TheAltWorld The antisemitism scam
Claims of a global surge in antisemitism are being used to shield “Israel” from criticism and obscure the colonial project of displacement, apartheid, and regional war. As Tim Anderson explains, conflating criticism of “Israel” with hatred of Jewish people suppresses dissent and protects Israeli policies from accountability.
The “rising threat of antisemitism” scam is cover for Zionist genocide and regional war, the worst campaign of racist violence since Nazi Germany.
The violent, racist campaign of Zionist colonialism drives the forced displacement or extermination of the indigenous population of Palestine, destruction or Balkanisation of all neighbouring states which are pro-Palestine, and the targeting of voices worldwide who support equal rights for the Palestinian people.
While apartheid South Africa was brutal and criminal, it did not practice racist violence on this scale or of this character. To find a parallel in ethnic cleansing, genocidal extermination and wide ranging war on independent peoples, we have to go back to Nazi Germany.
The aim of this antisemitism scam is to distract from real, deep racism and present the Zionist racists as victims of some sort of unprovoked attack.
All claims that there is an unprovoked new wave of hatred and attacks on innocent Jewish people are tainted by the fact that its main proponents systematically conflate the apartheid regime of “Israel” with ordinary Jewish people. That conflation is driven by data collecting groups like the ADL and campaigns in support of the IHRA ‘working definition’ of antisemitism. In 2025, the ADL admitted that a majority of its “antisemitic” incidents “contained elements related to Israel or Zionism”.
The result is that all expressions of public outrage at the crimes of the Israeli regime are counted as acts against Jewish people, including statements by the “not in our name” Jewish protesters who are also horrified by Israeli crimes.
Colonial Zionists have pursued a systematic practice of deliberately conflating the Jewish people with the Israeli state, sabotaging any distinction between the two and “trivialising” the original European meaning of antisemitism. Israelis, including Israeli judges, have told Arab Palestinians, on some fictitious Biblical basis, that “this land belongs to the Jews” as they seize Palestinian land. Those interactions help explain why Arab peoples also make few distinctions between Jews and Zionists.
It is those of us with a European sensibility who make this distinction, out of deference to European Jewish history. Yet Israeli officials like Abba Eban, former Israeli ambassador in the 1950s, argue that “one of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world [sic] is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all.”
Similarly, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2022 declared that “Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism”, in an attempt to sabotage the better European and liberal sensibility that the actions of the Israeli state were not the responsibility of all Jewish people. Accordingly, ADL and related reports on “antisemitic” activity deliberately conflate criticism of or attacks on “Israel” with those on Jewish people.
Nevertheless, former Israeli Minister for Education Shulamit Aroni acknowledged that this conflation was a deception. “It’s a trick. We always use it. When from Europe, somebody criticizes Israel, we bring up the Holocaust. When, in the United States, people are critical of Israel, then they are anti-Semitic.” Jewish people who do it are branded “self-hating” Jews.
Hidden by this fictitious debate, the deeply racist Zionist project proceeds, and constitutes a threat to peace and security in the world. The openly stated Zionist claims of wiping out entire civilian populations and destroying neighbouring peoples have no parallel in living memory.
Following are the main elements of “Israel’s” violent, racist operation which are covered up by its “antisemitism” scam.
Elements of “Israel’s” violent racist operation
- Nazi style expulsion or extermination from land to be colonised; these are not partisan assertions, the genocide in Gaza and ongoing violent ethnic cleansing of the West Bank have been recognised by several UN bodies, including the ICJ;
- Destruction or balkanization of surrounding states which support the Palestinians, including annexation of some of their lands (Syria and Lebanon) and promotion of full scale wars against independent states (Iraq and Iran) under various pretexts.
- Persecution and penalisation of individuals and educational institutions which allow support for the Palestinian people.
Key features of the “antisemitism” scam
- A fake rationale which equates Jewish people (victimised in Europe) with the violent Israeli colony, seeking to spread a cloak of privilege over racist violence,
- Distortion of Jewish doctrines to present racist religious justification for crimes of the Israeli colony, including the promotion of Jewish supremacy and racist contempt towards non-Jews (“goyim”),
- Campaigns of discrimination and repression against supporters of Palestinian equality and liberation, in the name of Jewish-Israeli exceptionalism,
- Hiding the great crimes of apartheid, persecution and genocide behind a veil of European Jewish privilege.
As Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley wrote in their 2017 report for the United Nations, the Israeli regime is an apartheid state which constitutes a crime against humanity. Far from deserving some exceptional privilege, the international community has “a moral and political duty to … dismantle apartheid structures in compliance with international law.” The antisemitism scam should be exposed and denounced. Indulgence of this scam would be complicity in Israeli apartheid and, in the Israeli case, the necessary corollary of genocide.
Guy
Thank you Tim for stating what many of us put together a long time ago .Now it is out in open .It was always a ruse .