When Jew Hate Doesn’t Count

Outside the White House this weekend, protesters chanted “Hezbollah, Hezbollah, kill another Zionist now!” (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for *The Washington Post* via Getty Images)

When antisemites marched through Charlottesville, America was outraged. But when calls to “kill another Zionist now” were heard outside the White House this weekend, the nation shrugged.

By Peter Savodnik

06.10.24 — U.S. Politics

Remember, folx, what’s most important is not whether someone threatens to kill Jews. What matters is who is issuing the threats.

If there’s a lesson from the orgy of hatred that we witnessed outside the White House this weekend—“Hezbollah, Hezbollah, kill another Zionist now!” the masked, keffiyeh-wearing activists shouted—it is that.

Recall August 2017, when several hundred alt-right chumps, in their pleated khakis and white polo shirts, descended on Charlottesville with tiki torches, vowing “Jews will not replace us.”

The Reverend William J. Barber II called the Unite the Right rally, in which a white supremacist drove into a crowd, killing a woman and wounding thirty-five others, “a symptom of a greater moral malady.”

Michael Hayden, the retired four-star general who had been the director of the CIA and National Security Agency, condemned Donald Trump, saying his response “put the concept of nation as ‘blood and soil’ back into play for the first time since Appomattox.”

As far as right-thinking Americans were concerned, there was an obvious through line connecting Trump and the blood in Charlottesville. “President Trump lit every one of those torches in Charlottesville,” The Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak wrote.

Corporate America was also quick to weigh in. Airbnb removed people who were staying at their units and taking part in the rally, Apple donated $1 million to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, the Detroit Red Wings condemned alt-right protesters brandishing modified versions of the team’s logo, and so on.

And Joe Biden, who had previously vowed he wouldn’t seek the White House, reversed course because. . . Charlottesville.

“That’s when we heard the words of the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation,” Biden said in his April 25, 2019, video announcing his presidential bid. “ ‘Very fine people on both sides’? In those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime.”

Apparently, that outrage does not extend to all Jew-haters.

Over the weekend, thousands—not hundreds—of protesters encircled the White House waving Palestinian flags and accusing Israel of “genocide” and calling for the death of “Zionists,” which is what Jew-haters have taken to calling Jews to veil their hatred. “Stand with Hamas,” read one poster.

These are the people who dressed up as jihadists and defaced statues and screamed “Piggy! Piggy!” and “Fuck you, fascist” at the park rangers and held up a fake bloodied mask of Genocide Joe Biden. The New York Times, like CNN and The Washington Post and most every major outlet, made a big point of how the demonstrators really, really just want a cease-fire. There was no mention of Jews or antisemitism.

The Biden administration, to its credit, put out a statement saying it was against antisemitism. But that did not stop Biden campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod from saying that Biden “supports the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression” and that the protesters “have a right to speak their mind.” (I could not agree more. Where were these champions of First Amendment rights at Charlottesville?)

Most everyone else stressed that the only people who detected any antisemitism were the Jews, and that that wasn’t the point, and that the anti-Zionists, the people screaming at the park rangers and defacing statues and LARPing around like wannabe terrorists—who specialize in murdering and raping Jews—don’t hate anyone. Except Israelis.

“Many protesters chanted slogans that some Jewish groups have said incite violence against Jews,” the Times explained. “That some Jewish groups have said.”

Because—remember!—it’s never, ever about whoever dies. On the contrary, it is always about who can be blamed for that death. That is how one furthers the agenda.