Literal, Fascist, Genocide: On the Abuse of Dibbur
- “Literally”
A quote attributed to Jean Paul Sartre: “The anti-Semite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he actually believes he stole. He accuses the Jew of stealing because he enjoys watching the Jew empty his pockets to prove his innocence.”
Just replace the word “Jew” with “Zionist”, and you have an exact description of why today’s Antizionist bigots enjoy employing the modern-day libel-vomit buzzwords of “Apartheid” and “Genocide” against Israel. We need to stop being on the defensive about these terms, and shift the burden of proof, by pointing out a simple truth: that the word “genocide” has now gone the way of the word “literally” in our age of social media. People today use the term “literally” to mean “figuratively”. It’s just a bratty term of sarcasm for our bombastic age.
George Orwell famously wrote: “The word ‘Fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. He wrote that many decades ago. It’s even more true today. The apotheosis of all these phenomena is when the Antizionist might heave out something such as “you’re a literal genocidal fascist”, combining all three abuses of language into one.
My fellow Jews: Do not get into the mud with them. The use of the word genocide against Israel today does not even pretend to be a term of dispassionate, legal analysis. It’s transparently being used as a polemical social/emotional cudgel of opprobrium, to mark the Israeli and the mainstream Jew (“Zionist”) for othering, marginalization, bullying, and exclusion from polite society. It’s a spiritual/religious term for a secular age. Its function is to replace the outdated terms such as “heretic, apostate, Christ Killer” with something more fashionable, for the Marxist who thinks that he has no religion, but who is still reaching for the most hallowed and authoritative sounding word that his deracinated mind can grasp onto. And, of course, it’s a term which was invented by Jews, and which they have now profanely appropriated against us.
(It should be noted that while the term “Marxist” can be misused just as the word “Fascist” can, I’m only describing a group of people who openly embrace the use of that term for themselves: see the example of the DSA).
And here is the proof: we should always reply that, for the sake of argument, I’ll actually grant that Israel has committed “genocide”. But now, the interlocuter must respond himself, in Talmudic parlance: L’Mai nafka mina? (So, what’s the practical result of this?) Are you asserting this claim as dispassionately as one might assert that Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians? And in that example, is there any practical result to how we should treat Turkish citizens, and “Turkish patriots” in the Turkish diaspora today based on that fact?
Because what you really mean by using the polemical term of genocide against Israel, practically speaking, is that the State of Israel has no right to exist, that its every citizen is marked with unique moral stain, that its every inhabitant, including its children, brings their own violence upon themselves, and that its every supporter should be seen as the hated Other. And if you mean none of those things? Then, granted! Let’s say that Israel did commit “genocide”, and let’s then move on.
- “Boo to the Jew[ish State]”
Another framework to understand how they use the terms genocide is through the theory of moral emotivism. From Google:
“Moral emotivism is a meta-ethical theory stating that moral judgments do not express objective facts but rather serve as expressions of the speaker’s personal feelings, emotions, or attitudes. Because moral statements essentially function to vent feelings or influence others, they cannot be empirically proven true or false. Often colloquially referred to as the ‘hurrah/boo’ theory, emotivism strips morality of factual truth. For example, when someone says ‘Murder is wrong,’ an emotivist argues they are not stating an observable fact about the universe. Instead, they are functionally saying, ‘Boo to murder!’ or ‘I disapprove of murder!’. Saying ‘Charity is good’ is conceptually equivalent to saying ‘Hurrah for charity’”!
As Jews, we actually reject moral emotivism as absolute heresy. We believe that morality is objective, and that it comes from God Himself. However, I submit that it is in fact a useful framework to describe the abuse of moral words; such acts of abuse really are just cases of moral emotivism. Whenever anyone says something like “Israel genocide” they are actually just saying the modern-day equivalent of the timeless “boo to the Jew[ish state]”. And whenever a Jew utters something like “Israel genocide”, that Jew is also only expressing the modern-day equivalent of the timeless “Boo to my temporally unpopular ancestral identity”.
In other words, let’s not even pretend that such statements are even attempts at describing any set of facts. They are simply expressions of moral emotivism.
They might respond that their position is still sound, because they can list a certain set of facts which supports them. But that is where the is –ought problem arises. To quote again from Google’s AI:
“The is–ought problem is a philosophical concept stating that you cannot logically derive a moral rule or value (what ought to be) solely from factual statements or observations (what is)”.
I have the same set of facts as them. Tens of thousands of civilians were tragically killed in Gaza (along with tens of thousands of Hamas fighters), and much of the Strip was destroyed. I still think that the war ought to have taken place just as it did. I bridge the gap from the set of facts to my sense of what ought to have happened through Just War Theory.
They bridge the gap from is-ought by declaring it a genocide that ought not to have happened. But the point is that the gap between is and ought is infinite, and that it cannot be bridged by anything except certain underlying ideological suppositions, by something that we might as well call for what it is, which is a sense of religious faith in what’s right and wrong. Of course, the postmodern neo-Marxist is not aware that her underlying faith assumptions derive from the clinically psychopathic thought of the French alleged pedophile Michel Foucault, who was a top supporter of Ayatollah Khomeni (because, of course he was), and who advocated for removing any limit to the age of consent (because, of course he did), and who saw the world only through the lens of the Oppressed/Oppressor binary. His thought has tragically captured much of academia today. His aforementioned modern-day acolyte thinks that her Foucauldian ideology today is just the objective truth of the universe, just as every idolater has throughout the ages.
That’s why no Jew who employs the popular “genocide” slur against Israel is welcome to step foot into my shul, even if their view is sincerely held. The litmus test for opposing anti-Jewish bigotry does not lie in opposing the anti-Jewish sentiments of 100 years ago, which are no longer fashionable. That takes no courage at all. The real test lies precisely in having the courage to oppose the slurs which do hold social and emotional power today.
Of course, I’m aware that those employing these words don’t relate to them as slurs at all, but just as objective facts; just as fish can’t see the water. There were probably Jews in the Middle Ages who sincerely felt that, wait a minute, maybe we Jews really do have a usury problem, we are disproportionately money lenders after all. Maybe the Antisemites have a point! Even if they were to mean that sincerely out of internal concern for the community, their lack of awareness of being coopted as useful tokens by bigots who are wildly and disproportionately obsessed with the alleged misdeeds of the tiny Jewish State over any other nation in the world doesn’t make it any better, but on the contrary, only makes it much worse.
- Dibbur and Dictation
We are now in Parshat Re’eh, the fourth weekly portion in the Book of Devarim: the Book of Words. I am grateful to my friend R. Adam Scheier for showing me a beautiful essay by R. Moshe Shapiro on the Hebrew word dibbur, which means speech. Kaballah equates the very essence of what it means to be human (Adam) with the capacity to communicate, to speak. Some people, of course, are sadly mute, but speech is a general feature of being a person. When Adam named all the animals, he was performing a creative act. Speech is akin to the power of divine creation, the ability to impose your will on reality itself.
I am proud of the insight that I came up with myself with from reading R. Shapiro’s essay: that the same dynamic can be found in the English language. Why is an absolute ruler called a Dictator? Because to dictate means to speak, and the dictator imposes his will through his verbal orders to his subjects.
So too, returning to R. Shapiro’s essay, when we conjugate the root of dibbur into different forms, we get fascinating results. The word Yadber means to impose your will. We say in the prayer for the IDF: Yadber soneinu tachteihem, may our enemies be subdued before them.
The Torah was given in the desert, which is called the Midbar, the same root as dibbur, speech. What is the connection? When you place the letter Mem before the root, you get its opposite: the desert is the place of no dictation, i.e., the ungoverned place. It’s precisely in the place where no man can impose his verbal control, where the noise of human speech gives way to plain silence, that one can hear the voice of God.
So too, we must identify and call out our enemies’ abuse of language for what it is, which is a creative attempt to subdue us to their will. And we must respond in kind: That we will never allow them to dictate the terms of the conversation based on their fashionable bigotry; that we will hold fast to the prayer for the IDF, to subdue (yadber) all our enemies from before us. Because no matter how much they seek to malign and defame the brave heroes of the IDF, we will never stop affirming the verse from next week’s parsha, Devarim 20:4, which appears in the prayer for the IDF:
כִּ֚י יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹֽהֵיכֶ֔ם הַֽהֹלֵ֖ךְ עִמָּכֶ֑ם לְהִלָּחֵ֥ם לָכֶ֛ם עִם־אֹֽיְבֵיכֶ֖ם לְהוֹשִׁ֥יעַ אֶתְכֶֽם
“For the Lord, your God, is the One Who goes with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you”.
And because our words are rooted in timeless, divine truth, and theirs are rooted in the temporal ideological rot of postmodern neo-Marxism, their presently fashionable abuse of language will ultimately be subdued by the moral truth.
