Israeli officials have spent recent days circulating antisemitic conspiracy theories, with Benjamin Netanyahu boasting that he manipulated the United States into war with Iran, and Itamar Ben-Gvir sharing an AI video of Palestinians being sent to Nazi-style concentration camps.
In an appearance on Israel’s Channel 12 on Sunday evening, Prime Minister Netanyahu said in Hebrew that he’d “been against Iran for almost 40 years” and had worked hard influencing the United States to join Israel in a war of aggression to topple Tehran.
“It took a long time to bring the United States in,” the prime minister said. “I was able to do this because I had close to a thousand hours on American television, influence in the United States, and intimate knowledge of all its leaders — both those who support us and those who do not.”
As we all know, it is a horrifying evil disgusting monstrous Nazi antisemitic trope to suggest that Washington is manipulated by Israel or that Israelis have anything to do with American wars. The Anti-Defamation League tells us that such assertions “play into tropes about ‘Jewish control’ of government and are unacceptable.” Earlier this year the ADL Center on Extremism warned that the war in Iran is leading to “a rapid convergence of extremists, alleged anti-war activists and anti-Israel groups around a shared set of narratives, including that the strikes were launched for Israel’s benefit at the cost of American lives, that Jewish or Zionist actors exercise illegitimate control or power over U.S. foreign policy.”
So I am sure we can expect antisemitism watchdog groups to take a short break from yelling about Hasan Piker and instead spend some of that energy denouncing Benjamin Netanyahu’s crazed and hateful conspiracy theories about himself and his own personal actions.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has also contributed to the rising tide of antisemitism by posting an AI video promoting the hateful blood libel that Israel treats Palestinians in the same way Nazi Germany treated the Jews.
In the video, which Ben-Gvir subsequently deleted in response to public outcry, a group of obese AI-animated Arabs are seen having their dreams of a happy future crushed as the national security minister loads them onto a conveyor belt feeding them into a concentration camp with barbed wire walls where they are seen weeping and growing emaciated like Holocaust victims.
According to the IHRA definition of antisemitism which western governments are firmly encouraging us all to comply with, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is an example of hateful discrimination against the Jewish people. By publicly boasting of Israeli policies that he himself is responsible for instituting which are clearly intended to evoke the memory of Nazi death camps, Ben-Gvir clearly now stands guilty of an antisemitic hate crime.
Since our society has decided that antisemitism is the single most urgent threat on our planet and must be placed front and center of our attention at all times throughout all of our politics and media, I trust that we will soon see these Israeli antisemitic blood libels treated with the widespread condemnation they so deserve.
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