On Bari Weiss’s supposed martyrdom: my mind goes back to the brutal attacks on @IlhanMN and @lsarsour she made in articles (and before that Muslim congressman Keith Ellison), accusing them of genocidal hatred against Jewish people on the basis of relatively innocent comments.

Bari Weiss essentializes Palestinians - the very sin her friend @thomaschattwill decries about other groups. The tendency to see genocidal hatred as an essential feature of an ethnic and religious group is paradoxically a classic reason for violence and even genocide against them

The Nazis essentialized Jews in this way - they regarded Jews as obsessed with hatred for Aryans, and devoted to their destruction. That was why, according to Nazis, mass violence was legitimated against Jews. That is why Jewish children were murdered without remorse.

The theme of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Jews are taken to advance their anti-Christian agenda behind universal values of social justice. Behind these universal values of social justice, in Nazi ideology, was a murderous plot to destroy Germany.

Hitler (and the KKK as well) advanced this thought - Jews cried for universal justice and equality for minorities as a means for power over white Christians. It should be much more widely noted that this is one of the central arguments of Weiss’s book.

According to Weiss, those who defend Palestinian rights to political equality under the guise of human rights advance a murderous anti-Jewish plot against Jews and Israel. It is concerning to read this argument deployed by a Jewish person against Palestinians and their allies.

I made this clear to her in private communication when she was writing it - that her book repeats the themes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but against Palestinians. It did not seem to have an effect on the final project.

I largely agree with @thomaschattwill on the ills of essentializing. For example, if you think all white people are racist, you will see deadly forms of racism in innocent or perhaps poorly thought out comments by white people.

Bari Weiss’s career involves essentializing Muslims as anti-Semitic. Her work inspects the comments of Muslim politicians, activists, and academics under the lens of an essentializing ideology according to which the desire for genocide against Jews is always presupposed.

Of course, like anyone who essentializes a group, she has friends among that group - ones who also are critical of that group. They serve as shields for these objections. In a way, Bari Weiss embodies one of my central concerns about the United States today.

In the United States, a classic form of group hatred - exactly the one directed against Jews - is directed at Palestinians, and even more broadly against Muslims. It is far too widely accepted. This is an accepted legacy of the war on terror.