Try to imagine for a second that we’re all Canadians. I’m a middle-class Anglophone Canadian in the old capital of Kingston, Ontario, a two hour drive from Syracuse, New York. One day I pick up the local newspaper, the Kingston Whig Standard, and learn that the provincial government of Quebec had mobilized the 2^nd Canadian Division, which then stormed into the Mohawk reservation of Akwesasne, killed all 14,000 residents, and buried them in mass graves. The next day protests erupted on college campuses all across Canada, the University of Toronto, McGill, the University of Ottawa and Queens University in Kingston. The students at Queens University had even set up a tent city with signs like “No More Genocide in Canada” or “Arrest François Legault for War Crimes.” A few of the signs were a bit nuttier. One or two of them expressed outright dislike for the French. “You can never trust a frog,” one sign said. “Die cheese-eating surrender monkey,” another read.

As the week went on, more and more mass graves at the Akwesasne Reservation began to appear on Tik Tok, snuck out of the province by brave local activists with cell phones. It was clear that the provincial government of Quebec had committed a genocide. As a typical Anglophone Canadian, a bit conservative and a bit racist, I was first inclined to doubt the news of the atrocities, but after awhile it became undeniable. The people of Quebec had gone mad, and in an orgy of white supremacist violence, were trying to cleanse the province of the First Nations. I began to feel my outrage grow. I also began to take a certain pride in the 18-22 year old college students who had been the first to call national attention to what had happened in Quebec. But that’s not how the media saw it. All across the English language media of Canada, all my fellow Anglophones, who had always had a problematic relationship with the French, could talk about nothing but the former lowly status of the Francophone working class in Quebec. Every day there was a new apology from the media for what the United Kingdom had done to these oppressed people. Soon it started to be considered racist to refer to French Canadians as “white.” Every day there was a new horror story about how someone got a dirty look for saying “bonjour” instead of “good morning.” One day at the local Tim Hortons I found myself behind a pair of French-speaking patrons. “Oh hurry up you fucking frogs,” I whispered under my breath. The next day woke up to see myself on tape that the security camera had taken. “Who is this racist?” the local reporter said. “Anybody with information contact the station immediately.”

Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it?

It may sound ludicrous, but that’s exactly what’s happening in the American media. The Palestinians in Gaza are among the poorest people in the world. For the past 6 months, the Israeli Defense Forces have pounded a densely populated area with American made weapons, killing tens of thousands of people and creating a famine that will doubtedly kill many thousands more. The Israeli government is committing a genocide with the full support of President Biden and all of the wealthy, powerful countries of the European Union. The entire American political and media class has remained silent, even as they uncover mass grave after mass grave. Finally, the student body at Columbia University, the very best and brightest 18-22 year olds America has to offer, erect a tent city on their campus. They are met with brutal repression. The NYPD storms the campus, and evicts their first encampment. They return even stronger than before, determined to resist the attempts of the university administration to silence them. The media begins a smear campaign, accusing the protesters, many of whom are Jewish themselves, of being anti-Semitic terrorists. Rich conservative Jews make it all about themselves, and the story becomes all about how one of the wealthiest, most secure populations in the United States, a country which has never had a tradition of anti-Semitism, feels “unsafe.”

It is the narcissism of the oppressor class on full display. Oddly enough, as a white American Christian, I finally understand how black people perceived people like me in 2020, when a nationwide wave of protests erupted against police brutality, and many white conservatives made it all about themselves. It shouldn’t be “Black Lives Matter,” they insisted, but “All Lives Matter.” There is nobody in Western society more afraid and more insecure than the oppressor class. As Malcolm X used to argue, it’s all about projection. White people in America are terrified of black people because they are terrified of the idea that they will someday be treated like black people. Jews in Israel and the United States remember that in the 1930s they were the Palestinians, a stateless people targeted by all the most powerful racial supremacists in Europe and North America for destruction. It always comes full circle, doesn’t it?