What is feasible about tackling the oldest hatred using a bullet list of what antisemites do and say? No list yet developed keeps Jew-baiters quiet. As inventive as they are invincible the more complete your definition or strategy for tackling bigots the more slippery and aggressive they get.
Today Jews are beating a retreat because the vaunted and anticipated U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism was born dead. “In light of the strategy’s failures many in Jewish leadership are afraid to confront antisemitism head-on in its (anti-Zionist form).” https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/national-antisemitisim-strategy-has-no-clothes
The Biden regime, looking to both fight anti-Semitism (to placate Jewish Democrats) and to let it rip (to placate anti-Semite Democrats) neutered the “gold standard” IHRA working definition by recognising caveats in the so called “Nexus” document. The latter rendered the former about as useful as a bucket with a hole in the bottom. Antisemites get to keep their right to deny Jews their right to the land of Israel. They can also go on “paying disproportionate attention to Israel” and, to put the cherry on top, people afflicted by this mental disease keep their double standards and defamations. The Biden regime has effectively proclaimed: “Nothing anti-Semitic about hating Zionists and their illegal Jewish state.”
Anti-Semites have every reason to be drooling or slavering at the mouth. They can shout ‘Zionism is racism’ to their hearts content, escaping the stigma and keeping their platform and popular appeal. One critic nailed home this unpalatable point:
“The problem of antisemitism doesn’t lie with a hitherto unclear and contested definition. The problem lies with those who bait Jews and demonize Israel. Those who refuse to sign up to the IHRA (definition) do so because they want to continue to demonize Israel and bait Jews.” /news/372256
Syria starved hundreds of Palestinian Arabs to death in a refugee camp and provoked not a peep from the gallery. Here were the Palestinian Arabs whom Israel is forbidden to scratch...
The gold standard is dead. Long live the Impossible Standard!
Acting as a stand-alone identikit the impossible standard renders the need to define the beast redundant. Antisemites from your blood-thirsty Jihadist to your ivy league academic demand that Israel conducts itself according to a bizarre and infantile code of war. Even when they do allow Israel to retaliate attacks from “Palestine” the antisemite insists that Israel goes to war impossibly handcuffed. It may not kill the enemy, injure the enemy, or damage property belonging to the enemy. Should one of the above happens bigots blow the whistle, followed by cries of ‘disproportionate!’ and ‘war crimes!’
Needless to say the demand for waging war safely so that that no one gets hurt and nothing gets damaged applies exclusively to one country. That’s one red light.
A second red light is that concern for Palestinian Arab lives is demonstrably not behind the demand on Israel to wage war safely. Assad the butcher of Syria starved hundreds of Palestinian Arabs to death in a refugee camp and provoked not a peep from the gallery. Here were the Palestinian Arabs whom Israel is forbidden to scratch but Syria may starve to death with impunity. Understand, here I withdraw motives, not complain of double standards. By removing a ‘get out of jail free card’ the impossible standard cuts off antisemites who scuttle for cover behind human rights.
The word ‘disproportionate’ blinks another red light or ticks a third box. Antisemites relying heavily on it, aren’t willing to explain how and why IIDF attacks are disproportionate. That includes professors of international humanitarian law (IHL). Some indeed are so impatient to demonize and criminalize the Juggernaut Jews that they can’t wait for one shred of evidence.
“Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is not self-defense - it’s a war crime. The rocket attacks on Israel by Hamas deplorable as they are do not, in terms of scale and effect amount to an armed attack entitling Israel to rely on self-defense…Israel’s (disproportionate) actions amount to aggression, not self-defense.” (Hadrian’s Echo. Ch 11)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007PIVM6G/
Ranting Professor Chinkin delivered that instant verdict before she’d set one dainty foot in Gaza. Other antisemites, more circumspect, are difficult to nab. Lawman of Leiden, Professor John Dugard knows how to keep his cool.
“It is not possible to adopt an armchair attitude in assessing Israel’s response to suicide bombings and Palestinian violence. Israel is entitled to a wide margin of appreciation in its response. But, even allowing for this, it is suggested, on the basis of the evidence provided, that Israel’s response to terror is disproportionate.” (Hadrian’s Echo. Ch 8) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007PIVM6G/
That word again. Has ‘disproportionate’ a dimension that can be measured? It seems not when even a professor of law reveals a personal and subjective dislike of Israel going to war. Like Professor Chinkin his verdict reeks of disgust. He can merely suggest that Israel had crossed a red line and broken a vague law. Feelings guide him. No honest lawyer can give a straight answer, only because there is none to give. If there really was legal clarity, indictments of Israel would come with cogent argument and precedent instead of “disproportionate and indiscriminate.” Case closed.
The International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia long ago confessed: there are no hard and fast rules for disproportionate force. War crimes, declared the Tribunal, have to be carefully proven, one by one, case by case.
Today the prosecutorial duty of damning Israel for its power to stop race-murder has devolved to the most brazen UN functionary of all. American academic Francesca Albanese abandoned the veneer of her predecessors. What they felt constrained to imply, Albanese says outright: Israel has no right to defend Jewish lives against Muslim attacks.
“Israel has a right to defend itself, but can’t claim it when it comes to the people it oppresses [or] whose land it colonizes.”
The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million - that number again - hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide.Case closed. Note how Albanese gives Jews the right to life with one hand and with the other confiscates it. https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-739603 Members of the UN Human Rights Council, one supposes, would call that even-handed justice.
Hence there’s no hard and fast rules that Israel must meet. There’s only the impossible standard: for antisemites a single Palestinian Arab victim of the Jews is a victim too many. An Israeli attack is simply an attack they don’t like – or an attack committed by people they don't like.
But so what if lawyers and laymen maliciously convict Israel at the drop of a hat? How does it prove anti-Semitism beyond a doubt? To answer the question we need a pair of eminent authors. One is a French playwright and the other an American columnist.
At the end of the Holocaust in his thin but seminal book, ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’, Jean-Paul Sartre cut to the heart of what hating Jews means.
“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.”
So in terms of human instinct there’s zero difference between a law professor in gown and a jihadist hooded with a black balaclava. The first is a closet Jew killer, the second a bloodthirsty physical killer.
Now to the American if the Frenchman was over the top for you. Washington Post columnist the late Charles Krauthammer wrote after the infamous 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.”
The impossible standard! The purpose: to disarm Israel. The object is for Jews to be attacked and killed and be unable to defend their lives. Antisemites want to take them back to the days when pogroms were inflicted on helpless communities. Dead Jews are the only good Jews. Now if a person wants Jews to die there’s no question: he or she must be anti-Semitic. If Israel’s security barrier prevents Jewish death and people object to it, they’ve got to be antisemitic. Therefore when setting out to hunt the beast take along this identikit and you’ll not snare critics of Israel in your bagful of bigots.
Steve Apfel is an authority on anti-Zionism and a prolific author in general. He blogs at Balaam’s curse. His very first book is now available in Kindle
US - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007PIVM6G/ UK - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007PIVM6G/