Fighting antisemitism has become a circus.
‘It’s that time of year - 2025 Antisemite of the Year. Vote for your top 3 candidates by Friday December 12th!”
Confronted by a competition in harmony with the festive season, I see a watchdog pressed to be a crowd-puller in a competitive market. I discover stopantisemitism.org trying a gimmick to fight the hate that was the bane of humankind when the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob strode the Holy Land.
The citation stipulating what made Tucker Carlson the front-runner runs true to form. Because it attributes no antisemitic remarks to him, we have to fall back on colourful innuendo and insinuation. Doing so, I gather that what mainly put the podcaster in pole position was cozying up to the likes of Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes.
“From downplaying white supremacy to promoting the antisemitic ‘great replacement’ theory, Carlson has built a career turning extremist dog whistles into broadcast-ready talking points, legitimizing voices that traffic in Holocaust revisionism, conspiracy, and hate”.
A second noteworthy aspect of the competition is that stopantisemitism.org stole the thunder of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, originator of the annual award. Named after the iconic Holocaust survivor, it long ago began giving crass personalities a medal for “Antisemite of the Year”.
Under the enterprising Rabbi Marvin Hier, SWC spanned seven countries and built two Holocaust centres with the brand name, ‘Museums of Tolerance.’ It took the Rabbi and family members six-figure salaries to make certain that the Holocaust would never be forgotten.
If that conveys brazen commercialism it’s because it is. The milieu was tolerant, Jews were not threatened. Their worst day since the Holocaust lay ahead.
Oct 7 revealed the hardest truth Jews have to face - not to rule out a second Holocaust. This gave mega donors a new impetus to dip deep. Which turn lured activists into the lucrative fight against antisemitism. It’s not every year that a cash cow beckons.
In short, political causes make perfect money traps. Everyone and their aunt are pro-something or anti-something, and nothing quite matches the anti-Israel and pro-Israel causes for raking it in. Jewish federations couldn’t resist their lure.
Recrimination did not come soon enough: the vast resources mobilised in the wake of Oct 7 were already misspent. And heedless of the debacle raw and rampant antisemitism raged on . Communities that once flaunted their identity now hid it. Synagogues that opened their doors to newcomers, now interrogate and frisk them. Holocaust reflections that were fuzzy are now in focus.
Enrichment is one thing. The incapacity to tackle antisemitism better next time is another. Nor is that confined to the American community. Israel’s Diaspora Minister squandered his budget on a conference for strategising how to combat the scourge. The bigwig delegate list dwindled weeks before the event got under way. The problem? Organisers overlooked not a small point: invitees understood the term ‘antisemitism’ differently. Colloquially, they weren’t on the same page. What kind of general would despatch troops to the front, not knowing if they’d recognise the enemy.
The problem remains unsolved. And the Diaspora remains in turmoil. The bugbear is the divide between legitimate and illegitimate criticism of Israel - if that red line exists in the liberal West where the notion of free speech is sacrosanct. We hear a great deal about the risk of permitting opinions that incite violence. About the cost of putting limits on opinion we hear little. In any case governments can hardly be mandated to stop the likes of Nick Fuentes or Candice Owens or Tucker Carlson or Ivy League dons imbuing followers with antisemitic conspiracies.
It doesn’t mean governments are not trying to control ‘unacceptable’ speech. Their device to gag and encumber antisemites - aka ‘critics of Israel’ - is not hi-tech surveillance but a detailed checklist. You tick boxes for determining if the target is an anti-Zionist innocent or an anti-Jew bigot.
If you think you’re not acquainted with that mojo board, think again. It’s the widely adopted ‘gold standard’ IHRA code - the same as gave President Trump the wherewithal to bring academia to book.
Spare a thought for the identikit’s well-meant but miss-led inventor who never meant it to be used for witch hunts. Kenneth Stern loathes the decisive but divisive tool he developed two decades ago. He “never imagined it would one day serve as a hate speech code” He meant no more than to “help countries track anti-Jewish bias.” Today he debunks the “weaponization” of his code to punish ‘pro-Palestinian Arab’ activists, nabbing even Jews.
“People who believe they’re combating hate are seduced by simple solutions to complicated issues. It’s actually harming our ability to think about antisemitism.”
That’s a very germane assessment. It might indeed go to the root of failed attempts to tackle antisemitism: the inability to think about what it means.
When Israel’s minister for antisemitism invited the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt to his conference he didn’t know that ADL staff had mutinied over Greenblatt adopting the IHRA code. Anti-Zionist to a fault, they were incensed at suddenly becoming blackguard antisemites in terms of the code. Like it or quit, the boss told them.
Yet Greenblatt himself is ambivalent about what is and is not antisemitic. He as good as accused Elon Musk of hating Jews after he compared George Soros to the comic book character, Magneto. For good measure Musk had claimed that Holocaust survivor George Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization, that Soros hates humanity.” Greenblatt looked foolish when he subsequently cleared Musk of making a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. For the second time the ADL’s progressive staff hung the boss out to dry. Who could blame Wikipedia for red flagging the ADL unreliable.”
For her part, Professor Deborah Lipstadt, President Biden’s ‘Antisemitism Tsar,’ relied on ‘classic tropes’ to declare Musk an antisemite - Musk, admired by Israelis across the board. No wonder antisemites enjoy free reign. Organisations fighting them are at sixes and sevens, “too timid to call Jew-hatred for what it was, and deliver programs which “bent over backwards to avoid offending the very people we needed to stand up to.”
There is something in Stern’s identikit for everyone not to like. Antisemitism, to take one check box, involves “Jews killing Jesus to characterize Israel or Israelis”. It was now the turn of Tucker Carlson to be grossly offended. If that’s what antisemitism is, said the podcaster, the New Testament could be banned. Moral outrage can get ridiculous.
It’s a real circus out there when Meta looks to ban derogatory uses of the word ‘Zionist’ as in, “Zionist rats”. What about ‘Zionist criminals’? Meta okays the term when people accuse Israel’s military of ‘war crimes’.
The ‘Antisemite of the year’ award puts the lid on the circus. Tucker Carlson will treat it like a crucifixion. He didn’t interview Fuentes only because he’s a fellow traveller. He did it to tap into Fuentes’s audience as much as the latter looks to tap into Carlson’s. Both Jew-baiting and witch hunting are where the money is.
Steve Apfel is many things: Economist. Former founder and Director of the School of Management Accounting. Veteran authority on anti-Zionism. Scourge of antisemites. Prodigious author.
A version of this article appeared in the American Spectator.