Article in The Times of Israel by Andy Blumenthal: While we should continually strive to promote mutual understanding and empowerment, we must also call out the false messiah of wokeism for what it is: a hateful, corrupt, and self-righteous ideology of entitlement and dictatorship. Instead of wokeism endlessly talking about victimhood, trying to turn one against another, and taking "all you can get," we should instead take a more positive and unifying approach that includes strong individual and family values, hard work, constructive reform, and of course, faith in the One above.

1. 12/17/23, 7:00 AM Why Wokeism Hurts More Than It Helps | Andy Blumenthal | The Blogs
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THE BLOGS
Andy Blumenthal
Leadership With Heart
Why Wokeism Hurts
More Than It Helps
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2. 12/17/23, 7:00 AM Why Wokeism Hurts More Than It Helps | Andy Blumenthal | The Blogs
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Today, I had the opportunity to hear David L. Bernstein, author of Woke
AntiSemitism, speak after Shabbat services at Downtown Jewish Center Chabad
in Fort Lauderdale. He spoke about the radical woke progressives and how they
have perverted the civil rights movement and liberalism for their own extreme
agenda.
This was an especially timely and relevant discussion in light of the brutal
Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and the progressive anti-Semites coming
out in droves to rally not around the Jewish victims of the attack but rather to
support the Hamas terrorists. We saw this in threatening and sometimes violent
protests by Hamas activists in our streets and campuses, stopping traffic,
threatening and terrorizing our citizens, chanting for Intifada revolution and
murderous Jihad, and burning our flag while hoisting their own over our
landmarks and institutions.
Bernstein described essentially how the progressives have hijacked classic
Democratic liberalism. They see the world in a narrow binary fashion: You are

3. 12/17/23, 7:00 AM Why Wokeism Hurts More Than It Helps | Andy Blumenthal | The Blogs
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either the oppressor or the oppressed. This leads them, unfortunately, to miss
all the gray in between. Despite their concept of “intersectionality,” progressives
lack the intellectual nuance to deal with the fact that people can be oppressed
in one way and the oppressor in another.
Moreover, it seems to me that wokeism doesn’t capture the complexity of power
dynamics in the real world. While it is true that some Arabs in Israel became
refugees upon the formation of the state, others became citizens, and now 20%
of Israel is comprised of fully equal Arab citizens, and many others became part
of Jordan, which was allocated as part of a Palestinian homeland and is roughly
4x the size of Israel. At the same time, in the “reverse Nakba,” close to a million
Jews became refugees from Arab countries but were fully absorbed by Israel.
In addition, the oppression of the Palestinians is manufactured for propaganda
effect. Their entire plight resulted from the Arab decision 75 years ago to start a
war with Israel from the moment of the U.N. resolution establishing partition.
Their oppression persists because the Arabs, and in particular Hamas, ensure it.
In addition, it ignores the fact that Palestinians are part and parcel of the much
larger Muslim community worldwide. Muslims outnumber Jews by 1000 to 1.
They also have 55 Muslim-majority nations, many with vast oil wealth,
compared with just one small Jewish State of Israel, the size of New Jersey. The
Palestinian victim movement has co-opted and reversed victim and oppressor. It
is the very powerful Hamas terrorists and their Iranian supporters who have
cast them into this status.
Further, the abuse of rhetoric by woke progressives is typical. They
indiscriminately call Israel “occupiers,” “colonialists,” and an “Apartheid state.”
This, despite the facts, which include that the Jews were literally there first, that
they bought the land, that the UN established the partition for Jewish and
Palestinian states, and that the Jews have thousands of years of religious,
cultural, and historical claim to the land. In contrast, no nation of Palestine has
ever existed in all of human history.

4. 12/17/23, 7:00 AM Why Wokeism Hurts More Than It Helps | Andy Blumenthal | The Blogs
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Finally, beyond the Palestinian issue in particular, wokeism enshrines
victimhood. It is an industry aimed at gaining power and money through a
tyrannical and false hold on the notion of righteousness. By calling their cause
“social justice,” they attempt to claim a vast entitlement to dictate everything.
They manipulate good people who naturally believe in the values of fairness,
equality, justice, and helping others who are disadvantaged.
There are many other problems with wokeism, and this includes progressive
policies aimed at addressing inequality, however noble in attempt, which can
ultimately undermine traditional values of individual responsibility, hard work,
and meritocracy. Also, by portraying the world as a bleak and one-dimensional
place of institutionalized oppression, woke progressives pave the way to
overturn our democratic institutions and replace them with some form of
socialism or communism, and we know how that ends.
While we should continually strive to promote mutual understanding and
empowerment, we must also call out the false messiah of wokeism for what it is:
a hateful, corrupt, and self-righteous ideology of entitlement and dictatorship.
Instead of wokeism endlessly talking about victimhood, trying to turn one
against another, and taking “all you can get,” we should instead take a more
positive and unifying approach that includes strong individual and family
values, hard work, constructive reform, and of course, faith in the One above.

5. 12/17/23, 7:00 AM Why Wokeism Hurts More Than It Helps | Andy Blumenthal | The Blogs
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-wokeism-hurts-more-than-it-helps/ 5/5
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andy Blumenthal is a dynamic, award-winning leader who writes frequently about Jewish life,
culture, and security. All opinions are his own.
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