Give 'Em A Mantra...

Humans like patterns. They make us feel secure, they dampen uncertainty, and they simplify our lives.

They also serve as substitutes for actual thinking, unfortunately.

The manipulators among us figured this out a long time ago, and routinely introduce patterns in the form of slogans, phrases, or chants when they want to steer us in a certain direction and keep us from questioning what they've told us.

Behold, the latest:

Colonizer!

The term is meant to challenge the purportedly grave injustice of white Europeans expanding into the Western Hemisphere, into Africa, and into wherever else the in-crowd wants to get cranky about. It implies malevolence, destruction, injustice, and appropriation of more sorts than I can count. It became fashionable when the Hate-America-First crowd discovered the fiction that is the 1619 Project and the rest of the reparations folderol, but has now been redirected at Jews who dared to convert a barren stretch of desert into a thriving nation in the Middle East.

Seems that Jews are "colonizers" of land that rightfully belongs to... a heterogeneous amalgam of a "nationality" that's a subset of a traditionally nomadic people. No matter that the tribes of Israel trace back millennia in that shard of land, and no matter that the best we can do in terms of placing "Palestine" is to Philistia, which happens to be where Gaza is today.

Gaza could, by the way have peace tomorrow if its citizens arrested, tried, and imprisoned the Hamas terrorists, acknowledged Israel's right to exist, and embraced a multicultural existence (like Israel has today). Gazans don't want that sort of peace, however, nor do their supporters around the world. They want "from the river to the sea," i.e. all the land that is the nation of Israel. Moreso, they want it exclusively, purged of Jews as Gaza has been. And purged of Christians, by the way.

Any thinking person can figure this out in a matter of minutes.

That's where the mantra comes in.

By chanting "Colonizer!" in its various forms, many clog up their neural pathways, and shut off the rational part of their brains. If you challenge these people when their blood is up, they'll just keep shouting you down (or worse, sadly). If you engage these people in quieter moments as to the barbarity of the Hamas attack, the elimination of Israel as a nation, and the extermination of the seven-plus million Jews who live there, and you're apt to get a deflection, a mealy-mouthed concurrence, and a denial.

These are the people who don't fully embrace antisemitism but have vague tendencies that way because it's required for membership in their in-groups. These are the "useful idiots" that have been indoctrinated by various more genuinely antisemitic people and groups. They fill out the pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas ranks without fully pondering the depravity of their position. Among them you will find rejections of plain fact and overt evidence, because most of them can't handle the dissonance of siding with baby beheaders.

This is why it's a waste of time to try and debunk "Colonizer!" in your encounters with them.

What you must realize is that it's not actually about colonization. That's just the excuse they use to help them sleep at night. It's about their own narcissism. It's about imposing their preferred “snapshot geography” on a region they know too little about. It's about standing in favor of people who don't even remotely share their values and who would mistreat and oppress them in the blink of an eye. And, yes, there's plenty of antisemitism there, even in those who pretend to a difference between Jews and Zionists.

Meanwhile, there are the full-blown antisemites, the people who have decided to let their Jew hatred fly. People are unveiling their bigotries, and we should take note. Joining the ranks of the academic Best-and-Brightest in that naked bigotry are the rest of America's far left, including the self-styled socialists in Congress. Those members of "The Squad" have been obfuscating their bigotry for years, but have mostly stopped pretending now that Israel and Gaza are in a hot war. They've chosen their side, and every demand for a cease-fire serves as an affirmation of what we've long suspected and mostly known.

Trying to rationally rebut them is, as I noted above, folly. Don't bother with the maps, don't bother with history. They don't care. Rebutting "Colonizer!" in that manner serves only to accept their discussion boundaries and language mandates.

Barbarity doesn't win hearts and minds unless those hearts and minds are already full of hate for the victims. Demands for a ceasefire, which would cement for Hamas a major victory, are also an affirmation. Arguments that Hamas and the people of Gaza are not the same ignores both the reality that Gazans voted Hamas into power and that neither Hamas nor the Palestinians in general afford that distinction to Israelis. As in, murdering children and babies is not an act of war, it's an act of unmitigated hatred. Hatred that virtually requires being taught from infancy.

Which brings the next point. What would happen if Israel packed it in? If the seven million Jews living in Israel up and left, as the "decolonizers" demand? Setting aside the matter of where they'd go, current events tell us that not only would that departure not end the hate, but that they'd be hounded across the planet. The incidents at Cooper Union in NYC, where Jewish students had to lock themselves in a library against a pro-Palestinian mob, and in Russia's Dagestan region, where Muslims and other antisemites surrounded an airplane that had arrived from Tel Aviv, aren't skew data points. Blood lust is up, hatreds have been unmasked and unleashed, and Jews the world over are justified in their fear, no matter their views on Zionism.

In favor of... what, exactly? A culture that subordinates women, and in some iterations treats them as property? One that rejects the liberties we cannot imagine living without? One that criminalizes homosexuals, sometimes to the point of imprisonment or death?

One that spawned the people who raped and murdered and beheaded and committed all those other atrocities?

It is mind-numbing to contemplate that people who will destroy someone's life for the grievous sin of using the wrong pronoun are standing up for such a culture. It truly makes me despair for the future.

There is only one way to respond to all this. Don’t waste your time with maps, history, and logical arguments. Call them out, get them to admit they hate Jews, that they are happy Hamas raped and killed children, and that they want more killed. Those folks won’t change, but maybe, just maybe, some good people who've been conned into supporting that crowd will come to their senses.

Maybe, just maybe, some of those who are brainlessly bleating "Colonizer!" will come to understand just what it is they are demanding.

Maybe, just maybe, the people with the Coexist bumper stickers and the Hate Has No Home Here lawn signs might actually embrace those notions.

And maybe, just maybe, those who know who is in the right in this war will stop voting for the party chock-full of those in the wrong.

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There are inflection points in history. This is one of them. It is the product of, among other things, many years of our finest institutes of higher learning teaching that naked hatred is not only OK, but to be commended, if it is aimed at the right targets. More on this in the coming days and weeks at The Roots of Liberty.

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