JOY
After successfully hustling Joe Biden off the 2024 ballot and maneuvering Kamala Harris onto the ticket in his place, Democrats were so relieved it made them giddy with joy. Then someone had a brainstorm: Make "joy" the Harris watchword! Harris proclaimed herself a "joyful warrior." Speakers at the Democratic convention invoked the J-word repeatedly. But like Gretchen in "Mean Girls" trying to make "fetch" happen, Harris's "joy" strategy came to naught. Soon the joyful messaging was replaced with much darker themes. The Harris campaign spent the last weeks of the race fervently warning voters that Donald Trump and JD Vance were dangerous fascists. But on Election Day the Republicans won and there was no joy in Dem-ville.
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GENOCIDE
Antisemites always accuse Jews of whatever, in their society, is most feared or despised. To medieval Christians, Jews were Christ-killers; to Nazis, they were race-polluters; to Bolsheviks, they were capitalists. In our era, the worst of all evils is genocide. Sure enough, the Jewish state is endlessly libeled by antisemites as a perpetrator of genocide — never more so than in 2024 as Israel has fought against Hamas, a genuinely genocidal enemy that celebrates the slaughter of Jews and demands the elimination of Israel "from the river to the sea." In the long history of antisemitic big lies, "genocide" is the biggest of them all.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.
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