The Fish Rots From the Head

By Park Macdougald, THE SCROLL    26 April 2024

The Big Story

• The Columbia tent city, according to the Post, was organized by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Within Our Lifetime (WOL), and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). SJP, in addition to being connected to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood through its founder, Hatem Bazian, is fiscally sponsored by WESPAC, as is WOL. JVP has received significant funding from the Open Society Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Kaphan Foundation, founded by Sheldon Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee.

• SJP, WOL, and JVP have also, according to the Post, received money from the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman, whose Sparkplug Foundation sponsors a variety of anti-Israel and pro-illegal immigration groups.

• WESPAC, which we’ve written about at length before, is headed by Howard Horowitz, the president of a market research firm and a former Orthodox Jew, who is also a member of the New York chapter of JVP. WESPAC has received funding from Tides—a progressive dark-money group aligned with the Obama faction and funded by Soros, Warren Buffett, Pierre Omidyar, and the heir to the Lehman Brothers fortune, Peter Buttenwieser—as well as from the Sparkplug Foundation, the Elias Foundation (which also funds JVP), and the “environmental” group Grassroots International.

• And, just for a sense of how small this world is, Grassroots International received $1.3 million in 2022 from Thousand Currents, which is heavily funded by Peter Buffett’s NoVo Foundation—which also funds Tides—and acted as the fiscal sponsor of Black Lives Matter between 2016 and 2020, until passing that role off to Tides. Until the summer of 2020, when the group deleted this information from its website, the vice chair of Thousand Currents’ board was Susan Rosenberg, a former Weather Underground member sentenced to 58 years in prison for her role in the 1981 Brinks robbery—only to be pardoned by Bill Clinton.

One curious element of all this is that many, though not all, of the oligarchs funding anti-Israel radicalism are Jewish. We mention that to frame some thoughts on the campus protests sent to us by Tablet’s geopolitical analyst, who began with the observation that these protests, unlike the 1968 Columbia occupation, involve only a few hundred students, plus outside supporters. So why can’t Columbia administrators simply tell them to shove it? Here’s our analyst:

This is what push-button activism looks like. The problem, for the Columbia administration, is that the protesters and their funders are ultimately a Democratic Party constituency. In theory, if you push hard enough, the entire constituency has its “rights” endangered.

Mau-mauing the Jew is their job. It’s an organizing tool and proof of authenticity. Constituencies don’t exist in nature; they have to be organized. The new Democratic Party is a creation of head organizer Barack Obama and the billionaire foundationland that sponsored his rise. The constituencies of the old Democratic Party needed to therefore be replaced by new constituencies loyal to the new party. Especially since the old constituencies were old—reflecting social constructs from a century ago.

So, in the new dispensation, Jews = Palestinians, Gays = Trans, Auto workers = grad students, Italians/Irish = undocumented migrants, etc. What’s new is that these groups are all top-down constructions paid for by new oligarchs. But this also reflects the change in society. Jewish oligarchs pay to replace the Jews with Palestinians because, in their minds, both groups are fictions. They’re just sectarian-labeled vote containers. The point is who controls them. It’s an antisemitic conspiracy of Jews against Jews, backed by the party.

The post-Obama Democratic Party has a different operating system with different functional categories. That operating system is identity politics and symbolic sectarian representation, which makes it a perfect fit for an oligarchical surveillance state. The party can give out any title or credential it wants. Here’s Harvard. Here’s a Pulitzer Prize. Here’s Hollywood. Here’s a Ph.D in astrophysics. Meanwhile, we set the rules and we own the machines, which produce infinite amounts of money, which we also keep. The key word here is equity—a classic banker word, repurposed to also mean “justice,” which means “sectarian representation.”

It’s also why “Queers for Palestine”—or a “he/she/they” student protester declaring that “Zionists don’t deserve to live”—makes perfect sense within the structure of the party, which positions itself as “mediator” among various synthetic identity groups that, in reality, the party creates and controls. (Thus the investments in Astro-Turfing or co-opting party-approved “representatives” for each constituency: BLM and the NAACP for Black people, Stop AAPI Hate for Asians, GLAAD and Human Rights Campaign for “queers,” JVP and Bend the Arc for Jews.)

What is hard in this moment is nailing down precisely how this system operates. What are the dynamics between the party and its “ideology,” the power of the security apparatus, and the class interests of the oligarchy? Those are the meaningful players: oligarchs, the security apparatus, the party. What reduces to what? What is a function of what? Whose interests are ultimately primary? What happens in a contest for power?

The model is proto-fascism—the formation of Mussolini’s Italy or Nazi Germany or the Bolshevik state. There is too much power in America for some force not to make massive gains by consolidating it into a system. That’s what we are seeing. There’s a physics to how systems are consolidated. We are stage X of a formative moment. We have examples of such moments going back to Greece and Rome, which is why we can still read Aristotle and it doesn’t sound like gibberish.

Or, as Tablet’s Tony Badran put it in an X post on Monday: “Although we intuit it, it’s important to understand that sectarian structures, including militias, are organized from the top.”

The Rest

Zionists, they don’t deserve to live comfortably. Zionists don’t deserve to live. The same way we’re very comfortable accepting that Nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live. Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world. If we’re truly living life and living in this world in order to achieve peace, the existence of Nazis, white supremacists, Zionists—these are all the same people—the existence of them and the projects they have built, i.e. Israel, it’s all antithetical to peace. So yes, I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.

James is the “cackling nonbinary” individual (The Daily Mail) who led the crowd ejecting “Zionists” from the Columbia “solidarity encampment” in a widely circulated social media video from earlier this week, and he/she/they has also frequently spoken to the press on behalf of the protesters. He/she/they made the above remarks in a livestream of a disciplinary hearing with Columbia authorities over a social media post in which he/she/they had warned “Zionists” that “I fight to kill.”

We thank James for connecting all the various anti-Zionist themes we’ve been attempting to address over the past seven months: Holocaust inversion, Soviet anti-Zionism, American “antiracist” discourse, and a general conviction that Jews should die—not because they are Jews, but because inherently they are “racists” and “Nazis.”

But we fear he/she/they has gone too far. The elite consensus that consolidated over the past decade was merely that “racists”—initially defined to include every American who voted for the opposition party, now expanded to include Jews who support Jewish self-determination—should be silenced, shunned, fired, erased from culture, and physically menaced for appearing in public, until such time as they die off in sufficient numbers to be simply ignored. But killing them? That would be extreme.

“I am frustrated that words I said in an Instagram Live video have become a distraction from the movement for Palestinian liberation. I misspoke in the heat of the moment, for which I apologize.” James said in a Friday statement. In the same statement, he/she/they wrote, “Zionism is an ideology that necessitates the genocide of the Palestinian people.” So he/she/they is very, very sorry for saying that genocidaires should die.

The Biden administration will not sanction the Netzah Yehuda Battalion after all—even as it continues to publicly tout that the unit committed “gross human-rights violations” in the West Bank, according to a Friday report in ABC News. The sanctions will not be imposed, according to White House officials, because of steps Israel is taking to address the problem; they added that it’s “not uncommon for the U.S. to work with countries through a process known as ‘remediation’ that can encourage foreign countries to weed out bad actors within their militaries.” In other words, this whole stupid saga was a messaging campaign, the point of which was to broadcast that the administration’s official position is that the IDF violates human rights. The White House is going to ignore these alleged violations of U.S. and international law, however, because of its ironclad commitment to Israeli security, while leaving it to surrogates in the media to “connect” the “dots” and claim that Washington is funding human-rights abuses by fascist Jews who want to drag American boys into another Middle Eastern war.

More on that note: National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Wednesday that the United States, joined by the European Union and United Nations, is demanding “answers” from the IDF on Hamas’ “deeply disturbing” claims to have discovered an IDF-created mass grave outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis—a claim that had already been thoroughly debunked by open-source conflict monitors on Monday. Perhaps, for its next act, the White House could ask Benjamin Netanyahu if he’s stopped beating his wife yet.

U.S. troops have begun constructing Biden’s humanitarian pier in Gaza—with protection from troops from the same Israeli military that, according to U.S. officials, commits “gross human-rights violations” and may be conducting mass executions of hospital patients. According to a Thursday statement from the Pentagon, U.S. military vessels have “begun to construct the initial stages of the temporary pier and causeway at sea.” The site where the pier will touch land came under mortar from Hamas on Thursday; no U.S. personnel were present, but a spokesman for the terror group said Wednesday that it would “resist” any foreign military presence, according to The Times of Israel. TOI also reported that “thousands” of IDF soldiers, as well as Israeli Navy and Air Force units, would protect the U.S. troops setting up the pier and provide “security and logistics support” for the initiative. Is it a bad look for the United States to sandbag the IDF while simultaneously seeking its protection? Probably. But as Tablet Deputy Editor Jeremy Stern, a U.S. military veteran, put it to us:

It’s probably good for everyone to understand that the U.S. military that went through Saddam’s Iraq like shit through a goose in three weeks is gone, and as Edward Luttwak keeps saying there is literally no American general or even field-grade officer alive who’s fought in a real war. We have bombers and some relevant tech but there’s only one actually formidable land army in the region, and it’s currently protecting helpless Americans struggling to nail planks of wood together on a beach. Not an altogether terrible look for the IDF even if it’s demented on a policy level.

To which Tony Badran added:

What’s pathetic about it is that it’s the empire who is propping up a hostile province while also demanding that another province provide the manpower and conscripts to defend the imperial project—at the latter province’s expense. It’s demented and pitiful at the same time. Like Caligula.