Melanie Phillips: The progressive world – an antechamber to evil

The passivity that greeted British rapper Wiley’s brazen Jew-hatred has shocked many Jews into concluding that a line has now been crossed.

By Melanie Phillips, JNS

After days of anti-Semitic rants on social media, the “Grime” rapper Wiley has finally been barred from Twitter and Facebook following outrage by Jews and others that he was allowed to use these platforms for his vicious incitement.

This episode was particularly chilling. It involved a sustained onslaught of anti-Jewish invective by a prominent public figure who described Jews as “cowards and snakes,” likened them to the Ku Klux Klan and suggested they should be shot.

He could do this with impunity because no one saw fit to stop him until protests had escalated into a 48-hour boycott of Twitter. Days of brazen incitement against Jews had elicited merely indifference from content providers or even attracted support.

Indeed, after Wiley was banned from social media, he was given yet another platform. In an interview in Britain’s black community newspaper The Voice, he accused the Jews of using black people as slaves in the music and entertainment industry—to which his interviewer wondered: “Maybe it’s a discussion that needs to be had?”

The passivity that greeted Wiley’s brazen Jew-hatred has shocked many Jews into concluding that a line has now been crossed.

Wiley, however, may be an egregious offender but he is far from alone. Social media is awash with anti-Jewish bigotry and incitement. Few in politics or the mainstream media pay it much attention.

Yet people with conservative opinions or who resist the cultural bullying aimed at overthrowing core Western values find themselves abruptly “canceled” and treated as social pariahs.

Meanwhile, anarchy and anti-white violence have been consuming various American cities.

In Seattle this week, 59 police officers were injured by a mob throwing rocks and explosive devices. In Chicago, gang warfare has combined with anti-police protests to achieve record levels of deaths and violent crime. Portland, Ore., has been subjected to more than seven weeks of violence targeting federal and city authorities and institutions, with repeated attempts to burn down the courthouse.

According to Portland reporter Andy Ngo: “They’ve made it a game to lure law-enforcement officers out of buildings so they can assault them with blinding lasers, paint, rocks and other weapons.”

The ostensible spark, the killing of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer on May 25, is no longer even the pretense of an excuse. The self-declared aim of these rioters is to attack the police and civic institutions in order to overturn white society.

Democrat municipal leaders whose cities have been engulfed by violence for weeks have allowed this criminal disorder to continue, sometimes even preventing their own police forces from using approved restraining techniques.

Instead, they attack President Donald Trump for having eventually sent in federal troops to try to quell the violence, preposterously accusing him of seeking to impose martial law.

The Democrats’ support for the enemies of American values was on shocking display at this week’s hearing of the House Judiciary Committee where the Attorney General, William Barr, was constantly barracked and interrupted.

The committee watched footage of the mayhem in Oregon. Led by Rep. Jerry Nadler, who had previously been caught on camera describing the violence in Portland as “a myth,” the Democrats failed to show any concern over the disorder or offer any support for the police who had been under attack from knives, fireworks, petrol bombs, rocks and lasers.

Instead, Nadler said Barr had “endangered Americans and violated their constitutional rights by flooding federal law enforcement into the streets of American cities … to forcefully and unconstitutionally suppress dissent.”

To which Barr said precisely what needed to be said: “Federal courts are under attack. Since when is it OK to try and burn down a federal court?”

Revolutionaries, tyrants and other criminals are allowed to abuse power and cause mayhem when others passively stand by or even condone what they are doing.

The movie Mr. Jones, which has just started streaming on Amazon, shows how the monstrous crimes of Stalin were covered up in the West.

The movie focuses on The New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who ensured that the death by mass starvation of millions of Russian peasants as a result of Stalin’s grain seizures was sanitized and denied for his paper’s readers.

At the Times today, history is being repeated. Bari Weiss, who resigned as a senior writer and editor because the paper enforced a conformity of views and whose colleagues reacted to her proud Zionist sympathies by sneering that she was “writing about the Jews again,” has been replaced by an extreme Israel-basher, Max Strasser.

This is in line with the paper’s practice of systematically pumping out falsehoods about Israel, sanitizing Palestinian Jew-hatred and getting Jews to attack other Jews so it cannot be accused of anti-Semitism.

As Mr. Jones records, the monstrous abuses under Stalinism were ignored, winked at or actively supported not just by debauched cynics like Duranty, but by those in thrall to the belief that “for all its flaws,” communism offered the best hope for making a better world.

Progressive circles have never admitted their own part in sanitizing, and thus helping perpetuate, Stalin’s crimes against humanity. They can’t because they can never admit they are not the unchallengeable embodiment of virtue.

That enduring moral blindness means the progressive world is fated to replicate its role as the antechamber to evil. Today, that’s why it supports the anti-white racists of Black Lives Matter. It’s why the universities—the supposed crucibles of reason—have turned into cauldrons of intimidation and censorship.

It’s why we have descended into a nightmarish Orwellian world in which those deemed to be part of a victim group present lies as truth, justice as injustice and their own anti-white racism as anti-racism.

And it’s why Israel-bashing has become the poster cause of the Western left, and open season has been declared against the Jews.

This way of thinking now dominates progressive politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular. That’s why Democrat politicians are tacitly or actively supporting violent attacks on civic order.

As Barr observed: “This is the first time in my memory that the leaders of one of our great two political parties—the Democratic Party—are not coming out and condemning mob violence and the attack on federal courts. Why can’t we just say, you know, violence against federal courts has to stop? Can we hear like that?”

Jews are directly in the cross-hairs of those who are intent on overthrowing Western values. That’s because Judaism, mediated through Christianity, gave the west its civilized moral precepts.

So attacks on Jews are symbiotically connected to left-wing attacks on western civilization.

Of course, there are still decent Democrats and those who remain sympathetic to Israel. But in general, the Democrats, like Britain’s Labour Party and other progressive folk, have drunk the anti-Western Kool-Aid.

The tragedy is that so many Jews are incapable of seeing this. So they’ll continue to vote Democrat, just as they’ll continue to read The New York Times.

Reaction against the onslaught on American and Western values is what brought Trump to power. Many are outraged and exasperated by him. I share many of their criticisms.

But the choice at this coming presidential election is a fateful one; and for all who care about protecting American and Western core values, as well as Israel and the Jewish people, a Democrat victory is much to be feared.

anti-SemitismBlack Lives MatterDemocratic partyUS violence