A Note On The 10/7/23 Hamas Slaughter And The Burst Of Wide Spread Anti Semitism

 F:

I have to say that I am shocked at the amount of antisemitism I am seeing.  Is it just some kind of social contagion, am I seeing more of it because I am following the war, is the media over emphasizing the extent of it?  What's your take?

I'm hoping it's temporary.  

Me:

Shocked as well.

It seems to reflect the extent to which left wing progressivism/woke has taken over portions of elite sensibility based on an analysis that starts from seeing the world through the lens of oppressors and oppressed; it’s the fetishizing of the marginalized, which since they appear most dramatically as non white leads to the obsession with racial identity and thinking politically and socially collectively rather than focusing on the individual. The intellectual lineage of this goes back to Marx reformulated by the “Frankfurt School” intellectuals then finding increasing acceptance around the developed world, and fuelled in the U.S. by its past of systemic racism only dismantled de jure in the mid sixties. Then by an alchemy I don’t fully understand many radicals of the sixties found themselves in universities as teachers influencing their students some of whom became profs as well. The adapted Marxian lineage continued and strengthened to this day. Part of this rhetoric involves “colonization, decolonization, settlers, racist hegemony and imposition”, much of which is reflected in the noxious notion of toxic “whiteness”. Point of all this here is, it finds its perfect example in Israel as an ostensibly imperialist colonizer, a white supremacist nation oppressing dark skinned, immiserated Arabs, like say the Gazans supposedly locked up in an “open air prison”. All this is facilitated by age old ethnicist libels of the blood sucking, villainous Jew, who in modern times dispossessed, via Franz Fanon, the “wretched of the earth”. So the 10/7 massacre is seen as an act of liberating resistance  and vindication, the barbarity of which simply measures the extent of Israeli brutalization of the indigenous population. And since we’re thinking collectively now, all Jews are real and symbolic—often conflated—targets. On this way of seeing it, the, massacre can be likened to the long suppressed and repressed id escaping the pressure of the superego and, here, at its animalistic worst, liberated to do what has been done to it.