Cancel culture never applies to anti-Semitism

For years now, those made uneasy by the bullying, intellectually dishonest and manipulative tendencies of the illiberal and identity-obsessed Left have been sneered at for raising concerns.

Stop snivelling about free speech, they are told. You’re just part of a right-wing conspiracy, manipulating reality to wreak evil on oppressed minorities. And what are you complaining about anyway? Conservatives hold high political office.

As the headline on the most recent offering from slippery social justice warrior-in-chief Owen Jones whined: “The Right are in power everywhere, but can’t stop playing the victim.”

That’s certainly not how I, or a growing number of shocked bystanders of diverse political stripes, see things. Yes, the Right holds formal power in a handful of civilised nations: the UK, the US, Australia, Israel. But it’s not “playing the victim”.

It’s rather that, when it comes to influence over culture and our everyday lives, it’s the unelected hard Left that increasingly wields the weaponry, and it’s chilling. The elected parties make actual laws, but it is the illiberal Left now making all the other laws; those we increasingly must live by if we want to work, express ourselves, and keep our friends.

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the ascendancy of the mass anti-racism movement, the grip on what we are allowed to say and think has tightened still further.

It all finally became too much for a wide range of intellectuals and personages – many once standard-bearers of the Left – resulting in an open letter to

Harper’s Magazine on July 7, denouncing the “vogue for public shaming and ostracism”. Signatories included JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis and Steven Pinker (see p21).

The backlash was immediate, and predictable, with signatories mocked for being privileged

crybabies, and worse, for leveraging it all for personal gain.

But I was particularly interested by another highprofile analysis of the tyrannical groupthink at the pinnacle of supposedly liberal society. For this one showed with clarity the black heart of anti-Semitism that beats in plain sight amid all the virtue signalling.

Bari Weiss, the 36-year-old author of How to Fight Anti

Semitism, announced her resignation from The New York

Times, where she had been hired to bring in diversity of opinion as an op-ed editor and writer.

The open letter in which she described her reasons for leaving was forceful, clear and plainspeaking. “My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views,” she wrote. Notably, that bullying often took the form of anti-Semitism: “They have called me a Nazi and a racist,” Weiss wrote. “I have learnt to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again’.”

Weiss’s letter highlighted a now-familiar irony: not only does anti-Semitism not count in the new reckoning of racial harms, but Jews are seen as the enemy. She noted that colleagues could “publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. [It never is].” Indeed: cancel culture never applies to anti-Semitism.

The responses to Weiss’s letter made me feel even queasier. Writing in Forbes, Dani Di Placido was just one writer who managed to distort the real outrages Weiss had elucidated, and mock her reasons for resigning: “Bari

Weiss, famous for trying to silence professors during her college years … recently quit her position at The New York Times because of perceived harassment and the supposed self-censorship of the newspaper, apparently the fault of Twitter.”

The jibe about silencing professors is a reference to Weiss’s involvement in calling out the bullying she experienced, as a pro-Israel undergraduate, by pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia University.

Di Placido’s sneer about silencing professors just offers another example of how the Left now operates: when a Jew calls out flagrant anti-Semitism, that Jew is accused of “silencing” criticism about Israel. This is a mendacious trick.

In the UK, of course, the idea that those who call out antiSemitism are conspiring for personal gain against the true warriors of truth and justice (the PC mob) gained significant ground under Jeremy Corbyn.

And even though he’s gone, the idea persists. Last week saw his allies throwing tantrums as Labour seemed set to apologise to anti-Semitism whistle-blowers for the harassment and bullying they faced under the former leader. Corbyn’s hangers-on still think the whistle-blowers’ evidence of anti-Jewish culture under the dear leader, revealed in a Panorama programme last year, was a cynical attempt to smear the party, rather than the sign of a party gone rotten to the core.

The illiberal Left, obsessed with policing thought, speech, art and expression, insists it wants justice for the oppressed. It is a grotesque irony that this campaign requires treating Jews just like our persecutors always have: liars who – no matter what we say or what happens to us – are always on the side of manipulation and greed.

A culture that allows this kind of thinking about Jews to flourish, or that tolerates the kind of double standards experienced by Bari Weiss, is a culture that needs a reboot – fast.

There is a nowfamiliar irony in the new reckoning of racial harms