4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
I am so tired of so many wanting to wave away violent hatred as though if we stick our heads in the ground and ignore it then it will disappear.
This post is the seventh in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the first six installments here:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth
The JFK Conspiracy Theory Which Makes the Most Sense & Why It Matters Today
An Open Letter to Elon Musk Thanking Him for the Correct Decision Shutting Down Neo-Nazi Kanye West
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
Today, I’m extra annoyed, because I’m still having to explain and argue on behalf of the first article in this series, which some of my former right-wing blogger colleagues are still disputing. And they’re doing so for the dumbest, most morally confused reasons.
Their objections boil down to four points:
Not that many people in America are antisemites and neo-Nazis, so can’t we just ignore them since they’re so small a group?
These people are stupid, pathetic losers! Don’t worry about them! Nick Fuentes is a 160-pound “dweeb!” Milo Yiannopoulos is no Osama bin Laden! Kanye is obviously a crazy person! These people aren’t a real threat to anyone!
By loudly condemning antisemites in the mass media, aren’t we just empowering them and giving them a greater platform to recruit people to their ideology? By not ignoring antisemites or giving them a quick dismissal, aren’t we just making them more influential? Who’d ever heard of Richard Spencer before Rachel Maddow and the rest of the MSM made him famous?
This sounds an awful lot like “cancel culture.” Who’s to say where the line is between the expression of an opinion and incitement to violence? If we condemn antisemitism, then aren’t we opening the door to receiving condemnation ourselves - in the same way that abortion clinics claim pro-life advocacy inspires violence against them? If we let anyone at all be “canceled” for their speech, aren’t we opening the door for us to be “canceled” ourselves for our own unpopular ideas?
The points and questions are just cringe-inducing. They’re painful to read. This is the response they inspire in me:
A big reason I’m so annoyed by some of these responses is because I thought I already addressed them in the original piece. Points one and two are largely the same idea - they’re attempts to minimize the problem. There aren’t that many antisemites in America, and the ones in the media lately seem clownish. And they don’t have a very large following, either. So what? Well, the non-violent antisemites aren’t the real problem. The much smaller group of violent ones are the problem. And the former group fuels the latter’s actions.
Dion J. Pierre at The Algemeiner reported today, “New York Antisemitic Hate Crimes Up 125 Percent in November, NYPD Says”:
Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City during the month of November increased by 125 percent when compared to last year, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) reported on Monday.
The NYPD recorded 45 antisemitic hate crimes in November 2022. In November 2021, it recorded 20. According to the data, Jewish New Yorkers were the most targeted group, accounting for 60 percent of all hate crimes that occurred.
There were several incidents of note in November, including a series of antisemitic and racist notes sent to several restaurants in the City Island neighborhood of the Bronx, the shooting of Hasidic Jews with a gel gun, and the uncovering of a plot to attack synagogues in Manhattan…
More antisemitic incidents were recorded in New York than in any other state, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported in April, noting that it tallied 416, which “accounted for an astounding 15 percent of the total reported antisemitic incidents across the country.”
Previously in this series, I’ve noted the utility of the ADL’s Global 100 for showcasing the levels of antisemitism by country. In the United States, 10% of the 2015 adult population holds antisemitic attitudes, or 24 million people. Well, how many total Jews are there in America? A 2020 Pew Research report:
This report classifies approximately 5.8 million adults (2.4% of all U.S. adults) as Jewish. This includes 4.2 million (1.7%) who identify as Jewish by religion and 1.5 million Jews of no religion (0.6%).
In the United States, the antisemite is four times as common as the Jew. There are four enemies of the Jews for every Jew in the country. Now perhaps for fundamentalist Christians primarily concerned about criminalizing abortion, or for extreme libertarians primarily concerned about maximizing their bank accounts, this doesn’t seem like a very “big problem.” But to those of us with Jewish people in our lives, whom we care about, it’s a very real, significant concern.
Regarding the third objection, the idea that media condemnations of antisemitism just provide a platform for otherwise obscure people, such as neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, I’d counter that it actually works the other way around. Such people being covered by the mass media does not actually help them gain followers and money. Rather, it shows the consequences of promoting this hate - it’s a deterrent for their would-be followers - and eventually, over time, it brings them down.
We don’t hear that much about Spencer these days. Why is that? Because life has become so difficult for him since he endured the cultural beatdown he brought on himself. He’s endured multiple lawsuits, and has found it much harder to operate now that he’s so infamous. We’re seeing the same phenomenon now with Kanye West. He’s not gaining support, he’s actually losing it. This is how journalism is supposed to function - as sunlight disinfecting lies and eradicating cultural disease.
The fourth point, fear of “cancel culture,” is a stark reminder of why, for some time now, I haven’t particularly felt at home politically “on the Right” or in the obsolete abstraction that is “the conservative movement.” For years now it’s been my job, in one capacity or another, to get people “canceled” for their antisemitism. This used to be a standard and normal cause among conservatives. Some leftist professor or a progressive congressman would take their anti-Israel politics a few steps too far into the realm of antisemitism, and it would be understandable to call for serious consequences. Nowadays though, traumatized by seeing various people wrongfully fired for expressing fairly common views on gender or religious issues, too many on the Right have made the mistake of taking the extreme position: that “no one should ever face consequences for expressing an unpopular opinion.”
They’re unwilling to stand for anyone to be “canceled” for their speech out of fear that somehow they will be canceled for something else, and then have no recourse to defend themselves.
To which I respond: antisemitism is unique. It’s not comparable to an “unpopular opinion.” It’s a unique hatred that over a billion people around the globe now embrace, and a hatred that inspires terrorist groups and terrorist states to wage wars against the one Jewish state. One’s “opinion” about whether Jewish people should exist is not comparable to one’s “opinion” on abortion legality or the size of government or what trade policy the nation should embrace. This is not just another issue to have a friendly Left-Right, Us vs Them debate.
This is an existential issue for the 15.3 million Jews on the planet. They’re massively outnumbered here. As noted above, in America, Jews are outnumbered by antisemites 4 to 1. At the global level, it’s far worse: 0.2% of the world population is Jewish, and 26% of the population as a whole holds antisemitic attitudes.
Is the depth of the problem starting to come into focus yet at all?