We’ve all heard the “woke” assertion that some people cannot be considered racist no matter how they act or what they say while other people are destined to live their entire lives as racists no matter how they act or what they say. The key difference between the two groups of people is whether their ancestry dictates they be labeled among the oppressors or the oppressed.
People exercising rationality see through this nonsense. They can judge people’s actions and statements with no investigation of family trees required.
Reading the Tuesday editorial “The New Antisemitism” at Time one comes across a fair amount of interesting commentary. But, in the end, the editorial just ends up applying a variation of the now familiar woke garbage assertions to Israel’s ongoing war. The Israel government cannot be engaging in genocide in its war because Israel is “the Jewish state” and Jewish people have a long history of being much oppressed, plus people who say otherwise are antisemitic. That is how the author Noah Feldman wraps up the editorial.
Here is the Time editorial’s presentation of its conclusions on genocide and antisemitism:
There is something specifically noteworthy about leveling the [genocide] charge at the Jewish state—something intertwined with the new narrative of the Jews as archetypal oppressors rather than archetypal victims. Call it the genocide sleight of hand: if the Jews are depicted as genocidal—if Israel becomes the very archetype of a genocidal state—then Jews are much less likely to be conceived as a historically oppressed people engaged in self-defense.
The new narrative of Jews as oppressors is, in the end, far too close for comfort to the antisemitic tradition of singling out Jews as uniquely deserving of condemnation and punishment, whether in its old religious form or its Nazi iteration. Like those earlier forms of antisemitism, the new kind is not ultimately about the Jews, but about the human impulse to point the finger at someone who can be made to carry the weight of our social ills.
The Time editorial says people seeking to hold the Israel government to account for its actions and statements are applying a “genocide sleight of hand” rooted in antisemitism. However, critical readers will recognize that real sleight of hand is the rhetorical sleight of hand whereby the clever wording of the editorial is used in an attempt to absolve a government for its horrendous actions by defining that government as a perpetual victim and its accusers as inescapably antisemites.
