In his introduction to his Cold War history, The Atlantic and Its Enemies, Norman Stone recalls the way Margaret Thatcher stood firm in the face of “often contemptuous” criticism. He then writes, in one of the all-time great told-you-so’s by a modern historian: “I myself drew some flak for writing in the press, fairly frequently, in support of her. So be it: I was right. Nowadays there are 400 German students at Oxford, the largest foreign contingent, and they are not there because the truth is in the middle.”
Hear, hear. The desire to believe that “the truth is in the middle” is one of the seemingly permanent weaknesses of a certain class of Western intellectuals and politicians. One manifestation of this: As a wave of anti-Semitism washes over the free world, politicians tie themselves in knots to portray the global intifada as stemming from legitimate grievance. One politician who doesn’t fall into that trap—one of Europe’s few, it must be said—is UK Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.
Yesterday, talking to the residents of a town in Essex, Badenoch was interrupted by a Gaza leftist who wanted to pretend that what’s happening to Britain’s Jews is happening to Muslims and others, too. Badenoch would have none of it. She responded that, in effect, the truth of the anti-Semitism crisis is not in the middle:
“I go to Jewish primary schools that have security guards outside. I don’t see that outside any other primary school in this country. I go to supermarkets that have security guards. I go to businesses, Jewish businesses, that are having their windows smashed in. Gail’s bakery having graffiti sprayed all over it. We need to stop pretending that this isn’t happening. We do not want the 1930s repeated again. And what we see are people making excuses for this. You will never get excuses from me.”
The heckler wasn’t satisfied. What about protecting non-Jews, the heckler wanted to know. Not taking the antisemitismandislamophobia bait, Badenoch again insisted on grounding the conversation firmly in reality: “The people who’ve died and who’ve been killed were Jewish people in synagogues. Let’s stop pretending that something else is happening.”
At which point the shouter tried to claim that that’s not what this crisis is about. Badenoch: “It very much is. It very much is about Jewish people. And you can say all that you like, but this is how the 1930s started: with people pretending not to see what was happening in front of them. I am not blind.”
With a happy-warrior smile on her face, Badenoch continued to dispatch with the practitioner of Soviet whataboutism. The aggressive posture of the haters, she noted, was simply an attempt to intimidate rather than persuade. “People know where I stand and I’m not going to be intimidated,” Badenoch said, finishing with a justified swipe at the “sort of ignorance people like you put out there.” She repeated that she’ll “never be intimidated by it.”
It is to Badenoch’s credit and, perhaps, her political talent, that she was so sure on her feet when the Gaza leftist came barreling her way. It’s also because the truth is easier to remember than whatever elaborate gobbledygook these obnoxious, ignorant activists are expecting from a politician in such a confrontation.
And that goes double for the stammering lemmings cosplaying revolutionary politics. Watch any of the videos of town hall meetings where a series of people get up to the microphone and read their complaints about “Zionism” from their cellphone screens, where they can access the talking points and speech templates they’ve been sent ahead of time by some pathetic Linda Sarsour wannabe.
Reject the premise of every intifadist’s yammering. Reject the whataboutism. Most of all, reject the idea that the truth is in the middle. Hamasniks should never be coddled. If they don’t want their feelings hurt, they could simply stop regurgitating terrorist propaganda scraped from the very bottom of the trash bin of history. As for Kemi Badenoch—hopefully her peers were taking notes.
Source:
www.commentary.org
