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You may not envision Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky as some rootless cosmopolitan. After all, save for his paranoid fixation on the undocumented masses flooding across our nation's southern border, Byko prefers to fix his ire on pressing local matters such as the existence of bicyclists in designated lanes or the scheming atheist plot against the city's Christmas market.
But you, fellow Philadelphians, are wrong: Byko is downright smitten with international affairs.
Last week, he dedicated the allotted real estate to abusing pro-Palestinian activists at Penn, smearing last weekend's Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) conference as a “carnival of hate,” which “immorally equates Israel with white-dominated South Africa, and even Nazi Germany. That's what follows when you ally yourself with those who deny the Holocaust.”
Mean words. But with the Israeli occupation stretching into its fifth decade and the rise of an increasingly vocal Jewish human rights movement, Americans are less willing than ever to allow a cheap and baseless accusation of anti-Semitism to shut down reasonable protest.
So it is no surprise that Bykofsky, sticking to his guns, fails to mention that South African Archbishop and liberation movement icon Desmond Tutu has endorsed BDS―as well as the appropriateness of the “apartheid” analogy. To do so would have forced him to acknowledge the existence of a large number of people and institutions―like Jimmy Carter and Amnesty International, or BDS supporters Jewish Voices for Peace―who speak out against the occupation because it's a grave offense against civil and human rights and not because they are in any way anti-Semites.
But I'm getting away from the point of this post: Byko's bizarre December column ruminating on the Thai sex trade (see #6: “Thai women tend to be slim, with soft features and thick black hair...an endless supply of girls with no marketable skills, but rentable bodies”) and suggesting that he may have partaken, just won't go away. Why? Because yesterday―the same day he published an out-of-nowhere denunciation of sex trafficking, saying he wanted to “bash” a sex trafficker's “grinning mouth” and that “if one touched my daughter, I would shoot him in both kneecaps and then castrate him”―activist Helen Gym published a bunch of creepy screenshots of Byko's Thailand Facebook posts.
Photographs, on his public Facebook page, are captioned with the word “touts”―as in “female touts try to attract business.” Gym surmises that "tout" and “prostitute" could be used interchangeably here. Indeed Byko — who wrote in to gripe about some finer points of my last article on the matter (his take on the usage of the word "Christmas," for example) — has never denied that his Thai adventures were anything less than what they appeared (again, how they appeared in the column he wrote about it. It's not like we're snooping.)
Bykofsky will likely hold on to the (increasingly auto-psychoanalytic) column until death. But can't someone at least confiscate his passport?
Correction: I initially suggested that Byko might be a "rootless cosmolpolitan." An astute friend pointed out that this was a derogatory Soviet term for Jews (although that is certainly not its only usage). I thought it just meant an open-minded man-of-the-world type. Whoops. The irony of this is perhaps overwhelming given the subject matter of this post--I apologize, and look forward to Byko chewing me out.
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