I was already going to reblog with illustrations, and then I saw @intergalacticle in the replies saying, "that is not how anything works. people point out the fact that the government of israel is committing genocide, then they get accused of antisemitism for criticizing israel, which is what actually prompts them to point out that being against genocide is not antisemitic. No one is just randomly being like "man, genocide is so totally not cool" for no reason, only for a Jewish person to randomly interject to accuse them of antisemitism completely unprompted."
No one is saying that's what's happening.
Let's see what happens when you throw "opposing genocide isn't antisemitic" into Twitter's search bar!
What he actually says in that clip is that even though there's been a ceasefire for months, the Green Party in England is exploiting Gaza by using its position on Gaza, an international issue, to gain city council seats, which are about hyper-local issues.
He does say that the reason this works is "antisemitism sells."
And here we see the problem: in order to understand that, you need to know enough about the issue to unpack it.
"This works because antisemitism sells" means:
Many people have an immediate emotional reaction to Israel that they don't have to any other country doing the same things or worse.
Let's assume that Israel actually committed genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. It must be virtually empty of Palestinians now, just as Myanmar has become virtually empty of the Rohingya Muslims, over a slightly longer period, through active genocide and ethnic cleansing.
But even if Israel went door to door raping and burning people to death until entire villages were razed to the ground, as Myanmar did, you cannot get votes for British city council seats by trumpeting your support for the Rohingya.
Most people have never heard of the Rohingya. Three years ago, most people had never heard of Gaza. But they have certainly heard of Jews.
And the past century, in particular, has seen intense efforts to spread propaganda globally, portraying Jews as untrustworthy, dishonest, shady, sneaky, scheming, power-hungry, money-hungry people. In a word: sus.
Many people who don't consciously "have a problem with Jews" have still absorbed a lot of unconscious bias from the world around them. Just as we do with every axis of oppression.
A lot of people mentally split Jews into "the good ones I have no problem with" and "the bad ones," just as people do with every marginalized group. But with Jews, "the bad ones" isn't "I do think some women are manipulative hos," it's "I do think there's a Jewish movement to commit genocide."
Now let's do another one, and hope that those bullet points unpacked enough to cover it too!
First of all, Jackson Hinkle is a white supremacist. And he's joined a lot of white supremacists in setting up a fun progressive-to-Nazi pipeline, to hide behind and trap people who would otherwise loathe them.
What is this person replying to?
Greens again; apparently Polanski is the head of the Green Party there.
Speaking on a visit to a synagogue, Starmer labelled Polanski “disgraceful” for saying it was important to distinguish between an actual threat to the Jewish community in the UK after recent arson attacks and the “perception of unsafety”.
Labour have also criticised Polanski for saying in another interview that he had been wrong to previously criticise Jeremy Corbyn for not properly dealing with antisemitism as Labour leader, and that the issue had been weaponised at the time.
This entire article is the Guardian doing what it does the most, which is stir up drama to get engagement.
When Polanski said that, nine out of what ended up being 11 attacks on London Jews had already occurred. The article brushes right past all that to focus on what he thought about antisemitism being weaponized. And his response was basically that he'd HEARD it had been, sometimes.
1. Polanski said it was weird that Starmer was accusing him of antisemitism, which he didn't do; he accused him of not taking antisemitism seriously enough.
2. Someone quoted that on Twitter.
3. Someone immediately assumed that Polanski was being accused of antisemitism for talking about Gaza, which is not the case.
4. And immediately jumped to, "Opposing genocide isn't antisemitism," while linking to a white supremacist as supporting evidence.
Okay, here's a standalone one; that's interesting.
This one is the weakest argument I've seen in a while.
There were a lot of Zionist movements, many with totally different goals, but none of them were fascist or ethno-supremacist.
Hitler made the "I have no problem with Jewish people because of their religion" pretty much useless for everybody else.
(Ethno-supremacist is just a fancy way of getting mad that there's a country with a Jewish minority. It's just, "oh, so we're not good enough for you anymore?! You think you're better than us now?!" Like, no: people just got tired of the literally constant pogroms and systemic oppression.)
It's horrifying how quickly the "Epstein was a Mossad agent!" conspiracy theory spread from Christian Nationalists to the far left.
The Epstein-Mossad conspiracy theory continues to be a recurring theme in fringe and far-right discourse. Recently, it has gained renewed traction among Trump's MAGA base.... Prominent right-wing voices, including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have openly accused Epstein of being an Israeli agent, while also criticizing efforts to dismiss such claims as antisemitic conspiracy theories.
This new push was spurred by a MAGA Holocaust denier for the lolz. Because of course it fucking was.
Okay, just one more. Someone saw a tweet praising AOC for saying, "Hey so marching into a predominantly Jewish neighborhood and leading with a chant saying 'we support Hamas' is a disgusting and antisemitic thing to do. Pretty basic!"
And knee-jerk responded with:
Protesting in a Jewish neighborhood and chanting about Palestine would be antisemitic for the exact same reason that people claim it's NOT: choosing a Jewish neighborhood as the site for your unrelated protest is pretty clearly Making It About The Jews.
It's not protesting at the Israeli Embassy. It's not protesting downtown to get the most visibility and spread awareness. It's not protesting about local issues in your own neighborhood.
It's going into a residential neighborhood you're not from, and acting like your protest has something to do with it.
Marching your protest into a Jewish neighborhood and chanting "We support Hamas" is an explicitly and openly hateful act against Jews.
Because Hamas, aka the Islamic Resistance Movement (that's what Hamas is an acronym for, in Arabic):
Explicitly believes that the entire land, both Israel and Palestine, and "all other lands accessed and consecrated by Muslims at the time of conquering for all Muslim generations until the day of Resurrection," is rightfully Muslim land forever.
Explicitly states that the Jews are its enemy: that "our battle with the Jews is long and dangerous, requiring all dedicated efforts."
As a result, Hamas considers Israel to be Occupied Palestine. Its goal is to free Palestine from them, and "to raise the banner of Allah on every inch of Palestine."
In 2021, it held a conference revealing its plans to establish its own caliphate across the whole land, once Israel has been annihilated.
(Something Hamas has been advocating for and working towards pretty hard ever since it seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and established a brutal dictatorship.)
It talks about drawing up rules for which Jews will live, which ones must be killed or prosecuted, and which ones can flee. And that “educated Jews and experts in the areas of medicine, engineering, technology, and civilian and military industry… should not be allowed to leave.”
Hamas explicitly states that it will immediately issue "a direct continuation of the Pact of ‘Umar Bin Al-Khattab," which is the system of laws that subjugated indigenous Christians and Jews during 1,300 years of caliphate rule.
October 7 was a sort of "proof of concept." A test to see what more they needed to meet their goal. Hamas leaders have promised to repeat their attack until Israel has been annihilated.
On October 7, Hamas explicitly sought out Jewish civilians to kill. They did also kill Arabs, in some cases. But mostly, they tried to get Arabs to tell them where the Jews were. They repeatedly mocked Arabs as "traitors" for, e.g., working for Jews. There are also recordings of Hamas fighters looking for Jews specifically, and boasting about how many Jews they personally killed.
TL;DR: Hamas is not Palestine. It is not activism. It is not resistance.
It is a group that has explicitly said very openly, for DECADES, that it wants to commit genocide next door and take over. While telling us that actually, that's what ISRAEL wants.
It's a group that Gazans have been protesting throughout the entire war, and before it. While the supposedly pro-Palestine movement silences and erases them.
This one is definitely the most egregiously ignorant and blatantly wrong example of "Opposing genocide isn't antisemitic!" I saw.