Antisemitism, including anti-Israelism, makes use of shunning. We should recognize that there are two types of shunning – one we might term as active shunning and one we might term passive shunning.
Active shunning is the taking of steps to boycott or otherwise act against the party or idea being shunned.
Passive shunning is the refusal to even discuss or provide public space for ideas deemed uncomfortable.
This is reflected in the definition of shunning in the Oxford Dictionary: “persistently avoid, ignore, or reject (someone or something) through antipathy or caution.
And so, one part of shunning is avoidance or ignoring something that makes people uncomfortable and the other part is the rejection of that thing. The definition goes on to distinguish between active antipathy and passive caution.
The cautious person who wishes to avoid confrontation or disputes perhaps does not understand that a passive shunning makes active shunning more likely.
In fact, there is little understanding that passive shunning is not a moral high ground: we often hear someone say he or she does not want to discuss anything political, implying that in their avoidance of difficult or controversial topics, that is a moral high ground, or even a type of virtue signalling. Somehow the avoidance of discussion of complex topics is deemed virtuous, as a type of “peacemaking”.
We Jews struggle with the way that most ordinary people during the Shoah did not speak out or take concrete steps to try to stop it. For me, the refusal, even in the pursuit of caution or avoidance of acrimony, to discuss the end result of antisemitism, is somewhat similar in today’s world of antisemitism compared to the Shoah – even though we earnestly hope that it will never get even close to that level, notwithstanding what we are seeing and hearing from the Arab and wider Muslim world and the “useful idiots” who facilitate the evil.
I don’t shy away from the difficult questions, because doing so conduces to passive shunning and the end result of passive shunning is the ease with which active shunning contaminates our culture.
And so, in these pages at https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/383645, I have been unafraid to use the term “hostage holocaust”, as we watch otherwise moral people shun the difficult issue of the way Hamas breaches all morality and laws of warfare and uses hostages including the abuse of their own people. The use of double standards and some kind of obsession about Israel’s every move to defend itself against explicit threats and actions of genocide, show what we are up against.
While the world thinks it appropriate to criminally charge Israel for committing genocide in its defense against the clear genocide of Hamas and the other terrorist states, especially a soon to be nuclear Iran, we see that the International Holocaust Commemoration Day in late January strives to avoid talking about why Israel is never mentioned in this commemoration.
The shunning of Jews is somehow justified as mere anti-Israelism, which has led to the shunning of the inherent Jewish value of Zionism, which has been a value of Judaism since Biblical times.
Some writers, including Daniel Pipes and Yoram Hazony have written that the nation-state of Israel has been caught up in a paradigm shift. They recognize that the nation-state is de-emphasized in favour of multinational and globalist institutions, making Israel easier to shun.
The passive shunning of ignoring the leftist and Islamist antisemitism has inevitably passed into an active shunning of any Jew who so much as mentions Israel.
A year ago, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called for a shunning of Benjamin Netanyahu by world leaders over judicial reform. Does he understand where shunning might lead?
Here is an example from Canada, which historically has been a stable liberal nation but has, due to cultural relativism, wokeism, leftism and the welcome of Muslim immigrants without vetting them for dangerous attitudes, now become a place with active antisemitism tolerated by the elites who in fact daily submit to the leftist/Islamist world view.
In Canada, there is a quite large city called Hamilton about an hour away from the largest city, Toronto, home to many Jews and a fast increasing Muslim population, which of course is creating the same sort of problems seen in Europe. In Hamilton, like many other cities with large Jewish populations there is an annual Jewish film festival.
The first venue for the festival this year withdrew its permission to host it when the administrators of the festival declined to show a severely anti-Israel film. Then the second proposed venue cancelled based on what they termed “security and safety concerns” after stating that they had received “numerous” emails, phone calls and social media messages.
What had traditionally been seen as a Jewish cultural event had no doubt been cancelled because that part of Jewish culture that embraces Zionism is now deemed beyond Canadian values, which instead seek to tolerate hatred of Jews and our small homeland and then submit to Islamism. While Jews in Israel fight an active military and terrorist war, Jews in the Diaspora fight a culture war that gets harder to win with each year of further Muslim immigration in the furtherance of Jihad and a world-wide Caliphate.
The festival hopefully will be rescheduled elsewhere but will doubtless attract protests including threats of violence. What were the films set to be shown? There is the final work of Israeli filmmaker Yahav Winner – who was killed in the October 7th attack – about a father and son living near the Gaza border. Other films, produced in Israel, France and Poland, tell stories of an Israeli field hospital for war-torn Ukraine, a Jewish theatre student in Communist-era Poland, the women of a Haifa hair salon, at-risk youth in Israel, and a psychological thriller about antisemitism in modern-day Paris.
Israel has seen the shunning of its athletes in international sporting events, and of course the United Nations and other international bodies seem to have little purpose other than shunning Israel in evermore active ways.
We must understand that passive shunning always makes it easier for active shunning, as our enemies lose their inhibitions in Jew-hatred.
Howard Rotberg is a cultural critic writing about ideologies, values and culture, with five books out, including the recent Second Generation Radical: The World Through One Man’s Second Generation Lens. His website is www.howardrotberg.com