A quote attributed to Jean Paul Sartre: “The anti-Semite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he actually believes he stole. He accuses the Jew of stealing because he enjoys watching the Jew empty his pockets to prove his innocence.”

Just replace the word “Jew” with “Zionist”, and you have an exact description of why today’s Antizionist bigots enjoy employing the modern-day libel-vomit buzzwords of “Apartheid” and “Genocide” against Israel. We need to stop being on the defensive about these terms, and shift the burden of proof, by pointing out a simple truth: that the word “genocide” has now gone the way of the word “literally” in our age of social media. People today use the term “literally” to mean “figuratively”. It’s just a bratty term of sarcasm for our bombastic age.

George Orwell famously wrote: “The word ‘Fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’”. He wrote that many decades ago. It’s even more true today. The apotheosis of all these phenomena is when the Antizionist might heave out something such as “you’re a literal genocidal fascist”, combining all three abuses of language into one.

My fellow Jews: Do not get into the mud with them. The use of the word genocide against Israel today does not even pretend to be a term of dispassionate, legal analysis. It’s transparently being used as a polemical social/emotional cudgel of opprobrium, to mark the Israeli and the mainstream Jew (“Zionist”) for othering, marginalization, bullying, and exclusion from polite society. It’s a spiritual/religious term for a secular age. Its function is to replace the outdated terms such as “heretic, apostate, Christ Killer” with something more fashionable, for the Marxist who thinks that he has no religion, but who is still reaching for the most hallowed and authoritative sounding word that his deracinated mind can grasp onto. And, of course, it’s a term which was invented by Jews, and which they have now profanely appropriated against us.

(It should be noted that while the term “Marxist” can be misused just as the word “Fascist” can, I’m only describing a group of people who openly embrace the use of that term for themselves: see the example of the DSA).

And here is the proof: we should always reply that, for the sake of argument, I’ll actually grant that Israel has committed “genocide”. But now, the interlocuter must respond himself, in Talmudic parlance: L’Mai nafka mina? (So, what’s the practical result of this?) Are you asserting this claim as dispassionately as one might assert that Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians? And in that........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)