The murder of two Israeli embassy workers in DC is no random act of political extremism
It is a full-blown revelation of the abysmal thought rot of America's intelligentsia
The assassination of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington DC by a radical left gunman last week has shattered virtually every persisting illusion the American public might share about the anti-Israel protest movements on college and university campuses since the events of Oct. 7, 2023.
As former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss has written:
If anyone even noticed it among the chaos that began in this country on October 8, they probably dismissed it as a few kooks or ignored it entirely. As if it were ever normal to target a Jewish museum in order to protest a war in the Middle East against a terrorist group. As if it ever had anything at all to do with “Palestine.” Then, over the weeks and months, the flags turned into chants to “globalize the intifada,” and professional talkers dismissed it as a metaphor and not what it always was: a demand for open season on Jewish people worldwide. The more elite the institutions, the more the people who populate them glorified evil. At George Washington University, students projected the words “Glory to our martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” in giant letters on campus buildings.
In his putative manifesto the gunman Elias Rodriguez talked about “bringing the war home”.
What does that really mean, and what “pale cast of thought,” as Shakespeare would have phrased it, motivated such an act?
Rodriguez clearly stands apart from other “lone gunmen” who have set off their own fugitive flash in the lowering shadow world of political extremism.
He is neither mentally deranged nor glory-seeking. If one reads his manifesto carefully, it becomes obvious he views himself with iron logic as some adamantine instrument of historical judgment.
The manifesto is shot through with the sort of icy inferencing that can typically be culled from the writings and reflections of the world’s most notorious totalitarian butchers and mass murderers.
Everything is reduced to a pitiless abstraction.
Rodriguez observes:
Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human.
Rodriguez goes on to argue what are the real implications of the now fashionable progressive theory that all of us somehow share in a “systemic” culpability for all the sins of postmodern civilization, whether it be racism, colonialism, capitalism, sexism, environmental degradation, etc.
Regardless of their “humanity”, let alone innocence of any mistreatment of others, they are guilty simply because of their generic status. Retribution must be ruthlessly exacted.
Everyone, no matter how nondescript and innocuous, must be categorized as an “enemy”, according to Rodriguez. “A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same.”
He adds ominously: “Humanity doesn't exempt one from accountability.”
Rodriguez’ mindset shockingly is not much different from the outlook these days of many of my academic peers and students in the humanities.
The difference is Rodriguez simply had the temerity to follow through with what revolutionaries of his ilk from the nineteenth century forward have dubbed “direct action”.
Rodriguez notes that unlike even a decade ago what he was about to do would have been regarded “insane.” Yet now it is all within the Zeitgeist.
“I am glad,” he says, “that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.”
Considering the massive adulation he has already received on social media, Rodriguez’ bravado does not seem in any way hollow.
And that is where the real horror crouches.
The glib rhetoric of “oppressor” and “oppressed” - what can simply be dubbed “oppressionism” - has come to permeate and most recently dominate acceptable intellectual discourse. Such an emotionally charged binary is singularly seductive and abysmally malignant.
It can be invoked on virtually any occasion as a thought-stopping cliché that paralyzes even the most primitive impulse toward rational reflection.
Stripped nowadays in its entirety from its original Marxist idiom, it has become an all-purpose trope to ignite the passions of the academically inept and the ideologically inane, albeit fanatically moralistic.
It has become a handy verbal dudgeon to plunge without any real consequences into the beating hearts of perceived and fantasized “class enemies” of the most decadent icons of the overindulged knowledge class.
And that is how so much of the explosive growth of viral antisemitism among the knowledge classes, especially on university campuses, in just a few years can be honestly explained. The toxic and mindless polemics of “oppressionism” has always required a master signifier to hold its own vacuous syntax together.
With the end of Oct. 7 it found its “quilting point”, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would say, in antisemitism.
As Noah Feldman writing in Time remarks:
It emerges that far from being an unchanging set of ideas derived from ancient faiths, antisemitism is actually a shape-shifting, protean, creative force. Antisemitism has managed to reinvent itself multiple times throughout history, each time keeping some of the old tropes around, while simultaneously creating new ones adapted to present circumstances. In each iteration, antisemitism reflects the ideological preoccupations of the moment. In antisemitic discourse, Jews are always made to exemplify what a given group of people considers to be the worst feature of the social order in which they live.
It is no accident that as soon as the tsunami of “wokeness” that inundated the chattering classes in the midst of Covid around the time of the George Floyd murder receded, the next breaker was bloated with the flotsam and jetsam of Jew hatred.
The events of Oct. 7 and beyond proved to be a perfect pretext.
The Russian atrocities perpetrated on the Ukrainian population, which had already been going on for eighteen month, had not spurred even one campus demonstration.
Yet Hamas’ carefully orchestrated Oct. 7 assault, codenamed “Al Aqsa Flood”, on Israeli military bases and civilian populations activated a fifth column of militant pro-Palestinian activists and supporters among hundreds of American colleges and universities to champion a highly sophisticated, not to mention elaborately sophistical, iteration of the ancient blood libel.
As Yossi Halevi describes it pithily, in this new iteration “the satanic Jew has been replaced by the satanic Jewish state.”
I see this in the tortured speech and Blue Sky postings of some of my own academic cronies. Although they vigilantly parse the distinction between “Jew” and “Zionist”, they habitually refer to Jews as “Zionists”.
Oppressionism has become the opioid epidemic of America’s cognitive elites. It is conceptual fentanyl, pure and simple.
It foments furor in the addled academic mind without any visionary inkling of a possible or even utopian future, as was the case in the past with genuine revolutionary philosophies.
It is unfiltered, unadulterated nihilism.
Even if Rodriguez was no longer a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) with which Rodriguez was involved at some point in his career, its discourse and diction obviously suffused his thinking.
The PSL’s motto is “for the planet to live, capitalism must end.”
But the language of the Hamas charter, in which the phrase “from the river to the sea” is first minted, turns out to be light years away from that of The Communist Manifesto.
“Workers of the world unite” does not exactly dovetail with Article 6 of the charter, which proclaims:
[Hamas] strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine, for under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety where their lives, possessions and rights are concerned. In the absence of Islam, strife will be rife, oppression spreads, evil prevails, and schisms and wars will break out.
The faux ideology of “oppressionism” does not just completely betray its own intellectual genealogy. It is a full-blown revelation of the terminal dementia of those who pretend to speak for our once proud institutions of the higher learning.
We have no idea where Elias Rodriguez inhaled the pernicious ideological vapors that incited him finally to storm into the Jewish Museum that fateful evening. But in the steamy sauna bath of Chicago’s radical chic underground culture all he had to do was to take one hearty breath to be afflicted.
What psychologists Jonathan Haidt and George Lukianoff have termed “the coddling of the American mind” has set in motion a chain of events that as we speak have already conjured up a thousand more Elias Rodriguezes whose even more pernicious deeds remain yet outstanding and are poised unfortunately to creep into the spotlight.
It is high time as a nation to confront the radical evil that in our ostrichlike complacency is spreading like toxic black mold among our intelligentsia.