Antisemitism and consistency: Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ilhan Omar

 OK, fine.  I'll go back to politics for a Sunday post.  But I'll be quick about it.

A few days ago, while addressing the hypocrisy of the left on bigotry, I mentioned their ongoing tolerance of Ilhan Omar despite her gross antisemitism.*  I restated my indecent, counterfactual proposal:  what if a white, male, Republican said the kinds of things that Ilhan Omar says?  And... roll the tape of Marjorie Taylor Greene saying some crazy shit about space lasers, because holy shit can she turn "the crazy" up to 11.

OK, now I'm a big fan of C.S. Friedman's This Alien Shore, in which the Gueran culture does not conceive of mental illnesses, learning disabilities, 'n such.  Instead, people just wear face paint to indicate how their different minds work, because their ancestors' minds were all altered by the first generation of FTL technology.  But even the Guerans would look at Greene and say, "that woman is just nuts."

And we observe what the left thinks about antisemitic conspiracy theories when they come from a conservative white woman!  The left is a little less tolerant of those conspiracy theories.  Now, granted, Greene and her crazy space lasers are a little more... creative than Omar and her money-based conspiratorial antisemitism, but still.  Two Members of Congress, both raging antisemites.  And not just Uncle Leo-accused antisemites.  The real deal.

So here's the thing, lefties.  Do you want moral standing when you go after Greene?  Deal with Ilhan Omar.

And the funny thing here-- ha, ha-- is that there are lefties who recognize, at a basic level, that there's something fishy.  Look around and you will see lefties going after Marjorie Taylor Greene, and then, in the next breath, saying, "hey, remember Ilhan Omar and the furor over her?"

Yeah, remember Omar?  What was your stance on her?  Yes, there were conservatives who tried to exploit her antisemitism for political gain.  And they are tolerating Greene.  Yup.  Hypocrites.  But if you don't deal with Omar, and you go after Greene, then you are guilty of the same hypocrisy!

OK, I realize that pointing out hypocrisy in politics is about as challenging as pointing out grammatical errors in social media posts.  Nevertheless, the modern left sees itself as the bigotry police.  Modern day woke-ism and the social justice warrior phenomenon define themselves as a quest to stamp out bigotry, yet the contrast between how the SJWs treat Marjorie Taylor Greene and how they have treated Ilhan Omar demonstrates several points.

First, to the modern left, antisemitism remains a lesser bigotry.  There are violations of the rules of woke-ism that are not to be tolerated by anyone under any circumstances.  Regardless of how many intersectional traits Ilhan Omar has, there are certain rules of speech that, were she to break them, she would be cast as the demonic spawn of Hitler.  The big thing right now is on gender and transgender issues.  Cross a line there, and you're toast with the left.  Antisemitism?  Meh.  Forgivable.

Yet this is conditional.  As we see.  The left claims to oppose bigotry, but... antisemitism is bigotry.  Why tolerate it from Omar and not from Greene?  Because it isn't really about bigotry.  It's about picking sides.  If you pick apart the central ideology of woke-ism, everything in politics and society can be explained by the binary of oppressor and oppressed.  Is the world actually that simple?  No, but simple minds require simple models.  Anyway, if that's how you think the world works, and you think that "oppressed" means "good," then you just ask yourself, "who is the oppressed side here," and that's the side you take, always and forever.  That's woke-ism, in Pliny's nutshell.

Omar gets a pass on antisemitism because a) in the binary categorization of oppressor and oppressed, she gets categorized as "oppressed," b) her antisemitism is rooted in her hatred of the state of Israel, which means that in the oppressor-oppressed dichotomization, she is siding with the oppressed (the Palestinians), and therefore the good, over the oppressors (the state of Israel), and therefore the evil.  Follow?  See, this is how the fucked-of-wits justify bigoted conspiracy theories and the toleration thereof.

Marjorie Taylor Greene?  She just thinks that there are space lasers, and... um... she's nuts.  You can't put her antisemitism into the kind of silly, oppressor-oppressed framework that wokesters use to justify Ilhan Omar's conspiratorial antisemitism.  She's just coo-coo.

Of course, that conditionality-- the oppressor/oppressed framework within which Omar is working-- is directly related to Omar's partisanship and ideology, which is built into how I constructed the counterfactual before we got our roll-the-tape moment with Marjorie Taylor Greene.  And the sheer craziness of her variation does make this a little weirder.

Nevertheless, any leftie staring agog at Marjorie Taylor Greene and saying, "but... Ilhan Omar!"  Yes.  So do something about her too.

At the very least, the contrast should lay bare the emptiness of woke-ism's supposed opposition to bigotry.  That ain't what it's about, and it never was.  Show me a social justice warrior who cares about Ilhan Omar's antisemitism.  C'mon.  Do it.  I can't stand Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I can't stand the SJWs either.  Havin' another Holden Caulfield moment here, and I never liked Salinger, even when I had age-appropriate teen angst bullshit.  Unfortunately, there isn't a similarly iconic character for "grumpy, old codger," despite the fact that the validity of the complaints will not diminish over time.

*As point of petty linguistics, you will often see the term hyphenated so that the "s" can be capitalized.  I am occasionally guilty of over-hyphenation, so when presented with options, I consciously choose non-hyphenated terms.  Wait a minute...  Fuck.  With a capital "F."