Almost certainly, if you asked the right-on hordes of woke lefties protesting for Palestine, they’d be horrified at the suggestion that they’re anti-Semites. After all, hating Jews is what Nazis do.
They might even be sincere – even if more than a few of them like to be a part of hate sites that spout unabashed anti-Semitism. The New Zealand left also have a strange fondness for gangs sporting Nazi regalia.
But they’re not Nazis, no way! Why, some of their best friends might even be Jews.
Because the sad truth is probably that – despite anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head wherever the left go, these days – a great many of them are more stupid and ignorant than actually Jew-hating.
Of all the narratives competing for our attention, there is none as volatile as the one that tells the story of Israel-Palestine. Indeed, there is no other conflict in the world that manages to combine all the highly charged story-lines of our time: the narrative of the oppressor versus the oppressed, of the coloniser versus the colonised, of the genocide perpetrator and system of supremacy.
It is a subject on which everyone seems to have a strong opinion. It is overloaded with emotion; with people desperate to tell their side’s “truth”. Instead of a thoughtful, conscientious approach, people rush to defend their “side” — and, in doing so, swiftly drift away from facts, and closer and closer to narratives that dismiss and overshadow objective truths.
The narratives circulating today regarding Israel and the Jewish people are[…]dangerous, and are already wreaking havoc around the world. How else are we to explain the fact that, since the most recent conflict erupted between Israel and Gaza, acts of anti-Semitism have spiked in many corners of the Western world?
Anti-Semitism is the world’s oldest hatred and even after Auschwitz banished it from polite society, hatred of Jews continued to simmer on the fringes. On the extreme of the right, certainly, but also on the far-left. Anti-Semitism is mainstream in much of Islam, which teaches that Jews are the descendants of pigs and monkeys.
Today, however, anti-Semitism is no longer confined to the fringes of society, but instead has started to leak into the mainstream. Social media has turned it into a contagion, normalising anti-Semitic tropes and attacks. Following the recent outbreak of violence in the Middle East, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found “17,000 tweets which used variations of the phrase, ‘Hitler was right’” in just one week. Likewise, anti-Semitism has ferociously spread across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. This is in large part due to a group of popular “influencers” who — along with their thousands of young, impressionable followers — use their platforms to highlight the Palestinians’ plight. No doubt they think they are fighting a just cause.
The optimistic case is that these people are just ignorant and stupid.
Take supermodel Bella Hadid, who, as Daniella Greenbaum Davis has pointed out, has almost four-times as many Instagram followers as there are Jews in the entire world. In response to the conflict, she joined a pro-Palestinian protest in Brooklyn, chanting: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — an anti-Semitic slogan coined by the Palestine Liberation Organization to call for the elimination of Israel[…]in today’s hysterical climate, one of the West’s most famous celebrities can use it and expect applause.
Not just celebrities, but impeccably leftist Greens List MPs.
Another slogan the left are adopting is the horrifying “Khaybar” chant. Maybe the simpering simpletons in keffiyehs have no idea what it means. “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Mohammed will return”, as it runs in full, is an Islamist battle-cry, referring to the massacre of Jews by Muhammad and his army.
It’s the equivalent to chanting, “Auschwitz, Auschwitz, oh Jews, the army of Hitler will return.”
Yes, it’s that vile. Yet, it’s now common currency on the woke left.
Such cretins protest that they don’t hate Jews, they just want a “free Palestine”. But ignorance as an excuse is wearing very thin. Especially when their embrace of anti-Semitic hate-speech is having horrifying real-world outcomes. Years of violent anti-Semitism in Europe and Britain has seen Jews fleeing that continent in numbers not seen since WWII.
Now, it’s America’s turn.
Last Saturday, a man was arrested for attacking Jewish diners outside a restaurant in Los Angeles “on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon”. Two days earlier, a Jewish man, Joseph Borgen, was attacked by a group of pro-Palestinian activists in New York City’s Times Square. They reportedly beat him with a crutch, sprayed him with mace, called him a “dirty Jew” and explained that “Hamas is going to kill all of you”. Remarkably, a photo of one of the men accused of assaulting Borgen, Waseem Awawdeh, recently appeared in a now-deleted Instagram photo posted by Bella Hadid from a pro-Palestinian protest.
UnHerd
“Remarkably”? Not at all.
This is the new face of the left.
And it hates Jews.
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