I see Jerry Seinfeld has got the pompous left sobbing into their keffiyehs. His sin? He refused to buckle to their neo-religious mantra ‘Free Palestine’. The comedy legend was accosted by a YouTuber outside Madison Square Gardens in NYC last week.
‘Free Palestine’ feels like a jeer designed to taunt Jews
“Can we get a ‘Free Palestine’?”, the streamer asked as he shoved his mic towards Seinfeld’s gob. Seinfeld smirked. He held his tongue. No ‘Free Palestine’ passed his lips.
It gets better. He then proceeded to shut down his chirpy interrogator with three words. “It doesn’t exist”, he said. He was talking about Palestine. Cue fury from the Gazaholics. This was “racist rhetoric”, cried the cranks at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Oh keep your burqas on. He wasn’t being racist – he was showing the world that even in an age of crushing conformity it is possible to stand your ground.
There was something heroic in Seinfeld’s smiling refusal to speak on command. By resisting the pressure to parrot the slogans of the self-righteous, he struck a blow for freedom of conscience. He resisted the trap of compelled speech, preferring the company of his own supposedly blasphemous thoughts. What a relief to discover there are celebrities out there who decline to bow to the passing fads of correct-think.
The backlash over his Palestine heresy was fast and furious. Social media is awash with Jerry hate. ‘Racist’, ‘apartheid lover’, ‘psycho’ – those barbs and others have been hurled his way. Mehdi Hasan called him a “disgusting and proud racist” and said he will never again watch an episode of Seinfeld. I bet Jerry’s gutted. Perhaps he’ll take comfort in the millions of dollars he still rakes in from Seinfeld every year, courtesy of viewers who aren’t big babies and don’t switch off TV shows in a pique of infantile rage when they discover they disagree with the people who made them.
The intensity of the backlash is proof of what a suffocating orthodoxy ‘Free Palestine’ has become. Fail to genuflect to this chattering-class catechism and you risk being cast out of polite society. Hence Seinfeld is being treated not as someone who has a different opinion on the Middle East but as a moral deviant deserving of castigation. Five hundred years ago he’d have been in the stocks. Or worse.
The pressure to hate Israel can feel overwhelming at times, especially in the cultural sphere. The keffiyeh people resemble a religious sect, checking the minds of every public figure for any whiff of that most verboten emotion: sympathy for the Jewish State. As the latest report from Freedom in the Arts found, Jewish artists are often subjected to ‘exceptional scrutiny’ and even ‘suspicion’, especially if they have Zionist leanings.
So good on Seinfeld – who is himself Jewish – for rebelling against the cruel scrutiny of Jewish creatives and instead staying true to the dictates of his own conscience. That’s another good reason to resist the lure of ‘Free Palestine’ – because it isn’t only the hollow slogan of arrogant activists; it has also become a tool for the taunting of Jews.
Badgering Jews to say ‘Free Palestine’ is the modern equivalent of making them take a loyalty test. It’s a way of measuring whether they’re a ‘Good Jew’ or a ‘Bad Jew’. Have they dutifully disowned the Jewish homeland, as their tormentors in the activist class demand of them? Or do they still stubbornly cling to their Zionists beliefs? If it’s the latter – if they openly balk at the purity test of saying ‘Free Palestine’ – then they will be denounced as racist, genocidal, a lower species of human. Such a cruel division of Jews into camps of ‘the moral’ and ‘the immoral’ will feel familiar to Jews who know their history.
Worse, Jews have been murdered, assaulted, set on fire and forcibly expelled from public institutions by people barking ‘Free Palestine’. That baleful slogan was the last thing those two Israeli Embassy staffers heard before they were shot to death on the steps of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC last year. It was bellowed at the elderly Jewish woman who was set on fire in Colorado, also last year. Or watch the clip of the American-Jewish woman being expelled from a spa in Barcelona last month after someone spied her Star of David necklace. ‘Free Palestine’, a member of the mob shouts.
‘Free Palestine’ feels like a jeer designed to taunt Jews with the dystopic vision of the destruction of their homeland. It is hollered at them as a threat, as a warning that, alone among the peoples of the world, they will one day be robbed of their sovereign rights and will see their homeland dismantled, all the way “from the river to the sea”. Listen, if your favoured slogan is yelled at Jews as they are mobbed and murdered, then it might not be as virtuous as you think it is. Thank you, Jerry, for helping to expose this dark truth about ‘Free Palestine’.
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