Anti-Semitism Reconsidered and Reconsidered Again

That part of the speech is hardly needed today, when haters of Israel — and not just Muslim Brotherhood affiliates like Hamas — openly express their hatred for Jews. But it was always an easy matter to demonstrate that mass demonstrations around the world against Israel and its allegedly inhumane treatment of the civilian population of Gaza have next to nothing to do with a concern for civilians, even for Palestinian civilians, and everything to do with the chance to portray Jews as perpetrators of evil.

In the nearly two years since Russia invaded Ukraine, it has constantly targeted Ukrainian civilian targets, such as hospitals and schools, without the slightest attempt to conceal what it is doing or to make a claim of military necessity. And yet there have been no demonstrations against Russia in any major Western capital.

So perhaps you’ll say, in Whoopi Goldberg’s famous formulation, that’s because Russia versus Ukraine has nothing to do with race, just a bunch of white people going at it, and thus is of no interest to good progressives espousing intersectionality. But then what are you going to do with half a million black Muslims in the Darfur region of Sudan slaughtered by Arab Muslims between 2002 and 2006? Musa Hilal, the leader of the Arab militias, the Janjaweed, expressed the goal of ridding Darfur of African tribesmen. That’s two war crimes in one — real, not fantasized, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. But again, that slaughter aroused no one to demonstrate against the brutal treatment of black Muslims. What’s the story? Arabs can’t be the bad guys because they fight the Jews?

Between 350,000 and 614,000 Syrian Muslims were killed in the Syrian Civil War, and approximately 12.2 million people displaced from their homes, including 850,000 Palestinians. And Bashar Assad employed chemical weapons against his own population. Yet, again, there were no demonstrations against the Assad regime. In sum, the world’s store of outrage is highly selective, indeed almost entirely limited to outrage against the Jewish state.