As Israel Gets More Murderous, We’ll Be Hearing Even More About “Antisemitism”
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
The Israeli military says it’s preparing a ground offensive in Lebanon as it continues to hammer its neighbor to the north with bombs. Which of course means we’ll be hearing a lot of anxious hand-wringing from the western political-media class about “antisemitism” in the coming weeks.
We know we’ll be hearing a lot more about antisemitism because that’s what always happens whenever Israel does something profoundly evil. People start objecting to its atrocities and demanding that their government stop facilitating them, and the imperial spinmeisters start framing these objections as a frightening rise in anti-Jewish bigotry in order to delegitimize and silence them.
The very first time you get accused of hating Jews for voicing legitimate criticisms of Israel’s actions, you immediately understand that the whole narrative about an epidemic of “antisemitism” in our society is a complete lie.
You’re like “It’s bad to murder children by the thousands” and someone tells you “Ah so you hate Jewish people then,” and you say “No I definitely do not,” and they say “Yes, yes you most definitely have very strong negative opinions about the members of a small Abrahamic religion.”
And you obviously know they’re making a false claim, because you’re you; you are the world’s foremost authority on what you feel and what opinions you have. You know with absolute 100 percent certainty that you have never at any time harbored any negative feelings toward this religious group you see around in your society whose members look and act pretty much the same as all the other pale-skinned people you run into.
You know Jewish people. You grew up routinely interacting with them, without their Jewishness ever entering into your head as a matter of significance. It’s not something you ever thought much about or cared about in your day to day living. And then here’s this person trying to tell you that you actually have a seething, obsessive hatred against Jews because you denounced the extensively documented abuses of a small middle eastern state which are being actively supported by your own government.
And so then you immediately go, Oh, so THIS is what people are talking about when they say there’s an “antisemitism crisis”? This is the “antisemitism” they’re talking about? People like me, who have never at any time had the slightest twinge of ill will toward the Jewish people ever appear inside them? We’re the “antisemites” that the entire western political-media class has been shrieking about all year in the midst of an active genocide? Well, that’s pretty ridiculous!
And from then on you know it’s a lie. Not only do you know it’s a lie, you know the people hurling the accusation know it’s a lie too, because you know from your own experience that it’s a smear tactic which is being cynically used as a bludgeon to protect the information interests of a warmongering apartheid state.
But you keep seeing it used, day after day after day after day by liars and manipulators, most of whom are not Jewish. Most of the people employing this cynical, manipulative smear tactic are gentile supporters of the US-centralized empire and the status quo world order it enforces. They support not only Israel but all the other warmongering projects of the empire against all its other targets throughout the world, in places like China, Russia, and South America.
So while you’re being dishonestly smeared with accusations of anti-semitism it still doesn’t make you feel any ill will toward Jewish people, because you can see that all this violence, dishonesty and manipulation isn’t being caused by Jews and isn’t ultimately about Judaism. This is about a giant globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around Washington, whose managers around the world belong to every sort of faith and ethnicity.
When you define antisemitism as “any and all criticism of the state of Israel,” and then the state of Israel massacres thousands of children, you will naturally see a rise in “antisemitism” as you have defined it.
And make no mistake, that’s exactly what’s been happening. The Anti-Defamation League has admitted that last year it began including pro-Palestinian activism in its records of “antisemitic incidents”, and acknowledged that the majority of the supposed antisemitism in its recorded incidents could be “directly related to the Israel-Hamas war.”
So when you hear about “soaring antisemitism” and a crisis of anti-Jewish bigotry in our society, that’s what people are talking about. They’re talking about entirely valid and responsible public outcry against the actions of an apartheid state that is materially supported by the most powerful empire that has ever existed.
Obviously real antisemitism exists and is bad, but its scale, influence and threat in today’s world has been inflated by orders of magnitude by this freakish perception management operation, to the point that it is now treated as a more urgent and important concern than actual war and genocide.
The thing about smear campaigns is that once they are seen and understood, they always make the smearer look worse than the one being smeared. Keep calling this bullshit out for what it is, and help everyone understand that this is a slimy, disgusting manipulation that’s being used to defend some of the most evil things happening in our world today.
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