The Israel-Hamas conflict has revealed a lot about the battle lines in the war over Western Culture.
How you see the conflict depends mostly on how you see the West as a whole–which is interesting in its own way because Judaism is arguably pre-Western–the West has roots that go back to Judaism. Many Jews are Westernized, but the religion itself is arguably not Western itself.
Still, Jews have had an outsized impact on the development and growth of Western culture, and Westerners have had a sometimes healthy and often unhealthy relationship with Jews, who are often seen as outsiders who are inside the tent.
Yet, with few exceptions during the Israel-Hamas conflict, advocates of the Western political and cultural traditions have stood with Israel and embraced their cause while also fighting the antisemitism of the Left. Westerners, it seems, have come to embrace Jews (if not Orthodox Judaism), and Jews have become a symbol of Western culture to those who want to destroy it.
Islamic extremists express this through their identification of Israel as the “Little Satan,” putting it in the category with the “Great Satan” of the United States. Leftists express the same idea by identifying–bizarrely–Israel as a “settler colonialist” state in the same manner as America is in their eyes.
🔴 Black and Muslim patients at risk from ‘Zionist’ doctors, claims US anti-racism campaigner
Read more 👇https://t.co/2diDUvloGd
— Telegraph US (@TelegraphUS) January 2, 2024
Saira Rao is of the latter class of antisemites, seeing in Israel and Zionism the same “oppressor” class as Whites. (Jews come in all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities, although they all have roots in the Middle East).
Rao has been one of the louder voices in the antisemitic Left. You may remember her as the subject of a couple of pieces I wrote, including one in December where she criticized Taylor Swift for not stopping the war in Gaza. Whiteness is magical, you see, in Rao’s eyes.
Rao is now complaining that there are Zionist doctors (I suspect their absolute number is small, although I sincerely hope most doctors can oppose rape, mutilation, kidnapping, and murder; too few do, in fact), and she libels them by claiming they are a danger to “black and brown people.”
Given the fact that “black and brown” people have been at the forefront of threatening Jews, zionist or no, this is a fascinating observation. As far as I know, Jewish doctors and their supporters have presented no threat in the other direction and are still in the business of saving the lives of everybody. In fact, many of the residents of a kibbutz who were massacred on October 7th dedicated themselves to transporting Palestinians to hospitals in Israel for treatment–and suffered for it.
Saira Rao, a former Democrat congressional candidate, said she was “genuinely terrified for Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, South Asian and black patients” because of the number of “Zionists” among American doctors and nurses.
Ms Rao, 49, refused to back down as she was widely accused of anti-Semitism.
Daniel Sugarman, director of public affairs for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: “Just say ‘Jewish’, Saira, this is taking forever.”
Posting on X, formerly Twitter, he continued: “There are lots of Jewish people in medicine. We’re very well aware of what this sort of comment means.”
Ms Rao founded Race2Dinner, a group that aims to “help white women confront their own racism”.
Rao’s whole persona–in fact, her business–is based on White people being evil, and her ideological commitment is to destroy Western culture. Destroying Jews is important to that mission, largely because Jews’ success in Western society despite centuries of oppression is a direct refutation that it is impossible for “outsiders” to succeed.
Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore said that claims “Zionist” doctors harmed patients were a tenet of anti-Semitism.
“A call to purge dangerous ‘Zionist doctors’ and ‘decolonise’ medicine,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Out of the slime of racist history crawls the blood libel and Stalin’s anti-Jewish Doctor’s Plot: he devised personally the lie of Jewish faux-healers who killed.
“Even for our times this is gross.”
Katherine Brodsky, a US author, asked: “How come it’s so common for those who claim to be actively “anti-racist” to turn out to be some of the most racist people out there?”
However, Ms Rao was supported by Rupa Marya, professor of hospital medicine at the University of California San Francisco.
“The presence of Zionism in US medicine should be examined as a structural impediment to health equity,” she said.
“Zionism is a supremacist; racist ideology and we see Zionist doctors justifying the genocide of Palestinians. How does their outlook/position impact priorities in US medicine?”
It is hard to escape the conclusion that the DEI agenda, or “wokeness,” is as much about undermining Western ideas and culture as it is a racialist ideology. It is because Whiteness and Western culture tend to overlap that Whites are the target of so much hate. This is why successful “black and brown” people are among the most hated by the DEI crowd–success in and of the West is the enemy, and Whiteness is a symbolic category.
Hence the whole theme of “multiracial” White Supremacy. It is the ideas, even more than the race, in which they see the enemy.
That is real, sadly. 👇 It’s “decolonizing”.https://t.co/BMS8YAuhnk
— Theo Jordan (@Theo_TJ_Jordan) December 21, 2023
“Multiracial Whiteness” is apparently a thing, and Jews are White because of it. It is Jewish success that makes them a target of the Left, and the racial/religious minority category in which Jews fall is just a bonus. The Left can draw on a long tradition of antisemitism in our history.
Conservatives should themselves look beyond race and religion as barriers to allying with other pro-Westerners, and there is plenty of evidence that this is happening. The embrace of Israel’s cause is evidence of that fact, as is the embrace of Black Republicans that I have been seeing for decades.
We share a common cause, as do Antifa, “Defund the Police,” the alphabet people, and the DEI crowd. The new ideological alignment has little to do with race or class and everything to do with defending our ideals.
It may be tempting for some to associate the anti-Whiteness of the DEI/woke crowd with racial groups they claim to represent, but that is a mistake. They don’t hate us because we are White (if you are), but because we are committed to liberty and prosperity. Klaus Schwab and Saira Rao are more allied than Rao and Thomas Sowell.
We should keep that in mind, and not get drawn into the trap being laid for us by the Left.