Left-Wing Antisemitism Is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

By Wilfred Reilly

Friday, November 10, 2023

 

Over the past three weeks, a lot of crazy sh** has been said about the Jews. Following the October 7 onset of hostilities between the nation of Israel and the terrorist group Hamas (sometimes billed as the “nation of Palestine”), a group of tens of thousands of recent migrants to Australia, university students, and others gathered in scenic downtown Sydney and quite literally chanted “Gas the Jews!” At 30–40 other large rallies, including this one in my hometown of Chicago, the cris de coeur were the just slightly less radical “From the river to the sea!” — a call for the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel — and “What is the solution? Intifada! Revolution!”

 

As has been documented to death by now, some 34 prominent student organizations (bizarrely including Amnesty International) at America’s third-best university, Harvard, signed on to a petition that assigned the “apartheid” state of Israel 100 percent of the blame for the current war — and indeed for the Hamas atrocities that began it. At another college, New York City’s Cooper Union, a group of Jewish students was apparently trapped inside a small campus library for hours by a braying pro-Palestinian mob. And so on.

 

In response to such open and gleeful hatred, more than a few conventional liberals — from comedienne Amy Schumer to the admittedly more heterodox Bill Maher — seem to have had their eyes fully opened as to who their keffiyeh-wearing “allies” truly are . . . at least when it comes specifically to Jewish people. But there is a deeper point, rarely made outside of the hard right, that lurks just beyond the mainstream’s discovery of rampant hard-left antisemitism: The same campus radicals and general hipster fauna quite regularly say worse things about a whole range of other groups than they do about Jews.

 

Whites — regular ol’ Caucasian Americans — represent probably the largest and most obvious such target group. As right-leaning but quite popular figures, such as the various Daily Wire personalities, are beginning to note, open hatred of white people has become something of a pillar of modern leftism. A Google search for the phrase “the problem is white men” turns up an astonishing 2,140,000,000 mostly on-point (at least as per the first 20 pages) results — including such gems as the former CNN feature piece titled “There’s Nothing More Frightening in America Today Than an Angry White Man.”

 

Quite prominent figures regularly say completely insane things about the suntan-challenged. Tenured Rutgers University academic “Professor Crunk” — still flatteringly described on the place’s website as an “unapologetic Black feminist” focused on “accelerating the pace of change” — recently described all Caucasians as villainous monsters on national television, and argued frankly for “taking the motherf***ers out.”

 

Around the same time, massively popular Wild ’N Out TV host Nick Cannon received considerable heat for some antisemitic comments he made on the air . . . but essentially none for saying that white people are “savages” and “a little less” than black people and other so-called people of color. Far further toward the true fringe, of course, the recently released written manifesto of Nashville’s Covenant Christian school shooter focused largely on hate for the white national majority. The shooter at one point actually noted “white privilege” as a motivating factor behind her murder spree.

 

Speaking as a conservative black man, I will note that whites hardly stand alone as a target group for modern leftist rhetoric. A few high-school scuffles aside, almost literally the only people ever to call me a “n*****” or a “coon” have been left-bloc activists — mostly white — accusing me of somehow betraying my tribe. More prominent black conservatives, such as Larry Elder, have faced Chappelle’s Show–level accusations of being “black white supremacists” and “black faces of white supremacy.” A short list of other groups that fairly regularly experience get-on-the-train-style rhetoric might include the rich (“Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist”), gender-critical women (“Punch/Kill TERFS!”), practicing traditional Christians, and in some real sense all non-Indigenous Westerners (“Decolonize NOW!”).

 

I recommend a radical approach to all of this facially vile speech: Sane, armed conservatives should believe what the speakers are saying, and take it seriously. At present, pervasive upper-middle-class postmodernism has significantly influenced even the Western Right, to such an extent that we regularly see serious editorialists and TV men treating things like a full soccer stadium chanting “Kill the Boer . . . kill the white farmer . . . bang bang!!!” as some sort of amusing metaphor — perhaps referencing South Africa’s ongoing spate of lawsuits over land rights.

 

Against this tortured reading, I — not being an idiot — suggest an alternative explanation: When intelligent adult humans say that they do not like whites, or Jews, or wealthy blacks, and want to kill them, I propose that they mean they do not like whites, or Jews, or wealthy blacks, and want to kill them. When citizens say that all American whites are privileged lairds who should lose most of the positions they currently hold, or that minorities can never be effectively racist (unless they’re conservative), or that “the only cure for past discrimination is present discrimination,” or that we need a federal Department of Antiracism with the ability to regulate every business in the U.S., or that borrowing ideas from other cultures should be socially toxic or even illegal, or that “colonizers” should be killed . . . they mean it.

 

So, what to do about all of this, once it is taken seriously? A simple answer would seem to be: React the way that any sane person would to an opponent saying that they hate or wish to kill him. In the wake of the pro-Hamas statements emanating not merely from Harvard but also quite a few other universities following the atrocities of October 7, many donors closed their wallets for good or emphatically threatened to — and this makes hard sense as a form of punishment. At least a dozen major firms are publicly refusing to hire students from any of the Harvard 34, and — whether you approve of this development or not — we seem to be moving toward a sort of “mutually assured destruction” re: cancel culture, which should eventually result in true free speech for all or a return to some damned manners.

 

All of this (and quite a bit more that is yet to come) is good, proper, and sorely overdue. A third or so of the country has been telling us exactly who they are for the past 50 years. It is long past time that we started listening to them — and responding appropriately.