MARGARET SANGER, LE CORBUSIER, AND PHILIP JOHNSON SMILE: Swastikas Are Progressive Now.
After Hamas supporters vandalized a synagogue with a swastika, leftist cheered this prototypical Nazi act as a progressive commitment to human rights.
“A swastika clearly has a deep and painful history for the people in our community, it’s a symbol of hatred and death,” Rabbi Ethan Witkovsky of Temple Beth El said.
However Malcolm Harris, a former Occupy Wall Street activist and author of ‘Palo Alto’ and other books published through Hachette, explained that swastikas were progressive now.
“Israel’s genocide has literally reversed the meaning of a swastika on a synagogue from a Nazi threat to a condemnation of genocide,” Harris, who also writes for The Nation and Wired, argued.
Harris claims that he viewed vandalizing a synagogue with a swastika as “an anti-zionist condemnation of Israeli genocide.” And if vandalizing synagogues with swastikas, the ultimate symbol of Nazi behavior is only “anti-Zionist”, not antisemitic, then there really is no difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and between leftist anti-Zionists and Nazi antisemites.
David Austin Walsh, a postdoc at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, who has a book on the “far-right” coming out from Yale University Press, chimed in, “I’ll stipulate for the sake of argument that tagging a synagogue with a swastika has an ambiguous or multivariate meaning. How are we to determine which is the intended meaning?”
Marshall Steinbaum, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and a Senior Fellow at the Jain Family Institute, whined that, “I wish we lived in a world where spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue still meant Nazis”.
In the UK, where the London Met Police had previously arrested and threatened anti-Jihad protesters for flying the St. George’s flag, an officer explained to a Jewish woman complaining about swastikas at a pro-Hamas hate rally that the swastikas needed to be viewed in context.
In certain contexts, such as Neo-Nazi rallies, swastikas might be bad, but when leftists and their Islamist allies aim swastikas at Jews, these Neo-Neo-Nazis were actually progressive.
While the debate about whether vandalizing synagogues with swastikas and waving swastikas at Jews was antisemitic, the progressive swastika was making its way around the world.
Exit question: “I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: ‘Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?’”