A Queen’s Gambit: The Sacrifice And The Message
Politics is often spoken through dog-whistles.
According to the Blue Square Alliance, “…dog whistles are coded signals–phrases, numbers, or symbols–that carry a hidden meaning. To most people they look harmless, but to those inside extremist circles they are instantly recognizable…The purpose of these dog whistles is both to disguise and connect. On the one hand, they allow people to share hate while maintaining plausible deniability. On the other hand, they work as a kind of password: an easy way for people in the know to find each other and signal shared beliefs.” Blue Square Alliance – Antisemitic Dog Whistles
Referencing Queen Esther is not a dog whistle and the seeming discrepancy between Queen Esther’s role in her own story and what Michigan AG Dana Nessel said invite not comparison. Rather the gap between what she said about seemingly abandoning the Jewish people’s right to self determination for a midterm election borders on the farcically absurd as does much of Esther’s story and the chag we celebrate from it, thus inviting analysis after the initial shock of her words wears off.
That outrage you’re feeling? That’s part of her strategy, she didn’t throw down the gauntlet to the Jewish community and supportors of Israel. Instead she invited scrutiny of the anti-Israel elements trying to influence the Democrat party and instead of allowing the current vanguard to hedge and moderate, she created a contrast between what he doesn’t want to say versus what he represents. He represents the omnicause, the same absurd conflation of the idea that somehow climate change, nuclear apocalypse, and a real life reenactment of the Terminator series from the AIs whose main function is literally-pathological agreement, will all be solved by voting to give Israel to Islamists who don’t care about climate change (Hezbollah planted trees to hide from the IDF even if they greenwashed it), would nuke Israel and anyone the disagree with if they could, and exclusively use AI to spam the Internet with propaganda and misinformation, not to mention Gaza suffers from massive inequality due to Islamist kleptocratic terror-funding priorities. As I argued previously, Israel is actually essential to solving these problems.
Hold onto that outrage though. In Michigan it’s an invitation to vote split-ticket in November, yet the real function of inviting your condemnation is to put a spotlight on the absurdity of anti-Israel politics. Dana Nessel herself says that being anti-Israel is antisemitism. Queen Esther never planned to sacrifice the entire Jewish people, nor must we assume that a champion for equality like AG Nessel would either. She would rather be exiled from the Democrats, based on her own words.
Yet where did AG Nessel say these things? To a crowd mostly made up of other Jews, the Michigan Jewish Democrats’ Summer Simcha event in suburban Detroit, to which the Jewish Telegraph Agency was the only invited media. Compare that to functionality of Esther having Haman invited to the banquet.
“If it please Your Majesty,” Esther replied, “let Your Majesty and Haman come today to the feast that I have prepared for him.” Esther 5:4
“What is more,” said Haman, “Queen Esther gave a feast, and besides the king she did not have anyone but me…” Esther 5:12
Afterwards, Haman becomes emboldened. He progresses in his plot to murder Mordecai. And Esther let him think he was winning, just as the elements of Jew-hatred in society think they’re winning. They’re not winning though, they’re exposing the inhumanity of their radicalism.
Esther doesn’t win through straightforward confrontation. She wins through social manuevering, in the court of politics. Her story can plainly be read as a triumphal story of survival and liberation, yet it should also be read as a story of a woman who knows how to win not with Yael’s spike or Yehudit’s sword but instead with the case she makes.
Haman didn’t realize he was the accused, thus his actions and attitude ended up dooming him. Right now it seems like Jews are the accused and support for Israel is toxic. While much of that is optic that doesn’t fully correspond with polls, polls are not reality and political campaigns are often more about perception than results. Changing the perception of Jews and Haman switched the outcome of decree from Jews to Haman.
Abdul El Sayed is not Haman, yet he does represent antisemitism within the Democrat party. The supporters he associates with often do too. Hasan Piker resembles Haman even more in what he says and his attitudes, to the point of implying that Jews should expect violence for supporting Israel, though we know that this is a dog whistle justifying violence against all Jews since violent antisemites don’t conduct political surveys of their targets when they can just assume.
Politics is never about what is right, it’s mostly about what verdict comes out of the court of public opinion. In courts, Dana Nessel faced the judge and jury as an attorney. In the King’s court Esther had to change one man’s opinion. The court of public opinion is more convoluted than a courtroom and much vaster than a King’s court even with courtiers.
The commonality is that each trial has stages. Dana Nessel just made the argument that Democrats don’t want to own, that Israel could be sacrificed for electoral politics. Setting aside the immorality of it and it is still a literal impossibility, a trade that can’t be made. Had King Ahasuerus allowed the Jews to be massacred, he would have lost much and gained nothing. Highlighting the underlying flaw in anti-Israelism shows that far from saving anyone or anything, the activists focusing on opposing Israel have undermined every cause they might otherwise support.
For example: Greta Thunberg is easy to mock given her celebrity activism, yet look at the tragedy of her career. Instead of advocating for climate justice, she turned to harassing Eden Golan at Eurovision. Again, it may be easy to laugh at yet the real problem is that the left has been forced to abandon real causes in favor of coddling antisemitism. This is actually not a new problem, just like the Jew’s status in Queen Esther’s time didn’t start in a golden era either. For decades this has been especially apparent in the UK but also with anyone influenced by media and organizations linked to USSR and Russian influence such as the Green Party.
Though it has been apparent, it hasn’t been widely apparent and instead has been creeping towards the mainstream. Note that while this problem is still worse on the right, it matters to leftists since it’s become an issue that undermines leftists’ ability to work together. A perfect example of this happened in Michigan already, when the Uncommitted National Movement undermined Kamala Harris’ already faltering campaign. There are other reasons Harris lost, yet Uncommitted was pivotal in making her loss unrecoverable.
Instead of coming to a consensus that rejecting Israel helped lose Democrats the 2024 Presidential election due to allowing extremism to divide the party and distract from issues Americans care enough about to support the Democrats, the Democrats chose appeasement. This brings to mind the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Currently, the Democrats have made short term gains by making a pact with anti-Israel politics yet refuse to face the reality that while it may start with the Jews it will not end with us.
If Haman had been allowed to genocide Jews, would he have stopped there? No. Yet Queen Esther didn’t stop him by fighting him directly. She encouraged him to show his true colors and that became his undoing. Queen Esther is not a dog whistle, she’s a role model who fought in a certain way. She fought with words and social manuevers, treating life much like a chess board.
On the chess board, the queen can very rarely be sacrificed in order to checkmate an opponent. Though Esther’s story precedes Shatranj and its transformation into chess, this is hardly a strategic innovation at this point. At Summer Simcha, Dana Nessel may just have made that difficult classic move with her reputation in order to reposition the pieces on the board in the fight against antisemitism in politics.
