Featured
The Antisemitism Scam
How Israel terrorizes Jews, silences critics, and justifies genocide
On January 19, 2025, New South Wales (NSW) police found a Caravan filled with explosives and a list of Jewish targets in Sydney’s north west district. NSW Premier Chris Minns said it was intended to be used in a “mass casualty” terror attack against the Jewish community. Jews were terrified of what Australian PM Anthony Albanese called the ‘rising tide of antisemitism.’ Minns proposed strengthening hate speech laws and banning protests near synagogues, in order to “protect Jews.”
Two weeks later, police announced that the whole thing was a hoax. They blamed it on organized criminals, conveniently based outside of the country, so they could not be named, arrested, or interrogated. The ‘wave of antisemitic arson and vandalism’ Albanese described turned out to have been done not by Jew-haters, but by criminals in it for the money.
Now, who could be paying for vandalism of Jewish spaces and hoax bomb threats? Who might be holding demonstrations “near a synagogue?” What ‘hate speech’ is Premier Minns talking about? To me, all signs point to the Israeli government attacking Palestine supporters. Israel has been using fake antisemitism to terrify Diaspora Jews, silence Tel Aviv’s critics, and justify their growing list of crimes against humanity for over 75 years.
In 2002, former Israeli Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni was asked on the American program Democracy Now, “Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called anti-Semitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?”
The ‘wave of antisemitic arson and vandalism’ Albanese described turned out to have been done not by Jew-haters, but by criminals in it for the money.
Ms. Aloni replied, “Well, it’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in the US, people are criticizing Israel, they are anti-Semitic.”
The trick has worked so well that now, in a time when their mass murder of Gaza is being live-streamed to the world, Israel has taken it to a higher level. To counter pro-Palestinian voices, they not only call critics antisemitic. They actively engage in behaviors that provoke hostility, so they can then claim that antisemitism is the problem, not Israeli violence.
They have created an entire made-up ‘antisemitism epidemic,’ and are using it to subvert rights and freedoms that Westerners had thought guaranteed. In this, they have the full support of bought-off media and right-wing politicians, some like Donald Trump using it for their own ends. People are being fired, canceled, jailed, or deported for their speech or tweets supporting Palestine. Israel’s backers are bringing the West a new wave of fascism, and doing it in the name of protecting Jews.
Those committed to supporting Israel (often called “Zionists”) create this artificial pandemic with a mix of hoaxes, provocations, redefinition of words, and entitled whining.
Hoaxes
The Sydney Caravan hoax was not a one-off. A café in Winnipeg, Manitoba, was recently trashed inside and out, with anti-Jewish graffiti painted all over the walls. Police determined that the vandalism was an inside job, perpetrated by the café’s Jewish owners.
In Davis, California, someone scrawled the Nazi swastika symbol on the outside wall of a residence hall. Zionists blamed ‘antisemitic’ Palestine supporters, but Palestinians are not Nazis; even the radical Islamists among them have their own symbols. The Israeli government makes the same absurd charge, occasionally ‘finding’ a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a Palestinian home.
Sometimes these charges are not a complete hoax, just a blatant misinterpretation of what people say and do. Chants of “Free Palestine,” are twisted into supposedly being a call to kill the Jews.
People chanting at Joe Biden, “We charge you with genocide,” were deliberately misunderstood as a call for “Jewish genocide.”
Redefining terms
The Zionist lobby has worked for decades to have most criticism of Israel legally defined as ‘antisemitic.’ The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) published a detailed definition of what it called the “New Antisemitism,” and helpfully gave examples, including calling Israel a racist state, or Zionism a racist ideology, despite the fact that racism is explicitly written into Israeli law.
Other examples from IHRA include: “Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, than to the interests of their own nations.” “Applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” or “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” When Israel bombs hospitals or massacres children, are those actions something Nazis would have done? Seems a perfectly apt comparison to me, but such crimes happen all the time. Reporting the news is now an ‘antisemitic’ act.
The IHRA definition is especially targeted at universities. The European Legal Support Center (ELSC) analyzed 40 incidents between January 2017 and May 2022, in which staff, students or outside speakers were targeted with accusations of antisemitism. According to the Electronic Intifada, “every single allegation was determined to be false.” Yet the allegations have been used to cancel classes and fire professors.
Provocations
In California and Australia at least, Zionists have taken to wearing hats or t-shirts with the Israeli flag symbol of the Star of David emblazoned on them, and going into Palestinian owned cafes or restaurants looking for trouble. In some cases they have brought reporters with them to record any ensuing confrontation and frame it as ‘antisemitic.’
Entitled Whining
All during the student encampments for Palestine of 2024, we read stories about how “uncomfortable” the demonstrations made Jewish students feel. Many times their discomfort was framed as the result of an ‘antisemitic attack.’ If demonstrators set up mock ‘checkpoints’ on campus and asked students their religion, to dramatize what West Bank Palestinians go through every day, Zionist students said they were being prevented from attending class because they were Jewish.
I don’t know how many revolting images I saw of well-dressed, well-fed Jewish students from elite universities, standing with Republican legislators in support of some new law to crack down on campus protest, whining about how uncomfortable they felt on campus.I don’t know how many outraged reports I’ve read from Republicans about “Explosions of campus antisemitism,” all of which were about opposition to Israel’s horrific assault on Gaza.
A brief history of real antisemitism
What is antisemitism anyway? Antisemitism is a unique form of racism. “Semites” are a group of linguistically-related ethnicities from West Asia and North Africa, including Jews and Arabs. In the 19th Century, German Jew-haters decided “antisemitism” sounded more scientific and less bigoted than Jew hatred (“Judenhasse”) and brought the new term into general use. It’s code; Semitic origin has nothing to do with it. Racism against other Semites such as Arabs is now usually called Islamophobia.
Since the rise of Christianity, anti-Jewish discrimination has meant exclusion of Jews from many fields, while allowing success in others. In many places and times, Jews could not own land or join craft guilds. They were pushed into areas forbidden to Christians, such as money lending, or they became merchants, two areas where they remain leaders to this day.
At times (before it was called antisemitism,) anti-Jewish discrimination has pushed Jews into poverty. At others, it has meant Jews living in privilege and power. These good times for Jews were often followed by their expulsion or murder when local rulers needed scapegoats for bad news. It reached its height in 20th Century Europe with the Nazi genocide of Jews.
Israel’s founders, called Zionists, were motivated by the antisemitism they faced, which they saw not only as curse but opportunity.
They hoped that hatred of Jews in the West would drive Jews to emigrate to Palestine or contribute money and political support to the new state of Israel. They did nothing to defend the Jews of Europe from anti-Jewish discrimination and violence.
A lot of Christian Jew-haters are among Israel’s strongest supporters, as Zionist founder Theodor Herzl predicted in his journals. Some powerful “antisemites,” such as England’s Lord Balfour, supported the new Jewish state outside of Europe. It was win/win for European elites: get the Jews out of their hair and expand European colonialism into Asia.
Predictably, colonizing Palestine has required endless violence and horror, as uprooting indigenous people always does. Unfortunately for the Zionists, the age of colonialism is over. Now people across the world can see on their video screens the suffering visited on the Palestinian people, and they (including many Western Jews) hate it.
Fake ‘antisemitism’ charges bringing fascism
In the 2020s, right wing forces have picked up the ‘antisemitism’ weapon and are wielding it to destroy people’s rights to protest, to boycott, even to speak. Would-be authoritarians use ‘protecting Jews’ as their cover story to enact repressive measures, deport people and close down speech they don’t like.
There are real Jew haters out there. I see them in my comments section, saying things like “You call them Zionists, when the problem is Jews.” I see right wing social media posts saying Jews are trying to destroy the white race with immigration and must be stopped.I don’t know their numbers, but they have done terror like the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, making ‘’epidemic of antisemitism” warnings sound more realistic.
Many of these racists support the state of Israel. Real Jew-haters are almost never Palestinian or pro-Palestine.
False charges of ‘antisemitism’ are first and foremost an ideological weapon. Fear of Jew-hatred is used by Israel to justify their genocidal violence, silence their critics, and terrify Jews into supporting behaviors they would never otherwise support. With it, Zionists bring down progressive leaders like Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. The Trump administration wields this weapon against universities, progressive activists, pro-Palestinians, and others they want to silence.
Conclusion
The antisemitism scam will not go away. Israel needs it, and it works. The Zionists create, promote, and scream about antisemitism to gain support, an operation UK journalist Jonathan Cook calls the antisemitism industry.
We have to continue to call out actual Jew hatred for the racist trope it is.
And equally, we must call out Israel’s manufactured “antisemitism” as a scam used to terrorize Jews, silence critics, enable fascism, and justify genocide.
— -
Thanks for reading! Please comment, share, or repost, with or without att3ribution. Join my Substack community Make Earth Sacred Again. To hire me for freelancing, editing, or tutoring, e-mail me here.
