Mainstreaming hatred

Museum staff walk out in protest of exhibit on anti-Semitism

If the board and administration of the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle cave to their anti-Semitic staff who walked out on strike, then said Museum will have forever ceded any legitimacy it might like to lay claim to.

The Museum self-describes as “pan-Asian,” and had scheduled an exhibit on anti-Semitism. Apparently, some of the staff were none too happy to see that the exhibit curator had accurately included information on how “anti-Zionism” often (I would say 99 percent of the time) is no more than a mask with which to hide one’s anti-Semitism.

So many staff refused to work under such onerous honesty that the museum has had to close its doors the past week.

It’s funny (strange funny, not “ha-ha” funny): When the Saudi government’s oil fund tries to divest its profits into entertainment, including underwriting a breakaway professional golf tour, Western leftists complain that this was no more than “sportswashing” the Saudi’s record on non-traditional sexual mores.

Yet it is largely the same political demographic criticizing the Saudis that is simultaneously chanting “We are all Hamas” while trying to shut down college and university commencements.

And let’s be honest: Compared to Hamas — which throws accused homosexuals off the roofs of apartment buildings without benefit of trial — the Saudis are almost worthy of a Stonewall Award.

So if LIV Golf is a “sportswashing,” what does that make the keffiyeh-wearing Ivy elites telling Jewish classmates to “go back to Poland”? Culture-washing?

The frequent invocation of the fallacious argument that “anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism” (the argument the striking museum staff are using) is a pretty fair sign that the argument is about to go off the rails into full-on anti-Semitism.

As most Jewish civil rights group have belatedly recognized, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic: To oppose Zionism is to deny the indigenous Jewish history in Israel. Further, those who claim they are “only” anti-Zionist almost never oppose an Arab right of return to that land — even though most of the contemporary Arab population can only trace its arrival back a century or so.

Anti-Zionism holds that European Jews have no ties or claims to Israel, overlooking the fact that not only is the Jewish diaspora the result of two millennia of pogroms (i.e., ethnic cleansing), but that Jerusalem has remained the single greatest center of Jewish scholarship in the 2,000 years since the destruction of the Second Temple.

Even during the caliphates, Jerusalem generally remained a Jewish-majority city.

Ottoman census figures from the late 1800s show that modern-day Israel and surrounding environs were agrarian, with tiny populations. Gaza was largely empty just 120 years ago, northern Israel not much busier.

As Jews fleeing increased racial violence in Europe and elsewhere in the Middle East returned to their ancestral home, the Ottoman government was busy expelling or killing 8 million Christians throughout their empire (which stretched from modern-day Turkey to the Sinai peninsula). As Greek communities that had lived in the region since the times of Alexander the Great were murdered or forcibly deported, as Armenians and indigenous Assyrians were likewise targeted for extermination, their lands, homes and shops were given to Muslims willing to relocate and take them on.

The fact is that a significant swath of the Arab population in Gaza and the West Bank traces its arrival to the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocides that culminated in 1921.

Just 20 years later, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was recording Arabic-language radio commercials on behalf of Nazi Germany encouraging Muslim men to enlist in the Wehrmacht (German Army under the Nazis) — thousands enthusiastically did so.

So we can drop the myth — and it is provably just that — of the peaceful Arabic people who had lived peacefully in “Palestine” for thousands of years until being displaced by white invaders from Europe.

It’s not only a myth, it’s a racist trope.

Jews are not, and cannot be, “settlers” or “colonialists” in their ancestral homeland. This is neo-Marxist propaganda. Nor are they ethnically European — another racist fallacy.

But this attempt to mainstream Jew hatred is going on on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, a boycott is being waged against a documentary that looks at the victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack.

In a bit of irony utterly lost on the anti-Semites organizing the boycott of the film, they’re calling the film an “artwashing” of a supposed genocide of Gaza’s Arab residents.

Not only do the anti-Semites have no clue what genocide is, it is they who are engaging in artwashing — hijacking music festivals, art exhibits, and now even museum exhibits to make further the message that it’s okay to hate Jews.

And of course it never stops at a boycott. The theater that agreed to show the film has been vandalized, its employees threatened.

This artwashing, or culture-washing, of anti-Semitism is like nothing we’ve seen in recent history. While anti-Semitism has long been a stain on both Western and Islamic cultures, it was generally a low-key, mostly unspoken form of discrimination with occasional outbreaks of violence.

This — this is organized on a global scale, from Norway to Australia, Argentina to Alaska, the tentacles coalescing in places like Moscow and Teheran.

That so many young adults from the upper economic echelons of Western society are falling prey to this campaign of overt hatred and the rhetorical tools that allow it to fester should concern all of us.

In young elite circles, it is not only acceptable to hate Jews.

It is becoming expected.

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