Unabashed Antisemitism Takes Center Stage At This Year’s Anti-AIPAC Protest

When I attended AIPAC last year, I remember encountering a throng of protesters speaking against Donald Trump, calling Israel an Apartheid State, calling for an end to the occupation, and that was about it.

The protestors last year were careful to avoid blatant antisemitism. However, this year, at AIPAC 2017, they are far more emboldened and empowered. Out, proud, and shameless antisemitism at levels unseen since the Second World War have emerged from the latest wave of leftist anti-Zionism, blaring from megaphones and written on signs.

In a country where a convicted terrorist and a terrorist sympathizer were allowed to take center stage in the very mainstream anti-Trump movement, successfully tying opposition to Trump to anti-Zionism and making one appear impossible without the other as part of a crackpot twist on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory, it shouldn’t surprise me but watching these videos still did.

Man calls IDF a terrorist organization. The usual anti-Israel nonsense. But there’s more….

“Mossad carried out 9/11 attacks against this country, AIPAC is treason. They own our politicians, they get us into wars around this world, and they are committing treason time and again. The USS Liberty was attacked by Israel. Jonathan Pollard and his ethnic kinsmen spy against America. Israel commits terror around the world and gets us into wars that are destructive for us all. AIPAC out of America! AIPAC is treason, and AIPAC must GO!”

This particular video has hints of antisemitism, though it claims to be against Israel. If you listen closely, you’ll realize it’s not about Israel at all, rather it’s about Jonathan Pollard’s “ethnic kinsmen” aka Jews, replete with the usual antisemitic stereotypes and blood libel.

But it gets even worse:

“You guys are trouble, everywhere you go, that’s why you’ve been kicked out of countless numbers of countries throughout the years, get out of our country, you are guilty of treason!”

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? When the seemingly innocuous anti-Zionism discourse unmasks itself far more boldly than ever before. It’s merely confirming what we knew all along: that antisemitism never disappeared, rather it was latent in the few decades after the holocaust, and that anti-Zionism is only a cover for the real antisemitism that permeates around the world.

And then of course we have the traitors among us who are standing alongside the antisemites, accusing us of only being for ourselves, another antisemitic stereotype, evidence that the anti-Jewish hate all around them is slowly getting internalized.

Jews from the organization #IfNotNow recite Pirkei Avot, not realizing the irony that they aren’t for themselves at all, and couldn’t care less if nobody is there for them. Apparently sucking up to other causes for personal gain is more important.

Now that the mask is down, can I finally say “I told you so!”?