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Hasan Piker Threatens the Establishment. That’s Why They Want to Destroy Him.

Critics are leveling baseless charges of antisemitism and bigotry at the mega-streamer. But they’re really scared of the challenge he poses to their power.

Over the past few weeks, Democratic establishment figures and the Israel lobby have come together to denounce mega-streamer Hasan Piker and to demand that left-wing Democrats shun his extremely popular platform. Their charge is that he’s an antisemite. The reality, of course, is that Piker is not an antisemite. But he is a trenchant critic of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, of US warmongering, and of a Democratic establishment that supports both. What’s more, he’s an unmatched online warrior against MAGA and an American far right that is increasingly open about its fascism and antisemitism.

Seeing someone like that rise in stature and influence is an inherent threat to Democratic bigwigs and pro-Israel hardliners, which is why they are working so hard to destroy Piker’s reputation. But their moment is passing, and their power is fading. This time, Piker and the American left will not be silenced.

In attacking Piker, the centrists and Zionists are reaching for a playbook that once seemed foolproof. For decades, any criticism or protest of Israel’s occupation and apartheid system was met with an accusation of antisemitism. Those accusations did the trick, driving dissonant notes out of mainstream media and politics—or even from their jobs. It didn’t matter when the critic was Jewish—or even, as in the case of scholar Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors.

With the onset of the genocide in Gaza in 2023, such accusations accelerated and intensified. As the global movement against the genocide grew, so did the scale of the disinformation campaign mounted by Israel and its allies. Above all else, the attacks were meant to make people forget that large numbers of Jewish anti-Zionists, particularly youth, were active leaders in the movement—and that the US left, like many lefts, has always been profoundly Jewish. (The myth that communism was a Jewish conspiracy was a core feature of 20th-century fascist ideology; that shouldn’t obscure the fact that being on the left in the United States and elsewhere has long meant being in community with large numbers of Jewish people dedicated to universal human emancipation.)

Democratic politicians from New York Mayor Eric Adams to President Joe Biden nonetheless condemned this substantially Jewish movement as antisemitic. Such bogus charges were credulously regurgitated by The New York Times and CNN. Democrats cheered the repression of the movement on campus,........

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