The late Anglo-American writer, Christopher Hitchens, once declared to journalist Alice Fordham the following: “My attitude to posters with swastikas on them has always been the same. They should be ripped down.”
Hitchens was right: the swastika is viscerally provocative. Not for Hindus, of course, for whom it is an ancient symbol of good luck and prosperity. But when viewed through its appropriation by the Nazis as a symbol of racial superiority and purity, that is when it riles.
Unfortunately, a new symbol that roils or rattles depending on whether you are its witness or target, has recently snaked its way into the West. I am talking about the inverted red triangles that were liberally daubed recently on the front of Anne Pasternak’s home. Accompanying the triangles was a banner on which was dabbed this message: ANNE PASTERNAK BROOKLYN MUSEUM WHITE SUPREMACIST ZIONIST. Beneath the caption and in lower case was the supposed clincher: ‘Funds genocide’.
Yes, you guessed it: Pasternak is Jewish. She also is the director of the Brooklyn Museum that has a corporate partnership with the Bank of New York Mellon which by its own admission has small investments in the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. According to New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, the residences of several Brooklyn Museum board trustees were also targeted.
People have the right to protest lawfully in public spaces, but no one has the right to damage property whether public or private and intimidate people in their homes. These vandals have also displayed ignorance of considerable magnitude. Let us consider their ignorance first.
With regards to Pasternak herself, she epitomises the so-called progressive politics that her persecutors are also probably into. Under her leadership, the Brooklyn Museum has presented art displays that explore feminism, ethnic and class identities and the very troubled history of white America and First Nation Americans’ relations. To write on a protest banner that she is a white supremacist is simply libellous. What she thinks of Israel’s policy in Gaza seems absent from that go-to source, the Internet. The trustees who also suffered vandalism no doubt support her progressive approach to curation. The spray-can mad zealots do not appear to have known this, but if they did, it made no difference. Their conflation of Pasternak’s Jewish identity with Zionism and the indirect link to an Israel arms maker was more than enough to act.
Contrary to the banner’s message, Israel is not exclusively white but is multi-ethnic. There are white Jews such as those Russian and Ukrainian Jews who have recently immigrated into Israel, but Middle Eastern Israelis are not white and neither are the Palestinian Arabs, Christian Arabs and Druze who are among the 21.1% of the population that is collectively known in Israel as Israeli Arabs. Israel is therefore not a white supremacist state. As for the accusation that it is perpetrating a genocide against Palestinian Arabs, the fact that there are Palestinian Arabs who are Israeli citizens proves otherwise. I have argued too in a previous article for The New Conservative that Israel’s offensive in Gaza is not a genocide.
Not only are the activists who targeted Pasternak and the trustees’ homes stupendously ignorant of Israel’s demography and military objectives, they have also displayed moral cretinism, for trashing private property crosses an ethical line. Pasternak and her colleagues are now in a position of not knowing whether the protestors took their protest too far, or if the message is that they know where they live and can come for them and their loved ones if they choose. That the protestors chose to plaster their windows and walls with inverted red triangles adds credence to the second possibility, for that symbol is one used by Hamas.
According to author and journalist Daniel Bel-Ami, Hamas use upside-down red triangles to mark someone out for execution for advocating Israel’s cause. The symbol first appeared last November in Hamas’ propaganda videos in which it was superimposed upon images of Israeli soldiers and military vehicles. Meme-like, it has spread across the Arab world’s social media. In the West it has been displayed by students in America and Germany. In Britain it is possible to buy t-shirts with an inverted red triangle design. How cute.
It could be that the Hamas wannabes are ignorant of why Hamas use this symbol. As demonstrated above, they are ignorant of Israel’s demography and military objectives, so they could be ignorant of this too. Perhaps they think that it is Hamas’ sign of their so-called freedom struggle against Israel. But ignorance is no defence in law. They have paradoxically appropriated a terrorist organisation’s symbol whose covenant aims at Israel’s destruction to protest against what they think is the Palestinians’ destruction by Israel.
Mayor Adams has promised Pasternak and her fellow victims that the police will apprehend the miscreants. Knowing the NYPD’s reputation for diligence, it is likely they will be. Clearly, there is no two-tier policing in New York. As Adams warns, there is no place for Hamas-style terrorism in New York. Indeed, there is no place for any kind of terrorism anywhere. Let us hope that when the culprits are found guilty, the judge decides to make an example of them pour encourager les autres as they say.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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I’ve not heard of, or encountered, this symbol until reading the article. My reaction to the use of all symbols, including the swastika, is ‘so what?’ Symbols don’t hurt, neither do words and far too much angst is invested in outrage by the viewers/hearers of ‘hurty things’ instead of focusing on real actions that do hurt. Additionally, many of those using symbols, words and phrases they clearly don’t understand are doing so merely as fashionistas.
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“there is no place for any kind of terrorism anywhere”
Did you intend that as a philosophical view, or as an assessment of the current state of the world?
If the former, what is your recommendation to an oppressed minority in circumstances where deliverance is reasonably understood to necessitate influencing some general population upon whom the oppressive regime depends, or who are otherwise reasonably believed able to bring the oppressors to heel?
Your syntax is tortous. Please re-express yourself so I can understand you. If you are saying is is acceptable to maim and slay civilians, intentionally, then please hand yourself in at the Court in the Hague for the incitement of war crimes.
“Let us hope … the judge decides to make an example of them”
Let us hope not.
Punishment should be appropriate for the crime committed, in the context of any extenuating circumstances.
We are in a perilous state, when the prevailing regime is free to abuse individuals to impress its views upon the mass of us.
A material risk of the defendant’s exploitation in some political campaign should be sufficient reason for a fair jury of his peers to return a verdict of not guilty.
If the punishment ought to fit the crime, do you agree that those responsible for vandalising someone’s home ought to be punished?
“posters … should be ripped down”
“no one has the right to damage property”
Did you miss the potential inconsistency between endorsing Hitchens’s opinion and your own contribution three paragraphs later?
Of course, posters affixed to public property might be considered abandoned, as litter, whereupon their removal may be viewed as an equivalent exercising of the right of free speech to their fixing, but, when their attachment is to something in private ownership, ought they not to be recognised as having been rendered to the owner’s disposition? Moreover, the owner might actually have chosen to use his property for display of the poster, for all Christopher Hitchens knows.
My use of Hitchens’ statement was to illustrate how provocative the swastika can be. An inverted red triangle used to identify those doomed to die by Hamas is equally viscerally loathsome when painted on the house of a woman who happens to be Jewish. Surely, you are not so morally myopic on this matter as you seem to be.
“Yes, you guessed it: Pasternak is Jewish.”
No, the inference I took is that she was believed to be a Zionist. Well informed people do not conflate Zionism with Jewishness.
“the fact that there are Palestinian Arabs who are Israeli citizens proves otherwise.”
What do you suppose to be proven by the fact that there were Jewish citizens of the Third Reich [1]?
1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1f2qr44
You might care to notice that whereas Jewish citizens of the Third Reich ended up dead, Palestinian Arabs in Israel have not.
Thank you for re-engaging.
“You might care to notice that whereas [some] Jewish citizens of the Third Reich ended up dead, [some] Palestinian Arabs in Israel have not.”
Were you not surreptitiously omitting words from your accounts, you might notice that you don’t have a point.
Try reading Michael Burleigh’s text on Nazi Germany, then compare what he says about life and death for German Jews to the lives of Palestinian Arabs who are Israeli citizens and blush, if you can, at your ignorance on this matter.
It really is a sign of ignorance to describe the destruction of 150,000 to 200,000 German Jews as ‘some Jews’. And if Israel is engaged in the same murderous programme against its Palestinian Arab citizens, please supply the evidence.
“To write on a protest banner that she is a white supremacist is simply libellous.”
In the circumstances of the accusation being proven as fact, it would be your statement which was libellous, would it not?
But no circumstances have proven this as fact. And how can my statement be libellous? Your train not thought is a train wreck.
“What she thinks of Israel’s policy in Gaza seems absent from that go-to source, the Internet.”
Absence of evidence is not, of course, evidence of absence, and less than absolutely everything is documented on the Worldwide Web.
Moreover, I seriously doubt that you have read through the entire Internet, and hazard that all you are really recounting is that such pains as you took, in pursuit of relevant information via indexes compiled and made available by third parties, hardly renowned for eschewing agenda-supporting censorship, produced nowt.
I would heartily encourage you to demand others furnish their evidence, but summarily accusing them of falsehoods, on the sole basis of your own inability to identify any, strikes me as hubristic.
It is not for me but for those who made the statement of white supremacy to provide the evidence. The burden of proof is on the accuser.
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