Names—Like ‘America First’ or ‘Progressive’—Have Histories
By Cynthia Ozick
It was recently revealed that Donald Trump’s family, immigrants from Germany, chose early on to live a lie: They called themselves Swedes. There is more pathos than blame in this deceit. After all, they were by then established Americans residing in Queens, N.Y., far from the venomous swastikas of Munich. Understandably, they were in fear of stigma, much as today a Muslim immigrant from, say, Sri Lanka might dread being associated with the Islamists of Hamas.
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As for the unlucky descendants of Captain Charles Boycott, the ostracized Irish land agent known for the cruelty of his summary evictions, perhaps, like the Trump family, they have sought other identities and are nowadays mercifully concealed under Smith and Jones. Boycott was a vile fellow, and the legacy of his name reflects the indecency it evokes.
The term “boycott,” currently one-third of an infamous and shamelessly accelerating trio—boycott, divest, sanction—is designed to harm the Jews of the state of Israel and to extinguish a living nation. And more. So energetic a will to boycott Jews instantly exposes its source and inspiration: the Nazi “K auf nicht bei Juden” campaign—Don’t Buy From Jews—which led directly to the smashing of glass and the burning of synagogues and ultimately to the extirpation of the Jews of Europe.
That repugnant movements repeat themselves is unsurprising; when depravity is unopposed, permission is tacitly granted to do it again. An unmistakable spawn of the German boycotts is the activist fiefdom headed by Riham Barghouti and brazenly known as “The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel,” an entity dedicated to defamation, canard, dishonest sloganeering and the fomenting of hatred. Its progenitor may be the blatantly crude Big Lie of the 20th century, but its language is a sophisticated masquerade in the idiom of human rights, with the aim of duping the guileless, chief among whom are writers, artists, intellectuals, the touted cream of the crop. It is this nobly seductive idiom that, with malice aforethought, has been schooled in the means to turn the Jewish state into an international pariah.
There is a commonplace word for these depredations: It is anti-Semitism, and what a pity, and what a scandal, and what a dirty display it is, to conflate, as the boycotters do, open Jew-hatred—the wish to destroy an entire nation of Jews—with the sublime notion of human rights.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/nameslike-america-first-or-progressivehave-histories-1472598153
