Category: intersectionality

As I was saying about sex. . .

November 30, 2018 • 1:30 pm

Andrew Sullivan, whose increasing self-imposed distance from Trumpism now makes him at least a centrist, has a good column in this week’s New York Magazine. Half of it is about the dangers of global warming and the malfeasance of Republicans in not just ignoring it, but exacerbating it.

The other half is about whether or not sex is binary. Like me, Sullivan concludes that it’s almost binary but certainly bimodal. I swear he’s been reading my thoughts, if not my site. But maybe it’s just a case of like minds. At any rate, both of us are right!

Sullivan:

The real question, it seems to me, is therefore an almost philosophical one: Do these exceptions prove or disprove a general rule? I’d argue that, by and large, they prove it. The number of people with a mismatch between chromosomes and hormones, or with ambiguous genitalia, is surpassingly small. Well under one percent is a useful estimate. Similarly with a transgender identity: It absolutely exists but is also very rare — some estimates put it at around 0.7 percent of the population. Gay men and lesbians who have unambiguous male and female sex organs and identity but an attraction to their own sex are also pretty rare (whatever we’d like to think). Maybe 2 to 5 percent, with some outliers. Does this mean that general assumptions about most people being either male or female and heterosexual and cisgendered are misplaced or even offensive? Hardly. I’m gay but usually assume that everyone I meet is straight until I know otherwise. And I don’t mind the hetero assumption applying to me either. It’s a reasonable statistical inference, not bigotry. And I can always set them, er, straight.

My preferred adjective for sex and gender is bimodal, rather than binary. What bimodal means is that there are two distinct and primary modes with some variations between them. The vast majority of humans are either male or female, with corresponding chromosomes and hormones, and heterosexual. But with nature as messy as it is, and genetic variation being the spice of evolution, there will always be exceptions on a spectrum. Think of it as two big mountains representing, in sex matters, well over 95 percent of humans, with a long, low valley between them, representing the remaining percent. Everyone is equally human. But clearly the human experience of sex is one thing for almost everyone and a different thing for a few.

Do we infer from this that we need to junk the categories of male and female altogether, as many critical gender theorists argue? That seems insane to me. These two modes actually define the entire landscape of sex (the exceptions are incomprehensible without them), and the bimodal distribution is quite obviously a function of reproductive strategy (if we were all gay, or intersex, we’d cease to exist as a species before too long). Ditto the transgender experience: Does the fact that less than one percent of humans feel psychologically at odds with their biological sex mean that biological sex really doesn’t exist and needs to be defined away entirely? Or does it underline just how deep the connection between sex and gender almost always is?

He refers to a discussion on identity politics which I’ve put below (I haven’t watched it yet):

I was invited to the Heritage Foundation this week for a panel on political correctness (You can watch it here. I speak at 1:04). The invite was quite a surprise. I’ve been a nonperson in Washington conservative circles ever since I objected to the spending explosion, torture, and shambolic Iraq War in the Bush administration, around 15 years ago. Of course I wasn’t invited to criticize conservatism — just to excoriate the social-justice movement for inverting the principles of liberalism. Nonetheless, I included in my remarks an attack on the Trump movement for providing so much ammunition for the hard left with its race-baiting, and even got one dude to walk out. But what surprised me was the positive response to a single, minor point I made about intersectionality.

The discussion (Sullivan starts at 1:04:06 and ends at 1:16:44). Note that he claims (correctly, I think) that extreme identity politics has spread far beyond campus and into the Leftist mainstream media.

He finishes with a snarky discussion of “intersectionality”, and a discussion of who’s a victim and who’s an oppressor. Conclusion: everyone is both.

And that’s why I favor more intersectionality, not less. Let’s push this to its logical conclusion. Let’s pile on identity after identity for any individual person; place her in multiple, overlapping oppression dynamics, victim and victimizer, oppressor and oppressed; map her class, race, region, religion, marital status, politics, nationality, language, disability, attractiveness, body weight, and any other form of identity you can. After a while, with any individual’s multifaceted past, present, and future, you will end up in this multicultural world with countless unique combinations of endless identities in a near-infinite loop of victim and victimizer. You will, in fact, end up with … an individual human being!

In the end, all totalizing ideologies disappear up their own assholes. With intersectionality, we have now entered the lower colon.

I can’t help but like this guy, even though we’ve crossed swords in the past.

 

Once again the Left dines on its own: the demonization of Gal Gadot

February 22, 2018 • 9:15 am

When Gal Gadot starred in the enormously successful movie “Wonder Woman,” Leftists at first saw it as a moment of women’s empowerment. Here we had a strong and independent superhero who was a woman—much like “Black Panther” is praised for empowering black children. But it didn’t take long for the approbation to wane. After all, Gadot is Israeli and, like nearly all Israelis, she had to serve in the IDF, the Israeli military. That’s a national requirement. Gadot didn’t kill anybody; she was a combat instructor.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before her nationality and service in the IDF eroded her status as feminist hero, for in the pantheon of intersectionalist Leftism, Israel lies at the bottom of the heap—just above old cis white males. Her luster (and that of “Wonder Woman”) among Leftists began to fade (see here and here).

Now, it seems, Gadot, since she’s way low on the Oppression Hierarchy, isn’t allowed to decry last week’s school shootings in Florida.  One would think that her tweet below would have garnered approbation, and it did according to the hearts and retweets. But not everyone was happy.

Yes, the termites gnawed their way in, and, according to Everyday Antisemitism, the new social editor of Allure magazine, Rawan Eewshah, issued the following hateful response. “Child murderer”—seriously?

(I think this tweet has now been deleted. Good call!)

 

Eewshah wasn’t alone:

https://twitter.com/Luzde_laluna/status/964581589702381568

There are many more such reactions, but I needn’t go on. This reprises the old “blood libel” fiction of anti-Semites, and in my view reflects anti-Semitism. Does anybody think that Gadot endorses the targeting of children? Apparently some of the people above do, and they’re simply lying for the cause.

Let’s get this straight. Gal Gadot didn’t kill anybody when she was in the IDF. She did not kill any children. I highly doubt that she “relishes” watching children killed.  The Israeli Army has killed Palestinian children in military operations, but it does not do so deliberately, despite the claims of the ignorant. It would be a public-relations disaster in the eyes of the world if Israeli solders were under orders to kill children; in fact, the opposite is true. Children do get imprisoned in Israel for terrorist acts or attempted murder or injury. Gadot had no part in this; her crime was solely to be Jewish, to be Israeli, and to be in the IDF. To Intersectionalists, that makes it hypocritical for her to react in horror when a shooter kills 17 people in a Florida school.

Well, let’s look at the shoe on the other foot. Hamas and Hezbollah, and other Palestinian terrorists, deliberately target and kill Israeli children.  Want examples? Here are some:

  • The Itamar Attack in 2011(even in Wikipedia!): An Israeli civilian, his wife, and three of their children (aged 11, 4, and 3 months), were slaughtered by two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The baby was decapitated and the children stabbed. The IDF tracked down the murders, who were tried. Many Palestinians celebrated the murders, even handing out candy and sweets in the street.
  • The murder of Hallel Jaffa Ariel, a 13 year old girl, in 2013. Mohammad Nasser Tra’ayra, the Palestinian killer who wished to be a martyr, stabbed Hallel to death in her bed. (You can see photos of the girl and the gruesome murder scene here.) Tra’ayra was killed when attempting to evade capture. He, too was celebrated for his deed; as Wikipedia reports:

The attacker’s mother praised her son as a martyr defending Jerusalem and the al-Aqsa Mosque and hoped others would follow in his path. A banner with pictures of Tra’ayra and the late Yasser Arafat was hung outside a building in the West Bank village of Tra’ayra’s family, and the family is eligible for $350 a month from a Palestinian fund for martyrs.

  • Here’s a long list of Israeli children killed by Palestinian terrorists; some were deliberately targeted, others were killed in suicide attacks, which of course are aimed at civilians. I suspect that if people take issue with this, Malgorzata can provide more examples in the comments.

The killing is bad enough, but when the murder of children is celebrated by Palestinians, as they so often do, that makes it doubly disgusting. Do Israelis shoot off fireworks and hand out sweets in the street when a Palestinian child is killed? Think again.

Now here is a Palestinian father taunting and daring Israeli soldiers to shoot his 3-year-old son. He even goads the kid to throw rocks at the soldiers. Note how the soldiers behave. I can’t help but think that the father, his comrades, and the person making the video actually wanted that child shot—so they could use it for propaganda. What kind of father would do this?

Who are the hypocrites? It is the intersectional Leftists who support Palestine (and their child-killing practices) and yet decry the shootings by Nikolas Cruz. What Cruz does resembles what Hamas, Hezbollah, and the terrorists named above do: they all deliberately target children. ‘

It is those who support Palestine, not those (like Gadot) who support Israel, who tacitly endorse the targeting of innocent children. If somebody lacks the moral standing to criticize what Cruz did in Florida, it is those who defend the actions of Palestinians. When was the last time you heard them complain about the murder of civilians, much less children?

The Women’s March and Linda Sarsour honor two murderers; Sarsour has a tantrum when questioned

July 20, 2017 • 9:33 am

If you don’t like the reporting of Fox News (and we know they have a conservative bent), how about the Daily Beast, which is slanted in the opposite direction? Well, put together the story at the former,”CNN pundit, Women’s March organizers under siege for ‘honoring’ birthday of New Jersey cop killer Assata Shakour“, and at the latter, “Linda Sarsour echoes Donald Trump, smears CNN’s Jake Tapper“, and you get not only consilience, but a nasty picture of The Women’s March and of its most prominent face, co-organizer Linda Sarsour.

I have to examine myself when calling out things like the Women’s March, as I’m all for moral and economic equality of women. But like much of the Left, many “intersectional” feminists have developed an authoritarian strain, so that those with the loudest voices, often bullies and regressives like Sarsour, can become the voice of the movement. In Sarsour’s case, it’s particularly distressing, for she’s in favor of sharia law, demonizes people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is pro-Palestinian to the point of favoring the elimination of Israel, and, overall, is a regressive in progressive’s clothing. I see her as a theocrat who’s learned to use victimhood and her status as a Muslim “person of color” to endear herself to muddled Leftists. To me, people like Sarsour represent a degradation of the progressive Left, and so I spend more time on them than on Trumpites because a). it’s my own side, and b). calling out Republicans is not only futile, but everybody else is doing it and I have little to add.

Both Fox and The Beast agree with me that Sarsour and the Women’s March have shown notably poor judgment in extolling terrorists and convicted murderers. Further, Sarsour has started to demonize (in the characteristic Authoritarian way) CNN reporter Jake Tapper, who questioned the wisdom of extolling terrorists and murderers. Sarsour’s response was not to explain how she and the Women’s March could bring themselves to honor killers, but simply to smear Jake Tapper and then act aggrieved and persecuted. I think that Sarsour’s victimization complex (which heretofore she’s employed to great advantage), as well as her narcissism and personal ambition, are eventually going to bring her down, or at least make the Left wake up to her. So far it’s still asleep.

Here’s the story. Four days ago the Women’s March emitted this tweet:

Unfortunatly, Assata Shakur (formerly JoAnne Byron) is a convicted murderer who, as a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), was indicted numerous times for robbery, kidnapping, and murder (charges were either dismissed, she was acquitted, or there was a hung jury), and finally was convicted for assault and murder of a New Jersey state trooper in a shootout. After several years in prison she escaped, lived as a fugitive, and then fled to Cuba in 1984, where she was granted asylum. Extradition requests have failed, and she has been on the FBI’s “most wanted terrorist list” (the first woman so “honored”) since 2013.

Now I know that the police sometimes persecute black activists, and the BLA may have had revolutionary goals, but I have no truck with violence and murder, except in self-defense (Shakur’s was not). Shakur seems like a dreadful candidate to be honored by the Women’s March.

And that’s not all. One of the speakers at the Women’s March in Washington D. C. was Donna Hylton, who served 25 years in prison for kidnapping, gruesomely torturing, and killing a wealthy New Jersey businessman. Here there was no revolutionary organization involved, just pure criminality. Why are such women seen as heroes and given public platforms? Believe me, if the Right were to take as heroes women like these, the Left would be all over it like white on rice. Imagine what HuffPo would write!

The Daily Beast author Emily Shire also reports similar encomiums from the International Women’s Strike—plaudits for a woman who spent ten years in an Israeli jail for a supermarket bombing that killed two students:

[There was no criticism from intersectional feminists] when the International Women’s Strike touted Rasmea Odeh as one of its original and main organizers. Odeh, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the State Department officially considered a terrorist group, was convicted for her involvement in a 1969 bombing at Hebrew University that killed two students.

Odeh, though, has found allies in many so-called progressive groups that claim to support immigrant and civil rights. When I reached out to the International Women’s Strike in March about Odeh’s involvement, Cinzia Arruzza praised Odeh and decried  “the persistent harrasmment [sic] by the US government and zionist political forces” she allegedly faced.

Just as the President and other Republican leaders are called upon to forcefully denounce the alt-right, and criticized when they fail to do so, the left needs to be held to the same standard.

Let’s face it: intersectional feminism has no problem demonizing Israel (and Jews, a historically marginalized group), as well as extolling murderers and terrorists. But I have a problem with these things.

So did Jake Tapper, chief Washington correspondent for CNN. He tweeted this, also mentioning the expulsion of Jewish lesbians waving a “Jewish pride” flag at the Chicago Dyke March:

Sarsour, in a pattern that’s typical of offended Authoritarians, simply smeared Tapper in her response while playing the victim:

Seriously, Tapper joins the alt-right for asking a question? And Sarsour didn’t let that rest, for she angers easily and extols her virtues at the same time she flaunts her victimization:

 Tapper responded by reminding Sarsour of something she’d rather forget (and has deleted her tweet about it):

In case you forget, here’s that ugly sentiment:

As Shire noted, the “strange bedfellows of the intersectional feminist movement” are disturbing, but bullies and authoritarians like Sarsour can’t seem to stop themselves, for they bear the hubris that the movement simply must fall in line with their personal views. Moreover, they attack and then smear those—even leftists like Tapper, who was famous for calling out Trump for his racism. (Did I mention that Tapper has a Jewish background?)

Shire adds this:

Sarsour’s ridiculously weak attempt to slander Tapper as a member of the “alt-right” was not the first time she has tried discrediting negative reports about her by falsely attacking the character of those voicing them. Last week, it was reported that the damaged Jewish cemetery that Sarsour had professed to help raise money for had not, in fact, received funds. Sarsour suggested she would sue the people reporting this (another Trump go-to move) and declared that she was the “target of the right wing, alt-right, right wing zionists.” That’s a mean feat of inverted intersectionalism.

The concern Tapper raised — about progressives standing with violent radicals — speaks to a much larger problem regarding the intersectionalist approach to social justice movements. On the one hand the intersectional feminist movement has been making strange bedfellows; on the other, it has been increasingly hostile to those who question those additions.

The smearing of opponents in an attempt to write them off forever is a trait of Authoritarian Leftists, but not of Progressive Leftists, who are usually willing to defend their stands instead of engaging in ad hominem arguments.

I hope that feminists and Authoritarian Leftists come to their senses about “leaders” like Sarsour. Even the American Civil Liberties Union has fallen for her schtick–the ACLU, whom I once worked for as a volunteer and supported financially!:

And Sarsour’s Twitter thread is full of threats against those who “defame” her and “lie about her”. Well, there are legal recourses to defamation, Ms. Sarsour, so avail yourself of them:

Here is a self-pitying, narcissistic Regressive who’s seen as a hero to feminists. Has the world gone mad? I’m hoping that her behavior, and the penchant of regressive intersectional feminists to ally with unsavory characters and movements, will eventually take its toll. So does Shire:

Perhaps, Sarsour’s attempt to slander a journalist at CNN for asking questions — rather than to answer the question —  may be a much-needed wakeup call for feminists and others on the left about the destructive tactics that the intersectionalist left appears to be picking up from its counterparts on the alt-right.

But I’m not holding my breath.

h/t: BJ, dano

NYT editor decries “intersectionality”, says Chicago Dyke March was wrong to ban the Jewish Pride flag; Dyke March says it was misunderstood.

June 30, 2017 • 12:00 pm

As I reported a few days ago, this year’s Dyke March, part of Chicago’s Gay Pride celebrations, kicked out a handful of Jewish women who were carrying “Jewish Pride” flags: multicolored Gay Pride flags with a white Star of David in the middle. I call that an act of anti-Semitism, and so does Bari Weiss, who happens to be a staff editor at the New York Times. She posted about it on Tuesday, in an op-ed with the intriguing title, “I’m glad the Dyke March banned Jewish stars“.

Why, pray tell, is Weiss glad? Because the Dyke March’s actions expose the hypocrisy and unworkability of “intersectionality” as a part of social justice. As she says,

I’m sorry for the women, like Ms. Grauer, who found themselves under genuine threat for carrying a colorful cloth falsely accused of being pernicious.

But I am also grateful.

Has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of “intersectionality” than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dyke March?

Intersectionality is the big idea of today’s progressive left. [JAC: I’d say “regressive” left, for many progressives don’t sign on to “intersectionality” as it’s used.] In theory, it’s the benign notion that every form of social oppression is linked to every other social oppression. This observation — coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw — sounds like just another way of rephrasing a slogan from a poster I had in college: My liberation is bound up with yours. That is, the fight for women’s rights is tied up with the fight for gay rights and civil rights and so forth. Who would dissent from the seductive notion of a global sisterhood?

Well, in practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

By that hierarchy, you might imagine that the Jewish people — enduring yet another wave of anti-Semitism here and abroad — should be registered as victims. Not quite.

Why? Largely because of Israel, the Jewish state, which today’s progressives see only as a vehicle for oppression of the Palestinians — no matter that Israel has repeatedly sought to meet Palestinian claims with peaceful compromise, and no matter that progressives hold no other country to the same standard. China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang, while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but “woke” activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.

. . . though intersectionality cloaks itself in the garb of humanism, it takes a Manichaean view of life in which there can only be oppressors and oppressed. To be a Jewish dyke, let alone one who deigns to support Israel, is a categorical impossibility, oppressor and oppressed in the same person.

That’s why the march organizers and their sympathizers are now trying to smear Ms. Grauer as some sort of right-wing provocateur. Their evidence: She works at an organization called A Wider Bridge, which connects the L.G.B.T.Q. Jewish community in America with the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Israel. The organizers are also making the spurious claim that the Jewish star is necessarily a symbol of Zionist oppression — a breathtaking claim to anyone who has ever seen a picture of a Jew forced to wear a yellow one under the Nazis.

No, the truth is that it was no more and no less than anti-Semitism. Just read Ms. Shoshany Anderson’s account of her experience, which she posted on Facebook after being kicked out of the march.

Unfortunately, Ms, Weis isn’t all that woke, as she seems to be realizing only now that the Left harbors a large component of anti-Semitism, particularly on the Regressive Left. Here’s her last paragraph:

It may be wrong to read too much into an ugly incident at a single march, but Jews should take what happened in Chicago as a lesson that they might not be as welcome among progressives as they might imagine. That’s a warning for which to be grateful, even as it is a reminder that anti-Semitism remains as much a problem on the far-left as it is on the alt-right.

Earth to Bari Weiss: your piece is very good, but you can absolutely read what you did read into the March. The Cntrl-Left segment of “progressives” has been anti-Semitic for years. They call it “anti-Zionist”, but that’s just a euphemism. If you don’t think the state of Israel should exist, and was wrongly founded as a homeland for expelled Jews, then yes, you’re anti-Semitic.

Now one of the organizers of the Dyke March, Alexis Martinez, taken by surprise at the negative reaction to the expulsion of Jews, has responded in an interview on the gay site Windy City Times. I find the response disingenuous and unconvincing, motivated by the very bad press the Dyke March Collective got.  Their story is that the Jewish Pride Flag Wavers were expelled not for their flag, but because they were chanting. What were they chanting? Well, they were said to be chanting a response to pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist marchers who were already chanting “No walls from Mexico to Palestine.”

According to Martinez, the Jewish women then chanted, in response, “No walls anywhere.”

That was all it took to boot their asses out. Martinez doesn’t see the irony of her own account:

The first thing I want to say is that this was never about the Jewish Pride flags. They never came into the conversations. As long as I’ve been an organizer, Laurel has always marched [in the Dyke March] with that flag. I had a conversation on text message with Laurel the night before. She asked me if people would be protesting her Jewish flag. I told her “No. It’s never been an issue and it shouldn’t be an issue.” But I also told her very clearly that we were anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian and she needed to understand that and the nature of the event.

. . . They were taking ‘No walls from Mexico to Palestine’ and they started with “No walls anywhere.” They were disrupting the chants and nobody said anything to them.

What happened at the site [of the rally] was some Palestinian Queers who came up to organizers and said they were being antagonized verbally. The Jewish contingent kept agitating and being aggressive about presenting a pro-Zionist position to Palestinian women.

I would say 15 or 20 minutes after we entered the park. One of the organizers came to me and said “Alexis, you have to do something about this.” So, I went over and talked to Laurel. She tried to make it about the flag. I said “Nobody’s got anything against your flag. Wave it proudly. I am asking you if you’re trying to present a pro-Palestinian, pro-Zionist point-of-view.”

She said that she was proud of her Zionist views and she needed to be able to express them. I told her “This isn’t the format to do that. Either you have to stop or you have to leave.” They refused. We don’t have an armed security force to push people out so I left. They stayed around the park until the whole event was over. They were still there an hour and a half later.

So it wasn’t just a Dyke March, it was a pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic Dyke March, and the statement “no walls anywhere” was somehow taken to be disruptive, and offensive to the Palestinian Queers (n.b. Queers are prohibited in Palestine but not Israel). And that chant alone isn’t even pro-Zionist, much less pro-Israel.

It’s clear from Martinez’s long account that she’s trying to rationalize expelling the Jewish dykes because they were “Zionists,” yet at the same time saying that, vis-à-vis the world, they’re not an explicitly political march. The fact is, all this confusion just reflects their upset at being called out, and their haste to confect rationalizations, viz,:

. . . the media and social media outrage was almost instantaneous and we got hit from every possible site and angle. I have never seen any member of the Collective make anti-Semitic statements. We’re anti-Zionism and people are conflating that into being anti-Semitic. They’re saying that we acted against Jewish queer women and it’s just a complete falsehood. Anyone who interprets our political positions as anti-Semitic is profoundly wrong. They’re misinformed. There’s nothing in our history that indicates that.

and

 What we stand against is oppressive governments be they in Israel, El Salvador, Nicaragua; if people are struggling for their freedom, we try to show support in the context of the small organization that we are. The State of Israel is not endangered by anything we have to say at Dyke March and neither was Laurel. Nobody attacked her.

How hypocritical can you get? If they’re talking about oppression of women and gays, well, Palestine is infinitely worse than Israel—not to mention Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and so on. Why single out and demonize Israel? Because they oppress the oppressive and homophobic Palestinians.

But wait–there’s more! The Dyke March wasn’t political!

WCT: So, you are saying that, if the women had minded their own business, enjoyed the rally and not engaged others, that would have been fine?

AM: Right. We’re not there to resolve the political issues of the world. Laurel could have approached Dyke March at any point prior to the march and requested to make a statement but she used the occasion as a representative of A Wider Bridge to inject herself into a space and then ferment dissention.

They’re not there to resolve the political issues of the world—except to bring up Palestinian political issues and suppress dissent from them. Finally, there’s this:

WCT: There are a lot of nation states which are oppressive to populations. Example, the British to Northern Ireland, the Australians to the Aboriginal people, France to the Muslims living within its borders, Iran to the LGBTQ people living there. Is the presence of such people or open support of their government’s policies whether verbal or in a manner of dress or a sign also unacceptable at Dyke March?

AM: We’re not ignoring that. It’s why you see very few flags [at the march]. But we’re pro-Palestinian. We think that the Palestinian struggle demonstrates a good model for what constitutes oppression. [JAC: except for oppression of gays! Why not North Korea, which oppresses nearly all of its citizens?] You have a military power that subjugates a group of people. It could be any number of places in the world including the US. But I’m not going to stop somebody from wearing a US flag tattoo or whatever. It’s only if you begin to agitate a point of view that creates a condition that could explode into something much bigger. We have to be the judge of that. It’s not just hurt feelings. It could become physical. If somebody gets hurt, we are going to be held accountable. I don’t get sucked into arguments with circular logic. If you want to debate Zionism, there’s other forums for that. I’m not going to ban you from my event.

Who is “we”? I guess it’s all the dykes who aren’t Jewish, and if that’s the case, then Jewish lesbians aren’t welcome unless they keep their mouth shut. Pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic lesbians, of course, are free to chant.

You can read the long interview for yourselves; I’ll show just one more bit of dissimulation, pretending that all cultures are equally homophobic (my emphasis in Martinez’s answer):

WCT: Some commentators challenged you to hold the Dyke March in the middle of the Gaza Strip and “see what happens”—that the Palestinians would respond with violence. How do your respond to that argument?

AM: If we had our march nearly anywhere in the world, we run the risk of being attacked. There are Gay Pride marches being attacked everywhere. Even in Israel. Queer people have civil rights there but that doesn’t give you a free pass on not giving Palestinians equal rights. Having equal rights for queer people in the US doesn’t give us the right to ignore the problems that queer people of color face.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: you see how far the termites have gone, and how well they’ve dined. To buttress her anti-Semitism, Martinez pretends that gays are just as bad off in Palestine as in Israel. That, of course, is bullpucky.

What the whole interview demonstrates is what the Times’s Bari Weiss realized too late: the cancer of anti-Semitism, masquerading as anti-Zionism, is metastasizing through much of the Left, and has now infiltrated the gay community. One would think that a gay pride march would decry the oppression, hatred, and execution of gays by Muslims in Muslim-majority lands. But no, they ignore it. Because for them, “intersectionality” puts being brown (i.e., Palestinian) higher than being gay in the Scale of Oppression. What a confused pride of people!