Judith Butler Speaks with Forked Tongue

When Hamas massacred over a thousand Jews in Southern Israel their action exposed a hideous truth about today’s American universities. Beginning with Harvard, extending across the country, students and professors proclaimed, not just their allegiance to the Palestinian cause, but their heartfelt belief that the Israelis and only the Israelis were at fault. And deserved to be slaughtered.

Aside from the few who paid lip service to the moral depravity of people whose idea of fighting the good fight meant decapitating babies, burning children and raping women, most of those whose brains had marinated in the squalor of the leftist academic thought found nothing wrong with what Hamas had done.

Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia declared the Hamas attack to be “awesome.” Yale professor Zareena Gewal declared that “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.” Cornell Professor Russell Rickford called the Hamas attack “exhilarating” and “exciting.”

People have signed petitions calling for them to be fired. As of now, Columbia University has had nothing to say about Joseph Massad. 

As opposed to the Harvard student organizations that declared Israel to be solely responsible for the massacre, these people were adults. No one is saying that they are too young to know what they have been doing.

So, the American academy has corrupted the minds of students. While a strong majority of Americans defends Israel in the current conflict, GenZers withhold their support. Don’t say that indoctrination doesn’t work.

Of course, the current ideology values social justice. It sounds nice. It even sounds idealistic. Now we know that it means hating American and Western civilization,  believing it to be an organized criminal conspiracy. 

Obviously, this radical leftist thought wants in particular to overthrow free enterprise capitalism and the religion of the patriarchs. Its true enemy is Anglo-Saxon culture, what with its embrace of empirical science and its rejection of gauzy ideals. People who learned to hate white supremacist Anglo-Saxon culture have found it easy to redirect their hatred to Jews. It’s proxy hatred. Keep in mind that notable Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, after expressing virulent anti-Semitism directed his ire against Great Britain.

In the past Berkeley professor Judith Butler defended Hamas and Hezbollah as belonging to the vanguard of the radical leftist rebellion. A seriously limited thinker, Butler managed to parlay her incoherent but  politically correct ramblings into a chair at Berkeley. Could there be a better sign that America’s best universities have been idiocratic, and not meritocratic.

Butler seems to consider herself something of an amoral thinker, so she takes to the pages of the London Review of Books-- where fewer Americans will have access to her mental drool-- in order to defend Hamas while pretending not to defend Hamas. She does not even say that perhaps they did not know what they were doing. She says that they could not have done otherwise. Of course, she still thinks that massacres are bad.

One might say that she is speaking out of both sides or her mouth. Or else, if you prefer another metaphor, that she is speaking with forked tongue.

Butler does not care what happens to the Jews. She merely pays lip service to their difficulties. She cares mostly about how much the poor Palestinian people are suffering. Not once does she suggest that their leaders are responsible for their suffering. She prefers to blame it on the Jews.

Butler is hardly alone in thinking that suffering is the meaning of life. More than a few denizens of therapy culture believe the same thing. In Butler’s hands, it implies that she need not defend Israelis because they are successful, and are not suffering. Since she believes in the ultimate idiot concept-- empathy-- she accepts that the recent massacre was designed to teach the Israelis what it means to suffer. Or, to share suffering.

However you want to read it, Butler cares about the poor put-upon suffering Palestinian peoples. Whatever sentiment she can gin up to denounce the Hamas massacre, her heart and her argument side with the people of Gaza, and with Hamas.

Let’s be clear, Israeli violence against Palestinians is overwhelming: relentless bombing, the killing of people of every age in their homes and on the streets, torture in their prisons, techniques of starvation in Gaza and the dispossession of homes. And this violence, in its many forms, is waged against a people who are subject to apartheid rules, colonial rule and statelessness. 

And she adds, for emphasis:

The contemporary media, for the most part, does not detail the horrors that Palestinian people have lived through for decades in the form of bombings, arbitrary attacks, arrests and killings. If the horrors of the last days assume a greater moral importance for the media than the horrors of the last seventy years, then the moral response of the moment threatens to eclipse an understanding of the radical injustices endured by occupied Palestine and forcibly displaced Palestinians – as well as the humanitarian disaster and loss of life happening at this moment in Gaza.

So Butler rushes to defend the Harvard student organizations that declared that Israel was solely to blame for the massacre.

Some have suggested that students do not need to be held accountable for their appalling beliefs. Butler thinks that the Harvard students-- the ones who are running away from the statement as fast as they can-- were right:

  

At the same time, this group and its members do not deserve to be blacklisted or threatened. They are surely right to point to the history of violence in the region: ‘From systematised land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.’

Better yet, Butler is up to the task of rationalizing the worst violence. She blames Israel and says that Hamas had no choice. This is gussied up moral depravity.

The necessity of separating an understanding of the pervasive and relentless violence of the Israeli state from any justification of violence is crucial if we are to consider what other ways there are to throw off colonial rule, stop arbitrary arrest and torture in Israeli prisons, and bring an end to the siege of Gaza, where water and food is rationed by the nation-state that controls its borders. In other words, the question of what world is still possible for all the inhabitants of that region depends on ways to end settler-colonial rule. Hamas has one terrifying and appalling answer to that question, but there are many others. If, however, we are forbidden to refer to ‘the occupation’ (which is part of contemporary German Denkverbot), if we cannot even stage the debate over whether Israeli military rule of the region is racial apartheid or colonialism, then we have no hope of understanding the past, the present or the future. 

Being young and naive, Butler envisions a future Palestinian state that embodies values of freedom and equality and justice. It shows you just how stupid she really is. She does not recognize that the Hamas charter promotes the destruction of the state of Israel and the murder of Jews. It has no interest in living in peace with anyone. It wants to conquer everyone. 

Besides, no Arab state in the region embodies the values of freedom, equality and justice. In truth, the only state in the region that embodies these values is Israel.

And pay close attention to the rhetorical sleight-of-hand. Butler says that everyone she knows is afraid. This suggests that she does not know any Israelis or Jews-- who might have reason to fear terrorism.

Everyone I know lives in fear of what the Israeli military machine will do next, whether Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric will materialise in the mass killing of Palestinians. 

As for the genocidal policies of Hamas, not a word from Professor Butler. 

Of course, Butler is openly gay. You and I know that if she were living in Gaza, the clerical authorities would hang her from a lamp post. Yet, she considers herself a great friend to the Palestinian people. 

Palestinians cannot build a state. They cannot run a functioning economy. They can only destroy. That is their problem. Blaming it on the Jews is a confession of impotence.

In the current clash of civilizations, the Palestinian cause accepts that Muslim groups cannot compete against Western and Anglo-Saxon cultures. It can only work to destroy them. As for the nation that is leading modern Islam to compete in world markets-- that would be Saudi Arabia-- the denizens of the radical left are happy that the massacre calmed down the thrust toward an alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

As much as she says she dislikes what Hamas has done, Butler believes that the Israelis had it coming. It is probably less about anti-Semitism than about her visceral hatred for the Anglo-Saxon West. As I noted on Sunday, she joins those who want to undo the original Exodus and return to the pagan idolatry of ancient Egypt.

Without equality and justice, without an end to the state violence conducted by a state, Israel, that was itself founded in violence, no future can be imagined, no future of true peace – not, that is, ‘peace’ as a euphemism for normalisation, which means keeping structures of inequality, rightlessness and racism in place. But such a future cannot come about without remaining free to name, describe and oppose all the violence, including Israeli state violence in all its forms, and to do so without fear of censorship, criminalisation, or of being maliciously accused of antisemitism. 

So says Judith Butler. That such an individual can be holding a chair at a prestigious university tells you all you need to know about American academic corruption and the absence of standards of objective judgment.

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