Defeating the New Antisemitism
It’s not about what you think, writes Izabella Tabarovsky. It’s about Soviet propaganda.
Claire—David Bezmozgis has written an article in the Globe and Mail expressing a sentiment I’ve heard recently from almost every Jew I know. “The Jews of my generation thought they’d be exempt from history,” he writes. “They were wrong.”
In the weeks since Hamas massacred some 1,400 Israelis and abducted more than 200 others into Gaza, Jews around the world, including in Canada and the United States, have come to the shocking realization that a significant number of their fellow citizens are indifferent to their pain, openly celebrate it or, under the right conditions, would inflict more. Not only Jews have come to this realization, but all people of conscience who had believed that antisemitism was a stale anachronism—not entirely vanquished but practiced by a depraved minority of extremists. Evidence to the contrary, offered up at university campuses, public marches, and in statements made—or conspicuously not made—by various groups and institutions, has revealed that many people one did not expect to detest Jews seem to detest Jews. This has been particularly painful for Jews who align themselves with the political left, since much of this animosity has come from people whom they considered friends and allies.
There is a set of suppressed premises here. To witness this recrudescence of lust for Jewish blood causes every Jew to wonder if antisemitism is simply ineradicable, like a genetic defect.
That antisemitism was ineradicable was Theodore Herzl’s conclusion, of course, except that the existence of a Jewish state has done nothing to mitigate it, as he believed it would. And so, many Jews now suspect, we are doomed. The world’s antisemitism at times goes into remission, but it will always return, vile and murderous as ever, and nothing can be done about it.
But if it is understandable for Jews to suspect that antisemitism is somehow an idea with supernatural immortality, it is also superstitious and fatalistic. It prevents us from looking at this problem clearly. The idea that antisemitism is ineradicable makes no sense. There is no such thing as an antisemitism gene. There is no antisemitism instinct.
Antisemitism is, in essence, a conspiracy theory, and it is a theory that’s neither true nor useful, so there’s no reason for it to survive as an idea. An obsession with 0.02 percent of the world’s population offers no benefit to the obsessed; to the contrary, antisemitic societies inevitably stagnate or self-immolate. There’s no such thing as a successful, prosperous, contented, and advanced society of antisemites. Jews of my age were right to believe that antisemitism was a stale anachronism, practiced only by a depraved minority of extremists.
Yet here it is—again. Why?
We’re not seeing this outbreak of antisemitism because it is simply the nature of things. We’re seeing it because hostile states find it useful to cultivate antisemitism in their own populations and in ours. These ideas are not blossoming spontaneously in the West. They’ve been injected, deliberately, into our bloodstream.
Who’s doing it? The usual suspects, probably.
Izabella Tabarovsky explains.
HOW TO BEAT THE NEW ANTISEMITISM
It’s the Soviets, stupid.
By Izabella Tabarovsky
In July of 1970, Soviet Ambassador to Washington Anatoly Dobrynin sent a cable to his superiors at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow entitled, “On Fighting American Zionist and Pro-Zionist Circles’ Hostile Anti-Soviet and Anti-Socialist-Bloc Activities.” In it, he provided his analysis of Zionists’ success at penetrating the American establishment.
Dobrynin wrote about the all-powerful Israel lobby; the “excessive public activity” of more than three hundred Jewish organizations; the presence of a large number of Jews in influential positions in American media, business, and the AFL-CIO leadership; and the Pentagon’s supposed pro-Israel position. He noted that the Zionist element “had struck deep roots in the American soil” and that fighting it successfully required “a unified and carefully coordinated plan.”
The language and assumptions of the report fully aligned with Moscow’s belief that a mighty Zionist conspiracy operated against it in Washington. His superiors responded by directing Dobrynin to study closely the American Jewish community and American Zionist organizations, and pay particular attention to the ways Zionists “manipulated American public opinion” in general and members of Congress in particular. The embassy was to work to undermine harmful Zionist influence among Republicans and Democrats; investigate Zionist connections with “American monopolistic capital”; and study financial and industrial enterprises controlled by “Jewish capital.” It was tasked with taking note of any disagreements among American Jews regarding the Soviet Union, Israel, and the Nixon administration, and to use these “to discredit and weaken the unity of anti-Soviet Zionist forces.”
If you sense a whiff of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion emanating from this exchange, you are right. In the wake of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War over Soviet-trained and Soviet-armed Arab states—an unexpected and traumatic defeat for Moscow—the Soviet propaganda and security apparatus developed an elaborate theory about a shadowy, omnipresent, and omnipotent enemy operating against the USSR around the world. It dubbed this enemy “International Zionism.” Among the sources of inspiration for this conspiracy theory were the Protocols, Russian pre-revolutionary pogromist literature, Nazi literature, and Arab antisemitic propaganda, rewritten to fit the Soviet Marxist-Leninist framework.
Guided by this Protocols-based logic, the Ministry directed Dobrynin to play up the trope of Zionist treacherousness—an easily recognizable counterpart of the right-wing idea about the perfidy of Jews. He was to demonstrate to the American public that Zionists were hostile to American national interests; to try and divide the Jewish community by working with progressive American Jewish and mainstream press to expose Zionist anti-American actions; and to report on antisemitism in the United States, particularly among political elites, while suggesting ways to use such instances in Soviet propaganda.
When Dobrynin wrote back, he informed his superiors that the embassy had established a special propaganda council tasked with aggravating divisions among American Jewry along the Zionist-Israel fault line as well as between Zionists and the non-Jewish population of the United States. The council’s task, he wrote, was to raise questions among key American constituencies about Zionists’ loyalty to Israel; to help deepen disagreements between American and Israeli governments; and to expose ordinary Americans to “the brazen face of the leaders of the newly-minted Zionist ‘higher race’ from Tel Aviv.”
We don’t know whether the propaganda council in fact was established, or if it achieved its objectives. Window dressing was an essential part of Soviet bureaucratic culture. An experienced bureaucrat, Dobrynin would have known exactly what to say and how to say it to please his superiors. But the fact that pleasing Moscow meant playing into its anti-Zionist and antisemitic conspiracy fantasies says much about the climate in Soviet corridors of power at the time.
Dobrynin’s correspondence also points to some of the tactics Moscow used to fight its imaginary Zionist bogeyman. One crucial strategy, for example, was to induce American Jews to end their support for Israel. Convinced that Zionists ran America, Moscow calculated that once American Jews turned away from Israel, the American establishment would do so as well, draining Zionism and Israel of their magic powers. One of the ways to achieve this objective was to turn Zionism and Israel into moral outcasts.
Soviet propaganda worked tirelessly to achieve this goal. It equated Zionism with Nazism, claimed that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis in the annihilation of their own people, and painted Zionism as a colonial project serving the interests of imperialism and monopolistic capital. It engaged its Academy of Sciences and the full power of its press, domestically and internationally, to equate Zionism with racism and paint Israel as an “apartheid state” akin to South Africa.
It is astonishing to me that American Jews remain blind to this history—or how it continues today, more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, through a range of institutions and movements. What makes it especially bewildering is that American Jews had been at the forefront of the fight for Soviet Jewry and understood that what the Soviets called anti-Zionism was but a rebranding of old antisemitic conspiracy theories. They knew that the antisemitism experienced by Soviet Jews was inextricably linked to the anti-Zionist propaganda that the state engaged in at home and abroad. Yet today, when the very same tropes appear in the American environment, American Jews seem blind to the toxic history and charge.
Yet the antisemitic effects of these tropes are already evident. We see Jewish students and professors in America being harassed and silenced on university campuses. We see pro-Israel Jewish authors being shut out of mainstream American publishing. We see Jewish organizations being excluded from progressive circles on account of their failure to denounce Israel and Zionism. Conditioned to worry about right-wing antisemitism, third- and fourth-generation American Jews are sleepwalking through this latest iteration of Jew-hatred, which comes at them from the Left, which many consider their political home.
Debates about whether anti-Zionism is or isn’t antisemitism play out in the pages of the Jewish press and scholarly journals. Some have acknowledged that it is antisemitism but dubbed it “new,” and possibly more benign than the right-wing kind. But there is nothing novel about this form of antisemitism. We have seen it all before. We know how it ends.
Today, when these Soviet themes resonate across American university campuses and are part and parcel of American political discourse, it is instructive to trace their history and evolution.
Take, for example, the slander equating Zionism with racism and Israel with South African apartheid. To understand its origins, let’s turn to a 1959 KGB memo, which reported on the agency’s effort to analyze Jewish religious writings to better understand Zionism. With no religious background, and none in Jewish religious thought, KGB personnel ploughed through the Hebrew Bible and a dozen Russian-language Jewish prayer books. Their conclusion: Jewish religious writings are “permeated throughout with a spirit of militant nationalism and ‘spiritual racism,’” expressing “the racist conception of exclusivity and superiority of the Jewish people” and enabling Jews to “disseminate hatred toward those of different ethnicity.”
Claiming that these “racist” ideas “constitute the foundation of Zionist ideology,” the KGB raised particular alarm over two prayers: Aleinu and Kol Nidre. These, they wrote, openly propagated “Zionism, the ‘exclusivity’ and ‘superiority’ of the Jewish people, and the final victory of the Jewish people over the entire world.”
What is striking about this analysis, besides its utter ignorance, is the extent to which it parallels right-wing antisemitic thought. The obsession with supposed Jewish superiority, predicated on the religious concept of “chosenness,” is central to the fear and loathing of Jews on the far-right. But this parallel did not stop Soviet propaganda from turning it into the centerpiece of its anti-Zionist defamation and, ultimately, into the well-known trope about Zionism as racism. Here, for example, is the Soviet ambassador to the UN Yakov Malik in a 1971 speech to the Security Council:
The Fascists advocated the superiority of the Aryan race as the highest among all the races and peoples in the world … and the Zionist does the same. The chosen people: is that not racism? What is the difference between Zionism and Fascism, if the essence of the ideology is racism, hatred toward other peoples?
The same logic guided Soviet propaganda’s defamation of Israel among African states to which Israel had begun to make diplomatic outreach, peeving Moscow in the process. Here is a quote from a 1974 book Against Zionism and Israeli Aggression published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences:
Both Zionism and Afrikaner nationalism propagandize the idea of the “chosen people,” especially created by God … It’s no wonder that Zionists consider the theory of separate development (apartheid) a sensible solution to the racial problem in South Africa. This is precisely how they would like to solve their “Arab problem.” Zionists and white South Africans find common ground in their attitude to people of color.
The same gross distortion of the biblical idea of chosenness lies at the core of one of the most infamous Soviet tracts: Valery Skurlatov’s 1975 Zionism and Apartheid. “Racial biological doctrines, according to which people are divided into ‘chosen people’ and goyim,” he wrote, “have been turned into official ideology and state policy in Israel and South Africa, where the ‘inferior’ are forcibly separated from the ‘superior.’ That is what apartheid is.”
Efforts to paint Israel and Zionism as racist culminated, of course, with the adoption of the UN “Zionism is a form of racism” resolution in 1975. Countless well-meaning progressives and anti-racists around the globe took this monstrous propaganda exercise at face value, ignorant of the fact that it was built around a fundamental element of right-wing antisemitism. Moscow’s endless protests that anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism helped thwart potential criticism. Yet antisemitic outcomes quickly followed the adoption of the resolution for Jewish communities across the globe. For example, British Students’ Unions began restricting the activities and funding of Jewish societies on campuses and even banning them. As British author Dave Rich noted in his The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Antisemitism: “When you use the ‘Zionism is racism’ idea as the basis for practical politics, you can end up with an antisemitic campaign.”
But for no other group were the outcomes of Soviet anti-Zionism as damaging as for millions of Soviet Jews. Anti-Zionist fear-mongering limited Jewish educational and professional opportunities. Convinced that Jewish religious and cultural institutions served as channels of Zionist influence, the state increasingly banned those, along with Jewish religious texts, literature, and the Hebrew language.
The effect was more insidious than one might imagine. An academic council failing a Jewish Ph.D. candidate might do so not because its members were antisemitic or got a specific directive to fail the Jews: They might do it because they understood instinctively that it was a safer choice, for their institution and their careers. A manager of a television station might harbor no personal animus toward Jews but choose to keep a Jewish journalist or performer off the air—just in case. With Zionists declared public enemy number one, avoiding adding Jews to a workplace or keeping them out of the public eye was simply the sensible approach.
Among the tools Moscow used to undercut the Zionist power it imagined ruled America was to work with the American press. And here, the Soviets’ biggest success was a piece they managed to place in the New York Times in January 1971. From a secret Soviet memo, we know that the authors of the piece, which was published under the title “A Soviet View on Jews,” had proposed a different title: “The Fuehrers and Storm Troopers of Neo-racism.” Their objective was to expose “the spiritual kinship of Zionism and fascism.”
The piece was framed around condemning Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League, which at the time were busy terrorizing Soviet offices and cultural productions in the United States in the name of freeing Soviet Jewry. The framing was clever and offered a surefire way for Soviet propagandists to earn an agreement from most American Jews. But the real point of the piece was to introduce Soviet “Zionism-is-Nazism” smears to the Times’ massive readership. While ostensibly focused on Kahane and the JDL, it ultimately tagged every American Jew identifying with Israel as a “Zionist fanatic” and member of a fifth column standing in the way of peace between the United States and the USSR.
Another approach was to work with Western leftists sympathetic to the USSR. One way to do so was to finance these groups and to get them to toe the Soviet line in return. According to the historian Harvey Klehr of Emory University, in 1958–1980 the American Communist Party (CPUSA) alone got US$28 million in subsidies from Moscow. Subsidies grew each year after that, to reach US$3 million in 1988 alone. Millions more were spent on European groups.
One example of how this cooperation played out in practice is evident from the story of Hyman Lumer, editor-in-chief of CPUSA’s Political Affairs journal. In 1971, Lumer went to Moscow to attend a symposium on Trotskyism. He used the opportunity to request help from highly-placed Moscow comrades to prepare “materials to unmask the Zionist anti-Soviet campaign.” He promised that the materials would be distributed widely in the US. His liaisons arranged the necessary meetings. The material Lumer collected appeared in his 1973 book Zionism: Its Role in World Politics as well as other writings that circulated among the American and, presumably, British far-left.
People like Lumer were extremely valuable to Moscow. For one thing, having Soviet talking points on Israel coming out of the mouths of Western activists, thought leaders, and journalists helped endow them with greater credibility. Having first fed them these talking points, Moscow then translated and republished their writings and speeches at home, creating an illusion that all the world’s “progressive forces” agreed with it on Israel and Zionism. This global anti-Zionist echo chamber was a classic case of circular reporting: Although multiple independent sources seemed to confirm the idea that Zionism and Israel were evil, the real source of this idea was the same—the KGB and Soviet propaganda.
Soviet anti-Zionism left behind a rich written legacy. Soviet anti-Zionist books circulate on the internet and live in libraries around the world—in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic, and Farsi.
More importantly, it left behind a legacy of political conviction. Soviet tropes about Zionism are part and parcel of Palestinian discourse vis-à-vis its Western supporters. (We only have to recall that Mahmoud Abbas defended his dissertation at the Soviet Institute of the Oriental Studies and turned it into a book to understand some of the channels through which Soviet ideas traveled to the rest of the world.) Portions of the Western Left adopted the conspiracist perspective on Israel and Zionism in the 1970s, when the Soviet influence was strongest, turning it into their default position.
Does this history really matter? Even if contemporary demonization of Zionism has antisemitic roots dating back to Soviet propaganda and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the argument will be made that Israel is still a problematic state and Zionism a problematic ideology from the left-wing perspective. Why can’t a well-meaning anti-racist denounce antisemitism while feeling free to use these slogans to communicate their very valid concerns?
The best way to answer this question is to use an example that is closer to home. It comes courtesy of the British philosopher Quassim Cassam. In his book Conspiracy Theories, he asks: Could a white Southerner raise the Confederate flag over her porch to express pride in her Southern heritage without it connoting racism and slavery?
Most progressives would intuitively answer this question with a resounding negative. Cassam agrees and explains why. What the flag symbolizes, he writes, “isn’t determined by the beliefs and intentions of the individual who chooses to display it. The flag has a life of its own, its own history and meaning.” It does not become “politically benign” just because the person displaying it is a good person or “doesn’t think of it as a symbol of slavery and racism.” The flag’s history and meaning are independent of those who raise it. Which means that “people who display the flag are, wittingly or unwittingly, associating themselves with what it in fact symbolizes, regardless of their personal views.”
In other words, a well-meaning leftist deploying Soviet anti-Zionist tropes inevitably dips into the toxic legacy of Soviet antisemitism—a fact that is obvious to any Jew who, like myself, had been subject to that form of Jew-hatred. This legacy includes persecution and murder of religious and Zionist Jews. It includes the physical destruction of Jewish cultural figures and intellectuals. It connotes an eradication of Jewish culture and religion and restrictions on educational and professional opportunities for Jews. For Jews from the socialist bloc, it brings up memories of humiliations—from what we would today call micro-aggressions on the part of friends and colleagues, to open taunts and even beatings in the streets.
When we recall what toxic right-wing antisemitic brew went into the construction of Soviet “left-wing” anti-Zionism, the picture looks even bleaker. The simple truth is that when well-meaning progressives say that Zionism is racism or equate Israel with apartheid, they evoke an intellectual heritage that is responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews in pogroms and Hitler’s genocide, and for a spiritual and cultural annihilation of millions more. I can’t imagine that any genuine progressives would want to associate themselves with that—much less Jewish progressives.
Diaspora Jews, and especially American Jews, have failed to incorporate this part of history into our collective memory and to pass it on to the next generations. Today, we and our children are paying the price of this forgetting.
It is time to wake up. We must reacquaint ourselves with the long history of contemporary anti-Zionist demonization. We have to acknowledge that today’s anti-Israel Left often draws on tropes, motifs, and explanatory logic of Soviet anti-Zionist discourse grounded in antisemitic conspiracy theory. We must recognize that politically weaponized anti-Zionism has left behind a long trail of antisemitic outcomes around the globe and will produce more—including and especially in the United States. It is our generational task to figure out how to stand up to it today.
Izabella Tabarovsky writes about Soviet Anti-Zionism, contemporary Left antisemitism, and the links between the two. This essay is an excerpt from the forthcoming Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, ed. David Hazony (Wicked Son, 2023). For more information visit: JewishPriorities.com.
Claire—Now consider that Russian intelligence services continue to conduct the same subversion and propaganda campaigns around the world—but now they have two key advantages over their Soviet predecessors. First: They are ideologically unconstrained. Whereas Soviet apparatchiks were obliged to look for useful idiots and tools on the left, Moscow now designs its influence campaigns to exploit and appeal to the whole political spectrum.
Second, the Internet has given Moscow direct access to Western publics, and a reach that would have been unimaginable to the KGB. One look at Twitter or TikTok is sufficient to answer the question, “Where is all this Jew-hatred coming from?” Clearly, some organized entity is running a massive influence operation on the network.
Under Musk’s tenure, the number of Russian propaganda accounts on Twitter has skyrocketed. Kremlin-linked accounts that were once restricted are now being boosted, pushed into users’ “For You” feeds, and appearing in lists of recommended accounts to follow. The European Commission recently published the results of its investigation into Russian disinformation campaigns:
[T]he reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts has grown further in the first half of 2023, driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards. … the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe. These circumstances raise questions not only about European Union defenses against Russia’s information warfare but also about the integrity of the European election in June of 2024. …
… the reach of pro-Kremlin accounts has increased between January and May of 2023, with average engagement rising by 22 percent across online platforms. However, this increased reach was largely driven by Twitter, where engagement grew by 36 percent after CEO Elon Musk decided to lift mitigation measures on Kremlin-backed accounts, arguing that “all news is to some degree propaganda.” Shortly after the end of our monitoring period, Twitter withdrew from the [EU] Code of Practice [on Disinformation]. By contrast, and in apparent compliance with the Code, average engagement with pro-Kremlin accounts dropped by 20 percent on Facebook, and remained largely unchanged on the remaining platforms.”
Before Musk, Twitter was the only major platform that had a comprehensive policy to geoblock, label, and demote Kremlin-backed accounts. Musk publicly reversed these policies. Now, no one is even trying to get Russian propagandists off the platform. Russian propagandists are freely purchasing Twitter blue-check verifications. The report continues:
The proportion of toxic, and potentially illegal, comments to the posts from pro-Kremlin accounts increased sharply and immediately between February and April of 2022. Our data show a 120 percent increase in toxic posts on Twitter. … We identified a wide variety of content promoted by pro-Kremlin accounts carrying potential systemic risk to public security, electoral processes and civic discourse through intentional disinformation. This type of narrative has a particularly high potential of increasing risk to civic discourse and elections, in that it is designed to deceive and “brainwash” audiences on matters of critical public importance, including matters of life and death.
Pro-Kremlin actors, for example, alleged that the Ukrainians were responsible for a nuclear cloud blowing into the EU, claimed that Europe would run out of gas in the winter, and said that Putin had won the war and NATO was abandoning Ukraine. They pumped anti-vax propaganda into the information ecosystem at a rate of knots, and of course, hemorrhaged calumnies against Jews.
In another study, the EU found that disinformation was more easily found on X than on any other social media platform and received more engagement than it did on any other platform. This statistic is stunning:
Relative post engagement measures the ratio of the average level of active engagement with mis/disinformation posts compared to that with non- mis/disinformation posts. When this ratio exceeds one, it implies that the average level of active engagement with mis/disinformation posts is higher than that with non-mis/disinformation posts. Conversely, a ratio below one indicates the opposite. Twitter showed the highest relative post engagement. The average engagement with mis/disinformation content found on Twitter is 1.977 times as high as the average engagement with non-mis/disinformation.
In other words, Twitter users are twice as likely to be engaging with lies than the truth. This study concluded that between 8-9 percent of Twitter users are “disinformation actors;” that is, they are knowingly posting disinformation, not merely misinformation. (They define disinformation as “false or misleading content that is spread with an intention to deceive or secure economic or political gain, and which may cause public harm.”)
Twitter no longer allows users to report Tweet’s because they’re misleading. Musk seems to believe there is no such thing as the truth (“all news is to some degree propaganda.”) Even if it did, Twitter no longer responds to user complaints of violations of its terms of service. It still officially prohibits the incitement of violence, but never enforces this policy. Anyone who uses Twitter will within minutes encounter calls for genocide, be it of Jews, Ukrainians, or some other people.
ISIS, which was pushed off the platform in the Dorsey era, is back on the platform in force. So is Hamas. Twitter says it’s removed “hundreds” of Hamas accounts. But “tens of thousands” remain. The cumulative effect of these changes has been to transform Twitter into an engine of propaganda from and on behalf of the world’s worst regimes. If Twitter’s official policy were to promote antisemitism, terrorism, and war, it could not improve upon what it’s now doing.
Since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, scammers and propagandists on Twitter have been pumping out fake videos with Stakhanovite industry. They post images of dead children from every conflict of which there are photos, or gruesome images from the movies, or from video games, or generated by AI—and claim they show Gaza. A very significant percentage of the photos on Twitter that purport to show the horrors Israel is inflicting on Gaza are in fact photos of the horrors Russia inflicted on Syria. (If you’re asking yourself whether the global orgy of antisemitism we’re witnessing now might simply be a reaction to the brutality of the Israeli campaign against Hamas, ask yourself why the very same photos did not cause college students to take to the streets screaming, “Free Syria.”)
These images, which purport to show Jews committing “genocide” in Gaza, are retweeted hundreds of thousands of times. Some of the people posting these fakes are doing it for the money. Others are doing it because they hate Jews. But many, clearly, are doing it at the behest of a hostile state whose interests are best served when the West is divided, confused, and distracted from Ukraine. Whatever the motive, their actions are increasing not only the world’s hostility toward Israel, but toward Jews and Americans everywhere.
But it is no longer just Russia. Russia has shown every rogue and hostile state how much can be accomplished through a sophisticated social media demoralization campaign. Hamas and Iran have taken note. Both are now clearly waging campaigns of their own.
So no, the world is not genetically, incurably antisemitic. People are working very hard to make it so, and we are stupidly giving them the tools to do it.
We’ve not yet even mentioned China. Today in the Free Press, Representative Mike Gallagher wrote about the sinister role of TikTok:
Why do young Americans support Hamas? Look at TikTok. The app is digital fentanyl made by China. And it is brainwashing our youth against the country and our allies.
According to a Harvard/Harris poll, 51 percent of Americans ages 18–24 believe Hamas was justified in its brutal terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli citizens on October 7. … How did we reach a point where a majority of young Americans hold such a morally bankrupt view of the world? Where many young Americans were rooting for terrorists who had kidnapped American citizens—and against a key American ally? Where were they getting the raw news to inform this upside-down world view?
The short answer is, increasingly, via social media and predominantly TikTok. TikTok is not just an app teenagers use to make viral dance videos. A growing number of Americans rely on it for their news. Today, TikTok is the top search engine for more than half of Gen Z, and about six in ten Americans are hooked on the app before their seventeenth birthday. And it is controlled by America’s foremost adversary, one that does not share our interests or our values: the Chinese Communist Party. …
Xi Jinping understands the importance of information warfare—or the “smokeless battlefield,” as he’s called it. In a text regarding “military political work,” Xi declared, “The crumbling of a regime always starts in the realm of ideas. . . changing the way people think is a long-term process. Once the front lines of human thought have been broken through, other defensive lines also become hard to defend.”
Gallagher calls for banning TikTok. But it’s no use banning TikTok without wresting control of Twitter from Musk and placing it under minimally responsible guardianship. He continues:
Allowing a CCP-controlled entity to become the dominant player in America would be as if, in 1962, right before the Cuban Missile Crisis, we had allowed Pravda and the KGB to purchase The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, and NBC.
It’s not “as if.” That is the situation. Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and a wide range of well-financed jihadi terrorist groups have unlimited and free access to the arteries through which information circulates in the modern world. No major social media platform has come close to making a serious effort to stop this, and Twitter has made an effort to encourage it. Musk is economically beholden to China. Congress—as cynical or as deluded (or as dumb) as Musk—excitedly welcomed Musk’s purchase of Twitter as a deliverance from “censorship,” preferring to fight a wholly manufactured battle in the culture war than the real one against American adversaries. A more responsible body would have immediately understood that the sale represented a major threat to American national security and prevented it. Writes Gallagher:
So long as TikTok—and control of its algorithm—remain in the grip of the Chinese Communist Party, we are ceding the ability to censor Americans’ speech to a foreign adversary. Time for Congress to take action. Time to ban TikTok.
I’m glad he grasps that major social media platforms can pose a threat to national security and social cohesion so severe that the state has a significant interest in regulating them.
Banning TikTok would not, he argues, be an assault on free speech:
… neither banning Huawei nor banning TikTok restricts the speech of Americans. To the contrary, doing so protects our public square from the surveillance, malign influence, censorship, and propaganda of a foreign adversary.
Gallagher is right, but now he must follow his argument to its logical conclusion. When Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies turn themselves into playgrounds for American adversaries, the US government must likewise protect our public square. The European Union has perceived this clearly. It’s a measure of our political dysfunction that we don’t.
Perhaps the statistic with which Gallagher began—“51 percent of Americans ages 18–24 believe Hamas was justified in its brutal terrorist attacks”—will persuade Congress that we’ve a massive problem on our hands.
The global epidemic of antisemitism is only one symptom of this problem. That problem is social media. Our enemies are poisoning us with it. It needs to stop before those 18–24-year-olds get their hands on the levers of power and start killing us, because that’s where this sort of thing leads.
Record number of hate incidents against British Jews reported, says antisemitism charity …
Israel warns citizens to downplay signs of Judaism while abroad …
German vice-chancellor Habeck hits out against rising antisemitism …
Some 60 Stars of David were daubed on buildings in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. …
Argentina’s Jewish community rattled by rise in antisemitism …
The EU commission has condemned antisemitism as Jews in Europe grapple with a spike in attacks ...
How the surge in antisemitism is affecting countries around the world
A new wave of antisemitism threatens to rock an already unstable world
“Jews not allowed”: As Erdogan praises Hamas, antisemitism rages in Turkey
Cornell cancels classes citing “stress” after antisemitic threats lead to arrest
I would argue that social media poses a much broader problem that simply "TikTok causes antisemitism". Thought I think Gallagher and Izabella are probably right on that score. Social media causes ignorance. I find that nobody is interested in truth any more. People trust what they read on social media, and social media reinforces pre-conceived notions. It doesn't challenge people to think differently.
I've been asking two questions lately of my sphere of influence (which is populated predominantly by conservative Christian Americans):
Why do you stand with Israel?
What is revolutionary about Christ's Gospel?
A few folks have good answers. Most have never been asked to think about it.
I agree with Wig Wag and David Eggleston who would argue the deliberate normalized teaching of soviet propaganda--which is amazing that after all these years our universities still don’t get it--is more alarming. Just imagine how much less effective Russia’s and Hamas’s and China’s propaganda would be if kids were not already wokeified. Imagine for example that people got a normal liberal education in college if not a pro-American pro-capitalism education. Do you think that social media alone would change people’s minds? Moreover why is it that young people are so demographically susceptible to this antizionist ideology? It’s because young people are fucking woke. Look also at how congruent is antizionism with antiracism, the vain paranoid Marxist belief in a superstructure of structural inequality and invisible and unconscious bias, and the doctrine of intersectionality. Antizionism surely began with the Soviets as that great essay magisterially explains. But what drives antizionism today? What is the vehicle of its dissemination and what aids its popularity abetted but NOT caused by social media? Wokeness. Woke influencers, woke celebrities, woke politicians who are celebrities too like AOC, a self-indulgent narcissistic materialistic culture colliding with deeply antiwestern ideas propagated from college on down to elementary school. With the stakes of the new global cold war, for which we are still underprepared and currently we are losing, isn’t the least we can do to rid our schools of this nonsense right now? As our enemies divide and conquer the world right now, must we be self-sabotaging at home by teaching younger generations to hate our country more than any other country on earth??
And they’re not just ignorant. How Claire, do you explain all these people who acknowledge that October 7th happened and then either excuse it by saying we just need “context” to interpret it, or they champion it as an act of revolutionary revenge? As I explained on my blog post about how the woke are proto-terrorists, these people are much more self-aware than it is convenient to give them credit for. These people hate America as much as the national conservative Tucker Carlson and Musk followers on the right, except its worse because on the left, it’s more mainstream, and they are also more conscious of their own postliberalism. It’s a badge of honor for them. They show support for Hamas and their hatred of Jews in a clout-chasing competition with each other to show how anti-West and antiAmerican they are. Their celebration of Hamas’s pogrom is a proxy of the violence they would also joyfully see inflicted on everyone down the intersectional hierarchy of identity groups. This ideology, like ideologies of old, Prussian militarism, national socialism, leninism, Maoism, is immeasurably more alarming than propaganda floating around on social media.-- With consequences not only for Jews but for every other racial group. These demonstrations make explicit that the most authentic realization of “racial justice” is racial violence, ethnic cleansing committed against identity groups considered “oppressors.”