Here's an excerpt. See the whole column here.
"According to Canada’s La Presse, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a vampire, and he is poised to suck the life out of the Palestinians in Rafah, Hamas’s final outpost in southern Gaza. The publication that was once a paper of record in Canada ran a political cartoon on March 20 portraying Netanyahu as a vampire, with a huge hooked nose, pointy ears and claws for fingers, dressed in Dracula’s overcoat while standing on the deck of a pirate ship.
"The caption, written in blood-dripping red letters, read: “Nosfenyahou: En Route Vers Rafah.” Nosferatu, the Romanian word for vampire, was the title of a proto-Nazi German silent horror film from 1922 chock-full of anti-Semitic poison. The film, which became something of a cult flick, featured a vampire with a long Jewish nose. He arrived at an idyllic German town with a box full of plague-carrying rats that he released on the innocent villagers as he plotted to suck his realtor’s blood.
"La Presse’s cartoon didn’t leave any room for imagination. It wasn’t making a political or military argument against Israel’s planned ground operation in Rafah. Its goal wasn’t to persuade anyone of anything.
"The Netanyahu-the-vampire cartoon asserted simply that Netanyahu is a Jewish bloodsucker and, more broadly, the Jewish state—and Jews worldwide—must be vigorously opposed by all right-thinking people who don’t want Jewish vampires to kill them.
"As the paper no doubt anticipated, the cartoon provoked an outcry from Canadian Jews and some politicians. And after a few hours, the newspaper took it off its website and apologized. Anyone who thinks that means that the good guys won misses the point of the move. The Jewish outcry and pile-on by politicians and media coverage proved the point. Jews are evil and control everything, even what a private paper can publish. Like Nosferatu in its day, the cartoon will become a piece of folklore, additional proof that the Jews are the enemy of humanity.
"In other words, the cartoon was a blood libel."We’re seeing lots and lots of it these days. And so, it is worth recalling what a blood libel is.
"In its original form, of course, the libel was specifically about blood. About 1,000 years ago, Christians in England began accusing Jews of performing ritual murders of Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzahs.
"The accusation was inherently insane. Jewish law prohibits murder. It prohibits cannibalism. It prohibits child sacrifice. It prohibits eating food with blood. But none of that mattered. Like the cartoon in La Presse, the blood libel didn’t seek to persuade anyone. It presumed that its target audiences already hated Jews or had a latent tendency to hate Jews, which the blood libel aimed to unleash. The purpose of the blood libel was to scapegoat the Jews and to incite target audiences from London to Damascus to act on that hatred. Over the millennium, hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred in Europe and the Islamic world in response to blood libels.
"Since the original blood libel, other ones have appeared. Whether Jews are accused of spreading plague, poisoning wells, controlling the banking system, the media, corrupting young people or spearheading a world Communist revolution, the common denominators in all of the accusations are the same.
"Blood libels appeal to emotion, not reason. They do not seek to persuade anyone; rather, they are geared towards unleashing the latest anti-Semitism.
"They legitimize and incite violence against Jews, who—once slandered as the enemies of the good—have no moral right to live.
The numbers game
"The nature and purpose of blood libels make them impossible to combat. Jews cannot disprove blood libels because they aren’t based on fact but on feelings or intentions attributed to Jews by people who hate them. Can Netanyahu prove that he isn’t a vampire? Of course not. If he bothered to try, it would be seen as proof that he’s covering something up. Can Jews prove that they aren’t evil? No, again. Because people predisposed to believe that Jews are evil see everything good that Israel does as an effort to cover up its foundational, immutable malevolence. “Pink-washing” is a case in point.
"The discourse on Israel’s war in Gaza is suffused in blood libels.
"Consider the accusation that Gazans are starving. USAID administrator Samantha Power issued a statement on Tuesday claiming that “famine is imminent in northern Gaza.”
"Power pointed a finger directly at Israel, blaming it for the “imminent” famine. “The U.S. will continue to do everything we can to get food to people in Gaza, but Israel must do more to put an end to this mass—and preventable—suffering.”
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"The question is what can Israel—and Jews more broadly—do in the midst of this avalanche of blood libel? The answer is twofold.
"First, Israel must stop trying to prove a negative. No one cares if we are really blood-thirsty vampires. Persuasion doesn’t work with people moved by emotion, particularly hatred. Instead, Israel and Jews worldwide need to concentrate on rallying the people who viscerally understand what is going on and aren’t taken in by anti-Semitic cartoons and Hamas propaganda, even if it is spoken by Samantha Power.
"As for the haters, countering them means going on the offensive. On the battlefield in Gaza, it means destroying Hamas completely so that everyone understands that attacking the Jews is a bad idea. And on the battlefields of the United Nations, the European Union, the State Department, Harvard, Berkeley, New York City and London, the answer is to expose the haters with as much vigor and ferocity as they demonize the Jews."
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Amen to that! These atrocious people, both terrorists and antisemites alike, are living in the Dark Ages. Let's stop worrying about what they think of us, and defeat them! Israel should stop listening to anything Biden and Blinken say in their desperate attempts to stop the war, declare a ceasefire, and let Hamas continue to exist. Jews everywhere are fighting a war for survival, and we must win.
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