— Feature, Musings —02.03.2024 05:23 PM
My latest: the Jew-haters plan
Young people are anti-Semitic.
Not all of them, of course. But, these days, too many.
Polling done since the massacres of October 7 tell a deeply disturbing story: vast swaths of Generation Z (who are 18 to 26) and Millennials (who are 27 to 42) in Canada meet the dictionary definition of anti-Semitic. A third support “targeting” Jews. A quarter want Israel destroyed.
In the U.S., it’s just as bad. A Harvard poll found a majority of younger Americans felt Hamas’ campaign of rape and murder was “justified.” Twenty per cent of them think the Holocaust is a myth.
How did so many young people come to embrace points of view that are so clearly historically and morally wrong?
Gary Wexler has an answer. Wexler is a brilliant and gifted American writer. Recently, he authored a piece for the Jewish Journal titled: “The Inside Story of How Palestinians Took Over the World.” The headline was a deliberate overstatement, of course, designed to draw the reader in.
But once you’re drawn in to Gary Wexler’s argument, it’s very hard to dispute. Because it’s true.
Thirty years ago, when peace was breaking out between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Wexler was hired by a human rights foundation to interview Palestinian and Israeli organizations seeking funding and support. The Israelis, Wexler recalled, were “almost giddy with hope.”
The Palestinians weren’t. In fact, he said, none of them would even utter the word “peace.” And all of them told Wexler he needed to meet with Ameer Makhoul, a man who would years later be convicted of acting as an agent for Hezbollah, a listed terrorist entity in Canada. Makhoul would serve nine years in prison.
When Wexler met Makhoul in Haifa, however, he was still a free man. And the Palestinian leader had a message deliver:
“We will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists. Just like you spent your summers on the kibbutz, we will bring college students to spend their Summers in refugee camps and work with our people. Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.”
And that, of course, is exactly what has happened in the intervening years. In the streets, in the corridors of academe, online – wherever young North Americans and Europeans gather, these days, the stench of Jew Hatred dominates. Young people, more than any other demographic, have been captivated by the “pro-Palestinian” movement – a movement that is, when you distill it down to its base elements, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.
Wexler is aware of the work this newspaper has done exposing that anti-Israel protestors are being paid to protest. Asked where he thinks the money is coming from, Wexler says: “Makhoul said to me: You know where we are going to get the money for this? It will come from Arab countries and the European Union.” And that is what has happened, Wexler says in an interview from his California home.
But how can we know the campaign is coordinated, and not just happening organically? Says Wexler: “Because it is all just too similar. As soon as BDS started to rise, and I started to see real similarities in language and tone across the board. It was coordinated. It was directed.”
He adds: “These people have been brilliant. It’s very coordinated. It’s not just some people who happened to get organized on their own.”
Is the anti-Israel campaign working? Says Wexler: “As I started to see all these things starting to happen – BDS, Apartheid Week, both of which started in Toronto, by the way – I started thinking: My God, this is what Ameer Makhoul said was going to happen. I started to see the hand of Ameer Makhoul everywhere.”
The anti-Israel campaigners have pursued “a brilliant, brilliant strategy,” Wexler says, forging alliances with Black Lives Matter, Indigenous and anti-colonial groups. The minds behind the anti-Semitic campaign have also been very active online, he agrees. “They’re using influencers who they have working on these campuses. Their online effort isn’t just messaging. It’s bringing people to events, it’s community organizing.”
“They have been so, so successful. The curtain needs to be pulled back, to see where the money is coming from. We need to know why and how this is happening – and we’ll see that they have billions of dollars behind this effort.”
Gary Wexler is right. We in the West need to wake up, and start fighting back against a propaganda campaign that is reaching, and converting, millions.
And we need to do that before it’s too late.
As long as people think that anti-semitism is far right, it will flourish on the left.
I’ve always maintained the left has a much bigger anti-Semitic problem.
“It’s our intifada and we’ll rape if we want to.”
https://twitter.com/alanfryermedia/status/1753893809216536877?
Note the young Hamas supporter in the photo.
Warren,
Humanity makes a rational person condemn both CIVILIAN deaths in Israel and Palestine. Humanity is the common denominator. Anyone who does not see the equivalence suffers from a level or condition of mental illness.
Worldwide, cults of personality have flourished across the political spectrum. People have become indoctrinated sheep with absolutely no critical capacity to judge politicians and their positions objectively. It’s happening on both the left and right, going down the Hitler road where blind obedience and unshakable and unquestioned loyalty are now the norm. No wonder we’re catastrophically drifting in a slow-motion train wreck leading to either domestic civil war in some instances, or a new world war in other contexts.
There’s isn’t one propaganda campaign. There’s two. Both require the demonization of an entire race of people, and a choice of absolution for, indifference toward, or active participation in their chosen side’s most egregious of sins.
I refuse to participate in either. 17,000 orphaned children is absolutely not a valid consequence of 1200 dead civilians, which was in turn absolutely not a valid response to political grievances.
As long as politicians and media continue to instruct their readers and supporters to see this overarching conflict only in black and white terms with no regard for humanity, you can expect the hate to grow exponentially.
Jason – moral equivalency is a big part of the problem. It is plainly obvious that there is not a “demonization of an entire race of people” being espoused by Israel or its Western allies. Just saying so doesn’t make it a fact.
Moral equivalency is what separates the decent from the bloodthirsty and savage.
It’s only “plainly obvious” if you refuse to listen to anything actually being said and continually ignore what’s actually happening. How many unarmed Palestinians are gunned down in the West Bank, despite not being affiliated with Hamas whatsoever? To pretend this is justified is to be as much a part of the problem as Hamas itself.
Jason,
Hyperbole does not equal evidence. You provide no examples of Israel or Western Allies demonizing all Palestinians. You are not doing that because, as is well known, there are no examples. You are proving my point.
Examples, like Israel’s public news broadcaster Kan showing a video of children singing that the Palestinians would all be dead within a year? That was 2 months ago.
Or how nearly a third of children’s books published in the country in the 20th century paint Palestinians as liars, traitors, terrorists and/or vermin? Incidentally, it’s an Israeli professor (Adi Cohen) that compiled that stat, and not a Muslim.
Or was it humanizing when the IDF took all the men in Beit Lahia, stripped them nude and laid them out in the street, regardless of who they were? Are you among those few who still think it was “just” when Americans did exactly that at Abu Ghraib?
Or is it the humanistic approach to criminalize even marking the displacement of 750k people?
As an overarching conflict, this is not a one sided affair. Hamas is an organization of terrorists and war criminals, in that we’ll agree. But treating the rest of the populace as “Hamas-in-waiting” is a war crime, just like it would be everywhere else on this planet. This is like Yugoslavia all over again.
It really started with the change of Palestinian overseas tactics with the end of Cold War. With the end Soviet financing and far left support, the Palestinians had to reassess their campaign of international violence against Israel.
Recall the days when the Palestinian militant groups and their international allies on the left bomb, shot and hijacked targets all over the world? That proved to be ineffective, just driving the West to support Israel .
Same during the 2nd Intifada when wave after wave of suicide bombers struck bus stops, discos and markets all over Israel. That also has stopped. Most of Gen. Z were diapers and Millennials in high school.
Now, violent action, until Oct 7, was rocket fire (barely covered in the West) and tossing rocks at the fence to get shots of ‘unarmed’ Palestinians being overawed by IDF or Israeli border police.
On the home front, mass immigration from Muslim counties has brought you people into direct contact with anti-Israeli beliefs that are near universal in the Muslim world. Package in brown skin, rather than skin head and called ‘anti-Zionism’ the most obscene anti-Jewish prejudicious became acceptable if given a multicultural package.
That’s where we are now.
“Twenty per cent of them think the Holocaust is a myth.”
I guess what would we expect when Justin has a cabinet minister that literally gave oxygen to the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job. And they say the alt-right are nuts.
Jason,
I would go a bit further and add this: for Netanyahu, the problem lies in recognizing that the root out Hamas campaign, no matter how fully justified will eventually and inevitably end up in a grey zone. What percentage of Hamas terrorists killed or captured will actually constitute a victory over Hamas, and more importantly, from Netanyahu’s perspective, is it a big enough military victory to boost his ongoing efforts to remain in power?
For the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority will have to find some balls and denounce Hamas as terrorists and with the help of the Arab League begin now to actively prepare for the initial establishment of PA rule in Gaza once the IDF withdraws and secondarily, to create a common front that’s prepared to do whatever it takes diplomatically to push forward to a two-state solution. Without shades of grey from both sides, there will never be peace, nor the coming into being of a Palestinian state. A two-state solution is the only practicable and possible permanent solution. As for the Palestinians and Gazans, they collectively need to renounce violence and terrorism and thoroughly commit themselves to permanently living in peace side by side with Israel. In short, an explosion of grey is needed on both sides or this conflict will become permanently intractable and incapable of resolution.
The campaign to end Hamas is the uniting call for the people, and the only thing keeping Netanyahu from getting the Mussolini treatment from his people at this point. But when there are tactics not being used (such as destroying the tunnels with seawater, which has worked before), and instead it’s hospital bomb after refugee camp bomb, you start to get the distinct impression that isn’t the full scope of the goal here – particularly when IDF commanders are being caught saying the quiet part loud: that it is severely unlikely most of those hostages are coming back if they want to press Hamas to oblivion.
President Obama hit the nail on the head – you can defend Israel and support their military, but until a show of good faith can be made that it is understood that the history of Palestinian treatment is woefully unjust, true peace and reconciliation isn’t possible. Yet this is a criminal offense in Israel.
Hamas needs to go. But if the cost is our humanity and our collective souls, it’s not worth it.
While there is a lot of substance to this analysis it ignores that Israel, because of its tremendously flawed election system, has repeatedly elected Netanyahu a convicted criminal. And Netanyahu has allowed religious zealots to repeatedly break agreements with the Palestinians because he needs these religious parties votes. Because of this Palestinians have been able to point to unreasonable and unlawful actions by Israel when making their claims.
I support Israel, however, it has been tragic that it has let a criminal and religious zealots abuse so much power bringing the country into disrespect.