Reading up on the shocking developments that followed after I wrote my recent post on the frustrated efforts of Max Blumenthal and David Sheen to spout their hatred for Israel from respectable platforms in Berlin, I came across a post at Legal Insurrection, where William A. Jacobson highlights a truly revealing image that one of Blumenthal’s fans promoted on Twitter a few months ago. As Jacobson noted in a post back then, Blumenthal responded with obvious delight that the image was only “too real.”
While most of Blumenthal’s fellow Israel-haters were too prudent – or perhaps just too busy – to relate to this vile image, Blumenthal’s response was favorited by the person who had posted it, by a German fan of Blumenthal who has spent much of the past week defending him, and, tellingly, by Steven Salaita, the proud author of a screed on “Israel’s Dead Soul,” who recently got much media attention when his vicious anti-Israel rhetoric cost him an offer of a tenure-track position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The image clearly deserved more attention from Israel-haters, not only because it conveys their demonization of the Jewish state so well, but also because it perfectly illustrates Ali Abunimah’s Orwellian definition of antisemitism that reflects the preposterous notion that Zionism is “one of the worst forms of anti-Semitism in existence today,” and that support for Zionism “is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.”
Antisemitic Israel-haters obviously couldn’t ask for a better (or more antisemitic) re-definition of antisemitism, while those of us who are serious about fighting the antisemitism that masquerades as Israel-“criticism” couldn’t ask for a better illustration of the views espoused by Israel-haters like Abunimah, Blumenthal and most other prominent BDS activists than the vile image of Herzl giving birth to Hitler.