How did we get here?

As I’ve read more and more reports about the insane rhetoric that student protesters are using against Israel, I find myself wondering what they are thinking. How do they think that saying things like “gas the Jews” or “go back to Poland*” is going to help their cause? How do they think calling for the beheading of their university administrators is going to accomplish their objectives?

If anything, their approach has distracted from the war and calcified support for Israel. Do they really think talking like Hitler and acting out the ugliest parts of the French Revolution will help them?

I’m tempted to just dismiss them as uneducated and childish. And maybe that’s really what it is. Maybe they really haven’t studied the Holocaust or the French Revolution and are just reacting to the news and are expressing their feelings about what is going on without thinking deeply about what they are actually saying. But how can that be true? I mean these kids are at schools that are really hard to get into. You can’t be low information and go to Columbia or Harvard. Right?

—

So, if we are going to assume that these individuals are educated and know what they are doing then how do we explain it?

It seems to me that these students are only looking at the Arab-Israeli conflict through the lens of Critical Race Theory.  Rather than seeking to objectively analyze this complex situation and being willing to recognize that there isn’t an easy answer, far too many college students are choosing to only look at the conflict as one between the “oppressed” Palestinians and the Israeli “oppressors”.

They see Israel’s walls and cry “Apartheid” and “racism” without giving any thought to the fact that Hamas-led terrorists have dedicated their lives to setting off bombs, mass-shootings, stabbing, taking hostages, launching rockets, and any other horrible thing that terrorists do to the objects of their hate.

They see a western state in the midst of Islamic countries and call Israelis “Colonizers”, not acknowledging that the modern state of Israel came about in 1947, just 2 years after the Holocaust. Do a group of people who just went through the worst genocide in history qualify as “colonizers”?

Speaking of “genocide”, the deaths of innocent civilians is certainly something to be concerned about. I don’t want to act like Israel is beyond reproach nor do I want to be an apologist for civilian casualties. I worry that what started out as national defense may have morphed into revenge. God loves Palestinians and Israelis equally and it is not consistent with His heart to support the indiscriminate death of the innocent.

But it’s just as important to state that things aren’t always what they seem. Rather than opting to fight on a battlefield away from civilians, Hamas seems to have elected to employ a strategy where they store weapons in civilian buildings and purposefully put their people in harm’s way so that when Israel attempts to attack Hamas the reports come out that Israel “blew up a hospital” or a church or school.

Also, unlike the European nations who took in millions of Ukrainian refugees to get people out of combat zones, none of the neighboring Arab countries are accepting Palestinian refugees. This alone could have saved thousands of lives.

With all that in mind is it really appropriate to call the, albeit very tragic, deaths of Palestinians “genocide”?

Furthermore, considering the sad history of Jewish suffering how insensitive is it to apply that word so flippantly to this complex situation?

--

But in recent years many have begun to use words as tools to elicit a response or shape an opinion rather than as precise indicators for what is actually going on.  We have seen this very frequently with Trans activists who call anyone who disagrees with their ideology as “doing violence” against Trans people.  No physical force has been used at all, but the word “violence” is chosen because it conjures up a certain feeling.

Another example is “Gender Affirming Care”, which unless one knows what this really means would think it is the opposite of what it actually is.  When I first heard that hospitals were embracing “Gender Affirming Care” I thought it meant that they were helping boys and girls to work through the difficult sense that they don’t belong in their body and – through the program I imagined they had established – help them to learn to accept the body (and gender) they were born with. 

But that’s not what it means at all.  What it really means is amputating working body parts from a child’s body because he/she perceives himself/herself as a different gender than the one he/she was born with.

No one could get that from the phrase “Gender Affirming Care” unless someone had explained to them that it was predicated on the idea that gender is a construct of the mind.

So why use it then? Why not use the term “Sex Change Surgery” like it had been referred to in the past?

It’s used because of the feeling it gives.  The word “Affirming” feels like a nice warm hug.  And it’s even more endearing when followed by “Care”.  So, when presenting an unalterable surgery to the parents of a child with a struggle like this, which afterward will leave them sterile, medical professionals present it like it’s an embrace from an old friend.

--

Such an approach to language is used because it works.  And this is why I am so alarmed by how this tactic is now being used against Jewish people. 

Harsh, manipulative rhetoric, based on half-truths and full-on fabrications has been used against the Jews before. And it led to one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen.

Anyone who has seen the terrible images or read the horrifying stories will understand that the Holocaust was an abomination. But how did it happen in a country that was – at the time – the most advanced nation in the world? I plan to examine this in future posts.

 

—————-

*Poland is where 3 million of a population of 3.2 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust