To: People who hate Jews, but don't want to be caught out. Let me do you a favor. Here's a life hack. All you have to do is pretend it's about Palestine, and you're fine. If you make it about Palestine, you will incur zero social stigma for it, and no negative consequences. IN FACT, it will probably be the case that you'll gain friends and receive many plaudits. Extra points if you go around saying “End Apartheid!!!” while gesturing obviously at the State of Israel. (Btw Apartheid ended 30 years ago in South Africa. Well done to the ANC.)
The Free Palestine pacifiers/brigade/platoon etc can go and will go everywhere. They will appear at protests that have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. Climate change protestors love a Palestinian flag. LGBTQ+ rallies are truly gay for it. Recently my friend Ben walked past a protest in Islington, North London about an ice-skating rink. Guess what he saw? Correct: a Palestinian flag.
Of course, Islington is home to the CEO of Palestinians R Us: Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn is the local advocate, who has made Palestine his raison d'etre. He is Palestinian on the inside, it seems, and most weekends you can find Jeremy Corbyn rallying somewhere about Palestinian liberation because Jeremy Corbyn will not sleep until the day Palestine is totally free. I would love to do a sense-check in the West Bank of how many civilian Palestinians have heard of Jeremy Bernard Corbyn. If and when the Palestinians finally get out from under the thumb of their tyrannical and oppressive rulers, how do you think they’ll feel when they go to whatever town in the Western hemisphere and see that these people of great and heightened virtue have decided to erase their experience and make it about them instead?
Define virtue signalling: pretend act of apparently selfless devotion and courage to any given cause that is truly rooted in a a cry for external validation and is often deployed to mask and obfuscate from a person's own shortcomings, failings or immoral behavior. Virtue signalling is the easiest thing to do to receive maximum applause for at best the bare minimum show of support and at worst an act of counterproductive procrastination from the real issues. Whether it's the Corbynistas, or the BLM crew, or nations recovering from sectarian violence, the Palestine virtue-signallers have their own problems, and instead of resolving them they decide to create a false equivalent with the Palestinians, and blame Israel instead for everything - and I mean EVERYTHING – that is wrong. Israel is the reason the Labour party failed. Israel is the reason George Floyd was killed. If Israel didn't exist, nobody would ever hate each other again, or have any form of dispute. It's all Israel's fault.
This is a remarkably easy way to be righteously angry, and nobody will stand in your way. You can celebrate this act of rage. Turn it into murals. Put it on a bumper sticker on your car. From the river to the sea, honk if you agree!
The virtue signalling is so legitimate, it's made its way inside US Congress. Today Israeli President Isaac Herzog spoke in Congress, and representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, AOC and Jamaal Bowman (aka The Squad) all refused to attend. President Herzog: "My deep yearning is for Israel to one day make peace with our Palestinian neighbors." The Squad didn't hear this. They don't want to hear it, they would rather boycott altogether. President Herzog is not a political figure in Israel’s system. He is a head of state, not part of the elected government. But that doesn't matter to the Free Palestine cause. The Free Palestine cause don't recognize Israel, or Israelis, no matter who they are or what they do. To recognize Israelis would be to understand that Israel is not the problem. The Palestinian leadership is.
Here pictured: Rashida Tlaib, a member of Congress, is reflective of Palestinian leadership. I have written previously about the great Apartheid lie, and the baseless evidence around this defamatory claim, which is nothing but an updated iteration of an ancient libel and conspiracy theory against Jewish people in general. With her ridiculous sign BOYCOTT APARTHEID, Tlaib is justifying her racist xenophobia, by reverse-engineering blame on Israel. She is aping the stance of Palestinian authorities, and let me paraphrase: "No we do not want to meet with representatives of Israel, or negotiate with Israel. We do not want to give Israel a seat at the table. We don't want peace. We just want that country and all of its people wiped off the map."
This is the door to Rashida’s office by the way:
It seems noteworthy to me, at least, that Rashida was born in Detroit. Not Ramallah. She is obsessed, as all Palestine virtue-signallers are.
Tlaib stated on Twitter: “The Israeli government is committing the crime of apartheid according to the @UN, @HRW, @Amnesty International, & @BTselem (the largest human rights organization in Israel). Apartheid is a racist system of oppression.”
Virtue-signallers weaponize their own identities all the time to blackball people they paint as enemies from sharing their own stories via ridiculous, extreme and libellous claims. They stick their fingers in their ears when the people at the centre of the debate want to teach them about their own perspectives, thereby erasing the important voices and speaking over them. Tlaib would rather not show up than to hear the President of Israel speak. Why? Because she’s not interested. She wants the issue to be about her and her perspective, her pain, her history. She virtue signals with the side she wants to believe are victims, not because she has any desire to understand the issue but because she needs a vessel for her own struggles. She should be looking closer to home.
“The Israeli government is committing the crime of apartheid according to the @UN, @HRW, @Amnesty International, & @BTselem (the largest human rights organization in Israel). Apartheid is a racist system of oppression.”
She may as well have said: The Jews are committing the crime of being lesser humans according to Tiberius and the Romans, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Crusaders, most of the rest of Europe at some point, the vast majority of the Muslim world, the Nazis, etc etc etc. Next!
Virtue signallers take their own separate pain about a separate experience and use it to claim that they know better, to be saviours in a situation that doesn’t require their help. They do this because they’re still angry that they couldn’t save themselves and they need someone to blame. Jews have always made a great source for blame. Human rights organizations have made a business out of this. They have made it their business to “globalize” issues that are nuanced, and cannot and should not be globalized, so they can be the good guys. But the currency comes from their virtue signalling, not an investment in making the world a better place.
It’s a victim complex. And it thrives on hate – obsessive hate. So here is a list of antisemitic statements:
Oh I love Jews, and bagels, and Drake, but…
1/ …the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians what the Germans did to the Jews
2/ …Israel is an Apartheid state
3/ … the Palestinians only throw rocks and Israel has the most sophisticated military in the world
4/ … Jews love killing Palestinian babies
5/ … don't the Jews control the media and the banks
6/ … the Jews secretly have more power than they admit
7/ … From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free #FreePalestine
8/ … Zionism is racism
9/ … the Jews have dual loyalty so therefore cannot be trusted
10/ … the Jews pretend they're not white, LMFAO
If you're a leftist or a “progressive”, you've probably made one of these statements. And even if you know it’s racist, you're OK with it. Because nothing bad is going to happen to you. It's very popular. And the only time anyone ever has to make reparations for Jew hate is when they've really exposed themselves, ie, The Nazis. And even at that, the guilt and the public shaming only lasts seconds, and you can now go to any of the outdoor Holocaust memorials in Berlin and take smiling selfies.
The joke’s on you though. Because the Palestinians can’t hear you, and the Palestinian Authority are laughing at you, and you’re still going to have all the same issues you had in the first place, probably more so, because Israel and the Jews really can’t help you with your problems. We’re busy dealing with our own.
Thanks for this post.
When i visited Berlin, I did appreciate the memorials to the Holocaust.
I'd like to think that if I'd seen someone cavorting as in the picture you included, I'd have said, "Stop! this is not a place to do this."
“They will appear at protests that have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine.”
In 2017 there was a blowup due to the Chicago gay pride parade banning Israeli flags and the Star of David in general (because: Zionism). A splinter group with very legitimate issues referring to themselves as the “anti-slut shamers” held a rally across the street from my building. I was going to fly an Israeli flag off our balcony but decided instead to confront the group accompanied by my fluffy Shetland Sheepdog for protection. An organizer had a bullhorn so I chatted with her in earshot of a few supporters. First I ran down the list of their grievances (e.g. no shame for sex workers) and stated that I agreed with every one. Then I asked, “but why the Jew hatred?” The organizer said I wasn’t welcome (via bullhorn in my face). I said, “But why? Aren’t you trying to highlight your issues and gain supporters - I am your target audience!” (I am a boomer-era man). The other women looked really distressed because the anti-Zionism was far afield from their issues. Then another organizer came up who was a representative of the JVP. I restated my position and she said Zionists weren’t welcome. I said, “Do you even know what Zionism is?” She then said, “I am a woman of color and don’t need to speak to you.” At that point I left, but came back when the “Zionesses” had arrived and were confronting the crowd brought in by the JVP screaming about Zionists and Palestine. They had obliterated the purpose of the rally. Later, we saw them marching around Michigan Ave with a pig in effigy hanging from a pole, chanting “f*** the Zionists, kill the pigs, …” The whole thing would be comical if it wasn’t such a serious entrenched problem, deceiving so many people and promoting hatred of Jews and Israel.