The Selective Outrage and Hypocrisy of Antisemitism

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

A lot of people who oppose Israel resent people who suggest they might be antisemitic, and that’s a legitimate criticism. They’re not necessarily synonymous, but when people start talking about Jewish people in a certain fashion, a conspiratorial fashion that, for example, a small country of 10 million can influence 340 million in America and tell Donald Trump what to do, or that a small cabal of Jews run a particular industry, then you start to get worrisome. 

But one of the best indicators of antisemitism is selectivity, selective outrage. What do I mean by that? We talked about Israel after Oct. 7. Remember that 1,200 Israelis were butchered, raped, mutilated in medieval fashion. Israel did not go into Gaza on the ground right away. For three weeks, not until Oct. 27, did it enter Gaza. 

And what was it supposed to do? Go to the U.N., past China and Russia on the Security Council? China has a million Uyghurs in camps. Russia is waging a genocidal war in Ukraine. And ask them to be fair? Go to NATO or the EU and ask the Spanish premier, Mr. [Pedro] Sanchez, to negotiate with Hamas? 

What were they supposed to do? What were they supposed to reply to when Hamas would not give up the perpetrators, would not give up the 251 hostages, descended into a labyrinth of tunnels, and the entries and exits were beneath churches, mosques, and schools? 

What were they to do? What would anybody do? What would the United States do? The United States is 34 times larger than Israel is. Thirty-four times larger. So what would we do? Well, if 6,000 Hamas people went into Israel, what would happen if 200,000 people came into the United States across the border, let’s say from Sinaloa, the cartels? 

And instead of butchering 1,200, let’s say in American terms, 34 times larger, they butchered 40,000 Americans. That would be a fair comparison. And then they took back 8,000, not 251 but 34 times, given our larger size, back to Mexico. What would we do? 

Would we say, “Would you please negotiate with El Chapo and the cartel people in Geneva? Can we ask our friends in the U.N. to criticize them?” Or would we hear almost immediately that we had it coming because of the Mexican War or Yankee go home? We’d probably hear that. 

And don’t think that is an exaggeration. In 1917, Pancho Villa crossed the border, went into Columbus, New Mexico, and took over the town and killed 17 Americans. What did the United States do? We put 100,000 people on the border, and left-wing President [Woodrow] Wilson sent John Pershing into Mexico to find him, futile. 

And do you think people were outraged that Pancho Villa did that? No. President [Adres Manuel Lopez] Obrador, the former president of Mexico, just two years ago said that he thought it was a wonderful thing what Pancho Villa did by invading the United States and killing Americans. He said it was a blow to U.S. imperialism. 

It’s easy to imagine what we would do. We would bomb, and we would tell people in Sinaloa, please separate yourselves from the cartel members. Please get out of the hospitals, schools, and churches where their entry or exits are beneath them. And you can imagine the outrage. 

Are we worried about illegal occupations? I don’t think so. Worldwide, Turkey is still occupying, via the Turkish population, northern Cyprus.  

Are we worried about ethnic cleansing? Turkey, from 1917 to 1921, ethnically cleansed 1.2 million Armenians. We’ve given Turkey an aggregate of about $500 million in direct aid and military sales. 

Are we worried that they threaten to go into Cyprus? They threaten Athens all the time. They threaten Israel. Why do we stay allies with them? 

Recently, Azerbaijan, a Turkic-speaking country, went into the Nagorno-Karabakh corridor and ethnically cleansed 120,000 Armenians. Some of them had been there since medieval times. What was weird about it was it happened almost to the day simultaneously with Oct. 7. 

Did Mahmoud Khalil and the Columbia protesters say we want a moment of silence because our Turkish Muslim friends have gone into another country and ethnically cleansed 120,000 people? No. We didn’t hear a word. 

If you want a more direct comparison, after the 1967 war and the wars that followed, the Arab nations ethnically cleansed 900,000 Jews from Egypt, the Gulf states, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. There are almost none left in the Arab world today. 

Did Israel do that? When Israel was formed in 1948, about 800,000 Arabs fled. One hundred fifty thousand stayed in Israel. Today that population has increased 14 times. There are 2.1 million Arab citizens of Israel, and yet Israel is called an ethnic cleanser and a police state when the surrounding Arab world ethnically cleansed almost a million Jews. 

Sometimes the Europeans are very angry. The French have been very vocal. Do we remember what France did in Chad for almost 50 years? Currently, the people of Chad are rediscovering their national identity and are very anti-French. 

We helped the French. We gave them logistical support, reconnaissance, and logistics to go in and stop Islamists in Chad. But in the early part of the 20th century, around 1917, they massacred 400 Islamic scholars. They call it the Coucou Massacre, blow blow or cut cut. And they didn’t just massacre them. The French beheaded 400 Islamic scholars. 

Does anybody talk about that today? No. Almost nobody talks about it. So what I’m getting at is selectivity. 

Now, Rep. Ilhan Omar has been very critical. She has called Israel an illegitimate entity. She has a map where it doesn’t even appear in her office. She has talked about Benjamin’s baby, referring to Netanyahu and supposed moneyed interests influencing the United States. 

Her father was a colonel in Siad Barre’s Marxist dictatorship in Somalia. He waged a genocidal campaign against an entire tribe of Somalis. He may have killed 150,000 to 200,000 people. Many Somalis who fled were supporters of Barre’s Marxist dictatorship and had alliances with the United States, so they fled to the West. 

There is a sizable percentage of the Somali community in the United States that were elites, as was Ilhan Omar’s family, and were directly involved with that illegitimate dictatorial Marxist government that waged ethnic cleansing. 

Let people without sin throw the first stone. 

Zohran Mamdani is very critical of Israel. He cannot seem to have an appointee without an antisemitic past. He talks about interlopers, and his supporters say Israel is a settler-colonial power. There is a 3,500-year continuum of Jews in the land of Israel. 

That is not true of Indians in Uganda. Mamdani’s family came as what he might call settler colonialists into Uganda. They make up 1% of the population and control about 65% of the wealth. The wealthiest person in Uganda is a billionaire of Indian descent. 

Mamdani’s family later came to the United States and are very critical of Israel as illegitimate in the Middle East. Israel has a far stronger historical claim to its land than Indian immigrants do to running Uganda’s economic structure. 

There is no criticism of that. The hypocrisy is shocking. 

So when you want to know what an antisemite is, it is selective outrage and hypocrisy. 

Why did campuses erupt over the Israeli incursion into Gaza? No one offered the Israelis a better plan to retrieve the hostages and punish Hamas. What were they supposed to do? Ask Hamas to surrender peacefully? The people in Gaza cheered Hamas on, even though there was a labyrinth of tunnels under schools, mosques, and hospitals. 

It was inevitable that civilians would die. A Hamas leader admitted that. 

While this was happening on campuses, professors and Middle Eastern studies programs were furious. At the same time, 40,000 mostly Muslim Iranians were butchered by the Iranian government. There was not a peep from the American left. Not a word. 

Instead, there was criticism of the United States for trying to isolate and weaken the government that killed those 40,000 people. 

All the contempt was reserved for one tiny country of 10.5 million people. 

So if you want to know what an antisemite is, it is selective outrage and hypocrisy. 

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