THIS IS MY BRAIN ON THE INTERNET

He's not going for the sheath. The sheath wasn't originally important. The sheath is all he has left of what he originally found sentimental, and thus it became important in the aftermath of being robbed.

I mentioned this in The Other Side before I noticed this was even included in the style guide, but it's nice to have it somewhat confirmed!

So, you want to murder:

6,377,000 Jews

1,771,000 Arabs

and 374,000 others (which includes non-Arab Christians and Baha’i

No, no, let’s think about this, since you’re adamant you don’t mean “every Jew.”

Considering only 14.3 million Jews exist on the planet, you want almost half of the world’s Jews dead.

You want to kill over 6 million Jews. 6 million that have relations all over the world.

Hmm. I wonder how on Earth someone could possibly think that you’re an antisemite.

Tell you what, explain how that’s a reasonable and not-antisemitic thing to want when you want the same number of Jews dead that the Nazis managed to pull off.

HOW THE FUCK IS THAT BETTER, YOU’RE ADVOCATING THE SYSTEMATIC ANNIHILATION OF 8.5 MILLION PEOPLE

Zionism, Fascism, and Loaded Questions

Anon's logical fallacy is The Loaded Question. 

The Loaded Question is a rhetorical tactic which embeds controversial, unjustified, unsupported, or false assumptions into the question itself. The goal is to force the responder to either:

Answer within the false frame

or

Reject the premise entirely, often at the cost of appearing evasive.

Anon will know in the future that this sort of rhetorical dishonesty works far better verbally. 

Doing it in writing gives the responder the opportunity to dissect the dishonesty and display its innards like a specimen in formalin.

(The analogy works because what's on display is both repulsive and educational.)

First lie: "Zionism calls for an all-Jewish Israel"

No, it doesn't.

Zionism is the movement for Jewish national self-determination in a portion of the historic land of Israel, to which the Jewish people are indigenous.

That's it. 

Nothing about "only Jews allowed." Nothing about kicking everyone else out. Nothing about "extermination."

Israel's founding documents are explicitly pluralistic. 

From Theodore Herzl's Der Judenstaat:

Every man will be as free and undisturbed in his faith or his disbelief as he is in his nationality. And if it should occur that men of other creeds and different nationalities come to live amongst us, we should accord them honorable protection and equality before the law.

Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence includes:

The State of Israel… will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture…

It also pledges to "Safeguard the Holy Places of all religions," and has consistently kept those promises. Talk to religious minorities in Israel and they'll tell you. (The Baha'i faith originated in Iran, but the Islamic regime has endlessly persecuted them. Their world headquarters is in Israel.)

The State of Israel has always had a sizable non-Jewish population and was founded with a commitment to equal rights for all its citizens regardless of religion or ethnicity. In 1948, Israel had about 156,000 Arab citizens. It has over 2 million Arab citizens today who vote, hold office, and serve in the judiciary and military.

If Zionism really called for an all-Jewish state, Israel wouldn't have:

21% non-Jewish citizens (mostly Arab)

Arab Supreme Court justices

Arab parties in the Knesset...including Antizionist parties

A movement which calls for extermination does not preserve voting rights and legal protections to those it supposedly seeks to destroy.

You don't have to like Zionism, Anon, but you don't get to invent your own definition for it.

Second  Lie: "Necessitating extermination of all others"

This is more than a lie, it's incitement.

Like falsely yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, the aim isn't to warn, but to provoke panic and hostility. The charge weaponizes moral outrage through fabricated stakes, collapsing any possibility for honest discourse under the weight of its dishonesty.

There is no Zionist doctrine that calls for extermination.

None.

I'd like to believe Anon has simply been misled by propaganda, but it's more likely they’re repeating this falsehood knowingly.

This accusation doesn’t come out of nowhere, it plays on longstanding antisemitic tropes.

For centuries, Jews have been accused of plotting secret control, poisoning wells, harvesting organs, and killing children. The idea that Jews need others to disappear in order to be free is one of the more recent remixes of that tune.

Like Holocaust inversion, it accuses Jews of the very crimes committed against them. In this case, the ideology that gave rise to the actual genocide of Jews, fascism, is being projected onto Jews...for building a refuge against it.

That's more than  intellectually lazy. It's morally bankrupt.

Third lie: "Isn't that fascism?"

Words mean things. Specific things.

Fascism is not a term for "stuff I don’t like." It's a political ideology characterized by:

Authoritarian, centralized power

Suppression of dissent

Ethnic supremacy

Militarism and expansionism

The glorification of violence and obedience

Fascism was pioneered in Mussolini’s Italy, developed in Franco’s Spain, and perfected by Hitler’s Germany, the regime which murdered six million Jews while the world looked the other way.

It resulted in book burnings, secret police, mass exterminations, and world war.

Zionism, by contrast, is a democratic national movement. It exists across the political spectrum from far left to socialist to liberal to conservative to far right. It includes Orthodox Jews and secular atheists. It's messy, contested, and noisy. Israeli politics are combative and often infuriating, but Israel is not monolithic, authoritarian, or totalitarian. Israel has free press, regular elections, and independent courts. That's democracy, not fascism. Like all democracies, it is deeply flawed and not remotely comparable to fascist regimes.

If Israel was expansionist, it would not have given the Sinai (larger than Israel itself) back to Egypt for peace. If it was militaristic, it would have started at least some of the wars it has been forced to fight by being attacked.

Anon may not like nationalism, and that's fine if Anon is willing to condemn all nations similarly.

Anon may not like religion playing a role in state identity, and that’s fine if Anon also condemns the other ~80 countries which make religion part of their national identity.

But Anon is focused only on Israel. Huh.

Crying Wolf/Fascism

If they truly oppose fascism (as we all should), Anon should understand that diluting the meaning of the word through strategic misuse is a gift to actual fascists.

When you misuse the word fascism, you weaken its meaning. The word loses its power to describe real threats and that helps those threats go unrecognized. Movements which thrive on confusion and historical amnesia benefit from the kind of fog this strategic, dishonest misuse of the word creates. 

You're not calling out fascism, Anon. You're helping clear the way for it.

Turn out your pockets!

This indictment-disguised-as-a-question has three major components:

"Zionism means all-Jewish Israel." (False)

"All-Jewish Israel requires exterminating others." (False and inflammatory)

"That sounds like fascism." (Only if you rewrite history and all dictionaries)

This method of framing falsehoods as questions is common in conspiratorial thinking and was once seen mostly on the political far right (Tucker Carlson is famous for it).

It works by bypassing critical scrutiny. It attempts to shift the burden of proof onto the accused and then demands they explain why they're not guilty of something they never did.

Jews recognize this for what it is immediately because it's very familiar to us.

There’s an old Jewish saying:

The antisemite doesn't accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence.

As Haviv Rettig Gur put it:

They’ve only got one trick. This is that trick. They think words are weapons, so they throw them around mindlessly and see what sticks.

Why Does This Seem Plausible to Some People?

It confirms what they want to believe.

When people have decided to see Israel as a colonial, racist, or imperialist project, every fact get twisted to fit that framing.

Arabs in Israel? Tokenism.

Elections? Apartheid theater.

Self-defense? Genocide.

This is confirmation bias at its most toxic. They first decide that Zionism/Israel is evil, and then reinterpret or contort every detail as proof to fit that assertion, no matter how contradictory or nonsensical.

What’s Actually Going On Here

Here's the trick at the core of this question:

It turns Jewish survival into Jewish aggression. 

It takes the desire of a historically oppressed people to live in safety and reframes it as domination. 

It takes victims of fascism and accuses them of being fascists. 

It takes a people who have been repeatedly expelled, persecuted, and murdered…and accuses them of genocidal intent for wanting a homeland.

It's DARVO. (Ironically, antizionists love to accuse Israel of DARVO!)

Yes, these inversions are antisemitic, and not because they seek to criticize Israel. 

This trick is antisemitic because it demands that Jewish nationhood be uniquely criminalized and uniquely illegitimate…based on unsupported, unsupportable lies.

You don’t need to support Israel's policies. Many Israelis don't. 

You don't need to agree with Zionism. About ~10% of Jews don't.

But if you're going to accuse an entire national movement of being inherently fascist, genocidal, and illegitimate, the burden of proof is on you, Anon.

You've offered no proof. Just buzzwords, historical inversions, and invented definitions.

That's most of what we see from the antizionist camp. 

Lies don't build peace. Slanders don't help Palestinians. Calling Zionism fascism won’t bring a Palestinian state closer, it just fuels hatred and pushes compromise further out of reach.

Zionism isn't above criticism because no national movement should be above criticism.

Criticism based on fiction, however, is propaganda. 

If you're sincerely interested in understanding Zionism (as a movement, a history, and a lived reality for millions of Jews), you need to start with what it is, not with what its enemies say it is.

The path to a better conversation (and maybe even a better future) starts with honesty.

TLDR:

Zionism isn’t fascism. It doesn’t call for extermination. It doesn’t seek ethnic purity. What it seeks is what nearly every people on Earth seeks: a place to live freely, safely, and with dignity.

If you have a problem with that only when it applies to the Jewish people, Anon, your issue isn’t Zionism.

I say this with so, so much care: Real queer shit written by real queers can and will sometimes make you uncomfortable. That's one of the defining features of weird, independent queer media. And weird independent media more broadly. Art that comes from true individual passion and authenticity has edges and bite to it that mass market corporate products intentionally do not. Has a rawness that can offend.

Like this. And it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because he’s presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.

For the folks curious about templates, these are the shapes I cut from cardboard. I added a couple little pieces of cereal box cardboard as structural support in various points, like the bridge of the nose and behind the beak. Also, I ended up cutting the forehead piece a little smaller, which I marked on the paper, but I kept the template size in case you want to see how it originally looked.

When I read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey – where she made a point of keeping it the same length as the original text – I was shocked to realize that very little of it was about Odysseus’ famous journeys and adventures – the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, the Lotus-Eaters, the Sirens, his men releasing the winds, Circe, and so forth. All of that is told in flashback, and all of that is 4 chapters out of 24. That’s right. They’re less than one-fifth of the text (in page count as well as chapter count). They take up a little less space that Telemachus’ journey to see Menelaus, which starts off the book and is not part of popular common knowledge of the Odyssey (when people talk about accuracy to the the text, the fact that this was included at all is probably one of the things they’re thinking of!)

The rest of the book – i.e. the majority of it – is the events that happen after Odysseys leaves Calypso. His meeting with the princess Nausicaa, getting help from her father, returning to Ithaca, everything with the suitors. Odysseus on Ithaca isn’t the conclusion (as it has been in most popular depictions and descriptions of The Odyssey that I’ve seen) it’s over half of the story!

You’re talking accuracy? You are never going to get an adaptation that distributes its time that way, and virtually everyone watching it would be disappointed if it did!

And the clincher, also the thing that made this translation really make an impression on me, is that Emily Wilson starts off Odysseus’ tale of his fantastical adventures, with:

Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies, answered:

This translation is implying that all the monsters and magic in his adventures could be Odysseus just making shit up. No adaptational divergences from the specifics of those adventures even comes close to the kind of earthquake that reading of the text is.

In terms of the history – other people with more knowledge have said this too, but it’s impossible to have a “historically accurate” adaptation of The Odyssey because the original wasn’t historically accurate! The most common estimates for when it was composed are around the 700s BC (though there’s certainly debate ). The original events that inspired it, if they occured at all (which is also debated) would most likely have been in the 1200s BC, and would have been far smaller scale in terms of number of ships, number of men, and length of time. Neither the logistics nor the technology nor the pooulation size of Mycenaean Greece would have been able to sustain a war of anything like the size of the one described in The Iliad. It’s transposing 700s BC-scale-wars (probably the scale of wars in the Middle East, like Assyria’s conquests; 700s BC Greece was only starting to have governments and writing again after the multi-century impact of the Late Bronze Age Collapse) into the 1200s BC.

So there’s no way to get historical accuracy. Put it in the Late Bronze Age, where it was set, and it’s out of step with the kind of war that could have existed at the time. Put it any time in the Iron Age, when that scale of warfare could exist, and it’s wildly discordant with actual historical events. It is fantasy. It’s kind of like the Arthurian mythos, whose faint historical roots are, if anywhere, in the early middle ages and whose knights-and-castles aesthetic is in the late middle ages.