{"id":275569,"date":"2023-11-12T08:15:08","date_gmt":"2023-11-12T08:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=275569"},"modified":"2023-11-14T07:17:23","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T07:17:23","slug":"im-a-jew-im-not-a-genocidal-racist-why-do-israel-supporters-keep-telling-the-world-that-i-am","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=275569","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m a Jew & I\u2019m NOT a Genocidal Racist \u2014 Why Do Israel \u201cSupporters\u201d Keep Telling the World that I Am?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Lesher \u2013 Off-Guardian Nov 10, 2023<\/strong><\/h1>\n

\u201cIt was a dark week in New York City\u201d<\/em> for Jews,\u00a0wrote Josh Nathan-Kazis<\/a>\u00a0about Berkowitz\u2019s arrest in a 2019 retrospective. In fact, so eager were Jews to dissociate themselves from a homicidal maniac that when evidence surfaced that Berkowitz had been adopted as a child,\u00a0Forward\u00a0<\/em>ran that discovery on its front page, exulting that the killer wasn\u2019t really Jewish after all. (Unfortunately for\u00a0Forward<\/em>, it turned out that both of Berkowitz\u2019s birth parents actually were Jews.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a fan of this sort of bad-for-the-Jews kvetching. But at least it\u2019s predictable. Who needs a murderer for a\u00a0landsman<\/em>?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I\u2019m so flabbergasted about the Jewish celebrities who have taken to the hustings over the last few weeks not only to embrace Israel\u2019s\u00a0mass murder<\/a>\u00a0of the civilians of Gaza \u2013 a slaughter that makes Berkowitz\u2019s eight homicides look like a practical joke \u2013 but have even insisted that all Jews feel the same way.<\/p>\n

What do they think they\u2019re doing? It\u2019s bad enough that these Jews want to display their moral turpitude to the world. But do they really have to slander the rest of us into the bargain?<\/p>\n

Actress-turned-Israeli-propagandist Mayim Bialik is typical of the bunch. Lecturing a social media audience on October 27,\u00a0Ms. Bialik purported to explain<\/a>\u00a0to the world \u201cwhat your Jewish friends are experiencing\u201d whenever they see demonstrators calling for an end to Israel\u2019s mass murder in Gaza, or for the liberation of over two million people from what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0\u201cthe world\u2019s largest concentration camp ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

And what\u00a0did<\/em>\u00a0they experience?<\/p>\n

Shame that such crimes were being committed in the name of a \u201cJewish\u201d state? Relief that so many of the protesters (as, for instance, at\u00a0Grand Central Station<\/a>\u00a0in New York City) were themselves Jewish?<\/p>\n

No, according to Ms. Bialik, Jews weren\u2019t fazed by the bloodbath in which Israel was drowning Gaza \u2013 a\u00a0slaughter<\/a>\u00a0that had obliterated more than 6,000 lives, nearly half of them\u00a0children<\/a>, by the time she took to social media \u2013 but they were really,\u00a0really<\/em>\u00a0upset about people who objected to the massacre.<\/p>\n

Criticism of Israeli brutality, Bialik insisted, was \u201ca strain of anti-Semitism that is alive and well.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, given that the \u201cfacts\u201d she reported came straight from Israeli propaganda, much of Bialik\u2019s rant was sheer nonsense. (No one at UCLA, for instance,\u00a0chanted<\/a>\u00a0\u201cWe want a Jewish genocide.\u201d) But for the moment I\u2019m more interested in the logical inferences to be drawn from her comments about \u201cthe Jews.\u201d If objecting to Israel\u2019s crimes against humanity offends \u201cthe Jewish people,\u201d it follows that \u201cthe Jewish people\u201d endorse those crimes.<\/p>\n

And that can only mean one thing: that if Bialik is right, Jews are criminals. All of them. Just because they are Jews. Honestly, can there be a more anti-Semitic claim than\u00a0that<\/em>?<\/p>\n

And just in case anyone missed her point, Bialik ended her homily by boasting that the State of Israel (her \u201chomeland,\u201d the San Diego-born Bialik called it) is now a cozier fit for Jewish consciences than a country where people are allowed to protest against genocide.<\/p>\n

Wow. With friends like Bialik, why would Jews need any enemies?<\/p>\n

Not to be outdone \u2013 and as the civilian death toll in Gaza passed the 10,000 mark \u2013 Batya Ungar-Sargon, deputy opinion editor at\u00a0Newsweek<\/em>,\u00a0appeared on Fox News<\/a>\u00a0to lament that she was struggling in a \u201csea of anti-Semitic media and bigotry\u201d and that all American progressives want to \u201ckill the Jews.\u201d (Like Bialik, Ungar-Sargon has had a remarkably successful career in a professional environment in which she claims that everyone hates her \u2013 but who\u2019s counting?)<\/p>\n

Egged on by her interviewer, Ungar-Sargon wasted no time seconding Alan Dershowitz\u2019s asseveration that \u201cliberal Jews\u201d will never vote for anyone who doesn\u2019t embrace Israel\u2019s mass murder in Gaza.<\/p>\n

So Batya Ungar-Sargon, like Mayim Bialik, has effectively accused all Jews \u2013 even \u201cliberal Jews\u201d \u2013 of supporting an openly-declared Israeli\u00a0genocide policy<\/a>. Another whiner about factitious \u201canti-Semitism,\u201d Ungar-Sargon is actually spouting the real thing.<\/p>\n

Even more unhinged in her bigotry was Allison Josephs, who runs an Orthodox Jewish website called \u201cJew in the City.\u201d<\/em> Ms. Josephs was invited to speak about anti-Semitism as part of a Los Angeles-based panel for\u00a0Variety<\/em>. But the tantrum she threw there may have surprised even Hollywood professionals, who probably aren\u2019t used to being\u00a0scolded<\/a>\u00a0for not reflecting\u00a0enough<\/em>\u00a0Jewish influence.<\/p>\n

And that was just the beginning.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have students on college campuses marching with Hamas,\u201d <\/em>a breathless Ms. Josephs\u00a0hectored<\/a>\u00a0them. \u201cThey\u2019re on the side of baby-beheadings, and burning Holocaust survivors [sic], and gang-raping women.\u201d<\/em> (Weirdly, Josephs blamed this on the movies \u2013 because, don\u2019t you know, too many Jewish characters are \u201csuper-white\u201d and affluent.)<\/p>\n

Adopting the Nazi position<\/a>\u00a0that Jews are a race \u2013 \u201cit\u2019s in our DNA\u201d<\/em> \u2013 Josephs went on to claim that Jews cannot be \u201ccolonizers\u201d of Palestine because they are \u201cthe indigenous people to the Middle East.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

What are normal people to imagine when a fuming wingnut who thinks antiwar protesters want to cut the heads off babies, and defends ethnic cleansing as a consequence of \u201cJewish DNA,\u201d presents herself as an exemplar of \u201cthe Jewish people\u201d? I can tell you this much: if her audience takes Ms. Joseph\u2019s grotesque\u00a0manqu\u00e9<\/em>\u00a0of Judaism for the real thing, so much the worse for the rest of us.<\/p>\n

All three of the women I have quoted describe themselves as religious Jews. And each of them, at some time in the past, has fidgeted about the public image of her coreligionists (who are also mine).<\/p>\n

Yet all three have been guilty of venomously anti-Semitic remarks \u2013 and I doubt that they\u2019re even aware of it. Such is the power of propaganda, and the need of a guilty conscience to scapegoat others when the alternative is an uncomfortable look in the mirror.
\nBut please: let\u2019s call things by their right names.<\/p>\n

Propagandists like Bialik, Ungar-Sargon and Josephs are not only flacks for apartheid and genocidal violence. They are a disgrace to the things they claim to value most. By equating Judaism with crime, they are guilty of the very bigotry they claim to be opposing.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Michael Lesher<\/strong> is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. His latest nonfiction book is Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014); his first collection of poetry, Surfaces, was published by The High Window in 2019. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult \u2013 Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a \u201cBorn-Again\u201d Jew \u2013 was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books.<\/p>\n

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The crisis in Gaza presents all Jews with a moral dilemma. Do they defend Israel\u2019s actions and thereby condone the ongoing genocide? Or do they turn their backs on their heritage, which the Zionists have hijacked, to embrace wider humanitarian values? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":275570,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[118,61,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-275569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-7-10-gaza-war","category-Commentary","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=275569"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275571,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275569\/revisions\/275571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/275570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=275569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=275569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=275569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}