The April 25th international edition of the New York Times published an anti-Semitic cartoon that portrayed a blind President Trump being led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depicted as a dog with a Star of David collar around its neck. After widespread criticism for perpetuating anti-Semitic tropes the New York Times apologized and deleted the cartoon. Which only brought more attention to it.
Cartoons, words, images, symbols and gestures that individually seem trivial, collectively reveal a pattern of stealth anti-Semitism. These continual incidents are casually explained as anti-Semitic tropes. The use of the word trope minimizes the threat, sounds like an unintended blunder and sugarcoats the covert agenda.
These are not simply anti-Semitic tropes they are symbolic warfare tactics used in global information operations that target America, Israel, Jews and Trump supporters. These tactics were successfully used by Hitler and subsequently adopted by Islamists. Symbolic language that evokes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are skillfully being used by Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and sanctioned by democrat apologists to incite hatred against Jews, Israel and President Trump.
Islamist anti-Semitism adopted many Nazi themes and symbols in their propaganda including the strategy of depicting Jews as dirty, filthy, impure life-threatening agents of disease and corruption. Both Nazi ideology and Islam are based on doctrines of purity resulting in the use of specific language, symbols and fears to perpetuate anti-Semitic hatred. Stigmatizing Jews as filthy impure dogs is effective because Islamic purity rules inculcate a particularly potent version of a moral revulsion against the unclean other.
Islamic purification rules function to protect true believers from both physical and spiritual contamination by designating specific things as taboo and impure. These impure taboo things are referred to as najis. There are two kinds of najis: inherent, which cannot be cleansed, and acquired, which become unclean through contact with an inherently impure thing. Things that are inherently najis and cannot be purified include: alcohol, dogs, swine, dead animals that were not ritually slaughtered, blood, urine, semen, feces, milk of animals whose meat is forbidden, dead bodies and unbelievers. Anti-Semitic images depicting politicians as dogs or pigs are chosen to evoke visceral emotions of disgust, impurity and uncleanness.
Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib understand the fear of impurity and have weaponized it. For this reason, symbols of Islamic impurity and the symbolism of contagion are found throughout anti-Semitic propaganda in both overt and subliminal images and language. Images of blood, pigs and dogs, all inherently impure unclean things, are often used by Islamists and frequently misinterpreted and perpetuated by Western Newspapers like the New York Times. Numerous political cartoons in which enemies are depicted or referred to as a dog, ape or pig are symbolic warfare tactics designed to evoke subliminal disgust emotions that evoke fear and incite violence.
This visceral reaction appeals to the unusual and accepted Islamic idea that Jews are descended from apes and pigs. For many this is not just symbolic or figurative derogatory speech but based on beliefs that Allah turned disobedient Jews into apes and pigs and that modern Jews are literally descended from them. Depicting Jews as the descendants of apes and pigs is extremely widespread in public discourse in the Arab and Islamic worlds which is why the New York Times cartoon depicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog, symbolizing inherent unclean evil.
Symbolic warfare is most successful when evoking deep-seated feelings of disgust and arousing fears of contagious impurity.
Anti-Semitism goes beyond perpetuating tropes when it equates Jews with impurity. Impurity is symbolically contagious in many cultural contexts, including that of Nazism and Islam. Impurity signifies the other and is experienced both physically and spiritually as a mysterious and harmful substance of the outside world that keeps attacking, contaminating, defiling and desacralizing the sacred world of true believers. True believers have to protect themselves and their communities against this threat of defilement and to get rid of it once the contamination has taken place. Individuals have to cleanse themselves by means of various purification rites and cathartic practices, while communities cleanse themselves by excluding, expelling, or proscribing the things and people whose presence defiles the community. Those unclean things are Jews, Christians, Trump and Israel supporters.
Combined with the fundamental belief that impurity must be cleansed, relegating the other to dirt and disease makes it easier to commit violence. Symbolically, instead of harming a person you are just removing dirt, taking out the garbage. Name-calling prior to and during attacks symbolically functions as a method of transforming violence into a sacred cleansing ritual. There have been many incidents of anti-Semitic violence where the offender used phrases like dirty Jew to demonize the victims and legitimize the cruelty. This form of cursing transforms any potential feelings of remorse into righteousness.
Anti-Semitic symbolic warfare is flourishing. Once the trope, cartoon, image or conspiracy theory is injected into the internet, apologies only serve to spread the propaganda further. Anti-Semitism is the real highly contagious virus and U.S. Congresswomen, their democrat apologists and propaganda arms like the New York Times are all carriers of the disease.
No comments:
Post a Comment