Microaggressions are hateful unless used against the Jews

By Matthew Hausman

Negotiations with Hamas were exposed as hollow farce when six hostages were executed to prevent their rescue – in tunnels built with humanitarian aid provided by the west.

Whereas the Biden administration persists in demanding that Israel negotiate with terrorists who tortured, raped and murdered her citizens, Hamas has been honest about its commitment to jihad and genocide irrespective of negotiations. One need only read its charter to know its objective was never really the creation of a Palestinian state, but the destruction of Israel and extermination of the Jews.

Nevertheless, the Biden administration continues to pressure Israel for a ceasefire instead of demanding that Hamas surrender.

Sure, President Biden claimed he was “devasted and outraged” when the hostages were executed, and Vice President Harris condemned “Hamas’ continued brutality.” However, Biden immediately blamed PM Netanyahu for not doing enough to conclude a feckless ceasefire that would leave Hamas intact and absolve Palestinian-Arabs of their overwhelming approval of the atrocities committed on October 7th.

Meanwhile, Harris contextualized Israeli suffering by repeating the revisionist claim that Hamas poses as great a threat to Gazans as to Israelis – even though the Palestinian majority in Gaza and elsewhere continues to support Hamas and reject Jewish sovereignty.

And Secretary of State Antony Blinken demonstrated magical thinking when he stated: “The killing of these hostages only further confirms Hamas’s depravity. It should release all the hostages immediately. We will continue to work with our partners in the region to secure an agreement without delay that frees the remaining hostages.”

How has that worked so far, and who are these “partners in the region”?

The Qataris? It seems odd to consider them bona fide partners considering they have funneled a reported 1.8 billion dollars to Hamas over the years and have played host to much of its leadership. And can one really negotiate in the face of confirmed “depravity”? Would the United States?

The truth is that Biden and his administration have been ambivalent about honoring the integrity of the US-Israel relationship – perhaps because doing so would alienate the anti-Israel (and antisemitic) progressives that Democrats rely on for electoral support.

Neither have they taken any serious steps to purge Jew-hatred from their ranks. Indeed, when asked after October 7th about the drastic increase in American antisemitism, Biden’s Press Secretary skirted the question and instead lectured the press in attendance about the threat of Islamophobia – which according to US law enforcement statistics is barely a problem.

Unfortunately, the Democratic establishment seems more interested in restricting speech and penalizing dubious “microaggressions” against favored identity communities than protecting Jews who are really under attack – often by members of those same select demographics. Perversely, “equity and inclusion” policies often employ lexicon insulting to traditional Jewish sensibilities, even at times of existential strife for the Jewish people.

Recent law enforcement statistics show that Jews are victimized by hate-crimes far more than any other racial or ethnic minority, including African-Americans and Arabs. And as a function of religious prejudice, crimes against Jews account for 55% of all incidents reported, compared to only 8% for Muslims. Jews suffer religious hate-crimes significantly more than Muslims and more than all other religious groups combined.

The preoccupation with Islamophobia by the White House, liberal politicians, and the mainstream media only belittles the reality of antisemitism. Inapposite comparisons between the two are discomforting to Jews and would seem to fit the Oxford Dictionary definition of “microaggressions” as “statement[s], action[s], or incident[s] regarded as…indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination or prejudice against members of a marginalized group such as a racial minority.”

But why must discussion of raging antisemitism, which is well-documented by US law enforcement data, yield to the supposed scourge of Islamophobia, which by comparison is not? Radical mobs on college campuses and in the public square are not screaming for violence against Arabs or the extermination of Muslims. They are chanting “kill the Jews” and “death to Israel,” mantras which cross the line to “macroaggressions” or worse.

And in fact, many of the slogans and buzzwords used by politicians and media mouthpieces regarding the Jews and Israel implicitly or overtly disparage Jewish historicity, inspire enmity, or incite violence against the most persecuted minority on earth. Provocative terms are routinely employed to harass Jews or legitimize a revisionist Palestinian Arab narrative that necessarily repudiates Jewish history.

The term “Nakba,” for example, refers to an event that was not what Israel’s critics allege, i.e., the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian-Arabs from a land they claim as ancestral (but in which they have no historical footprint). The tale that Israel massacred and drove out the majority in 1948 is intended to validate claims of Jewish colonialism and redefine evacuations that were often encouraged or ordered by Arab leaders and commanders who justified their attack on the Jews as holy war. The actual number of Arabs who left, moreover, is far less than the nearly one-million Jews who were dispossessed from Arab countries and taken in by Israel.

“Occupied territories” is a similarly inflammatory term used to portray Jews as colonial interlopers in areas like Judea, Samaria, and even Jerusalem, which are not “occupied” according to the standards of international law. Rather, these lands – which have been historically Jewish since biblical times – could at most be characterized as “disputed.” They do not qualify as occupied because they never attained sovereign status after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and before their liberation by Israel in 1967 (insofar as Jordan’s illegal annexation in 1948 could not confer lawful sovereignty). Moreover, Jerusalem was never the capital of any nation other than the ancient Jewish commonwealths and modern state of Israel.

“Two-state solution” is another galling term because it implies that the Arab-Israeli conflict is simply a dispute over real estate, when in fact it is an existential battle to erase Jewish history, delegitimize Jewish nationhood, and destroy Israel.

Then there are words and phrases that have come into common usage since October 7th to validate Hamas, demonize Israel, and dehumanize Jews, and which are morally offensive:

-The term “acts of resistance” is used to describe the murder, rape, and kidnapping of civilians by Hamas terrorists

-The word “prisoners” is used to describe Israeli hostages, as if they are prisoners of war captured on the battlefield instead of noncombatant men, women, and children dragged from home and hearth.

-Referring to Palestinian-Arabs as the “indigenous population” is a provocative lie because the term implies a superseding authenticity not reflected by the historical, archeological, or scriptural records, and is typically invoked to undermine the legitimacy of ancient Jewish claims. It was first posited by Palestinian Arab leadership.

And the word Palestinian?

Long before the word “Palestinian” was coined as a national designation, it was rejected by Arabs during the British Mandatory period. This was made clear in 1937 during the Peel Commission hearings, when Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi testified that: “There is no such country [as Palestine]. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria.”

The prevailing understanding at that time and thereafter was that the term “Palestinian” did not connote race, ethnicity, or nationality.

Indeed, in a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw, the late Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO’s executive committee, expounded that: “[t]he ‘Palestinian People’ does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel for our Arab unity.” Yasser Arafat echoed the same sentiment in a more bumptious tone in his authorized biography, wherein he stated: “The Palestinian people have no national identity. I, Yasser Arafat…will give them that identity through conflict with Israel.”

The strategy of manufacturing a national identity by constantly repeating a modern appellation to enforce its acceptance as historical – and then projecting it through the lens of faux victimhood – is similar in concept to the “Big Lie.” What makes Palestinian Arab revisionism so insidious is that its acceptance demands a negation of Jewish history. As framed by Israel’s detractors, the Jewish and Palestinian Arab narratives are mutually exclusive; but whereas the former has ancient antecedents going back millennia, the latter does not and is informed by rejectionist ideology.

Progressives claim to oppose all forms of bigotry, but there is nobody more bigoted or oppressive than leftist progressive antisemites who project their own negative character traits onto others. This is especially apparent when they craft terminology to intimidate, invalidate, and exclude – and to elevate revisionist myth over historical truth.

And make no mistake – denying Jewish history is fundamentally antisemitic.

First published in Israel National News