I have a business idea I’m putting on Kickstarter. It’ll be awesome.

First, a bit of background: A friend of mine won a major literary award. The award sponsor posted tons of pictures with my friend posing with the losers. One of the losers made a comic book. In every photo, the comic book person made a point of ostentatiously wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh. Everyone else was dressed normally except the comic book person, who was permitted for some reason to turn the occasion of losing into a platform for their own activist hate speech, which isn’t hate speech because the powers that be deemed the hate-target a legitimate object of hate, and therefore it is not hate speech, but outpouring of idealistic benevolence deserving selective free speech protection.

And when I saw these photos my second reaction — after the usual burst of alienation and sense of betrayal, not so much at the public jew-hatred of the comic book person, but the universal acceptance of it by so many morally passive people, like the mild Canadians who hosted this event and reposted this photo — was “wow, that’ll sure be incriminating someday.”

But it was my third reaction that gave me my idea: It will be so much harder to airbrush out a whole keffiyeh than an armband.

A keffiyeh armband!

You can pack it in your purse, or fold it into your back pocket. You can walk around looking like an ordinary decent human being — but if an opportunity to show your inner hate or political conformism – or both! — presents itself you can pull it out your keffiyeh armband put it on your right arm. You can march around, maybe chant some genocidal slogans and show the world what kind of person you are. Then you fold it back up and continue to enjoy the abundant benefits of this world you claim to want to dismantle.

And when this hideous moment ends, and everyone wants to maintain the delusion that they are decent people capable of critical thought and independent judgment — people who absolutely would have been among the few who did the right thing when everyone else was doing the wrong thing — inconvenient evidence to the contrary can be airbrushed out like it never happened.

I think it was the cover of this book that might have seeded this idea.

Or maybe it was this one

I own that first book, but not the second one. It actually looks pretty good.

In the most crucial phase of the Second World War, German troops confronted the Allies across lands largely populated by Muslims. Nazi officials saw Islam as a powerful force with the same enemies as Germany: the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Jews. Islam and Nazi Germany’s War is the first comprehensive account of Berlin’s remarkably ambitious attempts to build an alliance with the Islamic world.

“Motadel describes the Mufti’s Nazi dealings vividly…Impeccably researched and clearly written, [his] book will transform our understanding of the Nazi policies that were, Motadel writes, some ‘of the most vigorous attempts to politicize and instrumentalize Islam in modern history.’”

— Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal

It is funny how today’s anti-Zionists think that their hate is somehow different from the hate of Nazis. Nazis, like today’s anti-Zionists, made all kinds of extravagant accusations of senseless atrocities against Jews. Accusations that required incuriosity and willingness to throw up one’s hands and say “It’s all so complicated! How can anyone know? But everyone seems to think this is true, including all our most prestigious newspapers… so…”

Had the Nazis had a slur like “Nazi” to fling at Jews, they absolutely would have used it.