Dara Horn’s Trojan Complaint and My In-kind Prose Donation
a bilious responsum to a bilious opinion
Below is a recording of the author reading this piece LIVE on the THIS IS HELL! radio show/podcast. The volume was too high and the mic often too close, but one producer felt the resultant infrequent incidents of audio overload captured the author’s state of mind. Thus, here it is, presented with minimal editing.
A fellow Jew shared an article published in the Atlantic called, WHY THE MOST EDUCATED PEOPLE IN AMERICA FALL FOR ANTI-SEMITIC LIES
Subtitled: At Harvard and elsewhere, an old falsehood is capturing new minds. By Dara Horn
The article reports on antisemitic rhetoric, intimidation, mob mentality, and violence on college campuses and elsewhere, and expands its purview to intellectual antisemitism throughout the ages in the West. It makes a good case for being extremely outraged at the hatred of Jews that is tolerated in contemporary society. Let me assure you, there is a story to report here. But Horn is not the person to report it.
To be fair (unlike Horn), she makes some good points about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion doctrines as they relate, or fail to relate, to the Jewish situation. The problems with Identity Politics she briefly flogs with her insult stick are even now being explored by broader minds, including Jews of color and diverse class and gender identification.
“On campuses around the country,” she writes, “students began gathering regularly to chant ‘There is only one solution: intifada revolution!’—a reference to a suicide-bombing campaign in Israel a generation ago that maimed and murdered well over 1,000 Jews. (If there is only one solution, perhaps one could call it the Final Solution.)’”
Holy crap, Dara Horn, it sounds like you’re calling “intifada” a Nazi thing, but putting Palestinians in ghettos and trying to bomb them into extinction or exile is not? Throughout the article, Horn makes similarly debatable statements and leaves them unexamined – one-sided evaluations of events, self-serving definitions of terms such as genocide, dubious equations between actions and thoughts. It’s a one-woman circle jerk, a Portnoy’s complaint, if you will. It’s a balm to soothe the hawkish Jew’s conscience and deserves an in-kind prose donation.
There are shades of the thesis that Palestinians are only cosplaying as victims. In reality, she implies, they are carrying on, in theatrical fashion on the world stage, the millennia-old tradition of the Blood Libel. And everyone supporting Palestinians is falling for it, or worse, playing along and cheering. Attacks on Jews in the USA prove it. In positing the linkage, she bites off more than she can chew and certainly more than the reader can swallow.
The overall thrust of the article is that hatred of Jews is so embedded in global culture and intellectualism that the world is egregiously slanted against us (even Caligula was unfair to us; imagine! Caligula!). Such an argument has undeniable merit. And that any so-called criticism of Israel must be viewed in the context of that slant requires exploration. But this is not that.
She attenuates her premise in dubious ways. She gives one example of an exposed Hamas lie and tacitly allows her mistrust to taint all news of Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians, even while paying vacuous lip-service to “legitimate concerns.” We are meant to ask, how can we believe that 11,500 Palestinian children have been killed to date in the current Israeli bombardment? How are we to believe that 1.7 million civilians – if such a term can even apply to Palestinians – have been displaced? How are we to look at an ad from Médecins Sans Frontières about Gaza requiring their aid and not consider Doctors Without Borders a Jew-hating organization? Or at best that, despite its work on the ground in Chad, Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere, its pleas for aid in Gaza are based on its gullibly swallowing Hamas’s lies?
I don’t know, Dara Horn. I received a video from a friend showing Palestinian kids ripping holes in one friend’s shirt and dirtying him up to make him look like he’d been the victim of Israeli bombing. The caption on the video said, jocularly, “He deserves an Oscar!” Nevertheless, call me an antisemitic Jew, but I have a hard time believing that 11,500 Palestinian children are only pretending to be dead.
For every example in Horn’s Gish Gallop of antisemitic violence and rhetoric, there are, plausibly, an equal number of outraging domestic anti-Arab and anti-Muslim acts, violence, and rhetoric that could be blamed on the current climate, so I won’t list them tit-for-tat here. A good-faith effort by the reader will turn them up easily.
Horn reveals the core endeavor of her Atlantic piece in a paragraph beginning bitterly with: “Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic: Jews are now required to recite this humiliatingly obvious sentence, over and over, as the price of admission to public discourse about their own demonization, in ‘debates’ with people who are often unable to name the relevant river or sea.”
That’s the “instant historian” smear. The people against the Occupation and Genocide are ignorant. They don’t even know what river or sea their chants are about. Now, to be fair, many of the millions protesting are ignorant, and guilty of being both instant historians and of harassing Jews. But Horn isn’t talking about just “many” of them, or even most of them.
In her de rigeur mentions of “the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza,” she elides what exactly those legitimate concerns might be. What concerns would Horn consider legitimate? She doesn’t say, but the lacuna is suggestive to say the least.
Whatever the legitimate concerns are, they “… cannot explain these eliminationist chants and slogans, the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews [I’d say the assaults are covered under the lawlessness, but make your list longer if you must]. The timing alone laid the game bare: This mass exhilaration first emerged not in response to Israel’s war to take down Hamas and rescue its kidnapped citizens, but exactly in response to, and explicitly in support of, the most lethal and sadistic barbarity against Jews since the Holocaust, complete with rape and decapitation and the abduction of infants, committed by a regime that aims to eviscerate not only Jews, but also all hopes of Palestinian flourishing, coexistence, or peace.”
Let’s be clear: Hamas’s depraved violence on October 7 is utterly indefensible. Those urging a ceasefire are required to recite this humiliatingly obvious sentence, over and over, as the price of admission to public discourse about our own demonization, to paraphrase one Dara Horn.
“The timing alone laid the game bare.” And really, why would someone jump to the defense of Gazans so soon after news of the Oct 7 massacre broke? Speaking for myself and multitudes of Occupation watchers, we’ve seen what Israel has done in the past, with or without provocation. The incursion into Jenin was the first such action I wrote about for This Is Hell! (The Failure of the Jews, 2002), but of course, there are other examples. Just in the past few years the IDF and Israeli cops have harassed, evicted, and tear gassed both Palestinians and their own citizen protestors. And reprisals for resistance to illegal settlements, IDF-supported settler violence, and even violent responses by Israeli authorities to peaceful demonstrations have been “legitimately concerning” to the aware observer.
And, Jesus H Christ, Dara Horn, many of us lived through the insanely violent aftermath of 9-11! How quickly we forget, huh? Maybe you’re too young and ignorant. Do you comprehend that many of us recognized immediately that the October 7 attack was for Israel comparable to 9-11?
So of course I feared the worst kind of Israeli revenge bombing when the news of the massacre broke, and that is why I urged everyone concerned not to react as if all Palestinians were animals, a “humiliatingly obvious statement” for which I received abusive messages and threats. Two days later, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” while ordering a “complete siege” of Gaza, which is now still grinding toward its parabolically approached “completion.”
No, the “timing” does not “lay the game bare.” On the contrary, the assertion that it does lays Horn’s game bare: her mission is to paint the massive protests against the continued destruction of Gaza as solely explicable by ignorance and antisemitism. There can be no theoretically “legitimate concerns” of which she so charitably entertains the existence. Therefore, all protest against Israel’s military response to the October 7 massacre must be cheerleading for Hamas.
The statement, criticism of Israel is not antisemitism, is “humiliatingly obvious,” yet Dara Horn seems unable to refrain from humiliating herself by so obviously conflating the two.
differentiated and far less bilious than the article this saved me from
Thank you for your thoughtful analysis.