Sista-Souljahing Israel

Bill and Sister

There seems to be a temptation among some who are just or beautiful enough to empathize with Israel and the Jewish People on the one hand, but are averse to ostracism by their crowds on the other, to repeat in their own way a version of Bill Clinton's notorious 'Sister Souljah Moment' perpetrated when he was first running for President.

Clinton at the time looked well positioned at long last to break the McGovern/Carter/Dukakis curse of the Dem Party and win the US Presidency as a 'southern moderate.' There was some concern, though, that then-settled impressions of the Dems as 'soft on crime,' 'soft on culture,' and just plain ... soft ... might still be strong enough to keep Bush in the White House.

The previous election's 'Willie Horton Effect' in particular, it was fretted, might linger - especially after the Rodney King cop verdicts and ensuing Los Angeles riots just a few months before the November elections.

So in a well-planned and well-scripted stunt before Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Clinton went out of his way to attack one Sister Souljah, a not particularly consequential hip-hop artist, for perceivedly inflammatory remarks she had made about the LA riots in a Washington Post interview.

There seems no evidence that Clinton understood the remarks, their context or possible justification, or indeed Sister Souljah herself at all. And that's not surprising, as none of this would have been to his purpose. For his purpose was fawning. His purpose was placating. His purpose was positioning.

'I am like you,' Clinton was aiming to signal to 'middle America,' 'I too am fearful of sundry randomly selected, vaguely menacing-sounding Black people. I am a new kind of Democrat - a "New Democrat."'

It seems to me there is a sense in which Israel, Bibi, or the IDF now figure as Sister Souljah in the daily platform and even more general conversational performance of many who are sufficiently decent and cognitively endowed to worry about the new rise in Judeo- and Israelphobia across the West, but who don't have quite adequate strength of character to stand up to the inevitable hounding by idiots that follows on public expression of those concerns.

Two instance-types seem to recur with some frequency.

In the first type, our hero speaks out on behalf of Israelis, the Jewish People, or both in the midst of the current psychosis, perhaps not fully anticipating the baboon attack that will instantly follow. When it follows, our hero then quickly retreats halfway, saying in desperately would-be conciliatory voice something like 'but yes, I definitely disavow Israel's [or 'IDF's,' or 'the "settlers',"' or 'Bibi's,' or in a somewhat more sophisticated rendition 'Smotrich's' or 'Ben-Gvir's'] g🤡nocide [or 'war crimes,' or 'atrocities,' or 'ap🤡rtheid,' or 'oppression,' or some other suitably monster-making choice of word].'

Our hero does not actually hold a firm opinion about the claims presupposed in the partial backtrack. S/he simply accepts the assertion implicit in the definite article ('the g🤡nocide,' 'the ap🤡rtheid,' etc.) without actually investigating primary sources of any kind - or even, in these cases, vetting reliable secondary sources, or noticing that these themselves are all quietly now retracting their own earlier Blood Libels as hamas's own data now proves them to have been what more seriously engaged people have been warning all along - viz. bullshit.

And, as with Clinton on Sister Souljah, so here the reason for there not being a real opinion is that the truth or falsity of the claims constituting the disclaiming litany is not to our hero's point. For the point is, again, to 'make nice' post hoc. To 'go along to get along' going forward by buying-off backlash from backward. To purchase, retroactively, one's right to express sympathy for Israelis or the Jewish People at the price of making the requisite public confession or uttering the requisite password: 'g🤡nocide,' 'ap🤡rtheid,' 'Netanyahu,' & cet.

The second instance-type of the phenomenon that I have in mind here is like the first, but incorporates the lessons of previous experience with precisely what it responds to. In effect, it now disclaims preemptively while claiming. Hence you will hear or read something like the following: 'Of course, I cannot condone Israel's g🤡nocide in Gaza, but I nonetheless must denounce this new rise in antisemitic violence.' Replace the given clown-word with any other - 'ap🤡rtheid,' 'f🤡mine,' etc. - and you have the same story.

Heroes who fit this second pattern are, I think, marginally more heroic than those of the first type, inasmuch as they exhibit at least sufficient adherence to principle or staying-power as to keep playing the game in face of the typically ever-worsening baboonery that continues to greet every kind word about Jews or Israelis. It is nevertheless a cowardice, however, insofar as it manifests concession without investigation for merely placative purposes - the purpose of placating nothing more noble than mental and moral degeneracy.

A final word here on why I am writing this: I speak from personal experience. There was a long while that I routinely uttered my own milder version the usual disclaimer. 'Extremes on both sides,' 'tragedy of the squeezed-out middle,' 'Ben-Gvir [this]' or 'Likud [that].' I never bought the 'g🤡no ide,' 'ap🤡rtheid,' or other bullshit, of course - one must truly be the victim of botched lobotomy to believe rather than merely stupidly parrot or nazily propagate that. But I was bullshitting nevertheless in Harry F's sense, for I was not concerning myself at all with the truth or falsity of the claims about 'settlers,' 'extremes,' 'Bibi' or whatever implicit in even my more innocent disclaimers.

Once I looked into those matters, now seriously caring about their truth or untruth, I began quickly to realize that I, too, had been simply accepting a pre-given schema - the 'extremes driving out the middle' schema in particular. (It turns out on investigation to be a bullshit schema; for while there is indeed a reactionary fringe in Israel, among Israel's opponents near everyone is that 'fringe.') Worse, I had been doing this all of this, semi- or subconsciously, placatively. I had been buying quiet, bullshitting in the cause of an impulse no nobler than fawning.

It is hard to do justice to the fury that rises within you when you first realize you have been basically pimping and bullshitting yourself to retain the approval of ... mere feel-good casuals or fawning imbeciles at best, full-on nazis or medieval troglodytes at worst. The sense of swindle at the hands of creatures who never deserved your trust, never had anything but the shallowest of takes or the vilest of motives and dispositions, and never should have been clever enough to have bamboozled you into wanting to keep them happy is simply beyond adequate description.

If anyone wonders why my tone is now tart sometimes, here is your reason. If you too do the actual primary source research into what's underway now in the Levant after having tried hard to 'make nice' for as long as I have, you too will quickly grow sharper in your language as well.

There is no getting over it when the very existence of a People - a People who happen also to include among them nearly all whom you've most loved for as long as you've lived - is now threatened by unthinking fools, malevolent bigots, and bible-thump creatures no morally better than sea slugs. And when actual loved-ones die in the conflict itself, forcing you to grow more serious about it yourself than ever before, well, ... there's not much more to be said.