Another Jewish woman has a hard time understanding that different groups have different interests.
The Coalition of the Fringe (the make-up of all left of center parties in the West) may be fraying.
Last week a Belgian Muslim named Zakia Belkhiri posted a cheeky selfie that nearly broke the social justice internet. Belkhiri, an attractive young hijab-wearing woman, took a picture of herself flashing a peace sign in front of a wall of anti-Muslim protesters. Her sly smile in the face of overwhelming hate caught the attention of millions and the picture went viral. Her message was powerful — the antidote to hate was not more hate, but laughter.
I was one of thousands who shared Belkhiri’s snap on various social media platforms. I’m a part of the Jon Stewart generation. When confronted with the fact-resistant, primal pleasures of hatred (so notably practiced by Fox News) the obvious answer is righteous laughter.
Belkhiri’s photo wasn’t just funny in the way it cut anti-Islamic protesters down to size. There was something moving about the image. The French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas wrote that it is the face-to-face encounter that makes us responsible to each other — “the face is what forbids us to kill.” Belkhiri’s selfie hinted at a vulnerability in tension with the frivolity inherent in the selfie, something that might make each side see each other as human, rather than monolithic. It was a deeply hopeful moment of distinctly contemporary resistance.
Only a few beats in the news cycle later came the disappointment. The inevitably incriminating social media was dug up, complicating the nervy woman in the selfie. Numerous tweets and Facebook posts showed Belkhiri might be against Islamophobia, but also unashamedly dabbling in anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Her most devastating tweet being “Hitler didn’t kill all the Jews, he left some. So we know why he was killing them. #fuckrs.” As the news filtered out about Belkhiri, I was disappointed, but not surprised.
The Belkhiri story illustrates the failure of intersectionality, perhaps the most important critical tool of the New Left.
Intersectional analysis understands oppression as multi-dimensional and privilege as contingent. A white Jewish woman in America may experience white privilege, but she still has to fight against sexism and global anti-Semitism.
Yet, over and over, Jews and Jewish oppression get left out of that intersectional analysis. Jewishness is conflated with whiteness, with the bizarre results of seeing the Holocaust described (and dismissed) in certain circles, as “white on white” crime.
Belkhiri’s stumble wasn’t an exception in the contemporary social justice narrative, it was another example of how the global Left systematically fails to include the Jewish struggle for self-determination both cultural and political within its framework of national and personal liberations.
After World War II, particularly in America, anti-Semitism was often seen as no more than a distasteful kind of bourgeois country club exclusion, a result of Jews’ perceived operationalizing of postwar economic mobility and white privilege. It was not taken seriously as a real threat to individuals, their bodies and livelihoods, or as a threat to a minority group’s right to practice its religious, cultural or national expression.
The New Left has always had its ‘Jewish problem’, something we’re seeing in the latest flap within the British Labour Party. Today it’s often boiled down to the question of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. But the problem isn’t anti-Zionism, it’s the obsessive focus on the Jewish state to the exclusion of much else.