TJS S6E16 - American Antisemitism part VII - The Endgame

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You will never do anything in this world without courage, said Aristotle. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor. Lord, give me the courage to wade into battle, and bless me to equip myself with honor. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Season 6, Episode 16, American Antisemitism Part 7, The Endgame. So, there really is no bottom to the pit of anti-Semitism, but at least I feel we've plumbed its modern American depths as far as really necessary, or as far as we need to go in order to begin to draw some conclusions. And, since the question of whether it's actually possible to say anything new about the oldest hatred hangs over this episode, I want to first remind you of how I framed the bigger picture of Jew hate.

That arc of historical evolution, which can fit the present in the past and illuminate just how old and how new Jew hatred is in our time. And that might possibly give some insight on how we should act toward the future. So recall, back in antiquity, Jews were the indigestible element of empire, fighting the Romans to maintain our Judean state. And don't miss the fact that even today, we remain a national stone which the builders of global empire refused to use. Now, once our political existence was erased and we evolved into a religion, Jews were labeled obstinate refusers of salvation. And since then, orthodoxies of every type have sought to destroy us for insisting on staying Jews and not joining whatever their club might be.

More recently, in modernity, Jews became the alien other, that unassimilable element of modern society. And frankly, for many, we remain the stain on their humanist, universalist, utopian vision. And finally, today, Jews are the story which just won't die. Somehow, deeply bound up with the identity wars of our day that emerged out of the postmodern death of the grand narratives that used to stitch the world together. Our nature, as basically a never-ending story, has always been present. It was there at each of those stages, but it's never been so comprehensive in defining the Jews as a category. This is the base, in my eyes, for any insight that a study of contemporary American antisemitism can offer.

So over the last six episodes, we've been tracing three facets of Jew hate in the United States, white, black, and progressive. and it's crucial to recognize that while none of these categories is in any way total, monolithic, or mutually exclusive nonetheless, all of them are real and what I want to do now is wrap things up one way or another by touching on a few of the ideas and events of the new millennium which remain unexplored and frankly, they'll largely remain unexplored even when we're done but at least we'll have spiced things up a bit each of these flavors of anti-Semitism has a narrative arc that underpins them. I mean, Jew hatred is embedded, as we spoke about not so many episodes ago, in both the socioeconomic and conceptual frameworks of various societies, which means that there is a story arc for each of those worlds.

The role we play in society, as presently understood and ideally envisioned by white, black and progressive anti-Semites has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's a story. Now we fleshed out some of the origins of these facets of hate, and traced a bit of their evolution. So now, in order to take the time to think about how Jews might best respond to the modern resurgence of tripartite hate, it's time to talk about the endgame. There's no question that when it comes to white anti-Semites, the endgame is race war and ultimately genocide. It's a dire and hateful end goal, which of course is in no way solely oriented toward the Jews. On the contrary, modern white supremacist ideology is obsessed by what it sees to be the imminent extinction of the white race altogether.

And whether the specific dark fantasy revolves around unchecked immigration, shameless miscegenation, or a population explosion, the collective fear of white supremacists is a flood of non-white people, which will wipe them out. And the narrative around this fear is often known as the Great Replacement Theory, or simply white genocide. And in that story, Jews play a crucial role, often identified as controlling the process. You know, the chants of the Jews will not replace us that were heard in Charlottesville, Virginia, back in 2017, so alarming to so many good people, didn't mean that we would ever outnumber white America, a silly notion. They were a warning about the nefarious plot by Jews to use people of color in order to undermine the whites as a controlling majority within American society, and, of course, open the door thereby to our evil international plan.

Right, it's not just an American thing. In today's neo-Nazi lingo, Jews have created Zogs, Zionist-occupied governments all around the world. Hence the fact that George Soros and his known advocacy for immigration is the bugbear of the far right at this point. Now, none of this is new. What's changed in our day might be its sense of urgency, as well as what we might call a certain narrative clarity. The racist skinheads who energized white hate back in the 80s and 90s were angry and violent, but they lacked a coherent storyline. Today, the political movement which unites white supremacists in America, and indeed around the world, is the identitarianism that we discussed back in episode one of this series.

And despite its loopy origin story, remember, Jews spawned Satan and Eve, and people color, mud, subhuman, who knows. Despite that, identitarianism has managed to embed itself at the end of a spectrum whose other end extends right into legitimate culture and politics. This is the so-called alt-right, paleoconservatives, Republican renegades, right-wing conspiracists, right, to many people genuinely concerned by the erosion of traditional American values and social structures, by the way, myself included. There's a whole manosphere of misogynists out there, if you're unaware. I mean, witness the unbelievable popularity of something like Andrew Tate. If you don't know who that is, God bless you. But if you do, Hamei Vinyavi, those who know, know.

There's also a distinct subculture happening online. Forums like 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, and of course, the whole QAnon thing. It's one part safe space for airing white grievance, and another part militant recruiting ground. As the executive vice president of the global project against hate and extremism, testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security recently in a manual reproduced by what's called Generation Identity, which is a major pusher of the so-called Great Replacement narrative. The manual is called The Art of Red Pilling. Ah, The Matrix. It's a step-by-step instruction book for what it says is radicalizing potential recruits. Quote, you sow the soft red pill seeds, then you water them constantly.

An honest question to start with, a news piece here, an email there, and in the evening, an anecdote over beer. The VP went on to detail a process that begins by engaging grievances over things like free speech, political correctness, gender equality, real issues, and slowly drawing young recruits in before radicalizing them with much deeper racist ideas and then driving them toward the darker, even less regulated parts of the internet. And by the way, this process is working. The FBI told the same committee that the lethal threat white supremacists pose is responsible for more homicides than any other domestic extreme movement in the post-9-11 era, not to mention the countless acts of attempted murder, assault, and weapons charges.

Underlying that rise in actual violence is a ramping up of the Info War, The ADL records a 38% increase in white supremacist propaganda between 2021 and 2022, with specifically anti-Semitic hate messages more than doubling. And you might be inclined to write those stats off as a bunch of incel losers hiding online behind a cool avatar living in their parents' basement. But a 2017 poll by the Washington Post and ABC News found that one in 10 Americans said it was acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views. That's more than 30 million people. The driving narrative of white supremacists is that any action which will help save the white race is justified, and hence their plans for the coming race war. Now, nothing makes that stance and its implications for the Jews more clear than the Turner Diaries.

If you haven't heard of it, it's a book written by American neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, And since its publication in 1978, this dystopian novel about the apocalyptic overthrow of the U.S. government and the subsequent global race war has been basically the Bible of white supremacists. The book's fiction, but it's way more than hate fantasy, as can be seen by the actions it inspired. cited explicitly by perpetrators in more than 40 terrorist attacks and hate crimes since it came to print. The best known without question was the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. If you're my age, you remember it well. Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people, injured almost 700 other with a massive car bomb in the parking lot.

Rescue workers kept a vigil in the law of the federal building overnight, but they found no survivors, only destruction and the sense that nothing will ever be the same again in Focadal City. Hundreds of employees, there were certainly hundreds of people visiting the building when the bomb went off at 9 o'clock in the morning. So if you want to destroy innocent human lives, you couldn't pick a better time and a more vulnerable place than this. It was literally a copycat attack. Because the Turner Diaries describes the bombing of an FBI building as the trigger to set off the White Revolution And in case you missed the reference FBI agents found a copy of the following passage from the book in McVeigh car that he drove on the day of the bombing They learned today that not one of them is beyond our reach.

They can huddle behind barbed wire and tanks in the city, or they can hide behind the concrete walls and alarm systems of their country estates, but we can still find them and kill them. You know, in this sense, one could also call the almost comical January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol also a Turner Diaries copycat crime, in that the book describes an unsuccessful attack on the Capitol in which dozens are killed, including members of Congress. Now, think about the following words from the author. Next time you notice how much attention that we give to January 6th, He says the real value of all our attacks today lies in the psychological impact. You feel the panic in the air? The book literally ends with a vision of global racial holocaust involving nuclear, chemical, and biological means.

And in case you were wondering, the author makes it abundantly clear who's at fault for it all. He says, if the white nations of the world had not allowed themselves to become subject to the Jew, the Jewish ideas to Jewish spirit, this war would not be necessary. We can hardly consider ourselves blameless. We can hardly say we had no choice, no chance to avoid the Jews' snare. We can hardly say we were not warned. Chilling, to say the least, and frighteningly inspiring to a whole new eager generation of hate. The Turner Diaries has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has sold millions of copies. In fact, until just recently, you could get it on Amazon. So what does this tell us about the endgame of white hate and how Jews might respond?

Well, you know, you may have noticed that in general, around the world, the activist element of our time is driven by a sense of almost apocalyptic necessity. Here in Israel, it's peace now. I mean, heck, even Chabad is Mashiach now. Around the world, climate advocates cry, we have no time, as they glue themselves to Van Gogh's. Racial justice warriors are willing to riot and burn because the system must be dismantled now. Well, the white supremacists have their own eager activist element. They call it a movement of accelerationism. Accelerationists see, quote, modern society as irredeemable and believe it should be pushed to collapse. so a fascist society built on ethno-nationalism can take place. I want you to appreciate the fact that the first half of that statement, modern society is irredeemable and should be pushed to a collapse in order to replace it with something, could be fit into any number of frames.

Because acts of violence are seen to be beneficial because they're destabilizing and thus have a hope to clear the way for what's new to come. Now, you may be a good-hearted person who wants a greener world, or a kinder world, or a more just world. But if you do it through destruction, beware that you have some strange fellow travelers. And it should come as no surprise that the Turner Dyers is, of course, a favorite amongst these white racist accelerationists who have recently combined its militant revolutionary vision with the religious rhetoric of Christian identity in what they call the Phineas priest. It's a sick case, if you didn't catch the reference, of cultural appropriation and inversion.

Phineas is English for Pinchas, the zealot priest whose act of vigilante justice stayed God's wrath in the form of a plague against Israel back in the book of Bamidbar. Today, for these white supremacists, you join the so-called Phineas priesthood through lone wolf attacks on, I don't know, interracial couples, abortionists, homosexuals, and of course on Jews. Extra points, by the way, for robbing banks to undermine the Jewish usury system. Robert Bowers, perpetrator of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre back in 2018, wrote on Gab, which is a social media site favored by many extremists, that his enemies, quote, bring invaders that kill our people, and I can't sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.

I'm going in. So, this is all very dramatic. But what should the Jews do as the race war boils in the minds of more white Americans, and they arm themselves with hate and guns in a story which ends only one way. Well, organizations like the ADL, the AJC, government agencies like the FBI advocate monitoring, education, allyship, and I don't disagree. These are important pieces. But, tachlis, bottom line, if you think you can solve widespread hatred through Holocaust education, when the white supremacist online propaganda is doubling annually, a big piece of which, of course, is Holocaust denial, that's just ludicrous. Allies are crucial, but go back and listen to what my mom had to say about that in episode 11.

And, considering that the Turner Diaries identifies the narrative turning point in their race war, as when the federal government confiscates all civilian firearms under what he calls the Cohen Act of all things, then you have to recognize that the notion of disarming angry white America might just be a fatal fantasy. So I say yes to monitoring, education, and yes, even real allyship. And I'd add one last thing. At least in the face of white anti-Semitism, Oh my brothers and sisters, arm yourselves, or as Kahana said, every Jew, a 22. The endgame of black antisemitism is to make the Jew completely white. Now in part, this actually has nothing to do with the Jews again. It's driven by that same longing for racial war that we see in white hate.

An expression of atavistic drama, American society has basically been playing out since the pioneers first crossed the ocean and started to slaughter the natives and take the continent. Truth be told, it's a murderous hatred of other, which is a darkness that all societies have to contain. And that's not a surprise, considering that the first murder was fratricide. Cain and Abel were both other and brother. It was an act that cast all subsequent human associations in a, let's call it, challenging light. But the particular human conflict finds expression in American history is a black and white one. And becoming more so every day as it demands a totalization into race. Forcing a binary so ironic it makes me want to cry and puke at the same time.

Because once everything must be a race, well then, the Jew can only be black or white. And you know, for a people that has always defied easy definition, this is not a comfortable spot. Spoiler alert, the social demand that the Jew fit somewhere never ends well. But there's something more complicated than a simple rush toward apocalyptic race war driving the need for the Jew to be white in the eyes of black America. In an odd way, when I look at it, it speaks to me of a healthy dose of replacement theology, combined with that deadly element of displaced anger that we discussed in previous episodes. And of course, the Western cultural habit of mine, which abstracts the Jew into whatever they need us to be, capitalist, communist, architect of white supremacy, Always hidden, but always in control.

Right? This is strangely the place where black and white hate really come together. Though, in my eyes, there are still very different conclusions to be drawn about response. What about that replacement theology piece? It might be the one that you're not familiar with because we haven't really spoken about it yet. You know, if you know American history, then you know that the story of the Africans who were brought as slaves to the Americas is bound up with Christianity in painful and powerful ways. And often unnoticed is the Christian supersessionist stance foundational to Christianity for the better part of two millennia and therefore absorbed along with everything else by black Americans. Now, thank God that songs about Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt can help inspire or did help inspire and maybe still do black Americans in their suffering and their quest for freedom.

I'm all for it. But the adoption of our story as their own by Christians, whomever they may be, often leaves very little space for real Jews to exist. The actual Jew has always been a problematic response to the need to be the spiritual Israel. And in the present case, that combines quite powerfully with the racial totalization of Jews as white. Now just listen to this warning. Once again, from that James Baldwin 1967 article, Negroes are anti-Semitic because they're anti-white. You must read it in full. Rav Mike Foyer, gmail.com, or you can find me on Facebook, Rav Mike Foyer. Send me a message. I will happily share the link. It has to be studied. He says, The root of anti-Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples all over the globe to the Christian world.

Now, when Baldwin says that black Americans hate Jews because they're white, that racial designation is completely identified in his mind with Christianity, an international element that actually helps explain the intersection between black and progressive hate that we're going to have to come to by and by. And his reference point for the relationship of colored peoples all over the globe to the Christian world, as he says, is the Belgian Congo, a country with a colonial history so brutal that Joseph Conrad used it as the setting for the heart of darkness. It was a brutality, as Baldwin notes, that occurred in almost total silence, justified as necessary by those who knew, and blissfully ignored by those who didn't need to know so long as they continued to benefit.

That twisted combination of silence, suffering, and benefit led, in Baldwin's words, the Christian world to become misled by its own rhetoric and narcoticized by its own power. Now one can suppose that the Europeans genuinely believed that when the Congolese rose up against their oppressors, they were savages, motivated by hunger for white flesh, like Baldwin says. It was an ignorance that only deepens the evil of the relationship. It's a worthy warning unto itself, by the by. What fate awaits a society which allows itself to be so misled by its rhetoric and narcoticized by power that it can't read the writing on the wall or understand the reaction of those it facing I just going to leave that statement sitting here because for now Baldwin message for the Jews is that black hate is hate for the white which is hate for the Christian which is the hate of the oppressor for the oppressed which means that the Jew is finally a white Christian oppressor whether he likes it or not.

Poof! The missionary work of millennia has been completed. To Baldwin, there is no Jewish story in America in a meaningful, actual sense. He says, one can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough for not having learned from history. But, as he notes, nobody learns from history. Otherwise, it would look quite different. He goes on, he'd say that you might blame the Jew for failing to be ennobled by oppression, but having suffered plenty of oppression in his own life, Baldwin knew that this was, quote, not indicting the single figure of the Jew, but the entire Jewish race. Meaning, we don't actually exist, except as an abstraction. And then he finishes the article in a bizarre and chilling fashion.

He says, The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the Star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross, on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered, and not by Jews. That one deserves to be chewed on. But for now, he points out black hate is nonetheless rising in his time, and it seems to have reached a crescendo in ours almost 60 years later. In truth, Baldwin is delivering a triple warning, which will help us understand how best to respond to black anti-Semitism. It's a warning to white America, black America, and to the Jews. To white America, he commends the burden of history, which awaits all white Christianity.

a perhaps insurmountable debt of horror and suffering, which is fast coming due in our day. Read the news. Black America, he warns against the counterproductive nature of Jew hate, much as the German socialists warn against the socialism of fools. The real conflict, says Baldwin, is with white Christianity, and it, quote, can only be aggravated by the adoption, on the part of colored people now, of the most devastating of Christian vices. and his warning to the Jews? I have to admit, it's a historical perspective which is painful. But the truth hurts even when it's mixed with profound misunderstanding of our story. He says the ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country, remember, in Baldwin's mind, it's not about the Jews.

We don't really exist. We're just white people. He says the ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serf merely created another serf here and created him on the basis of color. And that needs to be seen as true. It's not the only story of America, but it's an important one. But for our purposes, he goes on. The Jew must see that he is part of the history of Europe and will always be so considered by the descendant of the slave. Always, that is, unless he himself is willing to prove that this judgment is inadequate and unjust. There's a reckoning going on in American society, one that requires unearthing the deepest questions of justice, power, identity, and all the ugliness and pain around them.

I can't express, personally, how deeply painful it is for me to hear anyone say that the Jew must see he's part of the history of Europe and mean that we're part of the system of oppression that culminated for us in the murder of six million. And yet, if I can put that hurt aside, I can hear the power of his call that we prove that judgment to be inadequate and unjust. It's not existentially true. It's indicative of a certain behavioral posture. Now, the last decade has seen a profound breakdown in black-Jewish relations, even since Baldwin's time. and not one entirely driven by hate, but deeply connected to it. Now, I gotta wrap this section up. So when it comes to how Jews ought to respond to the endgame of black anti-Semitism, which aims to make us white, the simple answer is we should refuse to be anything other than Jewish, which by nature defies all binaries, certainly a racial one.

Now, I'm not going to waste my breath relating to people like Yi and Kyrie or even Theracan. Crazy conspiracists, no matter how rich and famous, and the street thugs they inspire, deserve the same kahanas response as the neo-Nazis. But displaced anger can be healed. Stories of past, present, and future can be retold. And justice must be pursued. Yet the unfolding of the Black Lives Matter movement has exposed a fissure amongst Jews, the bridging of which is actually the first step in any pursuit of healing, justice, or narrative therapy on the national scale. On one side, there are those of us who see the linkage drawn between, say, Ferguson and Gaza after Michael Brown's murder not long after Israel invaded the Gaza Strip as opportunism at best and Jew hate at worst.

On the other hand, you've got the Jewish Voices for Peace, who use that coincidence of events as a springboard in their quest to paint Jewish nationalism as, frankly, the source of all evil. Just look up the so-called Deadly Exchange Campaign, which spawned the modern blood libel that makes the Israeli army the source of American police brutality training. Now is not the time or place to unpack the complexity behind that split. I just want to say that a Jewish response to black anti-Semitism requires standing up and being the Jews together, not taking the easy out behind the walls of white privilege, or assuming a bootlicking subservient stance as faux allies to the angry black community, acting as basically self-abasing cheerleaders to those who would dare tell us what it means to be a Jew.

real healing, real justice requires a conversation in which we have the courage to both own the advantages we've gained in America noticeably by shedding our visible Jewishness while at the same time owning the redemptive reality of our journey through history we have much to offer in the coming conversation and as Baldwin notes, a genuinely candid confrontation between American Negroes and American Jews would certainly prove of inestimable value. And in words that should cause any Jew connected to the roots to sit up and listen, he says, what is really a question is whether Americans already have an identity or are sufficiently flexible to achieve one. This is the real response to black antisemitism.

Deep identity work. First and foremost amongst ourselves as Jews, and then turning outward toward both the black and white binary, with which we can connect on each side. And if that sounds like too hard a task, that it might not be fair that we're being asked to do it since we didn't really create the problem, well, never forget, real identity issues are life or death ones on the personal or the national scale. And when the pressure is that high, you can run, but you can't hide. When it comes to progressive anti-Semitism, the endgame is to erase Jewish national existence. And since anyone with even a modicum of understanding about Jewish history knows that the personal, the religious, and the national are inextricably intertwined, that really means erasing the Jews.

Or at least cowing them into being what you allow them to be, which is the same thing. I ended last episode with the idea of intersectionality, that theory which combines an understanding of the layered nature of identity with a totalizing approach to power relationships. Remember, just like with the racializing of everything, anyone who needs to totalize the world in order to understand or fix it has to get rid of the Jews. We never fit an absolute framework. There's only one absolute with which we fit, and the Torah itself shows that we're willing to argue with that absolute as well. Our focus now is on American anti-Semitism, but since progressive Jew hate centers on anti-Zionism, we're going to have to start international in order to understand where it's gone in America in the new millennium, and, of course, how Jews ought to respond.

Is anyone else feeling a little bit exhausted right now? Well, too bad. It's only going to get worse. You can't find a better place to start, so to speak. With this story, then the UN's World Conference Against Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, in the first week of September 2001. Yeah, that was a week before 9-11. The Durban Conference is seen by global progressives and social justice warriors around the world as a watershed moment in both the practice and the sort of international intellectual currency of intersectionality. And it ought to be seen by the Jews as a watershed moment in progressive hate. You may think you know how bad it was, but I got news for you.

It was worse. The best and brightest of the activist world gathered to Durban that summer, especially for the Youth Congress, but also the NGO Congress, and of course, the International Assembly. Diplomats aside, these were people who had paid their dues in the trenches of the most difficult problems of the world. So much so that either some organization was willing to foot the bull for them to have a week in Durban, or they themselves were so devoted to being part of a global moment, they'd raise the money from who knows where. Now I say this without cynicism. it's crucial to understand that what unfolded in Durban took place in the context of a gathering of people who have genuinely devoted their lives to making the world a better place which makes it all the more chilling despite our disproportional representation amongst organizations that aim to fix the world very few Jews actually made it to the Durban conference for many, the two year preparatory process of town hall meetings, trainings, draft dialogues that went around the world showed that the writing was on the wall.

But their fears that Durbin would turn into an anti-Zionist festival were actually vastly understated. And none of them could imagine the raw Jew hate which would come pouring out. One of the few Jewish delegations which braved the conference was from the European Union of Jewish Students. And their experience was so shocking that they decided to document it in detail immediately afterwards. I have the document, Rav Mike Foyer, gmail.com. Send me on Facebook, Rav Mike Foyer. Happy to share it with you. It needs to be read but slowly and with a high degree of comfort Now you have to picture the arrival They get there Hundreds of excited young people clustered in the hotel and immediately our Jewish participants notice that many are wearing the same t-shirt.

It looks, in fact, like the one that had been distributed to all the participants. But on closer examination, they notice that beneath the official UN logo are the following words. Racism can, will, and must be defeated. Apartheid is real. Okay, certainly an acceptable statement for the context, but on the back, together with a photo of Palestinian child Mohammed al-Dura crouching behind his father, above a caption, it read, killed on September 30th for being Palestinian. Since then, over 532 persons killed one-third children. Occupation equals colonialism equals racism and Israeli apartheid. Now, not only was Mohammed al-Durrah's supposed murder eventually exposed as the ultimate act of Palestinian propaganda, though that would take place years later, this is at the height of the Second Intifada.

The equation of Israel with apartheid at a UN conference in South Africa not only set the tone for what was to come, but it actually established a reality that we live in today. You know, it was a telling episode that the UN Human Rights Commissioner when confronted by the Jewish students about this and actually forbid the participants to wear the T-shirts. After all, they were illegitimately using the UN logo, but they simply didn't stop. And in a sense, the conference actually went downhill right from there. You know, when I worked with at-risk youth in the woods, we had a very simple dress code that involved in long-starting things, keeping your shirt tucked in. I'm here to tell you, when a kid was going to go off the rails, the first thing he did was untuck his shirt.

And that's really what happened when these participants defied the UN Human Rights Commissioner's order to stop using the UN logo illegitimately. So when the delegation of Jews left their hotel for the stadium in which the youth conference was taking place, this is how one student later reported what they sell. Wherever you turn, Israel is compared to Nazi Germany. Posters associate Israel with South African apartheid. Everywhere, there are images of suffering Palestinian children. The stand of the Arab Lawyers Union is selling the protocols of the elders of Zion. Caricatures are hung up. One depicts a rabbi with the protocols of elders of Zion under his arm and an Israeli army cap on his head. Another poster describes how the Jews make their bread with the blood of Muslims.

As the delegates began to see, the distinction between Jews and Zionism wasn't gradually erased. It was non-existent to begin. on the second day when all the delegates met to classify the morality of each state itself a shocking act Israel was of course relegated to the bottom rung NGO delegates from all around the world began saying in Jerusalem the Israeli leaders have built the foundations of a racist regime we should do something about this by day 3 it became clear that the Jews were about to be criminalized under international law tarred as accomplices of the world's most evil regime. And when the Jewish delegates tried to engage in substance debate, a cry went up around the conference. The Jewish NGOs intend to divide the world's anti-racist movement.

You can't even defend yourself because that itself is an act of aggression. Sound familiar? What began with disrespect and shaming moved quickly to angry rhetoric and the accusation of Jews, Jews, not Israelis, sucking the blood of the Palestinians. By day four, the Jews were afraid to even walk alone, and their security detail, provided by the South African Jewish community, insisted on escorting them wherever they went. A central part of the conference was actually when each minority was given time to tell its story. Every victim of racism was meant to have some narrative which was instructive to the others. Now, you might think that the attendees at a conference devoted to combating intolerance would have what to learn from a panel of experts on the oldest hatred, trying to explain the roots of anti-Semitism and its contemporary forms.

But you would be wrong. The tent in which their presentation was held, by the way, I mean, assistance of their security detail, who felt it provided the easiest exit and most defensible position, was actually overrun by people screaming, you don't belong to the human race, chosen people, You're the cursed people. Why haven't the Jews taken responsibility for killing Jesus? We don't want you here. Jews don't belong in Jordan. Jews don't belong in Israel. Frankly, Jews don't belong anywhere. The violence actually became physical, and the delegates were forced to flee, but not before a paper was shoved into one young woman's hand. When she later read it, it said, anti-Semitism is by definition a racist concept, since it bases superiority on religion.

Why should the demands of one particular national or follower of a religion benefit from a privileged attention at the conference? Does the whole world need to bear the burden of the Third Reich? It was signed, Revolution Committees Movement. I could go on, but I bet I've made my point. The conclusion drawn by the student delegates of the European Union of Jewish Students before they fled was the following. Jews are seen in the collective consciousness of Durban as the direct cause of Palestinian suffering. We are considered the last bastion of a fascist international order to be eliminated. Restoring the dignity of oppressed people will only come through our defeat. Notice once again the totalizing theme.

Now what does this have to do with American progressive anti-Semitism? Well, everything. Durbin created, or at least crystallized, the conceptual framework that legitimized destruction as the only solution, the final solution to the Zionist problem, and by extension, to its Jewish supporters, or frankly, just to Jews. And it quickly took that conceptual framework and it metastasized around the world. The lymph system of that process, of course, was academia. And hence the appearance, not so long after Durbin, of the first BDS, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and Israel Apartheid Week on American college campuses. Now, I need to wrap this up. But where's one more thought I have to, of course, share on how Jews ought respond to progressive hate, whose end goal is to erase us?

Before I do, you just have to appreciate what's happening out there if you don't already know. Because since the first Campus Apartheid Week in 2005, Israeli Apartheid Week, the IAW, has become one of the best-known and most vehement anti-Israel programs. It parallels Durban, dozens of cities around the world, each year. and it's filled with a week-long series of events that paint Israel as nothing but an apartheid state and also serves as a platform for furthering that BDS campaign. It's at the Israel Apartheid Week that notions like pinkwashing were first introduced, tested in the discourse. That's a shorthand, if you don't know, for claim that Israel showcases its progressive record on LGBTQ issues in order to whitewash its policies toward the Palestinians.

If you want to appreciate how this impacts young American Jews leaving home often for the first time to go to university, that's a whole episode on its own. But I'll give you this one little insight shared with me by a Hillel professional at a major university that will remain nameless. She said that she suddenly began to see students coming into her office, students that she was excited to see at Hillel because they were largely completely unaffiliated with Judaism. But she quickly discovered the cause. That in their classes, they were being asked, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, to sign off on their opposition to Israel. Now, many of these Jews had never been to Israel. They didn't really know anything about Israel.

They didn't really know anything about their Judaism. But suddenly, they're being pushed into a corner, being asked to take a stance on something which others have decided defines who they are, but they themselves don't have a relationship to. And they're saying to her basically, WTF? I never thought about Israel before. Now, on one hand, you could say, hey, they managed to push these kids to Hillel, where this young woman was doing good work. On the other hand, what on earth is going on? So what's to be done? Now, I have to say, there is definitely an element of healing required vis-a-vis progressive hate as well. I would never be so foolish as to claim our relationship with the Arabs of the land is anything but deeply broken.

or frankly that our stance in relationship to the world politics and the division between the developed and the developing nations is anything other than problematic in its pragmatism. But remember, healing requires a dialogue, which means that you need to be willing to look at each other face to face. You can't totalize the other into a caricature of everything which is wrong with the world. And what about that every Jew at 22 stance? Well, all I can say is stay safe out there, people, and thank God for Zahal. The real response to the endgame of erasure doesn't come from Kahana, but rather from Zev Jabotinsky, his hero and the founder of the revisionist Zionist movement. Jabotinsky was famous in his day for insisting that the Jews of his time needed a new posture, one that he called genius, generous, and cruel.

Genius meant an upright, daring fighter. Generous meant noble and acting noble toward all others as if they themselves were nobility and cruel only toward oneself. Jabotinsky dreamed of a generation of Jews free from what he called diaspora complexes, always prepared to stand in service to their people and motivated by the spirit he called Hadar. It's an elusive term. even in Biblical Hebrew it encompasses beauty, pride to Jabotinsky, respect, loyalty basically it encompasses every lofty value what he called a sense of overall impeccability and most importantly Hadar requires that we examine every action be it personal or national in light of who we are as Jews in short, the answer to erasure is to stand up as Jews not with a false pride the type that sustains the wounded and the abused but with a true expression of our divine nature which has the capacity to illuminate the whole world and that's a light that no one will ever extinguish I want to thank some folks before I sign off, thank all the folks who give their hard earned money to make the show happy, keep it free, widely available I want to ask you to join them now, go to jewishstory.co.

Up in the upper right hand corner you see a button that says be a patron. You can click on that to give a little bit per podcast support or be in touch. RobMikeFoyer at gmail.com. RobMikeFoyer at Facebook. Happy to share with you the ways in which you can dedicate a show or give another one-time donation. I want to thank the Land of Israel Network. That's thelandofisrael.com. They're building a center for global transcendence in the heart of the Judean mountains. I want to thank the Pardes Institute. P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L for of throwing the doors of the Beit Midrash open as wide as possible. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.