The preconditions for genocide are common knowledge. A majority group deems a minority group incurably evil or subhuman on account of their race or tribe or religion. On the eve of colossal crimes there is a resounding battle cry, lighting the fuse for all hell to break loose.
“Jewish financiers” lit Hitler’s fuse. If they instigated another world war, he told the Reichstag within months of his invading Poland, he would “exterminate Europe’s Jewish race”.
In the Great Lakes region of Africa, talk of cockroaches and snakes escalated genocide on the Tutsi minority.
By the same token the aggressive song and dance, “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” depicted by a cocked trigger finger and gunshot effect, brings simmering tribal hatred to boiling point. The way Donald Trump played the video for the whole world to gasp and gape at was brinkmanship at its best. Mistakenly though, he played down the target for genocide - far greater than Afrikaner farmers. ‘Boer’ of course covers the whole minority. After all, the Anglo Boer War was not against farmers but against the independent Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and Orange Free State.
Adding to the menace they pose at this time, President Ramaphosa and ‘Kill the Boer’ Julius Malema idolized Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, the maniac who borrowed a North Korean killer brigade to massacre more than 20,000 Ndebele, the minority tribe. And the eerie coincidence does not end there.
Mugabe passed a law that allowed him to confiscate white farms. Armed invaders would descend on a farmhouse and give the family hours to pack their portable belongings and leave - showing gratitude for being allowed to live. In this manner the politically connected got free farms. Mugabe and his wife got no one knows how many. The recipients couldn’t tell a bull from a cow, a tobacco leaf from cannabis; no surprise therefore that the land was left fallow and famine set in.
There was indeed no end to the talents of comrade Mugabe. Under his malignant watch Zimbabwe boasted an economic milestone that will be impossible to beat. Inflation peaked at 79.6 billion % month-on-month, equal to 89.7 sextillion % year-on-year. At this time a $100 trillion bill did not cover a local bus fare.
I have remarked that Africa’s bad men don’t fall, they explode on their people. Ramaphosa and Malema see it differently. They sorrowed over comrade Mugabe’s death and eulogised him as a “champion of Africa’s cause against colonialism.” Malema himself exhibits genocide in his genes. When he becomes President, he told supporters picketing outside the Israeli embassy in Pretoria, he is going to, “arm Hamas and make sure it has the necessary equipment to fight for its freedom.”
By comparison the process of dehumanizing ‘Zionists’, of prepping them for the scalding genocide pot, has been a drawn out process. Decades of hate-mongering and indoctrination led up to a set of battle cries for genocide:
“By any means necessary”
"Globalise the Intifada”
“Free Palestine”
The day after President Trump turned down the lights and treated a South African delegation to the cinematic exhibit of “Kill the Boer, shoot to kill”, elsewhere in Washington “Free, free Palestine” rang out from the assassin who pumped two dozen rounds into a young diplomatic couple outside a Jewish event. A rabid and rancid group, said to have instigated the Columbia library takeover, exalted the deed as, “an act of love.”
Many ponder whether particular chants are anti-Semitic or not. The double murder shocked doubters into a realisation that, “This is what, physically manifested, ‘Free Palestine’ looks like.”
Eureka! The slogan is antisemitic. Therefore...? It therefore involves murder. All three kooky slogans involve murdering Jews. But that’s the least of it. Rather than wishing to randomly murder a few at a time, the slogans plant a seed for making genocide of it. As such ‘Free Palestine’ et al mark the end of a continuum.
I mean, look how different epochs truncated human rights to which the Jews were entitled. Beginning with the Greeks and Romans, they effectively decreed,
“You have no right to live among us as Jews.”
Christianity, walling the Jews into ghettos, superseded it with an implicit decree,
“You have no right to live among us.”
Ultimately came the Third Reich which truncated human rights to the death camp decree,
You have no right to live.”
Now that Jews live in their homeland, what do anti-Zionists decree? Brace for it: they copy Hitler’s decree, ‘You have no right to live.’
Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the UN General Assembly or the Human Rights Council or international courts or Ivy League professors or the EU Parliament or President Macron of France or the Prime Minister of Canada or homegrown Israeli Norman Finkelstein. Listen with the mind to their utterances. Forget the meaning. Grasp what their words mean. “No right to defend yourself”. Indeed, especially UN officials say it outright. “Israel as an occupying power does not have the right to self-defense.” Still others gave their genocide wish an airing by greeting the news of Oct 7 with glee.
A former government minister in South Africa went ecstatic. “They swept on them, and they killed them, and damned good! I was so pleased.” Professor Norman Finkelstein reacted to Oct 7 with equal fervor: “Hamas’ actions “warm every fibre of my soul. The scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.”
Trying to define antisemitism is about as useful as defining a woman. It is what it is, and the Passover Haggadah, compiled two millennia ago told us what antisemitism is, in sixteen everyday words: “In every generation there are those who rise up against us and seek to destroy us.” Clarity is a wondrous thing. Pro-Hamas hordes have risen up against Israel and the Diaspora and seek their destruction.
It took a French playwright and an American columnist to grasp “No Right to Live” in psychological terms.
In a thin yet seminal book, ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ Jean-Paul Sartre raked the oldest hatred over the coals:
“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.”
What Sartre is saying is that the human instinct of a Columbia professor or campus crazies is identical to that of Hamas invaders murdering, burning and raping their way through the Gaza envelope. The former are closet killers. They have never personally murdered a Jew yet they’d like to butcher them to the point of extinction as badly as a terrorist in battle fatigues and black mask. Every anti-Semite in the West drools over the prospect of dead Jews.
Now to the American if the Frenchman seemed over the top. Washington Post columnist the late Charles Krauthammer wrote this after the escapade of the ‘Free Gaza Flotilla’:
“But if none of these (Israeli military tactics) is permissible, what's left? Ah, but that's the point… What's left? Nothing. The whole point …is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. ..The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million - that number again - hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists - Iranian in particular - openly prepare a more final solution.”
Never again let a college president slip the noose by mimicking “freedom of speech” Fire off two Yes or No questions to make him squirm. Hamas murders Jews: Yes or No? Supporting Hamas therefore involves supporting the murder of Jews: Yes or No? When someone wants Jews to die there can be no question: they have to be antisemitic.
Carry a notebook containing this one and only benchmark of antisemitism, and you’ll clinch the debate every time.
Q E D Quod erat demonstrandum
Steve Apfel is a diversity freak: Economist. Former founder and Director of the School of Management Accounting. Veteran authority on anti-Zionism and activist. Scourge of antisemites. Prodigious author of non-fiction.