It Was Never About the Victims

In December 2019, there was a series of violent attacks on visibly Orthodox Jews in New York City during Hanukkah. After the muted reactions in the media: “possibly antisemitic attacks” (The Guardian); and reports that the man who attacked worshippers in a Rabbi’s home with a machete had “no history of antisemitism” (The New York Times); I realized something about the progressive left — which claims to care about victims.

Given the lack of outrage (or even sympathy) regarding the Hanukkah attacks, it would be easy to conclude that if the victims are Jews, the progressive left (distinct from the liberal left) doesn’t care.

That’s true. But it’s not the whole picture.

One year earlier, progressives had seemed to care very much when Jews were victimized in the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. “For months,” The New York Times reported, “Robert D. Bowers had been spewing his anger in post after post on the web, calling immigrants ‘invaders,’ distributing racist memes and asserting that Jews were the ‘enemy of white people.’”

Six months later, Jews were victims in the Poway California synagogue shooting, where, according to The New York Times, “a 19-year-old man armed with an AR-15-style gun stormed into the Chabad of Poway synagogue” where he “yelled antisemitic slurs at the 40 to 60 people there, screaming that Jews were ruining the world.” According to New York Times reporting, he “wanted to kill Jews and Muslims.” Progressives seemed to care about Jews then, too.

But that was an illusion.

Here’s the headline from a New York Times article once it was no longer possible to deny the antisemitic nature of the machete attack: “Suspect in Monsey Stabbings Searched Online for ‘Hitler,’ Charges Say.” “In his journal,” the first line of the article reads, “he referred to Hitler and ‘Nazi culture.’”

One would reasonably conclude that the attacker, like the Tree of Life and Chabad shooters, was a white supremacist. That is, unless one both read all the way into the 22nd paragraph, and also did some critical thinking about why, as that paragraph reveals, the suspect “was arrested in Harlem.”

After the coverage of these incidents, I came to the realization that Jewish victims are irrelevant. In fact, all victims are irrelevant, regardless of their identities. Identitarian progressives merely use victims (and sometimes nonvictims they claim are victims) to punish people of an identity category they classify as evil. When perpetrators are from an “evil” identity category, punishing them and elevating the profiles of their victims looks like supporting their victims. But if attacks on those same category of victims come from people in favored identity categories, the victimization of those they attack is suddenly invisible.

In contradistinction to those whose intact moral compass tells them that violently attacking another human being is immoral regardless of identity categories, the progressive imagination doesn’t find immorality in the act of violence at all. It locates morality in identity, not conduct.

When it was white supremacists who attacked Jews in Pittsburgh and Poway, it appeared as though the progressive left cared about Jewish victims because they decried that hate-fueled violence and insisted on justice. But when it was black men (and women) who attacked Jewish men, women, and children, The New York Times attempted to obscure the fact of the attackers’ identity category, and the progressive left didn’t seem to have the same passion for justice.

When it was a Muslim man who held Jews hostage in a Texas synagogue, thinking Jews control the world and could release from prison “Lady al-Qaeda” — a terrorist who demanded genetic testing to screen out “Zionist Jews” from her jury — the cognitive dissonance was so great that the hostage crisis was initially reported as (hold onto your seat): “not directly related to the Jewish community.”

When it was lunatic Islamist terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, the scale and sheer depravity of the attacks couldn’t be ignored. So, either it didn’t really happen, the Jews did it to themselves to frame Palestinians, or it was the Jews’ own fault that Palestinian terrorists had to resort to such barbarism.

The same people who championed “microaggression” trainings, who pushed Al Franken to resign during the height of the #MeToo excesses, and who consider the U.S. a “rape culture” were silent about the mass rapes perpetrated on Israelis on Oct. 7, and continued their silence after firsthand reports emerged of the sexual torture of Israeli hostages, both male and female. Rape-denier Briahna Joy Gray even rolled her eyes and then cut off Yarden Gonen as she pleaded for help for her sister, Romi Gonen, who was still being held hostage in Gaza.

As if all that weren’t enough, the imaginary atrocities that progressive antizionists have long accused the IDF of perpetrating against Palestinians are the real atrocities that Hamas perpetrated on Israeli victims — and is still perpetrating on Palestinians in Gaza today. (Follow @JusoorNews for news from Gaza not preapproved by terrorists.) On this oppression of Palestinians by Palestinian terrorists, the progressive left is also silent.

Worse, the demonization of Israelis is so complete that antizionists are even circulating recent video footage of Palestinians in the West Bank attacking other Palestinians, claiming that the video shows an attack by Israeli “settlers.” Which reminds me of when omni-cause activist Greta Thunberg posted an image of starved and skeletal Israeli hostage Evyatar David, decrying the “fact of systematic cruelty and dehumanization” against (wait for it): “Palestinian prisoners.” (She deleted the post and maintained her silence about Israeli hostages.)

This moral brokenness is evident among progressives who complain about “emotional labor” and the “gender pay gap” in the U.S., but can’t bring themselves to care about the brutal gender apartheid inflicted on the women of Iran — forced into second-class status, required to cover their heads and conform to an oppressive dress and behavior code, and when imprisoned, routinely raped. (This is apparently particularly common before a death sentence is carried out. The depraved ideology from which the ruling class derives its policies includes the belief that raping a woman prevents her from going to heaven.)

But instead of protesting this barbarism, or the murders of tens of thousands of peaceful Iranian protesters hoping to free themselves from an unbearable terrorist regime, Western progressives continue to protest only the Iranian deaths caused by Israeli and U.S. strikes — including condemning the elimination of, and in some cases holding vigils for, the architects and enforcers of the Iranian people’s decades-long oppression.

Because none of this is truly about victims. It never was.

“The issue is never the issue,” as the radical leftist doctrine goes. “The issue is always the revolution.”

A social psychologist with a clinical background, Pamela Paresky, PhD serves as an Associate at Harvard University in the Psychology Department, Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute, Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at NYU, and Senior Fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute. In addition to The Jewish Journal, her work appears in Psychology Today, The Guardian, Politico, Sapir, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She has taught at Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and the United States Air Force Academy. Her Habits of a Free Mind newsletter is on Substack. Follow her on Twitter at @PamelaParesky