Everyone's a bigot

Typical American madness in 2019: the other day Chelsea Clinton visited a vigil for victims of the Christchurch massacre to pay her respects and make a show of solidarity with the victims of Islamophobic bigotry. At the vigil, Clinton was confronted by two NYU students, one Jewish and the other Muslim, who accused her of complicity in the massacre.

Here's how the students got there. A few weeks ago, Clinton got involved in the controversy over Rep. Omar of Minnesota's remarks about the "allegiance" of some American politicians toward Israel. Omar was accused of anti-semitism because the charge of "dual loyalty" goes back among anti-semites to before there was a Jewish state. Allegiance, apparently, is a loaded word. The dictionary defines it as loyalty to a group or cause, though it also has a context of subordination that partly explains the outrage. Historically, however, Omar can be compared to Irish-American politicians of a century or more ago who probably accused American politicians and other prominent people of allegiance to Great Britain when those people failed to support the cause of Irish independence. No one would have accused those Irish orators of bigotry, and those who defended Omar are right to question why she was accused of bigotry merely for questioning the congressional consensus on Palestine. The answer, so the NYU students tell us, is that critics of Omar are bigots themselves. It is not merely an exaggeration or a slander to call critics of American support for Israel anti-semites, they say. In particular, when the critic is, like Omar, a Muslim, it is bigoted and specifically Islamophobic to call her an anti-semite. Putting it another way, we've reached the point where calling someone a bigot is itself bigoted, depending on who's accusing and who's accused.

While the students aren't so stupid as to suggest that Clinton's comments, among so many criticizing Omar, had a causal effect on events in Christchurch, they do insist on their prerogative, if not their obligation, to confront anti-Muslim bigotry wherever they find it. Chelsea Clinton was a target of opportunity, but she also shares responsibility, as far as the students are concerned, with "enabling" Islamophobia by criticizing anti-semitism. It was necessary to confront her, they say, because Clinton, like nearly all critics of Omar, has failed to apologize to the congresswoman. In effect, they say that you cannot criticize Omar on the subject of Palestine without being a bigot yourself or contributing to global Islamophobia.

What we have here, basically, is tit-for-tat tactics in the anti-Zionist camp. Having heard ad nauseam that criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, they now claim, for all intents and purposes, that criticism of the Palestinian cause is Islamophobic. What, then, if you don't think that Omar deserved all the criticism she received -- that she was within her rights as an American and member of Congress regardless of the thin skins of Zionists, but that her self-appointed defenders at NYU are idiots? They're women and I'm not, so maybe that explains it. They're Jewish and Muslim and I'm more or less an atheist, so maybe that explains it. It can't just be because one fine day they did something that can be described objectively as really stupid and self-defeating, could it?  Of course not. This is America, where people only disagree with you if they hate you and, accordingly, everyone hates everyone else....