Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism? How dare you! 
Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism? How dare you!

Anti-Semites, damn them, are horribly adept at slipping out of your hand with as little effort as they slipped into it. To get an admission out of one is more difficult than gripping hold of a slithery fish in water. And that’s because anti-Semites double up as bleeding-heart critics: they don’t hate Jews; they hate Israel, the way it behaves and the “Zios” that support it.

Leaders of Britain’s Labor Party concede that the party harbors them in its ranks. The party’s flagship, Guardian newspaper agrees. Problem is, they turn shy when it comes to actually naming anti-Semites in the woodwork. They did call out an obscure Laborite after she tweeted that “Jews have big noses.” This was nakedly racist, even for the likes of a leader who counts  suicide bombers among his friends. But Laborites won’t call it naked when a looked-up-to and well-liked leader is involved.

The GuardianKen Livingstone did come close in writing, “Ken Livingstone has been suspended by Labor for inflammatory remarks about Hitler supporting Zionism. There can be no place in (the party) for presuming – as Mr. Livingstone did – to dictate to a minority the forms of hostility that it is entitled to resent.” Livingston the hater, you see, wants to make the rules for those he hates. He and his like permit other groups to define racism. Women are allowed to define sexism and Muslims have their Islamophobia to make a noise about. Everyone but Jews. Jews cry foul at peril of being laughed and ridiculed out of court.

How dare anti-Zionists decide for Jews, and only Jews, the difference between allowable criticism and hate speech!
Political figures, indeed, are the hardest anti-Semites of all to grab hold of. There’s the case of a Labor anti-Semite who sits on a parliamentary committee ‘investigating’ to what extent the British hate Jews. For heaven sake! An émigré from Pakistan, Naz Shah is the Labor MP for Bradford West who, until elected, was active on social media raving about Jews and their little state. She liked the idea of closing down Israel and relocating Jews, lock stock and barrel to the US of A. The irony escaped the good woman. Here was a Muslim from Pakistan living in Bradford, England telling Jews living in Israel to ‘go back ‘where they came from’.   

How dare she! How dare the Guardian! The words of Naz Shah, opines that  Labor flagship, are “principally expressions of anti-Israeli fury, and as such could be written off as an unfortunate byproduct of Middle Eastern conflict.”

How dare anti-Zionists decide for Jews, and only Jews, the difference between allowable criticism and hate speech! Go back to 1993 and the case of a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, murdered in London in a racist attack. The inquiry into the murder and its ramifications defined a racist attack as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim.”  So, the definition of a racist attack is how the victim, not how the perpetrator, perceives the attack. The principle, today accepted in UK legal circles, is that Jews, and Jews alone, must be allowed to define whether or not an attack on them is a hate crime.

And how dare the Left equate Jews to Nazis and insist that’s not anti-Semitic? Howard Jacobson, novelist and columnist, gives a beautiful answer. “What do we in England think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? Those that make the comparison wantto wound Jews in their anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. It is as though Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday. Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity…is the latest species of Holocaust denial. Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern denier accuses the Jews of trying to profit from it. According to this, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it. The true heirs to their suffering are the Palestinians.”

How dare men of the cloth peddle a hauntingly exact idea of replacement, making Christians the true heirs of the Chosen people. The likes of the World Council of Churches, the Presbyterians of America, Orthodox denominations, and clerics Desmond Tutu and Stephen Sizer are cast in the St Augustine mould. Get the hell out, Israel! After you rejected the Messiah the Church took your place as God’s Chosen. Out of Palestine with you! Return to being the witness wanderers the Almighty meant you to be.

How dare Black bigots deal the racist card! “There seems to be an unwritten law that Israel and Jews cannot be criticized, particularly by blacks,’ said Louis Farrakhan, founder of Nation of Islam…. Dealing this joker card after he’d ranted in the 1984 Vice- Presidential campaign for Jesse Jackson, “Two thousand years have not changed the Jews, nor God’s condemnation of them.” Jews took this badly because a black man said it? Perhaps Jews took this next one a little better. “Judaism” writes Farrakhan in the Final Call, ‘is a dirty religion and the Jews an accursed people.’

How dare they! Hating Israel and Zionism is not the same as hating Jews?

Ask the communists – they’ll tell yah.

Under Stalin and then Kruscheff communism never made the distinction. Zionism, Jews and Judaism were all one thing. “Judaic sermons are the sermons of bourgeois Zionists” said a Ukrainian broadcast from Korovograd in 1959, going on, “The character of the Jewish religion serves the political aims of the Zionists.” “Zionism,” wrote Kommunist Moldavia in 1963, “is inseparably linked to Judaism. It is rooted in the Jewish idea of the exclusiveness of the Jewish people.” After the Six-Day War the Soviets exported their ideas to the West. Trofim Kychko’s book, ‘Judaism and Zionism’ wrote of the ‘chauvinistic idea of the God-chosenness of the Jews, the propaganda of messianism, and the idea of ruling over the world’. Vladimir Begun’s book, ‘Creeping Counter-Revolution’ (1974), called the Old Testament an unsurpassed textbook of hypocrisy, treason, perfidy and moral degeneracy.  “No wonderthe Zionists are gangsters since their ideas come from the holy Torah and the precepts of the Talmud.”

Hating Israel and Zionism is not the same as hating Jews? How dare the Left! Ask the Arabs – they know a thing or two. Ask Sheikh Adel Bin Ahmad of the Jiddah mosque. “The Jews disseminate everywhere the lie of the Holocaust and claim that Hitler killed six million Jews in gas chambers. Although pure falsehood, they have made it part of their history…and …accuse everyone who denies a holocaust of anti-Semitism.”

Ask Anis Mansur, one of Egypt's top journalists, and old confidant of President Anwar Sadat. He knows. "There is no such thing in the world as Jew and Israeli. Every Jew is an Israeli. No doubt about that.” Follow the late Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. “The Zionists have been inflicting very heavy damage and suffering on the whole of humanity for over 2,000 years, especially over the last four centuries.” Were there Zionists 2000 years ago, or even four centuries ago? Of course there weren’t. To the Iranian leader Zionists and Jews were one and the same.

How dare the Guardian, standard bearer of the Left, make a distinction!  How dare media entities make one when they know very well there is no difference. After 9/11 Saudi Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz claimed the Jews were behind it. He used that word and no other. When Associated Press (AP) reported his statement, it edited out ‘Jews’ and inserted the word ‘Zionists’. And remember the cover of the January 2002 New Statesman. It had a Star of David piercing a Union Jack, with a headline: "A kosher conspiracy?" Just anti-Zionist is it!

   

How dare human rights figures claim to be anti-Zionist and no more! In the controversy over whether French Jews should wear kippot (male head covers) in public after the stabbing of an observant, kippah-wearing Jew in Marseille, Rony Brauman, one time president of Doctors Without Borders, stated that wearing a kippah signifies support not just for Israel but also for Israel’s policies.

And the king of human rights kings? How dare the UN and its arms be anti-Zionist but not anti-Semitic! At the World Conference in September 2001 in Durban, delegates indulged in a wild orgy of bigoted incitement, with posters of big nosed Jews and wishes that Hitler had finished the job. Rallies in Europe to protest Israel almost always lead to attacks on Jewish targets.

How dare pro-Palestinian groups and BDS crackpots deny that Jews and Zionists are one and the same!  

No, the Zionist is the Jew and the Jew is the Zionist and never the twain shall part. They cannot. It is simply not possible to hate Israel but tolerate Jews.