With everything happening right now—bombs thrown in NYC; synagogues and Jewish schools shot up in Michigan, Toronto, and the Netherlands; Israelis beaten in nearly every European country—one would think that semantic arguments would be the last thing we’re engaging in.
But we’re Jews; we do like to argue. And even pro-Israel millennials were raised on the post-modern falsehood that words can be manipulated to suit personal agendas.
It all started with a satanic hyphen, which refused to conform to social media norms. Hashtags are sacred on social media. And hashtags are anti-hyphen—sorry, #antihyphen—so anti-Semitism had to be smushed up and millennialized: “antisemitism.” If you dare to spell it correctly, you will receive long tirades on how conformity will set you free.
Never mind that non-conformity is at the essence of who we are as a people; that when the French began throwing Holocaust survivors out of windows and poisoning Jewish kids’ food, the perpetrators didn’t shout: “No hyphen!”
In the old days, we would call these types of theoretical arguments “academic,” essentially meaningless. Quite ironic, actually, given that so much of academia is now meaningless. But we’ve now moved past meaningless to actually harmful.
The newest post-modern fascism I mean fashion is to not just remove the hyphen from anti-Zionism but to smush it up into: antizionism. It is so disrespectful to the word Zion, which of course means Jerusalem (Tziyon), and to Zionism, which means the return of Judeans to our homeland, that many of us find it hard to even look at these post-modern configurations.
But by unlinking the term to anti-Semitism, post-modernists have also allowed it to be redefined by anyone with an anti-Semitic agenda. At a minimum, this could lead to a course called something like “Zionism vs. anti-Zionism,” and we all know how factually accurate that will be.
The post-modernists argue that we need to say that it’s a hate movement. Leaving aside the fact that anti-Semitism says precisely that, I would even be willing to indulge a little of this nuttiness if the primary source of today’s anti-Semitism was still coming from the Soviet Union.
The Soviets did a great deal of damage, and not just by promoting the warmth of collectivism. In addition to creating the PLO with Egyptian Yasser Arafat in 1964, the Soviets first introduced the oppressor/oppressed narrative into our universities, failing to mention of course that Russia has been one of the greatest oppressors throughout history.
But the truth is, the bulk of today’s anti-Semitism—both in and out of academia; both here and in Europe—is not coming from Marxists. It’s coming from Islamists. Islamists who have been taught since birth to hate Jews; who go to mosques to hear Imams preach hate and violence, using direct quotes from the Quran; who are now invited into Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home on a daily basis.
Islamists have never felt a need to disguise their anti-Semitism. The Quran and Hadiths use the word “Jews” repeatedly. According to statistical analysis by scholar Bill Warner, the Quran devotes 123 verses to condemning Jews. “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them.” (Sahih Muslim 2922) “You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers [to be] the Jews.” (Qur’an 5:82)
Which is why Arab Muslims who were living in Eretz Yisrael before ’48—before the fulfillment of Zionism—did what they have historically done: attempt to erase Jews. Check out the Hebron massacre of 1929.
As I write this, the NYPD discovered the possibility of a third bomb—within blocks of my son’s school. The first two bombs belonged to Islamists, inspired by ISIS, who were following their religious duty to kill infidels—Jews, Christians, Hindus, Africans.
The anti-hyphen warriors claim to be merely calling out a hate movement. But by giving it a new name they’re legitimizing it. We still need to “name the movement,” they vehemently demand.
Okay. It’s called anti-Semitism. It’s the world’s oldest hatred. Spelling it incorrectly doesn’t lessen the hate or mitigate the violence that always follows. It just takes our eyes off of the escalating situation. No doubt Islamists can’t believe their good fortune.
Karen Lehrman Bloch is editor in chief of White Rose Magazine.
