Jews, Beware of Double Standards for Political Points

For the approximately 90% of the Jews in the world who support and love the state of Israel, it is no mystery that Israel, the Jewish people’s nation-state, is always under a media and political microscope and likely subject to more attention and criticism per capita than any other country on earth.

In large part, this extra attention and criticism is a product, as noted by journalist and author Matti Friedman in his excellent 2014 articles in Tablet and The Atlantic, of the incredible number of reporters devoted to covering (and manufacturing) stories about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. As just one example, Friedman noted how the Associated Press had more staff covering Israel and the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas (around 12 million people) in 2011 than the AP had in either China, India or Russia.

But for a people who have been subject to centuries of extraordinary persecution grounded in raw-Jew-hatred, many have no doubt that the extra attention and criticism heaped on Israel is grounded in anti-Semitism.

To distinguish between ordinary criticism — to which every country and government should be subject — and the type of criticism of Israel grounded in anti-Semitism, human rights activist, Soviet dissident and all-around hero, Natan Sharansky, developed his famous “3-D test” (Demonization, Delegitimization and Double Standards).

Although one could fill up the Library of Congress with examples of all three Ds applied to Israel, three recent examples demonstrate how double standards related to anti-Semitism are used to cynically score cheap political points.

A Monstrous Double Standard – Israel and the ICC

According to its own president, the “core mandate” of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is to “act as a court of last resort with the capacity to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes when national jurisdictions for any reason are unable or unwilling to do so.”

Given its “core mandate,” one would think that over the last 10 years that the ICC would be very busy dealing with the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign to obliterate its Muslim Uighur population, the use of chemical weapons by the Assad government and its Iranian proxies and Iran’s repeated mass murder and wholesale incarceration of civilian protestors. These monstrous crimes against humanity warrant the attention of the ICC, particularly given that China, Syria and Iran have no due process, no credible independent court system and are certainly “unable or unwilling” to investigate or prosecute any of the many heinous crimes committed by their respective governments, militaries and militias.

But the reality is that no such ICC investigations or prosecutions have ever occurred. Instead, the ICC recently announced that even though Israel, like the United States, is not a signatory to the Rome Statute (which confers upon the ICC its jurisdiction), the ICC somehow has the jurisdiction to investigate and potentially prosecute Israel (and its citizens) for actions it has taken to defend itself from rocket attacks and riots caused by Hamas. The ICC ignored the fact that Israel is a democracy with a robust and independent judiciary, which regularly investigates and prosecutes officials for potential war crimes and excessive force.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s crimes against humanity — and the reason for Israel’s defense against Hamas — certainly warrant investigation and prosecution. Take for example, its use of child soldiers, the children it has killed digging terror tunnels, its placement of rocket and missile launchers in civilian apartments and mosques, its indiscriminate firing of rockets and missiles from within civilian residential areas at exclusively civilian targets, its execution without trial of alleged “collaborators” in Gaza and its imprisonment and execution of people for being gay. Hamas and its leaders should be prosecuted, particularly since there is no “national jurisdiction” willing or able to prosecute anyone for these crimes within Gaza.

The cynical double standard employed here for political purposes is glaring and monstrous. In fact, the United States refused to sign the Rome Statute because it was evident even in 2002 that the ICC lacked prudent safeguards against political manipulation. Nowhere is that more evident than in the ICC’s campaign against Israel.

“Rothschild Space Lasers” Gets You Sanctioned — “All About the Benjamin’s” Gets You Promoted

There is no doubt that before she became a member of the House of Representatives, Marjorie Taylor-Greene posted some truly heinous comments and claims. One of them was the crazy and anti-Semitic claim that the perennial Jewish boogeymen, “the Rothschilds,” were using a “space laser” to cause forest fires in California as part of an evil money-making scheme. The anti-Semitism, as well as the use of a classic anti-Semitic trope about rich, powerful Jewish bankers nefariously using their money, should be obvious to everyone not intentionally trying to ignore or excuse Greene’s misconduct.

For her use of a plain anti-Semitic trope and promotion of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, Greene was appropriately sanctioned by the House of Representatives and stripped of her committee assignments.

Barely a few days after Greene was sanctioned, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, was promoted to the position of vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Global Human Rights. Unlike Greene, Omar was already a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee when she made many of her anti-Semitic comments — such as her infamous “all about the Benjamins” tweet, which she followed up with multiple comments about members of Congress being required to “swear allegiance” to a “foreign country [Israel].”

Omar not only refused to apologize for her use of the trope about rich Jews buying congressional support for Israel, but she also twice repeated the plainly anti-Semitic “dual loyalty” trope about how supporting an American ally like Israel is somehow equivalent to “swearing allegiance to a foreign power.” As with Greene, Omar’s use of classic anti-Semitic tropes should be obvious.

The lesson from the double standard in Congress’s sanctioning of Marjorie Taylor Greene and its refusal to sanction Ilhan Omar and, even worse, promote her? Jew-hatred and the promotion of plain anti-Semitic canards by our political leaders does not matter. It is which party is in charge of Congress that matters. It is scoring cheap political points that matter. Not standing up to anti-Semitism or anti-Semites.

Nazi Comparisons are Bad & Plainly Anti-Semitic … When Made by a Conservative.

Last week, Disney’s Mandalorian star Gina Carano, who is a conservative, made a very stupid and offensive comparison. Specifically, she wrote:

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”

There is a huge difference between hating someone for their ethnicity or race and hating someone for their political views. Carano effectively trivialized the Holocaust and its horrors by comparing 1930s Nazi Germany to the United States in 2021. For making this insulting statement, Disney promptly fired Carano because “her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Setting aside that Disney’s statement mischaracterizes the Nazis’ race-based Jew-hatred, the far bigger problem is that almost no one, including Disney, actually cares about Holocaust comparisons that denigrate and cynically appropriate Jewish history and suffering.  Thousands of people make such comparisons regularly with no cognizable consequences. For instance, Trump has been compared to Hitler by dozens of media and movie stars; so were Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez even compared ICE migrant detention facilities to concentration camps, and many people compared ICE agents to the Gestapo.

So trivialized and universalized are Holocaust comparisons that while many were posting #FireGinaCarano, they may also have been opposing the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, which states that comparing Israel and its policies to the actions of the Nazis and Nazi Germany is anti-Semitic.

At the same time that the ICC employs clear double standards to politically attack Israel, Jews and anti-Semitism are being used as a political football in America. We shouldn’t stand for it. Political affiliation should never matter. Jew-hatred is Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitic tropes are Anti-Semitic tropes. We need to have zero-tolerance for all of it, no matter whether the person is red state or blue state, Democrat or Republican, right or left. By tolerating any anti-Semitism, we create excuses for all anti-Semitism.

Tolerating or excusing Jew-hatred or the use of anti-Semitic tropes based on whether we agree with the political views of the anti-Semite is not nuanced; it is hypocrisy. And it is a recipe for more anti-Semitism.