Posters

Let's begin with a tweet about something happening in my neck of the woods, and, well, the world over.

University students in Los Angeles tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children

What’s going on at the universities in America?

🇺🇸🇮🇱pic.twitter.com/nStxTviGAj

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 21, 2023

This is but one example. We've seen this occur in cities all over the "civilized" West. Young people running around and ripping off the posters of kidnapped Israeli children, doing so gleefully, thinking they're striking a blow for Palestinian freedom. They think they're righting the narrative of the mainstream media and the "Establishment", which is supportive of Israel and ignores the plight of Palestinians. They think they're standing for the oppressed.

I will tell you what they're doing. They are erasing The Other. They are eradicating the existence of The Other. They are denying the humanity of The Other. They are doing all the things which they accuse Jews and their allies of doing.

And, of course, they do this because "Jews" control everything. They believe in the quote misattributed to Voltaire, but actually coined by white nationalist Kevin Alfred Strom: To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. Jews are the evil puppet masters, pulling the strings of their Western slaves, ordering the world to fit their ends and goals. According to them, Jews are never criticized in Western media or culture; therefor, they relinquish any claim to being victims.

And the "victims" which the white Left in the West supports?

By any objective standards, Hamas is a far-right, reactionary, theocratic, fascist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, antisemitic group.

The fact that many Western Leftists sympathize with it, promote its propaganda, repeat its talking points, and/or make excuses for it,…

— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) October 21, 2023

I've seen trans and gay leftists support an "oppressed" group which is well-known for throwing people like them off of rooftops in order to save bullets. I've seen feminists stand up for a group which sees them as less than men. I've seen champions of Black racial equity stump for a group which is not known for promoting the brotherhood of man. 

"I don't hate Jews; I just hate Israel." That's a distinction without a difference, as in hating Israel you perforce hate the Jews who live there. And when you do that, then it seems right and proper to tear down posters of kidnapped Jewish children. Because the common refrain is that these children are part of a settler, apartheid, genocidal state, so they share in the collective guilt of all Jews.

Tearing down those posters is an act of erasure. An erasure of the fact of their kidnapping. An erasure of millennia of Jewish trauma. An erasure of Jewish humanity. While they protest Israeli violence, they commit an act of violence not against the Israeli state, but against Jewishness itself. It is an act of violence against the idea that Jews are at all fully human, just like Palestinians. They set themselves as arbiters of who is worthy of human empathy. They set themselves as the petty commissars of the coming revolution which will sweep all aside and usher in utopia.

And this is the "utopia" they wish to usher in:

My friends, we've seen this picture and its like before. They paved the way to Auschwitz. If those protestors don't like being lumped in with genocide, that's too bad. For by their actions they align themselves. 

And what is Israel doing to combat this denialism in real-time? Sadly, this:

We are witnessing a Holocaust denial-like phenomenon unfolding in real time.

So tomorrow, Israel will screen for foreign journalists the raw, unedited footage of Hamas’ atrocities in the October 7 Massacre, as captured by its death squads’ body cams. pic.twitter.com/wm7rjuvFsn

— Eylon Levy (@EylonALevy) October 22, 2023

Shortly after this piece posts, at 11:30am Israeli time, the footage will be released. Jews will again have to prove that they are fighting extermination. And many in this fallen world will either not care, not believe, or believe but say that it's a just outcome.

Times like this are why I'm a Zionist. No, I'm not Jewish. And I'm certainly not a "Christian Zionist", who only supports Israel for eschatological reasons. I am a Zionist because I grew up on 175th Street in Washington Heights. And across the street from me was a synagogue. My neighborhood was heavily Jewish and Italian and Irish before those folks moved up the socio-economic ladder and moved out. When I lived there it was mostly Dominican. My parish church was kitty-corner from me. It was never graffitied. But the synagogue? Always marked up when apartment buildings around it were not. And at that young age, I knew this was wrong. I knew this was unjust. And I've never forgotten it. Jews can't rely on Gentiles to keep them safe, or to see them as fully human. This is why Israel's right to exist is non-negotiable.

We're in for a long fight. And the frontlines are not just places on a map, but fissures in the human soul. But we will win. Darkness will not triumph.