If you ask students why they support Hamas’s call to eliminate Israel and murder Jews, many will deny—sincerely—that they are antisemitic. How is that possible? Some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may also sign statements condemning antisemitism and resent accusations that they hate Jews.Why not? Well, according to Morson it's because there are actually three types of antisemitism: The core type, which most people have in mind, is hatred of Jews simply because they are Jews. Reasons may be advanced, but the hatred isn’t based on reasons. Rather, the reasons stem from the need to justify the hatred. If one justification won’t do, another will be sought.
We can’t move them by showing the harm antisemitism has done because they don’t regard themselves as antisemitic.
The readiness to switch between divergent, even contradictory, justifications is usually the best indicator of this incorrigible antisemitism.
This is the version of antisemitism evinced by the architects of the holocaust, for example. Not all of the students who've participated in the recent protests, however, are of this first type. The second type is a consequence of the near-universal inculcation on campuses of the doctrine of intersectionality which has the pernicious effect of,
[dividing] people into good and evil: racists and antiracists, victimizers and victims, colonizer and colonized. Once such thinking becomes routine, it is almost inevitable that opponents in any new conflict will be pigeonholed. And so Jews become colonizers and Palestinians, represented by Hamas, become their hapless victims.So the first type of antisemite hates Jews just because they're Jews. The second type hates Jews because they see them as oppressors. The fact that many Jews are white amplifies their culpability in the minds of the intersectional zealots.
Since one side is entirely evil, anything done to them is justified. One must prevail “by any means necessary.” That is why Hamas’s brutality can be accepted, even praised.
People who think this way believe they aren’t antisemitic because they didn’t start with some preconceived hatred. Rather, they applied a familiar, widely approved framework. Today the evil party is Israel; tomorrow another great Satan may be designated. Under different circumstances, Jews could have found themselves in the victim category.
In a third type of antisemitism, hatred is based on specific reasons, which aren’t merely excuses....if one really believes that the elders of Zion plot to enslave the world or that Jews have constructed a state based on apartheid and genocide, then militancy against Israel will seem rational.Morson asks rhetorically why these ignorant antisemites don't see the real facts. His answer is that they've simply shut themselves off from any source of information that doesn't support their ideological worldview:
These antisemites may really imagine they are drawing rational conclusions from the facts. The problem is that their “facts” are entirely spurious.
In [today's America] educated people voluntarily silo themselves. They close themselves off from any unapproved voice and commonly favor censorship of “misinformation.”It is, he asserts, willful ignorance.
"[All] three [types] can lead to the same horrors," Morson avers. "Antisemitism is a big tent, and in any group of antisemites we can find all types hating Israel."
In his conclusion Morson says that intersectionality must be eliminated from university curricula. I agree. Intersectionality, or perhaps more accurately, the critical theory upon which it's based, is a spawning ground for all sorts of hatreds - ethnic, religious, economic, racial, et al.
Young people are being taught that good and evil are properties of races, ethnicities, or economic classes, but Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom Morson quotes, was much closer to the truth when he explained that "The line between good and evil runs not between classes, nations, or parties, but through every human heart."
