In my childhood – not that long ago – we believed Americans were modest and plain-spoken – and Canadians, even more so. Soviet Communists were the Orwellian liars, creating ministries of truth masking atrocities with ten-dollar words.
Democracies have lost such purity. On the Right, America’s spinmeister-in-chief believes his own bluster and is a linguistic imperialist. He re-christened Lake Ontario “Lake America” after making the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”
On the Left, fanatic anti-Zionists – including academics who should know better – have overinflated the meaning of the word “genocide” to libel the Jews, who know exactly what the term means.
Until Palestinians taught their enablers to cry “genocide” whenever Israel defended itself, “genocide” required an “intent” to destroy a nation categorically and meant murdering hundreds of thousands, or millions.
North of the US, CBC journalists – on the taxpayers’ dole – are plumbers, draining words of meaning. Their bosses commanded them not to “refer to the September 11 attacks as terrorist attacks” – they just retreated. Still, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sought “impartial” coverage of the 25th anniversary of “the hijackings [that] led to passenger jet crashes in Washington, DC, Pennsylvania, and Manhattan.”
Undoubtedly, relatives of the 24 Canadians murdered – I mean, liberated from earthly concerns by the unsanctioned low-altitude thermal expansion events resulting in large-scale personnel attrition – would have wanted their official broadcaster to suspend moral judgment regarding purposeful, political, mass murder.
Despite preferring accuracy, morality, and truth, let’s follow these trends.
President Donald Trump should fulfill another fantasy without firing a shot by rebranding Greenland as “Trumpville.” Let’s end the debate about whether the disputed territories are “The West Bank” or “Judea and Samaria” by returning to the source: call all of Israel “Bibleland.”
In the United States – er, the Disunited States – label American Democrats “Whiny Prius Trauma Ward” and American Republicans “Angry MAGA Asylum.”
Looking toward Mexico, where, over 10 years, 12 million people crossed the border illegally – I mean undocumented – rename America’s borderlands “The Welcome Wagon.”
Label the Ivy League “The Gulag,” recalling the Kulturno-Vospitatelnaya Chast, the Cultural-Educational Departments that treated Soviet prison camps as re-education opportunities.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson’s street should become “Lindy Lane,” honoring Charles Lindbergh, the antisemitic, sweet-on-Nazis, isolationist. Candace Owens’ street can be “The Dumpster Fire.”
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Gracie Mansion should be “The Faculty Club,” and Trump’s White House should simply be called “For Sale.” Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign headquarters should be “Jihadi USA Central,” with the outside plaza “Yahya Sinwar Square,” memorializing Hamas’s head butcher, I mean, de-colonizer leading the resistance.
And let’s be linguistic plumbers, Canadian-style. Military types call wars “kinetic actions” and civilian deaths “collateral damage.” Left-wingers drain the moral rot from criminals by calling them “justice-involved individuals.” And corporate types never fire anyone; they don’t even “downsize”; they “right-size” or “de-layer.”
Even as they soft-pedal bombing as “servicing the target,” right-wingers overinflate by going martial. Mass immigration is an “invasion,” while they resist the “war on Christmas,” the “war on men,” and the “war on whiteness.”
Left-wingers are masters – oops, too patriarchal – experts – in such verbal flooding, overstuffing regular words with excess emotion and judgment. Words can be “harmful.” Disagreement is “violence,” and sometimes “silence is violence,” too. Rampaging snowflakes find everything triggering, traumatizing, and unsafe.
Israel demonized like no other country
Then there’s Israel, Zionism, and the Jews. From accusations of Christ-killing – when the Romans did it – through fearing one family, the Rothschilds – to today’s hysteria about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Jewish lobby, antisemites love overblowing their disdain for Jews to make them monsters.
Today, Israel is demonized like no other country – if Israel surrendered to the Palestinians tomorrow, even all the Middle East’s problems wouldn’t vanish. And the lexicon of Zionist bashing follows the “Syndrome rule” from The Incredibles: “When everyone’s super, no one will be.” If everything Israeli or Zionist is genocidal, racist, settler-colonialist, imperialist, or oppressive, then nothing really is – the words and accusations become meaningless.
In The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964), the political scientist Murray Edelman taught that politicized words are “condensation symbols.” They “condense into one symbolic event, sign, or act patriotic pride, anxieties; remembrances of past glories or humiliations; and promises of future greatness.”
Not surprisingly, Edelman hailed from Eastern Europe’s highly verbal, super-intellectual, Ashkenazi world.
From the Talmud through Yiddish literature, Jewish tradition generated jokes and rabbinic insights mocking big talkers who manipulate words. When an egomaniac boasts in synagogue, “I am a self-made man,” the rabbi mumbles, “It’s always a relief when someone takes the blame for his own mistakes.”
In Israel, the phrase “diburim kmo chol,” dismisses “words like sand” – lacking anything nutritious. David Ben-Gurion supposedly dismissed one table-thumping Knesset windbag by murmuring “The volume of your shouting is inversely proportional to the execution of your ideas.” Golda Meir slammed someone who was affecting false modesty while fishing for praise by sighing: “Don’t be so humble – you’re not that great.”
True, words can kill, fomenting terrorism and ruining reputations. But in this age of polarization and delegitimization, when so many words are weaponized against one another and against Israel, Zionism, and the Jews, remember the Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s declaration, “In the beginning, God created the worker” – not “the word,” as Genesis proclaims.
Better to say little and do much: Israel is still better off winning the war and losing the PR game, especially if it needed to lose the war in order to become popular in the West.
The writer is a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University and a Senior Research Fellow at the JPPI, the Jewish People Policy Institute. He is the author of nine books on presidential history and, nine books on modern Zionism, including To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream as well as his latest e-book, The Essential Guide to the U.S.-Israel Partnership: the 250th Anniversary Edition.