There is a certain irony in the fact that those that speak most vehemently against anti-Semitism have, in doing so, become anti-Semites themselves by virtue of grossly abusing the anti-Semite label into irrelevancy by totally misrepresenting the term for political purposes.
There was a time when the anti-Semite label was an important and powerful symbol that recognised the injustices the Jewish people have suffered during their existence. But now the label has been hijacked by the extreme Right of Zionism who have commandeered the term and trivialised it in order to demonise their detractors. Zionists and their neoconservative supporters around the world, and particularly in the US, have misapplied the anti-Semite label by accusing those who dissent against Zionism, its expansionist aims, their insistence of Jewish exclusivity within Israel and what they hope to be Greater Israel, as being ‘anti-Semites’.
Right-wing Israeli politicians and US neoconservatives have been prominent in leading the ‘anti-Semite’ smear campaign. The idea is to induce within public opinion the entirely false and deliberately deceitful notion that to be anti-Zionist is anti-Israel and anti-Jew and, therefore, anti-Semitic.
While there are indeed some anti-Zionists that truly are anti-Semitic, these people are only anti-Zionist because they really are anti-Semitic. As real Jew-haters they are actually anti-anything connected with Jews, including Zionism.
Most anti-Zionists, on the other hand, see Zionism for what it really is; a political ideology. Among anti-Zionists there are many Jewish people as well as non-Jews. Compounding their misuse of the term ‘anti-Semite’, Zionists and neoconservative have pigeon-holed anti-Zionist Jews as ‘self-hating Jews’.
As a result of their extensive abuse of the ‘anti-Semitic’ label for nefarious political purposes, Zionists and neoconservatives have rendered the term all but irrelevant. By using it as a derogatory term directed at people who clearly and quite obviously are not anti-Semites, they have diminished the true meaning of the term to the point that there is no longer any fear whatsoever of being labelled an ‘anti-Semite’ when the term is used in the context of demonising Jews and non-Jews alike that do not go along with Zionist political ideology. Since Zionists and neoconservatives use the term in a catch-all sense whereby they attempt to tar anti-Zionists with same brush as they tar real Jew-haters, all they have succeeded in achieving is destroying the significance and validity of the real meaning of the term. In other words, they have deprived Jews throughout both the Diaspora and Israel of a potent and powerful symbol that recognised the struggle Jews have endured over time.
Is not that abuse in itself an anti-Semitic act?
For a classic example of the Zionist/neoconservative deceit and misuse of the anti-Semite label, see here.
AUSTRALIANS AT WAR
THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY is a compelling factual history of neoconservatism and its influence on US Foreign Policy in the Middle East during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Click on image above for details.
1 comment:
Absolutely correct, good post. I am sick and tired of having anyone who criticizes Israel being pointed at as an anti-Semite. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be of that country, and both non-Jews and Jews do so. Criticizing these opinions as "anti-semitism" degrades the true anti-Semitism that Jews have sometimes suffered in their history.
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