How They Do It– 'Israel Doesn’t Cause Anti-Semitism. Anti-Semites Do'

ed note–a very telling and instructive essay on the pathological narcissism of Judaism and the mental illness Jtosis that it inevitably produces.

Before we get into it however, a little joke for everyone to set the stage–

A Jewish man is rejected for a job as a radio announcer, and when one of his friends asks him why he was passed over, his answer is–

‘S-s-s-simple, it-t-t-t-t w-w-w-w-was anti-S-S-S-S-Semitism…’

Despite what they claim, Jews are the most anti-intellectual people in history. A true intellectual loves the truth for the sake of the truth and is unafraid to ask difficult questions, hear difficult answers, and arrive at difficult conclusions.

Jews however–when it comes to them, their history, and their identity, patently refuse to engage in any of this. They chronically kvetch about being the world’s most ‘persecuted’ people, but when asked WHY they are so persecuted, always give the same answer–

….’anti-S-S-S-S-Semitism’….

It could be argued that there were times in history where the average person of the non-gentile persuasion could be forgiven for not being so introspective about this thing known as ‘anti-Semitism’. Now however, there is absolutely no excuse. The Jews these days are LARGE AND IN CHARGE, in your face with their bad breath and their bad behavior and they have no apologies for it. They murder people for sport in the Middle East, turn out in droves at the border to watch it happen and celebrate it and then when it is broadcast live over the internet they deny with a straight face that it happened. They throttle the president of the United States to use his authority in satisfying their addiction to Judaically-inspired warporn, throw their weight around in the US Congress and stink the place up with their Chutzpah and Judaic arrogance and yet, when the inevitable backlash occurs, they fall back on the one-size-fits-all ‘explanation’ for that inescapable law of physics concerning every action resulting in an equal and opposite reaction–

‘anti-S-S-S-S-Semitism’…

Gentiles of the world, get down on your knees everyday and thank whatever god you worship that you were born gentiles and not Jews, and everytime that fever erupts in you known as ‘anti-S-S-S-S-Semitism’ that causes a visceral, autonomic reaction against aberrant, obnoxious and unhealthy Jewish behavior, embrace it, for it was given to as a gift by your maker who is more devoted to your survival than you are.

Sara Yael Hirschhorn, Haaretz

With all due respect to fellow UK intellectual Tony Klug, I read his op-ed (If Israel’s Occupation Doesn’t End, Anti-Semitism Worldwide Will Rise to Sinister Heights) attributing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians since 1967 to a rise in global anti-Semitism with outrage. 

And yes, that’s also what the occupation – which is morally and politically wrong, deprives Palestinians of human and political rights, and should be brought to just and peaceful end quickly – should provoke in all of us: outrage, protest, censure, intervention, outcry. There is certainly space for criticism, expressing concern, and outright condemnation of some of the strategies of the State of Israel without delegitimizing its sovereignty or crossing the line into anti-Semitism.

But there is a vast different between hating Israeli state policy (and recognizing that 50 years on, settlements and the occupation are seemingly indivisible from it) and hating Israelis – and all Jews. A chasm between causation and correlation when it comes to bigotry. And an ethical abyss, especially between motivation and justification for anti-Semitism. We hate many countries for what they do, but only with Israel and Jews is it somehow acceptable to hate a religion, ethnicity, and people for who they are.

As the wildly illiberal social media reaction my recent op-ed (If You Can’t Say Israeli Settlers Are Civilians Too, You’re Propping Up Apologists for Terror) betrayed, for many, the word “settler” is just a substitute for what it isn’t polite to write in public: Israeli or Jew (and probably a proxy for the pronoun they might prefer – “you”.)  When you buy into a logic that believes murdering settlers cleanses the sin of settler-colonialism, it only makes sense that you might also blame the victim too. 

By this line of thinking, settling in the land (within or beyond the Green Line), Israelis – but not just Israelis, who have profound internal differences of opinion, but all Jews worldwide, who are apparently seen as uncritical supporters – are “asking for it,” active agents in hastening their own hatred and authorizing their own annihilation.

Unfortunately, anti-Semites don’t need the activities of the State of Israel or the pursuit of Jewish power to hate and wish to kill Jews. They just do. They hate Jews as aggressors, they hate Jews as intermediaries, and they especially hate Jews as victims. (Jews, as is clear, really can’t win with anti-Semites.)

In this one aspects, I agree with Klug: Israelis and Jews face an impossible cycle of contention from anti-Semites. If they deploy Jewish power, they are accused of evoking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the international Jewish conspiracy, and if they don’t, there are those who would like to consign them to the gas chamber – damned if they do, damned if they don’t. 

I stress that Jews as individuals and as a collective are responsible for their own behavior. In no way do I condone expressions of Jewish power that preclude and prohibit the rights of others.

But to anti-Semites, it isn’t really the attitudes or activities of Jews that are unacceptable. It’s their very being. It’s a lot easier and more palatable to explain that the occupation (a policy that justifiably attracts international objections) causes and justifies a project of overt bigotry and obliteration, than the oldest and most pernicious hatred of loathing Jews more and differently than any other religion, ethnicity, or people.

In fact, Israelis aren’t the only country with a morally and politically controversial occupation that threatens their democracy and deprives other peoples of one of their own.

So does China with Tibet, Morocco in the Western Sahara, Turkey and Greece (and if we are to expand our horizons, America and Canada in the land of First Nations and the saga of every other settler-colonial state etc.). But for Klug only one occupying state, Israel, triggers by its own actions a hatred of an entire collectively associated people wherever they are. Anti-Semitism is, in his trope, the fault of the Jews.

Israel, like every liberal-democracy, has its failings. Israel has many reasons it should and must end the occupation, make peace with the Palestinians, and heal rifts with the wider Arab and Muslim world. But doing so out of a belief it will placate anti-Semites is not one of them. 

As much as anti-Semites mine the occupation, wars, racism, and many of Israel’s other foreign and domestic problems for ammunition, the two-state solution might empower anti-Semites by rendering Israeli security more fragile and vulnerable. Both ways, anti-Semites will always find a will and a way. Israel can and must take risks for peace, but kumbaya in the Middle East will never appease anti-Semites.

Klug writes that Israeli policy is normalizing anti-Semitism. But what is being normalized is the idea that anti-Semitism can be justified, and that it is “normal” to blame the victim as part of a wider ‘guilty’ collective.

Jewish thought recalls that the Temple was destroyed out of baseless hatred amongst the Jewish people. Klug’s arguments suggest a kind of callousness and fragmentation of Jewish solidarity that echoes this. But they do more: excusing prejudice is a crude inversion of the liberal values he professes to uphold and that protect all of us.