This article appeared in today’s Algemeiner.
Pessin, Ironic Prophet: The Liberal Emperor’s New Clothes of Humanitarian Racism
[[In the spring of 2015, Connecticut College erupted into a bizarre frenzy of condemnation over philosophy professor Andrew Pessin’s Facebook post from and about the 2014 Israel-Hamas war, falsely (but vehemently) accusing him of racism, hate speech, dehumanization, and celebrating and inciting violence. For those unfamiliar with the Pessin Affair, see here, here, and here.]
In his now notorious Facebook post on Gaza’s rabid pit bull – the very one that caused the scandal – Andrew Pessin described the situation as one in which a rabid pit bull goes for the jugular every chance it gets, meaning that Hamas, obsessed at is it with killing Israelis, will take advantage of any occasion to do so, even if it means stepping on their own people to get at “al Yahood” (the Jews).
Cartoon by Ellen Horowitz
In the current context it means that, now that the barrier (aka: “Apartheid Wall”) makes suicide terror too difficult, Hamas fires rockets continuously and episodically at Israeli civilians. And proud of it.
Most people, having been given the “racist alert” were so shocked at the possible description of the Palestinian people as rabid pit bulls, didn’t read any more than this. But Pessin’s subsequent comments constitute the most interesting part of the post. It describes the people who call on Israel to let the rabid pit bull out of its cage (e.g., end the blockade).
He then describes two kinds of people who support that “humanitarian” discourse.
You may call for this release because you are yourself a rabid pit bull protesting your co-specimen’s detention, or because you are a well-meaning liberal hearted animal rights person. But you are demanding the same thing.
This describes perfectly and prophetically, the combination of forces that, seven months later, attacked this post and drove its composer from the “excellently inclusive” campus that ConnColl told everyone they had created and were defending by excluding Pessin. It can be understood in terms of the Emperor’s New Clothes, with the small but significant difference deriving from the fact that it’s not a joke about vanity, but an imperial procession of hatred that promotes the very poison its dupes believe they denounce.
On the one hand, the revolutionaries, people like Khandaker, letter writers Fratt and Garb, and Ciancollo and Raizen, the school newspaper editor Zuraw-Friedland, are those who actually do sympathize with the rabid pit bull, Hamas, whom they see a the brave David, resisting Israeli imperialism. Already in High School, Khandaker founded a chapter of SJP (Students for Just Us in Palestine). Once in the spotlight, she hastily took down her facebook posts to prevent people from realizing/claiming that she embraced hate speech drawn from the same sources as Hamas’ genocidal jihadi ideology. These “revolutionaries,” “social justice warriors,” were the tailors of this particular naked procession, orchestrating the collective folly from the student press.
On the other, the well-meaners, including the President and Dean (naked emperors), who strove as best they knew how, to promote “inclusive excellence” and to oppose “dehumanizing” “hate speech.” This collective delusion first spread among the courtiers (the faculty) and then, among the larger student body, by now thoroughly intimidated by the activists who made any objection a target of public derision, any criticism of this campaign of outrage, as a disgusting manifestation of racism.
This is classic humanitarian racism. On the one hand, HRs hold whites to high standards, and loudly denounce them for failing to reach the bar they impose. On the other, they treat people of color as having no responsibility for their acts, as if they were forces of nature to be placated, rather than moral agents capable of reasoning.
Humanitarian racists uphold these attitudes not in principle – heaven forbid they condescend to the natives! – but in their behavior. As Charles Jacobs discovered in the 1990s, what moves the “human rights community” to outrage is not the suffering of the victim, not even the victim at all, but the perp: White? Outrage! POC? Embarrassed Silence.
In principle, HRs are anti-racists. And yet, for reasons they need to examine, they are extremely reluctant to ask even a fraction of those anti-racist principles from their colored friends. Intersectional theory makes it easy to insist that blacks cannot be racists or semites (Arabs) be anti-semitic.
At Connecticut College in the Spring of 2015, this humanitarian racism governed the behavior of the vast majority of campus public opinion. The controversy concerned the conflict between Israel and her neighbors, and the positions of the players all align with HR. In the 21st century, autonomous Jews (Israelis) are double white, while Palestinians are double-POC. Thus a profoundly contorted exegesis claiming hate speech could drive a Zionist faculty member from campus for [alleged] hate speech and provoke a paroxysm of passionate anti-hatred, but not a word was said about the staggering hate speech that fills the discourse of Hamas, and for which Hamas and its promoters need to answer.
At ConnColl, it’s doubtful most of the faculty even knew about this, or the fact that Hamas uses the most racist forms of “animal-human” analogy – Jews as apes and pigs. Certainly the readers of the NYT and listeners of NPR, would not know about this. Had Pessin a chance to speak, they might have heard something about the demonstrable penchant for the worst kind of hate speech among Israel’s enemies, and the more religious (Hamas), the more hysterical.
But could they have listened? what could they do with that knowledge? Challenge their young firebrand Lamiya Khandaker? No, we give her a “Scholar Activist Award.”
How could they have listened when it might mean recognizing that Bibi Netanyahu actually has a moral challenge addressed directly to them.
Anyway, how could they continue to tower over Pessin morally, in their inclusive excellence? Just as the Global Progressive Left towers over Israel in their moral indignation.
Not surprisingly, these dynamics are at play in much of academia today. Indeed, the degree to which Jewish students are silenced and Israel’s critics empowered by BDS activity, led one critic to write of the “Jewish exception to free speech on campus.”
One need only contrast the treatment of Joy Karega, WOC, at Vassar College, with Pessin’s treatment at ConnColl. With Karega, we have a stark case. She lives in a feverish world of malevolent Jewish global conspiracy and recycled blood libels. Her view of the Jews shares much with Hamas. It takes not exegetical pirouettes here to show the malice and scandalous lack of academic standards in treating evidence.
And yet, when caught expounding this hate speech, her university defended her right to free speech, none of her colleagues went on record to rebuke her (cf. Pessin’s own department), and until there was heavy pressure from trustees and alumni did 174 members of the faculty sign a letter distancing themselves from her rantings. Unlike ConnColl and Pessin, there were no faculty eager to jump on the occasion and rally the flag of anti-racism, they waited patiently while their administration bungled it, and friends, family and alumni made it clear this was really not acceptable.
She’s now on paid suspended leave, pending an investigation. (Hopefully the committee judging the matter will screen for “humanitarian racism.”
Ironically – irony overflows here – it’s the ConnColl “humanitarians” who treated not just Hamas, but the Palestinians, like a pit bull – don’t criticize, don’t hold them to any standards, don’t upset them. Palestinians (and apparently their supporters, like Khandaker) are, like pit bulls, a force of nature. You should not question them, their grievances, their motives, their narrative, their hatreds.
No wonder people – many people, many progressives, people like Cherie Blair – reason that if the Palestinians hate Israel so much that they’ll send their children to their death in order to blow up Israelis, Israel must have done terrible things to them. No wonder that the same people, when told that Hamas is part of the same movement of global Jihad, dismiss this as Israeli propaganda.
Otherwise, these humanitarians might have to examine the possibility that the source of this perennial conflict is a hate discourse that seeks to finish Hitler’s job. But that would mean that in order to bring peace, you might have to hold Palestinians to some basic moral standards… something that Humanitarian Racists, again for reasons that deserve articulation, stubbornly refuse to do.
As Pessin noted in his remarks on the Charlie Hebdo affair (which got him in trouble in the first place):
the great challenge for societies committed to liberal democratic values is how to maintain those values, to maximize those values, even toward those who don’t share those values, who are so opposed to those values that they attack them with violence ….
At Connecticut College, in the Spring of 2015, those who claimed to espouse those liberal democratic values, utterly failed that challenge.
Pessin adds, in a final aside:
(And I wonder how heartily you’d demand this if the rabid pit bull was to be released in YOUR neighborhood.)
Here, we’re at the heart of the problem. It’s one thing to Jew-bait when it’s relatively cost-free. But when you join in the apocalyptic narrative of your enemy, just so you can stand on imagined moral heights and piss on autonomous Jews, when you circulate and adopt Jihadi war propaganda as news, it’s quite another…
Because HR’s have no idea what goes on inside Hamas’ world of discourse, having been radically uninformed by the sources they trust, they cannot understand that ISIS and Hamas are part of the same global Jihad, and that their collective targets are unsubjected infidels everywhere. Hence Europe’s confusion when it became the object of that suicidal hatred that, till then, they assumed targeted – deservedly – the Jews.
If the 20th century joke about anti-Semitism being “hating Jews more than absolutely necessary,” then the 21st century version is “Anti-semitism indulging in Jew-hatred even when it’s killing you.”
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