Why Explain Antisemitism?

From Sam Harris’ Making Sense Podcast.

We begin by tracing the recent history of those organizations that are dedicated to the premeditated butchery of civilians. Both Merav and Mira share with us their experiences when the sirens went off on Saturday morning October 7th. We follow them as they attend to those who physically survived the mutilation, murder and kidnapping of their family members.

Hatred of Israel cannot be distinguished from hatred of the Jewish people. Incontestably now, anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

At the university where I teach in London, the local branch of the lecturers’ union has just passed a motion calling for “intifada until victory!” The university’s Jewish studies department notifies students of lecture venues by text, for fear of disruption.

The incomprehensible brutality of the 7 October Hamas pogrom launched a full scale war, both on the battlefield and in the parallel realm of soft-power and propaganda. Following the pattern developed over the past 20 years, the claimants to expertise and moral authority focused and continue to focus primarily on delegitimising the Israeli military response and preventing the defeat of Hamas.

Cary Nelson argues that Amnesty International’s report, by reducing a complex, political, national question involving two victim peoples to a simplistic morality play about ‘racism’ distorts the origins of the conflict and makes a balanced and prudential approach to its resolution impossible. Amnesty, he says, are race-baiting. And by indicting Judaism itself as a racist supremacism, the organization has crossed a line into antisemitism.

Matthew Bolton, of the Centre for Research on Antisemitism at Berlin‘s Technische Universität introduces the centre’s Decoding Antisemitism project’s latest research on online antisemitism in the wake of the October 7th pogrom. ‘The results were striking,’ he finds, and ‘suggest a significant radicalisation of online discourse about Israel, Israelis and Jews’.

A visual analysis following the IAF’s examination on the subject.

Columbia University, which has a relatively large Jewish student population, has emerged as a key battleground in the friction that has erupted throughout U.S. campuses since October 7.

Since October 7, “857 anti-Semitic acts” have been recorded in France, according to the Minister of the Interior. This is double the number of incidents recorded for the whole of 2022.

This isn’t a contest of heroes and villains – but two peoples in deep pain, fated to share the same land, says the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland.

A bookshop in Turkey has stirred fears of antisemitism with a sign over the door saying “Jews not allowed”.