The Brothers Wolodzko

How bad ideas happen to good people

Alice Neal, Untitled (Karamazov, his sons, servant Gregory), 1938

We had Bolsheviks in my family. The brothers Wołodźko. I remembered the story when I saw progressives in the West celebrating Hamas’s atrocities on October 7. How could thinking people persuade themselves they were fighting oppression by justifying the rape and mutilation of 1,400 innocent Jews? How could they give full-throated support to those that would see them raped, enslaved, or beheaded? These are the kind of people, Christopher Hitchens once wrote, who would find a viper in their child’s bed and place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. But he was writing decades ago. Now we have the sort of people who would find a rapist in a child’s bed and celebrate, provided the child is white and the rapist is not. If the child is an American Jew, you might even find black intellectuals of the bell hooks variety explaining to us why the little boy or girl deserves it.

On November 18, 2014, two Palestinian men entered Kehilat Bnei Torah synagogue in the neighborhood of Har Nof, which sits upon a hillside in western Jerusalem. I used to live nearby with an old buddy, a krav maga instructor for the IDF, and I sometimes walked to Har Nof because the people of the neighborhood were kind, the neighborhood was surrounded by tranquil forests, and there was good hiking in those woods. That November morning, some of the good people of the neighborhood were at synagogue saying the silent amidah standing prayer, which includes asking God for peace and goodness and compassion, when the two Palestinians came in and began chopping people up, literally hacking them apart with with axes and meat cleavers. They murdered four rabbis and shot a Druze police officer in the head. Another man, Howard Rotman, was struck in the face multiple times with a meat cleaver and spent a year in a vegetative coma before succumbing to his wounds. The very next day, Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani called the massacre a “natural response” to Israel’s existence. Kiswani has repeatedly called for the “annihilation of Israel.” Two years ago at a march in Brooklyn, she screamed, “We want all of it and we will not stop … from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” When protestors set off firecrackers behind her, she added, “I hope that pop-pop is the last sound some Zionists hear within their lifetime!” Only the stupid, at this point, believe when she said Zionists that she meant anything other than Jews.

This morning, I saw a video in which pro-Palestinian protestors targeted a cancer hospital on New York’s Upper East Side. Kiswani was leading the protest, shouting into her bullhorn, “We will continue to march as we talk about another complicit institution—Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center!” The protestors booed and howled at the building, which also houses a pediatric day hospital for children with cancer. “Make sure they hear you!” Kiswani shouted, pointing. “They’re in the windows!” You can hear more howls of anger as the camera pans right to reveal…children standing in the window. The camera pans back to the crowd and there are white protesters, black protesters, all sorts. Look closely and you can see some of them are not howling so loud anymore. Maybe the idea of screaming at children with cancer made them a little uncomfortable. But most of the crowd was fine with it.

The Hitchens essay noted above, Stranger in a Strange Land: The dismay of an honorable man of the left, was written in December 2001, mere months after the September 11 attacks. In it, Hitchens describes being on a panel at the New York Film Festival in early October and hearing Oliver Stone talk about “the revolt of September 11,” followed by bell hooks informing the audience of the Lincoln Center, not six miles from where the planes hit, that “state terrorism” was nothing new in America, putting the blame on us. The crowd booed when Stone used the term “revolt,” to which Hitchens replied, “What happened on September 11 was state-supported mass murder using human beings as missiles!” Stone replied, “The Arabs have a point, whether they did it right or not. And they’re going to be joined by the people from Seattle,” referring to the Seattle protesters. The crowd began to boo and hiss at these remarks, and shortly, Stone and hooks got the shit hitchslapped out of them. Today, I worry, the crowd would be on the other side, but Hitchens uses this scene to consider the larger problem, referencing Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. “It’s not the sentence about the historical relation between tragedy and farce,” he says. “It’s the observation that when people are learning a new language, they habitually translate it back into the one they already know.”

This translation problem is really nothing more than ethnocentrism. It is true that Americans, in their worldly ignorance and cultural arrogance, think of all the problems of the planet in terms of their problems, so of course the conflict between Israel and Palestine becomes nothing more than a story about white colonizers and occupied people of color. But ethnocentrism is only part of the problem. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the problem has evolved in the 23 years since Hitchens offered his assessment. We have a new enemy now. In the ignoble tradition of Franz Boas and Michel Foucault, these are relativists who do not believe in truth or justice in any higher sense. Their moral philosophy is not taken from the teachings of Aristotle but from the theatrics of Johnnie Cochran, in that they are not interested in what’s true because for them Truth is a fiction used to exert power. As the sociologist David Hirsh writes, they deal in “discursive force rather than rational debate.”

Like Cochran, there is no striving for justice or accounting of the actual facts. There is only how one uses the idea of justice and the appearance of fact to achieve victory by any means for the people. It is entirely cynical. Worse, this is, again, not some Aristotelian body of moral citizens but an identitarian body of people with the same skin color as you. Also like Cochran, they make great use of thought-terminating cliches. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Stay woke, black lives matter, impact over intent, and cetera. These people have no moral integrity. As Hannah Arendt said in the early pages of On Revolution, hypocrisy is the “vice of vices” because integrity can coexist with every other vice except this. There is honor among thieves and even the assassin has his creed. But, she said, “only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

Consider for a moment the hypocrisy of the woke progressive. They claim slavery is one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated, but they direct all their fury at America despite the fact that across the New World only the tiny islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John and Saint Croix took fewer slaves. Brazil took 6 million African slaves, compared to fewer than 400,000 who ended up in North America, but we are told America is the problem and nothing is said of Brazil. More than this, the Atlantic slave trade stole 12.5 million Africans to the Americas while Muslims have enslaved more than twice that figure and have never stopped since. Yet we hear nothing at all from that side of the room about the Arab slave trades. Yes, plural. The Saharan slave trade alone stole roughly 9 million Africans, the Red Sea slave trade took millions more, the Indian Ocean slave trade took millions also, and the Barbary slave trade took about 1 million Europeans. Add to this the slavery of the Ottoman Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, and more. The fact is, white people have nothing on Arabs when it comes to slavery. Not only did Arabs have vastly more slaves, and continue the practice to this day—the progressives’ new pet monkey, the Houthis, are slave-traders—but white people have fought long and hard to end slavery. Consider the British abolitionist movement led by people such as Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce. Or the anti-slavery patrols of the British Royal Navy. Or how about the American Civil War, the bloodiest conflict this nation ever fought.