Everything You Don’t Like Now Called Apartheid

Following HRW expansion of the term’s application, things that are Apartheid now include lawn maintenance and jelly-filled donuts.

New York, May 27 – A report by Human Rights Watch that redefined a loaded political term in order to shoehorn Israeli policies to fit it has resulted in a cascade of instances of the same phenomenon, whereby any action, attitude, substance, event, idea, or experience you find objectionable now constitutes a moral outrage on par with the systematic separation, exclusion, and removal of political rights from blacks in white-ruled South Africa during the twentieth century.

“This pizza is Apartheid,” declared Susanna Lloyd of Huntington, Long Island, in reaction to her father’s culinary attempts.

“Taking out the garbage is Apartheid,” agreed Mario Martinez of Washington Heights. “So are jelly-filled donuts, kids who wipe boogers on furniture, idiots who don’t look both ways before entering a street, and my mother-in-law. Same goes for the whole prison-industrial complex.”

Observers credited Human Rights Watch with opening their eyes to the prevalence of Apartheid. “I hadn’t realized just how oppressive and evil everything is,” acknowledged Morristown, NJ homeowner Tyrone Powell, “until Ken Roth and his folks began to describe Israeli policies using the term ‘Apartheid.’ Something clicked when that report came out, and I realized they were onto something. I, too, can try to mobilize public opinion against the things and people I hate, simply by applying the ‘Apartheid’ label wherever I deem necessary, as they do to buttress support for their own dislikes. It’s been a revelation. We’re coming for you, you Apartheid homeowners’ association lawn-maintenance regimen!”

Others noted the similarity between the liberal application of the “Apartheid” label to every element of Israeli self-defense and earlier, but still persistent, use of the “Nazi” epithet for the same purposes. “Over-the-top criticism of Israel – or of Jews in general – takes the shape of whatever society finds most objectionable at the time,” explained antisemitism scholar Linda Sarsour. “But as the Holocaust recedes in the collective memory, it loses the valence it once had, and the term ‘Nazi’ has lost some of its rhetorical oomph. By employing the term ‘Apartheid’ instead, Human Rights Watch and other advocacy groups are trying to inject a more immediate, more relevant charge into the discourse, because a lot more people remember the 1980’s than they do the 1930’s and 40’s.”

Sarsour downplayed concerns that expansion of the term “Apartheid” to include measures or phenomena that are not, in fact, Apartheid, will undercut efforts to root out genuinely egregious policies. “Once ‘Apartheid’ loses its power, we’ll just move on to the next objectionable thing and accuse Israel of that instead,” she explained.

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