Combating antisemitism could take a leaf out of marketing

Define the broad market. Break the market into segments with shared characteristics. Target the segments, each with a pinpoint strategy

Look for the killer instinct to find antisemitism

Train people to not hate Jews? Tim Davie the BBC Director, declined the offer. Time over time he rebuffed Lord Mann, adviser on antisemitism to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

He clearly thought the idea was baloney. (So do I.) The Lord knows, it might be possible to train the man to control his dogmatic antagonism when Jews are making news. Why not, if a mutt can be taught not to bite kids?

Freud wouldn’t even give it a try. “Anti-Semitism is surely due to ancient and unconscious fears and fantasies,” he states in Moses and Monotheism. What did the antimetism advisor expect from a BBC director who drives a corporate culture saturated with animus: capitulation and compliance? We don’t know what he expected. We do know that Lord Mann warned Davie of, “growing concerns about anti-Jewish bias within the BBC”. For his trouble he got the cold shoulder treatment.

The truth is that bigotry is too ingrained for placing trust in the restorative powers of a training module. Culture is not trainable where, “The vast majority of the journalistic pool from which the BBC, Sky, ITV, and other news media draw their teams are left-liberal in outlook. The default attitude is that Israel is a rogue state which kills Palestinians with impunity.”

So now we know. Frankly, my previous article foretold that dismissive pique would greet the best attempts to identify antisemites. At least we now have it from the mouth of one – indeed a mass influencer.

I have said it before and will say it again: absent the simple meaning of antisemitism it’s a fool’s errand to set about combating it. Like the University of Columbia’s three disgraced Presidents who met calls for action on pro-Hamas antics on campus as “Capitol Hill nonsense”, the BBC spurned calls for action on what Lord Mann tactfully called, “anti-Jewish bias”. As if a public broadcaster has a duty to bother about the demarcation between bias and hate.

This was all true to form. Antisemites are only too happy to let ‘militants’ go on killing Israelis to their heart’s content. They live to see the Jewish state wiped off the face of the earth. They want Tehran to ultimately triumph. Above all “biased” broadcasters and channels take typical delight in dead Jews.

For want of that down to earth but disarming definition, the International Conference on Combating Antisemitism was a farce. For one thing it got bogged down in politics. For another, even had the main people not dropped out, there simply was no way that delegates, unclear as to exactly what they were meant to combat, could have germinated a winning plan of action. Launch a project without defining the market for it?

Careful definitions of antisemitism are redundant when it openly announces that it wants Jews to die as did the UN General assembly. The killer instinct defines the ‘market’ for combating antisemitism.

To segment this broad market, look at shared characteristics in terms of vulnerabilities or threats. International courts rely on credibility. Human Rights NGOs can’t exist without grants. UN agencies like UNWRA or the UNHRC or WHO depend on member contributions. International lawyers live or perish by the authenticity of their pronouncements on Israel, especially occupation. Anti-Israel governments like South Africa fear sanctions. Campus trouble stirrers are susceptible to expulsion or deportation. And so forth.

Targeting each segment with a pinpoint strategy follows naturally. Destroy the credulity of the ICJ. Lobby funders to stop grants to NGOs. Lobby the Trump Presidency to impose sanctions on office bearers. And so on.

Compare such precision to the shotgun method of throwing money at ‘influencers’ or conferences or ‘TikTokers’ with massive followings.

Steve Apfel is a combat veteran in the war against antisemitism. Apart from being a prolific author, since 2002 he has singlehandedly exposed and put paid to antisemites in the media, academia, government and the church