Firing a Nazi publicly cheering on the genocide of Jews is not cancel culture
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Over at Reason, my friend Robby Soave wondered if Playboy’s termination of porn star Mia Khalifa constitutes cancel culture. For those thankfully unfamiliar with the matter, the raunchy print magazine and lifestyle brand terminated the Lebanese American Khalifa for cheering on the Hamas terrorists’ illegal invasion and war on Israel.
“If you can look at the situation in Palestine and not be on the side of the Palestinians, then you are on the wrong side of apartheid and history will show that in Time,” said Khalifa, who also called a photo of Hamas terrorists a “Renaissance painting” and called for the “freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal.”
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Soave has championed a righteous crusade challenging cancel culture, but Khalifa’s case simply doesn’t fit the bill. For starters, cancel culture usually refers to content often “resurfaced” from the very far past, views held in private, or views well within the Overton window of common decency. Not one of these categories fits Khalifa’s dayslong diatribe. Under her public name and with her full affiliation with Playboy, Khalifa decided publicly to support the terrorists actively engaged in the worst genocide of the Jews since Hitler enacted the Holocaust. From Sudan to Tigray, plenty of civil clashes and territorial disputes are complicated. An invading army beheading babies and raping women in their own sovereign territory is not complicated.
Soave also points out that Playboy knew what it was purchasing when it hired Khalifa, who has gone viral for bragging that her Vichy France-bottled wine was “older than your apartheid ‘state,'” referring to Israel. But I would like to believe that there is a difference between supporting terrorists in the abstract and continuing to support them as the burned remains of corpses and child hostages spill into full view of our X feeds. Maybe I’m wrong, but I imagine there were moronic antisemites during World War II who sympathized with the Nazis when still subject to propaganda but snapped out their hatred and delusion as the full scope of the Holocaust came into public knowledge.
In an ostensible liberal democracy, we should be broadly tolerant of viewpoints, many that we find abhorrent. I consider communism or refusing to get your children vaccinated for measles both reprehensible, but again, people are complex, and we can recognize the still extant humanity of those holding misguided and wrong views. I can even have a civil conversation with a sexist, but that conversation ends once they start cheering for the systemic rape and murder of women on the basis of sex, the way Hamas is persecuting Jews at this moment.
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Further, capitalism always wins. Whereas cancel culture has correctly backfired on corporations that have engaged in it to the point of criticizing its own consumers, Playboy is correct to see Khalifa’s bloodlust as a threat to its brand and market capitalization.
Khalifa’s posts, however, actively cheered on a terrorist organization while it was genociding the Jews. If that doesn’t extend past the Overton window in a way that refusing to endorse Black Lives Matter does, then nothing really does matter.