Steve Apfel
Steve ApfelINN:SA

“I’ll tell you who’s an antisemite,” said a bureaucrat in the Jewish Agency. To tell us, Yigal Palmor required no less than 200 words conducive to vacant looks and an audience none the wiser. Antisemites, he began grandiloquently, have “certain perceptions of Jews which may be expressed as hatred. And antisemitism can manifest itself, among other variations....” Then he quoted verbatim the IHRA working definition, and sat back satisfied.

Stopping a yawn we’d do well to invite the earnest but confused Palmor (symbolic of what passes for push back against rampant Jew-loathing unleashed by Oct 7) to study a sample. In it are groups, organisations, personalities and credos with a common denominator – a very low one. They vented sympathy for Hamas, anguish for Palestinian Arabs and animus for Israelis in the wake of atrocities that will go down in annuls of terrorism, along with 9/11.

Radical Democrat caucus

UN Secretary General

Harvard’s Palestine solidarity groups

Norman Finkelstein

Jewish Voices for Peace

BBC, CNN, etc

Francesca Albanese

Amnesty International

The credo that Oct 7 was a mere matter of Palestinian self-defence

Everyone in the sample:

Condemned Israel more than they condemned Hamas.

Cared more about suffering Palestinians than slaughtered Israelis

Called for a “humanitarian” cease fire

Ranged from cool to cold on women and children taken hostage.

Looked at the frenzied murdering, mutilating and raping in “context”.

Believed the fatality counts from Hamas’ health ministry and cried ‘genocide’.

The reality is that pro-Hamas elements like the foregoing make light of being accused of antisemitism. The question is, can such brazen bigotry be deterred if not defeated? Might the time come when the pro-Hamas will wriggle like a fish caught on a hook?

It might and it should come, provided we get the proverbial ducks in a row. This in turn depends on taking to the fight the one cudgel capable of doing the job. Is there such a weapon though?

Yigal Palmor may well shrug. ‘Well – I don’t know – it seems a funny sort of thing to expect. ‘Cudgel? Reminds me of a Harry Potter book.’

Dubious and helpless, Palmor typifies defenders of Israel. He feels desperate to convert politicians, diplomats, the media and the street to the imperative of dismantling Hamas. We can respect his commitment but fear his muddle. Absent clarity as to what antisemitism boils down to, the pro Hamas will win, and their heroic fighters kitted with black mask and green headband will live to fight another day.

What is this ‘seek and neutralise’ firearm? Melanie Phillips, unbeknown, came close to wielding it.

“They scream for a ceasefire by Israel. None of them is calling for Hamas to surrender, which would stop all the killing immediately. A ceasefire by Israel, by contrast, would sentence yet more Israeli civilians to be murdered, tortured and raped. Those who want Israel to “stop the killing” therefore aren’t gentle pacifists devoted to the ideal of the brotherhood of mankind.”

No, they are not. In fact they are the Nazis of our day. How so?

Prior to 1948 antisemites stuck out a mile. The Jews were the wrong religion or the wrong race, and if you said so then the game was up: you had animus towards them. For Nobel Laureate poet, TS Elliot, the game was up after a caustic comment that, “Reasons of race and religion combine to make free-thinking Jews undesirable.”

Then Israel was born, and antipathy shifted to what Philip Luther calls the “Israeli state’. If Amnesty’s concoctor of the ‘Apartheid report’ cannot give Israel a sinister name who can? The report delivered the preordained verdict, ‘guilty as charged’. But the arguments Luther used matter more. Israel he wrote, “is guilty not just of committing a grievous crime but of being a grievous crime.” BACK

This is a remarkable idea. The verdict is not a conviction but a curse. Israel is guilty of existing. The Jew among nations has no right to live – a Third Reich decree.

We shall return to it because the decree happens to be the bedrock of the oldest hatred.

People like Philip Luther who get up in the morning to denounce, indict and convict Israel are given a free pass. More, they are bankrolled. A chunk of the Amnesty $440 million budget went on the Apartheid report, subtitled, “Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity.”

Understand one thing: moral crusading when reinforced by double-speak produces a camouflage that fools just about everybody – certainly people who start out with no love lost for Israel. Paul O’Brien, Amnesty’s US Director, is a camouflage artiste. In one breath O’Brien asserts that Israel “shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state”. In the next breath he defies belief by crossing his heart that, “Amnesty takes no political views on any question, including the right of the State of Israel to survive.”

If that is not brazen enough, look at CAIR, designated by the White House for tackling antisemitism. In the most brazen exit possible, Nihad Awad the Director, unleashed a suppressed racism. What made the White House co-opt a Muslim body to stamp out Koran-sourced Jew-hatred is anyone’s guess, but Awad left it with no choice but to part ways after he tweeted about Oct/7:

“I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land. The people of Gaza have the right to self-defence. Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defence.”

Hold onto the end sentence – it will come in handy.

When did an antisemite in America or Europe ever own up to hating Jews? Cornered, what they do is open a pocket book of vapid excuses. The two favourites seem to be:

‘I hate Zionists but not Jews.’ Or, ‘What I said was taken out of context.’ “I had been discussing international law,” wailed Nihad Awad.

Such are the oily obstacles Israel-defenders have to clear. Antisemites are as inventive as they are invincible. At the end of the day pro-Hamas elements keep their platforms and their popular appeal. Unclear and contested definitions of the disease – the sort Yigal Palmor relies on – bear much of the blame. A complex definition is a popgun weapon. The issue goes right back to a fundamental truth: to fight evil you have to know what evil looks like. Palmor however has no cause to feel ashamed; not even ‘expert’ appointees know evil when they see it or, for that matter, good when they see it.

Take Barak Obama’s former staffer, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL. And take Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a Biden appointee with the high faluting title, “Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.” Hard as it may be to get the head around, the ADL is being sued by Elon Musk for declaring him to be antisemitic. Lipstadt hit the red button when Musk used a classic “trope”. Could be she looked at a pejorative Musk had used, the last syllable of which is very near to “trope”: Musk called George Soros a misan(thrope.)

“Soros reminds me of Magneto,” Musk had tweeted. He referred to a comic book character named Magneto from Marvel’s X-Men series. For good measure Musk touched up the portrait. “He (Soros) wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.”

Therefore....? Prager U co-founder, Dennis Prager (an observant Jew and Israel-lover) called Soros worse than misanthrope. Prager called him a despicable human being and the most destructive Jew.

Come to that, I’m another who compared the humungous Hungarian to a comic strip character.

“Gotham City in the grip of a ghastly criminal genius is the cue for Batman. In real life a Gotham menace plagues the whole of the United States and a bloc of Europe across ‘The Pond.’ Jewish billionaire, Soros, through colossal and moral crushing endowments, bankrolls chaos. I mean, what can be more chaotic than free-for-all borders? What I call, “Orban’s bind” is the clearest possible case of antisemitism prodded by a Jewish provocateur.” /news/357430

George Soros has the combination leftists can’t resist: he’s a non-identifying Jew and a Holocaust survivor, by dint of which Greenblatt and Lipstadt put him behind heavy glass like a protected specimen. Explained Lipstadt:

“Irrespective of how one feels about Soros’s politics or policies, it is entirely disingenuous to deny that many ad hominem attacks on him rely on classic antisemitic tropes and rhetoric. In bygone eras the antisemites invoked the Rothschild family to advance their conspiracies about Jews. Today they use Soros to do so.”

The sweeping statement should raise an eyebrow or two.

What definition of antisemitism did Lipstadt apply to Elon Musk?

“In bygone eras anti-Semites invoked the Rothschild family”. Is it a valid parallel to our era and to Musk invoking Soros, the deep pocket keeping pro-Hamas groups alive and active?

3) Was the Magneto comic character really used by antisemites to “advance their conspiracies about Jews?”

4) Ad hominem attacks on Soros “rely on classic antisemitic tropes and rhetoric”. How to reconcile this with what Israel’s Diaspora Minister said about Musk? “As the minister entrusted with combating anti-Semitism I would like to clarify that the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and a role model.” https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-antisemitism-envoy-pans-attacks-on-soros-after-criticism-by-diaspora-minister/.

5) A man who paid a respectful visit to Israel’s Prime Minister and President can be anti-Semitic? One who reverently and mournfully inspected the slaughter sites in the Gaza envelope can be a Jew-hater? You see, that’s the trouble with academics. Lipstadt obviously did not stand back and ask herself, ‘Does my theory fit the facts?’

6) Did Lipstadt make the same outcry, or any at all, over Democrat antisemites, or over BLM or Woke antisemites? If not why not? Surely leftist groups tick more boxes than Elon Musk ever ticked.

It would seem that a double standard is built into defining antisemitism with a committee-made list. Fighters against it bring their politics to work – the ADL tiptoes around the ‘M’ word. Let’s be clear: how well can it fight antisemitism if political correctness stops the ADL saying “gotcha!” when a Muslim steps in front of it bawling, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. We’re not dealing here with a mild form of racism. Jew-hatred is the only exterminationist form of it, but the way matters stand there exist all manner of respectable ways to express Jew-hatred. https://steveapfel.substack.com/p/for-countering-anti-semitism-the

Who better than a French playwright and non-Jew who lived through the Holocaust and mixed in antisemitic circles? Jean-Paul Sartre’s thin but seminal book ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ goes to the Freudian heart of the mental disease without all the razzamatazz.

“The anti-Semite has murderous instincts but has found a means of sating them. His thunderous diatribes at the ‘Yids’ are really capital executions.. He is a murderer who represses and censures his tendency to murder without being able to hold it back, yet dares to kill only in effigy.”

Here’s the lowest common denominator of our sampled groups, organizations, personalities and credos. Here’s the anti-Semite, the killer in effigy; here’s the Harvard professor, the human rights honcho, the Secretary General, the ‘Cease Fire” callers, the pro-Hamas.

Not over the top? Fanciful? Let’s bring on three ‘killers in effigy’. See them clapping, cheering, legitimizing, visibly thrilled like a birthday kid by the Oct 7 slaughterers they adore and yearn to be.

  • “They swept on them, and they killed them, and damned good! I was so pleased.” This from Sout Africa's former chief of intelligence..
  • Norman Finkelstein: Hamas’ actions “warms [sic] every fibre of my soul. ..If we honor the Jews who revolted in the Warsaw Ghetto—then moral consistency commands that we honor the heroic resistance in Gaza. I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fibre of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.”
  • UNHRC Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese: “Israel has a right to defend itself, but can’t claim it when it comes to the people it oppresses [or] whose land it colonizes.” Her one hand gives Jews the right to live and the other hand confiscates it. https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-739603 Members of her UN Human Rights Council, one supposes, would call it even-handed justice.

Anyone who unambiguously desires Jews to be killed, all the better en-masse, has to be anti-Semitic. There are billions who feel that way – and would have attended the pro-Hitler rallies in 1930s Germany. The UN and UN agencies are packed with Jew killers “in effigy.” Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick said much the same thing. After her stint at the UN she opined, “I think the Holocaust is possible again. I didn’t think so before I came to the U.N, but I think so now.”

Steve Apfelis a veteran authority on anti-Zionism and a prolific author in general. After “Hadrian’s Echo: The why’s and wherefores of Israel’s critics,” his latest book, “Hitlers at Heart: anti-Zionism and its Believers” will be out in 2024. Selections of his work can be accessed at https://steveapfel.substack.com/ and at https://enemiesofzion.wordpress.com/

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