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SEE CORNELL - A Message on DK From a Jew on DK: IF ISRAEL IS DESTROYED, WE ARE NEXT. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-10-29  

[I started to write this before the Cornell story came out. I added this preamble within these brackets along with the attached screenshots, as well as part of the story below as it makes the points I had planned to write for me:

Threats were posted to Cornell’s Greekrank forums on Sunday, Oct. 29, including one that threatened a shooting at 104West!, which is home to Cornell’s Center for Jewish Living and the kosher dining hall. “if i see another synagogue another rally for the zionist globalist genocidal apartheid dictatorial entity known as “israel”, i will bring an assault rifle to campus and shoot all you pig jews [sic],” said one post titled “if i see another jew” by a poster calling themselves “hamas.” “jews are human animals and deserve a pigs death. Liberation by any means. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free [sic]!” The post also threatened to rape female Jewish students and behead Jewish babies in front of their parents. Greekrank is a discussion site about the fraternities and sororities across colleges and universities, with user guidelines banning content that “contains hate speech or promotes or condones violence.” Another post by screen name “jew evil” titled “jewish people need to be killed” [sic] called for students to follow Jewish students home from campus and slit their throats. “rats [sic] need to be eliminated from Cornell,” said the post, which has since been taken down.

Those of you who support the BDS Movement, as I’ve written elsewhere, I know that you are earnestly attempting to make humanitarian efforts to help the Oppressed Palestinians. Yup. Got that.

You don’t seem to realize that when they come for us Jews, they won’t care if you support BDS or not. The above happened at Cornell — TODAY. The kosher kitchen at Cornell is on lockdown, and the FBI is involved. If one of the people who wrote these threats act on it, and if you have a child at Cornell, or any of dozens of academic institutions that conflates “hate speech” with “free speech,” who bastardize intersectionality beyond recognition, it won’t matter if your child is Jewish. It will be enough to “look” Jewish.

It won’t matter If you (like me) oppose Netanyahu and The Occupation or not. It won’t matter if you or your child — at Cornell or anywhere else — supports the BDS Movement or not. If the people who wrote these posts act on them, they will not differentiate between Jews who agree with them and Jews who do not. Once again, Israel and Diaspora Jews are conflated with hate. Actions taken by Israel or against Israel as we saw on October 7th — either way it doesn’t matter. Israel simply gives Jew haters a reason to act on their hate.

They won’t care if you were arrested at Grand Central Station last night. They might “thank you” before they kill you, or your child, but they. Won’t. Care.

If you take action in support of BDS, you are a useful pawn. As someone said,

"It's Easier to Fool People Than to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled."

It can’t be any clearer: while Israel is a convenient excuse for the hate, if Israel is destroyed, we are next. The fact that Israel exists protects us to some degree. Without a Jewish Nation, the diaspora is in existential danger, as clear is the posts at Cornell make it even with a Nation of Israel. If you don’t believe me, ask the Armenians or the Kurds. Right now, Israel is in existential danger. This hate towards Jews did not start in 1948(!). And it will not end if Israel is wiped off the map. At that point, it will only begin….

Here is where I was going to start my post. The Cornell incident makes where I started embarrassingly obvious]

We Jews once again are becoming complacent. We think we blend in. We think that the history doesn't repeat itself. We think, as did German and French and other European Jews, still within the living memory of some still around to tell of it, that living here makes us immune from extermination. No. It does not.

Assimilation does not make us accepted . Or safe. It only makes us complacent .

Watching the well-meaning JVP hold a mass civil disobedience demonstration in Grand Central Station, I realize that they likely feel that they have assimilated, that they are Americans who happen to be Jews, not Jews who happen to be Americans. They feel like they have the luxury of complacency. History does not agree.

We think we blend in. We think, as did German and French Jews, that living there, owning property and businesses for hundreds of years. makes us immune from extermination. No. It does not. To repeat: assimilation does not make us safe. It only makes us complacent.

Here is a metaphor: About 25 years ago I went to a museum of science in Cambridge, MA. In one room, they had an image of a butterfly that they created with light that could only be seen with peripheral vision. When we turned to look at it directly, the butterfly disappeared. It could only be seen when looking elsewhere.

The metaphor applies here. Many Jews in Germany, France and other parts of Europe, less than 100 years ago, could not see what was in the periphery because they were staring it in face. As mentioned, for many, their families had lived in the same town or city for hundreds of years. Many were prominent and respected members of their communities, completely assimilated. They thought they were accepted. They thought they were safe. They were Germans, ja ? They were French, oui ? No. They were Jews who lived in Germany. They were Jews who lived in France, or Italy, or Romania, or wherever they were.

Those who saw what was in the periphery, left when they had the chance, IF they could find a country that would take them. Those who stayed discovered that they were not of that country. They were not German. They were not French. They were not Romanian. They were not Italian. They were Jews, who lost their land, their homes, their businesses, and, tragically, for many/most, their lives.

[Just as it would not matter to anyone espousing the beliefs of some Ivy League students at Cornell]

Michael Brown wrote this in The Christian Post, a publication that I rarely quote. Still, He asked A question for those who chant ‘Palestine must be free’:

I have an honest question for all those who chant (or who affirm the words), “Palestine must be free!” Or, more fully, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine must be free!” My question is simply this: Where would you like the 7 million Jews currently living in Israel (or, “Palestine” in your words) to go? What is your plan? As many have pointed out, this chant is not a call for a two-state solution. It is a call for the obliteration of Israel. Better to chant, “We are full of hate! No more Jewish state!” Why not spell it out? After all, if you speak of the Israeli occupation of Palestine since 1948 (or, since 1947) and you claim that Israel as a whole is living on stolen land, you are saying, “No more Jewish state!” Perhaps this chant would be even more appropriate: “Listen to our brand-new line, our land will be Judenrein!” (For those who are not familiar with the German term Judenrein, it means “cleansed of Jews,” as in, “Nazi Germany will be Judenrein!”)

We ignore these questions, literally, our own peril.

I have quoted my friend Rafa,who lives in Belgium, in a previous article:

"So what actually is this 'Palestinian liberation movement"?…. Does it also include the Hamas supporters showing up at their demonstrations and possibly shouting 'Hamas, Hamas. Jews to the gas!'? I don't see much liberation of people in that." "Rather than stating that I am in solidarity with the Palestinian people - what does that actually mean? - I am not in solidarity with the Palestinians of Hamas, I would say that I am against the oppression of Palestinians. (Like I am against all forms of oppression.) That can be people living in poverty, refugees in the Middle East and Europe etc….

There is legitimate concern for those living in Gaza.

My heart goes out for those civilians in Gaza who died and will die as Israel does what it does in the name of protecting itself and its citizens. Some shout, “Not in Our Name!” Israel is not acting in your name. I hope that something can be worked out, somehow, before it gets worse.

Israel does have a right to exist, and the people in Gaza have a right to live in peace.

My heart, however, also goes out for the 45,000 German civilians, and their loved ones, who were killed in one night by Allied bombing on July 27th, 1943, and for the 350,000-500,000 German civilians, and their loved ones, some who might not have been Nazis, who were killed during WWII.

My heart also goes out for the estimated 100,000 civilians of Tokyo who were killed, and their loved ones among the million homeless who survived, when we dropped napalm on Tokyo in March, 1945, a few months before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

No, that list is not exclusive, and there were no cries of "Not in my name!" because it was in our name. We were trying to win a two front war while losing as few troops as possible.

We also did not hear cries of "No Genocide!" partly because the word was not yet in vogue, partly because the entire world was pretty much on fire, and because "Genocide" has almost become hyperbolically irrelevant. It means the annihilation of a people, (and please don’t split hairs over one “official” definition or another.) There was no attempt to exterminate Germans and/or Japanese as a race or people. The Germans did that. We did not.

Likewise, there is no intent to exterminate or annihilate Palestinians in Gaza. That is hyperbole. As I mentioned in an earlier article, the population of Gaza has increased steadily over the past few decades. That doesn’t happen when there is a “Genocide.” Calling this "Genocide" is crying "Wolf."

Of course I hope that the loss of life in Gaza, and in Israel, going forward, will be minimal. It is already in the thousands.

This is the consequence of war. They military calls it “collateral damage” because it sounds better than burnt bodies.

Any loss of life at that scale, even at the scale of Lewiston, Maine recently, is horrific. Any attack that kills civilians with military weapons is horrific. There are no words to describe it that give do it justice.

There is a call for a ceasefire. There was a ceasefire in effect on October 6th. When Hamas attacked Israeli civilians on October 7th, this, too, became war. Civilians die during wars.

Hamas is holding over 200 hostages.It is very likely that those civilians will die as well. And Israel is being attacked not just from Gaza, but from Iranian proxies in Yemen and Syria. A ceasefire will have to include Iran, and now Turkey, where Erdogan has announced that he might also attack Israel on behalf of Gaza.

Israel is facing an existential threat. And so are Jews in diaspora.

Helen Lewis wrote a piece in The Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, The Progressives Who Flunked the Hamas Test. It is behind a paywall, but I shared the essence of it in a recent post as well. She started with a simple question:

The terror attack on Israel by Hamas has been a divisive—if clarifying—moment for the left. The test that it presented was simple: Can you condemn the slaughter of civilians, in massacres that now appear to have been calculatedly sadistic and outrageous, without equivocation or whataboutism? Can you lay down, for a moment, your legitimate criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, West Bank settlements, and the conditions in Gaza, and express horror at the mass murder of civilians?

Simon Sebag Montefiore wrote a more recent piece in The Atlantic titled, The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False. It is also behind a paywall. His second paragraph, without referring to the "Hamas Test" by name, talks about those who fail the test:

...,[O]ne truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

I don't know if it's 7 million or 9 million. The same questions apply.

Lewis goes on to say in her article that she will defend to the death the original meaning of “intersectionality,” but that it has been distorted by the Left beyond recognition. So now she has to ask that question. And Montifiore in the article above has to remind his readers of the answer to that question.

Montifiore asks,

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

If you can access the article, He goes on to explain why it is false.

For those of you who have bought into this idea that Israel is a colonial occupier, an idea Montifiore dismantles, I wrote a few weeks ago here on DK that the history of Palestine has been a history of non-stop colonization for almost 2,000 years. The Palestinian people, and the few Jews who remained throughout, were oppressed by one colonizer after another. Palestinians had never had a free and autonomous nation. Where we are now is the result of the British Colonizers defeating the Turkish Colonizers in WWI, the British Empire and allies defeating the Ottoman Empire. To the victors went the spoils. The British, who now ruled the Colony of Palestine, made conflicting assurances to both the Arabs and Israelis, and “sold the same horse twice.”

Just a few days ago, I answered the question, Why groups like Jewish Voices for Peace are like "Isolationists" Pre-Pearl Harbor. In it I compare JVP and other advocates of BDS to those in Popular Front movements who opposed war with Hitler because Stalin told them to do so.

Montifiore has similar thoughts:

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place. The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.” This narrative also allows Jews in America and Europe to cast ourselves as “white” or “white-adjacent”, fighting for the oppressed Palestinians as “people of color.”

This illusion that we have assimilated enough to be "white" or "white-adjacent" gives some of us the myopia that allows some us to mistakenly believe that not only has this always been so, but thar it always will be so. It has not always been so. It will not always be so. You can't see in the periphery what is staring you in the face, just a few days after the anniversary of the massacre in the Pittsburgh Synagogue. [Or when students state the “quiet part” online on a Fraternity message board}

If you buy into this, you have bought into the idea that you call intersectionality but is not what intersectionality is at all.

Montifiore continues in his article:

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

But Jews can, and do, suffer from bigotry and hatred, whether we want to split hairs about being a “race” or not. And this “historically nonsensical” ideology, this bastardization and complete misapplication of intersectionality, as Helen Lewis notes, leads to groups like “Queers for Palestine,” even though in Palestine, Queers would have a very difficult time, and a Hamas leader was executed for theft and gay sex.

This idea that Jews, because we are regarded as “white” and “privileged” and cannot be victims, only oppressors, leads us back to where we started. We Jews have targets on our back. [Again, I wrote this before the Cornell incident]

As I wrote in yet another DK post here, the day after the brutal attack by Hamas,

Jews are a unique punching bag: the right punches down at us as Marxists and communists, and the left punches up at us as greedy capitalists. You cannot both be right.

Montifiore adds:

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews. Very strange company for leftists. Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians. The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

I find myself repeating this over and over and over and over again, here on DK. BDS is a way for people who want to see the destruction of Israel to manipulate people on the left to help their cause. As I wrote in that 4th “over,”

BDS is easy. It’s a “Plug ‘n Play”, pre-assembled, turn-key protest movement, easy to use, easy to be used. The Progressive Left can just jump right in and feel self-rightous, that they are defending the oppressed, that they are protecting the good from evil. Just pick up a sign. Share a meme. It’s easy. As I’ve written in several posts recently: The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. Some times they fool people into believing that, well, if Hamas is against Israel, and you’re against Israel,then somehow Hamas is your friend. They are not.



As hideous as the current government of Israel is, as much as we all despise Bibi and curse The Occupation, you do not seem to realize/remember what the world was like before there was an Eretz Yisroel. Feel free to criticize the leaders of the State of Israel as frequently as you desire (I’m right with you).

When you call for its destruction, however, you don’t see what see what is also staring you in the face:

You are next.

You may believe that your friends on the Left with whom you ally will support you as a victim when you become, yet again, the oppressed instead of the perceived oppressor. And don’t believe those on the Right, who support Israel, won’t come after you with torches demanding that we not replace them. People will punch up at us. People will punch down at us. Israel as an entity, regardless of how you feel about their past or present policies, protects us simply by being the Nation of Israel.

If you get your way, and Israel is destroyed, do you sit back and let Hamas kill every Jew? If every Jew in Israel survives and becomes a refugee, where do they go? If only a fraction of Jews survive, how do they go?

Have you really thought this through? Or do you simply not care?

[If you have a child in school, do you care if they look Jewish? Do you fear for their safety?]

I started writing this as an attempt to reclaim humanity. I have a friend, for example, also Jewish, very intelligent, who went to a prominent Ivy League University, is very thoughtful, learned Arabic, visited the West Bank, and is very concerned about the plight of the Palestinians. I asked her if she could pass the “Hamas Test.” She admitted that she could not. Ten minutes later, after a good discussion, she was able to acknowledge that, no matter how she felt about the Occuption or Bibi, she could condem the atrocities of Hamas on 10/7.

As I mentioned, she is very intelligent, and very thoughtful. She had lost a part of her humanity through equivocation. I helped her regain it, by giving herroom to remove the lenses she had on so she could see 10/7 for what it was, regardless of anything else.

That is my intent. That’s why I write these things. Sometimes it makes a difference, especially when I know the person. I allow room for people to reclaim their humanity and lose the “Otherness.”

Israel is facing an existential threat. If you are a Jew, and you ally with those who wish Israel destroyed, and Israeli Jews with it:

You are next.

If Israel loses, you lose your white-adjacent privilege. You lose your acceptance. You lose your complacency.

You lose your safety, because Hamas doesn’t know or care whether you marched against Israel or not. If you are a Jew, they are teaching their school children to hate Jews. And Trump has unleashed the hoardes who decended on Charlottesville who now have license to say the quiet parts out loud.

It's all on the periphery, but you can't see it because it's staring you in the face.

Mark Twain might have been the one who said that "History never repeats itself, but it rhymes." Whoever said it, it’s true.

I write all these posts because i see what is in the periphery that you might not.

I am reminded of the Müchener Post which goaded, taunted and warned about Hitler until it could not.

Often a lone but loud voice, the Munich Post’s reporting on the actions of Hitler and his regime was met with intense resistance. The Nazis decried the Post as the “Poison Kitchen” and as “enemies of the state and of the people” for its probing and critical coverage. Ultimately Nazi forces would ransack and shut down the Munich Post in March 1933; a front-page headline published days before its shuttering read: “We Will Not Be Intimidated!”

Daily Kos is certainly not the equivalent of the Munich post. I certainly have no illusions of grandeur that I could make even that much of a difference writing here. I write these posts out of concern for those of us Jews on the left, of course on my own time, because I realize that WE ARE NEXT.

If you are actively working to destroy Israel -- warts and all -- with your complacency and illusion of privilege — and you succeed:

YOU ARE NEXT. WE ARE NEXT. THIS IS EXISTENTIAL.

I will do everything I can to stop that, because they will take me when they take you.

And I will not go quietly.

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