In part 1, I described my encounters with antisemitic attitudes among Finnish gay men and among politically active LGBT people in Helsinki. In particular, I described abusive antisemitic remarks made by a member of the LGBT student group, at the University of Helsinki, during Gay Pride 2008 in Helsinki — rejoicing in the murder of Israeli children by terrorist acts. Because it was 2008, that young person was a millennial (i.e., Gen Y). Seventeen years and one Gen Z later, I was, therefore, not too surprised at the rejoicing in the barbaric torture, murder and kidnapping of Jewish babies, toddlers, children, youth, elderly people and families, on October 7th 2023, among Finnish youth, on Finnish social media, and in leftist and LGBT activist circles. Which brings me to this second part of the blog article.

In 1999 Philosopher and law professor Martha Nussbaum published a critique of Judith Butler's philosophy, titled "The Professor of Parody". For better or for worse (just a figure of speech; clearly for worse) Butler is the face of "queer theory" and also "feminism" nowadays. Moreover, she is the "Old Major" (sensu Orwell's Animals Farm) of what is generally known as Wokism, and from whom impressionable young morons, like the one described above, eventually take their orders. Nussbaum's article is long and criticizes several aspects of Butler's writings and ideas, many of them are too esoteric to be of general interest. Here, I will only concentrate on the relevant points.

First, there is the style of Butler's writing. So pompous and enigmatic that it is usually impossible to get what she is actually saying or believing. Often she avoids saying anything at all. So the impressionable reader remains constantly dependent on her image as an authority. It is, therefore, not surprising that she is considered a great thinker mostly among impressionable youngsters and uneducated literary "intelligentsia" (Finnish journalists, as an example). As Nussbaum puts it "When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. ...In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance." I will add that such vague, uncommitted, meandering and unclear style is the hallmark of con artists and charlatans.

Second, there is the originality of Butler's work, or more accurately lack thereof. Nussbaum demonstrates that much of Butler's so-called ideas about gender go many decades back, even to the 19th century. But that esoteric academic point is of less concern to me here. It does, though, further highlight the great ignorance among her star-struck followers.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Nussbaum warns that Butler's ideology is offering support to "an amoral anarchist politics." (recall that this was in 1999). Butler claims that gender is a performance, and so those not confirming to the strict heterosexual gender norms, can perform gender in a parodic subversive manner, as a form of quiet resistance. Nussbaum phrased it better: "...the social structure of gender is ubiquitous, but we can resist it by subversive and parodic acts." But Nussbaum rightly points out that such performances are hardly the only mode of resistance. There are legal and institutional ways that can actually make a difference in the world: abolishment of slavery, reform of domestic violence and rape laws, improving conditions of life for women and gender minorities, etc.

Through her exclusive focus on parodic performance, Butler even takes the ridiculous position of opposing laws against hate speech, as they may take away the oppressive environment, in which the oppressed can perform their parodic subversion. Nussbaum shows that Butler has no grasp of legal accounts, particularly in matters of free speech: "Excitable Speech, Butler’s most recent book ... is an unconsciousably bad book ... Nobody interested in law can take her argument seriously."

Finally, Nussbaum brings the message home in the following lines: "For every friend of Butler, eager to engage in subversive performances that proclaim the repressiveness of heterosexual gender norms, there are dozens who would like to engage in subversive performances that flout the norms of tax compliance, of non-discrimination, of decent treatment of one’s fellow students. ". Which brings me back to that dumb Finnish student from 2008, performing his own "parodic performance" in whatever Butlerian Jihad was going on in his head. Or what sane decent human beings would simply call good-old-fashioned bigotry and antisemitism.

Twenty six years and one Gen Z after Nussbaum's article, we can see her warnings coming into fruition. In the university that a century before banned Richard Feynman from attending because of its quota for number of Jews, loud violent antisemitic spoiled brats are nowadays terrorizing fellow students and staff, praising murderous terrorists and calling for the destruction of Israel, like it was downtown Tehran. Similarly, like the insane Left, the crazy Right is engaging in its own "parodic subversions" in full-throttle — decay into authoritarianism and destruction of the rule of law, separation of powers and individual rights.

Disciples of Butler have taken over academic positions throughout North America and elsewhere, including Finland. Given the obsession of this camp with Israel-Palestine, it should not be surprising that a Finnish so-called research institute, — FIME, Finnish Institute in the Middle East — is in fact a den of Israel-hate and antisemitism. Needless to say, FIME had no comment on the barbaric mass murder of Israeli children and families by Palestinians. An exemplary gem of their "research" can be seen in an article that attempts to discredit the UN report on sexual crimes perpetrated against Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7 2023.

The gist of FIME's claims is that Israel and Western media have weaponized the sexual violence against Israeli women to malign Arab males and to reinforce a "Western stereotype" of Arab men as violent. You see, in the Wokist "grievance science" academic cult there is a strict hierarchy of the grieved, and all is judged according to that. Not according to professionalism, evidence and circumstances. FIME also tries to discredit many of the reports of rape. Those "feminists" have somehow forgotten the difficulties of such cases, even when they are not committed as crimes of war.

As for the violent nature of Arab men, I can only speak from my own personal experience, from the time that I was a young gay man. I was sitting one winter evening, ca. 2002, with my then boyfriend on the nearly deserted beach in Tel-Aviv, hugging and holding hands. When suddenly we started hearing shouts behind us. Some thirty meters back, on the paved promenade, a group of young hooligans from Jaffa were shouting slurs in Arabic and Hebrew at us. We first ignored them. But then they began trowing small stones at us. At that point, we did what every sane person would do. We did not wait for small stones to turn into large ones, took our stuff, and quickly ran away to safety.

No doubt, FIME researchers would claim that it is utterly my fault, being so blatantly disrespectful to the cultural sensitivities of the hooligans. Obviously, no generalizations should be made. But, nonetheless, traditional societies in general, and particularly those in the Middle East, are not known for their tolerance of gays, or women for that matter. That includes the darlings of FIME.

The FIME article concludes with the words "For as long as rape has been used as a tool of warfare, rape rhetoric has been used as a tool of war propaganda." That is not a piece of scholarship. That is a piece of advocacy, cheap demagoguery and propaganda. Here is the even more reasonably-sounding reverse: "for as long as there was rape, there were deniers of rape". You can replace "rape" with "war crimes" or "Holocaust" or anything basically. That is the level of "scholarship" in "the humanities".

But wait a sec! Now, that phrase of FIME does sound awfully familiar. When did I hear that before?! Oh yeah! Rashid Khalidi, so-called professor of Palestinian studies at Columbia University, going on a long YouTube rant, while the blood of hundreds of Israeli civilians murdered by Hamas was not yet dry. On the same video he also set the stage for denial of the mass murder of hundreds (nearly a thousand, in actuality) of Israeli civilians on Oct 7, 2023. His claim was completely false, and to begin with, was based on zero evidence. When challenged for these words, he appeared embarrassingly confused and incoherent. He is admittedly more eloquent when he gets to recite his limited well-rehearsed repertoire in sympathetic echo chamber sing-alongs.

In the "Professor of Parody", Nussbaum reminds the reader that the post-modernist Michel Foucault, a major influence on Butler's ideology, "we should remember, cheered for the Ayatollah". The post-post-modernist post-colonialist totalitarian dogma has gone one "post" too many to rediscover and embrace religious fanaticism, homophobia, misogyny and antisemitism. That is the nature of totalitarian ideologies — what starts as "Two legs bad, Four legs good" ends as ... Well, you know the rest. Moreover, when cushy academic jobs are on the line, one will stubbornly continue following such ideologies ad absurdum, or cower to them out of fear, in the typical phoniness and cowardliness of most academics.

So, absurdities such as spinning the rape of Israeli women into a story about Arab men as the victims is just one example of what passes for scholarship in certain corners of academia nowadays. Of course that is not unique to Finland. It is a serious problem in academia everywhere. However, with its pre-conditioning to Israel-hate, antisemitism and "anti-Zionism", it is no wonder that such ideologies took hold of Finnish academia earlier and more easily. The Two-Culture rift is so wide, that it is no longer bridgeable. The post-modernist totalitarian ideology has taken over much of the non-sciences. Given that the Natural Sciences are the poster child of the Enlightenment and of Western liberalism in the past four hundred years, the post-modernist non-sciences, with their rejection of reason, the Enlightenment and its traditions, pose a serious threat to honest scholarship.