Wokeism Comes for the Jews: Centuries-Old Victims Now 'Privileged White Oppressors'
As published in Newsmax.
June 2, 2021.
You have to marvel at the resilience of Jew-hatred. Like a highly contagious retrovirus and its variants, antisemitism has the uncanny ability to evolve with the times, adapting to the prevailing culture and evading eradication.
From its historical roots in religion (the Jews as ''Christ killers''), it morphed into the Jews as ''evil manipulators'' using their vast powers to control the world.
Now, critical race theory (CRT), along with its companions postcolonialism, neo-Marxist identity politics and intersectionality, represents the latest manifestation: the Jews as ''privileged white supremacists'' who use their powerful ''whiteness'' to oppress black and brown people in America and the Mideast.
How can the world's appetite for Jew-hatred remain so insatiable? Haven't Jews had enough unfounded hatred without this?
Not according to critical race ideologues who show real hubris by shoehorning antisemitism into their narrative of power and skin color — a simplistic, crude, contradictory and false tale that is emotionally impactful as a convenient explanation for failure and an outlet for resentment and retribution.
The ''multicultural'' Left promotes an ideology that favors whomever they designate as victims.
So, you may ask, how do the proverbial centuries-old victims, the Jews, become ''privileged white oppressors''?
The Jewish American story contradicts CRT’s assertion that abused minorities don’t have agency to improve themselves without state intervention ensuring equal outcomes (equity). Despite a history of incredible oppression culminating in the Holocaust, Jews have achieved disproportionately high success in all walks of American life. This presents an intolerable paradox to critical race theorists.
No matter. CRT authoritarians fashion a new narrative in which Jews, who have never been considered ''white'' by bigots for whom white is a moral good, are labeled ''white,'' now that ''whiteness'' is an outright abomination. Jews, the narrative says, find ways to join the white majority, gaining significant privilege and usurping control of the institutions that shape society, to the detriment of non-whites, especially blacks.
At the same time, Jews also retain a claim on well-recognized historical victimhood, which provides them with an excuse to deny their privilege. They wield that excuse as a shield.
CRT theorist Robin DiAngelo in her book, "Is Everyone Really Equal?" tells us that Jewish immigrants to America initially were not considered white, but they ''became'' white as they assimilated into the dominant culture and, because of this new perception, gained legal, political, economic and social rights and privileges denied to blacks and other non-whites.
To deal with the paradox of Jewish success, CRT theorists insist that Jews succeeded in America only by becoming ''white'' and their success is proof of racial inequity.
In the CRT/intersectional worldview, antisemitism is conveniently downplayed using the argument that Jews have stolen victimhood from other, more deserving groups. Carried to its conclusion, some proponents even claim that the Holocaust was merely ''white on white crime.''
Psychologist Pamela Paresky, in her article, Critical Race Theory and the 'Hyper-White' Jew, aptly summarized the situation: ''Critical race theory does not merely make it easy to demonize Jews using the language of social justice; it makes it difficult not to. . . . At a time when the moral imperative of progressivism is to 'be less white,' there is no identity more pernicious than that of a once powerless minority group that, rather than joining the struggle to dismantle whiteness, opted into it.''
Zionism, the liberation movement to create a nation-state for the Jewish people in their ancient homeland, is viewed by the woke as a racist totem of white Western colonialism where white Jewish supremacists have stolen the land from powerless Muslim Arabs and victimize those ''people of color.''
Never mind that the Jews are the indigenous people of the area, that more than half of Israel's population consists of Israeli Jews from the Mideast and North Africa, many of whom are darker skinned than many Arabs.
Palestinian activist Linda Sarsour echoes the dogma: ''How can you be against white supremacy in America, . . . but then you support a state like Israel that is based on supremacy, that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else.''
Progressives expend considerable effort to draw an outrageously false equivalence between American racial minorities and Palestinian Arabs, claiming both are suffering ''non-whites.''
They repeatedly drag Israel into discussions about domestic issues ranging from immigration and prison reform to LGBTQ equality (where mentioning Israel's vastly superior record compared with that of other countries in the Mideast is branded ''pinkwashing'').
Black Lives Matter (BLM) slanders the Israeli military, maintaining that they train the American police in brutal police methods used against black Americans, linking Israel to allegations of American racism. A viral cartoon shared on Twitter depicts an Israeli and an American police officer embracing while kneeling on the necks of a Palestinian and a black man, respectively.
Belief in the justification of Israel's existence makes you a denier of CRT doctrine.
Rather than asserting that Jews are members of secret unpatriotic international cabals or accusing them of using the blood of Christian children to bake their bread, today's woke antisemites like Democrat Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Cori Bush (Mo.), with the acquiescence of their party, falsely smear Israel, the Jewish collective, with accusations of deliberately segregating and killing black and brown people, invoking terms like ''apartheid'' and ''war crimes.''
This persistent antisemitic demonization of the Jewish state helped inspire the recent verbal and physical attacks on Jews here at home in New York, California and elsewhere.
We must denounce unequivocally this pernicious doctrine where contradiction masquerades as virtue and bigotry as anti-racism. History teaches us — Joseph Goebbels comes to mind — that ''if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.''
Nazi-era history also teaches us that Jew-hatred is most virulent and dangerous when it is part of a larger venomous, ideological movement. Fourth Reich, thy name is wokeism.
