Note on Libel

 

JD Vance is now using the term "blood libel" to describe criticism of ICE, saying, "The Democrats and the media — because they so hate the idea of a real border — are engaging in a kind of blood libel against ICE agents." Somewhere, our ancestors wept.

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— Joel S. (@joelhs.bsky.social) September 26, 2025 at 3:07 PM

That's not a very good choice of imagery, JD. I wouldn't expect you to know, because I wouldn't expect you to know much about these things, though you went to Princeton, but "blood libel" is a technical term in the history of Jewish people in medieval Europe, who were treated as dangerous foreigners, with their strange languages and strange religion, barred from various occupations, and confined to ghettos and shtetels where they lived segregated from the Christian population, and victimized by a particularly horrible myth; that Jews would steal Christian babies from their parents' houses and kill them, for their blood, which the Christians supposed was used for some kind of magical ritual—like the making of Passover matzoh, the weird Jewish analogue to the Christian communion wafer (historically it was the other way around: the communion wafer, the symbolic Lord's Supper, being modeled from the unleavened flatbread, matzoh, that Jesus would have eaten at his Last Supper, a Passover seder with his followers, telling them, according to the Gospel, that it was his own flesh, and the wine they were drinking was his own blood). 

This was a typical example of the dreadful lies that brought about the persecutions in which Christian peasants or townsmen periodically slaughtered Jews by the dozens and hundreds and thousands, and served as precursors to the 19th-century pogroms of eastern Europe and the 20th-century Shoah, the Nazis' "final solution" to the "Jewish question". 

It's like the ancestor of all antisemitism, born out of the story that the Jews, as a collectivity, murdered God's own baby, his only-begotten son, which in the terrible history of antisemitism is the fons et origo.

ICE, in contrast, is a national police force that attacks ghettosful of aliens, and the story of their violence against the presumed foreigners is no libel, but attested in cell phone videos from all over the country. We've seen them knocking women to the ground and tearing children and their parents apart. If you're looking for a blood libel, you can find something like it in the words of *checks notes* Vice President JD Vance, in the 2024 campaign, spreading the false story that Haitians fleeing from the murderous violence of Port-au-Prince and living completely legally in Ohio under Temporary Protected Status had taken to killing and eating their neighbors' pet cats and dogs. Vance basically admitted that he had no citable evidence but claimed he needed to tell the story anyway, on the weird grounds that the mere presence of the Haitians in town was causing the good (white) citizens of Springfield some kind of "suffering" that couldn't be described, only communicated, apparently, by lying about it:

During a Sunday interview on CNN, the Ohio senator and Republican vice presidential nominee said his evidence for this claim was "the first-hand accounts of my constituents [although media reporting had clearly established by then that there were no such first-hand accounts]." He then went on to defend the dissemination of this false story.

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Sen. Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.

Totally ignored what? How the American people were "suffering" from a thing that wasn't in fact happening. "It's not real, but the media must pay attention to it!" And given the way people feel about their pets, hardly different from the way they feel about their kids, it's not just like a version of the blood libel. Telling the local citizenry that if they were unhappy it was the fault of those dark-skinned, foreign-accented people in their midst

What's wrong with these people? 

Free Mahmoud

 

"It's part of a wider strategy to obfuscate MAGA antisemitism and an increasingly fascist regime Gift link to the piece.

Somebody I respect, I don't actually remember who, was warning us against trying to show that Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian with a graduate degree from Columbia University who was kidnapped from New York over the weekend by ICE, and spirited away to Louisiana for deportation proceedings, was innocent of whatever wrongthink he's suspected of, on the grounds that it doesn't matter. He's clearly not charged with any crime, which would be a problem, but he has a right in the United States of America to hold any thoughts whatever, and associate with whomever he wishes to associate with, whether they're good people or bad, if only because that's what the First Amendment says, and if I were to use Mahmoud Khalil's personal behavior as evidence that he doesn't "deserve" to be deported I'd be suggesting that other people in a similar position might indeed "deserve" it, but the First Amendment isn't about what you deserve. It's about what you are owed, your unalienable rights, even if you are a bad person or have bad friends. It's "the thought we hate", as Justice Holmes said, that needs the most protection of all, because that's where it's easiest to not care about people's rights and let the cops do whatever they want with them.

On the other hand, it isn't just about him.  It's about what ICE and the Trump regime have in mind, what they are trying to accomplish, which isn't really about the thought they hate. That's just an excuse. If you look more closely at the case of Mahmoud Khalil, if you try to figure out what he's accused of and whether or not he might have done something that merits deportation, you get a clearer picture of what they're really up to, and how it threatens all of us.

That there was something very funky about the case was evident right from the beginning:

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night [March 8] when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer. (AP)

How did the ICE agents not know whether the man they were picking up had a student visa or not? (He had finished his masters' degree—in public administration, at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, and of course gotten married, which favored his getting the green card.) Or, given the swiftness with which they changed their story, were they making stuff up?

For the record: The Secret History of Diversity in US Higher Education

 

He doesn't look like an African explorer called Dr. Spaulding. He looks like a Commie from the Lower East Side. Duck Soup, 1933.

There's a story about the evolution of US higher education that involves "meritocracy" at a time the word would never have been used other than in its original satirical sense: The development of rigorous competitive academic standards for admission after World War II was part of an effort...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 8:56 AM

specifically to overcome anti-Jewish quotas at elite schools that excluded the "wrong kind" of Jews, from immigrant families and public high schools and not wealthy or athletic--and the point was *in favor* of diversifying the comfortable mediocrity of the WASP ruling class...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:01 AM

in the atmosphere of competition among schools to become "centers of excellence" in the era between the Manhattan Project and the Sputnik. But other kinds of excellence than very high SAT scores and other kinds of diversity didn't get the same kind of attention (sports helped overcome...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:09 AM

resistance against recruiting Black students but not in such big numbers--you don't need as many football and basketball and track stars as you do science students). But the effort to increase diversity was always understood as an effort to increase excellence of schools as a whole...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:13 AM

until the rightwing revolt we know from cases like Bakke turned the idea upside down with ideas of "reverse discrimination", meant to restore the mediocre WASP ascendancy. You can read some of this between the lines here www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/09...

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— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:16 AM

And of course the push to recruit Jewish science students and Black athletes also recruited a lot of Jewish and Black humanities and social science students and radical activists, and the ruling class didn't like that one little bit.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:23 AM

They combated it with a strategy of divide and conquer, welcoming (or feigning to welcome) Jewish students, as they now welcome Asian Americans, as "meritorious" allies.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) March 8, 2025 at 9:28 AM

And that's where we are.