Transcription
Hey everyone. So now they're mashing up the Palestinian flag with the Pride flag. [cheering]
I'm Rich Lowry of National Review and that was a scene at the Seattle Pride March. Someone had created a combination of the Palestinian flag with the gay pride flag. This wouldn't seem a natural association, as has been pointed out many times before, given how gays are treated in the Palestinian authorities and elsewhere in the Muslim world. But it's a real thing, raising the question, why are the queers pro-Palestine?
This was brought home by a viral incident a couple days ago. Scott Weiner, the ludicrously progressive California state senator who's running to fill Nancy Pelosi's House seat, was at a trans march. He's gay and Jewish and got harassed by pro-Palestinian activists concerned that he wasn't quick enough to denounce Israel's military action in Gaza as a genocide. And this is what one of the activists, one of Weiner's harassers, shouted at him: "You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel, you piece of >>"
It's worth noting, by the way, that Scott Weiner is one of the foremost advocates of radicalism on trans and gender issues in the state of California. And that provided zero shield to him from this kind of harassment at this trans event over his position on Gaza, which, by the way, is not an extreme position at all. At a primary debate forum, he demurred from calling what was happening in Gaza a genocide. Then he quickly backtracked, recorded a video shortly afterwards saying, "You know what? I've considered it carefully some more. Yeah, it is a genocide." So he went along with the crowd and with the mob, but that was no protection. That just, that hesitation is enough for him to be denounced as a witch in public by these activists who sought to exclude him successfully from this trans march and said he's no longer queer.
Now, how does that scan? How can you say, "Well, you're no longer queer because you're pro-Israel"? It sounds superficially a little bit like saying, "Oh, you're no longer straight because you oppose the Trump administration's recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Gaza, the Golan Heights," or whatever it is. But this does actually make a lot of sense, unfortunately, because both the queer identity and being pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas, they're transgressive and they're pushing back against and seeking to undermine Western norms.
Now, I'm not saying this about all gay people. Not at all. In fact, it's very notable at that event, the activists weren't saying, "We're queer, you're no longer gay." They're saying, "You are no longer queer," a term and an identity, if you will, an overused word that is much more transgressive and has a whiff of a revolutionary sensibility about it. If you don't believe me, there was this gay writer who just wrote a piece about this in the New York Times. The author writes, "Queer is often used interchangeably with gay these days. The two words don't mean the same thing. Queer carries an adversarial charge that gay does not. And that charge has a specific intellectual lineage. In 1990, an activist group called Queer Nation published a manifesto exhorting gay people to call themselves queer. His rationale was that gay was a much brighter word and that queer better conveyed the anger and disgust they felt at how society treated gay people as marginal others whose deaths barely mattered."
That sentiment had an understandable resonance at the height of the AIDS epidemic. But the us versus them posture it represented has outlived that crisis. As the queer theorist David Halpern has written, "Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant." So Weiner's tormentors clearly think of queer as a revolt against the established order and think about Hamas in the same way. In their worldview, Israel is Western. Israel is white, which is simplification or deception, but we don't need to get into that right now. Israel is settler-colonialist, which is also wrong. But all this supposedly makes Israel as immoral and restrictive and repressive as the gender binary.
So for the left now, it makes as much sense to be woke and pro-Israel as it would have been back in the day to be woke and pro-apartheid era South Africa. Moreover, implicit in this verbal assault against Scott Weiner, which also had a little bit of a physical element as well, certainly physically intimidating, is the idea that he may not be queer anymore, but he's certainly still a Jew, a suspect status owing to its association with the state of Israel. This represents a major change in how the radical left considers Jewishness and no longer beckons being an outsider and a victim. Instead, it means being an insider and an oppressor. It's no longer an identity at the outskirts of Western civilization. Instead, it's an identity at the very core of Western civilization, representing its very worst colonizing and racist tendencies. So Scott Weiner might be accustomed to considering his Jewishness as part of his intersectionality, something to put on his woke resume, but no longer. Now it means he's a member of a suspect class and will be treated as such.
>> "You do not belong here."
>> "You do not belong here."
>> "You do not belong here, Scott, anymore."
There's been a lot of schadenfreude on the right, by the way, over his treatment. This is the kind of politics that Weiner has tolerated and/or empowered. But I think it's awful. Just mobs are disgusting. And this is typical left-wing mob behavior. A relatively limited number of people accosting Weiner there, but he was physically intimidated for understandable reasons. And then we get the mob demanding that he bend a knee to it. At one point, one of the guys is yelling at him, "Scott, redeem yourself. Say something, Scott." As if he just says a few magic words that the left is enamored of, that would be enough to cleanse his sins.
>> "Scott, say something. Redeem yourself."
And then there's this.
>> "How could [screaming] you do this to San Francisco?"
>> "How could someone like you do this to San Francisco?"
Of course, it's completely absurd to suggest that what Scott Weiner says about the Gaza war, one way or the other, has any concrete effect on anyone in San Francisco, a place that's 7,000 miles from this conflict in the Gaza Strip. And reminds you a little bit of the thinking on college campuses where people maintain that they're somehow physically harmed by speech. Right here, Weiner's ideological sin is doing some sort of concrete damage to San Francisco. And then also there's just this fervor undergirding his assailance here. And this just goes again to how core the issue of being opposed to Israel is and being pro-Hamas is to the left. You can't depart, depart from this orthodoxy. It'd be a little bit like saying after the death of George Floyd, the police are okay. Or it'd be a little bit like saying at that trans march, boys can't be girls. It's something that just can't be tolerated.
So, in all these ways, it actually makes sense that the queers are pro-Palestine, and it's a very bad thing. Hey, by the way, do yourself a favor. Comment, like, subscribe. I guarantee you won't regret it. I'm Rich Lowry.