Words are Weaponized by Israelophobia

Islamophobia is a word

that liberals coined to show they do not fear

Islam, which in the West seems quite absurd.

Islamists wants these libs to disappear,

which should make liberals Islamophobic,

but doesn’t, by the very word persuaded

that this implies that they are xenophobic.

That’s why they love those by whom they are hated.

In fact Israelophobia thus is

their antisemitism’s antidote, invented

by those who hate not only Jews but Is-

rael, a hate by demons made demented,

mistaken diagnosis with a label

for hate, today used as a Trojan horse

by antisemites, it’s goal to enable

them antisemitisms to endorse.

Hamas: like Greeks in the Homeric fable,

Israelophobia: a perverse

attempt to justify Islamic hate,

word-weaponized, in order to reverse

existence of the world’s one Jewish state,

hate making most subhumanly Hamas

behave fallaciously like Paris, felon,

its every hostage like the looted lass

whom Homer’s Paris captured — Israel’s Helen.

Jews won’t allow the treachery of a Trojan

horse, Islamophobia, to destroy

the state in which some millions now sojourn,

and since the age of Abraham enjoy,

and will continue to do so, despite

Israelophobia that’s more left than right.

Robert Philpot writes in The Times of Israel on 12/2/23 about a new book, Israelophobia, by Jake Wallis Simons, the editor of UK’s Jewish Chronicle:

Tragically, the publication of Jake Wallis Simons’s new book could hardly be more timely.

The full horror of its subject — “Israelophobia,” a passionate loathing directed at the Jewish state — has been graphically displayed by Hamas’s murderous October 7 assault on Israel and the manner in which some in the West have sought to justify, excuse and even celebrate it.

For Wallis Simons, the editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, it has provided a moment of moral clarity like few others in the state’s 75-year history.

“This moment has been a real clarifying time to show people’s real true motivations. It’s been a time when the mask has really come off,” he tells The Times of Israel. “People can no longer hide behind the rhetoric of virtue and social justice. It’s clear. There have been so many people who have been celebrating, whose response to a pogrom and a massacre of Jews has been to chant: ‘Free Palestine.’”

“All over the West, and indeed elsewhere in the world, there has been a groundswell of support for the Palestinians which is nothing more than naked support for the murder and desecration of Jews,” Wallis Simons adds. “I think this extreme time has just brought all of those dynamics out to the fore: you can see people clearly now, you can see where they stand.”

In Wallis Simons’s telling, Israelophobia is simply “a deceitful new form of the oldest hatred,” drawing upon and parroting centuries of conspiracy theories, paranoia and tropes targeting Jews, refining them, and then using them to attack the Jewish state.

His book, “Israelophobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatred & What to Do About It,” forensically traces the manner in which hatred of the Jewish state has grown, seeded by Nazi efforts to woo the anti-British Arab street during World War II; spread by the Soviets’ massive anti-Zionist propaganda machine during the Cold War; and now pumped out worldwide by a sophisticated Iranian-backed online disinformation campaign.

But, argues Wallis Simons, there is a twist in this sordid tale. Despite its antisemitic, far-right roots — Soviet propagandists drew heavily on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — Israelophobia has now become “a core part of a suite of views held by the progressives who set the tenor for much of our culture.”

Thanks to the prominent place accorded to Israelophobia in the cannon of a small but powerful “intolerant progressive elite,” he says, “attacking Western history, values and culture often goes hand in hand with attacking the Jewish state.” Thus, Wallis Simons believes, “the first in the firing line when it comes to an attack on Western values are the Jews.”

The potency of Israelophobia, Wallis Simons says, derives from the manner in which the progressive elite deploys the terminology of the social justice movement as a “Trojan horse for antisemitism,” thus making “the old bigotry palatable to the mainstream.”

Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.