The two bodies politic on the left and right have unleashed the dogs of hate on their two least favorite groups
It was a feeling of déjà vu. Or maybe déjà Ju.
Like, “There it is, now for the Jews.”
The left’s cheerleaders for the Hamas attack seemed frighteningly familiar, even though I’m not Jewish.
Oct. 7 unleashed the ugly boil of anti-Semitism that I’ve always known has festered beneath the surface of the left, just as Donald Trump unleashed it on the right with Charlottesville.
I never truly recognized the depth of lefty Jew-hatred, but neither am I surprised by it. The left’s historical too-uncritical support for Palestinian ‘freedom’ has never seemed to have taken into account how deeply anti-Semitic they are, long before 1948, and that too many Palestinians believe they can’t be ‘free’ until all Jews are removed from their homeland (which is also the Jews’ homeland). The left’s commitment to antiracism and Indigenous rights has never seemed to include Jews. But racism is hunky-dory when they’re doing the Hamas happy dance, mislabeling Jews as white, conflating the Palestinians with historically enslaved American blacks, and wrapped up with growing illiberal racism against white people, including self-hating, guilt-ridden white progressives.
I’ve never felt comfortable with the West’s ‘Palestinian freedom’ rap. It’s always seemed too suspiciously like a thin veneer for anti-Semitism.
And now, here it is.
Still, Israel isn’t above reproach
I understand why many think the Palestinians have been abused, and how religious Zionism has sometimes veered into dangerous Jewish nationalism and anti-Islamism. I understand many on the Israeli right would rather see Palestinians pushed out from the river to the sea, and that Israel is primarily responsible for the humanitarian crisis that has emerged in Gaza, and that they keep telling Gazan civilians to evacuate somewhere else, and then shell that somewhere else. I understand that Netanyahu is a right-wing whack job and when he was re-elected last year, I thought, Ohhhh, this can’t be good for anyone, WTF, Israelis? Are you trying to start a war?
Is 17,000+ dead Gazans and counting, only a third of which were enemy combatants, enough recompense for 1,200 horribly murdered Jewish civilians in early October? Apparently not. Can it all be blamed on Hamas’s human shields defense? Nuh-uh. Israel is reacting out of rage, with no one to reign them in. I remember reading about George Bush’s reaction on 9/11. I’m paraphrasing, but it came down to Let’s nuke the snot out of them, right fucking now. I understood his rage; I felt it myself, we all did; but I was still glad that cooler heads in his Cabinet reined him in. No, that’s not the right response. We can’t respond with rage. We have to be careful, think this thing through.
Israel didn’t think this thing through.
Bush could have started World War III that week, just as Israel and Hamas still might.
What wasn’t clear to me before Oct. 7, though, is that the left had become so hateful that they could support Hamas. Yes, I expected they’d make the usual tugboat sounds— “Butbutbutbut all the ways Israelis have discriminated against or mistreated the Palestinians!”—yet it never occurred to me to believe they’d blame Israelis for a horrific attack of such diabolically considered cruelty, by a terrorist group who stands for everything progressive liberalism supposedly doesn’t.
I guess I’ve been more naive about lefty anti-Semitism than righty anti-Semitism. Charlottesville didn’t surprise me. I understood how aligned with far-right nationalism and genuine white supremacy the Trump gang was and is. I always knew the left could be anti-Semitic, I just hadn’t realized they’d become virtually indistinguishable from the MAGAs.
Maybe I just didn’t want to see the festering cesspool on my side of the political divide.
The reason why a non-Jew like me is getting a sense of déjà vu is because something similar happened on the left for women several years ago: The gross, intense eruption of misogyny I’d underestimated on my own side as well.
It’s always acceptable, for everyone, to throw Jews—and women—under the bus.
The rise of transmisogyny
I still have not yet come to grips with how much the ‘progressive’ left hates women. But it’s frighteningly clear they’re no more our allies than the Trumpers.
They fancy themselves ‘feminist’ because they’re appalled at the destruction of Roe v. Wade. We share that much in common, still. Although I’m no longer certain if progressive men want it back because they believe women have a right to corporeal autonomy, or because it makes it easier for women to end a paternal inconvenience.
The progressive left agrees that some men can be skeazeballs and need to rein in sexual harassment or objectification. But not all leftyboys are as feminist as advertised. Male ‘feminism’ can be an acquired mantle for horny dudes to score chicks.
Certain men have built their own workaround for satisfying their sexual urges without women’s consent: The trans movement, powered primarily by adult human males appropriating womanhood. They’ve seized the opportunity to demand and then force women to submit to their sexual desires just as women mostly had to before ‘feminism ruined everything’.
‘Transwomen’ fight for access to women’s-only spaces. Like bathrooms, because they claim they’re not safe in male restrooms. So how come gay dudes can use them? Countless cases of transwomen using female-only spaces to gain access to potential sexual assault victims or to satisfy their fetishes have been documented: Domestic violence shelters, public restrooms, rape crisis centers and even women’s prisons. Crappy male athletes have successfully campaigned to join female sports teams and it’s not the Trumpers, the MAGAs, or the Charlottesville gang trying to destroy Title IX, it’s so-called progressive liberals. The ‘woke’.
To cadge a favorite word from the illiberal left, and particularly its men, they’re perfectly comfortable colonizing women’s spaces, prioritizing men’s desires over women’s safety and privacy when the former claim to be the latter.
Can someone please explain to me why it’s wrong for right-wing men to dictate who can access female bodies, but it’s fine when left-wing men do it?
Transgenderism, or transsexualism as it was called fifty years ago, has always been heavily populated by fetishists, as documented by early classic books like Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire and Dr. Michael Bailey’s The Man Who Would Be Queen.
Autogynephiles and other fetishists are primarily behind the aggressive drive to force themselves into women’s spaces. Women can’t even hold a women’s-only rock concert without men pushing for entrance and forcing themselves in without consent. Yeah, there’s a rape analogy there.
The left fancies itself the champions of the oppressed—and, before wokeism radicalized and cadged hate models and violence as political expression from the right, they were. They never supported all oppressed and marginalized people, like, those harmed by globalism and runaway immigration on the right, but they still spoke for a lot of voices that couldn’t.
Now they communicate the language of hate. Now they pontificate like the privileged, entitled elitists so derided by the right. Now they call women ‘transphobic’ and ‘TERF’ for daring to challenge and lay boundaries around aggressive sexual predators, as truly progressive feminists have done since the birth of Second Wave feminism.
There have always been two exceptions to the left’s no-hate rule. Women, and Jews.
I’m not sure where it went wrong, whether the left stopped realizing, or ever realized, that Jews have been hated and marginalized for thousands of years, before woke antiracism was invented, but it’s no mystery why they hate women.
It all comes down to The Penis
One thing I’ve learned in the last few years is just how committed to specialized male sexual pleasure some men can be, even without being sexual predators or pickup artists.
I hadn’t understood before the power of the fetish, rooted in the Latin word facticius meaning an object made with supernatural powers, or which grants the ability of power over others. It then became the Portuguese word feitiço, and then the French word fétiche. Later it came to denote a sexual attraction to an object (like balloons, velvet or cheese) or non-genital body parts like feet or necks. In other words, something that had sexual power over a person.
What I’ve also learned is how far The Bro Code will go to protect sexual fetishes, including for others, even if one is not particularly fetishistic himself.
As Oct. 7 released the ugly dogs of anti-Semitism on the left, the trans movement made misogyny acceptable again for Good Liberals.
Certain ‘Feminist’ ‘liberal’ men, along with self-hating, misogyny-internalizing fauxminists, have returned to the horndogs among them the ‘right’ to demand sexual pleasure from women. It’s not yet gotten to demanding and requiring women directly submit to sexual service, but I believe it’s heading that way, from both the left and the right.
The largely male, self-obsessed trans movement, and particularly its violent transactivists (their rage largely directed at ‘TERFs’) have re-normalized misogyny on the left.
The ‘Free Palestine’ pack, sporting the ‘progressive’s swastika—the kaffiyeh—has done the same for anti-Semitism.
Women who aren’t easily gaslit by manipulative fetishists must stand with Jews against the hate speech we all receive from the right and the left.
What used to be ‘our side’ are now ex-liberals who’ve turned on progressivism, just as Trump’s cult has turned on true conservatism. Many Trumpers embraced fascism, and I think we’re witnessing a concurrent emerging proto-fascism and authoritarianism on the left. They each have their religious extremism faves: Christian fascism on the right, and Islamic fascism on the left.
Those of us who haven’t yet been subsumed with racism, hate, and misogyny must understand this: If there’s one thing women and Jews have always known, is that even when they’re not actively persecuting us, they still hate us.
And we can always count on everyone to throw us under the bus. It’s always acceptable to hate women and Jews.
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