Risk and Extortion LIX: Cultivating Hate, Cultivating Hope

Lessons from the Third Reich

In many western nation states, criticizing the Zionist Project – including its operationalizations in genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing – is being defined as hate speech. Hate speech that is defined as anti-Semitism is considered worse than genocide. This is what we have just learned from the fall out of news broadcasts following the BBC live broadcasting of the Glastonbury festival. What dominated the news was the fact that several artists had led public chants of “Free Palestine” and one proclaimed “Death to the IDF”. It is remarkable that chants against genocide are considered worse than the genocide itself.

Of course, this needs to be qualified. Had it been the reverse, for example, had the chants been “From the River to the Sea: Greater Israel shall be free from Palestinians” or “Death to Hamas”, then it is very unlikely that this would have been deemed worthy of concern. After all, Israeli officials had been doing this for years, and well before October 7^th, and it did not even raise an eyebrow among mainstream media in “the West”. Not all chants are worse than genocide or even considered hate speech, only those that target Zionism.

The government of the United Kingdom, led by Keir Starmer, is seeking to abuse the Terrorism act to label Palestine Action a terrorist organization. The House of Parliament voted in favour, thereby classifying an organization that has sprayed paint on fighter planes with the likes of Al Q’aida and ISIS. Stretching the meaning of the word terrorism to stifle legitimate political opposition comes from the playbook of the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, who from the 1970s onwards has been instrumental in racializing the meaning of “terrorist” as an ethnic category that applies to all who identify as Palestinians.

A few decades earlier, the German National Socialist Workers Party was able to label political opposition as “enemies of the state”, which was the precursor of terrorism. First the German Communist Party was labelled an enemy of the state, which was approved by the German Reichstag with the help of the Social Democratic Party (which were a little to the left of the British Labour Party today). Those associated with the Communist Party were sent to prison. Many of them became the first inmates of the very first concentration camp of the Third Reich in Dachau. Not long there after, every other political party was prohibited, including the Social Democrats.

It is important to know that during the rise of the NSDAP in the Weimar Republic in the 1920, it was common practice to collocate Jews and Bolshewiks. That is, the first inmates of concentration camps were not there because they were Jewish, but because they were communists.  However, it became more opportune to ethnicize the communists as Jews in order to gain wider legitimacy for suppressing political opposition. Hence, the ethnitization of political opposition was the decisive step in the unfolding of the Shoah.

In Germany, anti-Semitism is on the rise. Jewish groups, associated with left wing politics, especially those engaged in denouncing Zionism, are already under “Verfassungsschutz”; they are considered to be potential enemies of the state. Of course, the official target is referred to as “the extreme left”, but the anti-Semitism amplifies this by applying it to a notion of “the wrong kind of Jews”. These are Jews who do not follow the Zionist call and refuse to go to Israel. These are very similar to the Jews that were members of the Bund: one of the most established organizations that opposed the Nazis in Germany. These Jews are referred to by Zionists as “self-hating Jews”, because Zionism claims to represent all Jews. Of course, from the start, Zionism itself was promoted in Europe through the figure of the self-hating Jews, as Theodor Herzl himself used that trope to convince the leaders of European nations to support their objective to create a Jewish state in “the Promised Land”, which was already then referred to as Palestine. It should therefore not come as a surprise that a rampant fascist such as Steve Bannon calls Jewish anti-Zionists the biggest enemies of the USA. He wants all Jews to go Israel; those that refuse to go are thus for him the enemy within.

Anti-Semitism is growing in Germany because of Zionism. Not only because the vast majority of Germans are appalled by the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem and the West Bank performed in the name of Zionism, not only because the vast majority of Germans oppose the military support including arms supplies from Germany to the Zionist Project of Israel, not because it looks like the German government is held ransom by a seeming powerful Zionist lobby primarily operating from the USA and via the US government, not because Zionism wants Jews from the Diaspora to move to Israel, but above all because the German government is itself targeting anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, labelling them as potential enemies of the state, because they fraternize with “extremist” left-wing groups and Palestinian organizations. It is exactly the same anti-Semitism as that which was widespread before the advent of the Third Reich.

The United Kingdom are going down exactly the same path. When Keir Starmer loses the next general elections, which looks very likely, the Reform Party (the successor of the party responsible for Brexit – UKIP) led by Nigel Farage, a real fascist, will form the new government. It is certainly not unthinkable that the Labour Party itself will be officially declared a terrorist organization. By stretching the label terrorism to silence and criminalize political opposition to the government’s complicity in war crimes and genocide, the Labour Party have basically signed their own indictments. The fascists are already waiting to take over.

At the same time as the Labour Party expose their own criminal contempt for democracy, the BBC is being exposed for its Zionist propaganda. Indeed, by constantly diverting attention away from genocide to completely vacuous debates about anti-Semitism and terrorism, by engendering moral panics about Glastonbury and students becoming radicalized, they are engendering exactly the opposite effect of what they intend to accomplish. Whereas Israel and the supporters of Zionism may think that they are winning, by murdering ever more Palestinian civilians and incarcerating those who vociferously oppose war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide, most people, who are not bought and paid for, who are not extorted because they visited someone like Jeffrey Epstein, and who have nothing to lose but their humanity, dignity and sense of self-worth, will continue to speak up, protest or – when all of this is completely forbidden – still know how to distinguish between right and wrong. We are thousands, we are millions, we are all Palestinians.

I have one hope left: I hope that the time will come that those responsible for and complicit in these unspeakable crimes and those who have worked so hard to justify them, defend them, and even celebrate them, will face a reckoning. They have already lost their souls, their humanity, their dignity, their sense of self-worth. They are the cowards hiding behind their public offices, their security apparatuses, their ability to speak without being forced to listen. They have decided that the short term personal gains – whether they be financial, political or merely symbolic – are worth the price of their souls. There will be nothing left for them but the debris of their own desolation. When they die, they will only be remembered by their cowardice and dishonesty. Their legacy will be that of a rotten corpse, infested with maggots.