The Woke Jihad

By Abe Greenwald

Thursday, May 16, 2024

 

In April, a long-haired flower child on the campus of Princeton University was captured on camera. The picture, posted on social media, shows him sitting on his guitar case, guitar in hand, ready to play. Spread on the grass before him, completing this otherwise faithful portrait of hippiedom, is not a peace sign or a tie-dyed bedsheet but the flag of the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Look closer, and you’ll spot the keffiyeh around his neck. But what is incongruous about the picture—the pairing of hippie garb and jihadist imagery—is nothing of the sort in real life. This tree-hugging terrorist supporter is the moronic face of a harmonious marriage.

 

In the first decade of the 21st century, the United States was attacked by jihadists who drew the country into a yearslong, multifront war. At the start of the third decade, we were attacked in a far different fashion, from within. Left-wing radicals embarked on a violent campaign to upend the cultural and political order of the nation. Both attacks changed us in significant ways, but neither one broke us. In 2023, seizing on Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israelis, the jihadists and the left-wing radicals explicitly joined forces. They first launched a street campaign against Israel and in support of jihadist terror. Then they occupied university campuses, where they began harassing Jewish students, continued calling for death to Israel and America, and amplified their praise for jihad. All, naturally, in the name of peace.

 

We don’t know what this hybrid enemy of the West will do next. But we know that it won’t stop soon, as it is well funded and impressively organized. Moreover, its two halves enjoy a valuable symbiotic relationship. They need each other.

 

First, a sampling of the movement’s fruits so far.

 

Khymani James, a leading figure of Columbia University’s pro-Hamas encampment, and a gay African American in exquisite standing with the social-justice left, says, “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” At UCLA, Eli Tsives, a Jewish student wearing a Magen David necklace, is physically blocked on his way to class by keffiyeh-clad protesters. At Stanford University, a protester is photographed wearing a Hamas headband and face covering while he scrolls through his phone. At George Washington University, a statue of Washington himself is draped in a keffiyeh and a Palestinian flag. Elsewhere on the campus, students hold a “people’s tribunal” and sentence the school’s president and others to death amid cheers of “Guillotine, guillotine!” On campus after campus, left-wing activists call for “intifada revolution” or proclaim, “We are Hamas” under banners bearing the jihadist rallying cry for Jewish extermination, “From the river to the sea,” or the Islamist paean to holy suicide bombers, “Glory to all our martyrs.”

 

The union of radical leftism and jihadism on display across American campuses is a marriage born of necessity—and of love. The necessity is reciprocal. Three-plus years after the George Floyd revolution, the left had found itself adrift. With the liberal rank and file no longer interested in police-defunding, the public turning against DEI schemes, whistleblowers revealing the horrors of “gender-affirming care” for trans kids, and the term woke a source of liberal embarrassment, what was there to constitute the vital work of social justice? A revolutionary cannot live on microaggressions alone. The left needed a new animating theme, and jihadist fury would prove more than bracing enough.

 

For their part, the jihadists needed the American left for tactical purposes: to propagandize for their cause and fit anti-Semitic terrorists—alongside gays, the transgendered, and African Americans—into the intersectional left’s pantheon of victims. As one coordinator of a Vancouver-based “pro-Palestinian” organization counseled Columbia University students in March: “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas. These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.” If average Americans are shocked at how ardently the woke took to Islamist thinking, it’s because they don’t know the left as well as jihadists do.

 

The love between the two camps, however, is not reciprocal. Leftists love the jihadists. They love them for their ferocity and exoticism as much as for their bottomless self-pity. Those are the constituent elements of social justice. It’s why we see protesters trying to shape-shift into war-ravaged Palestinians, asking for humanitarian aid, claiming chemical attacks on students, grasping to bask in the reflective glow of the nobly oppressed. But no properly chauvinistic jihadist could feel anything but disgust for the unchecked females, sexual libertines, heathens, and even Jews he’s been forced to instrumentalize in the cause of Islamist domination.

 

Yet while the love is not reciprocal, it is in other aspects mutual, or shared. The leftists and jihadists both love violence and victimhood. They both love destroying the good things of the West. And they both love anti-Semitism. Up until recently, most of the anti-Semitic left was inclined to costume its Jew-hatred in anti-Zionism. Their alliance with plainly exterminationist jihadists has changed that. This shift can be heard in the common protest chant “We don’t want no two states. We want all of it.”

 

In pursuit of these shared passions, the protesters have been known to find guidance in a pamphlet titled “De-arrest Primer,” which encourages them to assault police officers and create their own “micro-intifada which can spread and inspire others until we may finally shake off this noxious ruling order all together.”

 

Maybe you’re not convinced. Perhaps you’re inclined to agree with former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who tweeted in May, “Hamas has nothing in common at all with liberal or progressive values.” If you think he has a point, look more closely at  those protesting in sympathy with Hamas. You’ll find every color in the identity rainbow. Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ groups, intersectional feminist organizations, and others salute October 7 as righteous resistance and condemn the Israeli response as genocide. If you still find it strange that people nominally committed to the defense of minorities, women, and the transgendered are supporting a racist, male-supremacist, anti-gay terrorist regime, you’ve missed the purpose of social justice: to “finally shake off this noxious ruling order all together.” This necessarily means destroying the Jewish state, laying waste to the U.S. as we know it, and deifying the enemies of both.

 

***

 

The first thing to understand about any left-wing protest movement is that its nominal cause is irrelevant. Black Lives Matter isn’t about saving black lives. Trans activism isn’t about protecting trans children. And intersectionality isn’t about the suffering of the diverse disaffected. Never were, never will be. Underneath their particular brands, social-justice movements are assorted fronts in a radical war against the good. And so it is for the “pro-Palestinian” encampments.

 

Would a group trying to save black lives have seized on a statistically tiny number of police killings as justification to rid black neighborhoods of police? That’s what Black Lives Matter did. And by the time the cops were hobbled, and violent crime spiked precisely where police were most needed, the movement’s leaders were using corporate donations to buy safe suburban palaces. BLM was an attack on law enforcement, because law enforcement maintains the good working order of the United States. Undermine that and you’re left with chaos, which is the objective.

 

And celebratory chaos is precisely the goal of the radical trans movement. Consider Rose Montoya, the trans activist who went topless on the South Lawn of the White House during a Pride Month celebration. How does that viral stunt protect trans kids or evoke empathy for an outcast demographic? Every aspect of the movement is designed to undo our common appreciation for a safe and sane way of life. Denying solid biological reality, throwing kids into emotional disarray, scaring the hell out of parents, endorsing ruinous medical procedures for minors, and trolling everyone who’s not convinced—that’s the game. And just as BLM leaders got rich, trans stars are furnished with endorsements and media deals once they’ve done their part to tear down the edifice of stability.

 

Intersectional ideology has infiltrated our lives mostly through the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training programs at work and school. To conquer, you must first divide. That’s the DEI trainer’s remit—splitting formerly cohesive groups into racial, ethnic, and gender camps, highlighting their differences and coaxing out ugly resentments. Not surprisingly, DEI work increases bigotry. As one DEI theorist recently admitted to the Wall Street Journal, “People often leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity toward other groups.” Because that’s what it’s supposed to do, especially regarding Jews. Soon after October 7, Tabia Lee, the disenchanted former head of DEI at California’s De Anza College, told the New York Post that she was called a “dirty Zionist” for bringing Jewish speakers to campus. And school administrators refused her request to issue a condemnation of anti-Semitism. Lee says, “I was told in no uncertain terms that Jews are ‘white oppressors’ and our job as faculty and staff members was to ‘decenter whiteness.’” Of the left’s post–October 7 bigotry, she writes, “This outpouring of antisemitic hatred is the direct result of DEI’s insistence that Jews are oppressors.”

 

Yes, there are well-meaning individuals who support civil rights, gay rights, and gender equality. And if these well-meaning people are still supporting social-justice campaigns because they believe their stated aims, then they’ll support anyone.

 

But the performative lunatics who turned identity fanaticism into a national pastime are enemies of Israel, the Jews, the United States, and human decency itself. That makes them natural allies of terrorists, whatever their do-good cover stories.

 

As with previous left-wing campaigns, the “pro-Palestinian” movement offers nothing in support of its supposed purpose. It sides with Gaza’s governing terrorists, who start wars with the express goal of producing a surplus of dead Gazans. American Hamas supporters chant “Cease-Fire now” as Hamas refuses every cease-fire offer that Israel and the U.S. put on the table. Why? Because a cease-fire means no more dead Gazans, and dead Gazans are Hamas’s chief natural resource and most valuable export. It’s what brings in the billions of aid money that’s used to build tunnels where Hamas hides—while civilians absorb the blows overhead. If Israel were to stop short of eradicating Hamas, as the protesters want, many more Gazans would die in the future wars that Hamas has vowed to instigate.

 

No, the encampments aren’t pro-Palestinian. They’re the latest expression of the social-justice left’s impulse to destroy the virtuous and raise up the wicked.

 

***

 

But that’s not all they are. What the jihadists of Hamas and other groups want from the protesters is not to save Palestinian lives but to further rally world opinion against Israel and pressure institutions to boycott, divest from, and sanction it. From their perspective, the encampments are both a psychological operation, or psyop, and a means of economic warfare against the State of Israel. In both respects, the protesters have been dutiful in trying to advance jihadists’ aims. But they are merely the end products of long-running, highly developed propaganda and finance networks developed to press them into service. And even a cursory look at the parties behind these networks gives you a sense of their interest in peace.

 

Consider the organization American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), founded in 2005. As Commentary contributing editor Jonathan Schanzer testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in April, AMP is “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States.” AMP supplies SJP with “speakers, training, printed materials, a so-called Apartheid Wall, and grants” to activists. Moreover, “AMP even has a campus coordinator on staff whose job is to work directly with SJP and other pro-BDS campus groups across the country.”

 

Whom does AMP employ? From Schanzer’s testimony: “At least seven individuals who work for or on behalf of AMP have worked for or on behalf of organizations previously shut down or held civilly liable in the United States for providing financial support to Hamas.” One of these individuals, Salah Sarsour, did eight months behind bars in Israel for “Hamas activity.” Little surprise that attendees of AMP’s 2014 annual conference were invited to “come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.” AMP has also received donations from businesses and foundations with one or two degrees of separation from terrorist funders.

 

Schanzer also testified about a pro-BDS group called alternately “The U.S. Coalition to Boycott Israel” or “Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine.” He said, “The organization’s president is Ghassan Barakat, a consular notary for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) who has been identified by the Palestinian Expatriates Affairs Department website as a member of the Palestine National Council (PNC).” Group coordinator Senan Shaqdeh was once, according to the PLO itself, a “‘fighter in the ranks of the mountain brigade’ for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” a PLO faction designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States. According to Shaqdeh, he is also a co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine.

 

The above describes only one stream of support for the protests. Another financial stream comes from well-known, big-money Democratic donors. Over the past five years, according to Politico, the Tides Foundation has given half a million dollars to the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). Along with IfNotNow, also a Tides Foundation recipient, JVP is one of the central organizing forces behind pro-Hamas protests at Columbia and beyond. Additionally, Tides contributes to the Adalah Justice Project, another Columbia protest participant, and Palestine Legal, a legal defense fund that claims to help “students mobilizing against genocide.” The Tides Foundation is heavily supported by George Soros, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Susan and Nick Pritzker.

 

Mega-donors often give to an array of such groups and watch the activism trickle down. The Pritzkers, for example, additionally support Solidaire and the Libra Foundation, which then disperse funds to more specialized organizations such as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, both of which have been involved in the protests. Soros also funds Students for Justice in Palestine, which has organized protests at Harvard, Yale, and elsewhere. The New York Post reports that the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) “received at least $300,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019.” For an eight-hour organizing shift, USCPR pays its community-based “fellows” as much as $7,800 and its campus-based fellows between $2,880 and $3,660. The fellows are trained, according to USCPR literature, to “rise up, to revolution.”

 

One such fellow, Malak Afaneh, co-president of the Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine, rose up and crashed a dinner party thrown by the dean of Berkeley Law School, Erwin Chemerinsky. In Chemerinsky’s backyard, Afaneh took to a smuggled-in microphone to preach against Israel. When Chemerinsky’s wife tried to get her to leave, Afaneh accused the hostess of assault.

 

There’s another, more insidious, channel of support that bears mentioning: the vast sums of money that foreign governments give to American colleges. The country most relevant here is Hamas’s patron, Qatar. A 2022 study by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) found that Qatar gave, in the form of “gifts” or “restricted agreements,” $4.7 billion to multiple American colleges and universities between 2001 and 2021. Since 2015, Qatar has given an astounding $1.5 billion just to Cornell, where history professor Russell Rickford was caught on camera telling students that the October 7 attack on Israel was “exhilarating” and “energizing,” and where Jewish students were warned to avoid the kosher dining hall because of anonymous threats to blow up the building.

 

There is a statistically robust link between the money and the Jew-hatred. ISGAP’s study found that, between 2015 and 2020, schools that accepted money from Qatar (and other Middle Eastern donors) averaged 300 percent more anti-Semitic incidents than those that did not. And Qatar-funded campuses were also more resistant to traditional democratic norms such as free speech. Qatar’s investment allows it to influence universities by organizing conferences and joint-research projects where Qatari administrators and researchers can indirectly relay Doha’s agenda to their Western counterparts.

 

***

 

And they could hardly enjoy a more receptive audience. It is on the rotting foundations of Western academia itself that the woke jihad built its home. Dominant academic trends such as intersectionality, critical race theory, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism have turned millions of young minds into a moral fun-house mirror in which racists are reflected back as angels, colorblindness as racism, one sex as the other, democracy as tyranny, tyranny as paradise, freedom as bondage, refugees as colonialists, Jews as white oppressors, and terrorists as saints.

 

At this late date, it’s no longer profitable to tease out the subtleties of one neo-Marxist theory or another. In their totality, they amount to a categorical inversion of the good and the bad. And without that, no Islamist psyop, donor network, or activist alliance could have delivered the campus Hamasniks and Judenrein quads we see today. By the time those forces got involved, the student acolytes of the identarian left had been hollowed out of anything that might have made them resistant to indoctrination. On a slew of campuses, they now evangelize for terrorism, standing side-by-side with the professors who prepped them for this moment.

 

Appropriately, it will be the universities that suffer most when the woke jihad winds down. The donor divestment and the drop in student applications that hit schools when the protests began are certain to increase as the full flowering of the encampments’ depravity becomes ever clearer.

 

Academic thought has been so thoroughly siloed from common experience for so long that it became unaccountable to itself and undetectable to most of the country. Not only was dethroned Harvard president Claudine Gay unaware that the unacceptability of genocidal incitement is not context-dependent; most Americans were unaware that she or any other academic didn’t know that. The past seven months have exposed for all the full catalogue of grotesquery that is American higher education.

 

Which is why a backlash against the pro-Hamas encampments has come more swiftly than the one that followed the defund-the-police campaign. In the 21st century, there is a predictable arc to a radical movement’s progress. First, a significant segment of the public embraces it. Next, the liberal establishment responds by incorporating its ideas in policy. Then, the policy produces tragic results. And, eventually, the public turns on the movement. Such was the case with police-defunding. But polls indicate that the public is already opposed to the pro-Hamas encampments, just by virtue of their existence. Meanwhile, the fraternity brothers who hoisted an American flag at the center of a pro-Hamas rally at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have received more than half a million dollars from appreciative patriots.

 

And, really, how could it be otherwise? In joining forces, the woke and the Islamists may have compounded their resources, but they’ve also compounded the disgust that the public already harbored for each group individually. The spectacle of their blended pathologies will be, and already is, their discrediting and their undoing. Not ours.

Genocidal, But Mostly Peaceful

By Christine Rosen

Thursday, May 16, 2024

 

After months of anti-Israel protests on college campuses across the United States—some of which ended in law-enforcement interventions, destruction of property, arrests, and canceled commencements—mainstream media are still confused, or misguided, or worse, when it comes to covering the story.

 

Two approaches have emerged, both illustrative of broader failings in the profession. The first embraces and romanticizes the protests as part of a long and admirable trend of student activism, often tapping into highly selective memories of 1960s-era youth culture. The second approach also views the protests as positive, in a way that allows journalists to ignore and minimize the violent and anti-Semitic words and deeds of many of those in encampments and on quads. Just as many journalists offered a falsified portrait of the George Floyd Summer protests of 2020—as captured by the infamous CNN chyron, “Fiery but mostly peaceful,” that ran live under images of protesters setting fire to buildings—the tone of many reports this spring might be described as “Genocidal, but mostly peaceful.”

 

American journalists learned over the past decade to redefine violence as speech (“mostly peaceful” arson) and speech as violence (Tom Cotton’s “unsafe” op-ed about calling in the National Guard). Now acceptable protest has been expanded to include . . . just about anything, including the occupation of buildings and destruction of property. “People understand that ‘occupying buildings on campus’ is, like, one of the most common forms of student protest for decades and not some devious new ploy devised by professional anarchist plotters, right?” said Chris Hayes of MSNBC. He went on to argue, bizarrely, that “college activism has long been part of a college education,” as if trespassing and barricading and holding janitors hostage is akin to Freshman Comp.

 

The Washington Post also made a serious effort to downplay the radicalism of the protesters by portraying them as victims of a right-wing vendetta. “They Criticized Israel. This Twitter Account Upended Their Lives,” read a typical headline. In the story, Pranshu Verma described the social-media account StopAntisemitism as a group that “has flagged hundreds of people who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza” and, as a result, lost their jobs. As Jill Filipovic noted in the Atlantic, however, “that’s not actually an accurate description of the reality that the Post is reporting.” One of the women who was fired had said “radical solidarity with Palestine means . . . not apologizing for Hamas,” while another was filmed tearing down hostage posters and claiming that the hostages were being held not by Hamas but by Israel. Still another, whom the Post described as calling Israelis “pigs,” in fact said: “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement,” adding, “May they rot in hell.” These are people who—as their employers rationally came to understand—were not colleagues with whom others might be comfortable working.

 

Many journalists clearly sympathize with the protesters and believe that their forms of expression are within the range of acceptable resistance. But their efforts to downplay the radical stances of the protesters would be comical if it wasn’t also so clearly a violation of the journalistic norms we are constantly informed are so crucial to a healthy democracy and supposedly under threat only from the bad guys on the other side of the aisle.

 

Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times described the often-violent words of protesters in her newsletter and on the paper’s Matter of Opinion podcast as follows: “They are peaceful if boisterous expressions of moral outrage” by “a bunch of kids hanging out, chanting various slogans, none of which seemed particularly outré to me.” Her colleague Michelle Cottle agreed, pooh-poohing the idea that the protesters promoted anti-Semitism. “I don’t think this is a question that you can ultimately solve in some kind of objective way,” she said. “There’s not a kind of anti-Semitism detector that’s just going to ding and tell you, yes, this is anti-Semitic, therefore, it’s out of bounds. Or no, it’s not, therefore, it’s OK. All of these things are in the eye of the beholder.” Indeed, two Harvard professors, writing in the explicitly anti-Zionist Jewish Currents, invoked Gramsci to argue that claims of anti-Semitism were false and evidence of a “moral panic.”

 

Oh? Columbia University undergraduate Khymani James was one of the leaders of the protests on that campus. He posted a video of himself taken during a disciplinary hearing back in January saying it’s fine to kill people with whom he disagrees. “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” he said. Nor was this James’s first turn in the spotlight. He received a glowing profile from the Boston Globe in 2021 while still a high-school student. The puff piece showed James in a Black Lives Matter T-shirt with the headline, “‘Speak Your Truth’: How One Student Leader’s Confrontational Approach Reflects Generational Shift in Fighting Injustice.” In the course of the piece, he is quoted saying, simply, “Of course I hate white people.”

 

It is no “moral panic” to report that Students for Justice in Palestine, the major student group on campus behind these protests, praised Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel as a “historic win” against “the Zionist enemy,” or that students at protests on elite campuses such as Yale and Princeton and Stanford have proudly displayed Hamas and Hezbollah flags and other terrorist regalia. Nor to note, as the Anti-Defamation League reported and many social-media accounts confirmed, that a Columbia protestor said, “Never forget the 7th of October . . . the 7th of October is about to be every f—king day for you. You ready?” If Michelle Cottle thinks judgments of such actions are “in the eye of the beholder,” her eye does not know how to behold.

 

What this soft-pedaling of the horrors being spewed on campus has produced is a disastrously incurious media. Consider the question of how the college protests are organized and funded. The encampments that mysteriously sprang up like mushrooms on campuses in a matter of days across the country, with matching Coleman tents, were funded by big-name Democratic donors with last names like Rockefeller, Pritzker, and Soros. A Politico piece declared it “surprising” that “Biden’s biggest donors” are backing the protesters. “Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros and was previously supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It in turn supports numerous small nonprofits that work for social change.”

 

Politico’s article came out months after the protests began. It is a telling example of mainstream media’s ideological monoculture that journalists who delayed even asking such questions then found themselves surprised that left-wing dark money was funding radical protests on campus.

 

This willful blindness to the beliefs of the protesters they are covering also poses a challenge when trying to describe them. Some outlets, like the Associated Press, describe student activists as “antiwar protesters.” Others refer to them as “pro-Palestinian,” when the correct description would be “anti-Israel” and, in many cases, simply anti-Semitic. Not surprisingly, such reporters also end up uncritically repeating Hamas propaganda. The Post quoted a Barnard student who had been arrested for participating in Columbia’s encampment. “There’s these big mainstream media outlets that are making it breaking news that Columbia canceled in-person classes, but not breaking news that mass graves were discovered in Gaza,” she proclaimed. The Post reporter felt no need to mention that the claim about mass graves had been thoroughly debunked. Perhaps the reporter didn’t know. Perhaps her editor didn’t know. Perhaps no one at the paper knew. Perhaps they chose not to know.

 

Or perhaps they knew, and they wanted the lie to stand unmolested.

Knockoff Nakbas

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

 

The nakba-ization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the process of historical revisionism by which the accurate and documented history is replaced retroactively by a lab-grown narrative favored by activists and academics.

 

Obviously, you can see this most clearly and most often with the event referred to by the term “nakba”: the failure of the combined Arab armies to destroy the nascent Jewish state in 1948. That Palestinians and their supporters openly mourn a failed attempted literal ethnic cleansing of the Jewish people three years after the Holocaust certainly tells you much about the conflict itself.

 

It’s also quite revealing about media organizations that join the mourning of the continued existence of the Jewish people. Here’s how the Associated Press, for example, marks Israel’s birthday today: “Palestinians on Wednesday will mark the 76th year of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the core of their national struggle. But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now unfolding in Gaza.”

 

This is the perfect example of nakba-ization: It not only rewrites the region’s history but attempts to revise what happened mere months ago, all in the service of claiming that Israel’s supposed illegitimacy grows by the year. More: “Palestinians in recent days have been loading up cars and donkey carts or setting out on foot to already overcrowded tent camps as Israel expands its offensive. The images from several rounds of mass evacuations throughout the seven-month war are strikingly similar to black-and-white photographs from 1948.”

 

Indeed, it’s uncanny how similar are the pictures of people loading up a car to earlier pictures of people loading up a car in the same place. On a more serious note, this kind of editorialized propaganda resembles science fiction more than it does reporting.

 

There’s another example of this kind of manufactured narrative being imposed on history: the credulous reporting of a U.S. Army officer’s resignation purportedly over America’s Israel policy.

 

On Monday, Maj. Harrison Mann posted a letter he sent to colleagues announcing his resignation from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He had emailed the note to his colleagues on April 16. “The policy that has never been far from my mind for the past six months is the nearly unqualified support for the government of Israel, which has enabled and empowered the killing and starvation of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians.”

 

The only problem? Mann’s letter also states: “Most of you know I already intended to leave the Army at some point, but this moral injury is what led me to finally submit my resignation on November 1.”

 

November 1? Mere days after Israel’s ground incursion into Gaza began? And this was the result of spending time agonizing over it, meaning his moral crisis likely came not when Israel moved to defend itself but in the wake of Hamas’s blood-drenched barbarism?

 

The good news is that there is almost no way the story Mann is selling here is true. And if it were true, based on his own timeline, he would be painting himself as something of a monster.

 

I don’t think Mann is a monster. What he is describing, instead, looks like this: A guy wants out of the Army, says so repeatedly, procrastinates (according to the timeline he stayed on for four more months after his exit was approved), figures out a story that is backwards-compatible with influencer-style self-branding and pronounces himself not lazy but a hero. All he has to do is nakba-ize his own life by revising what actually happened to fit a simple framework: the Jewish state is evil.

 

These types of stories always amuse me to some degree, insofar as the pro-Hamas protest movement and its cheerleaders love to talk about how brave it is to criticize Israel when their own actions prove it is the easiest route to social media clout available to them. Harrison Mann was an anonymous public servant, but now he may get some television invites and maybe an oped in the New York Times. At the very least, he can store away this anti-Israel street cred for a rainy day.

 

It is a sign of a deeply unhealthy culture to incentivize the retroactive scapegoating of Jews for individual misfortune. Expect to see more of it.

Enough with the ‘Uniparty’ Canard

By Natan Ehrenreich 

Wednesday, May 15, 2024 

 

If you’ve paid close attention to the recent rhetoric of certain Republican lawmakers like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Senator Mike Lee (Utah), you might be concerned about a demonic, omnipotent cabal of politicians who have taken over Washington, D.C.: the “uniparty.” According to Greene, it was the “uniparty” that spoiled her effort to remove Mike Johnson from the speakership. And Lee blames the “uniparty” for the $95 billion defense-aid bill recently signed into law. Lee alleges that the “uniparty” has now captured such a dominant role in our politics that it needs its own symbol. Indeed, he recently revealed on X that he had designated the “Uniparty Unicorn” to serve that role “after considerable reflection.” 

 

Is it true that our two-party system has entirely collapsed into a single blob of elites from both parties who are opposed to the interests of true conservatives? For a sensible observer, a few seconds of thought reveals the answer to be no. Large, irreconcilable differences remain between Republicans and Democrats on such issues as immigration, environmental policy, guns, taxes, religious liberty, the role of the courts, and the politicization of government agencies. That is not to say there are no areas in which both parties are complicit in bad policy. They have both presided over years of ballooning budgets and skyrocketing deficits, and have refused to address the entitlement spending at the root of our fiscal crisis. 

 

But “uniparty” conspiracists like Greene and Lee distort the reality that Democrats and Republicans agree on some bad things into the manifest untruth that they agree on everything. In doing so, they falsely message to conservative voters that there is no reason to elect Republicans over Democrats at all, reducing conservative turnout and increasing the chances of actual single-party rule — by the Democrats. 

 

It is particularly foolish to rage against an anti-conservative “uniparty” when Republicans hold a tiny House majority and control neither the Senate nor the White House. Clearly there isn’t going to be a mass implementation of doctrinaire conservative policy in such a situation. To suggest otherwise is at best deeply unserious and at worst threatening to the actual policy goals conservatives can hope to achieve. That’s to be expected from Republican politicians like Greene, who are primarily concerned with generating controversy and don’t actually care about public policy. But conservative commentators should know better. 

 

Yet some do not seem to. In a recent op-ed titled “The Tyranny of the Uniparty,” Josh Hammer notes that, especially in a presidential-election year, it is important to ask “whether the Republican Party, its protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, is itself institutionally part of the American ruling class.” For Hammer, the answer is an obvious yes. 

 

His assessment contains tidbits of truth. He correctly notes that both parties are “spending like drunken sailors and selling out future generations of American taxpayers.” But it is nonetheless self-refuting. For one, he acknowledges major differences in the attitudes of our two major parties towards illegal immigration and the border. 

 

But most perplexing is his assertion that the Republican Party ought to abandon the “free trade absolutists at The Wall Street Journal editorial board” for a more “populist” economic outlook. One can agree or disagree with this proposal. Adopting it, however, would shrink the distance between Republicans and Democrats on these matters, not expand it. Hammer asserts that Democrats have “abandoned the working class for the abstract dictates of neoliberal ideology.” That would be news to Joe Biden, who just this week announced tariff hikes on Chinese imports (and has kept Trump-era tariffs in place). True defiance of the uniparty, then, would have one avoid protective tariffs of the type enforced by both Donald Trump and Joe Biden. 

 

In this case and in others, conservatives’ use of the term “uniparty” mirrors leftists’ use of such epithets as “fascism” and “threats to democracy.” All of these terms assume the practical definition of “everything that I personally dislike.” 

 

The uniparty theory also suffers from its cluelessness in how to handle Donald Trump. By any measure, Trump is synonymous with today’s Republican Party. His daughter-in-law is the co-chair of the RNC. Aspiring and incumbent Republican politicians alike seek his endorsement. That means one of the following assertions must be true: Either Trump is a leading member of the uniparty, or the uniparty doesn’t exist. If the former, Trump ought to be disposed of immediately. If the latter, we should all stop fighting the uniparty, in his name or anyone’s. 

 

None of this should prevent or discredit serious criticism of the GOP for its failure to represent the conservative outlook on a variety of policy issues. William F. Buckley, in National Review’s original mission statement, justifiably wrote that “the most alarming single danger to the American political system lies in the fact that an identifiable team of Fabian operators is bent on controlling both our major political parties.” But it is no longer 1955. Nothing from NR’s statement suggests the existence of a monolithic “uniparty” in 2024. Democrats have since moved far to the left, and Republicans, at least in some areas, to the right. 

 

Today, those who trot out their opposition to the “uniparty” at every turn fail to distinguish between the bad policies of the Democrats and the unideal but still better policies of the GOP. In doing so, they make a forceful case against voting for Republicans, and in turn tacitly endorse the total Democratic rule one suspects they oppose.