Matthew reviews three books on gene editing

July 1, 2017 • 12:00 pm

Here’s a nice tweet:

New York Review of Books pieces aren’t often free, so it’s nice that this one, which has Matthew reviewing three books on biotechnology and genetics (list below), is available gratis at the link in the tweet. The books:

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
by Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 281 pp., $28.00

I reviewed the Doudna and Sternberg book in the Washington Post yesterday (in the paper edition tomorrow), and Matthew and I independently came up with the same assessment: it’s good and well worth reading.  He talks about something I didn’t, as I didn’t have the space: gene drives, a mechanism for spreading engineered “designer genes” through a species. It’s not only potentially dangerous per se, but could also be used for bioterrorism. See his piece for more discussion.

I haven’t read the other two books, but Matthew clearly feels that A Crack in Creation is the best of the lot, and I agree with him wholeheartedly when he says this:

In A Crack in Creation, one of the pioneers of this technique, the biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California at Berkeley, together with her onetime student Samuel Sternberg, describes the science behind CRISPR and the history of its discovery. This guidebook to the CRISPR revolution gives equal weight to the science of CRISPR and the profound ethical questions it raises. The book is required reading for every concerned citizen—the material it covers should be discussed in schools, colleges, and universities throughout the country. Community and patient groups need to understand the implications of this technology and help decide how it should and should not be applied, while politicians must confront the dramatic challenges posed by gene editing.

It is indeed required reading. Read it!

Harper’s Bazaar becomes Everyday Feminism, says “Wonder Woman” movie is insufficiently intersectional

July 1, 2017 • 10:30 am

When the Wonder Woman movie came out a few weeks ago, starring the Israeli actor Gal Gadot in the title role and directed by Patty Jenkins, it was universally acclaimed as a triumph for feminism, not only because of its star and director, but because by all accounts the movie was good. It garnered a 92% critics rating and a 91% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is very high. And it was a commercial as well as a critical success: it brought in $100 million the opening weekend—a record for a woman director—and its U.S. take is now over $330 million. If the idea of a female action hero in a movie directed by a woman heartens girls, or helps expand the roles for women directors in Hollywood, I applaud it. (I haven’t seen the movie, but only because I never see action movies or “space” movies: I’m probably the only living American who hasn’t seen Star Wars or the Star Trek movies, nor have I even seen 2001: A Space Odyssey or Mad Max.)

But for tech and culture journalist Cameron Glover, the triumph was sour, for Wonder Woman wasn’t “intersectional” enough (Glover is African-American).  In a June 9 piece at Harper’s Bazaar, “Why ‘Wonder Woman’ is bittersweet for black women,” she complains that having a white hero, and putting people of color in supposedly stereotyped positions, the movie erases black women. Here’s her beef:

This past weekend, Wonder Woman opened with more than $100 million in revenue, breaking records to become the highest-grossing opening weekend for a woman director. Many white female fans were overcome with emotion at seeing themselves reflected in Diana Prince (Gal Gadot), who is physically triumphant and unwaveringly optimistic in the face of adversity; in their Wonder Woman-themed shirts and hats, their love for the character is undeniable, a marker of their own dedication to female empowerment and feminism. But the premiere of the Wonder Woman film is bittersweet for Black and other women of color, because even in this so-called “feminist” film, erasure and a lack of inclusion is not only expected, but a given. When it comes to mainstream feminism, race and other identities often take a backseat to gender equality—and that simply isn’t good enough.

It’s always a red flag for me if an author spells “Black” with a capital letter and “white” with a small letter, as that suggests that there’s some subtle racism at play. (I spell both words with small letters, though perhaps, in light of the fact that I write “Hispanic” and “Asian”, I should begin all ethnic groups with caps. However, the last two names are geographic localities as well. It’s confusing, but I think that if you write “Black,” you should write “White” as well.) But never mind; what’s clear is that the film, even though it had a woman as a star and as director, wasn’t sufficiently intersectional:

Yes, Wonder Woman was an entertaining film. The bright colors, the female gaze of director Patty Jenkins’ lens, and the slight nuances which nodded to the superhero’s origins and various incarnations all made for an entertaining watch. I found myself rooting for Diana to rid the world of Ares, god of war, and bring peace to mankind. But like many other films about feminist themes—Mona Lisa Smile, The Help, even Mad Max: Fury Road—I was unable to shake the reality that the film embraced feminism for a very specific community—one that does not have people like me in mind.

Now it’s not clear if Glover thinks that Wonder Woman should have been black or Hispanic, or whether the other parts of the movie were what really bothered her (see below). If it’s the former, then other communities have a right to complain as well. Why couldn’t Diana have been Hispanic or Asian, or even a superwoman in a wheelchair? Such are the problems arising with the Hierarchy of Oppression. But when Glover says the movie doesn’t have “people like me” in mind, she explicitly means black women, not just women. Celebrating one oppressed group wasn’t enough, But what if Glover were gay, too? Would she then require that “women like me” include gay black women in the movie? The potential beefs could never end.

Now Glover has other problems as well, claiming that the movie presents women of color in degrading or subservient positions. I doubt that, but I haven’t seen it, so readers who have should weigh in on the validity of Glover’s complaints:

In the film, the only Black women depicted are a handful of Amazons on Themyscira, the hidden island where Diana and her people live in peace without men. The first Black woman we’re introduced to is Diana’s caretaker, a representation which hits the Mammy trope on the head. With roots in the transatlantic slave trade, Mammies were Black women who were domestic caregivers, mostly charged with taking care of the children of slave owners and, once slavery was abolished, white families who hired them for low wages. A Mammy literally exists to care for others, with no autonomy and independence of her own. Today, the image of the Mammy—a smiling, grandmotherly type who loves to take care of others—offers white people comfort within their own supremacy by creating the illusion that she did her work out of love, not necessity or survival.

Within this context, it’s sobering to see the first image of Black womanhood on Themyscira within a stereotype Black women have been fighting against for decades.

If she’s referring to actor Ann Wolfe, a black boxer who got the role of Artemis, then that’s just an insult; and from what I read Wolfe’s role isn’t at all like the “Mammy” stereotype of movies like Gone with the Wind. 

But wait! There’s more:

As for the other Black Amazons—who are only seen within the first 20 minutes of the film, as the story moves away from Themyscira—their physical strength is marveled at and highlighted, as it is with the other Amazons on the island, but this emphasis on physical strength left a bad taste in my mouth. Connecting Black people to brute strength dates back to slave-selling auctions, where a Black person’s value was directly linked to how physically fit they were. Later, this racist rationale justified the assumption that Black people were physically stronger than other races because of genetic differences. Today, Black women athletes like Serena Williams are endlessly ridiculed, their physical strength mocked in anti-Black insults which demean their womanhood. Wonder Woman‘s emphasis on the Black Amazons’ physical strength and little else—they’re barely named and only have a handful of speaking roles—is a reflection of these same, tired Black stereotypes.

This is how the Perpetually Offended operate. It’s not enough that the Amazons are depicted as a powerful tribe of women; one has to complain that this is just another black stereotype—that blacks have physical strength and little else. But that’s bogus, for Amazons were depicted as white in the past (they come from Greek mythology), so I can’t buy this argument about racism. But more important, the Amazons in the movie aren’t even uniformly black: they’re of mixed ethnicities: whites and blacks. In fact, a PuffHo article celebrates the Amazons and their mixed ethnicity, showing photos of several of the actors. Jenavieve Hatch, the author of that piece, writes:

In fact, I would have contentedly traded Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor for more time with Artemis, Antiope or Hippolyta at any given point in the film’s 141 minutes. It felt profoundly satisfying to watch women of all colors, sizes, shapes and ages wield so much physical power on a humongous screen, and as the story went from Themyscira to World War I-era Western Europe, I found myself missing the women warriors and wanting to know more about them.

Two more quotes from Glover will suffice; the first complains about erasure:

In the comics, Black Amazons were canon (i.e part of the storyline’s continuity) and visible in their own stories, painting a broader, more inclusive picture of what life on Themyscira—and the wider world of the Wonder Woman universe—looks like. In the comics, Philippus, the leader of the Amazon military, plays a significant role in raising Diana and eventually teaching her how to fight. Diana also has a Black sister named Nubia, though they don’t meet until much later in Diana’s story. But even with Black women playing such significant roles in the original Wonder Woman story, their erasure from the film adaptation proves the inclusion of Black women and their stories is still not a priority for mainstream feminism.

And Diana is attacked for fulfilling the “white savior” trope.  I think that’s not the director’s intent, or even an unconscious motivation, but rather Glover’s desire to fit every bit of this movie into Critical Race Theory:

Meanwhile, Wonder Woman offers opportunities for white women to exist in a nuanced, multifaceted, humanized way. We see the complexities of Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) wanting Diana to be raised as a strong, kind woman. We see Diana, in her naivety and earnest resolve to save mankind from itself, settle firmly into the White Savior trope through her unabashed assumption that mankind is flawed and in need of her help, however she wants to give it—never taking the time to ask exactly how and if her help is wanted. . . But for the few Black women and other women of color in the film, this luxury of humanization was never extended to its fullest potential, leaving them paling in comparison to the complete, complex characterizations of Diana and other white characters.

Well, readers can tell me me if that was the case. Finally, Glover pronounces this:

The film’s erasure of women of color and missteps on race send the message that cis, straight, able-bodied, white womanhood is prioritized above all else. It’s important that this is not overlooked, because true feminism cannot exist without intersectionality, which demands the dismantling of racism and white supremacy.

So here we have the movie criticized because it doesn’t deal with gay and disabled people as well. Remember, this is in Harper’s Bazaar, not Everyday Feminism. In the end, what was seen as a celebration of feminism and women’s empowerment is denigrated because it doesn’t empower every marginalized group. It seems to me that the movie’s success was good for women, but since Glover is black, being good for women isn’t sufficient. It has to be good for black women, and if she were gay disabled it would have to be good for gay black disabled women. Where does it stop?

In the end, it feels as if Glover is working out her own issues by criticizing a movie intended to be summer entertainment, but with an overtone of female empowerment. Such are the issues that arise when identity politics can’t celebrate the advance of just one oppressed group. Like seagulls in Finding Nemo, the intersectionalists demand that their own identities be recognized, crying “Mine, mine, mine.”

Now, I’m certainly not saying that racism isn’t a problem, that there aren’t problems unique to black women, or that I’m against the inclusion of more diverse actors and less stereotyping in movies. That’s not my point, which, as should be clear, is that intersectionality in the sense expressed by Glover is divisive and hierarchical, always calling out attempts to empower the marginalized because they’re not good enough. It’s always a Purity Test. But from what I hear, “Wonder Woman” was good enough, depicting not just powerful women, but powerful black women.

However, I ask readers who have seen the movie to weigh in below.

 

Caturday felids: Canadian women recovers missing cat–after 12 years; Arizona cathouse; interview with director of the hit cat movie “Kedi”

July 1, 2017 • 8:30 am

From the CBC News, we have a story of a lost cat returning home after the longest interval I’ve heard of: twelve years! And it was not just in CANADA, but in Winnipeg, where Gus lives. Here are some details:

Freda Watson was devastated when her cat, George, went missing 12 years ago in Winnipeg, saying she cried a long time for the pet she affectionately called her “little boy.”

She was crying again on Thursday when the pair was reunited.

“Oh my god, I can’t believe I got my cat back,” Watson said in an interview on Friday. “We love George. He’s my little boy.”

George was found wandering the street near Grant Avenue earlier this week and taken to the Winnipeg Humane Society. Staff there found a faded tattoo and began investigating to decipher it and find the owner.

Watson’s last name, address and phone number had all changed since the time George slipped out of her Weston-area home past a babysitter. It was Watson’s former sister-in-law who got the message from the Humane Society, and she in turn called Watson.

“I said, ‘Are you serious?'” Watson recalled. “I couldn’t sleep the night before. I was crying that night and I was crying in the morning.”

Here are the reunited pair of George and Freda (George looks very surprised). I wonder where he’d been. The story adds “Watson, who got George when he was just four weeks old and bottle-fed him in those early days, says someone must have been caring for him over the years, because he’s in good shape.”

Freda Watson holds George on the day she was reunited with him at the Winnipeg Humane Society. (Winnipeg Humane Society/Facebook)

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As reported in the HuffPo, you can now buy a house full of cat stuff for $240,000. It’s in Arizona:

A 2,500-square-foot home in the Arizona desert is sending cat lovers into a catnip-style frenzy. Nearly every indoor surface is covered in cat images or paraphernalia, thanks to a previous owner who spent a decade plastering photos and memorabilia to the walls, listing agent Elizabeth Keller told HuffPost.

The home has two bedrooms and one bathroom, plus at least 12 cat condos, according to Arizona Central. It’s an “extremely fun home,” per its listing with Century 21.

“If you love cats this is the home for you! If not, bring your sandblaster!” the listing reads. Notable features include “cat walkways” and a “Medieval cat castle with different levels (stone).”

And there’s no cat odor inside, even though the previous owner had three cats.

The outside (all photos courtesy Century 21):

Views of the inside:

 

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Finally, if you haven’t seen the movie Kedi, about the street cats of Istanbul, do so immediately (I believe reader Charleen is doing so today). It’s highly rated and I can’t wait to see it. It has a 98% critics’ rating and an 89% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and those are very high marks.

The June 18 Guardian has an interview with Ceyda Torun, the director, who says she made “a love letter to the city and the cats.” The article notes that Kedi, which means “cat” in Turkish, was described by IndieWire as “the Citizen Kane of cat documentaries”.

I’ve visited Istanbul several times and have been struck by the number of street cats and mosque cats, and the fact that they’re usually in pretty good condition.

Here’s a bit of Torun’s interview:

Why are there so many street cats in the city?
There are a few reasons. There’s the historical factors – that cats have been in this geography for so long. We interviewed a veterinary zoologist who showed us a cat skeleton that had been found while building the new tunnel under the Bosphorus. It was from 3,500 years ago and had a break in the thigh bone that could only have healed like that if a human had wrapped its leg. So his theory was that this relationship – tending to cats and cats helping us fend off mice – goes back to at least then.

Then there’s the Islamic element: cats are highly revered in Islam and there are multiple references to the prophet Muhammad having a cat. Often, people use that to justify taking care of them. There are people who don’t like cats and are bothered by others taking care of them, but [their frustration] is more a reflection of the city’s overcrowding, I think – the population has gone from 4 million in my childhood to close to 20 million now.

What do the cats mean to the people of Istanbul?
There’s nobody here that doesn’t have a memory of cats: no grandmother, no generation has been here without cats, so they’re ingrained in our collective memory. People tend to be in awe of the freedom cats have, their ability to go in and out of almost anywhere. They show up in political situations, universities; they go in and out of places that are forbidden or dangerous for humans. And cats provide this wonderful opportunity for people in Istanbul to pick a moment to be affectionate with a being that doesn’t judge them, that doesn’t have complicated human relationship issues. We have a lot of “cat daddies”.

And a picture of the director:

Photograph: Selçuk Şamiloğlu

And Kedi’s two-minute trailer:

And here’s a picture I took at the Şehzade Mosque in Istanbul in 2008; note that the cat is in good nick:

h/t: Taskin, Jon

Saturday: Hili dialogue

July 1, 2017 • 7:30 am

It’s July! July 1, 2017, to be exact, and all Americans, save your genial host, are celebrating the Fourth of July Holiday, which is on Tuesday. It’s National Gingersnap Day in the U.S. (I believe this cookie is not only called a “biscuit” in the UK, but also “Ginger Nuts”. Correct me if I’m wrong.) And, more important, it’s CANADA DAY, described like this in Wikipedia (which, contrary to Greg, I see as sometimes being right!).

[Canada Day] celebrates the anniversary of the July 1, 1867, enactment of the Constitution Act, 1867 (then called the British North America Act, 1867), which united the three separate colonies of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into a single Dominion within the British Empire called Canada. Originally called Dominion Day (French: Le Jour de la Confédération), the holiday was renamed in 1982, the year the Canada Act was passed. Canada Day celebrations take place throughout the country, as well as in various locations around the world, attended by Canadians living abroad.

In fact, it’s the 150th anniversary of Canada as a country! Here’s a video in which the world celebrates Canada (was Superman really Canadian?):

I’ve had nothing but good times in Canada, and refuse to stereotype it by putting up pictures of beavers or Mounties to celebrate. Instead, let’s see Gus, my favorite Canadian cat, playing with the Northwest Territories license plate I bought him. Note that the plate, like Gus, is in the shape of a polar bear. That license is now affixed, along with the maple-leaf flag, to the cardboard box that Gus naps in—his Canadian “boat”.  Sadly, bear-shaped license plates are no longer produced in Canada: they’re extinct, as the bear itself will be soon.

O Canada!

If you’re a Darwin scholar, you’ll know that on July 1, 1858, the papers of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were read jointly before the Linnean Society of London; this was the solution worked out after Darwin received Wallace’s letter showing that both men had independently hit on the idea of evolution by natural selection. Exactly five years later, the Battle of Gettysburg began; it marked the furthest incursion of the Confederate Army into the north; after they were defeated, it was downhill all the way until Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. On this day in 1873, Prince Edward Island joined the Canadian Confederation.  July 1, 1916, the Battle of the Somme began, one of the bloodiest days in human history. On the first day alone, 19,000 soldiers of the British Army were killed and 40,000 were wounded. Before the battle ended in November, more than a million men were killed in this battle.

There’s lots of Canadian history today: July 1 must be a day that things must happen there. On this day in 1958, for instance, there were two events: the Canadian Broadcasting System linked its television programming throughout the country, and the flooding of the Saint Lawrence Seaway began. In 1966, the first color t.v. broadcast in Canada (from Toronto) took place. On July 1, 1979, the Sony Walkman was introduced; did you have one? (I didn’t.) And—more Canadian history—on July 1, 1980, “O Canada” officially became the national anthem of Canada. In 1997, China officially took over Hong Kong, and exactly a decade later, smoking was banned in all indoor spaces in England.

Notables born on this day include Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646), Sally Kirkland (1912), Olivia de Havilland (1916), Gerald Edelman (1929), Karen “Rayette Dipesto” Black (1939), Twyla Tharp (1941), Debbie Harry (1945), Dan Akroyd (1952; today he goes on Medicare, as I suspect that although he was born in Ottawa, CANADA, Akroyd is now an American citizen), and Princess Diana (1961). Those who died on this day include Harriet Beecher Stowe (1896), Erik Satie (1925), Ernst Röhm (1934, killed during the Night of the Long Knives), William Lawrence Bragg (1971), Juan Perón (1974), Buckminster Fuller (1983), Wolfman Jack (1995), Walter Matthau (2000), Marlon Brando (2004), and Karl Malden (2009; remember the famous movie that starred both Brando and Malden?). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, who has slimmed down for the summer, has gained in wisdom what she’s lost in weight:

Hili: Let’s not delude ourselves.
A: What about?
Hili: About anything.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie łudźmy się.
Ja: Z czym?
Hili: Najlepiej z niczym.
Finally, here’s a tweet that Matthew Cobb sent me “to cheer me up”, but I’m not much cheered when Trump says anything dumb and others react. Still, Buzz Aldrin, on Trump’s left, is not impressed.

Oh hell, the laws of physics dictated that I’d post this:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

The incredible Darwin’s bark spider

June 30, 2017 • 1:15 pm

This is hands down one of the finest Attenborough segments I’ve seen. The four-minute video from BBC Earth has incredible photography of Darwin’s bark spider (Caerostris darwini) building its web over a river on a 25-meter-long “bridging line”. Rivers are of course good places to catch insects, as they’re clear conduits through the forest. Here’s some useful information from Wikipedia:

The spider was discovered in Madagascar in the Andasibe-Mantadia National Park in 2009. Its silk is the toughest biological material ever studied, over ten times tougher than a similarly-sized piece of Kevlar. The species was named in honour of the naturalist Charles Darwin, with the description being prepared precisely 150 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, on 24 November 2009.

If you are not moved by this video—which I’d call a spiritual experience in contemplating natural selection if I didn’t dislike the word “spiritual—then you’re made of stone. All those instructions coded in a tiny spider brain (though be aware that some web-spinning spiders have brains that spill out into their bodies).

h/t: Anne-Marie

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!