I have attended only one Supreme Court case. It was in October 2002 when I got to listen to a few minutes of a case as I did not have a reserved seat, so was ushered through the august chamber pretty quickly as a spectator standing in the back.
During that short time, I heard Justice Antonin Scalia asking questions which were designed to parse the space between law and motivation. His words were powerful then and remain so today:
“SCALIA: Now, let’s assume that there is a Federal statute that makes discrimination because of, or failure to hire someone, or let’s say, let’s say killing
someone solely because of his race — a crime, a separate crime. And someone, let’s assume he kills someone who is Jewish, and he said, well, I didn’t kill him solely because he was Jewish; I killed him because I disagree with the policies of Israel. Does that get him out of the statute?
MR. FRANKLIN: But it’s important. The section 525 is drafted — is an antidiscrimination statute, but it’s drafted differently than other — title VII, for
example, does not use the word —
SCALIA: I’m getting to the question of whether the fact that you have some other motive eliminates the sole causality. The only reason this person was killed was because he was Jewish, and so also here, the only reason this license was
terminated is because the person hadn’t paid. Now, there may be some regulatory motive in the background, just as in the hypothetical that I invented there was some international political motive in the background, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the person was killed solely because he was Jewish, and it seems to me that the license here was revoked solely because the payment hadn’t been made.”
The 2002 case was not about racism or antisemitism or any capital offense. It was on a commercial matter, but Scalia opted to throw in a hypothetical situation of whether a targeted killing of a person for being a Jew was perhaps not discriminatory and diluted by the motivation behind that murder.
Of all the theoretical examples Scalia could have dreamed up about a commercial dispute, he opted to tie antisemitism with anti-Zionism.
Scalia did not do this because he was a raving anti-Semite nor because he detested Israel. He used an example which he thought drove home his point which everyone in the room readily understood. People sitting and standing in the highest court in the free world understood the ties between antisemitism and the hatred for the Jewish State. Even though no one in the room was thinking about religion at that time, everyone had long ago internalized the various reasons people killed Jews over the centuries: Christ killers (Catholic Church until the Second Vatican Council); getting out of the debt of money lenders (various European governments throughout the Middle Ages); dirty, impure global manipulators (Nazis, Cossacks); and the latest preposterous version peddled globally since the 2001 Durban Conference and actualized in the terrorism of the Second Intifada, that Israel is a racist colonial apartheid Jewish state which occupies and torments a helpless and innocent indigenous Arab population.
In the Scalia hypothetical, the particular person was attacked because he was a Jew, making it an antisemitic hate crime. The inspiration for the assault was anger against the Jewish State, but the nature of the crime remained the same. At least for that Conservative Justice.
Exactly 5,999 days after Scalia made his argument, a Norwegian rapper named Kaveh Kholardi called out on stage “f***ing Jews” during a public event promoting multiculturalism. The Norwegian attorney general absolved Kholardi of violating a Norwegian hate crime stating that while the comment “seems to be targeting Jews, it can however also be said to express dissatisfaction with the policies of the State of Israel.” That ruling came despite Kholardi never mentioning “Israel” and posting on Twitter just days before the concert “f***ing Jews are so corrupt.” In the Norwegian court, the crime was no longer a crime and hate was no longer hate if a political motivation could be manufactured.
The crime and hatred against Jews by the alt-right, the alt-left and Islamic radicals may be the same, but the underlying motivations of each group may be different. It matters to some, but not others.
Motivations
The global king of liberal media, The New York Times posted a cartoon on April 25, 2019 about US President Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke and dark glasses as though he were blind, led by a dog with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face on it with a Jewish Star hanging from the collar.
The New York Times International edition on April 25, 2019
Maybe the motivation for the Times’ cartoon was their befuddlement about Trump’s following Netanyahu’s lead on all things related to the Middle East. But if it were just that, why put a Jewish yarmulke on Trump? Why specifically make him Jewish when he is Presbyterian?
Similarly, in 2014, the Times called the opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” which sought to find the “humanity in the terrorists” who threw an elderly wheelchair-confined Jew off of a ship, a “masterpiece.” The opera was written about a murdered American Jew, not an Israeli killed by Palestinians. Why should such an opera that seeks to find “humanity” in murderers be composed and performed at all, and why should the Times celebrate it?
The answer is a curiosity: since the alt-left would like to see the Palestinian Arabs have their own state, the Islamic terrorists had LEGITIMATE MOTIVATION, so the crime was negated, enabling their progressive fringe celebration.
When alt-right nationalists burst into a Chabad House in California and a synagogue in Pittsburgh killing innocent Jewish worshipers, the alt-left condemned the slaughter because the motivation as described in the killers’ “manifestos” was hatred of minorities and HIAS, a Jewish organization benefiting immigrants. Those are currently progressive protected classes. However, when Palestinian Islamic radicals slaughtered four rabbis in a synagogue in Jerusalem, progressive groups and the Islamic radical dominated-United Nations condemned the impasse of the peace process, thereby rationalizing the murder. The New York Times stated that Hamas “is so consumed with hatred for Israel that it has repeatedly resorted to violence.” It wrote “restoring” to violence, as if the 1988 Hamas Charter wasn’t the most anti-Semitic governing document ever written, which explicitly calls for the murder of Jews. The liberal rag chose to INVERT CAUSE-AND-EFFECT, making the Islamic hatred and violence by-products of Israeli actions rather than the root cause of the conflict.
When Palestinian terrorism was particularly frequent and noxious, the Times called the actions “desperate” because there was NO CHOICE to running over Israeli civilians and stabbing them in the streets and their beds. Those where acts of desperation, not hatred.
The United Nations and the progressive fringe reject the Conservative Supreme Justice Scalia’s notion that a crime is a crime regardless of motivation. If the motivation – say anger at the lack of a Palestinian State – is legitimate, the crime is rationalized and validated. Tricks such as inverting the dynamic that it is the Israelis who are racists, not the Palestinian Arabs, portrays Arabs as justly responding to a situation, not initiating it. The violence against Israeli Jews are acts of desperation, not cold-blooded murder. For the alt-left, only the alt-right kills Jews for that reason.
Jews are currently hated openly and being murdered by the alt-right, the alt-left and Islamic radicals, with each group attempting to rationalize its crimes with manifestos, smug self-righteous editorials and illegitimate UN resolutions. But make no mistake: there is no absolution from morphing malevolent motivations. This proud American Jewish Zionist says to all three groups: you are all evil and you are all guilty.
Related First.One.Through articles:
Cause and Effect: Making Gaza
Fun With Cause-and-Effect: Gaza Border Protests
Your Father’s Anti-Semitism
Germans have “Schadenfreude” Jews have “Alemtzev”
Murdered Jews as Political Fodder at Election Season in America and Always in Israel
Calls From the Ashes
A Review of the The New York Times Anti-Israel Bias
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