How antisemitism makes a perverse,
narcissistic sense
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| Queers for Palestine poster calling for participation in demonstration celebrating the "Al Aqsa Flood, " Hamas's official name for its October 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel |
We’ve seen them: gays, lesbians, and trans
marching in solidarity with Hamas, a terrorist organization that would
gleefully hang them all from a crane.
It’s bizarre. Like chickens for KFC.
Even stranger, how can it be that the worst
slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust released a worldwide flood of Jew-hatred?
You’d think people would turn away in revulsion (and certainly most people
have) but just as certainly, far too many greeted the murders and the rapes,
the tortures and the kidnappings with jubilation.
It's not just the horror that makes us reel, but
also the sheer irrationality of it all.
Consider, what do Queers for Palestine think of
the one country in the Middle East where being gay is legal; the only country
in the Middle East that has a Pride Parade; the sole country in the region
persecuted gays can escape to, the one country gay Palestinians flee
to, that one haven for human dignity? They hate it.
They call Israel’s respect for gays “Pink-washing.” It’s
nothing but a propaganda ploy to hide Israeli evil.
By the same logic, Israel’s respect for democracy,
for human rights and civil rights, its protection of minorities, of Druze,
Muslims and Christians, all of which is nearly impossible to find elsewhere in
the Middle East – they might call liberal-democracy washing and
human rights washing. By this twisted logic, Israel’s extension of
equal rights to all is nothing but a ploy to hide Israeli evil.
We might shout, "But that’s absurd! It’s
crazy to argue that something that makes Israel a beacon of hope actually
proves it’s evil."
We should save our breath. When we object to the
irrationality of Israel-haters, we’re just engaging in fact-washing
and logic-washing. Facts and logic be damned. They want Israel
to be evil.
As for Palestinian civilians, Queers for Palestine
couldn’t care less. Seriously, no one can possibly claim to care for
Palestinians, yet celebrate Hamas’s mass terror attack of October 7, as Queers
for Palestine explicitly do.
Decades of Preparation for War
Hamas spent decades preparing for this war. They
dug 350 to 450 miles of tunnels underneath Palestinian cities. That’s farther
than from Toronto to Montreal. They also dug 5,700 shafts for entering these
tunnels.
Note that for all this tunnel
construction, Hamas used concrete donated by the international
community that was supposed to be used to build homes in Gaza. Also, keep in mind that the
entire Gaza strip is only a thin 25 miles long (here).
Beyond that, Hamas turned hospitals, mosques, and
schools into command posts and used every other house in Gaza to hide weapons
or a tunnel entrance, and when the population of Gaza moved into refugee camps
to get out of the way of war, Hamas moved into those camps, too, so as not
to lose their human shields.
Having made every inch of Gaza into a war
zone, Hamas’s entire defensive strategy is to hide behind and below
Palestinian civilians and to pray for their deaths. Eventually, Hamas wants the
world to pressure Israel into letting Hamas survive.
But they’ve been in no hurry. Because the deaths
of Palestinian civilians is also Hamas’s offensive strategy. The longer the war
and the more Palestinian deaths, the more damage Hamas thinks that it can do to
Israel’s reputation. (For more on Hamas’s attitudes towards civilian deaths,
see here.)
The Joy of Hatred
But Queers for Palestine makes perfect sense as
soon as you realize they don’t give a damn about Palestinians and are
interested only in themselves. In common with other antisemites (and other
antizionists, if you still imagine there’s a distinction), they need Israel to
be evil because they get immense pleasure out of their hatred.
Eve Gerrard has written two of the most important
essays ever penned about Jew-hatred: “The Pleasures of Antisemitism” (here) and “‘Eat their skulls’:
The Pleasures of Antisemitism, revisited after 7 October” (here).
Unlike almost everyone else writing on the topic,
Gerrard looks at what drives antisemitism and identifies three of the distinct
pleasures Jew-hatred provides: Anger, Tradition, and Purity.
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| Anger and hatred are the calling cards of antizionists. Both locations of La Bruit kosher caterer, in Markham and in Toronto, were broken into last weekend and vandalized |
I believe Gerrard gets it absolutely right with
“anger” and “purity.” Never mind about the off-the-scale psychosis of Hamas,
anyone’s who’s even been to a local anti-Israel demonstration has seen the
protester’s self-righteous anger blended with their delusion of moral purity.
But I think some of the other pleasures of
antisemitism need to be teased out more.
I believe Gerrard hasn’t quite put her finger on
what’s happening with her suggestion that tradition provides
antisemites with a third source of pleasure. She writes:
They (the Jews) provide a
comfortably familiar target for blame; those outside the supposedly blameworthy
group can all concur that that group is a proper object of criticism and
dislike. It provides an occasion for warm and enjoyable agreement among those
doing the blaming.
I’d suggest this cozy feeling of being part of a
tradition is just a small aspect of a wider pleasure of peer group approval.
Hating Jews or hating Zionists is very much a
tribal thing. It’s a cult. It lets members be part of a mob, and whether in an
online cancelling, a street demonstration, or the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremburg
(video here), mobs amplify the anger and feeling of power of individual members.
Antisemitic mobs bullying Jewish students on
campus is nothing new. For example, see this report (here) from 2009 about an
incident at York University in Toronto. Since October 7, 2023, such scenes have
become common – most especially on campuses where the numbers of Israel-haters
greatly outnumber the Jewish students. See here for example.
Lest we forget, this past November, we saw
anti-Israel protests in Montreal escalate into a riot, as mob psychology freed
the protesters of restraint (video here and here).
Through mob action, antisemites look for another
pleasure: the feeling of power.
In most places in the West, antisemites are a
small cult (or they were prior to October 7, 2023). They seldom felt powerful,
except sometimes on islands of bigoty such as York University where they’ve
gained a critical mass (while still remaining a small fraction of the student
body).
But the atrocities of October 7, allowed
antisemites everywhere to feel a sense of visceral power. Hamas succeeded in
murdering 1,200 people, mostly Jews, and kidnapped another 250. Fifteen months
later, Israel has still not been able to rescue all those Jews, nor the other
kidnapped victims.
From the point of view of the antisemites, the
October 7 onslaught was a huge success. They thought mass killing of Jews had
gone out with the Nazis. Now it’s back. No wonder they greeted October 7 with
jubilation. No wonder they danced in the streets of Mississauga (here).
(And they're still dancing. Here is a video from yesterday, Thursday, Jan 23, 2025, taken outside the Kanafani restaurant (named in honour of Ghassan Kanafani, a terrorist with the PFLP). The pretestors sing, "O Hamas, O my love. Strike, strike Tel Aviv! Strike, burn Tel Aviv!" here.)
The news that seven of those murdered were
Canadian citizens never paused the celebration for a moment.
We do need to remember that not all of Hamas’s
victims were Israelis or Jews. On October 7, fifteen Nepalese agricultural
students were at a “Learn and Earn” work-study program at Kibbutz Alumim.
Hamas murdered ten of them, wounded four, and still holds one of them hostage
in Gaza (here).
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| Manju Devi Danguara (2nd from left) mourns her son who was murdered by Hamas on October 7, 2023 |
Hamas also murdered 34 Thai farm workers and took
the bodies of two of them into Gaza, along with 31 other kidnapped Thai
workers. Hamas still holds several of them hostage. Hamas kidnapped other
foreign nationals as well, including from Tanzania, Nepal, Mexico, the US, and
France (here).
Arabs and Muslims weren’t spared either. Hamas
murdered at least 17 Bedouin and took 7 more hostage (more here). The victims of Hamas’s
onslaught even included five Palestinians from Gaza who were
working at a kibbutz.
Those in Canada and around the world who glorify
Hamas’s terrorism never speak of these non-Israeli and Israeli-Arab victims. It
doesn’t fit their narrative to mention that, though Hamas identifies its
enemies as the Zionist entity, or the Jews, when carrying out a “resistance
operation,” Hamas murders everyone.
The pleasure of superiority
It’s no accident that we see antisemitism taking
hold in places such as universities, medical schools and hospitals (here and here), rather than, say, among
truck drivers. Antisemitism has always tended to be a vice of the elites – or
at least of those who imagine themselves as elite.
They see their antisemitism as part of what makes
them special. Contemporary antisemites don’t preen themselves only for their
imagined moral purity; they also picture themselves as possessing superior
understanding of the world.
This is partly why they latch onto scholarly
sounding antisemitic ideologies, such as racial theory in the case of the
Nazis, and Critical Theory for contemporary “progressive” academics (more here). When widely accepted,
such ideologies make antisemitism broadly acceptable, but the ideologies don’t
drive the antisemitism. Rather, they provide rationalizations and a
veneer of intellectualism. In turn, these reinforce the antisemites’
belief that they belong to a select group.
At best, they see everyone else as blind or stupid
for their failure to see Israeli evil. More harshly, everyone else is
complicit. The upshot is that the antisemites don’t just call for “Death to
Israel.” They call for “Death to Canada” and “Death to America,” too (here).
Islamist terrorists and their supporters in the
west hate Canada and America for their own sake, too. Hating enemies is so much
easier than the hard work of building a functioning state.
“I hate, therefore I’m important” is
the antisemite’s creed
Finally, we must understand the pleasure of self-aggrandizement. Antisemites
see their own importance as a mirror image of those whom they hate. The more
powerful their enemy, the more heroic they imagine themselves.
For example, a while back on Canadian
Zionist Forum, David Roytenberg wrote about an exchange he had with
someone who, not only believed the fatality numbers coming from Hamas were
accurate, but insisted these fatalities were exclusively Palestinian civilians
– no terrorists included at all. You can read it
here.
David pointed out that not even Hamas claimed this. The guy he was arguing with
remained unmoved by mere facts or logic.
Why?
I’d suggest this is the mirror logic of
self-aggrandizement at work: David’s interlocutor was invested in the
largest number of civilian deaths possible, because in his mind,
that maximized the importance of his own anger.
Numerous writers have pointed out the oddity that
antisemites don’t see Jews as inferior, which is how other prejudices look at
their object of disdain. Rather, Jews are seen as fiendishly clever, diabolically powerful, and are made
to stand in for all the evil of the world.
Why?
Again, by the mirror logic of self-aggrandizement,
this maximizes the antisemite’s feeling of self-importance.
So, for the Church, the Jews killed God; they were
Christ killers, the Synagogue of Satan. For Czarist Russia, Jews were the
puppet masters fomenting revolution across Europe. For Nazis, Jews were the
race polluters.
Today’s greatest evils are genocide, racism,
Nazism, and colonialism. Naturally, these are the accusations contemporary
antisemites hurl at Israel. (These accusations certainly aren’t new; each one
traces back to the Soviet Union’s antisemitic propaganda (more here). But in decades past,
only fringe groups embraced these notions; today they’re taught in Western
universities. See here and here for starters.)
In the minds of antisemites, this belief in Jewish
or Zionist evil justifies their hatred and allows them to feel morally pure
while supporting terrorism. Thus, at every anti-Israel demonstration, the
protesters proclaim: “resistance is justified” and “by
any means necessary.”
Hamas, of course, identifies itself as part of the "axis of resistance." And the means it considers necessary include mass murder,
mass rape and mass sexual mutilation, mass torture and mass hostage taking.
Mirror-logic says all of this is not merely justified; Jewish evil makes it
virtuous.
Mirror-logic works in the opposite direction, as
well: the horror inflicted on Israelis or Jews proves how evil
they are. The worse the terrorism, the greater the evil must be that provokes
it.
Thus, to antisemites, the butchery of October 7
“proved” what they knew all along: the Israelis, the Zionists, the Jews – they’re so evil that they deserved this.
This is why antisemitism is now much more out in
the open. The antisemites no longer feel they need to be coy. The lid has been
blown off. To their way of thinking, October 7 proved that all
Zionists deserve death.
Next time you hear someone claim these protesters
are well-meaning, keep this in mind: they’re not. Their antisemitism or
antizionism allows them to channel the worst human impulses imaginable. It
gives them license to express hatred and support for mass murder, all while
feeling a heroic glow of saintly purity.
We’ve seen this sort of fascism before. Don’t let
anyone glorify it now.
***
This piece was originally published on the Canadian Zionist Forum.
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| Freed hostage Emily Damari reunited with her mother and on video call with other family members |
Update: With the recently signed truce with
Hamas, we now have hope of getting all the hostages out. Three hostages have already been re-united with their families. Four more hostages should be released tomorrow (Jan 25). Of
course, if this deal allows Hamas to re-assert its rule, this is a grim outcome for Gaza, as Hamas
is certain to eventually break this truce – just as they’ve broken every other
truce – and begin the war once more.
Read more of my pieces here (and scroll down). ~Brian
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