By Jonathan Michael Feldman, January 6, 2024; Updated June 13, 2024; November 27, 2024

The Israeli government’s transgressions are real, problematic, and dangerous. Yet, the counter reaction is often defined by an idiotic version of post-colonial framing that displaces the cycle of violence and hence is about moral posturing and often lying propaganda rather than about solutions. So, the accountability force is deflated and the holier than thou posturing is inflated. And if you point this out, you can get demonized by the rules of engagement of identity politicians.

Introduction: Multiple Reference Points and “the Big Picture“

This essay is not a defense of Israel’s surplus militarism campaign in Gaza. It is rather about the deconstruction and exposure of memes that range from the idiotic to anti-Semitic and rest on various discursive foundations, e.g. “sins of omission,” begging the question, moral platitudes, conflating the truth with lies or other displaced truths, etc. Israel should stop its Gaza campaign, which I have already argued is counter-productive. This campaign, orchestrated by a political leader who increasingly lacks any credibility in his own country, similarly lacks any moral foundation in its current incarnation and poorly thought out design. This design is an attempt to provide security, but rather promotes insecurity and does nothing to address deeper problems of occupation and surplus violence. I have periodically updated this essay to capture the onslaught of idiotic memes which claim to advance the Palestinian cause, but actually undermine it.

On December 6, 2023, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) stated that the total number of Palestinian deaths in the Gaza Strip since 7 October was “21,731, including 8,697 children and 4,410 women as well as those missing and trapped under the rubble who are now presumed dead,” with “the number of injured people…increased to 4,016.” A CNN post on the same day explained, “Israel military says 2 civilians killed for every Hamas militant is a ‘tremendously positive’ ratio given combat challenges.” The Israeli state claims that it has killed about 8,000 Hamas fighters in a statement broadcast by Sky News Australia. The United Nations recently stated that “Israel’s war in Gaza has created a humanitarian catastrophe, with half of the population of about 2.2 million at risk of starvation and 90 percent saying that they regularly go without food for a whole day,” according to an article published on January 1, 2024 in The New York Times.

We have several events going on at the moment: mass killing in Gaza; a global outbreak of Anti-Semitism; and outbreaks of Islamophobia; and opportunistic and superficial commentary on some of these developments by various parts of the right and left, not to mention Hamas’s mass slaughter in Israel on October 7, 2023. It is not just Fox news which engages in superficial framing, bias and sins of omission. Surveying the scene, I have read or listened to several opportunistic if not mind-numbing commentaries in other media channels, particularly various Internet-based or linked sources, Facebook and YouTube. I have learned more about commentators who I thought were simply mildly annoying or sometimes misguided and discovered the hidden depths of their superficiality and self-serving selection system as to what they thought was important at the expense of other considerations.

This essay describes what I refer to as “push button politics,” a term which captures the kind of automated thinking found in various circles related to these developments. The problem, in contrast to the belief of some commentators, is not simply that Israel is “fixated” on October 7th developments at the expense of all else. Rather, the problem is that many groups (not just the Israeli or Israeli right) are fixated on some developments and not others. For example, some believe October 7th trumps all else. While others think October 7th has to be relativized. Moreover, the dramatic reactions to October 7th and the Israel assault can’t accurately be called “fixations,” an idea which itself reveals deep superficiality, smug arrogance and bias. Persons who appear reasonable may have a tribalistic sub-level, for better or worse, such that their views are simply solipsistic mirrors of some affiliation and matching loyalty to a specific news stream. I have written several essays which I have published or soon will, including this initial essay found in the Portside website.

Yaakov Kirschen has written a valuable essay entitled, “Memetics and the Viral Spread of Antisemitism through ‘Coded Images’ in Political Cartoons,” published in  The Yale Papers: Antisemitism in Comparative Perspective, 2010: 435-456. He writes: “In the twentieth century graphic images were widely used to efficiently and effectively infect the masses with a viral hatred of Jews.” But today “cartoons from openly antisemitic regimes such as Iran and Syria regularly make use of a specific set of antisemitic image codes” which “define Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish people as a powerful force corrupting and secretly controlling human society.” He explains that computer viruses are “viral” and can replicate and reproduce themselves “from one computer to millions of other computers.” Viruses can take the form of memes that similarly spread. He discusses “moral inversion” in which Jews are described as being Nazi-like. In this essay, we will see moral deflation used to describe Israeli actions as Nazi-like. I will discuss the limits of this comparison and even the demonization of Jews consistent with Kirschen’s descriptions.

One motivation for this essay is that someone recently posted in social media that Israel’s campaign in Gaza is one of the worst cases of genocide in history, something which leverages a malfeasance to generate a false statement (if looking at absolute numbers of genocide victims, with many such cases involving millions of deaths). I then encountered other memes of a similar nature, one-sided statements that attempted to leverage “the Big picture,” to spew utter nonsense and other statements which a reasonable person should find highly problematic. Critiques of such statements are viewed by some as “giving comfort to the enemy” or somewhat like those who opposed Communists during the McCarthyite era (there was sometimes a fine line between directly engaging in McCarthyism and opposing the repressive tolerance of political tendencies that supported Stalinism). Some may argue that I am ignoring Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians. Rather, these memes precisely cloud the issues by weakening arguments against this slaughter by means of sins of omission, false premises, false linkages, and other discursive strategies that are counter-productive at best and engage in various forms of gross generalization and objectification at worse. Leaving these memes unquestioned amounts to repressive tolerance that complicates our ability to address “the Big Picture.”

Push Button Politics and the Automated Society

Where do these memes come from? How do they arise? One key source is that time-compressed and less reflective automated society, where one can literally express one’s self with the push of a button. The expression “to push one’s buttons” originally meant “to do or say something just to make someone angry or upset,” according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

With the advent of the media and a certain kind of internal (as opposed to external) adversary culture, we can now say that the expression means something else, i.e. “to ratify the paradigmatic or silo button which is the framing and identarian system of both the sender and receiver.” This means now that pushing one’s buttons means saying “something just to make someone confirmed and feel better about how they might be thinking” at a given point in time. Push button politics relates to how human beings, or humanoids if you prefer, are increasingly programmed and programmable like pieces of malleable software. The training fields for such programming are our interactions with social media and our harvesting the same intellectual fields over and over, much like a farmer with dedicated croplands or a train that sticks to its track.

I reached my conclusions about push button politics by comparing my archaeological find earlier this month on Lafayette Street in New York City earlier this month (see above photo) and comparing its signifying intentions with the character of discourse easily found in Facebook silos. Marquis de Lafayette himself opposed slavery, in contrast to George Washington, which was hardly a majoritarian or automatic view. Thus, the signifier of the street name is in some ways more subversive than the anarcho-street-meme, which deconstructs all policing

Leveraging “the Big Picture” for Bullshit Opinions

We have several issues to grapple with. First, mass killing in Gaza that can’t be justified on security grounds given the issues of disproportionality, blow back (how military deaths lead to terror recruitment) and because of the absolute impact of the alleged anti-terror campaign. The campaign may or may not be a response to terrorism. Even if it may generate even more terrorists, the Hamas attack provided some cover or legitimacy for subsequent actions, a cover which quickly disintegrated. Some of those pointing to Israeli malfeasance prior to October 7th as a rationale for Hamas’s actions or to suggest that Israel will always be evil no matter what, try to leverage that idea to relieve Hamas of any responsibility for the subsequent violence. That’s basically a lie, despite Israel’s malfeasance.

Second, we have the problem of slander licenses and Stalinist-like positioning. This refers to how the campaign against militarist repression is appropriated by certain individuals according to the following formula which is like the software of push button politics, i.e. Formula I: State A does something horrible (B) to group C, therefore D is true according to observer E, i.e. A→ B→C, ∴ D, where D is a non-sequitur, lie and distortion. D is what I call the “slander license” used by persons believing that they are in solidarity with the C victims and where B is leveraged to justify whatever E thinks. The problems which we see in E‘s position are supposed to be displaced and deflected by B, the horrible act. The slander license which E uses to inflate itself in social circles, often social media, serves to de-legitimate the interests of C and objectively aids A by showcasing the idiocy of observer E which is unfairly used to represent C (the victims). In this case, C stands for the Palestinian civilian victims of A, the Israeli military. Simplified: X criticizes Y, therefore anything Z says, whether bullshit, idiotic, self-defeating for a larger transformative purpose, etc., must be true (here Z is an opponent of Israel or someone who thinks that they are advancing the Palestinian cause). In Stalinism, the purveyor of bullshit can not be criticized because the critic will be slandered as an apologist for some evil which the Stalinists believe that they have a unique claim on exposing and rallying support against, a personal monopoly certified by themselves.

Third, we have the problem of attacks on anyone who deconstructs the game being played. Sometimes various formulas are deployed simply to reduce the possibility that any nuance that could question activists or their line of argument is deflated. When one challenges push button politics, one encounters two additional formulas, we have the problem of anti-Zionist-splaining, Formula II: F criticizes E, therefore F supports Israel and must get (G) a lecture about the evils of Zionism. This formula is similar to anti-Stalinists (F1) who criticize Stalinists (E1) who themselves claim to criticize (G) capitalism, therefore (F1) must get (D1) a lecture about the evils of capitalism. Another fall back is Formula III: If you call out bullshit, you get a little lecture that “just because you criticize Israel does not mean you are anti-Semitic” or those criticize bullshit are told that they are “apologists for Zionist oppression.” The point is that some on the left, opposed to Israel (or engaged in what they think is solidarity) ride the wave of Israeli malfeasance to promote any bullshit that they want and therefore think themselves to be above reproach. I have had a number of people lie to me about what I think, make up a bullshit narrative about how I think, and do all that because they basically think that they have the word of God and morality and communicate directly with the deity of moral superiority.

When all else fails, there is Formula IV: There is no such thing as anti-Semitism against Jews by Arabs or maybe anyone else because Arabs themselves are Semites. Yes, Arabs are Semites, but the word “anti-Semite” means Jew-hate or oppression of Jews, as is well known, except for a group of activists and others who gaslight Jews and are basically telling them they can’t be victims because of the word “Semite.” Yet, the word anti-Semite means something different from Semite and does not mean “against Semites.” There are other words to capture hatred of Arabs and Muslims, including Islamophobia, racism, and perhaps Orientalism (although that relates more to objectification). And there is extensive Islamophobia, even in so-called enlightened nations like Sweden. A Formula V, that is deployed includes pure ridicule and rudeness directed at anyone questioning the deceitful memes, even if they are based on false assumptions associated with the previous formulae. The license to be rude is partially linked to moral posturing and narcissism.

We have here a nice merger of a perverse variety of Protestantism and the reincarnation of Stalinism, cemented by I-It (as Martin Buber might put it) relations or objectification, i.e. the individual in the left is above reproach because they are aligned with a holy cause. What’s rather interesting is how push button politics and the slander license resemble a kind of pseudo-religion, but it is more than that. We are seeing the merger and inter-penetration of advanced intellectual automation, human robots, pre-Enlightenment religious affiliation and tribalistic loyalty combine in a big ugly soup that constitutes the social field that many of us encounter in the on-line world. Please note, however, my use of the term “human robots.” In contrast to robot-humanoids (where robots are increasingly hard to distinguish from people), human robots refer to people who are increasingly hard to distinguish from robots. Just like the robot-humanoids have the fingerprint or imprint of human programmers behind them, the human robots have the fingerprint or imprint of algorithms, Internet social media tribes, and an asked for and ratified response. We marvel at the human like features of the robot arm, but now we must marvel at the robot-like features of some persons deploying their allegedly human brain.

We have a far-right and various right-wing media that engage in programmed thinking, where pundits and talking heads do the thinking and framing for their audience, with various false claims of anti-Semitism to silence dissent. Then, we also have a part of the left, albeit probably small, which do engage in anti-Semitism, gaslight their audiences by referring to other victims, and also silence dissent by lying and insulting persons who disagree with their frameworks and “truths.” When these two versions of stupidity accelerate via post-truth, unverified conspiracy theories, conformation bias and hardening of silos, we have a pretty good recipe for the erosion of democratic deliberation or dialogue in support of same.

The defenders of these memes always “double down” by trying to leverage their compression and displacement of reality by: (a) engaging in “surplus demonization” of Israel, (b) attacking the attacker of memes as apologists for Israeli atrocities, and (c) acting as if Israelis can never be victims, “have no history” or their history is simply that of colonization, oppression and militarism. Item (a) refers to the ideas that transgressions by persons like Muammar Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu are so grievous that diplomacy, equitable development, or peace paths are irrelevant. While there are “demonic” aspects to such persons, the surplus demonization means a demonization that kills off alternatives to the cycle of violence and thus militarism. While there is truth to Israel as colonial expropriator, there is also truth to Israel as creator of employment and some growth in Gaza and the West Bank. I make this point not to whitewash Israel, but rather to argue that in Gaza today it is militarism (and the cycle of violence) that also drives “colonialism” rather than colonialism simply driving militarism. Certain post-colonial types will never concede this point. They reject the idea of cycle of violence as being blind to Israeli crimes. The argument is burnished by comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany which are often repeated by people who live in countries with companies that aided Nazi Germany or even sanctioned Hitler.

The March of Stupid Memes: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good or Pseudo-Good Intentions

Jews as Would-be Nazis

There are various memes that have emerged which illustrate the slander license and problematic discourse that is the focus of this essay. One of the worst of the relevant memes I discovered in Facebook on January 1, 2024 (which I commented on) (Plate 1A). The post has a picture of a banner that states, “Stop doing what Hitler did to you!” My immediate question was “who is you”? We know that Hitler’s Nazi regime killed millions of persons, including about six millions Jews. So, what Hitler did was done to these millions, not all of whom were Jews and none of whom were Israelis as the state of Israel did not then exist, even if Zionists and Jews in Palestine existed. What is being done now to Gazans is being done by an Israeli state which many claim is tied to a Palestine where not many Jews lived, while others dispute that. So, when convenient Israel stands for Jews and when not convenient Israel does not stand for Jews. In any case, the post is a slur against Holocaust victims and by implication Jews, thus anti-Semitic (a term which some even try to gaslight into non-existence as referring not to Jews per se as I have stated). The stupid meme in Plate 1A was defended by various critiques of Israel and other non-sequiturs used to support utter anti-Semitic idiocy.

Plate 1A: A Social Media Post in Facebook

Source: Deleted or blocked Facebook post, documented by author January 1, 2024.

The original Facebook post could be seen as a random case of idiocy but it is far from benign or isolated. It is rather part of an indirect campaign to discredit Palestinian victims by rendering their cause reducible to stupid and myopic slogans. The origins of the slogan or its circulation are apparently a group in Australia, but I can’t be certain in this age of posting, reposting, editing and AI. The “stop doing” meme was picked up by The Daily Mail in another Facebook post and article and a German report on anti-Semitism provided evidence of further use of the slogan. The slogan was deployed in demonstrations in both Frankfurt and Berlin. It is also the fuel for Tory politicians in the UK who have linked Palestinian protests to anti-Semitism. Thus, my point about stupidity by those who may be on the left empowering the right can be easily documented.

A related post of the same genre is Plate 1B. Here we see that Jews, the victims of Nazis (with others) are conflated as being ironically engaged in persecuting Palestinians. This formulation and interpretation requires explaining. A person I know on Facebook defended the meme as follows: “The meme shows an ISRAELI soldier acting in a similar way as a NAZI soldier did against Jews. There’s nothing antisemitic here, far from it.” Why is this interpretation wrong? First, the victims of Nazis were Jews and the subset of Holocaust survivors, not Israelis or Israeli soldiers. That’s who the “you” represents. Second, the Israeli soldier was not necessarily related to a Holocaust survivor. Third, a military raid against a Palestinian civilian as terrible as that can be cannot be equated to Nazi soldier engagement with Jewish civilians. Fourth, Israeli soldiers (or the state of Israel as the symbolism indicates) can’t be equated with Nazism because they are not equivalents on scale or scope. Furthermore, the victim of the Nazi is not equivalent to the Israeli soldier as that group is different and need not overlap. As a result, this (a) equation of Israel and Nazis; (b) this deflation of the Holocaust and–most importantly–(c) slander of the Jewish victim of the Nazi as a would be Nazi equivalent are what render this meme as anti-Semitic.

Plate 1B: The Conflation of Israeli Militarism with the Jewish Holocaust Victim

Source: Accessed from Facebook, May 17, 2024.

The superficial interpretation by the defender of the meme is that it is the Israeli soldier who should recognize that he is Nazi like. That’s a dubious comparison despite some similarities that may or may not even be there. The more profound interpretation is to look at the Jewish person in the mirror and to project forward if that person is equivalent to the Israeli with the gun. The projection or equivalence is what this meme as a kind of pastiche connotes, whether or not those viewing the meme pick up on it. The meme has to be understood in a larger context of the logic of symbols of such memes in how the ensemble of these memes often involve some element of objectification of Jews as part of their imagery, a slander rent leveraged in the course of deconstructing Israeli militarism or oppression. The bait and switch imagery and its deniability as anti-Semitic transgression (via the superficial interpretation offered by the meme-defender) is exceptionally sophisticated and clever. This aspect (where theoretically intelligent persons pass on and circulate a meme that they don’t even understand) makes this meme very much like an incognito virus, much lack computer users who are hacked and relay viruses unconsciously.

This post reveals a total ignorance of who is behind persecuting Palestinians. Are the persecutors Jewish victims of the Holocaust? No. Are they all Israelis? No. Are they a fraction of the Israeli society? Yes. And what about how this cycle of violence is partly linked to Hamas, even if that does not justify the form of the Israeli counter-reaction? We have a whole sector within the Left or opponents of Israel can therefore be characterized as follows: (a) Total insensitivity to Jewish history; (b) vast ignorance of internal Israeli political dynamics, (c) engage in politics simply as a kind of sports cheerleading, and (d) leverages tragedy to spew nonsense.

Plate IB tells a lot about the capacity to increase slander against Jews. Things have gotten so bad that leftist intellectuals will continually defend such memes as part of their gaslighting campaign. They believe that exposing anti-Semitism is a low order priority or that such memes are not even anti-Semitic and focusing on these memes which are not offensive distracts from slaughter. They are wrong for these reasons. First, there is not just one idiotic meme out there, but a large ensemble. This essay documents them. Second, the Israeli bombing campaign which is a tragedy provides a smokescreen for left or anti-Israeli idiocy. Third, Plate IB is anti-Semitic because it deploys the hook nose symbolism about Jews. If one turns to this Wikipedia article, “Jewish nose,” which I consulted on May 19, 2024, you will find the imagery found in Plate IC.

Plate IC: The Jewish Hook Nose in Anti-Semitic History

Source: “Two shnorrers: a Sephardi and an Ashkenazi (1894),” image from Wikipedia article, “Jewish nose,” accessible at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_nose#/media/File:Manasseh_and_Yankele.png.

One can see clear resemblances between the Jewish/Israeli soldier in Plate IB and hook nose symbolism in Plate IC. I myself did not notice this obvious symbolism, but upon reflection it emerged as obvious and glaring. Consider it a kind of anti-Semitic signature which the author of the meme kind of dabbled in to telegraph their sentiments to the discerning viewer. It turns out that many persons are textually and aesthetically illiterate and consider deeper analysis to be “sophistry,” “long-winded,” and the like. This response is perfectly consistent with anti-intellectualism which is a long-standing part of American culture, but has now also been transferred globally to other countries via mobile phones, the Internet, social media, knowledge resistance and political silos. These silos are in turn enhanced by university curricula, social movement subculture and a kind of blowback from war and militarism in which exposing its utter horror is turned into a uniform command and control system in some peoples’ brains so they can shut out any complications. Of course this is a rather dangerous development as it weakens opposition to militarism, exploitation and correctives to dysfunctional social movement design. Among the keenest observers of this tendency was Paul Goodman as demonstrated in his essays (see below).

The Holocaust victim is also given a hook nose but apparently not the Palestinian victim. The Holocaust victim hook nose was kind of a anti-Semitic signature of the cartoon creator. It’s very interesting how none of these telegraphing symbols are noticeable, relating to “the duck-rabbit drawing…first used by American psychologist Joseph Jastrow in 1899 to make the point that perception is not only what one sees but also a mental activity,” as explained by Chloe Farand in an essay published in The Independent on March 24, 2021. The German soldier may or may not have a hook nose, part of the deniability aspect of such memes. What is most fascinating is the way the cartoonist telegraphs his anti-Semitism, but simultaneous builds in corrective, deniability features at the same time. I admire the intelligence of this move, even as I condemn the moral bankruptcy behind it. The pastiche effect sends multiple messages, marrying (a) outrage against Israeli oppression with (b) a little anti-Semitic dividend in (c) the attempt to rob opponents of anti-Zionism with any refuge in the Holocaust as a point of departure. The Holocaust is harvested in an effort that on one level exposes Israeli transgressions, but then piggybacks on that with gratuitous anti-Semitism. This is sheer brilliance. What we see is a kind of intellectual booby trap laid by the cartoonist. If you expose (b), you appear to condemn (a). That is a very intelligent form of propaganda, but hardly new (as it is recycled Stalinism as this essay argues).

What is sheer cunning and a kind of sadism is the way the cartoonist uses an image of history’s penultimate anti-Semitic event to promulgate gratuitous anti-Semitism. The normalization of anti-Semitism in the cartoonist’s culture (whatever that is) translates very well to American and other audiences. Why? How? The transnational validation of the imagery occurs precisely because of shared outrage at Israel, because of the diffusion of anti-intellectualism, because of dysfunctionalities and silo aspects of left discourse. These multiple forms of diffusion have mirrors or analogues in the rampant anti-Semitism in certain countries and how it finds resonance in left compression of nuance. It is very much like a transformer that takes one kind of electric current and turns it into another.

Cheerleading Hitler

The meme is hardly marginal. On the X platform, Sara Rey with 76.5 followers posted the slogan on November 12, 2023, garnering 39,000 views, 1,100 reposts and 2,100 likes. A businesswoman named Miriam Pervaiz, founder of Merium Pervaiz Cosmetics, with 2.3 million followers on Instagram used the slogan in a post and also added, “Now the world knows the Reason Why HITLER Hates Jews” (Plate 2). This contribution to ethical debasement received 56,339 likes. Pervaiz’s company is based in Lahore, Pakistan. Thus, we see how commodity production, social media status, anti-Semitism and de-legitimation of the Palestinian cause are fused thanks to the Internet. Pakistan’s substantial support for Palestinians in the current conflict is not the problem. Rather, the tolerance for anti-Semitism there is the problem, especially when it is the milieu in which certain solidarity statements emerge. As a side note, what’s interesting about anti-Semitism leveraged for an allegedly post-colonial cause is the following history as related by Wikipedia‘s entry on “Anti-Semitism in Pakistan”: “The Jewish community of the Indian subcontinent (known as the Bene Israel) lived in stable conditions and did not face widespread persecution when the region was under British rule. At the time of the Partition of India in 1947, which saw Pakistan carved out of British India as an independent Muslim-majority dominion, the territory comprising the new state had more than 3,000 Jews, most of whom resided in Karachi. However, shortly after the independence of Pakistan, Karachi’s Magain Shalome Synagogue as well as individual Jews across the country were subject to pogroms by Muslim mobs.” So post-colonialism was not a miracle cure for evil in more ways than one. There are only 200 Jews left in Pakistan, further underlining the limits of that society as modern, tolerant or diverse.  Ismail Haniye, the leader of Hamas, has turned to Pakistan for help against Israel according to a December 7, 2023 report. According to MEMRI, in May 2021 a Pakistani politician named Moulana Abdul Akbar Chitrali and “a member of the National Assembly from the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal Party” then “demanded that the Pakistani military declare jihad against Israel and use its long-range missiles, F-17 fighter jets, and nuclear weapons against it.” This statement was made by a group many on the left won’t like, but does the left monitor such persons? In 2010, only 18% of Pakistanis supported Hamas, according to a Pew Research poll. In 2014, 66% were concerned about Islamic extremism according to another poll.

Plate 2: When Mass Killing in Gaza is Leveraged for Anti-Semitism

Source: Instagram post, accessible at: https://www.instagram.com/p/CyiM09So0-u/. Accessed January 1, 2024.

Using One’s Holocaust Associations to Terrorism-wash Hamas

Recently Gabor Maté’s commentary about Israel was turned into a meme (Plate 3) circulating in social media. This moral intervention might be well intentioned but finds a way to help legitimate Hamas. Therefore, I wish Maté would make fewer such statements. Trying to downplay and diminish one evil by referring to something that is a greater evil is intellectually very weak. It is rather pathetic. Maté is essentially helping to legitimate some of the processes that contribute the cycle of violence, e.g. marginalizing Hamas’s danger, absence of nuance, denial of each parties’ security concerns, deployment of hyperbole, etc. And the record is very clear about what Israel does without referring to Hamas or engaging in stupid “whataboutism.” While this term is itself stupid, it potentially aims at a legitimate problem, e.g. bringing up X to deny the reality of Y. Here Maté unintentionally (one assumes) helps legitimate Hamas by deconstructing Israel.

Many of the victims of October 7th would not share Maté’s view, which he or others legitimate by reference to his being a holocaust survivor. That status is used as by him (and others) as a kind of intellectual trump card as if what he has got to say is above reproach. It is not. So Maté’s big idea is that the quantitative weight of suffering is how we weigh moral issues. That’s a totally idiotic and essentially amoral concept. Consider in contrast Sartre’s view that even a single case of anti-Semitism was too much and not tolerable. Maté should do a thought experiment. How will his meme resonate with someone about to get their head blown off by Hamas? Will that person be counting the number of Palestinian victims in their head to de-legitimate their own reality as inferior? Why is he unable to provide a larger context for his statements such as the role which Palestine played in saving Jewish lives?

I tried to understand how someone like Gabor Maté emerges and gains circulation. My best guess is that his criticism of Israel resonates because of their barbaric attacks and he becomes a useful foil to deconstruct claims by far-right Israelis that they speak for all Jews. Yes, that much is obvious. But there is another side to Maté, his debasement of Hamas’s victims as a pawn in his playing to the gallery, his so delinking from empathy with a potential Israeli perspective that it becomes suspicious. I am not referring to the “self-hating Jew trope,” but rather a kind of identity and status achieved by deconstructing and obliterating the idea of the Jew as victim. This new amoral morality attempts a kind of post-colonial intellectual dissolution of the “Zionist entity” and then this quickly morphs into debasing victims of terror and relativizing them. The tendency may be popular if we can link Maté increasing media capital over time and how it has risen dramatically since October 7, 2023 (Figures 1, 2 and 3) in both the U.S. and globally.

Figure 1: The Ascendancy of Gabor Maté in the USA: January 1, 2004-January 2, 2024

Source: Google Trends search, January 6, 2024.

Figure 2: Ascendancy of Gabor Maté in the USA: October 6-January 2, 2024

Source: Google Trends search, January 6, 2024.

Figure 3: The Ascendancy of Gabor Maté in Worldwide: January 1, 2004-January 2, 2024

Source: Google Trends search, January 6, 2024.

Plate 3: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions I

Linking Jews or Holocaust Survivors with Israeli State Actions

Another meme (Plate 4) involves the alleged linkages or not between surviving the Holocaust and opposing Israeli actions in Hamas. This meme is also rather offensive. The poster states that someone’s grandfather (presumably Jewish) didn’t survive Auschwitz to bomb Gaza. This raises the question as to who is actually bombing Gaza and whether that has anything to do with the referent object (Jews or holocaust survivors). Very much like atheists who go on and on about God not existing and thereby create their own religion (or facsimile of same), the poster’s deconstruction helps legitimate the very trope that it appears to or attempts to deconstruct. There is no potential association or logical association between Holocaust survivors and a desire to bomb Gaza, i.e. there is no potential correlation whatsoever. Even Israelis who are descendants of Holocaust survivors, can’t link such a desire logically to their background. Furthermore, while some descendants may be involved in bombing and others are not, the differentiating factor here is not being a Holocaust survivor or even being Jewish. So, we have a case of gross reductionism. The poster, through its attempt at deconstruction, puts something on the table that I find deeply offensive. It strikes me as some kind of gimmick to enlist one’s suffering grandparents to help de-legitimate an action that can be de-legitimated on far more important grounds.

The poster engages in a double movement. First, it raises a question with a premise makes no sense (linkage of holocaust survivors and military slaughter). Then, in the second moment, the question is contradicted. Many see the second moment, not the first. That failure is based on gross ignorance and lowering of standards for assessing cultural artefacts.

There also seems to be some implicit idea that Jews are obligated to speak out against Israel and/or that it is legitimate to refer to one’s Jewishness or the Holocaust while engaging in that transaction. I find this idea not a “slam dunk” for several reasons. First, in my view Jews should be obligated to speak out against all oppressive government actions and not just one government’s actions. This means that one either has to apply the Holocaust past to delegitimate all oppression not some. Furthermore, the Holocaust is not always a useful analogy for opposing other governments. Second, if everyone should speak out against all oppressive actions/governments, etc., not everyone is going to be able to make the reference to Holocaust grandparents, i.e. that is the special preserve of a more limited group. Thus, it is an appeal that can’t be universal and represents what appears to me as some kind of merger between identity politics and branding. It is true that Israel does things in the name of Jews, which Jews might feel obligated to react to. Yet, such a concept could lead to other memes which suggest that Jewish values don’t endorse militarism, illegal appropriation and dispossession. And why should Jews or any other group be obligated to refute generalizations about themselves if in doing so it helps legitimate the very premise that is being refuted?

There is a third order problem which is that Israel did save a number of Jews vis-à-vis the Holocaust, but I’m not sure if that is relevant to the poster which apparently blurs Jews, Israel, factions within Israel or any nuance that could promote a solution. That’s how I read this poster.

Plate 4: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions II

Source: Tweet, accessed from X platform, May 20, 2024.

Anti-Zionist-splaining

People who don’t fall into line and thus accept every stupid meme, slogan and commentary which deconstructs and critiques Israel often are subject to anti-Zionist-splaining by various figures on the left or would-be solidarity activists. We are supposed to accept the syllogism or whatever it is that: “Just because you criticize Israel you are not anti-Semitic.” This works as follows: (I) Criticizing Israel is legitimate; (II) I am criticizing Israel; (III) Therefore, I am legitimate (in everything and anything I say), see also Formula I above.

I have my own syllogisms or memes: (a) “Just because you are against Israel does not mean that you are not anti-Semitic”; (b) “Just because you are a Holocaust survivor, does not mean you have the right to invoke the Holocaust to perpetuate nonsense arguments”; (c) “Just because you support Palestine, does not mean that anything you say is justified, rational or makes any sense”; (d) “Just because you criticize Israel, does not mean that you do it in a way that is helpful and it could even be counter-productive and play into the hands of the right-wing media.” Some will argue that I am making an inauthentic reference to the left’s alleged anti-Semitism (which does exist as I have already shown here), but rather I say that some on the left use their syllogism to silence anyone who does not like what they do or how it does what it does. It is assumed that if you criticize the way the criticism of Israel is made or formulated that you must be blind to what Israel does. Again, we see Stalinist behavior, i.e. where you can justify or say anything against ANY critic against so-called “Socialists” or “Communists” because such critics of these entities are said to support capitalism and exploitation, etc. I don’t have such romantic associations which require me to be loyal to political tendencies and find fault with anything a right-wing person says. For me, a social movement is always potentially an alienated space controlled by a group of left managers for their own personal/political ambitions and which can even act against my identity and interests. There are human beings who can support flawed designs in memes and movements which can be exposed. There is no need for blind loyalty and obedience to a left cause simply righteous. As Paul Goodman wrote: “Pacifist propaganda in general, let me say, is prone to arouse guilt just because it is irrefutable and on the side of the angels.”

Leveraging Genocide to Peace-wash South African Militarism

There are scholars who support and dispute the claim that Israel is engaged in genocide, but we know clearly that mass killing in Gaza by Israel can’t be justified by various standards. That being said, I will now investigate if states can also engage in the same kind of bullshit syllogisms and formulas I have found among individuals. A case in point is South Africa, whose claims against Israel as genocidal are now gaining wide attention.

A report published by the Associated Press on December 29, 2023 explained how “South Africa launched a case” that day “at the United Nations’ top court accusing Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and asking the court to order Israel to halt its attacks.” Israel in turn also “accused South Africa of cooperating with Hamas, the Palestinian militant group behind the deadly Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel that triggered the ongoing war.” Mary Kluk, writing in Haaretz on November 16, 2023, argued that “Naledi Pandor, the South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, does not even try to hide her anti-Israel proclivities as she smugly denies Hamas’ crimes in parliament and enjoys a mutually sycophantic relationship with Hamas representatives. This is no longer about support for the Palestinians but rather constitutes unambiguous support for a genocidal organization dedicated to murdering Jews.” Kluk wrote that “on October 7, the very day that Hamas perpetrated its carnage, the opening paragraph of a statement issued by Pandor’s ministry read as follows: ‘South Africa calls for the immediate cessation of violence, restraint, and peace between Israel and Palestine. SA expresses its grave concern over the recent devastating escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The new conflagration has arisen from the continued illegal occupation of Palestine land, continued settlement expansion, desecration of the Al Aqsa mosque and Christian holy sites, and ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people.'” In other words, Kluk explains that there was “not even a moment of repulsion at the 260 or more young people being gunned down at a music festival of ‘peace and love’ and families murdered in their homes by Hamas terrorists as well as hostages being violently kidnapped in blatant violation of international law.” South Africa combines a legitimate critique of Israel with a bullshit displacement of its own malfeasance.

A BBC report noted that “President Ramaphosa…did condemn the Hamas assault.” Nevertheless, Gabriella Farber (now a former ANC official), stated that “it took the ANC nine days until they condemned Hamas for the atrocities they committed against the Jewish people” (emphasis added). Furthermore, it turns out that the South African government is simply an opportunistic regime which is not averse to promoting mass murder when it serves its own economic interests. This is made clear by Atilla Kisla in a December 4, 2023 analysis published by the Southern Africa Litigation Centre: “Similar to the Palestine conflict, the Yemen conflict has resulted in the immense suffering of the civilian population. The conflict in Yemen began in 2014 and only slowed down in 2022. A UN expert group repeatedly called during the conflict for a stop to arms transfers due to their role in “perpetuating the conflict and potentially contributing to violations.” The conflict in Yemen has resulted in an estimated displacement of 4.5 million people, 377,000 deaths and 21.6 million people in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Two countries that have engaged in this conflict are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Both countries are also on the list of countries that import South African arms. From 2014 until 2022, there has not been one single year in which South Africa did not export arms to one of these two countries” (emphasis added). Proponents of South Africa’s actions against Israel objectively are servicing peace-washing and displacement of South Africa’s venal militarism against the people of Yemen. This again is a Stalinist formula where the higher ends are supposed to justify the dirty means.

Conclusions: Can We Avoid a Society Based on Silo Hardening?

Silo hardening is the effort by right and left to harden the silos, the confirmation biases of one’s niches. A significant part of the left, with variants in the USA, UK, and Sweden (and no doubt Canada and other such places) cannot tolerate any questions to the dominant line. There is some evidence here of a cultural regression, much like following the party line of the Communist Party, but now in the new “woke” (or is it “pseudo-woke”?) and post-colonial (likewise pseudo anti-colonial) variant. Trying to raise nuances and other views can lead to censure from some persons. The idiotic “whataboutism” arguments are often applied to those who both oppose NATO (as we are unfairly called supporters of Russia’s slaughter in Ukraine) and oppose Hamas (as we are unfairly called supporters of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza or the West Bank), so in some ways apologists for militarism and terrorism share some of the same play book. Needless to say, I hope this tendency is erased by its own moral and philosophical contradictions.

In contrast, even in 1958, leading cultural figures like Jean Shepherd and John Cassavetes could discuss the confirmation bias of citizens, their unwillingness to consider alternative points of view. This discussion was previous to the rise of the New Left, which emerged in 1959-1960, but now some forms of dissent seem to resembled pre-packaged commodities. At one point Cassavetes states, “I haven’t heard one idea other than, ‘let’s keep preparing for war and we’ll have peace.'” Then, Shepherd says “that’s true.” Cassavetes says “today everybody is too afraid to think for themselves because for fear that they may be out of the general mode of public opinion, out of touch with the common man and the common man has become everybody.” Now, however, one might fear to be “out of touch” with one’s bubble. Shepherd pointed to the novel as a cultural intervention which might break with this pattern, where the artist had true freedom of expression.

On the surface one might think I have had made much ado about nothing. Rather, I am making much ado about something. Social movements and social media both have strong tendencies towards the lowest common denominator. They are both built on silo principles as opposed to deliberation (about what might be true), verification (as to what is actually true, outside one’s algorithm, news stream), and exchange among ideas (even ones that seem unpopular). They both are built around a point-to-mass system of distribution. While platforms like Facebook can involve user/audience reactions and a point-to-point communication exchange, persons who do not simply like, endorse, and ratify what has originally been posted by the local host can find themselves ridiculed, blocked, and objectified if they don’t fall into line and go with the apparent consensus or views of memes. Some on the left represent a drill sergeant mentality where obedience is the preferred virtue. This is very much like the far right’s routinization.

During the Occupy movement, there was an attempt to have exchanges founded in General Assemblies where there were no apparent leaders. While there were various unapparent leaders one could also see a strong anti-sectarian kind of vibe as best I could detect in some of these exchanges. Yet, even those dissenting in some of the local affiliates sometimes kept their mouth shut to go with the flow of a tedious consensus. Without dissent, there can be no design innovations. We see a kind of mirror image of the tedious Kafkaesque culture created by bureaucracies in the left, social media, and among so-called “activists.”

Despite the protests, some on the left and others circulate memes that are either anti-Semitic, offensive, or one-dimensional. The idea is that Israel’s brutality is so offensive, that we in the audience who might object should instead sit quietly and keep our mouths shut. While one can read official pronouncements and journalistic representations that usually or sometimes sound reasonable, social media is sort of like a bird’s eye view of the collective unconscious where stupidities are put out in full display, unfiltered by various activists in NGOS who have been trained by public relations consultants or vetted by somebody trying to hustle foundation money. In some other cases, gross stupidity emerges in academic, journalistic or social movement ranks as I have demonstrated elsewhere.

The memes and other bullshit interventions help de-legitimate or malign efforts to limit, constrain or oppose Israeli militarism and the cycle of violence. The Holocaust and its meaning are being debased to service the agenda of various activists who misappropriate history to service their sense of moral outrage as if being angry or outraged gives you a license to reinvent history or engage in dubious rhetorical linkages. One senses a distinctly inauthentic aura in these attempts, some kind of attempt to expiate sins or some such thing. There seems to be a reincarnation of 1960s-1970s-New Left-era self-imposed guilt trips which in the end are part of a larger project to avoid any comprehensive movement to eradicate larger problems like militarism, managerialist expansion of exploitative/exclusionary power, and the devaluation of reflection and critical judgment. There is the same feeling of topical obligations, moral one upmanship, and proselytizing holier-than-thou crap which took place during that earlier cycle of protest.

While this earlier movement cycle did engage in some successful attempts to stop the war system, it failed to eliminate the war-making institutions. One of the reasons for failure was that the devil was in the details, the moral code of the left broke down, and simply opposing the status quo or evil incarnate forces was supposed to be sufficient for demonstrating good or appropriate behavior–it was not. Eventually, after the right-wing media machine discovers the stupidity of the memes, they will be used against the authors and the larger cause that they represent. Some personal one upmanship will take place and that apparently will resolve everything.

Postscript: New Memes that Illustrate the Slander License

Since the original essay was written, I have discovered new memes that illustrate the slander license. The basic formula has been repeated over and over and over again. Take Israeli misdeeds and leverage those to spread any nonsense whatsoever. Play to the audience’s hatred, anger or disgust with Israeli actions to sell easily digested nonsense. Leverage perceived or actual Israeli transgression to bolster the credentials or status of some entity opposing Israel. Repeat the Stalinist formula that the ends justify the means.

Sins of Omission Memes that help Legitimate Terrorism

Another very sinister meme that does an excellent job of leveraging Israeli transgressions to support bullshit claims can be seen in Plate 5. This meme was circulated in a Tweet by Naila Kabeer on December 31, 2023. Kabeer is Professor, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. It was circulated by the Facebook platform, “Muslim best lectures,” which has 1.9 million members, and got 23,000 shares according to Facebook.

I must commend the author or authors of this meme for their brilliant skill in leveraging the formulas I have already explicated above. What’s wrong with this slogan? The meme suggests that Hamas lacks agency and responsibility. That is false. It also collapses past Israeli transgressions into the explanation for the current crisis, that is not a 100% overlap. The meme diminishes the domestic origins of the crisis in the Netanyahu far-right regime because it uses a kind of simplistic post-colonial gaze, being promulgated by various left factions/groups, which obliterates security concerns which have some legitimacy, even if they lose legitimacy based on the design of the response where that design can’t be collapsed into the trajectory of past transgressions as neatly as the meme implies. The terror linkages of Hamas and its militarist thug allies are not explicated, so it is a kind of repressive tolerance of Hamas meme. This meme gains wide circulation because various forces allied with Hamas directly or complicitly want it that way, with Israel’s brutal campaign contributing to “the fog of memes.”

Plate 5: The Sin of Omission Regarding the Terrorism-Militarism Dialectic

Source: Meme circulated by Twitter and Facebook, potentially linked to a professor at London School of Economics (LSE).

None of this excuses Israel’s thug behavior.  The meme acts as if the absence of security was never a cause of deaths and is in denial of how Hamas has contributed to the cycle of violence. This is sinister propaganda involved in sins of omissions. It gains currency because of the skillful use of Israeli malfeasance. According to one source, the Jewish Virtual Library, 24,981 Jews/Israelis have been killed since 1920, something that this meme does not address. Some of these numbers could be disputed, but there are other statistics. Joseph S. Spoerl writes that from the Jewish side 1948 was universally seen as being a war for survival with Palestinian Jews suffering from “massive casualties” with “nearly one percent…killed and two percent seriously wounded” (“Whitewashing Palestine to Eliminate Israel: The Case of the One-State Advocates,” Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 26, Issue 3/4, 2014, page 83). The cycle of violence includes the suicide bombing campaign of the 1990s as related in an article by J. Hiss and T. Kahana: “Between 1993 and 1995, 14 suicidal terrorist bombings took place in Israel; 86 victims perished in these attacks, which were carried out by militant Palestinian organizations that oppose peace treaties between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people. The modus operandi of the perpetrators was detonating, in a public area, an explosive device carried on or in close proximity to the terrorist’s body.” Another report states that in 2021, “at least 680 Palestinian rockets fell short or misfired, landing inside Gaza. According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center in Israel, 9 children and 10 adults were killed by Palestinian rockets.”

It is not that this meme lacks any logic. It does point to numerous Palestinian deaths. Yet, it obliterates history and does so in service of Hamas, a terrorist actor which did contribute to the cycle of violence. This cycle as noted has been elaborated in my earlier commentary. A list of Palestinians executed by the Hamas government appears here, published by B’Tselem. During Israel’s military offensive against Gaza in July and August 2014, “Hamas forces carried out a brutal campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings against Palestinians accused of ‘collaborating’ with Israel and others,” according to an Amnesty International report published May 27, 2015. The meme works according to the classic propaganda formula of combining truth and lies.

Memes that Insult and Lie About History

I discovered a new meme which furthered anti-Semitism as part of an effort to help de-legitimate the Palestinian cause by associating it with pure idiocy (Plate 6). First, associating Palestinians’ cooperation with Jews coming to Palestine/Israel as a crime, would thereby render immigration policy (if you want to call it that) as criminal. Such an association between migration and criminality is basically an idea that resonates with Donald Trump’s view and those of far right parties throughout Europe. Such a policy, taken to its logical conclusion, would have blocked Palestinian migrants from entering North America, South America, Europe and elsewhere.

Plate 6: Leveraging Israeli Misdeeds to Circulate Slanderous Inventions of Jewish History

Source: Meme accessed from Facebook on July 17, 2024.

Second, the meme again refers to “you” which I now realize is a floating signifier of objectification conflating Jews, Israelis, Zionists, right-wing Zionists and even fascistic or authoritarian-leaning Zionists. The meme implies that there was no continuous or long-term Jewish presence in Israel/Palestine or a presence that pre-dates World War II. One source, the Jewish Institute for Policy Research, claims: “The story of that growth actually begins well before 1948. The population living to the west of the River Jordan grew dramatically in the 150 years before the establishment of the State – climbing from 275,000 in 1800 to around 2 million by the time of the UN partition plan in November 1947. All religious groups grew there between those years – Jews, Muslims and Christians – but Jews more than others, albeit from a much lower base (7,000 in 1800, compared to 246,000 Muslims and 22,000 Christians). But greater changes occurred during the British Mandate (1922-48), when the Jewish population increased eightfold whilst the Christian and Muslim populations merely doubled, and the proportion of Jews in the country climbed from 11 to 32 per cent.” In any case, these facts cast doubts that Jewish presence was simply a byproduct of Palestinian policy, even if the Jewish migration was viewed by some in Palestine as problematic.

Third, the meme claims that Jews (the “you”) were kicked out of every country in Europe. This is a huge lie and anti-Semitic dog whistling. Jews were not kicked out of every country. They remained in various European nations like Sweden, but many were deported, murdered via extermination and concentration camps or assassinated. Being deported and murdered are not the same as “kicked out of every country in Europe.” Some Jews remained in Hungary and Ukraine.

Devaluing Nazism by Comparing it to Zionism

A constant meme is to compare Israeli actions to those of the Nazis (Plate 7), with other memes simply deflating the severity of Nazism and the Holocaust with comparisons to Israeli actions (see below). There have been various comparisons between the Jewish ghetto and Gaza and even a discourse about how Jewish suffering is leveraged to displace or dilute that of Palestinians. As Eric Levitz explained recently in an essay published in New York Magazine, “In a recent essay for the New Yorker, the Russian American journalist Masha Gessen…[examined] the uses and abuses of Holocaust memory in Germany, Israel, and Eastern Europe, and the suppression of dissent against the Israeli government. Their essay makes a variety of arguments, the most controversial of which is that contemporary Gaza resembles a Jewish ghetto during World War II.”

Plate 7: Devaluing the Nazism

Source: Accessed from a Facebook post, January 19, 2024.

The problem, however, is that despite more or less valid analogies, Zionism is not equivalent to Nazism. This meme clearly devalues Nazism by comparing it to what Israel is doing. In the attempt to create urgency and solidarity, we again see the slander system at work. Whatever Israel is doing, that should not be leveraged to re-write history and devalue it. In any comparison of cases, we can find similarities and differences. Making comparisons between cases which contain different elements requires that these differences be explained. That is an academic requirement for case study analysis which memes need not follow. The meme also goes out of its way to deny the logic of cycles of violence in which violence is not simply triggered by one side. The post-colonial conceit of just one set of victims is repeated. Gessen may be making arguments that are more or less accurate, but I’ve tried to show at length that there is a larger field of opportunistic appropriation of arguments made by various “sides” in this conflict. This means that truths can easily be mis-appropriated for lies, deconstructions of Israel (or the current regime) can be leverage for Hamas and deconstructions of Hamas leveraged for supporting Israel (or the current regime). As a result, Gessen’s arguments can also be mis-appropriated unless certain qualifiers are introduced and emphasized. And if these qualifiers are not emphasized or well designed, one can easily become a useful idiot for Hamas. There is of course a risk of being a useful idiot for the current regime in Israel in deconstructing Hamas. Deconstructing Hamas involves a risk, but the serial abuses documented here clearly indicates that the “risk” is worth taking.

My analysis is not intended to diminish what the current regime in Israel is doing. Rather, whatever they are doing is not an excuse for re-writing history and deflating it. There are also potential splits in Zionism which might be useful to leverage change in Israel, even if Yitzhak Laor writes about The Myths of Liberal Zionism (Verso, 2009). There may be myths there, but there may also be non-myths. Laor does not explain in detail any differences among Zionists and focuses mostly on deconstructing liberal Zionists. That might be useful, but it turns out to be hardly sufficient, especially given its limited utility for deconstructing other memes as the ones above.

Whitewashing the Houthi Rebels

The Houthi Rebels launched a series of rocket attacks at interests believed to be aligned with Israel, the United States and related interests. These attacks were celebrated on a Facebook page entitled, “Noam chomsky’s followers,” which for some weird reason cannot capitalize Chomsky’s last name. The posted meme, originally traceable to a January 12, 2024 post can be seen in Plate 8 below. By March 6, 2024, missiles from Houthi rebels had murdered three persons on a ship according to a report by Jon Gambrell and Tara Copp in the Associated Press website, published the next day.

Plate 8: Post-Colonial Kidnapping by Anti-Imperialist Kidnappers?

Source: Facebook post in the page, “Noam chomsky’s followers,” date January 14, 2024, accessed by the author.

Let us now consult from the September 25, 2018 Human Rights Report, “Yemen; Houthi Hostage Taking: Arbitrary Detention, Torture, Enforced Disappearance Go Unpunished.” According to this report, “The Houthi armed group in Yemen has frequently taken hostages and committed other serious abuses against people in their custody.” Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East Director at Human Rights Watch, explained: “The Houthis have added profiteering to their long list of abuses and offenses against the people under their control in Yemen…Rather than treat detainees humanely, some Houthi officials are exploiting their power to turn a profit through detention, torture, and murder.” The report continues: “Houthi officials have treated detainees brutally, often amounting to torture, Human Rights Watch said. Former detainees described Houthi officers beating them with iron rods, wooden sticks, and assault rifles. Guards whipped prisoners, shackled them to walls, caned their feet, and threatened to rape them or their family members, former detainees said. Several people described being hung from a wall by their arms shackled behind them as one of the most painful techniques. In many cases, Houthi officials tortured them to obtain information or confessions.”

A separate report in The New York Times, published January 11, 2024, links the Houthis to the repressive regime in Iran: “Once a group of poorly organized rebels, the Houthis have bolstered their arsenal in recent years, and it now includes cruise and ballistic missiles and long-range drones. Analysts credit this expansion to support from Iran, which has supplied militias across the Middle East to expand its own influence.” Yet, the meme is apparently not only aligned with Iran but also a group of torturers and persons who kidnap. In one recent incident, a ship and its crew were kidnapped, unless the ship was seized without its crew. A November 22, 2023 story in Benar News stated clearly, however, that kidnapping took place: “17 Filipino crew ‘held hostage’ on ship seized by Houthis in Red Sea.” Eduardo de Vega, an undersecretary at the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines, stated “there were 17 Filipinos according to the manning agency… together with other foreigners.” The meme links a group linked to Noam Chomsky and then tries to legitimate by association a group of kidnappers. Rather, what we have here are the Filipinos as what Chomsky himself would call “unworthy victims” in the eyes of the promoters of this meme. As of January 21, 2024, the post of the meme in Facebook received approval from 302 persons.

Using Moral Arguments to Support Collective Guilt and Whitewash Your Own Past

This meme was posted by a Swede and I found it in Facebook, a key platform for idiotic memes. One supported said that Jews from Germany stole her family’s land in Palestine. Another argued that most Jews are Europeans and don’t belong in the Middle East (or some such thing). The general idea is that Germany who killed a lot of Jews owes the Jews a country. Another person argued that Jews stole Palestinian land and so there should be no Israeli state. There are so many problems with this meme that it is rather tedious to go through them, but it is worth doing so for the encyclopedic value, particularly for younger persons who may be subject to such idiocy.

First, not all Germans born today are guilty of killing Jews. Citizens are responsible for what their states do now, but they have somewhat constrained responsibility for their country’s past. The responsibility is obviously not zero, but dividing up Germany in two is obviously idiotic as it implied exiling millions of Southern Germans somewhere. If that impossible task of relocation were to take place, then it would obviously lead to a fascist military country in Northern Germany. They would probably develop nuclear weapons and lead to the destruction of large parts of Europe. So this idea is probably not a good one. Of course, the plan would be impossible and is a non-idea. What we see in this map is pure emotion and the attempt to leverage that to make one’s anger felt. I have no sympathy for such idiocy, however, because such ideas and memes: (a) could be used by the growing far right movement in Germany, (b) are an obstacle to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

Second, if we were to use the principle that stolen lands should be returned, then large parts of the United States, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, etc. would have to have their borders changed. This is obviously impossible. Of course, more recent stolen lands are another story. We saw in the case of South Africa that it is possible to “return” those. But, in the South African case the level of violence and mistrust between blacks and whites might have been lower than between Israelis and Palestinians. In addition, Nelson Mandela does not have a counterpart in Israel or Palestine at present. There were no Islamic or Jewish fundamentalists in South Africa. There are “settler colonialists” in the West Bank and international pressure and domestic reform in Israel will require their removal and relocation.

Third, if the idea is that a country that screws over another country or people is the basis for creating a new country or a piece of a country in the country doing the screwing over, then we would have to divide Sweden. Part of this argument behind those advocating the meme in Plate 9 is the following: (a) Germany (or those responsible for supporting the Nazis) killed a lot of Jews; (b) many Israelis are from Germany; (c) Germany owes the Jews a country. Do (a), (b), and (c) apply to Sweden? Yes, they do.

On point (a), Swedish business interests helped Nazis Germany. They supplied Germany will valuable iron ore and ball bearings. Second, a number of Swedes (not many but some) served in the Nazi army. In addition, The Washington Post reported on February 10, 1997 that: “Sweden, and the vast Wallenberg financial empire, made money and acquired looted gold from doing business with the Nazis.”

On point (b), many Swedes are from Afghanistan and Iraq. Sweden helped kill persons in these countries. Turning first to Afghanistan, the Swedish military helped the U.S. military make kill decisions in that country according to a report in The New York Times dated September 4, 2015. Similarly Sweden helped the U.S. bomb Iraq, according to a news story in The Local dated September 3, 2012, building on Swedish news sources.

Turning to point (c), using the earlier arguments, one could argue that Sweden should divide part of its territory and create a country for Afghans and Iraqis. Obviously this idea is irrational, impractical, and idiotic, as is the meme below. At the very least, we could argue that Sweden should allow migration from countries which it has helped to bomb. This has occurred, but many Swedes regret the extent of migration that they have allowed. Yet, they appear to have more regrets over migration than the bombing campaigns and weapons exports. This too is irrational, but can be accounted for by the low level of debate and understanding of such questions.

Plate 9: Using a Moral Argument to Reveal One’s Idiocy

Source: Facebook post retrieved January 26, 2024.

Leveraging Israeli military excesses and surplus militarism to let Hamas off the hook and deny the cycle of violence

A meme that is rather stupid, while trying to make a point that sounds halfway sensible but is really disingenuous propaganda can be seen in Plate 10 below. While a ceasefire or alternative response to Hamas terrorism is warranted, the meme implies that Hamas had nothing whatsoever to do with blocking peace. This is an outrageous lie peddled by simpletons. It is true that Israeli leaders have blocked peace, but they have hardly been alone in that enterprise.

Plate 10: False Claim that the Cycle of Violence is Initiated by Only One Side

Source: Facebook post identified by author on January 30, 2024.

Creating Explicit Lies and Using Anti-Semitic Tropes: The Eye of Lies

One of the dumbest of all the memes I encountered (Plate II) implies that most or many Israelis were born outside of Israel. Various source indicate that today more than 70% of Israelis were born in Israel. The meme suggests or implies that all Israelis are white and none are themselves Arab or Palestinian. In contrast, more than 20% and more than 2,000,000 persons living in Israel have been identified as “Palestinian, and including Druze, Circassians, all other Muslims, Christian Arabs, Armenians (which Israel considers “Arab”),” according to a Wikipedia entry linked to this website.

A suspected producer of this meme, which was removed after my commentary on it (hence the split in Plate II as I tried to capture a screenshot of the whole frame), is an outfit called “Eye of truth from Palestine.” This Facebook group describes various Israeli atrocities or misdeeds but follows the formula of leveraging these to circulate whatever bullshit they deem acceptable. Some simple-minded or Israel-hating Swedes circulate such memes, despite the obvious lies that are implied by the image. They thereby help reduce the legitimacy or credibility of the Palestinian cause by associating that with outright lies. So Israeli misdeeds are thereby legitimated by persons who claim to be exposing what “Eye of truth” refers to in other posts that it circulates calls “the Zionist entity.” In one such post, by Kit Klarenberg, the British comedian Sasha Baron Cohen is described as a propaganda force for Zionism and is himself associated with anti-Semitism. The film Borat is viewed as slander against Jews and Kazakh peoples. In other words, Borat which purports to be against anti-Semitism is actually supporting it according to Klarenberg. The same can be said of this post and the entity that apparently is linked to it. They purport to be against Palestinian oppression, but actually support it by linking the Palestinian cause to outright lies and disinformation. And “Eye of truth” turns out to be “Eye of lies.”

Plate 11: Circulating Explicit Lies that Defame the Palestinian Cause

Source: Post found on Facebook on February 2, 2024.

The Eye of Truth Facebook page is not adverse to promoting gratuitous anti-Semitic tropes in the course of attempting to expose Israeli misdeeds. I argue that it leverages the latter to legitimate the former. The obvious engagement of Jews in Israel is leveraged to thereby link Jews to Israeli misdeeds. This is made clear in Plate 12. In this plate, the silencing of Palestinians (or perhaps their supporters) on various social media platforms is equated to a group of religious Jews and Mark Zuckerberg who is shown wearing a yarmulke. So these Jews in Facebook are linked to bans of all Palestinians as if there were not other Jews thinking other things, as if Zuckerberg’s religion explains all his actions. The irony is that this anti-Semitic trope can be found on Facebook itself, where the Eye of truth from Palestine circulates it. So, we have Zuckerberg’s company hosting anti-Semitic tropes accusing him of being a Jewish censor. Here we have hype-irony but what else can you expect from a group circulating lies while calling itself an agent of truth.

Plate 12: Anti-Semitic Trope About Jews Controlling Media

Source: “Eye of truth from Palestine,” Facebook group, accessed February 2, 2024.

Simplfying Zionism and Nazism (Yet Again)

There is no doubt that there have been major currents or dominant currents within Zionism that have been misguided, anti-democratic or oppressive. These limitations, however, are no different than similar currents within Marxism, Communism, liberalism, conservatism, or just about any other ideology one might consider. Of course there are some ideological approaches, like Fascism and the Stalinist variety of Communism, that have few if any redeeming qualities. About Stalinism, we can say that Stalin helped end fascism.

In Plate 13, we see that argument that “Zionism is a perversion of Judaism,” which is an ahistorical and false claim. The claim being made is that Judaism is comparable to “the evangelical right” or Wahhabism. This claim is totally false. The analogy being made is false. Zionism arose as a non-religious, political movement. It was a reaction to anti-Semitism. The argument made in the meme is that “to stand against Zionism is not antisemitic.” There are two problems with this argument. On the face of it, the claim is true. Yet, the argument begs the question of what Zionism is. Clearly the author of the meme does not even understand what Zionism is. Therefore, when he claims that being against Zionism is not anti-Semitic, we don’t really know what he even means. The other problem is that some anti-Zionists are actually anti-Semitic. So if an anti-Semite stands against Zionism they could actually be anti-Semitic.

The meme is also written by someone who is incoherent and illogical. The author writes: (a) Zionism is a perversion of Judaism” and also (b) Zionism is not about Judaism. This inconsistency is rather transparent. Perhaps the author means that religion is irrelevant. Yet, the way he writes this assumption is far from clear. Calling Zionism a “rival cousin” to Nazism clearly has no substance. There were racists, colonialists and even fascists among the Zionists, but not all Zionists can be so described. The author is again deflating Nazism and being ahistorical or anti-historical in his simplified potrayal of Israel. He is simplying the following realities: (a) the Netanyahu variety of Zionism is not all Zionism; (b) the portrayal of Zionism as an “original sin” does not explain when and how Israel made periodic peace concessions; (c) the actions of Hamas in blocking and limiting peace details is ignored and displaced; (d) the actions of far-right Jews in constraining more peaceful Zionists (even assassinating them) is summarily ignored. There can be very militaristic and colonial tendencies, even powerful ones in Zionism, but we find analogous tendencies in many, many countries, e.g. the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Sweden (via arms exports and capitalist dominance in the Baltics), etc.

The meme is pure propaganda designed to demonize Israel via a deconstrution of Zionism. The problem with this approach is changes to the current regime steering Israel or militarizing it requires alliances with forces inside Israel. This meme’s demonization of Israel is designed to derail such options. The deconstruction of “ethnonationalism” may be partially valid, but raises lots of questions, e.g. how anti-Semitism has partially constrained the ability to move beyond such nationalism. Some early Zionists or Jews on the left warned about the dangers of such nationalism, but the left has often failed to explain how the severe anti-Zionism and genocide of the holocaust was going to be addressed simply by having a world beyond nationalism and states.

Some Zionist tendencies blocked a cooperative, multi-cultural society. Yet, they have allies in that project among fundamentalist Palestinian or other tendencies in the Arab world (and beyond). Again, all these nuances are thrown into the garbage by various forces which are: ahistorical, perhaps Russian trolls, or trolls associated with fundamentalists or saboteurs. Some cultish parts of the left are also diffusers of idiotic memes.

Plate 13: Anti-Zionism as Pseudo-Politics

Source: Accessed from Facebook, February 15, 2024.

Slander Rents in the Face of Tragedy

A subtle and sinister meme builds on the comparison between Nazi organized ghettos and conditions in Rafah in Gaza (Plate 14). The comparisons between ghettos of Jews during the Nazi-era and conditions in Gaza are a repeated theme. The comparison has strengths and weaknesses (limitations), where the weaknesses are never acknowledged. The most problematic aspect of this post appears in its title and at the end, where it is stated, “And they said “Never Again.” While one should “never forget” the Nazi atrocities, that is not an obligation on the part of Jews (or Israelis for that matter) to be subject to idiotic memes. Here the leverage point for idiocy and anti-Semitism is the words “they said.” The idea is that the “they” are Jews or perhaps Zionists (the floating signifier invites me to think that the word is Jews, as Jews have used the expression often), are indifferent to or support the Israeli war machine’s actions in Rafah. This crass generalization leverages the Rafah tragedy to promote objectification of Jews. It’s shameful, unself-reflective crap. I am not sure who writes or designs these idiotic memes. Do they come from Russia, a badly educated North American, a troll factory financed by Iran and Hamas, or someone who is basically lacks any intelligence or moral integrity? So hard to tell.

Plate 14: Dog Whistling that Jews are Moral Idiots

Source: Accessed from Facebook, February 21, 2024.

Slander Rent to Deflate Anti-Semitism

A recurrent theme in idiotic memes is the slander rent, which can be called the “dominant signifier.” While it is true that many “cry wolf” by calling critics of Israel anti-Semites, it is also true that some of these critics invite the anti-Semitic label. A story in Reuters, October 31, 2023, noted that the “Jewish advocacy group the Anti-Defamation League reported last week that antisemitic incidents had risen by about 400% in the two weeks following the Oct. 7 attack, compared with the same period last year.” Another story by CNN, also published October 31, 2023, confirms the pattern in contrast to the idea that the Anti-Defamation League is simply confusing anti-Israel sentiment with anti-Semitism. The story reads: “The idea that Jewish Americans studying at Cornell University could so fear for their lives on their Ivy League campus in rural New York that they couldn’t even eat together in 2023 seems almost impossible to believe. Yet it’s the case after death threats were posted online. Tensions were already high after a Cornell professor said he was initially ‘exhilarated’ over the Hamas attacks at a pro-Palestinian event because the group had changed the balance of power. He later apologized for his choice of words.” The CNN story continued, by quoting FBI Director Christopher Wray who warned in late 2023 that antisemitism had reached “historic levels” in the United States. In a Senate hearing Wray stated that their “statistics would indicate that for a group that represents only about 2.4% of the American public, they account for something like 60% of all religious-based hate crimes.” 

Against this backdrop, memes claim that even the word “anti-Semitism” is meaningless (Plate 15). One wonders again whether one is witnessing utter stupidity, an effort by supporters of Netanyahu to undermine the left, or the more likely scenario of which is that the left often contains elements who are de facto saboteurs. Checking the X posts by the alleged author of this meme, the lack of nuance is not surprising. This author is a supporter of Max Blumenthal and George Galloway, two persons mired in various controversies. Galloway has praised Saddam Hussein, the genocidal murderer of Kurds. None of this means that Israel is above criticism as the state has engaged in grievous violations of human rights. Rather, two wrongs don’t make a right, something which various leftists do not appreciate. Of course, the right is populated by many engaging in double standards. The problem, however, is that many on the left or associated with these memes “turn the other way” and let “passion” replace logic.

Plate 15: Deflating Anti-Semitism as a Slander Dividend based on Opposition to Israeli State Policies

Source: Accessed from Facebook, February 25, 2024.

Dangling Modifiers as Displacement Agents: Part I

Israel’s past malfeasance is not in doubt. Like many other states, Israel engages in moral transgressions. By pointing to this plurality of malfeasances I do not mean to defend such malfeasance, but rather to point out the ubiquitous character of moral transgressions. The problem, however, is that some critics of Israel act as if Israel’s malfeasance wipes out the malfeasance of others. As I have slowly begun to notice, much too slow if I had been a bit more cognizant, the key discursive trick is to deploy dangling modifiers. These discursive tricks use pronouns or words like “they” or “it” to ambiguously encompass vastly different phenomena. These tricks are based on etymological compression in which words mean different things over time, gathering multiple meanings, and can mean different things in the present. The meme in Plate 16 tries to conceal Hamas’s role in provoking the scale of Israel’s attack, thereby leveraging Israeli malfeasance (in this case torture) to conceal Hamas’s role. So, the meme leaves ambiguous as to what the “it” means. Is “it” Zionism, right-wing policies, the “evil creation of Israel,” militarism or simply oppression and/or slaughter of Palestinians?

Plate 16: Dangling Modifiers and Leveraging One Malfeasant Actor to Displace Another

Source: Accessed from Facebook, February 27, 2024.

The most obvious counter argument to the meme is that even if Israel engaged in torture, the scale of its post-October 7, 2023 attacks clearly had something to do with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks. What is the connection? First, at the very least Israel could gain legitimacy domestically and from the U.S. elites for its initial actions. Second, even if U.S. support for Israel rhetorically or materially would depress over time, the Hamas attacks would produce a domestic consensus for a military campaign in Gaza. Third, Israel’s military/political elite would be motivated (by their logic of deterrence or credibility of deterrence) to attack Gaza and Hamas. Even if the campaign did not make sense in terms of constraining terrorism, the Hamas attack was a trigger for this military/political elite. Such persons are not convinced by left arguments or pro-Palestinians ones, as this elite has a very strong far right ideology. The meme does not address the taking of hostages which further is used to legitimate mass killing in Gaza, even if one does not justify the other. Such hostage taking added fuel to the fire of the original attacks even if Israelis themselves debate whether or not the design of the Israeli military campaign threatens hostages lives (with Israeli military killing of hostages playing a role in that debate).

Many countries support or have engaged in torture, including the United States. This is not always sufficient to trigger militarist campaigns. In the Iraq case and post-9/11 moment, torture and large scale military campaigns were certainly related. Yet, there is not always a necessary relationship between the two. How do we get a necessary relationship between torture as the precedent for mass civilian slaughter in Gaza? This requires demonizing Israel or more precisely engaging in surplus demonization (as one could argue easily that torture is demonic). By “surplus” I mean that one evil need not require or necessitate other evils and by suggesting that one necessitates the other, one creates a surplus. The surplus demonization is orchestrated by using the dangling modifier of “it.” The “it” being an oppression of Palestinians which necessitates the worst actions by Israel independent of what Hamas does. A key background fact is that Israel has killed thousands of Hamas fighters and this was part of its motivation for attacking Gaza, but not the sole motivation. Left arguments that Israel is doing more than killing Hamas fighters is patently obvious. Yet, that reality does not gainsay how the scale of attack and its timing were related to Hamas’s actions. This meme obliterates these considerations. Its endgame is to deny any capacity of Israel to ever be motivated by anything other than Palestinian oppression.

Let us assume that there is a strong current in Israel tied to oppression of Palestinians. The next question becomes what forces can constrain or promote alternatives to that oppression? Many Israelis will argue that security threats provoke their actions. Many Palestinians will argue that Israeli colonization and oppression provokes their actions. In either case, ending the cycle of violence is paramount to a solution and that can’t easily happen if Hamas’s role in the cycle is downplayed, displaced and ignored. Yet, this meme does exactly that.

Dangling Modifiers as Displacement Agents: Part II

One of the repeating impressions I am left with by the stupid memes is that they originate in a troll factory in some Hamas-controlled region or perhaps are designed by an Arab government engaging in influencer operations in the West. Facebook turns out to be an ideal platform for such operations as does the X platform. With each new stupid meme, one sees that the dominant themes seem to be: (a) deconstructing the idea of anti-Semitism, (b) deconstructing the severity of Hamas’s October 7 attacks, (c) inflating Israel’s actions to the point that Hamas’s actions can be seen more positively, (d) applying guilt and responsibility to Jews for Israel’s actions, or (e) trivializing the Holocaust and sometimes Jews so that the very foundation of any position that might be used to support Israel is eliminated pre-emptively. These memes are the mirror of Israeli supporters’ excesses as when they demonize Muslims, Arabs, or anything concerning Palestinians. The process of dangling modification at the word level, using the dangling modifiers of “it” and “they,” sometimes takes another form, at the level of an entire expression (Plate 17).

Plate 17: Dangling Modification and Potential Terrorist-Washing

Source: Accessed from Facebook, February 29, 2024.

The meme is reductionist. It was not those three people who murdered 11 million Muslims (although they were not engaging in murder simply or even because the persons were Muslims, assuming that 11 million is even an accurate figure). It was a larger system of institutions which persons in these countries which the three presidents served and helped to reproduce. The implication of the meme is either: (a) that you can kill a lot of people and not be called terrorist or (b) that they should be called terrorist, but are not. Choice (a) is absurd or irrelevant. Why irrelevant? For the same reason as (b) is irrelevant. The issue here is that there are other bad things that kill a lot of persons besides terrorism. What things? Militarism. So they should be called “militarists” and not “terrorists.” Militarism can involve “terrorism,” but it is not the same thing. Furthermore, the meme seems to be about deconstructing the idea of terrorism (at least that’s my impression), not just hypocrisy. It’s not about deconstructing hypocrisy because these persons were militarists and not terrorists, i.e. they had a whole militarized state behind them. So the impression is left that the meme is about promoting the idea that lots of killing can be done and you don’t have to be called a “terrorist.”

When you kill with a whole state behind you, then you are not a “terrorist.” An exception can be the Nazi state or the ISIS state. Yet, while both engaged in terror, calling these entities terrorists underplays the amount of damage in the Nazi case and perhaps that of the ISIS state as well. The U.S. government has certainly killed more persons than terrorists were capable of. So “nobody should call” the three presidents terrorists as their projection of violence was significantly more than can be achieved by terrorist actions which are often orchestrated by individuals and not groups. The October 7th incident was a combined terrorist/militarist action. Its classification raises interesting questions. Hamas ran a quasi-state in Gaza. Yet, most of its victims in the October 7th attacks were civilians, not military targets. So, Hamas’s attacks might not be called simply terrorism, but did involve terrorism. Hamas indirectly had its billion dollars funded quasi state behind it, as well as indirect to direct backing from Iran. It’s a kind of hybrid entity, similar to ISIS. Yet the Hamas quasi state is far weaker than ISIS was or certainly weaker than the US warfare state. At a certain point the issue is not even the distinction between “terrorist” and “militarist” but rather the underlying moral message that is being conveyed. The meme in question appears to downplay the idea that terrorists are bad. Its message about the moral culpability of the three presidents is tied to reductionism and displacing more analytical concepts.

The meme also exaggerates the number of deaths for which Clinton and Obama are responsible for and it’s not clear where the figure 11 million even comes from. I did a Google search and it yielded an X tweet (Plate 18). The author is identified there as being linked to the “Council of Muslim Theologians, South Africa Kwa Zulu Nat.” The poster has 16.9K followers, enough to promote memes on Facebook with some currency. Obama’s drone program did not kill even hundreds of thousands of persons according to one source. Another assessment confirms that the numbers in the meme are inflated. I also found another post which reads: “A self-media person named Mr. Sun Ning posted a headline on today’s headlines that the three US presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton have invaded nine countries in 23 years and killed 11 million civilians.”

Plate 18: Three Presidents Said to Kill 11 Million

Source: Accessed from the X platform on February 29, 2024.

Repressive Tolerance of Hamas

The Hamas-friendly nature of these posts is further confirmed in Plate 19. It repeats the tried and true platform of leveraging Israeli malfeasance to support some other evil, in this case burnishing Hamas’s image. The post is apparently by Richard Medhurst, a British journalist. In fact, it matches a tweet sent on February 28, 2024, with 527.2 K views. It was liked by 24,000 and re-tweeted by 8,300. On the X platform, Medhurst recounts numerous atrocities and human rights violations by Israel. Yet, it’s rendered meaningless by his singular act of moral relativism which reduces his credibility to less than zero. His implicit message is that Hamas attacks on Israeli lives are acceptable. He even leverages British nationalism (regarding what Hamas has not done to “us”) to make what appear to be “militant” arguments which end up defending Hamas. This represents a further sign of the left’s moral implosion. The greater Israel’s campaign of killing, the more space it generates for far-left repressive tolerance of Hamas. One can see history evaporating before our eyes as some repeat nonsensical, one dimensional arguments as they appear to ring true just because they take a side. Truth as sports.

Plate 19: Repressive Tolerance of Hamas

Source: Accessed from Facebook on March 1, 2024.

Accelerating Horror Leads to False Comparisons

I tried to argue that Gessen was letting a genie out of the bottle by promoting comparisons between Israel and the Nazis, without a vociferous explanation of differences. Further evidence for her mistake appears in Plates 20, 21 and 22. These comparisons exist, but they suffer from limitations. On Facebook debate about these comparisons leads to verbal abuse, anti-Zionist-shaming and slander against those raising questions about the limits of comparisons. It is a sign of a decadent left which is not motivated by truth, but rather vicitimization-identification at all costs. Again the formula is to leverage a large scale tragedy, with perhaps 30,000 dead (if not more), in order to win social media contests where the message is that “I am holier than thou” by using as extreme language as possible. The group featured is part of a Covid-health-effects denying cult, as in their complaint that “during the coronavirus pandemic, the Israeli government [did] not allow people to pray in groups.” Yet, they are useful foils for those circulating lunatic simplifications. While Plate 20 at least recognizes that the Israeli flag has two bars, one below and the other above the star of David, by Plate 21 this nuance is eliminated altogether as the artist simply repeats the floating “You” signifier which is either (a) anti-Semitic or (b) engaged in surplus demonization of all Israelis, including Netanyahu opponents. Plate 22, equates Netanyahu’s crimes with Hitler’s, i.e. he is taking over from Hitler. This meme leverages Israeli atrocities to deflate Hitler’s crimes and eradicate valid historical comparisons.

Plate 20: Leveraging Horror in Gaza to Dilute Nazi Crimes

Source: Accessed from Facebook on March 4, 2024.

Plate 21: More Israel Comparisons to Nazis

Source: Accessed from Facebook, February 19, 2024.

Plate 22: Netanyahu as Heir to Hitler

Source: Accessed from Facebook, May 20, 2024.

The Selective Erasure of Victims and the Eradication of History

A consistent trend in bullshit memes is the idea that Israel’s history on October 7th, 2023 does not count because of past Israeli transgressions (Plate 23). Note that the author of the meme does not suggest that we should also count the history before October 7th, but something more sinister. This is made clear when the idea is conveyed that Israelis have no right to defense. The author of the meme claims that “Israel has no history” which is code word for Israelis don’t have the right to exist. This approach as well as the deconstruction of any form of Zionism means that there is only one set of victims. If you take that starting point, you essentially are creating a logic which bolsters the idea that negotiations are impossible and all will be solved by armed struggle and any form of resistance is acceptable. Why? Because Israelis can never be victims, so the choice of tactics is now open to “anything goes.” You could oppose Israel by non-terrorist means, but this meme takes Hamas out of the picture and thereby lends credence to the idea that we have something consistent with the repressive tolerance of Hamas. That’s underlined by the “Israel has no history line” and the idea that there is no legitimate defense of victims.

Plate 23: Erasing Israeli Victimhood Status and Oblique Legitimation of Hamas

Source: Accessed from Facebook, March 6, 2024.

There are several problems with this meme. First, the author does not know how to use contractions in English, e.g. didn’t and can’t, although they are in fact engaging in “cant” or something on that plane: Second, while Israel has engaged in such repetitive malfeasance and occupation, the narrative here leaves out the role of Hamas, suicide bombers and rockets in triggering the cycle of violence as well as all the persons killed by terrorist attacks, with parallel lists appearing here and here. Third, the author argues that Israel is not able to even logically defend itself which has serious moral/political problems. Basically, the author suggests that all civilians in Israel have no right to defense and should therefore be victims and that terrorist violence is legitimate.

This perspective links deconstruction of Israel to legitimation of victimhood for an entire population, in which Arab Israelis have also been victims. Essentially, the author while deconstructing occupation and Israeli violence is also supporting the cycle of violence as well as displacement of terrorist crimes. Terrorism is likely to be used when other means for change appear to fail. Yet, such memes do little beyond (a) bolstering sentiments and (b) legitimating far-right ideology which can easily exploit the limit of such memes. The author of the meme might do better by arguing that the repeated cycle of violence and occupation warrant an alternative approach to both militarism/occupation and terrorism. Yet, the author overreaches and thereby perpetuates the lunacy we are seeing. There is very little authenticity in this meme, but there are spelling errors.

Memes are Not Part of Proactive Politics, But Simply Discursive Nihilism and War Propaganda

Increasingly, the pattern of memes reveals that they really are not about (proactive) politics and reality, i.e. they are not just about representing a distorted view of reality. Rather, they are about obliterating reality so that it is epistemologically impossible to introduce nuanced ideas or any deep idea whatsoever. The idea is to demonize opponents so that diplomacy is regulated to an irrelevant place. This implicit agenda fits well into the Hamas agenda. The point of the meme increasingly appears to be the utilization of passions as fuels for symbolic capital that demonizes the enemy in a propaganda war (Plate 24). One can listen to outrages against humanity in starving children, cut offs of support for aid organization, and other moral transgressions in Gaza and then be confronted by a meme which does not really care about solutions. The impression left is that persons who hate Israel will now harvest followers for further hate. There may be people who have good reasons to hate the Israeli state, but their hatred has zero value added for solving militarism, occupation and slaughter. It just perpetuates the cycle of violence and even helps legitimate it. If Israeli leaders have not supported deep diplomacy in good faith, this meme celebrates the idea of no real solutions possible.

Plate 24: Absurd Memes that Reveal that Solutions are Unimportant

Source: Accessed from Facebook, March 6, 2024.

From Deflating Hitler’s Crimes to Blatant Anti-Semitism

While the left has published its fair share of nonsense, the far right and various wacko nationalists always managed to do them one better in sheer idiocy. A case in point can be seen in Plate 25 where anti-Semitism is normalized as part of a critique of Donald Trump and Israel. Here Trump is given a Jewish last name a string of false assumptions are made. First, not all Jews support Trump and many hate Trump and would never vote for him or support him in any way, shape or form. Second, not all Jews support Israel’s campaign in Gaza. Third, many orthodox Jews don’t support Israel or Trump, even if many do. Fourth, the idea that you can mock Jews as a group and not be called out for anti-Semitism in the 21st Century is pathetic.

Plate 25: Blatant Anti-Semitism

Source: Accessed on Facebook, March 9, 2024

Extensions of the Hamas Public Relations Campaign

Another person uses selective quotes about the human side of Hamas to filter out the evil components. Consider the case of Chen Almog-Goldstein whose story appeared in The Guardian on March 3, 2024 under the title, “‘We were constantly in terror’: Israeli hostage tells of captivity in Gaza,” her story was branded as someone suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome as seen in Plate 26. The meme selects out the horror and uses nuance to deflate the truth. The Guardian article begins as follows: “Chen Almog-Goldstein refuses to forget her eldest daughter’s last moments. Yam, 20, was gasping for breath, having been shot in the face by Hamas gunmen, who minutes earlier had killed her father.” The apparent source of this meme, MintPressNews.com asks its readers to “Help us fight the decline of Internet Freedom.” By this they must mean the decline of the freedom to circulate bullshit memes.

Plate 26: Report Half the Truth

Source: Accessed from Facebook March 9, 2024.

Fake News Entrepreneurs in the Middle East Nations who Want to Deflate the Holocaust

As I have suspected, there are fake news entrepreneurs based in the Middle East who circulate some of these memes (although the United States and Europe are also contenders as they have their own homegrown anti-Semites). According to Canadian Jewish News in a post authored by Mark Mietkiewicz published August 23, 2017 the quote in Plate 27 can be traced to an article published by “a Dubai-based website called AWD News and is false. Internet debunking website snopes.com says AWD ‘doesn’t have more than a nodding acquaintance with facts, instead playing on nationalistic fantasy and conspiracy theory to create alarming (and thus clickable and shareable) stories.'”

Plate 27: Deflate the Nazis and the Holocaust

Source: Accessed from Facebook March 18, 2024.

Deploying Biblical References to Test Jews as Candidates for Being Terrorists

At first glance some memes appear anything but controversial. Yet, the architecture of a meme, its core and foundational design, is almost usually based on the formula of linking truths to lies and taking moralistic ideas and linking them to some kind of elicit hatred, objectification and gross prejudice. Here someone named Rashid (Plate 28) is very clever. He writes a meme that can be understood on multiple levels, very much like the kind of drawings that appear to be a rabbit when viewed one way and a duck another. Yet, Rashid’s meme has more than two levels.

The first level is simply innocuous, nice people are not thugs. A group chosen by God would not then kill a lot of innocent persons. That does not sound offensive.

The second level suggests that the actor behind mass deaths (be they Jews or Israelis) are not “God’s chosen people” because they killed thousands, but we know that the actors behind the violence are Israelis (most or many of whom are Jews). What contextualizes their actions? They usually do not kill in the capacity of being Jews. They kill in the capacity of: (a) retaliating against a terrorist attack or to eliminate terrorists, (b) servicing a warfare state or (c) engaging in gratuitous slaughter. If some kill because they think Jews own all of Palestine and Gazans are in the way, this idea is not simply coming from a Jewish identity but rather some other world view shaped by nationalism, chauvinism, etc. in the form of a person who happens to be a Jew or who appropriates Jewish material in the process of acting out in this way. So the meme could be saying that either these Jews or Israelis are not Jews. Most Israelis in the Israeli military are Jews, but the meme suggests on the contrary that they are not. And when does anyone ever claim that Hamas members are not Muslims even if most Muslims are not members of Hamas? So the meme can be suggesting that Jews are not even Jews. That’s absurd. The bible provides for self-defense, even if actions in Gaza are clearly beyond self-defense. Is the mistaken application of this principle making the actors behind the application non-Jews? I don’t think so.

The third level is just more anti-Semitic posturing as it places Jewish identity into an inquiry of militarism involving different kinds of persons who happen to be Jews in a given country and responding in part of a given historical episode. Here we see “God’s chosen people” as a substitute for Jews, as the expression is attached to Jews having a covenant with God. So then the meme suggests Jews would not kill 32,000 persons in six months. But why is the very association of Jews with potential acts of mass killing regarded as a legitimate question? Consider this expression: “Muslims wouldn’t kill 1,000+ persons in one day, but terrorists would.” The expression associates Muslims with potential acts of terrorism as Muslims, but then rejects it. But by placing Muslims into the equation, it legitimates an empirical inquiry of the question. If the expression said, “men would not kill 30,000, but terrorists would,” it is suggesting an inquiry as to whether or not men as men would kill 30,000. This would be a pure essentialist nonsense inquiry. So why is the inquiry even being made? We know that the killers are men anyway, even if they don’t kill in the capacity of being men. Some might argue that militarists are often men, but Jews as Jews are not killers. Israelis are Israelis when they kill, not reducible to Jews. Most Israelis are Jews, but not all, and even when Jewish frames are used to reference actions, even the meme suggests that the frames are not legitimate. But, it makes this argument in a larger context which is hardly helpful (see below) and problematic.

The fourth level has something to do with statistics and how they are deployed to reference the combatants. As of April 5, 2024, OCHA claimed that at least 33,000 Palestinians were killed and who are these persons? Some of them are Hamas soldiers who can be classified as terrorists. Terrorists when killed by a state are killed by militarists, militaries or military forces, not “terrorists.” The civilians killed are also killed by these state actors. Militarists who kill tens of thousands of innocents commit acts of terror, but are not terrorists. Essentially the meme does uses mass killings to gloss over the role of actual terrorists in the equation because it fulfills the requirement of pseudo-postcolonialism, i.e. there are always only one set of victims and the role of the left is to chose and validate that one set at the exclusion of others, with the others having to be demonized, objectified and toyed with. Hamas called their action on October 7th, 2023 a “military action” or “resistance.” It was rather terrorism carried out by terrorists. But now the terrorists are the Israelis. There is terror going on, by both sides, but this meme brings religious identity into the equation for no good reason, unless we assume only the first interpretation of the meme which is not the only possible or even logical reading of the meme. The Gaza casualty statistics organized by Hamas have been supported by some scholars, while challenged by others.

Plate 28: Putting Jews to the Terrorist Test

Source: Accessed from Facebook March 21, 2024.

Anti-Zionism based on Genetics Propaganda

In countries like Sweden, Muslims are told by far-right party leaders that they as migrants are intruders, criminals, and threats. Sometimes these leaders are more subtle and suggest that Islamic forces or some other identifier can be characterized this way. Muslims are treated as a “foreign element” that does not belong. The same ideology is used by parts of the left to characterize Israelis as a “foreign element” that does not belong to either (a) Israel or (b) the Middle East. I have recounted this meme in Plate 11 above. What has often accompanied the defense of such idiotic memes is the argument that Jews living in Israel have no links to ancient Hebrews, which takes the form of its own meme (Plate 29). There are two principal sources for this argument. First, a study done by Eran Elhaik, based at the Department of Mental Health, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Second, a book authored by Shlomo Sand, entitled The Invention of the Jewish People, published by Verso in 2020.

Plate 29: DNA Legacies as Left or Anti-Zionism Propaganda

Source: Accessed from Facebook, March 30, 2024.

In a review in Forbes entitled “Israeli Researcher Challenges Jewish DNA links to Israel, Calls Those Who Disagree ‘Nazi Sympathizers,'” May 16, 2013, Jon Entine wrote about Elhaik’s study as follows: “The current brouhaha arises over a recent study by Eran Elhaik and is accompanied by his personal attacks on more mainstream scientists who have eviscerated his work. In the face of overwhelming evidence from dozens of studies over twenty years from geneticists and historians around the world, Elhaik is aggressively stumping on behalf of his belief that most Jews trace their seminal ancestry not to the Middle East but to the Caucuses and Eastern Europe.”

Another study by Harry Ostrer and Karl Skorecki, “The population genetics of the Jewish people,” published in Human genetics, 132(2), 119-127 states: “Up to 6 million Jews are thought to have resided in the Roman Empire, comprising 10% of the total population (Fishberg 1911). In the period immediately preceding the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE, adherents to Judaism were located throughout the Roman Empire, to the west, and extended into the Arsacid Empire in the east (Isaac 1998). These Jews are likely to have been the ancestors of the subsequent Jewish Diaspora populations that lived in the Middle East (“Mizrahi”), Europe (“Ashkenazi and Sephardic”) and North Africa (Baron 1952).”

Entine describes Sand’s study as “a book panned by both historians and geneticists.” Michael Berkowitz, an historian at the University College London wrote: “The shining example of a counter-narrative, which Sand sees as decisive, is the ‘Khazar’ theory, asserting that European Jewry was largely the consequence of a mass conversion in the 8th century. As much as some aspects of this episode have been substantiated, the scale of conversion suggested by its proponents is highly questionable, and the theory is still too reliant on supposed similarities between ‘Khazars’ and European Jews. But it remains an extremely attractive theory to those who maintain that there is no connection whatsoever between Jewry, historically, and Palestine. This is one of numerous segments of the book that can be easily picked apart. “

While DNA legacies have been used by certain Zionists (often towards the right of the spectrum) to falsely make exclusive territorial claims over Israel/Palestine, anti-Zionists (often towards the left of the spectrum) have also sunk to the same level by suggesting that Jews have no historic link to Israel/Palestine, another form of exclusivity. Both of these right and left factions use DNA without any complementary discourse to make political arguments revealing yet again the isomorphism of elements of right and left stupidity, arrogance and knowledge resistance.

An alternative to this isomorphic post-truth stupidity comes from the reconstructionist perspective. This perspective builds on how one might use DNA legacies to show a cooperative solution to the conflict. Patricia Cohen, in a November 23, 2009 review of Sand’s book in The New York Times wrote: “Consider, for instance, Professor Sand’s assertion that Palestinian Arab villagers are descended from the original Jewish farmers. Nearly a century ago, early Zionists and Arab nationalists touted the blood relationship as the basis of a potential alliance in their respective struggles for independence. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Israel’s longest-serving president, made this very argument in a book they wrote together in 1918. The next year, Emir Feisal, who organized the Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire and tried to create a united Arab nation, signed a cooperation agreement with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that declared the two were ‘mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people.'”

Part of the anti-Zionist camp is trying to undermine the word “conflict” as a descriptor of present-day actions by reducing Israel’s current actions to the legacy of a settler colonial state. Unpacking this critique requires a more detailed analysis. What can be said at this juncture in the following: a) the word “settler” seems to be a combination of the word “migrant” and “exclusive occupier,” b) yet the left can’t in all honesty deconstruct all migrants, because many are refugees fleeing persecution, leading us to examine the issue of c) whether Zionists were of necessity “exclusive” in their presence. Item c) is tied to a narrative about how to characterize contemporary Israeli actions as natural Zionism, right-wing Zionism, hegemonic Zionism, Zionism as influenced by a warfare state, fascism, a state triggered by a cycle of violence related to militarism and occupation of some combination. The answer is too complicated to unpack here, but Berkowitz writes that Sand underestimated “the radicalization of Zionist Revisionism (the right-wing, anti-socialist, militaristic branch of the movement) during the Second Word War, as recently illuminated by Colin Shindler, and too easily subsumes their luminaries, Joseph Klausner and Vladimir Jabotinsky, into the mainstream.”  

Militarism, occupation and mass killing are not simply derivative of an internal drive within states as critical assessments of Russian motivations in Ukraine show, even if Russia engages in terror against Ukraine. In the Russian case we have a militaristic state engaging in terror that was provoked, despite whatever past abuses Russia was engaged in. The Israeli case is similar. Just as part of Ukraine wanted to join NATO for what it felt were good but tragic motivations, Hamas may have similarly engaged in its provocation of Israel on October 7, 2023. This analysis does not justify Israel’s military campaign, nor that of Russia in Ukraine. Rather, it also does not justify Hamas or Ukraine’s right-wing nationalist ambition to join NATO.

The counter-argument is that Palestinians resisted Zionist intrusions to eliminate them from their own lands. I would argue that such resistance per se (or as a principle) is not anti-Semitic but part of legitimate national, self-defense. The problem, however, is that such resistance has spilled into (a) a cycle of violence, (b) overlapped with terrorism, and (c) implicates a Hamas which terrorizes its own population as well as mass murder. The Palestinians and Israelis who sought an alternative to these problems of (a), (b) and (c), are hardly brought into focus by the elaboration of the counter-argument when it is laid out is certain ways. The way it is often laid out is in a purely tribalistic fashion which is at the expense of any viable and equitable solution.

From Tragedy to Farce

The bullshit meme must always negotiate between (a) deconstructing Israel, Zionism and Israeli state transactions and (b) verging into explicit anti-Semitism. Some posters have a more sophisticated idea of how to distinguish the two (or pretend to distinguish). Among others, the ability to make any such distinction is less likely. Of course, one cannot generalize about any country, but the quality of the hegemonic space can differ by region. Some individuals, living in regions where Jew-hatred is the norm, feel more liberty to express this hatred by grafting it into their deconstructions of Israel and Zionism, etc. In Plate 30, we see what I call “pure anti-Semitism.” The meme makes reference to “synagogues of Satan” and purports to reveal biblical secrets and was posted without disapproval in the Facebook group, “Anti-Imperialism.”

Plate 30: Pure Anti-Semitism: Case I

Source: Accessed from Facebook, April 20, 2024.

This meme must be read on two levels. On the most superficial level, the meme uses reference to Jewish cultural institutions in a gross way and combines that with the devil sewing the Israeli flag. The meme explains nothing but the crude idiocy of its designer and links anti-imperialist ideas with anti-Semitism. On a deeper level, the meme is part of a gaslighting flytrap. The left continually says that just because you criticize Israel and Zionism does not make you anti-Semitic. While true, anti-Semites can exploit that argument by covering their anti-Semitism with anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist statements. The meme in question does this. In addition, critics of left anti-Semitism are often accused of being apologists for Israeli genocide. When their bullshit is criticized, defenders of idiotic memes will argue that Israel’s defenders always say that criticism of Israel and Zionism are accused to being anti-Semitic. So the meme provokes and is actually used to defame critics of anti-Semitism and gaslight them.

William Korey, in “The Origins and Development of Soviet Anti-Semitism: An Analysis,” published in Slavic Review, 31(1), pages 111-135, writes: “Classical Marxism, in contrast to various forms of Utopian socialism, anarchism, and syndicalism, treated anti-Semitism with utter contempt. The German Social Democratic leader August Bebel summed up the prevailing attitude of classical Marxism when he dubbed anti-Semitism the ‘socialism of fools.’ Lenin was even sharper in his denunciation: ‘Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews,’ he cried in March 1919.”

The level of idiocy at the “grassroots” level should never be under-estimated. One supporter of the meme wrote, the following:

Is our democracy well served by empowering such idiots, even over the most capitalist and militaristic warriors who rule countries like the United Kingdom and the United States? Would such persons make such blatant and idiotic statements (leaving Donald Trump aside who himself is never so explicit)?

Another form of pure anti-Semitism is designed to gaslight Jews by denying them their symbols (Plate 31). These memes are circulated by persons who use the bible to carry out political vendettas and persons claiming to belong to solidarity groups. It is unclear to me why a solidarity group with Palestine has members who feel compelled to deconstruct Jewish symbols other than sadism and bad training in deconstruction by the educational system. The post was allowed by the administrators of a group called “Birmingham Stop The War Coalition (Official). I wrote the administrators to remove the meme.

Plate 31: Pure Anti-Semitism: Case II

Source: Accessed from Facebook, April 25, 2024.

The left has argued that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. I have concluded that they can be terribly wrong. There are several reasons why. First, “Zionism” is a floating signifier. It could mean anything from a hegemonic Zionism or political consensus which advances repressive policies to the very existence or maintenance of Israel. Second, by blaming the Gaza tragedy on Zionism we can neglect several key factors: (1) The fact that not all Zionists are the same, think the same, act the same or have the same responsibilities, with some Zionists supporting Arab-Jewish cooperation; (2) The fact that linking the Nakba or atrocities by Israelis to the current Gaza conflict conflates and reduces all Israelis to demonic agents when in fact not all Israelis have been demonic agents and some parts of the Palestinian camp have been demonic agents, i.e. Hamas, a terrorist organization that slaughters persons; (3) The fact that demonizing Zionists is used to displace the logic of the cycle of violence, in which it is not just one party that victimizes another party; (4) The fact that the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict cant’ be reduced to Israeli victimization, but involves other elements; (5) The fact that the counter-factual argument of the Israelis having more power can’t explain how particular far-right factions within Israeli are empowered by Hamas’s campaigns of suicide bombing and murder; (6) The fact that despite Israeli transgressions past or present, the Israeli state will not dissolve and has to be dealt with (when making peace treaties or by being subjected to pressure to promote a Palestinian state, etc.), and thus demonizing the State of Israel does not lead to any solutions whereas in contrast pressuring a particular regime, policy space, leadership group, etc. could lead to solutions, i.e. the Zionist frame is too macro and is deployed usually by persons who live in states that can similarly be classified as demonic during their life course based on the criteria of: (a) bombing civilians, (b) assisting in the bombing of civilians, or (c) repressive tolerance of or aid to Nazis, NATO or other forms of militarism and repression.

The left correctly surmised that “just because you are critical of Israel does not mean you are anti-Semitic.” Then, they ratcheted that up to “just because you are anti-Zionist does not mean you are anti-Semitic.” This proved to be a fatal flaw because it potentially leads to various problems.

The new formulation led to the following outcomes: First, gaslighting Jews that they were wrong about the need for a state for Jews–an idea which is belied by the Holocaust, by Europe’s failed to protect Jews, because Arab states persecuted Jews with pogroms, etc. The phrase “ethno-state” conflates a problem of political inequality with the larger issue of a need for a state dedicated to protecting Jews. Every Arab nation, Afghanistan and Iran is similarly an “ethno- state” more or less and when one realizes that one sees the irrelevance of the formulation. The protection of Jews need not require persecuting non-Jews. This conflation of non-Jew persecution with Zionism is made by superficial and revisionist (as in tossing the truth into the garbage) thinkers who don’t understand the design of early left Zionism or even its contemporary realities.

Second, many critics of Israel believe that: “Just because I criticize Israel does not mean that I am not anti-Semitic.” This is what I call “self-gaslighting.” You deceive yourself and lie to yourself about your Jew-hate because you identify exposure of this truth to support for Israeli bombing or some such nonsense. This second formulation turned out to be untrue as is self-evident in Plate 32. The poster of Plate 32 uses constant references to the Star of David in an anti-Semitic fashion, probably because he reduces that to the Israeli state. But even here he is terribly misguided because it is a particular part of that state, the dominant bloc, that engages in mass murder. And even if all major Israeli parties backed the Israeli military’s campaign, their consensus was partly rooted in Hamas’s murder campaigns lasting decades. So the anti-Zionist campaign potentially is partly about gaslighting about Hamas’s role.

Plate 32: Accelerated Anti-Semitism based on Self-Gaslighting

Source: Accessed from Facebook, May 15, 2024.

Finally, the more I see memes like Plate 32, the more I am convinced that we should have a Jewish state which should also should grant Palestinians or Arab Israelis equal rights and power in a way that protects various groups’ rights. The poster of Plate 32, also posted Plate 29. Perhaps he thought that debunking Jewish DNA links to Israel would help undermine the state he believed responsible for the Nakba, with Israelis all foreign invading colonizers or some such thing. The use of DNA ideas to eradicate the need for a state to protect Jews is just idiotic. Israel does engage in actions that trigger waves of anti-Semitism, but so too does propaganda by educational and media organizations throughout the Middle East and parts of the left and right in Europe and North America. Plate 32 tells us as much, if not more.

Movements as Discursive Silos Engaged in Floating Signifier Anti-Semitism

There are a set of complex and linked problems we can identify through readings of meme artefacts. These linked problems include: (a) solipsistic movement framing and (b) floating signifier anti-Semitism. In Plate 33 we see a burglar who enters a house. The burglar is identified as either Jewish and/or Israeli depending on your point of view. The burglar is at least Jewish in the sense that the person, most likely male, speaks “Hebrew” and there is a reference to the idea of some settlers that they can take property and space previously occupied by Palestinians. The kippah has a star of David which signifies Jews and/or Israelis. According to @MuslimMemeGirl, it apparently refers to Israelis alone or maybe settlers (I don’t know). For the solipsistic movement circles of this group, the fact that the kippah signifies Jews and not necessarily Israelis is simply part of a slander tax. The meme is a deconstruction of settlers using religious references to take property. Yet, it leaves open the possibility of interpreting the meme as a mockery of Hebrew, Jewish symbols and Jews. The meme does not try to dispel this interpretation, however. As a result, it displays “floating signifier anti-Semitism,” which is a meme that could mean anything, potentially anti-Semitism as the meme is consistent with tropes of Jews as thieves, criminals and morally abhorrent. The solipsistic movement framing means the meme is based on those who pledge a code of agreement to just about anything said within the boundaries of the social circle and those who disagree be damned. Ironically, the consensus code itself is analogous to a religious belief system that has its own rules, modes of conduct and shared rituals of interpretation and circulation. If an anti-Semite can read a meme as validating their anti-Semitism, then we could argue such memes potentially constitute “floating signifier anti-Semitism.” This form of anti-Semitism is harder to criticize, with deniability a core element, an evolution in memes which is a bit like the way pesticides wear off and cease to function based on the resistance of the insects to the chemicals as natural selection advances breeding among the most resistant stains of the insect.

Plate 33: Solipsistic Movement Framing Linking to Floating Signifier Anti-Semitism

Source: Accessed from Facebook May 26, 2024.

When one tries to learn more about @MuslimMemeGirl, one discovers that the authorities left at the X platform have suspended this account (Plate 34).

Plate 34: Disqualified Meme Producer

Source: Accessed from X, May 26, 2024.

By late May and early June a new meme to support floating signifier anti-Semitism emerged. The meme was circulated by various Swedes, in the example shown in Plate 35 the heading contains the words “Krossa Sionismen,” or Swedish for “crush” or “smash” Zionism. The meme was apparently circulated by an individual at a Chicano organization in Illinois. As of June 10, 2024, this meme received 2,500 likes or other assignations but was shared by 8,700 persons.

The meme argues that there is no such thing as a “Holy Land,” indicating that the poster either (a) has no respect for the beliefs of three religions: Judaism, Christianity or Islam or (b) does not believe in religious claims for territories in Israel/Palestine/Jerusalem. The context is unclear other than what appears in the next two sentences. Here we see that the meme author believes that there are no “chosen people,” which refers to the idea that in the Jewish religion Jews are referred to as a “chosen people.” But what does that expression mean? Does it mean that Jews believes themselves morally superior to others?

Plate 35: Anti-Semitic Dog Whistle Linked to Liberatory Rhetoric

Source: Accessed from Facebook, June 10, 2024.

Salime Leyla Gürkan has written a review of Reuven Firestone’s book, Who are the Real Chosen People? The Meaning of Chosenness in Judaism, Christianity and Islam published by Skylight Paths Publishing in 2008. Gürkan explains the concept found in Firestone’s book as follows. He writes that in Firestone’s view the idea of being chosen or “chosenness” originated as what Firestone refers to “as a natural part of old tribal religion” within the “the ancient Near East, where, as a matter of fact, not only the people of Israel, but all other peoples had entertained the idea of having a covenant relationship with, i.e., being chosen by, their national gods. As for the special or unique position of the religion of Israel in this matter, Firestone attributes it to the fact that it was the only monotheistic religion at the time. Thus, he argues that even after Israel’s tribal concept of God was eventually transformed into a universal monotheism, the notion of chosenness was still retained by the people of Israel ‘as a convenient and effective strategy’ (p. 26) to maintain their unique, i.e., monotheistic, religious system as opposed to the polytheistic ways of other peoples. Such an interpretation makes the idea of an eternal divine chosenness, at best, a fantasy. Here one should remember Baruch Spinoza’s interpretation of chosenness, which can be formulated as ‘chosenness for the people, not the people for chosenness’.”

Essentially, the idea of being “chosen” has to do with a relationship between a people and their god, rather than the idea that some people are morally or politically superior to others.

Levi A. Olan in his essay, “The doctrine of the chosen people reaffirmed,” published in  Judaism, 29(4), 1980, pages 461-468, notes that Professor Mordecai Kaplan omitted “any reference to” being chosen “from the Reconstructionist prayed book which he arranged.” So even reference to the idea is not universal among all Jews. Olan says that Kaplan was influenced by cultural anthropology “which taught that every group in the world is unique and autonomous in its culture and value system.” Olan links Kaplan to deconstructing a claim of moral superiority: “The Jewish claim to chosenness violates that nature and significance of all groups, and is an unacceptable piece of arrogance today.” Of course, this deconstruction accepts the premise of a certain view of the concept of “chosen-ness.”

In contrast to this premise Zalman Kastel, in an essay published in Tikkun called “Jewish ‘Chosenness,'” explains the views of Maimonides, also known as Rabbi Moses ben Maimon. This Jewish thinker emphasized “that it is an individual’s knowledge and motivations that are key to one’s spiritual standing. “Every person can be righteous like Moses…Every single person from all inhabitants of the world whose spirit guides him and whose intellect leads him to understand, to separate himself and to stand before God…to walk straight as God created him…he is sanctified [with the greatest holiness], ‘Holy of Holies‘…”  So the very premise of the idea of the “chosen people” as morally superior is explicitly rejected and involves no arrogance” whatsoever.

In light of Jewish persecution, Olan explains that it was “not difficult…to understand the reticence of Jews about their role as God’s chosen people and their confining it to the privacy of Jewish liturgy,” i.e. a standard practice was not to leverage this concept and project it outwards (even if others did so). Olan describes how the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn “argued that the Torah was revealed to Israel alone because it contained practical commandments and laws which Jews alone are required to observe,” i.e. here we see a sense of chosen-ness as duty and not moral superiority. Most importantly, Olan separates the idea of chosen-ness from Zionist ideas. He writes: “The first serious challenge to the doctrine of chosenness arose in the nineteenth century. Nationalist movements were breaking out in many European countries and ushering in a period of political and social turmoil as well as a fanatic era of brutal pogroms. This development led some Jews to propose the creation of a national home of their home. Its proponents viewed the situation for a new-born secular perspective, divorced from the Jewish religious heritage and its hope for messianic redemption.”

In any case, what is relevant here is not whether or not someone believes Jews to be a chosen people. The expression in the meme merely stands as a dog whistle to refer to Jews and the Jewish religion and is linked to Zionism by the poster, not Islam or Christianity. The poster may be referring to fundamentalist Christian ideas of Zionism, but that’s a low probability interpretation and in any case in meme-speak I believe the default interpretation is the one that is most associated with popular usage and the context provided by a juxtaposition with other sentences.

What is objectionable here is the juxtaposition of a dog whistle for Jews and the idea that Jews somehow believe that every person is not of “distinctly unique value.” And like other memes reviewed here, one can try to gaslight critics of the meme in various ways by bringing up how right-wing Zionists believe that they have the rights to occupy the West Bank and other similar arguments. Does the meme suggest that one should not occupy the West Bank if one is an Israeli or Jewish settler? Clearly not. One defender of this meme suggested that I was making a lot of assumptions, but to defend the meme he himself brought up a rather arbitrary interpretation or simply valorized and legitimated the ideas of right-wing Zionists even as he tried to debunk them.

Let me repeat, anyone on Facebook can share their (often tedious, self-serving) views on religion if they so wish. But now we see that signifiers for Jews are linked to false claims that all Jews don’t believe in peoples’ equal worth. It is true that some Israeli or Jewish settlers in the West Bank use the concept of the “chosen people” to justify their presence and claims to the land there. Yet, the meme is not criticizing that explicitly. Rather it is going after the idea of a “chosen people” itself (which is linked to Jews) and then linking that to the idea that people are not of equal worth. The author of the meme could have written: “It is a false narrative to use the idea of Jews as a ‘chosen people’ to justify settlements in the West Bank because that would be an inaccurate interpretation of Jewish teachings.” Or better, “Jewish teachings do not support the arbitrary occupation and displacement of other people and even if passages in the bible could be interpreted in that fashion other passages could lead us to the opposite conclusion.” No. We don’t get such arguments because part of the left engages in anti-Semitic slander or a discourse that easily can be interpreted as slander and is covered up by meme defenders who leverage right-wing Zionist arguments in defense of such bullshit memes.

The real “chosen people” (in the sense of persons who believe themselves to be morally superior) are the leftists in places like Illinois, Sweden and elsewhere who try to leverage Israeli state atrocities to circulate idiotic floating signifier anti-Semitic tropes.

Displacement of Anti-Semitism

On November 25, 2024, someone posted the meme appearing in Plate 36. It purports to deconstruct the false use of the charge of “anti-Semitism” by arguing that names are arbitrarily deployed so as to rearrange or displace facts. At least that is my initial interpretation. The whole structure of the meme is ambiguous. It also suggests that people who call something what it is (an apple) when others pretend that it isn’t (and call it a banana), people who speak truth to power are deemed anti-Semitic. Again we see a kind of merger or ingenuity and idiocy and flattening of reality. The meme serves to de-legitimate anti-Semitism by suggesting that people who use the term are liars or truth displacers. The irony is that the meme was posted in a Swedish discussion forum in Facebook, i.e. a country with longstanding problems of anti-Semitism. The discussion included the obligatory dodge, “Arabs are Semites,” which some on the left deploy to displace anti-Semitism as a concept, through the gaslighting discursive move I’ve already discussed. The tedious minimalism and kind of in-group-think of these memes does not trigger much reflection among the marketers of such nonsense.

Plate 36: Displacing Anti-Semitism by Demonstrating Platitudes About Its Misuse

Source: Meme posted in Facebook, November 25, 2024.