#antisemitim

Yet again, we call for Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley to resign or be removed from his post by @MayorOfLdn and the Home Secretary. Sir Mark allowed a hate march on the doorstep of a synagogue today. There were scant arrests as people called for ‘intifada’ and displayed the flag of Palestinian terrorist organisations. Placards claimed that the UK is controlled by ‘Zionists’ and destroyed by their ‘greed’. Masked thugs went unchallenged by police as they defied an anti-mask order. The outrageous scenes today showed that @MetPolice_UK had totally lost control of the streets of London. For all of the words after anti-Jewish terrorist attacks and arson, today proved that when it comes down to it, British Jews are not protected by the Met, they are gaslit by it. We are also aware of displays of some antisemitic messaging on the Unite the Kingdom march. It was absolutely dwarfed by the anti-Jewish hatred engulfing the much smaller hate march organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, whose outgoing leader was recently convicted of inciting a crowd to breach police conditions put in place to protect a synagogue. For British Jews, the statements issued by @KeirStarmer and @Sadiq Khan about the Unite the Kingdom march applied far more to the ‘Nakba Day’ hate march. Their outrage and warnings about Unite the Kingdom but not today’s hate march show a glaring double standard and wilful blindness toward the years of hate marches that are the engine rooms of antisemitism at a time when British Jews are being stabbed and our community burned.

waxewod

And why? Because no one cared. There was no one to answer to. Jews did not have a state, an army, and a voice. They were at the mercy of whoever held power that day. It did not matter whether it was the mob or a king signing another expulsion order because he woke up in a bad mood. Jews were nothing more than a target.

But I'm here to tell you that Jewish blood is still cheap today.

Not in the medieval sense of mobs with torches roaming European villages, but in a modern, sanitized way. Today it happens on podcasts, social media, and television shows. Jews are accused daily for everything under the sun. Wars, politics, money, media, culture. Somehow it all leads back to the Jews. It's being said behind microphones and studio lights. But the result is the same. It normalizes blame. And it turns Jews into a problem again.

And history shows exactly where that road leads.

That is why everything changed, and it changed for two reasons: the Holocaust and Israel.

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific and unimaginable atrocities in human history. It left the world so raw that even those who had spent centuries crushing Jews had to step back. It was too dark and too vile, even for those who once found pogroms and expulsions amusing. The Holocaust acted like a mirror, and it forced the world to confront its own brutality.

But even something as massive and horrific as the industrial slaughter of over six million Jews, has an expiration date in people’s minds. Over time, people forget. The world gets distracted, the survivors die off, and the lessons begin to fade. The old antisemitism starts creeping back through the cracks.

That is where Israel comes in.

Israel is the one that will never let that happen again. Daring, audacious beyond belief, and unapologetic, this is Israel. It is the only country in the world that has no dilemma whatsoever about doing what it needs to do, whatever and wherever that may be, to protect the Jewish people. No questions asked. No permission sought. No limits.

Israel will bomb, raid, bulldoze, and defend its people to the last man because no one else will. And that audacity, that unrelenting fire, is precisely why Israel is so hated. The people who miss the days when Jews were weak, defenseless, and easy to oppress are the same ones raging against Israel behind a newly found “humanitarian” mask.

They hide their hate behind claims of “human rights” and “justice,” but we know what this is. It is the same hatred that has burned for centuries, just repackaged for a modern age. Deep down, they cannot stand the fact that Jews fight back now. They cannot stand that we refuse to go quietly into the night as we did for so long.

But Israel did more than that. It gave Jews confidence. Even Jews who do not live in Israel, or who may have theological disagreements with the state, are louder and more willing to push back. In the back of their minds, they know that if things ever go south, there is a place they can run to.

So how long do people think it will take before someone in the United States does what just happened in Australia today? How many Jews need to be attacked, beaten, or killed before people stop and say we have gone too far yet again? How many warnings does history need to give before it is ignored for the millionth time?

The Holocaust woke the world up, but Israel is the reason it stays awake. And that is why the hatred is relentless. Israel will not apologize for doing what every other nation would do for its people. And to those who long for the days when Jewish blood was cheap, Israel is their nightmare.

And it is a nightmare that will never go away.

ticproject

2 YEARS OF GASLIGHTING...

The gaslighting the Jewish community has experienced in the last two years has been monumental. There is the obvious, of course: the vile gaslighting regarding the events and nature of the October 7 massacre, a phenomenon that mirrors Holocaust denial. Then there is the gaslighting regarding the 360% spike in antisemitism in the United States since, with similar staggering figures reported elsewhere in the Diaspora.

But there is something else, something arguably even more insidious. We are gaslit not only about the antisemitism that exists, but about the reasons that we speak out against said antisemitism. When the majority of Jewish New Yorkers express concern over Zohran Mamdani’s affiliation with antisemites, whitewashing of antisemitic incitement, and proliferation of age-old antisemitic conspiracies, The New York Times writes that we are weary of his support for Palestinian rights. When Jewish students sound the alarm at the overt support for terrorist groups, antisemitic rhetoric, physical violence, and the infringement of Jewish civil rights at the pro-Palestine encampments on campus, the media describes the encampments as “pro-peace,” thus implying that most Jewish students are anti-peace. It goes on and on.

...BUT IT'S NOT JUST GASLIGHTING

The other day, it finally clicked for me: it’s not just that we are gaslit. It’s that the weapon of choice in this gaslighting is the ancient antisemitic conspiracy of blood libel. 

Arguably, the biggest culprit in all of this is children’s educator and entertainer Ms. Rachel.

translation:

Jews that think I’m antisemitic are not normal and not good people. Jews that think I’m antisemitic want kids to be killed. Jews that think I’m antisemitic want kids to lose limbs. Jews that think I’m antisemitic want kids to starve. Jews that think I’m antisemitic want kids to be homeless. Jews that think I’m antisemitic don’t want kids to go to school.

STRAW MAN ARGUMENTS

A straw man argument is an informal fallacy in which, while creating the impression of refuting an argument, the real subject of the argument is not addressed or refuted, but instead, is replaced with a different argument. 

For example: Person A states, “I prefer dogs over cats.” Person B responds: “Why do you hate cats?”

Person B, while creating the impression that they’ve responded to Person A’s argument, is actually arguing something else entirely.

In this context, a straw man argument can look like this: Jews decry the use of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthi banners at pro-Palestine protests in New York City. Instead of addressing the issue at hand — that is, overt support for terrorism that kills Jews — supporters of the protests in turn accuse the Jews of being “pro-war” or “anti-ceasefire.”

AN UGLY PRECEDENT

This kind of behavior towards Jews is nothing new — and it has a really ugly history. 

After Hitler rose to power, American Jews who sounded the alarm on the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in Europe and urged the world to intervene on their behalf were gaslit and accused of being warmongers and agitators who sought to drive the United States into another world war.

"Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences."

CHARLES LINDBERGH, 1941

This is a pattern of history: when Jews express concern over antisemitism, we are demonized as warmongers and war instigators, baselessly suggesting that we want innocent people to die, and echoing an antisemitic trope dating back to 19thcentury Europe: that Jews provoke wars for pleasure and profit.

BLOOD LIBEL

Blood libel is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that originally asserted that Jews killed Christian children for ritual purposes, though it has since evolved to describe any false accusations of murder against Jews. 

The earliest origins of blood libel possibly precede Christianity entirely, dating to the Greek occupation of Judea between the fourth and second centuries BCE, but the first official blood libel took place in Norwich, England, in 1144, when the Jewish community was falsely charged with the murder of 12-year-old William of Norwich. Naturally, accusations of blood libel are always followed by an uptick in antisemitic violence.

Blood libels depict Jews as inherently evil, malevolent, and bloodthirsty. When Ms. Rachel implies that her Jewish critics must simply want children to die, she is not only shutting down all opportunity for reflection, education, and accountability, but she is echoing one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in history...and maligning the Jewish community in the process.

BLOOD LIBEL AS A GASLIGHTING TACTIC

For a while, I used to think the accusations of antisemitism against Ms. Rachel were overblown. I gave her the benefit of the doubt. 

But how a person responds to allegations of bigotry says a lot about them, and about how seriously they take that bigotry in the first place. And here’s the thing: every time, without fail, Ms. Rachel defends herself from allegations of antisemitism, she does so with more antisemitism…specifically, with blood libel. 

Ms. Rachel implies, time and time again, that any Jew who finds issue with her statements and behaviors must surely want innocent Palestinian children to die. This is a vile projection, untrue, and incompatible with empirical data on the Jewish community.

FOR THE RECORD, MS. RACHEL

Here’s why many of us believe you have some serious, serious antisemitic bias, at the very least:

You projected the oldest antisemitic conspiracy in the book, and one that has cost the lives of millions of Jews, the conspiracy of Jewish deicide, onto the Jewish state. Criticism of Israel isn’t antisemitic, of course. “Criticism” of Israel that utilizes antisemitic tropes is.

You uncritically repeat allegations made by Hamas and have not corrected yourself when those allegations were proven to be false. It’s fine to be skeptical of the Israeli government or the IDF, but it’s telling when that same skepticism is not extended to internationally-proscribed terror organizations that livestreamed their crimes against humanity.

You collaborated with Motaz Azaiza, who has posted in support of Hamas, celebrated October 7, and mourned Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, both of whom had Israeli children’s blood on their hands.

You, a white Christian woman with zero skin in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, have virtually made your entire platform about the one war involving the world’s only Jewish state, ignoring much deadlier conflicts elsewhere in the world, many of which concern the United States in one way or another. This suggests, at the very least, a hyperfixation on the State of Israel rooted in antisemitic bias — whether you are aware of it or not.

You’ve fostered such an antisemitic, terror-supporting online community that any time you throw Jews a bone, you have to close the comments. That should tell you something.

You respond to accusations of antisemitism by victimizing yourself, a non-Jewish person, and then deflect from those accusations by tokenizing fringe Jewish groups, instead of sincerely listening to the concerns of the majority of Jews. That tells us how seriously you take antisemitism — which is to say, not at all. If you took antisemitism seriously, you would reflect, not deflect.

ANTISEMITISM ISN'T ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS, MS. RACHEL

Kind of weird to tokenize JFREJ, an organization that gave an award to a convicted child rapist, Douglas Powell, two years ago, when you claim to care about children so much.

JFREJ has never apologized.

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this is who’s teaching your kids?