Mick Hartley

Further to Brendan O’Neill on Sally Rooney and her messianic pro-Palestinian obsession, here’s Seth Mandel at Commentary:

Sometimes people wonder how to tell when a passionate critique of Israel crosses into dangerous territory. One answer is when Israel is portrayed, essentially or explicitly, as the enemy of the world.

This happened recently when Francesca Albanese, the globetrotting Hamas apologist who operates under the aegis of the United Nations, named Israel as the “common enemy of humanity” at an Al Jazeera conference that was also addressed by Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal.

Over the weekend, Albanese was part of another anti-Zionist confab, where her fellow traveler Sally Rooney spoke of Israel in similar terms. Rooney, a sad Irish Marxist who writes novels about sad Irish Marxist novelists, gave a sad Irish Marxist speech to something called the People’s Congress for the Hague Group, which sounds like a labor union for war criminals.…

But there’s a second point here, in addition to Sally Rooney’s personal cry for help. And that is the unbelievable irresponsibility of public figures portraying the war against the Jews as a war to rescue humanity and save the earth.

In addition to Rooney and Albanese, the conference included—according to its website—the notorious anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn and Omar Barghouti, the founder of the main BDS movement which seeks the destruction of Israel.

Not forgetting Greta Thunberg.

It was, in other words, a conference devoted to drumming up enthusiasm for globalizing the intifada. There have been such rallies against Jews throughout history—many of them, in fact—and not a single one has been about making the world a better place.

Although the conference bills itself as progressive, one can hear in Rooney’s spiel an echo of America’s right-wing “lost boys,” drifting into white nationalism as a demented form of group therapy.

Throughout history, Jews have been blamed for a very long list of maladies. Ennui is a new one, I think. Yet in an era rife with the self-pathologizing of emotional duress, it makes a certain kind of sense that we’re somehow now being blamed for sadness, boredom, restlessness, loneliness, and the guilt of the privileged.