Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I. On the second night of Passover, in the year of our Lord 5784, a seder was held in the streets of Brooklyn, in Grand Army Plaza, a block away from the residence of Senator Chuck Schumer. The event was called the Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel. It was addressed by a number of anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and/or anti-Semitic speakers — after the wild blurring of those distinctions in the past year, the burden of clarification falls on the demonstrators, many of whose intense hostility to the existence of the Jewish state, and promiscuous political rhetoric, crossed the line into the ancient foulness a long time ago. Hundreds of protesters attended and hundreds were arrested, thereby reversing the order of the holiday and going from freedom to bondage. Their bondage, of course, did not last long; he is a fortunate man whose bondage is purely gestural.   I have not been able to establish whether anything remotely resembling a seder took place at the Seder in the Streets. (It sounds like the name of an old Richard Widmark movie.)  The political director of Jewish Voice for Peace explained at the gathering that “tonight’s Seder in the Streets will be happening on the second night of Passover, a holiday we observe every year that is all about liberation and how our liberations are intertwined with one another.” Well, not all our liberations: later in her statement she declared that “the Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.”  Here, for a start, was another instance of the popular misuse of the term “genocide,” which has now become a regular feature of progressive