Tea at Trianon: The Hate That Can’t Be Contained

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, December 14, 2020

The Hate That Can’t Be Contained

From The Tablet:

There is a common narrative that circulates in the liberal Jewish community when it comes to anti-Semitism on campus. It goes like this: Jewish students who complain are fragile. They hear the slightest criticism to the pro-Israel orthodoxy they grew up with, the slightest contradiction to all the wonderful things they learned about Israel at summer camp or on Birthright, and their emotions get the better of them and they cry “anti-Semitism!” when none is present at all.

Those who broadcast the stories of troubled Jewish college students? They are right-wing political operatives. They are engaging in smear campaigns against Palestinian liberation movements, blowing up what amount to silly tempests in teapots in order to sell the false and dangerous reality that leftist anti-Semitism is just as big of an issue as right-wing anti-Semitism. This is what I myself used to say. It’s certainly what I assumed when I arrived at school in the fall of 2018.

I landed on campus identified as a progressive activist, ready to spend my weekends marching the streets of D.C. against the Trump administration, against Brett Kavanaugh, against the evils of capitalism and corruption. Of course I had heard rumors of anti-Israel activism that occasionally “crossed a line,” but these stories came from them. You know...The AIPAC Jews, the Trump Jews, the right-wingers.

That was then. Two years later, I am sitting in my childhood bedroom comforting dozens of Jewish students scattered across the country on social media.

On this particular October night, the flashpoint is Northwestern University. There, a student organization called Northwestern University Community Not Cops was ostensibly undertaking an effort to protest the presence of police on campus. Somehow, part of their work involved branding Morty Shapiro, the school’s religiously observant Jewish president, “piggy Morton” and burning a school banner in front of his home. Shapiro accused the organization of anti-Semitism. (Read more.)