How To Create Anti-Semitism From Scratch
I’ve got a little theory about something that seems to be going on. If you wanted to create Anti-Semitism from scratch in a country like the US that has little enthusiasm for it, how would you go about doing it?
Giving Power To The Insignificant
Jews tend to have an oppression mindset. This seems to be especially prevalent in America. Basically all of our holidays involve somebody trying to kill us all, and it seems like half of the discussion about Judaism in the US is about the Holocaust. This isn’t particularly bad by itself, though I would argue that we would be better served and healthier by focusing on the great things that we’ve done versus the terrible things that have been done to us.
Many American Jews have a somewhat obsessive fear about Anti-Semitism, despite there being very little of it in modern day to day American life. This manifests in them funding a bunch of organizations whose purported goal is to report on Anti-Semitism anywhere it rears its head in American society. There’s nothing wrong with keeping an eye out for it, but the problem comes in when these organizations come to depend on their reporting on finding Anti-Semitism for funding and status. They’re now incentivized to keep finding more Anti-Semitism to report on, so they explore deeper and darker corners of society, find people of less significance, and statements that are much further away from actual religious hatred. It turns out the audience isn’t that picky, and anything they can report pays.
This increasingly hysterical reporting on increasingly minor and ambiguous cases has troublesome side effects. Once ideas like Anti-Semitism get to be sufficiently rejected in mainstream society, the people who continue to gravitate to them are much more likely to have mental issues, not have accomplished much in life, and to carry a lot of resentment about it. If you dig up someone like that and attempt to punish them even more for their troublesome views, you don’t really fix anything about the rest of society, but you do tend to radicalize someone who may already not have much to lose. I believe this is the real root cause of the horrible Tree Of Life synagogue shooting. People like Robert Gregory Bowers need help and support, not to be lectured to and pushed further underground. Like this example of some random guy being attacked for supposedly posting some mean tweets by an account with 26k followers.
Making Their Accusations True
The other mechanism I believe works like so: We ask ourselves, what do actual Anti-Semites believe? They tend to be really upset about how, in their view, Jews are taking over the country in various ways. They like to talk a lot about the “Zionist Occupied Government”, disproportionate ownership of media, domination of finance, etc. Well, they’re the enemy, and you gotta fight the enemy, right? How do you fight an enemy that you can’t see or hear? We already know what they’re mad about, so let’s do more of that! Let’s make sure that, for example, Biden’s Cabinet is full of Jews, and that we gloat about it all the time. Ditto Jewish over-representation in other industries. Ditto adjusting American foreign policy to favor Israel over America. By doing this, and by doing it on purpose and gloating about it, we’re making them right. We’re taking a shadowy near-non-existent movement spouting conspiracy theories, and making those conspiracy theories true, and patting ourselves on the back over it!
How does the rest of the country actually react to this? Maybe they see Anti-Semitic writings every now and then. Maybe they used to dismiss them as being obviously ridiculous. Maybe they’ve also seen some of this recent gloating, and when they see such things, they no longer just dismiss them, but start to listen. They haven’t changed their minds yet, but the door has been opened. We’re the ones that opened it, by going out of our way to make them right instead of simply leading good lives and supporting the country that has supported us.
Conclusion
Sadly, to the extent that Anti-Semitism is actually real, I think we’ve brought it upon ourselves by allowing the processes described above to take place. The good news is that this means it’s also within our power to stop, and by stopping it we make both ourselves and American society healthier and happier. Stop obsessing over the Anti-Semitism of insignificant people. Stop telling people that Anti-Semitism is a significant and growing movement when it isn’t. Stop doing things that are objectively divisive and bad for America to own the mostly imaginary Anti-Semites.
