Three Simple Rules for Gaslighting American Jews
I wanted to share this post from the Israel Policy Forum
For those who are unfamiliar with their work, they advocate for a two-state solution and fight to ensure Israel remains a democracy. If you are one of the people who understand the world is a nuanced complicated place and don't support the position that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic or the pro-Hamas people who celebrated the October 7 attack like many of the students being praised here or you would appreciate their sober analysis of goings-on in the region.
https://israelpolicyforum.org/principles/
Michael J. Koplow
The campus protests raise complex issues of free speech, public safety, and the rights and responsibilities of students and universities. But for too many, it’s easier to pretend that this is black and white and use it as an excuse to harass Jews.
Hello, and welcome to the pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist campus resistance! Thank you for standing in solidarity with us as we use our scholarship money, our student loans, and our parents’ tuition payments to enable us to do anything and everything while at school other than participate in the academic life of our universities! Demanding that righteous and deserved justice for Palestinians must necessarily mean the end of any form of Jewish sovereignty and statehood is the single greatest cause of our lifetime, and we will brook no accusations that we are in any way extremist, one-sided, or antisemitic. Nonetheless, there are some people who interpret our shunning anyone who supports Israel’s existence as bigoted, or our embrace of a term expressly identified with suicide bombings as violent, or our toleration of signs calling for Jews who came from the Middle East to go to Poland or the U.S. as antisemitic. We cannot abide that, since our support for bigotry, violence, and antisemitism must not carry any adverse consequences for us! To ensure our deeply-held but somehow simultaneously surface-deep beliefs and our inviolable right to do whatever we want do not actually come with any costs, here are three good tactics that you should begin practicing now in order to make our resistance more effective.
First: surround yourself with Jews! This one is the most important, because for some reason, people seem to take bigotry against history’s longest and most brutally persecuted minority very seriously. That goes double here in the U.S., where the Jews are particularly in your face about it and also control lots of stuff. Luckily for us, Jews are a famously fractious and argumentative bunch, and even embrace disagreement as an integral part of their religious and cultural heritage, so it is very easy to find Jews who agree with us and can inoculate us against charges of antisemitism no matter what we say or do. If there are Jewish people, or even better, Jewish groups who say that they support us, feel perfectly safe with our activities, and—best of all—hold Jewish prayers or holiday rituals in our encampments, then it is ironclad proof that there is no hint of antisemitism anywhere! It also lets us decide which kinds of Jews and Judaism are
good (anti-Zionists are the most authentic types of Jews) and which are bad (Jews who feel connected to their ancient and spiritual homeland and to the actual Jewish state that exists are violent genocidal maniacs), and also to decide what is or is not antisemitic. We definitely cannot leave such a charged issue up to the people who are on the other end of the purported antisemitism, especially since polls show that 9 out of every 10 American Jews feel that Israel is an important or meaningful component of their identity. So it is even more important to make sure that the Jews who agree with us are front and center, and held up by reporters who don’t know any better as truly representative of the community.
Of course, it goes without saying that this line of reasoning can only apply to Jews and accusations of bigotry against Jews. (They really are the chosen people, aren’t they?) Don’t you dare try to apply this line of reasoning elsewhere, for instance by claiming that Clarence Thomas or Candace Owens can’t possibly say anything deemed to be anti-Black because they are themselves Black, or that pro-life women cannot take any positions deemed antithetical to women because they are themselves women. Tokenism is used by bad actors to suppress authentic ideas, unless it is Jews we are dealing with, in which case having Hizballah flags alongside a Seder means that the Jews who object are the real antisemites. Plus Jill Stein (a Jewish name if I’ve ever heard one!) showed up to support the protesters and to decry Zionism, and you think you know better than a Jewish presidential candidate whether there’s any antisemitism going on anywhere?
http://israelpolicyforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/PRINT-Koplow-Column-5_2_24.pdf
This is me talking now. There is a big difference between being pro-Israel i,e the right to defend itself against terrorist attacks from Hamas and Hasbulla with their Iranian sponsorship and the idea of a Jewish homeland, and supporting Benjamin Netanyahu. There is also a big difference between being pro-Palestinian, i.e. the right of the Palestinian people to have a state of their own, and have self-determination, and being pro-Hamas I'm celebrating the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7.
