Steve Plotnicki

The reason Abdul El-Sayed (and Hasan Piker or other Antizionist public figures) define antisemitism so narrowly - as solely animus against Jews for their RELIGION - is the political utility of decoupling Jews from their history, ethnicity, and ties to the Levant. When someone insists Jews are only targeted as a religious group, he is using a rhetorical tactic that deliberately strips away the indigenous, ethnic, and tribal identity of the Jewish people. By reducing Judaism to a set of religious ideas (like Presbyterianism or Catholicism), it allows him to continue to claim that Jews are just Europeans who happen to practice a certain faith, and are thus the wrongful "colonizers" of the Levant if they happen to be Israeli. By erasing our shared ancestry, genetics, language (Hebrew), and the cultural continuity of our people for thousands of years, he is attempting to redefine Jewish identity from the outside to fit his specific pan-Arabist political narrative. In other words, if Jews are merely a religious group with no shared ethnic or historical homeland, then the return of Jews to Israel is easily framed as a modern colonial invasion by white foreign Europeans, rather than the return of an exiled indigenous population to a land littered with thousands of years of historical artifacts that prove their roots lie in that land. Jewish history, archeology, and religious liturgy are explicitly and intrinsically tied to the geography, weather, and historical facts of Judea and Samaria. When El-Sayed condemns antisemitism as only a faith-based animus towards Judaism as religion, he is implicitly denying the ethnic and national component of our Jewish identity, and continuing to delegitimize the very concept of Zionism, or Jewish self-determination in our ancestral homeland. Outside of denying the ethnic component of Judaism and centering his own opposition to the existence of Israel, people like El-Sayed do this to shield themselves from accusations of bigotry when their own speech or ideologies cross the line from political criticism into classic antisemitism. Once he narrowly defines antisemitism as "hating people for praying differently," he can freely traffic in age-old conspiracy theories (e.g., global Jewish financial control, media manipulation, or collective guilt for Israel's actions) but shield himself by saying, "I don't hate their religion, I'm just criticizing Zionists." Of course, this doesn't change the fact that his own rhetoric, or those of the people he associates with, is just recycling medieval and 20th Century antisemitic tropes (and explicitly calling for the elimination or expulsion of an entire group, Jewish Israelis, from the Middle East). By redefining antisemitism, he can use "Zionist" as a slur and substitute for "Jew" while claiming immunity to accusations of bigotry because he isn't explicitly attacking synagogues or Jewish religious beliefs. Worst of all, defining antisemitism so narrowly justifies the vast majority of modern antisemitism. Today, nobody in the West is upset that Jews worship one G-d. The allegations center instead on our alleged collective malice, excessive geopolitical power, and illegitimate national identity. The focus of the antisemitic rhetoric Abdul El-Sayed or Hasan Piker engage in, or enable and excuse, is on the Jewish people as a nefarious and corrosive political collective rather than as individual worshipers. In modern discourse, this antisemitic rhetoric simply swaps the word "Jew" for "Zionist" to express hostility toward Jewish political identity while maintaining plausible deniability. This allows classic prejudices to be directed at us as a collective and unified political entity rather than as religious individuals. It also allows those trafficking in such rhetoric to claim sympathy with victims of antisemitic attacks while implicitly encouraging the increased atmosphere of suspicion and exclusion that triggers them in the first place. The key to understanding modern politically-focused antisemitism is how figures like El-Sayed and Piker are the face of an American progressive movement that has created a conditional standard for Jewish acceptance and participation. Jews are allowed in that circle of far left politics only if we publicly disavow our ethnic connection to Israel or the collective political interests of Jews. If we embrace our full ethnoreligious identity - especially if we commit the great sin of recognizing our connection to our ancestral homeland in Israel - we are politically toxic, regardless of how devout or secular we happen to be. The goal of Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker, whether they admit as such or not, is the exclusion of Jews and their allies from political spaces unless and until we disavow our Jewish ethnic identity. That identity is inherently problematic, in their view. However, we may not point out the centrality of their unspoken pan-Arabist ideology, lest we find ourselves under attack as an "Islamphobic" defender of the nefarious political project of Zionist Jews. This version of "Islamophobia" makes the implicit claim that the central pillar of the Islamic (or progressive) political project is the destruction of Judaism as the evil political project they claim it is. But this is simply a pervasive, and corrosive, antisemitic bias now being normalized in American leftism. Hatred of Judaism as an ethnicity, the application of double standards to Jews, the denial of Israel's sovereignty and Jewish history in the Levant does not have to be central to Muslim participation in the American left. Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker simply have made it so, because their goal is the normalization of > 90% of modern antisemitism and the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. Every accusation that Jews are a uniquely perfidious political entity is mere projection of the unstated pan-Arabist project, normalized by Antizionism and the way those that espouse it hide their bias behind inaccurate and ahistorical definitions of antisemitism.

96th minute and Declan Rice runs like that?! That guy is a tank!

During the worst of the days of the hunger crisis in Gaza in the past six months, Hamas deliberately hid literal tons of infant formula and nutritional shakes for children by storing them in clandestine warehouses belonging to the Gaza Ministry of Health. The goal, as I said then, was to worsen the hunger crisis and initiate a disaster as part of the terror group’s famine narrative in a desperate effort to stop Israel’s onslaught against Gaza and force the return of the UN’s aid distribution mechanism, and away from the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Now, activists in the Strip are documenting the waste and deliberate disposal of tons of infant formula, nutritional children’s shake, and children’s powdered milk, which Hamas had hoarded away, given the saturation of the coastal enclave with humanitarian aid after the ceasefire two months ago. When countless other Palestinian activists and I from Gaza said this back in July, August, and September, we were villainized, attacked, threatened, and made into pariahs by the “pro-Palestine” industrial complex and activist mafias, even though for Gazans, the evidence was so clearly apparent before our eyes. What those in the West continue to fail to understand is that there is no being pro-Palestine without also having a serious vigilance against Hamas’s continued manipulation of international public opinion to hide behind the Strip's civilian population's suffering, something that the terrorist organization’s own actions have led to and created. Never allow yourself to be a useful idiot in Hamas’s propaganda. You can have compassion for the real suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, and demand Israeli action to facilitate aid entry into the coastal enclave, while still holding Hamas accountable for its part in causing a hunger and starvation crisis in the first place.

This is the wildest attack ad I’ve ever seen in politics. Andrew Cuomo pulling out all the stops.

My latest for @TheAtlantic: Hamas Actually Wants a Famine "Hamas actually wants a famine in Gaza. Producing mass death from hunger is the group’s final play, its last hope for ending the war in a way that advances its goals." theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…