Kimberl\u00e9 Crenshaw<\/a>. She invented it to explain how black women\u2019s lives were adversely affected by discrimination not only by race but also by gender and how the two impacted on each other.<\/p>\nThis basic idea \u2013 that one form of oppression actually influences another \u2013 appealed to sociologists. It quickly became an obsession, mushrooming to encompass the concept that every form of discrimination within a society against oppressed or disenfranchised groups is interlinked.<\/p>\n
It did not require much effort to incorporate into these intersecting forms of oppression the old chestnut that \u2013 despite all the evidence to the contrary \u2013 Israel was an apartheid state dedicated to oppressing Palestinians.<\/p>\n
As a result, the groups that considered themselves oppressed were led to embrace the Palestinians as fellow victims and to perceive Israel as part of the oppressive global power structure. \u00a0In short, intersectionality soon offered anti-Israel organizations a fashionable and acceptable way of wielding the ultimate antisemitic weapon \u2013 linking every perceived evil in the world to the Jews or the Jewish state.<\/p>\n
From the 2010s, intersectionality became mainstream in progressive NGOs, campus politics, social justice, and anti-fascist campaigns. Movements increasingly adopted an \u201cintersectional\u201d language of overlapping systems.<\/p>\n
In left-wing circles, it became both fashionable and a matter of self-preservation to maintain, for example, that equal pay for women is related to Black Lives Matter or that climate change activism is inseparable from the struggle against colonialism.<\/p>\n
And since left-wing opinion has decreed that Palestinians are quintessential victims and their villainous oppressors are Israel, dogma dictates that in opposing any form of discrimination, you must oppose Israel.<\/p>\n
Your opposition must, of course, extend to all those who support Israel \u2013 which means the vast majority of Diaspora Jewry \u2013 and then, by a further extension, to all Israelis.<\/p>\n
You must deny them a voice, ban them from public life, cut them off from academic interchange, and boycott or disrupt their artistic performances.<\/p>\n
It is on the basis of intersectionality that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement operates its anti-Israel and anti-Israeli campaigns.<\/p>\n
Theory in practice<\/p>\n
Pride Month events in the US and Europe supply clear examples of this frankly antisemitic thinking.<\/p>\n
LGBTQ+ organizations regularly accuse Israel \u2013 the only state in the Middle East with a liberal approach to sexual issues \u2013 of \u201cpinkwashing,\u201d that is, of cynically using its advanced LGBTQ+ rights to distract the world\u2019s attention from its alleged human rights violations.<\/p>\n
In other words, nothing that Israel can do \u2013 even demonstrate its open-hearted support for liberal sexual politics \u2013 can outweigh the underlying antipathy toward the Jewish state.<\/p>\n
As a result, Jewish and pro-Israel LGBTQ+ groups have been harassed or excluded from Pride marches, while organizations that support Palestinian factions with deeply homophobic ideologies are welcomed in the name of solidarity with the \u201coppressed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Groups and movements intent on putting intersectional theory into practice simply fail, or refuse, to perceive antisemitism as a rampant form of oppression.<\/p>\n
None take into account that for centuries, Jews across the world were subject to discrimination and persecution.<\/p>\n
Nor do they acknowledge that Zionism was the political reaction \u2013 a movement aimed at restoring to the Jewish people the right to determine their own future in their ancestral homeland.<\/p>\n
It is heartening, however, to note that the intersectionality tide is beginning to turn. Some scholars have started to argue that it sidelines antisemitism.<\/p>\n
Sociologist Karin Stogner writes that intersectionality, as usually practiced, shows a \u201ctendency to exclude global antisemitism from its understanding of oppression.\u201d<\/p>\n
She notes that movements guided by this exclusion \u2013 she names the Women\u2019s March, Chicago Dyke March, and parts of Black Lives Matter \u2013 have \u201cexcluded Jewish organizations and individuals from participation and take a vehement anti-Israel stance.\u201d<\/p>\n
In one paper, she describes \u201cstrange alliances that occur between queer and intersectional feminism on the one hand and global antisemitism on the other.\u201d<\/p>\n
Professor Christina Hoff Sommers has written: \u201cOf course, intersectionality theory is a confused muddle. It fights racism and sexism by classifying everyone according to race and sex. It views race and gender privilege as the root of all evil while ignoring the role played by dogmatic ideologies held by all genders.\u201d<\/p>\n
High among such \u201cdogmatic ideologies,\u201d of course, is frank antisemitism.<\/p>\n
Even Crenshaw herself, some 20 years after devising the idea of intersectionality, complained that her concept had been stretched beyond what she intended.<\/p>\n
She wrote that intersectionality was \u201coriginally meant to be a tool used to understand and frame the discrimination faced by black women in the United States,\u201d but that it had been \u201ccontorted\u201d to become something that she never intended it to be.<\/p>\n
No one could speak with greater authority. Crenshaw has asserted that intersectionality, as she conceived it, has burst its banks and flooded out of control.<\/p>\n
Are its proponents at last beginning to perceive that the misguided application of its theories to Israel and the Jewish people is in part responsible for the uncontrolled expansion of antisemitism in the West?\u25a0<\/p>\n
Neville Teller is a former senior civil servant. Follow him at: www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They either do not know or they choose to ignore, that according to the law and norms of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":225825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[2492,41582,37,12623,4261,33588],"class_list":["post-225824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-antisemitism","tag-bds","tag-israel","tag-jerusalem-report","tag-lgbtq","tag-pro-palestinian-groups"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116996828596243981","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/225825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}