Monologue Transcript
PART 2 - The ONLY 3 Facts You Need to Know About Israel, Palestine, and the Jews
If you only watch one video about Israel, Palestine and the Jews, it should be this.
Welcome to part two of my three part series.
The only three things you need to know about Israel, Palestine and the Jews.
If you missed part one, you can find the link in the description below.
Go check it out.
Come on back.
This week we're moving on to our second pillar, a clear understanding
of the contemporary anti Jew hate movement known as anti-Zionism.
The lie you've been sold is that anti-Zionism is a rational,
intellectual position worthy of consideration, or at least tolerance,
that it is rooted in just and fair opinion and legitimate historical,
political, or ideological grievance.
And while that all sounds reasonable on paper.
All you need to do is walk through a pro-Palestine protest
or spend three seconds on social media to see that in practice.
anti-Zionism is as much about being against Zionism as anti-Semitism is about
being against Semitism, which is to say not at all, it's smoke and mirrors kid.
Operationally anti-Zionism has nothing to do with intellectual discourse.
It is about hateful actions taken to bar Jews from polite
society, socially, professionally, culturally, and often physically.
Blocking Jewish college students from class defacing synagogues and
Jewish cemeteries, boycotting Jewish authors, artists, athletes, musicians.
These are the day-to-day activities of the anti-Zionist, none of which
has anything remotely to do with debating the merits of a Jewish state.
Obviously.
So how are people who define themselves as progressive and morally good able to
justify such blatantly horrendous and bigoted behavior through the creation of a
supervi known as the Zionist, an imagined creature, so uniquely evil and demonic,
its ceases to be human and is therefore deserving of all the righteous hate
and even violence brought down upon it.
The creation of this nefarious Zionist is where repetition comes in for.
It is constructed through the ceaseless echoing of several key libels, each itself
an inversion of something actually being done to Jews, not by them, and which
represent the ultimate antithesis of what today's cult of progressivism most
reveres human rights and social justice.
This framework is how Jew hatred has always worked.
You take whatever creed is most exalted by the people of the age,
be it Christianity or science or human rights, and employ distortions,
misrepresentations, and outright lies to paint Jews as the perfect enemy of
everything that creed holds most dear.
By this token, the persecution of Jews far from being unjust is in fact a
noble undertaking of ethical concern.
Safeguarding what is good while extinguishing, what is bad.
In medieval times when Christianity was venerated, the original blood libel
painted Jews as murderous Christian killers who drank the blood of
children for twisted demonic rituals.
In the thirties, the Nazis relied on pseudo-scientific proof that it was the
very blood of Jews that was literally polluting the superior German race,
preventing precious national unity.
And today we have anti-Zionism built upon a number of core libels that
portray the Zionist as everything we despise in our anti-racist,
anti-imperialist, prosocial justice world.
You know the greatest hits, apartheid, colonizer, baby
killer ethnostate genocide.
I often refer to these buzzwords as flaming bags of dog poop because it takes
zero effort to toss them on your doorstep and run away, leaving you to stamp out
the fire and end up covered in shit.
Not only is each patently untrue of Jews, but consistent with the historical pattern
each is actually true of the accuser.
In the West, you have deep-seated white guilt, born of the imperialist
pass, racial subjugation, and the slaughter of indigenous peoples.
In the Middle East, you have the Arabs, one of the world's great
imperialist forces whose own states subjugated their Jewish minorities
for centuries, and the most radical of whom on October 7th, committed as
much genocide as they could muster, killing every baby they encountered.
My original plan was to take you through each of these libels and
debunk them for you, but when I wrote it out, it was way too long.
So I'm saving that for two monologues from now.
Once our mental iron dome is locked and loaded.
If you can't wait and you wanna start digging in on the libels, now I recommend
checking out the work of Adam Lewis Klein, founder of the Movement Against
Anti Zionism, whose website is the definitive resource on this topic.
For now, suffice it to say they're all bullshit and the only reason you may be
ever questioned if any of these libels might be true is say it with me now.
Repetition.
Believe me, I get it.
I have been there too.
When you hear something enough times from enough people, as we've
established, our brains are wired to wonder if it just might not be true.
But just because you hear the lie a million times doesn't make it not a lie.
And the only reason you're even hearing it so many times is because
that is the official strategy.
Here's a small example.
In the first nine months after October 7th, the New York Times published
6,656 articles about the war in Gaza.
Compare that to only 80 articles in nine months during America's war against
ISIS in Iraq, or about 5,400 articles about serious civil war over 13 years.
The Associated Press, one of the world's largest wire services,
meaning they basically determine the news that other outlets then cover.
They employ more staff to cover Israel than they do Russia,
China, and India combined.
That's more staff to cover a tiny country of 10 million people than three
enormous countries of 3 billion people.
Another key facet of anti-Zionism is legitimacy.
Like every flavor of mainstream Jew hate before it, anti-Zionism has the
seal of approval of the intelligentsia college professors, Hollywood stars,
UN officials, amnesty International.
All of these infected spaces create a closed feedback loop, each conferring
legitimacy on the other, all while operating from the same basic
libels instead of racist behaviors.
And thus, to borrow an elegant phrase from Vanderbilt University Jewish Studies
Professor Shaul Kelner is how we end up with an intellectually justified,
socially acceptable othering of Jews whose social base is in the professional class.
So back to our pillar, you must be crystal clear about what
anti-Zionism is and how it works.
You don't need to be an expert in Israeli history or politics or
current events to fight this hatred.
And remember, anti-Zionism isn't based on facts anyway.
The anti-Zionist meets facts with dismissal, discrediting, disbelief,
or most commonly disinterest.
I have experienced this up close and personally myself.
Your facts, your experience, your argument may be unassailable.
Yet you can see those facts bounce right off them without making so much as a dent.
Their narrative has already been decided upon and nothing you can say will change
it, but all is not lost my friends.
Because you know what?
You can become an expert in discerning the machinery of Jew hatred, both
broadly and with anti-Zionism specifically to, again, quote Kelner.
If anti-Zionism is the othering of Jews from the left, anti-Semitism is
the othering of Jews from the right.
That's it.
That's what they are.
Folks, no more, no less both forms of hate function similarly,
but exhibit totally different features that must be understood.
Antisemitism is low class, anti-Zionism is high.
Class one says, Jews aren't white.
One says, Jews are super white.
One says, get outta Europe.
One says, go back to Europe.
One says, the Nazis were right.
The other says, Jews are the Nazis.
You get the idea.
In the post Holocaust era, we've been educated.
Not at all or at best to only recognize Jew hate from the right.
Almost nobody knows how to detect it from the left, including Jews, which
is why so many have marched straight into the anti-Zionist spotlight,
blissfully ignorant of their own tokenization by an anti Jew hate movement.
They lack the awareness to perceive and all of this, despite the fact
that the Soviets systematically repressed their Jewish population
through anti-Zionism quite successfully, less than a century ago.
But nobody teaches it, so nobody knows about it.
Well, now except for you.
So from this day forward, you need to commit to training yourself
to recognize anti-Zionist hate.
You need to be like Keanu Reeves at the end of the matrix.
Yes.
Again, when he's finally able to see past the illusory digital world to
the literal code beneath of which it's comprised, that's gotta be you seeing
through the facade of anti-Zionism to identify the architecture of
anti Jew racist hate beneath it.
Libels are anti-Zionist racist hate slurs like Is Rahel or Zio
or Zion Nazi are racist, hate.
Undercutting any positive word about Jews or Israel as being
paid for or propaganda is racist.
Hate defacing, something Jewish with the words Free Palestine, whether it
be outwardly Israeli, like a restaurant outwardly Jewish, like a day school,
or even something that just belongs to a Jewish person like a car or a
random social media post is racist hate litmus tests that require denouncing
Israel Jewish personhood or acceptance of anti Jew libels is racist hate.
Talking over Jews and explaining to them who we are, what we are,
what Zionism is, who Zionists are, that is racist Hate chanting.
For Israelis to be ethnically cleansed for jihadist violence against Jews
everywhere, or for the literal killing of Jewish men and women is racist,
hate, refusing service, whether it's in an Uber, a restaurant, a
classroom, or a therapist's office.
Just because the person is Israeli or Jewish is racist.
Hate.
Covering your face with a mask so you can roam the streets with a mob.
To harass Jews at synagogues, hospitals, or college campuses
is racist, hate, and of course, spitting on chasing, assaulting, or
murdering Jews or Israelis simply for being Jews or Israelis is racist.
Hate, moral clarity can only exist when the door to doubt has been slammed shut.
Not out of arrogance or obstinance or ignorance, but out of absolute certitude.
You know the world is round, that door is closed.
anti-Zionism is a racist anti Jew hate movement.
Set it, forget it, and slam that door closed.
This concludes part two of my three part series.
The only three things you need to know about Israel Palestine and the Jews.
To learn the final pillar of our mental Iron Dome, subscribe to this
channel and check back here next week.
If you like this video, please be sure to comment, like, subscribe,
and share it with anyone else you think might like it too.
And if you haven't already, look up being Jewish with Jonah Platt
on your favorite podcast platform.
And subscribe there too for even more in-depth analysis.
Or join my subscriber-only community for bonus content and one-on-one engagement with me@beingjewishpodcast.com slash community.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.