How Sticking to Facts about Israel Turned Me into a ‘Right Wing Idiot’

The unfriending continues. Most recently, I had to drop a business school classmate, a 60-year-old Jewish homosexual who posted how sad he was that Israel had killed 42,000 “Palestinian civilians” after “only 1200 Israelis” had died on October 7, 2023. I tried to point out to him that the 42,000 number is a lie that even the UN has had to retract, but when he insisted on doubling down on the lie, I decided to erase him from my life and get on with mine.

A few weeks later, he included me on a funding request to help him go to Uganda to protest for gay rights in that country. I considered suggesting that he do the same in Gaza, first, but I deleted the message instead. Life is short.

Around that time, a Jewish friend of a friend on social media labeled me a “Right wing idiot” for my blog Johnny Depp is Older than the ‘Palestinian People. I guess it’s easier to come at me with a weak ad-hominem attack than explain how an allegedly ancient indigenous people appeared on the world scene in 1964, with their own leaders claiming it was a fiction created for political purposes. I blocked him, too.

If asserting facts makes me an idiot, then I guess I’m an idiot. In fact, I’m glad to be an idiot. It’s preferable to willfully crushing my brain in the service of lies and fantasies. Josef Goebbels was wrong. Repeating a lie a thousand times doesn’t make it true. It’s still a lie, even if repetition makes people believe it.

With the caveat that I am very much not on the right wing, allow me to point out that left wing blindness to obvious human rights crimes by Hamas et al is one of the more puzzling ironies of this moment. For example, Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP), which provides the intellectual foundation for antisemitic protests on college campuses, has a statement of principles that includes “fighting oppression” and opposing “caste hierarchies and those targeting sexuality, trans and non-binary gender identification, and disabilities of any kind.”

It’s all well and good for FJP to take this position, but have these professors actually seen what happens to trans and non-binary gender identifying people who live under Muslim/Arab regimes?  Are they aware of the brutal caste-like systems that predominate in Arab societies?

While the Muslim world does not have a formalized caste system of the kind seen in India, it has long maintained comparable structures. For example, in Yemen, people of African descent are often relegated to the category of “Al-Akhdam” and confined to manual labor work. There are similar groups throughout the Arab world. Jews lived in Muslim countries for centuries as “dhimmis,” or second-class citizens with limited rights. Religious minorities in the Arab world often face systemic discrimination. People with disabilities face widespread social stigmatization and lack of support in the region, as well.

Income inequality in the Middle East is among the worst in the world. The top 1% of earners in the Middle East earn twice as much as the share of the bottom 50%. Fifty-six percent of national income accrues to the top 10% of income earners.

LGBTQ people in Gaza and the West Bank face public humiliation, physical abuse, imprisonment, and death. For example, a gay Palestinian man named Ahmad Abu Marhia was beheaded in the West Bank in 2022, for the “crime” of being gay. Marhia had applied for asylum in Israel because Israel, unlike every country in the Arab world, has equal rights for LGBTQ people. This is just one of many such tragic stories. So, it’s odd for FJP to point the finger at Israel for “oppression” against LGBTQ people when such oppression is endemic in the Arab world.

In terms of governance, Israel is a multi-ethnic democracy, in contrast to most countries in the Arab world, which are run on an authoritarian basis. This is not my personal opinion, but rather the conclusion of the Universitat Wurzburg’s Democracy Index. Israel ranks higher on the index, in terms of functioning democracy, even than the US. The index characterizes Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Qatar, and what it calls “Palestine/West Bank” and “Palestine/Gaza” as “Hard autocracies.”

You might wonder why political repression in the Arab world appears not to bother college professors so much. Maybe they’re ignorant about it (and we’ll ignore, for now, why all these ostensibly world class scholars don’t know anything about what matters) but you should know that Muslim countries in the Middle East hold tens of thousands of dissidents as political prisoners:

• 104,000 in Syria
• 60,000 in Egypt
• 2,600 in Saudi Arabia
• 3,000 in Bahrain

The irony here is quite rich, in my view. Do members of FJP think their political and social views would be tolerated in a society run by Hamas? If FJP members flew to Gaza and announced that they wanted to teach courses on gender identity and queer theory, would they be accepted or arrested? Take a guess.

Israel certainly has its problems as a democracy, but its citizens, including Muslims and other non-Jews, have the right to criticize their government, vote, serve in the government, and generally take part in running the society in which they live. Gazans and Arabs in the West Bank have no such rights. They are oppressed by their governments, so it strikes me as suspicious that FJP and its intellectual allies on the left seem to think that the oppression problem is with Israel.

For now, I’ll remain a “right wing idiot” when it comes to these issues, even if I’m not a right winger. It keeps me on the side of the truth.

Photo by Sides Imagery: https://www.pexels.com/photo/monochrome-photo-of-resist-signage-3141240/