Why western mobs are now sticking it to the Jews

By Melanie Phillips

Anyone who imagined that with the Gaza cease-fire the antisemitism that erupted around the west would correspondingly die down has been sorely mistaken.

It has not only continued to become ever more brazen and intimidatory but, astonishing this may seem, it has now morphed into something even more chilling. The toxic core of it, the Israel libel that fuels the onslaught, has become an axiomatic lie and a supposed marker of public conscience.

What some of us warned about the Labour party’s antisemitism under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has now proved all too true.  This malignity was not confined to the hard-left. It reflected a terrible development that had poisoned the entire “progressive” world and was rippling out beyond even that.

What’s been happening over the past few days has been horrifying: not just the continued and ever more brazen Jew-baiting, but the relative indifference which greets it and which ensures it continues to accelerate, even though physical attackers may be arrested and prosecuted.

In city after city, anti-Jewish onslaughts have been occurring camouflaged as pro-Palestinian demonstrations. While some useful idiots in attendance may have thought they were signalling their virtuous support for the oppressed, the language used and the targets of physical assaults committed under cover of these placards reveal the true agenda.

The Times of Israel reported of the demonstration that took place in London on Sunday, with tens of thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators:

Video shared on social media showed a car driving past the London demonstration as the occupants waved Palestinian flags and dragged an Israeli flag along the road behind the vehicle, drawing cheers from the crowds. Photos also showed demonstrators setting an Israeli flag on fire.

According to the Campaign against Antisemitism watchdog, placards brandished at the London rally included numerous comparisons of Israel to the Nazis. “Israel, the new Nazi state,” read one, while another said: “Nazis are still around, they call themselves Zionists now.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “surpasses Hitler in barbarism,” read another poster, while others accused Israel of carrying out a “Holocaust” against the Palestinians.

One protester was seen holding a banner with an image of Jesus bearing the cross and a slogan reading “Don’t let them do the same thing again today.”

The CAA tweeted in addition: “speakers declare that Israel creates antisemitism” and “there will be no ceasefire in our campaign”.

In America, these demonstrations gave rise to violence.  In New York last Thursday, as reported here, more than 20 people were arrested after demonstrators waving Palestinian flags and clad in keffiyeh scarves attacked a pro-Israel counter-protest in Times Square.

Video footage showed confrontations in the Diamond District, where many stores are owned by Jews, between people in cars carrying Palestinian flags and passers-by on the street. A woman was burned when demonstrators threw what police described as “commercial  grade fireworks”.

The worst attack was when  pro-Palestinian thugs beat, punched, kicked and pepper-sprayed a kippah-wearing Jewish man, Joseph Borgen. One of these attackers, 23-year-old Wasseem Awawdeh, allegedly called Borgen a “dirty Jew” and said,

F*** Israel, Hamas is going to kill all of you.

He reportedly told one of his jailers:

If I could do it again, I would do it again. I have no problem doing it again.

The issue was purportedly “Palestine” — but the real issue was to stick it to the Jews. As Walter Russell Mead observed in the Wall Street Journal, this has become something not seen before in America. He wrote:

Last week brought something different: mobs visited widespread violence on random Jews, or in some cases “Jewish-looking” non-Jews. The targets have no responsibility for Israeli policy. Given the policy preferences of US Jews documented in polling, many were likely anti-Trump, anti-Netanyahu, critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and pro-Black Lives Matter. None of this meant anything to the mob. All the attackers seemed to care about was that their victims were, or looked, Jewish. That was enough.

Some have perceived that the Palestinian war against Israel is now being exported to the west as part of a deliberate strategy. But as I wrote here, the crucial point is that the Palestinian war against Israel is something broader. What’s been exported to America and the rest of the west is the Palestinian war against the Jews.

As the Jerusalem Post reports:

Attacks on Jews from London to California now appear to revolve around a series of systematic assaults by groups of pro-Palestinian men organised in militia-like groups. They have included convoys of cars calling on people to rape Jewish women and targeted attacks on Jews eating dinner or working in areas known to have high numbers of Jews. This is not spontaneous or random. Jews have been targeted for two weeks under the guise of the war in Gaza.

While decent people are horrified by the physical attacks and street protests and disturbances, they tend to be bewildered by these violent passions that appear to have erupted from nowhere and to be as inexplicable as they are alarming. Why should Israel’s behaviour be attracting so much opprobrium? they ask. Why is this taking the form of anti-Jewish hatred? Why do so many people suddenly turn out to hate Jews so much?

Why indeed. This final question ultimately remains a mystery that merits further discussion. However, much of the reason for the bewilderment over the anti-Israel obsession lies in the almost completely unacknowledged fact that there has been a systematic messing with people’s minds over Israel and the Palestinians in a strategy pursued over several decades known as “psy-ops”, or psychological warfare — or as Professor Richard Landes has called it, “cognitive warfare”.

What this means in practice is that, rather like a cult is brainwashed so that it is simply incapable of acknowledging the reality beyond the lies it has absorbed into its collective bloodstream, so the west believes that certain assumptions about Israel and the Palestinians are unarguably true because “everybody knows” them to be true — such as that Israel is “Goliath” to the Palestinians’ “David”.

So much so that when “David” somehow gets the money and resources to construct some 300 miles of underground military tunnels (!) and fires more than 4000 rockets in 11 days (!!) all in order to procure the mass murder of Israelis, causing them to run for their lives several times a day and live in bomb shelters while “David” commits double war crimes against both Israeli civilians and the Palestinians’ own “human shield” population, “everyone knows” that there has to be a good reason why this still means that the Palestinians are powerless and righteous victims while the Israelis are all-powerful oppressors.

A principal reason why so many people are unaware that there is even another perspective on all this is that year in, year out they get nothing but Palestinian propaganda laundered through the mass media, particularly the broadcasters who create the cultural mood music.

In recent days, there’s been a fuss about a digital journalist Tala Halawa, who spent three years as  a specialist BBC reporter on Palestinian issues. In July 2014, it turns out, she tweeted:

#Israel is more #Nazi than #Hitler! Oh, #HitlerWasRight#IDF go to hell. #PrayForGaza.

The same year, she tweeted 

ur media is controlled by ur zionist government”, “#zionists can’t get enough of our blood

and tweeted a graphic depicting the image of a child being burned alive by the flames of a Jewish hanukkiah,  with the message:

#DontBurnOurBoys you Zionists…your claimed democratic state will be vanished one day#jerusalem is#palestinian.

In 2015 she said on a video here:

We lived the Second Intifada Palestine and the female anchors and journalists, reporters, were in the field and … everyone was very happy and proud of these women in the field reporting and highlighting the Palestinian cause and since then I knew that yeah this is my passion, I want to be one of those.

The Second Intifada was not in “Palestine”. It was a terrorist onslaught in Israel from 2000-2005 in which about 1100 Israelis were murdered by Palestinian Arabs, mainly blown up in buses and cafes and in particular wherever young people gathered. This campaign of mass murder of Jewish civilians is what inspired this BBC journalist.

The BBC has responded:

These tweets predate the individual’s employment with the BBC but we are nevertheless taking this very seriously and are investigating.

What an admission — the BBC hired this individual as a journalist after she had revealed herself on multiple occasions as an antisemitic, Hitler supporter who drew her inspiration from the mass murder of Jews. But don’t worry — the BBC is taking this very seriously and investigating.

Now CAMERA UK points out that on the BBC website three days ago, Halawa whitewashed the chant “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” which is a call to arms for the destruction of Israel.

Lo and behold — it turns out elsewhere that “call to arms” has become a forbidden phrase when used about the Palestinians. At a school in Leeds, the police were called to protect its head teacher, Mike Roper, after he referred to the Palestinian flag as “a call to arms” during an assembly. The Times reports:

The video recording of his address to pupils went viral on social media over the weekend, resulting in accusations of “blatant Islamophobia”. The school said that the assembly aimed to address tensions within its multiracial student community caused by the conflict between Israel and Gaza.

In the video clip, Roper said: “By using a symbol such as the Palestinian flag that message is lost because for some people they see that flag and they feel threatened, they feel unsafe and they worry because for other people that flag is seen as a call to arms and seen as a message of support for antisemitism, for being anti-Jewish and it was never meant to be like that in the first place.”

A joint statement from Roper and Leeds education authority said: “In a diverse school like Allerton Grange, with such a rich mix of communities, it is not surprising that divisions on the international front will be felt. It was in an attempt to address those tensions that I gave an assembly to all students on Wednesday morning.

I am deeply sorry that a particular example I used in that assembly, referring to the Palestinian flag, has caused such upset within the community. That was never my intention. The full message shared with students last week praised our students’ passion for their views and beliefs. It set out how we want to work through the issues highlighted with our students in an informed and respectful way.”

Ross Greer, a Scottish Green Party MSP, tweeted last week: “Imagine being a Palestinian kid at this guy’s school, being told your national flag is inherently hateful. Absolutely outrageous and racist behaviour from someone in a position of power.”

Roper has been subjected to threatening behaviour over the claim that he was “racist” towards the Palestinians. Leave aside the fatuous claim that the Palestinians are a race.  He didn’t even criticise the Palestinians, or their cause, or their flag. He merely observed that some people saw that flag and cause as a message of support for antisemitism and a call to arms against Jews, which he said it was never intended to be.

It is therefore shocking that he has been forced to grovel over something he didn’t even say.  But what’s so ironic, and so telling, is that what he was falsely accused of saying is actually more true than what he actually did say.

For the Palestinian cause is indeed profoundly anti-Jew. Palestinian identity was created solely to destroy the Jews’ rightful claim to the land of Israel by inventing the fiction of the Palestinians’ claim to the land.

Before Israel was re-born in 1948, there was no Palestinian Arab identity. The Arabs who lived in pre-Israel Palestine identified instead as Arabs belonging to a pan-Arab nation, or as southern Syrians. Palestinian identity was a wholly artificial construct created as an act of war by those determined to deny the land of Israel to the Jews — the only extant indigenous people of that land, to whom the international community in the 1920s had promised it as their restored national home on the basis that the Jews alone were entitled to it.

To thwart that restoration, the Palestinian cause not only aims to destroy the State of Israel through war. It also tries to hijack and appropriate Jewish history for itself. Hence the Palestinians try to write the  Jews out of their own national story, denying their history in the ancient kingdom of Israel centuries before Islam; hence their persistent theft and destruction of archeological artefacts excavated in Jerusalem producing incontrovertible evidence of the ancient kingdom of Israel; hence their false and beyond ludicrous claims that the Palestinians are the descendants of the Canaanites or the Jebusites or the Philistines (which would mean they aren’t Arabs at all, since the Philistines were in essence Greeks) and even that Jesus was a Palestinian,  even though he was a Jew from Judea.

Over the years, the Arabs themselves have acknowledged this. In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine:

There is no such country as Palestine! “Palestine” is a term the Zionists invented!

In a 1977 interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw,  PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein said:

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

It is not the case, as head teacher Roper suggested, that some antisemites have hijacked the Palestinian cause for their own ends. Palestinianism is in itself innately and inescapably anti-Jew. Writing the Jews out of their own history and denying them the right to self-determination in their own historic land — a presence within that land that is intrinsic to Judaism — is profoundly anti-Judaism and anti-Jew. The Palestinians’ insignia and maps which excise the whole of Israel and replace it by “Palestine” are  profoundly anti-Judaism and anti-Jew. Their educational materials which teach their children to hate Jews and steal Israel from them, their hysterical incitement against Jews as a conspiracy against the world and their Nazi-style antisemitic blood libels which pour out of their preachers and media are profoundly anti-Judaism and anti-Jew.

Which is why anyone who supports Palestinianism is supporting a cause that is profoundly anti-Judaism and anti-Jew.

Those of us who point out such things are routinely called “Islamophobes” or “racists” and dismissed. Instead the falsehoods, distortions and libels of  Palestinianism are accepted as axiomatically true. So anyone who makes any criticism of the Palestinians  — or who even merely vouchsafe, like the hapless Roper, that some people abuse that cause for other ends altogether — are damned as racist, Islamophobic, Nazi and so on.

This closely parallels the Black Lives Matter movement. Its odious mantra of “white privilege,” that white society is innately racist and colonialist, is nothing other than racial bigotry against white people. But to point this out, or indeed to question any part of that racially bigoted narrative, is to find yourself labelled as a racist instead.

It’s no surprise that Black Lives Matter activists and other anti-white bigots are now busily equating BLM with Palestinianism. This is intersectionality in action — the presentation of racial and even murderous bigotry and falsehoods as axiomatically and undeniably true, and the damning of those who call out this vileness for what it is or even dare question any part of it as racists and colonialists.

Palestinianism and Black Lives Matter have not been hijacked by anti-Jewish and anti-white bigots. They are intrinsically anti-Jew and anti-white movements. Until and unless this is acknowledged, the horrendous madness through which we are now living will continue to worsen.