Pahk Yah Jihad in Hahvad Yahd

An Open Letter to "GEN-OCIDE-Z"

There’s a strange fetish you Zoomers have for redefining words, picking over terms and colloquialisms for sinister, racist double entendre; assigning to benign everyday greetings inhuman, malevolent roots. The TikToker who tries to sell us that the universal salutation “Good morning” originates with sadistic slave owners coming to gloat the day after a slave has been killed:

“That was their way of being funny. Did you have a ‘good mourning?’ Did you have a good cry about that person’s death? Did you have a good cry about your daughter being tookin’ away from you?”

”Good mourning.” Yeah, you guys are sick.

You’re the same people who can’t even be in the same zip code with a word that sounds like another, more triggering word without spiraling out. On YouTube and other platforms, community guidelines ban the actual term for taking one’s own life. We all have to say, “un-aliving” oneself. You require trigger warnings about it before seeing Romeo and Juliet. That word, and a lexicon of other taboo terms, you deem “harmful;” “violent.” But you know which word seems, like, “low-key” fair game? The term you guys love to toss around like confetti? GENOCIDE.

Okay, Zoomer—I’ll play your silly little provenance game. Here’s a few facts about the word GENOCIDE.

genocide (n.). The term was coined in 1944 by a lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, a refugee Polish Jew who was on the legal team that prepared The Nuremburg Trials, where Nazi war criminals were tried for the mass extermination of Jews. Lemkin concluded that there were no existing terms adequate to encompass the magnitude of the evil, methodical annihilation the Nazis perpetrated. Lemkin derived genocide from the Greek genos, or race, and cide: “a killing.” The word describes a discrete type of coordinated, systematic destruction of an entire race, nation, or tribe.

Yep, that’s right—the slaughter of Jews and genocide are literally synonymous. So… tell me again, Claudine Gay, in which “context” the calling for the genocide of the Jews is not hate speech or an incitement to antisemitic violence…? I’ll wait.

Aurora “Birdy” Bird

Have you seen this TikTok nightmare named Aurora “Birdy” Bird, a gender non-conforming scold with a peach fuzz testosterone mustache who likely transitioned from angry white she/her from the suburbs who never knew her father? Sorry—their father? Birdy yammers at us that we are in:

SEVENTH STAGE TRANS GENOCIDE!!

—and you should call your trans friends and offer to do their groceries for them, or give them money, because:

SEVENTH STAGE TRANS GENOCIDE!!

Oh, and hey—this is SO fire!—Birdy recently discovered the Quran, and they are just soooo excited about it, and, “I dunno, maybe I believe in Allah (giggle)!”

I guarantee you, Birdy: Allah does not believe in you.

“Genocide?” How DARE YOU fling about a word like that, and spew such a stupid and pernicious lie? Your reckless idiocy belittles the actual anti-trans violence and abuse that needs addressing. Your tasteless, click-bait garbage is disgusting and inflammatory.

I lived through a genocide, Birdy. It was called AIDS. When I was a college kid, just coming out, an entire generation of gay men died all around me, as the government did nothing—because who cared about queers? That’s a genocide, Birdy. And, okay, gay men may not be a race, but we’re a pretty fucking righteous tribe. And our tribe got pretty fucking genocided during the AIDS crisis.

But, let’s get back to the Jews. Let’s talk race. Let’s explore the genos part of genocide.

I recently got into a comment thread kerfuffle online about Whoopi Goldberg’s infamous Holocaust rant on The View, and her ignorant insistence that Jews are white. Jews are not white. The blowhard who engaged me in this heated comment palaver was incapable of grasping that, yes—Judaism is a religion—but: whether or not you practice the religion, if you’re born Jewish, you’re Jewish. We are a well delineated racial/ethnic population. Genetics defines us as such. My mother was a first generation American, the daughter of immigrant Eastern European Jews. Her DNA test came back 97% Ashkenazi. For a genuinely brilliant and perfectly articulated explanation as to why Jews are not white, I refer you to heroic Jewish-Israeli rights activist Rudy Rochman:

“Let me say this clearly. Jews are not white. Race in itself is a social construct that was created to divide people for economic, political, or social gain. But in today's political language, we must understand what it means.

Rudy Rochman, from his brilliant video “The Purpose of Antisemitism”

Being white is way more than just skin color. It refers to a status and an origin. Jews come in all colors, and although some Jews with a European experience may have lighter skin pigmentation, Jews, no matter where they were displaced to, do not originate from those places. Even if we take Ashkenazi Jews, with their European experiences—not origins—their culture, identity, history, DNA, language, traditions, aspirations, and everything that makes them a Jew originates from the Levant, not Europe.

Origins aside, being white also has to do with a group's status. Jews that lived in Europe for the past 2000 years were never treated as white. Jews were barred from owning lands, could not participate in agrarianism, and were constantly persecuted and massacred for being Jewish. Even in the very short periods where Jews finally became equal members of society, this status was quickly stripped as genocides followed, since Jews are not a part of their Aryan race.

So what makes Jews white? Well, the argument used today is that Jews may not be white, but that they have white privilege. Yes, some Jews may be “white passing,” but to make a generalizing statement like that completely minimizes our experiences. Ask any white supremacist what their enemy number one is, and they will most likely tell you the Jews.”

Now, to be fair, Whoopi apologized and admitted her mistake, but there’s plenty of resentment of Jews in communities of color (I’m writing another piece on that subject, stay tuned).

Antisemitism is Racism. Full stop.

So, you “Queers for Palestine:” is it possible for you to imagine the pain and emotional upset a sign like the one below, equating Israel with the Nazis, might bring to a Holocaust survivor, or, say, their grandchild, attending Harvard alongside you? I mean, aren’t you the sensitivity police, the “activists” who define speech as violence, and demand safe spaces? Oh, wait: what was that…? Oh, right. Safe for some people, but not others. Gotcha. I guess that’s why Jewish students have filed a lawsuit against Harvard, characterizing the venerated college as “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment”.

Now, I know ignorance is all the rage amongst you kids—no—you’re not kids. You’re adults. Privileged adults attending an elite school. Ignorance may be a reason for your misguided activism, but it’s not an excuse. I understand that you don’t really have a memory of Charlottesville. You may not have seen the “tiki torch boys” chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us” as they marched across the University of Virginia campus.

Or the events of the next day’s “Unite the Right” rally, which turned into a free-for-all of White Nationalists, neo-Nazis and counter protestors rioting in the streets. And the car, driven by one of the far right extremists, plowing into a crowd of protestors, and killing a young white girl, an idealistic leftist activist named Heather Heyer. All this over monuments to Confederate soldiers being torn down. I still haven’t worked out how the Jews had anything to do with Robert E. Lee…but antisemites don’t need an excuse.

The tiki torch boys were pretty creepy, but you pro-Hamas-Queers-for-Palestine goons take the prize. On October 7th, 2023, you leapt into action with breathless speed, immediately blaming Israel for the hellscape playing out in Gaza in that infamous letter. Just from a decency standpoint, you couldn’t even wait a day before blaming the innocents massacred in that hideous pogrom for bringing it on themselves?

I realize you people have no memory of 9/11. You have no connection with the horror of that Islamic terror attack on our country; the destruction, the slaughter of thousands, the chronic and deadly illnesses plaguing the first responders, doctors, and workers at Ground Zero. I was here, in New York City, that day. And the days that followed. The terrorist maniacs who perpetrated the atrocity declared they’d committed it against all Americans. We choose our leaders, so to those animals we’re all guilty.

And you have the gall to get on TikTok and rhapsodize over Osama Bin Laden? To show such contempt for your country? To disrespect and torment survivors—courageous people who bore witness to a catastrophe, and who will cope with that trauma for the rest of their lives? Your hatred of America—which you engage in recreationally—offends me, and a lot of other people as well.

You should be locked in a room and forced to listen to the stories of the families of the victims on those planes, in those towers, at the Pentagon. The terrorists who slaughtered them—on our home ground—were “freedom fighters,” too.

You should be strapped to seats, and forced, like in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, to view the video recorded and live-streamed by the animals who savaged those concertgoers in Gaza. You may be too far gone; so detached from reality that you can’t feel another’s pain and anguish. I pity you. Where’s your fucking humanity? The Hitler youth movement, though better groomed, remind me a lot of you guys. Another righteous mob of psychopaths deciding which races can stay and which have to go.

So you know what, “Gen-ocide-Z?” I’m done with you. You’re garbage people.

But I say this with full conviction: Americans like me believe in free speech for all. You only believe in it for yourselves. You’re hypocrites. You’re morally bankrupt. You’re opportunistic and manipulative. Your lack of humanity in the wake of horrors perpetrated against innocents, other human beings…the zeal with which you leap to blame the slain for their own senseless rapes, mutilations, deaths?

Yeah. No. I’m done with you. You demand I “respect” your identity, your pronouns, your triggers and traumas? You don’t comprehend the meaning of respect. I will pay you the courtesy I extend to all my fellow humans. See, I’m a good Jewish boy. I was brought up that way. I believe in this country’s values, so I will exercise a lost American value: tolerance. But respect? Yeah. No. And for anyone not tuned in to what’s happening, what is playing out in front of our eyes, history repeating in subtle and unsubtle ways, I will quote Heather Heyer’s last words, posted on her Facebook page:

”If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”