Israel: not white colony, but “white” “colony”

Better education will not stop the Left and the universities from defining Israel as a “white colonizer” country. That is because they are not using these words in English. They are using them in pretend English, while meaning it in a language of their own.

The new, dishonest usage of the words

In English, “white” means white, the color and the racial phenotype that is more or less white. But in Leftist pseudo-English, “white” means Western (or pro-Western, or aligned with the West).

In English, “colonizer” means an actual colonizer. In Leftist pseudo-English, “colonizer” means Western, “decolonization” means exorcising the West.

The same goes for every other epithet thrown at Israel: “racist”, “imperialist”, “oppressor”, “privileged”. They all, in the Leftist pseudo-English, mean Western.

The same goes, indeed, for Hillary Clinton’s entire basket of terms for deploring people: “Islamophobe”, “homophobe”, “you name it”. They all, in the Leftist pseudo-English, mean Western. That’s why Hillary grasped that it doesn’t matter which word is used; you name it, and they all mean the same thing – in the collective mind of the Left and the institutions it dominates.

That is why we are seeing “gays for Gaza” today. For many gays, ones who are habituated to living within the Left as their social and ideological home, their “gay” identity is above all about their Leftist identity, only secondarily about the actuality and needs of gay people. Sacrificing actual gays on the altar of the Left is something that comes to them as a second nature.

Today it is Hamas and radical Islam that stands at the top of the hierarchy of the Left. It is the entity that is “doing it”, as a French Leftist put it years ago when he decided to convert to Islam. And so the gay Left offers up its fellow gays as human sacrifices on the altar of Hamas.

The cure that failed

No education in Jewish history will cure them of this.

No education in the ethnic and color diversity of Israelis will cure them of it.

No education in actual genocides, no amount of Holocaust education, no honest information about Israel’s extraordinary measures to prevent civilian casualties – none of this will cure them of calling Israel “genocidal”. Nor will any of it cure the predominant media of the habit of subordinating itself to the Left and lying about civilian casualties.

And no education in geography will cure them of their habit of chanting “from the River to the Sea”.

“But they don’t know which river or which sea”. So what? They don’t need to know it. They know that their slogan means the complete elimination of Israel, and that Israel is a Western or pro-Western country. And this is all they need to know. It tells them that the slogan does indeed express their goal.

Language as an instrument of disguise and deception

The anti-Semites are not wrong in their usage of the pseudo-English of the Left. They are wrong only in wanting to use a pseudo-English at all. They are wrong in looking down on the general public as inferiors and feeling virtuous about deceiving them.

In translation into real English, their meaning is simple and clear: they bear malice, unbounded malice, toward the West, and toward Israel as a part of it. Their actions comport with this malice.

What will work to cure them of this malice?

The only education that can possibly cure them of it is an education to stop being anti-Western.

“But how can that education get through their heads? Most of them in this generation are already too far gone to even listen to it.”

Probably true. Maybe true of most of the media, too.

“Can we at least stop still more generations of anti-Western anti-Semites from being raised?”

Yes, but only if we take drastic measures. It will require overhauling most of the personnel – administrators, humanities faculties, journalists, editors – in these institutions. It will require overhauling also their curricula, their teacher education, and their practices of training students in these ideological ways of acting.

It will also require a very different kind of diversity recruitment and diversity training, one that focuses on the one truly relevant form of diversity in education: intellectual diversity. It will require recruitment of non-Leftists on a large scale, to get a fully sufficient balance in ideological diversity. It will require retraining on a mass scale in accepting intellectual diversity. This means quite specifically: training in the psychological habits of respecting people who disagree with the Left. It means overcoming the longstanding, socially dominant, institutionally entrenched habits of looking down on non-Leftists and talking down to them.

And it will require doing this throughout all the relevant institutions – universities, community colleges, K12 schools, mass media…

“That’s a tall order! Wouldn’t we have a better chance of being allowed at least to do Holocaust education, Jewish history education, factual education about Israel?”

Sure. That’s easier. And it feels so comforting.

But it doesn’t work.

This easier solution is the one we’ve been using ever since 1945. Today we know as a matter of plain fact that it doesn’t work. We see its catastrophic failure right in front of our eyes.

To be sure, it had worked fairly well for years against the old anti-Semitism of the Right. But it has proved futile against the newly dominant anti-Semitism of the Left.

The harder solution may well be utopian, as a program to be completed in the near term. But it will work wonders if we can get even a bit of progress made on it. It is the one we have to urgently refocus on.