Last week I wrote a post about an Irish top anti-racism activist in Ireland who supports antisemites.
An Italian researcher by the name of Alessandro Zagato did not like my post, and bothered to let me know. Zagato got his PhD at Maynooth University (Ireland) and is currently at the University of Bergen (Norway).
I think the discussion with him is enlightening. Not because it's unusual, but because it's actually quite normal. People think that denying Jews the right to self-determination and voicing support for murdering Jews is not antisemitic. Because they don't hate the 'Jews' (a theoretical construct), they just hate the 'Zionists' and the Jewish state (ie, the vast majority of actual Jews) and they think their murderous hatred is justified.
The subject, let's not forget, is that fact that a top anti-racism activist in Ireland supports the antisemitic BDS movement and the no-less-antisemitic Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC).
Zagato started off by saying:
Systematically suspecting pro-palestine campaigners of anti semitism is a form of zionism imo
Zionists (ie, most Jews), have no idea what antisemitism is and/or use for their nefarious purposes, to attack the innocent.
Hoover, if he would have bothered reading my post, he would have realized that I do not "systematically suspect" pro-Palestinian groups of antisemitism. I just haven't found any that aren't. As I said in my previous post:
I don't know of any pro-Palestinian group that does not deny the right of Jews to self-determination and that does not fight Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Both of those are considered antisemitism according to every official definition: according to the United States, according to the EU, according to every antisemitism watchdog, and according to a vast majority of Jews.
If that sounds to you like the definition of anti-Zionism, you're exactly right. Anti-Zionists deny Jews the right to self-determination and deny Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. Both of those are flat-out antisemitism.
When I pointed this out to Zagato, he responded:
Right to self determination should not be obtained through genocide
But that, of course, applies only to Jews. Arabs can try and commit genocide against Jews, and they do not lose their right to self-determination.
In fact, when I asked Zagato if he thinks Palestinians have no right to self-determination because they tried to kill off the Jews, he actually voiced support for murdering Jews.
Zagato:
Unsurprisingly, occupation becomes war. Have you read any figures of the death toll? Both sides?
Arabs are allowed to kill Jews, because occupation and resistance. Jews are not allowed to defend themselves, because, well, because anti-Zionists are antisemites.
Additionally, all this talk of 'genocide' is a way of comparing Israelis to Nazis. Which also happens to be flat-out antisemitism, as well as soft-core Holocaust denial.
I then tried to understand what's Zagato's connection to the original post, at which point the conversation devolved into Zagato accusing me of working for the Israeli government and being a troll. Apparently, Jews who fight antisemitism must be Israeli stooges and/or trolls.
To sum up, in this very short conversation, Zagato managed to:
1. Deny Jews the right to self-determination
2. Support murder/genocide of Jews in Israel
3. Compare Jews to Nazis
Each one of those is antisemitic according to both the American and European official definitions.
Zagato doesn't just display his antisemitism in twitter discussions. He recently edited a scholarly work on the Charlie Hebdo attack, titled "The Event of Charlie Hebdo, Imaginaries of Freedom and Control".
The book was published by Berghahn Books, an independent British/American publisher "of distinguished scholarly books and journals in the humanities and social sciences".
This work in enlightening, not because it's special. In fact, it's a rather mundane scholarly work that speaks 'truth to power' by doing what most other academics do nowadays: justify anti-Western terrorism.
Would it surprise anybody to learn that the book does not mention the fact that as part of this attack on (evil, colonialist) France, Jews were held hostage in a kosher supermarket and then executed?
The intro mentions the 'subsequent attacks that took place in the Ile-de-France region'. Otherwise, the antisemitic attack is barely mentioned once in the book, and even that as an aside.
Zagato says that he followed the news closely after the Charlie Hebdo attack, and yet in his article he completely erases the fact that Jews were murdered at all.
He does, however, blame the attack, among other things, on... you guessed it, Israel.
On a broader scale and time span, we should consider the destruction and cultural imperialism which Muslim people have experienced since the start of the 'war on terror'... it also includes the complacent passivity of many European governments vis-à-vis the annihilation of the Palestinian people in the Middle East... it is easy to imagine how anti-state and anti-Western sentiments may emerge among parts of the population
Zagato doesn't just equate Israel to Nazism, intent on annihilating an entire people, he think Israel is to blame for the Charlie Hebdo attacks. In fact, for every anti-state and anti-Western attack. He would blame Israel for the Hyper-Cacher attack too, but he can't, because that would actually require him to mention it.
For antisemites/anti-Zionists, Jews are never a victim, they are the cause of everybody else's misfortune.
This is what passes for 'distinguished scholarly books' nowadays.
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