By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, April
24, 2024
“Go back to Poland!”
I’m trying to practice what I preach. I tell people that
we shouldn’t nutpick: Don’t take the worst examples of one side and claim
they’re representative of everybody you disagree with. Don’t let the trolls
manipulate you. And my advice doesn’t end there. I often say you shouldn’t let
frustration with the media overwhelm you. Also, don’t catastrophize, and don’t
let recency bias lead you to think everything is worse than ever. Don’t let
your anger get the better of you.
But when I hear pro-terrorist radicals shout “Go back to
Poland!” and see so many shrug it off, it is difficult for me to follow
my own advice. So I’m going to try to work calmly through all of the reasons I
find it so difficult to maintain my composure.
Let’s start with “Go back to Poland.”
Of all the insults hurled at Jews lately, this might seem
a weird one to be triggered by. But I find it more infuriating than the other
stuff, including even the endorsements of October 7 and the calls for more mass
rape and slaughter. Which is not to say I don’t find those incitements
infuriating, too.
But “Go back to
Poland!” combines, in just four words, an ocean of evil and hypocrisy. I
don’t know if the masked bigot in the video linked from that quote is a student
or an “outside agitator,” but he is, judging from his accent, an immigrant. I
suppose he could be a tourist, but I assume not. The “idea” behind “Go back to
Poland” is no Jew is indigenous to Israel. They are all East European Jews
that, in the wake of World War II, became settler-colonizers of “Palestinian”
land—and therefore they should go back to where they came from. In the context
of Israel, it’s a common trope. Helen Thomas, the bitter, wildly biased,
Israel-hating, former “dean of the White House press corps” infamously
said that Israelis should all go back to Poland and Germany. Now, I
reviled Helen Thomas and make no apologies for it, but in her defense, she was
at least referring to Israelis she believed had stolen “Palestine” from Arabs.
This guy is yelling at American Jews to go back to Poland
(and, oddly, Tel Aviv). In other words, he wants America (or
New York or Columbia) to be Judenrein.
Think about that. An immigrant to the United States
thinks Jews have no place in a country where Jews have lived since before its
founding. I have all sorts of problems with nativists, but there’s something
particularly appalling about a newcomer shouting, in effect, “Go back to where
you came from.” I mean, given how much “death to America” talk is swirling out
there as well, I’m going to take a flier and say this guy is not making an
“America: Love it or Leave it” argument either.
Then there’s the specific issue of Poland. It’s true that
Poland was once a relative safe haven for Jews. The Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth was hailed as Paradisus Judaeorum—paradise
or heaven for Jews because it was one of the few places in Europe
where Jews were safe and free. Jews were chased out of their communities by
Christians or Muslims and, later, out of Russia starting with the reign of
Catherine the Great.
Even by then Poland had started to become less
hospitable. Persecution of Polish Jews started with the religious upheavals of
the Reformation. But things got worse in the 20th century. Ninety percent of
Polish Jews—some 3 million men, women, and children—were murdered in the
Holocaust (most of the remaining Jews were effectively pushed out during the anti-Zionist
campaign of 1968-1969). Declaring “go back to ground zero of the
Holocaust” is, to speak plainly, evil.
Now, it’s fair to say that making too much of one
isolated incident is precisely the kind of nutpicking or argument-by-anecdote I
normally decry. And if that was all that was going on here, I’d agree. But in
the broader context, I think it’s more significant.
For starters, it’s not isolated. I’m open to the idea
that it’s less representative than critics claim. But much of the media
coverage and reaction from the progressive base of the Democratic Party often
sounds like it’s either completely unrepresentative or flat-out isn’t
happening. Some significant fraction of these protesters is obviously
antisemitic, and attempts to deny that obvious truth amounts to
gaslighting—gaslighting in defense of bigotry.
And this gets me to the issue of hypocrisy. I have
written dozens of columns criticizing the logic of critical
race theory, anti-racism, structural
racism, sexism, etc. But by the logic of the people pushing such ideas, a
much larger portion of the protesters are objectively antisemitic, even if
unintentionally so.
Until recently, the standard for “hate speech” was
profoundly subjective. The intent of the speaker was a secondary consideration
to the feelings of the offended. If someone felt “hurt” or
“aggressed” by a statement, that was enough to declare the statement
offensive. That’s why higher education and the diversity industry have spent so
much time and effort coming up with speech codes and replacement euphemisms for
offensive words. Yale replaced
the term “master” with “head of college” because the word “master” conjures
associations with slavery, even though no one intended any such connotation. Realtors
have moved away from “master bedroom” for the same reason. The examples are
endless and not just from the fringe. Joe Biden recently got in trouble for
using the word “illegal” to describe an immigrant who was here illegally.
Obviously, I could give you dozens more examples.
But the point is that vile and intentionally
offensive language about Jews is considered fair or defensible comment
on free speech grounds. Obviously, I think the free speech argument has merit.
But you cannot invoke it in good faith if in the past you defended linguistic
legerdemain and bureaucratic and journalistic enforcement of newspeak on the
grounds that the eye of the beholder or the ear of the offended is what
determines hate speech or offensive language. If writing “blind study” is
harmful speech, holding a sign saying that Jewish Columbia students are Hamas’
“next target” for rape and murder has to qualify as harmful speech. You can
retreat to the claim that anti-Zionist speech isn’t the same as antisemitic
speech, and sometimes that’s true, but not when any Jew on campus who doesn’t
join the mob is deemed to be a Zionist. And not when the standard is supposed
to be the feelings of the target of the speech.
Also, just to be clear. There is absolutely nothing
offensive about being a Zionist. I know a lot of people have committed a lot of
man-hours—sorry, person hours—to the claim that Zionism is racist, Nazi, etc. I
think being a communist is terrible. Communists killed exponentially more
innocent people than Israel is even alleged to have killed. But the Columbia
faculty members marching in solidarity with the students and the journalists
fawning over them would be the first to void their bowels and bladders in
terror and outrage over the “McCarthyism” and “fascism” of mobs chanting the
need to purge and harass communists wherever you find them.
Second, as I argued earlier
this week on CNN, the debate over what constitutes antisemitism is
increasingly a distraction from a more salient point. When you wave a Hezbollah
flag, praise Hamas, and say things like, “Never forget the 7th of October,”
and, “That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10 more
times, not 100 more times, not 1,000 more times, but 10,000 times!” the
question of whether you’re an antisemite distracts from the plain fact of logic
that you are an open supporter of terrorism. Protesters are shouting “Globalize the
Intifada!” What does that mean if not “take the fight to Jews, everywhere”? The
National Students for Justice in Palestine openly declares that
campus protests are exercises in solidarity with the terrorists who murdered,
raped, tortured, and kidnapped civilians in Israel and that, “We as Palestinian
students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this
movement.” They go on:
Liberation is not an abstract
concept. It is not a moment circumscribed to a revolutionary past as
it is often characterized. Rather, liberating colonized land is a real process
that requires confrontation by any means necessary. In essence, decolonization
is a call to action, a commitment to the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty.
It calls upon us to engage in meaningful actions that go beyond symbolism and
rhetoric. Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and
popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.
Condemning terrorism is supposed to be the easy part. For
years, anti-Israel activists at least did that much. Now, the mask is off. And
even the most “enlightened” of them feel compelled to say they “condemn
terrorism, but …”
As accurate as I think it would be to describe the
sloganeers and chanters as pro-terrorism, that’s obviously too much to ask of
the mainstream media, which is not merely biased in favor of the protesters and
their cause but is biased toward left-wing protesters generally. So I can live
with describing the protesters as “pro-Palestinian” even though I think what
animates many of them is better described as “anti-Israel.”
But the common label “anti-war” is propaganda. They
are pro-war.
Openly declaring, in chant form or otherwise, that Israel
must be Judenrein by any means necessary, is an open call for
war, not peace. Because the only way to “liberate” Israel from the river to the
sea is war. Pretending that “from the river to the sea” is a call for a
two-state solution is a lie. That’s not the position of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran,
SJP, and pretending otherwise is to volunteer as a media praetorian for people
who plainly declare they are pro-genocide. And since Israelis are opposed to
the genocide of the Jews, they will wage war to prevent it, as they must.
Whether on campus or off, if you cheer “Iran,
you make us proud!” when Iran opens a new front in the war on Israel, you
are not anti-war. When you defend Hamas’ slaughter but denounce Israel’s
response as genocide—even before Israel responds—you aren’t for a ceasefire,
you’re against Israel firing back. When you cheer the Houthis for attacking
Israel, you are not anti-war. Nor are you pro-American. The official slogan
Houthi slogan is ”God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse
on the Jews, Victory to Islam.” That is about as succinct a summation of a
pro-war, pro-terrorism, antisemitic, anti-American, and theocratically
totalitarian worldview as can be crafted. I write often about how I’m a
both-sides-er in my contempt for the fringes of both parties. But I’m not a
both-sides-er on this. One side is wrong and one side is right. Anything else
is gaslighting in defense of evil—and in defense of America’s terrorist
enemies.
I have openly condemned and denounced bigotry on the
right because it’s the morally necessary thing to do. But that obscures
the fact that it is politically and culturally necessary for
conservatives and Republicans to do so. Republican politicians are constantly
asked to denounce racist or antisemitic rhetoric from the right. Where is a
similar demand on the left? To be clear, it does happen. On Monday, Biden was
asked to do so. And he did. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” Biden said.
“That’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who
don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.”
That program was
set up explicitly to deal with the antisemitism of the sort seen in
Charlottesville. Here’s the first paragraph of the White
House’s National Strategy
to Counter Anti-Semitism:
Six years ago, Neo-Nazis marched
from the shadows through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “Jews will not
replace us.” With torches in hand, they spewed the same antisemitic bile and
hate that were heard across Europe in the 1930s. What happened in Charlottesville—the
horror of that moment, the violence that followed, and the threat it
represented for American democracy— drove me to run for President. The very
soul of our Nation was hanging in the balance. It still is today.
This idea that the antisemitism, allegedly encouraged and
condoned by Donald Trump, threatened the “very soul of our nation” was
Biden’s stated
reason for running for president in 2020 in the first place. The
antisemitism in Charlottesville was abhorrent and grotesque. So is the
antisemitism of Hamas and its domestic defenders. But I don’t hear a lot of
talk about the “soul of the nation” being threatened. I hear a lot more talk
about how the election results in Michigan hangs in the balance.
It’s fine to discuss the political reality the president
faces. Heck, that’s a big part of what I do for a living. But as with the
college presidents eager to demonstrate their moral clarity and courage when it
aligns with their institutional interests, but who opt to vomit a sludge of
false equivalences and euphemisms when moral clarity and courage are
inconvenient, this American president is happy to show spinal steel condemning
a bunch of bigoted chuds with tiki torches, but is desperate to show spinal flexibility
when it comes to far more numerous bigots in his own coalition.
And much of the media is only too eager to help him.
