By Seth Mandel
Monday, May 20,
2024
The morning after Easter Sunday in 1903, Yehiel Pesker
went to his shop at the Kishinev market to inspect for damage. The previous
day, the early rumblings of a pogrom had unsettled the city. On his way back
home, he saw about 200 Jews armed with clubs and even a few guns—the second
wave of one of history’s most notorious pogroms would come that day and Jews
wanted to be prepared. When the pogromists came there was a standoff, until the
police intervened against the Jews and the deadly violence continued.
Although these Jews merely presented a desire to defend
themselves should they be attacked, and although this was one brief moment on
the second day of a three-day blood-riot that would shock the world, “local
antisemites and their sympathizers,” according
to historian Steven J. Zipperstein, tried to argue that this was an
escalation by the Jews and therefore the victims were really to blame for the
pogrom. Elsewhere in town, a nearly 60-year-old Jewish man fought off four
attackers, who then spread the rumor that a Jew had murdered Christians. For
some, then, a literal blood libel in the middle of an extended massacre was
transformed into the origin story of the whole riot.
“In arguments made by defense attorneys at the trials of
pogrom-related crimes, Sunday’s rioting was dismissed as a ruckus that would
quickly have come to an end… had Jews not overreacted,” writes Zipperstein. “In
this version it was the all-but-unprovoked aggression of Jews and subsequent
rumors of attacks on a church and the killing of a priest that set in motion
the unfortunate but, under the circumstances, understandable violence.”
That all may sound ridiculous, because few pogroms are
better known than Kishinev and because it had such a profound effect on
history: It shaped the perspectives of important Zionist figures and it alarmed
the world, even becoming an element of the civil-rights fight in America as an
example of why racial and ethnic minorities needed protection from the state
enshrined in law.
But leave out the names of people and places, and you’d
be describing the response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre. The Jews had it
coming; the attacks were essentially an act of self-defense; it
would’ve been a minor event had the Jews not escalated by defending themselves.
The Russian police director tried to argue at least for
moral equivalence, based on these lies, between the Kishinev Jews and their
murderers. You can hear a direct echo of this in Karim Khan, prosecutor at the
International Criminal Court, filing
applications for arrest warrants for both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and Hamas terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar: “if we do not demonstrate
our willingness to apply the law equally, if it is seen as being applied
selectively, we will be creating the conditions for its collapse.” That echo is
arguably even louder in the New York Times, which describes
the reactions to Khan’s stunt this way: “Mr. Khan’s decision to simultaneously
pursue Israeli and Palestinian leaders was criticized by Israeli government
ministers and Hamas alike. Both sides questioned why their allies had been
targeted instead of their enemies alone.”
Ah yes, both sides. A month after the Hamas
attacks, the author Sam Harris denounced
this way of thinking on his podcast in a soliloquy that will stand the test
of time. The key part:
Of course, the boundary between
Anti-Semitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern—and I’m
not sure that it is always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a
person can’t distinguish between collateral damage in a necessary war and
conscious acts of genocidal sadism that are celebrated as a religious sacrament
by a death cult. Our streets have been filled with people, literally tripping
over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate that they cannot distinguish
between those who intentionally kill babies, and those who inadvertently kill
them, having taken great pains to avoid killing them, while defending
themselves against the very people who have just intentionally tortured and
killed innocent men, women, and yes… babies…
If you have landed, proudly and
sanctimoniously, on the wrong side of this asymmetry—this vast gulf between
savagery and civilization—while marching through the quad of an Ivy League
institution wearing yoga pants, I’m not sure it matters that your moral
confusion is due to the fact that you just happen to hate Jews. Whether you’re
an anti-Semite or just an apologist for atrocity is probably immaterial. The
crucial point is that you are dangerously confused about the moral norms and
political sympathies that make life in this world worth living.
And in Khan’s case, if you can’t or won’t differentiate
between Hamas’s war and Israel’s, you possess a moral deficit that disqualifies
you from any position of authority or responsibility over others.
More important, however, is the core idea behind this
trend. For most of history you could simply punish Jews for defending
themselves, for staying alive. A pathetic puffed-up prosecutor could watch in
silence as Jews were murdered and then file charges against “both sides” as
soon as a Jew picked up a club in self-defense. Because the law, you see, must
be applied evenly. The world wasn’t going to do anything about Hamas, even
after its demonic acts on October 7. A fair prosecutor must wait until there is
a Jew to be put in the dock as well. That’s balance. That’s justice.
Karim Khan may be a feeble clown, but he makes an
airtight case for the existence of the State of Israel.
No comments:
Post a Comment