For decades, commentator William Safire wrote a column for the New York Times Magazine called “On Language.” I remember one where he observed that in politics, labels matter. In the battle over abortion, he suggested, “pro-life” might win the contest for public opinion against “pro-choice,” largely because it sounded better.
These days the Far Left has hijacked words for its political agenda with so much disregard for their original meaning that it takes a leap of faith to take either the words or their advocates seriously. The Transgender Cult preaches that gender is, in the post-modernist lingo, a social construct. But it turns out that this paradigm ignores history, and morality. Drag queens would be killed in a society run by Hamas, while gays would be welcomed in Israel, but so thick is the oppressor narrative — any conservative who rules a country, bad, anyone ruled by a country, oppressed — that trans extremists hold signs asserting that “Palestine is a Queer issue.”
In the current war against Israel, the NYT and the BBC refuse to call Hamas “terrorists.” As one BBC analyst pointed out, “terrorists” or “jihadists” makes them sound like the bad guys. Really? Hamas beheaded babies, gouged the eyes of their parents, raped women, burned and tortured Israelis in their homes, and still hold captive some 220 hostages, in tunnels where they sit as human shields for the retaliatory attacks by Israel. In the ultimate heist of language to fit the Left’s narrative of victimhood, the Huffington Post wrote a column in its Spanish language edition comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, and Palestinians to Holocaust victims. The op-ed has since been removed from the website, but I have no doubt this meme will recur.
Hard to imagine any more coded words than “From the River to the Sea.” This is the Hamas agenda, Iran’s too — for Israel’s elimination as a nation from the map of the world, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. China is one step ahead of the mullahs, having already deleted Israel from its digital maps. The land mass that is Israel is still there, but unnamed. Luxembourg, another small nation, is clearly marked.
The war has unleashed a world-wide surge of anti-Semitism unseen publicly since Hitler’s Third Reich. In the US, it’s like open season on Jews, once unthinkable in a country that led the chants of “Never Again” when evidence emerged after WW2 that Nazis had perfected murder, using their camps to kill six million Jews and five million other “enemies of the Reich” — resistance fighters, gypies, homosexuals, the disabled.
At Tulane in Louisiana, students dressed as Hamas terrorists rode around in pickup trucks burning Israeli flags. At Cornell, a threatening note was placed on a university online discussion board, saying “The genocidal Zionist regime will be destroyed. Rape and kill all the jew women, before they birth more ... Jews are excrement on the face of the earth.” In Nevada, an unhinged man left voice mail messages for US Senator Jacky Rosen saying, “We’re gonna finish what Hitler started.” And at Cooper Union College in Manhattan, Jewish students were locked in the library as pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged on the doors trying to pry loose the lock.
The students trapped inside Cooper Union’s library for 40 minutes called 911. NYPD patrols were on campus, but did nothing to intervene, saying there was “no direct threat” to the students by these “peaceful protests.” How reminiscent of the CNN correspondent who stood in front of a building set on fire by radical rioters in Kenosha, Wisc., after the shooting of Jacob Blake. Behind the reporter, a fire. In front, a network chyron: “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests After Police Shooting.”
In the face of these abhorent attacks on Jews in America, who have long saluted a country based on the foundational goal of equality for all, President Biden, flanked by his vice president, announced a campaign to combat …. wait for it…Islamophobia.
Calling for a ceasefire is also the rage among university presidents under fire from their woke pro-Hamas students — who cancel critics — and their donors, many Jewish. Laura Sparks, the president of Cooper Union who was escorted out the back door while students were trapped inside, later put out a statement saying, “We condemn discrimination of any kind, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”
There is no moral equivalence between a people trying to protect their homeland and another people trying to obliterate them. Yes, as humans, we are are horrified when innocent civilians are killed under fire. But this shared humanity does not, in the current zeitgeist, extend to both sides equally. When Hamas kills innocent civilians, the attacks are covered by the media as an act of liberation. When Israel responds in kind, reporters, critics, and all Israel’s woke enemies — including CNN’s Wolf Blitzer — hammer Israeli officials about their war crimes.
In short, ceasefire is another coded word too, for unilateral suicidal.
In his classic 1984, George Orwell made clear that authoritarians change the meaning of words, or eliminate them altogether, as a way to patrol thought.
“The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought,” Big Brother explains in the novel. “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
Unbelievable - the whole world. Including Schumer, Nadler etc's Democratic Party