Your Antisemitism Is Showing

Don’t fall for the antisemitic PR campaign

Innocent people are dying in Gaza. It is a tragedy that we are seeing unfold daily in the news and on social media. What few understand is that this rapt worldwide attention is more confirmation that many don’t care if Jews suffer and die.

People are falling for the international antisemitic propaganda campaign, because they don’t do nuance for shit.

On October 7, Hamas terrorists purposefully attacked Jewish (and some Christian) civilians in Israel. The terrorists had no military objectives. The civilians were the target. Over 1,400 were killed, over 5,000 wounded, and over 200 kidnapped and held hostage. There was also lots of torture and rape. Not only that, but there is ample video evidence that this was done gleefully by the terrorists, whooping and cheering and taking selfies with their victims. Some even called their parents to brag about how many they had murdered.

The terrorists committed unspeakable atrocities, and immediately there was exhilaration on western social media, supporting the terrorists as “freedom fighters” and proclaiming it a legitimate resistance to oppression.

News flash: Never in history has the mass slaughter of civilians been considered “resistance.”

And don’t forget that plenty of so-called progressives refused to admit the atrocities were real in the first place. Show me the dead babies, they said. Well, there is ample evidence now.

Self-defense of a nation is a legal right under international law, and yet even before Israel reacted there were rallies and social media chatter supporting Palestinians. Again, in the wake of the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust, and before Israel had launched any counterattack, thousands of people took to the streets to show support for those that the October 7 attack was allegedly done on behalf of.

Now that Israel has fought back, the antisemitism has gotten much worse. And it’s not coming so much from the right; the right wing has always been fine with bombing brown people. But antisemitism on the left has been a problem for a long time, often by those wishing to score points as “anti-imperialist.” It takes a different form than what one finds on the right. It’s less explicitly hateful, but no less pernicious, especially with the collective blame of Jews, no matter where they live, for the actions of the Israeli government. There is also the use of Nazi analogies, holding Israel to a much higher standard than any other government, and engaging in Jews-as-wealthy-puppet-masters conspiracy theories.

Jewish people around the world have been relentlessly attacked since October 7, but the alleged progressives don’t seem to give a shit. They decry what is happening to Palestinians, but rarely mention the horrors of October 7 or the rise of antisemitism worldwide in the wake of that terror attack. Some even participate in those antisemitic attacks.

No reasonable person endorses the killing of civilians. Netanyahu is a war criminal who belongs in prison; the Israeli military response is indiscriminate in its killing. The world should care. The world should also ask why we don’t seem to worry over far worse mass killings of civilians. The world should wonder why all eyes are on Israel and nowhere else.

Can you find Yemen on a map? Can you name a single city there? What is the capitol city? That’s a trick question, because the capital is disputed due to the ongoing civil war, a war that Saudi Arabia intervened in.

Approximately 400,000 have died in that war, many of them children. Another four million have been displaced. Did you give a shit? Did you make a single post about civilian deaths in Yemen? Did you cry over those dead children? We have a wealthy military power (Saudi Arabia) supported by the United States using American weapons, intelligence, and logistical support resulting in what the international community deems a “humanitarian disaster,” and I don’t see many posting about that.

Or what about the over 300,000 civilian deaths in the Syrian civil war? How many rallies did you attend protesting that? Maybe you said something about the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians due to the American invasion of Iraq though, because that was white people doing it. But the other two? Those were Muslims killing Muslims, so who gives a fuck, right?

But in Gaza it’s JEWS killing Muslims, and so the world misplaces its excrement.

Do you even know about the Great War of Africa that happened a mere two decades ago? It involved nine countries and over five million people died, the most lethal conflict since World War II. But it was Black people killing Black people, so western media barely covered it.

I’m not a fan of whataboutism. In this case, it is fair to ask the question why the world is rapt when Jews kill Muslims, but its field of fucks is barren for these far more deadly conflicts. Why weren’t white people calling for a ceasefire in those wars?

If you only voice objections when Jews kill Muslims, you have fallen for the antisemitic PR campaign.

If you think Israel should call a ceasefire when Hamas has explicitly stated that their mission is to eradicate Israel, but have no problem when other nations defend themselves, then you have fallen for the antisemitic PR campaign.

Hamas terrorists launched this attack knowing full well that the people of Gaza would suffer the brunt of the retaliation, and they did it anyway. They did it, then they hid behind their own civilians to increase the death toll because they knew those civilian deaths would accomplish the job of making Israel look bad. And when Hamas killed hundreds of Palestinians at the Ah-Ahli Arab Hospital with a failed rocket launch, the terrorists immediately blamed an Israeli airstrike, and much of the world was quick to believe it. Like Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”

Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be destroyed if there is any hope for a semblance of peace in the region, or at least stability, and no other group except the Israeli military is stepping up to do it. If your country was attacked in such a way, would you tolerate your government’s inaction against the terrorists who perpetrated it? It would be a failure of your nation not to protect its citizens against further attacks.

Alas, there will be a high price to pay in defeating Hamas, made all the worse because the terrorists hide in hospitals, schools, and among the civilian population. Hamas seems to care about the lives of Gazans as little as it does the Israeli civilians it murdered on October 7.

Throughout his career, Gandhi revealed the power of nonviolent resistance via shaming his opponents into doing the right thing. Toward the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. came to recognize the power of “urban riots” to “shock the white community.” For most of his career, however, he was committed to nonviolence as a fundamental principle in the struggle for equality. For both men, they understood the power of influencing public opinion against those who continue to use violence. Comedian Jim Jefferies explained it by saying, “Eventually, everyone will see them as the asshole.”

Except when it comes to Jews it appears they were wrong, because immediately following this horrific terrorist attack there was no shortage of people proclaiming Israelis as the assholes. The murder of babies was justified. The rapes and tortures and kidnappings were all justified.

Because they’re Jewish.

How else to explain these alleged progressives gleefully tearing down posters of kidnapped Jewish children? How can Hamas commit the atrocities of October 7 and still have Israelis immediately proclaimed to be the bad guys?

Because they’re Jewish.

There is nothing wrong with criticizing the Israeli government; it’s military action should be closely examined, overreactions condemned, politicians and soldiers held to account. As I said, Netanyahu is a war criminal and should be treated as such. Many people, me included, said the same thing about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But how does not just an entire population, but the whole of the international ethnoreligious group, be seen as “the asshole” in all of this?

Because they’re Jewish.

How come when people decry the current wave of antisemitism happening in places far from Israel, they come under attack, often getting dogpiled on social media so much so that others fear to offer any public support to Jewish people out of fear of being likewise attacked?

Because those they are defending are Jewish.

If you disagree, then your understanding of history sucks.

For all of history, being Jewish means to be maligned, to be hunted, cast out, murdered, considered less than human. Jewish people have been subject to exile, pogroms, enslavement, and genocide for the entirety of their history. For a Jewish person, there is nowhere in the world that feels safe.

Israel is not safe, but it is a place that Jewish people can defend.

Alas, the nature of that defense is at the whim of a corrupt right-wing government. That government deserves criticism, and the matter of whether they have the right to defend that particular piece of land is a subject of intense debate, even among Jewish people. On the other side, innocent Palestinian civilians are victims not just of Israeli attacks, but the oppressive Hamas overlords who use them as human shields and pawns in their quest to obliterate the state of Israel and every Jewish person in it, replacing it with a militant theocracy.

I am against the killing of Palestinian civilians. I support a free Palestinian state.

I support the destruction of Hamas, which has not only terrorized Israelis, but terrorizes Palestinians, using them as human shields.

I am against Islamophobia.

And I am against antisemitism.

Don’t fall for the antisemitic PR campaign. You can support a free Palestinian state—and be against the killing and oppression of Palestinian civilians—without engaging in hatred against Jewish people.

For millennia Jews have been in a fight for their very survival. They make up a mere 0.2% of the world population; there are fewer Jews alive today than before the Holocaust. Half of the world’s Jewish population lives in Israel, which is surrounded by well-armed enemies who have tried numerous times to obliterate them. Those enemies will try again.

The phrase “Never again” was coined in the wake of the Holocaust.

Never again is now.

If you wish to learn more about world history, including myriad examples of antisemitism across the ages, get my book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.