After the Oct 7 pogrom complex definitions of antisemitism became redundant

Sixteen everyday words say it all

Sylvia Barack Fishman’s call for a committee-made definition of anti-Semitism to be adopted can be used to count on five fingers why it should not be adopted.

Two pedestals keep her ardent plea afloat. 

A)  “One of the few methods of combating unfair evaluations of Israel is to insist on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which demands that equal scales of justice be applied to Jews and to Israel as are applied to other peoples and nations”.

B)   “This widely adopted definition has proven to be a crucial educational tool in helping identify and combat antisemitism. Bearing false witness against Israel and having a double standard for Israel are both antisemitism, and should be opposed like all racial and religious hatreds.”

Count 1

“Equal scales of justice...” Uh oh – there goes Jewish and Israel exceptionalism. There goes their raison d’être, to be a light unto the nations. And who demands loudest for Israel’s battlefield conduct to be judged on a more demanding scale than that of all nations? Israelis demand it, that’s who.

“Heaven help us if our moral standard is reduced to not committing crimes against humanity. From my country, I demand a lot more,” declared Jessica Montell when CEO of B’Tselem.

Count 2

“The definition has proven to be a crucial educational tool ...” To educate who though?  Ivy League campers brainwashed and egged on by Ivy League faculty? Educate Norman Finkelstein who proudly compared Oct 7 to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis? Educate Reuters and AP which give Hamas the honorary title, ‘Fighters” and were participants in the atrocities on Oct 7? Educate the UN Secretary General who demands immediate unconditional ceasefire? Educate Francisco Albanese of the Human Rights Commission who declares that Israel has no right of self-defence? Educate the government of South Africa which hauled Israel to the ICJ for genocide?  Is there one example of Jew-haters taught what antisemitism means, thereupon  liking Jews? Were the IHRA definition put in the school curricula, yes – antisemitism might possibly collapse in a generation or two from now.    

Count 3

“Bearing false witness against Israel and having a double standard for Israel are both antisemitism.” Replace the word “Israel” with “Donald Trump” or “MAGA supporters”; after all they too are on the receiving end of bearing false witness (branded racist) and double standards (prosecuted or cancelled). Biased and malicious treatment is metered out to groups far removed from Jews and Israel. The depraved West, led by the media is filled with bearing false witness and double standards, but which has nothing to do with antisemitism.       

Count 4

“Antisemitism should be opposed like all racial and religious hatreds.”A short time before I came upon Ms Fishman’s article I was reading about Vladimir Putin’s use of antisemitism as a weapon. “Antisemitism is not just prejudice, it is also a highly effective political tool particularly in times of crisis.” 

Professor Ruth Wisse would concur. Antisemitism” she says, “had such advantages over other political movements like fascism, nationalism and communism that they incorporated elements of anti-Jewish politics in their programs.” Wisse goes on to define antisemitism as the “organization of politics against the Jews.” Anti-Zionism for that matter is the organization of politics against Israel.

 “If anti-Semitism is a variety of racism” said Paul Johnson, “it is a most peculiar variety, with many unique characteristics. In my view as a historian, it is so peculiar that it deserves to be placed in a quite different category. I would call it an intellectual disease, a disease of the mind, extremely infectious and massively destructive. It is a disease to which both human individuals and entire human societies are prone.”

More than peculiar, antisemitism is inexplicable. “It wasn’t images of dead Palestinians that sparked the outburst of Jew-hatred,” observed Dave Rich, “it was images of dead Jews.”

Count 5

Panicky politicians, academics and pundits are fighting shameless antisemitism by defining it ad nauseam until the concept resembles a farfetched marsupial created by AI at which ‘peaceniks’ crying genocide and death to Jews complain that the definition equates criticising Israel with antisemitism.  

More usually means less. More elaboration blunts a weapon, so that when a popular blogger souped up an already cumbersome definition devised by a famed refusenik, adding an algorithm to make it “a pretty good test” of antisemitism, he did not add gunpowder to the weapon but sawdust. And if it was a “pretty good test,” to what use could it be put? Did the so called 3Ds’ definition ever clinch a debate? Did it shut the muckraking mouth of one Jew-baiter? What it can do is bleep code red at targets which are neither Israel nor Jewish. All manner of enemies of the Left get Delegitimized, Demonized and Double standard treatment, to an equal or greater extent than Zionists. If 3Ds can’t do the job perhaps the definition in great demand and being made into law will. IHRA provides examples which, “depending on the context could be antisemitic.” Context. Could be. Recall the Ivy League Presidents grilled by a House Committee? Those were the escape words they trotted out.

So What Makes a Protest Antisemitic? Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (yet another pro-Hamas lobby with Peace in its name) regards the IHRA definition that US lawmakers are hoping will crack down on campus rabble rousers as, a “conflation of criticism of Israel/Zionism with antisemitism,” to censor speech that doesn’t align with unconditional support for Israel.” 

There is something in the IHRA definition for everyone not to like. Antisemitism, according to one example it gives consists of, “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism, e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus and blood libels) to characterize Israel or Israelis.” It was now the turn of Tucker Carlson to be grossly offended. If that is what antisemitism is, Carlson said, the New Testament could be banned.

Observe all the red herrings bred by elaborate definitions of the oldest hatred. Not even the man who fathered IHRA is at peace with the monster he gave life to. Kenneth Stern, Director of the Bard Centre for the Study of Hate is that true liberal who wants the most deplorable speech to be protected not punished. Making his definition into law, he fears, will be used to censor speech So it will. A cornerstone of liberty is the freedom to say or write the first thing that comes to mind. Will prosecuting antisemitic speech be worth the existential loss of liberty? And will it make Jews more popular or more hated?

“Antisemitism is often seen as a “canary in the coal mine,” warning of broader societal issues and human rights dangers. Times of emergency however lead to the worst type of legislation. A key example is the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023, a bill that the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed and is now pending before the Senate. People think they can use the government to stop hateful speech. But censorship does not stop bigotry. It often makes it worse.”

The unasked question is how was antisemitism defined and identified before 1879 when it became a word? Did we really have to wait two millennia for a German agitator named Wilhelm Marr to come up with what is now a buzz term scattered like confetti, with hardly more utility. It would seem that bygone times never needed a jargon term nor an explicit definition. The Hebrews in Genesis were ostracised for being strangers and sojourners. After the 2^nd Temple was destroyed dispersed Jews took the brunt of what Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks called, “the deadliest of human phenomena. More than hate destroys the hated, it destroys the hater,” he said. We shall soon find that ‘deadly’ and ‘destroy are the operative words.

Where does all this leave careful academic definitions of what essentially is a deadly hatred which in broad daylight advertises what it wants to do? Defining a baby is about as useful as defining antisemitism. It is what it is, and the Passover Haggadah, compiled 2,000 years ago, tells what it is in sixteen everyday words. “In every generation there are those who rise up against us and seek to destroy us.”

Accurate prophecy or age old incontrovertible meaning, this unequivocal statement tells us to stop with 3Ds and IHRAs and curbing academic freedom and defining what people in a free society may or may not say. President Biden, mental frailty and all, recognised the beast without resorting to a definition when he spoke of a “ferocious surge of antisemitism in America and around the world.” It is clearer than daylight that the West’s pro-Hamas ferocious hordes have risen up against Israel and the Jews, calling for their destruction.

It took a non-Jewish, in fact a French playwright who knew the Passover Haggadah as little  as he knew kneidlach to grasp the credo it set forth for all time. In a thin but seminal book, ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ Jean-Paul Sartre grasped the bedrock of the world’s most destructive hatred: 

“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.”

What Sartre is saying is that in terms of human instinct there is zero difference between your Columbia professor and campus mob on one hand and Hamas butchers murdering their way through Southern Israel on the other hand. The first are closet Jew killers, the second practice the Jew-killer instinct. Every antisemite, mask on or off, drools over the prospect of dead Jews.

Don’t therefore let CNN anchors slip the hangman’s noose by mimicking “freedom of speech.” Kenneth Stern should not have let himself be sidetracked by two anchor women. All he had to do was fire off two questions. Hamas murders Jews: Yes or No? To glorify Hamas is therefore to support the murder of Jews: Yes or No? When someone wants Jews to be killed  there’s no question: that someone must be antisemitic. When someone demands immediate and unconditional cease fire, there’s no question: that someone anticipates that Hamas will again butcher Jews. When  law professor maintains that Israelis have no right to self-defence, there’s no question: that lawyer wants them to be killed with impunity.

Carry a pocketbook inscribed with the oldest definition of antisemitism; you’ll clinch the debate every time.

Q E D Quod erat demonstrandum