jewish state? Usually a nation state is recognized when it has met various items on a checklist about the ability of the people in question to self-govern. In the eyes of Starmer, however, it’s precisely the opposite. It’s the very fact that the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, are currently in no position to self-govern — suffering, as they are, from dire humanitarian conditions — that makes “recognizing” them so appealing to him. Not because statehood would bring relief to the suffering of the Palestinians, but because it would really stick it to the Israelis.
In that sense, Britain is explicitly taking Hamas’s side in the conflict. If Israel doesn’t stop fighting before achieving its military objectives, Britain will punish it by giving Israel’s enemies a nation state right in their backyard. But what does Hamas stand to lose if they don’t similarly comply by releasing the hostages and disarming? Starmer doesn’t say, because I don’t think there’s an answer to that question.
So once again, Israel is being treated on the global stage in a way that no other country is treated. And why is that? Why is Israel held to a higher standard than any other country, and when they fail to live up to those higher standards, at least in the eyes of their critics, they are accused of literal war crimes?
Israeli historian J. L. Talmon coined the term “the state of the Jews has become the Jew of the states.” For most of human history, the Jewish people have endured various accusations of nefariousness and wrongdoing, including literal blood libels — the myth that Jews murder Christian children and drink their blood — at various points in history. Now that there is a Jewish state, many of those same historical inclinations have simply moved from the Jewish people generally to the state of Israel specifically, including baseless accusations of monstrous crimes against children. Old habits die hard, I suppose.
The Coming Ghislane Maxwell Pardon
Just go ahead and prepare yourselves for the fact that President Trump is going to pardon, or otherwise legally relieve, Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislane Maxwell.
For one thing, Trump has already started his “I’m allowed to pardon her, but I haven’t thought about it” shtick that he does before issuing politically untoward pardons. But the Department of Justice is really making a show of it. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interviewed Maxwell last week, which is itself unusual. Actually, it’s unheard of for the Deputy Attorney General to interview a convicted criminal for no other reason than “we need you to exonerate the president,” which is clearly the point of this entire endeavor. This is made worse by the fact that Blanche has served as Trump’s personal attorney, which would seem to raise some potential conflicts of interest, no? Beyond that, this seems to be well outside of normal protocol for the Department of Justice. Even if we set aside the fact that this is not usually the purview of the Deputy Attorney General, much less one who recently served as the personal lawyer for an interested party, and instead the responsibility of the relevant U.S. attorneys, there’s just a lot we simply don’t know. Were there FBI agents in the room, as is normal procedure? We don’t know. Was the interview recorded, as is also normal procedure? We don’t know.
It’s also worth noting that the previous Trump Justice Department charged Maxwell with perjury [though those charges were superseded by, y’know, all the sex crimes], and Justice Department officials have also publicly said at various times that they don’t believe Maxwell tells the truth. But here she is getting interviewed by the Deputy Attorney General to really get to the bottom of this.
Similarly, the Trump administration asked the relevant judge to release Maxwell’s Grand Jury testimony, but that was always a red herring because releasing such testimony is an incredibly high bar to clear, usually reserved for such scenarios as “we need it for another criminal investigation we’re performing.” Unsurprisingly, “the president needs it for political convenience” does not, at least not yet, meet that standard.
The whole thing is just shady from beginning to end, and it’s the sort of thing that used to end presidencies, in the Before Times. But we can all see it coming, even Trump supporters who used to be obsessed with the idea of elite sex criminals using their status to escape punishment for their crimes — who are simply, uh, pursuing other interests.
Occasional Trivia
Apparently I forgot to actually include a clue in Friday’s edition, so there’s no answer from last time. But here’s today’s:
Category: Scientific Instruments
Clue: With cups that rotate horizontally, an anemometer measures the speed of this, “anemos” in Greek.
Dispatches from the Homefront
The other day, my younger daughter was eating dinner without a shirt [as is her wont], and I noticed some food had dropped onto her stomach.
“What’s that on your tummy?” I asked her.
“…uh, salsa…” she said, looking down to investigate.
“Well get a napkin…” I suggested.
“Eh, no, it’s ok if [our dog] just licks it off,” she assured me.
“…you feral little street urchin…”