Pinkwashing

You would think that left-leaning people would celebrate the state of Israel as a beacon of democracy in the midst of cultural darkness.

You would think that left-thinking people would celebrate the only state in the Middle East that practices liberal democracy and free enterprise, that respects human rights and that rejects homophobia and misogyny.

Many liberals and progressives are staunch supporters of Israel. And yet, when you move to the more radical left, you find an entirely different state of mind.

The radical left takes its inspiration from socialism, especially totalitarian socialism. It rejects liberal democracy and free enterprise as ruses meant to narcotize the masses into accepting their own oppression. When Israel promotes human rights the radical left denounces it as a ruse to cover up its imperialist and colonialist ways.

The more radical the left, the more it hates Israel.

Israel is a living repudiation of everything the radical left holds sacred. An eminent American academic, Judith Butler has even asserted that Hamas and Hezbollah are “progressive” “social movements” that belong to the global left.  Butler insists that she does not condone their violent tactics, but she approves of the fact that that both groups oppose imperialism and colonialism.

When groups define themselves by their waging violent jihad, saying that you reject their violent tactics is empty rhetoric.

When Hamas and Hezbollah take a stand against colonialism and imperialism, which country do you think they are preparing to attack?

Judith Butler takes serious offense at the notion that she might be providing moral support to an anti-Semitic and racist organization. After all, she is Jewish.

But, she is also a fool. Someone who is supposed to be a great proponent of what is called “critical theory” did not bother to test her judgments against reality. This demonstrates yet again that critical theory and other trendy academic pseudo-philosophies care more about promulgating propaganda than seeking the truth.

David Efune points out the obvious:

Hezbollah militarily occupies large swathes of Southern Lebanon, as a well-documented proxy of a foreign power, Iran. Hamas occupies Gaza which it seized in a military coup, and exercises totalitarian control over its inhabitants.

Both organizations are constitutionally mandated to extend their imperialist ambitions over the neighboring sovereign state of Israel.

Butler has done away with all semblance of critical thought and swallowed the words of an internationally recognized terror group's parroting apparatchiks as fact. There is not a shred of evidence to support their 'anti-imperialist' claim and her support of it.

Butler’s prominence is a symptom of the inroads that anti-Semitic thinking has made on American campuses. There, the radical left is hard at work discrediting Israel, as a state and as a culture. 

By leftist lights, Israel’s accomplishments are really a ruse designed to cover up its more nefarious motives.

So, the City University of New York is holding a conference about what it calls Israel’s “pinkwashing.”

The term “pinkwashing” is the brainchild of CUNY Professor Sarah Schulman. She believes that when Israel promotes human rights, especially gay rights,  it is merely trying to cover up, that is, to “pinkwash” its oppression of the Palestinian people.

Alan Dershowitz reports on the conference and the idea:

“Homonationalism and Pinkwashing,” sponsored by CUNY’s Gay and Lesbian Studies Center, is scheduled for April 10-11, 2013; the cosponsors include New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and several other centers and programs at both schools. We’re told the conference will be academic, but much of the emphasis plainly will be on the claim that Israel is “pinkwashing” its mistreatment of Palestinians by promoting gay rights in Israel.

The conference’s coordinator and inspiration is gay activist Sarah Shulman. In a New York Times op-ed and elsewhere, she has argued that Israel’s positive approach to gay rights is “a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violation of Palestinians human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.”

Dershowitz correctly points out that this is pure anti-Semitism. Any success that Jews accomplish, from the existence of the state of Israel to the respect for human rights, must be hiding a malevolent intention.

If you are gasping in disbelief, you have failed to keep up with the radical left. 

Dershowitz sets the record straight:

Israel is easily the most gay-friendly country in the Middle East, and among the most supportive of gay rights in the world. Openly gay soldiers have long served in the military and in high positions in both government and the private sector.

In the West Bank and Gaza, by contrast, gays are murdered, tortured and forced to seek asylum — often in Israel. Indeed, in every Arab and Muslim country, homosexual acts among consenting adults are criminal, often punishable by death.

It feels useless to add that cultures that practice honor killings, execute homosexuals, imprison rape victims and stone adulteresses are not leading the way to a more liberal, more democratic, more progressive future.

The anti-Semitic thinking does not stop with gay rights. Dershowitz offers some other examples:

So when Israel sends help to tsunami and hurricane victims, the ideological soulmates of the pinkwash brigade accuse the Jewish state of merely trying to garner positive publicity calculated to offset its mistreatment of Palestinians. When Israeli medical teams save the lives of Palestinian children, they must be up to no good.

And when news surfaced that the Israeli Army has the lowest rate of rape against enemy civilians, radical anti-Zionists argued that this was because Israeli soldiers were so racist that they didn’t find Palestinian women attractive enough to rape!

There you have it. Anti-Semitism is alive and well in American universities. It is being propagated by leftists who have no use for freedom, no use for democracy, no use for free enterprise and no use for human rights.