Remember Procrustes? He made everything perfect. If you were too long for his bed, your feet were cut off. Now you fit in the bed, perfectly. If you were too short for his bed, your legs were stretched until they fit the length of the bed, perfectly. In a procrustean bed, everything fits.
Procrustes’ bed is good not just for bodies, but for ideas. Take the ideas of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), for example.
When an anti-Semite killed four people in Jersey City last month, Tlaib, she of pure and infinite compassion, tweeted, “This is heartbreaking. White supremacy kills.” No doubt, white supremacy motivates some anti-Semites and does kill. But, alas, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s tweet quickly disappeared. Her compassion, it turned out, was not so pure and certainly not infinite. It turns out that the good congresswoman learned, as the rest of us did, that the perpetrators of the Jersey City attack were not white supremacists. They were African Americans.
So much for being “heartbroken.”
So much for opposition to killing if not done by a white supremacist, but by a person of a different ideology and color.
For after Tlaib’s initial, ideology-driven, inaccurate tweet was taken down, she sent out no other tweet that we know of. There was no longer any room for being “heartbroken” at the death of innocent Jews and of two other innocent people. There was no apology from Congresswoman Tlaib that we know of.
There was only that bed of Procrustes. To Tlaib, anti-Semitism driven by white supremacism will be made to fit into that bed, no matter what. Otherwise, there is no anti-Semitism. Take down the tweet, and it goes away.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
