In a speech to the conservative Federalist Society loftily titled “You Are the Last Line of Defense” Bari Weiss declares a clash of civilizations.
“Of course that is what we must talk about tonight,” she starts. “The civilizational war we are in.”
She continued:
But seriously: I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, I know who my allies are. And my allies are not the people who, looking at facile, external markers of my identity, one might imagine them to be. My allies are people who believe that America is good. That the West is good.
A clash of civilizations—when has that been known to backfire? (9/11)
Weiss’s speech focuses primarily on some of the bad public responses to the horrific Hamas massacre and hostage-taking. And that’s valid. I have progressive Jewish friends who feel politically alienated because of some terrible reactions on the “Left”, especially in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack. I feel terrible for older Jewish people who carry the trauma of family histories rooted in pograms and the Holocaust. So I don’t take issue with Weiss’s concerns here (though she mischaracterizes certain incidents like the Cooper Union story).
But you can say all that without using the frame of “Western civilization” and positioning fucking right-wingers like the Federalist Society as a bulwark against barbarism. Because there are real people on the receiving end of that logic as well.
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There’s a global refugee crisis, and it’s driven, in large part, by fear and revulsion at the idea that “they” lack Western values. That they’re too savage to embrace our superior Western culture (right, good point: Muslims don’t drink themselves to death and Venezuelan asylum seekers want to work, rather than get addicted to fentanyl. They could really learn a lot from the West). The fear is that an influx of foreigners—“low-skilled” at that—will irrevocably transform, hence destroy, the peak historical achievement that is Western (white) civilization.
This is an ugly sentiment that takes insidious forms across the political spectrum, in the U.S. and abroad. It’s Tucker Carlson ranting about “white replacement.” It’s Denmark tearing down immigrants’ homes and forcibly relocating them because they fear “non-Western” enclaves. It’s French people’s bizarre obsession with Muslim women’s headscarves. It’s Sweden flipping from “we don’t build walls,” in 2015 to largely reaching the consensus that the country should close its borders to asylum seekers. It’s endless.
It’s Eric Adams boasting of New York City’s “sanctuary” status when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shipped asylum seekers to New York—and then swiftly reversing his pro-sanctuary posture and declaring that there was “no more room'“ in New York. There’s lots of room in New York. Hell! It’s the fact that my Bulgarian cousin and his wife don’t have any friends in Switzerland, where they both have high-level jobs in finance. People are cold to them because some Western Europeans manage to be racist against white people from Eastern Europe.
Both the U.S. and Western European countries push poorer neighboring states to illegally keep refugees away, by encouraging/turning a blind eye to violent border pushbacks. I spoke to a Syrian couple at a refugee camp in Bulgaria. The woman had been 7 months pregnant when they made the treacherous, 5 day crossing, from Turkey to Bulgaria. When his pregnant wife kept falling and hurting herself, her husband called 999 — some border guards showed up and beat the shit out of him instead of helping her.
The U.S. uses various tactics to push back Latin Americans into Mexico— “there’s no more room! The asylum process is dangerous chaos!”—putting them at risk of extortion and kidnapping by the cartels. There’s Donald Trump’s creepy fantasy of “immigrant rapists.’
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“I hear they have knives!” a woman at a coffee shop near the Bulgarian refugee camp told me in a frightened whisper. She was talking about the sweet, friendly 20-something Syrian guys who are her main customers in an economically gutted town. Young Arabs can drink 90 espressos a day without dying. They were probably singlehandedly keeping her business alive. “They have knives!” a cop told me (they don’t carry fucking knives). “They rape children!” some children told me, clearly having gotten this information from the adults in their lives (they do not rape children).
The notion that refugees are barbaric invaders, with strange, dangerous, violent customs—that they’re infiltrators looking to undercut Western values and sow violence and chaos—creates an environment of xenophobic loathing that makes it possible for coast guards to let a boat full of men, women and children sink into the sea. Recently, there was right-wing outrage that MIT refused to suspend foreign students who took part in pro-Palestine protests because they could lose their student visas.
Going back to Weiss’s celebration of Western values: It would be juvenile to understate or dismiss the unique levels of tolerance, codified into law, in the U.S. and Western Europe. But we can celebrate the fact that Weiss could marry a woman and also note that Western chauvinism is the main ideology that drives xenophobia. That, in turn, fuels the suffering of people who want to stay alive, not starve, work and make better lives for their kids in a different country than the one in which they were born.
I’m so worried about the asylum prospects of my Muslim and Arab friends.
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It occurred to me as I was reading this that this hysteria and fear is exactly what was fed to me in my Christian grade school and high school. Muslims are savages. The Ottoman Empire was completely barbaric. And then African countries are even lower on the scale of ignorance and savagery. This is the story the Evangelical right has been drilling into its children for decades.
This is a strawman article if there ever was one. Bari Weiss’ attacks were aimed at Hamas and its supporters, not at Arabs or Muslims. And the clash of civilizations she refers to is between the theocratic values and postmodernist epistemology versus secular Enlightenment values of individual rights and liberalism. The battle is against the stupid and reductivist "oppresor/oppressed" dichotomy bereft of any moral compass or universal values. The Left's response to Hamas' brutality exposed the horrific view that one's temporary status as "oppressed" seems to justify anything. Question the "oppressed" and the only answer you get is to shut up based not on your ideas, but on your identity and lack of "positionality."
. I have lived in India, China, Brazil and Mexico for many years, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that the divide she refers to does not fall on the racial lines you say. Weiss does not even mention immigration. Did you even read her speech? The overwhelming majority of the nonwhite people I know here in LA through 3 interracial marriages are appalled at what Hamas did and are repelled by postmodernist values. The vast majority of nonwhite people living in the US are glad to be here, despite what elite "POC" activists say.
Stupid "progressive" positions on race and gender are Trump's best friend. Nonwhite membership in the awful GOP is skyrocketing. The Dems need to sober up and distance themselves from the Left fringe before it is too late.
As for the Federalist Society, I am no member as a lawyer, but I can tell you one thing--it would be a hell of a lot easier to live as a free gay person under Federalist Society leadership than under Hamas. Hamas makes the Federalist Society look positively humane. The problem with almost all decolonization movements since the 50s is that they produce far more oppressive regimes than the ones they replaced. I invite you to live under one of them. I suggest Zimbabwe, where my daughter recently worked. It's literally hell to live there.
I am a lifelong liberal Democrat and the Progressive Left has seriously lost its way in the last 12 years or so. And there are MANY people who think just like me.