Jews and Zionists are not Nazis

Also, vegetarians are not carnivores

I’m pretty sure ChatGPT thinks I am an antisemite, after creating images like this

You read things here on Medium, you watch people like Steve Bannon, Maureen Galindo, Nick Fuentes, or Hasan Piker, and you cannot help but wonder why more people aren’t advertising a new apocalypse date, talking about how the earth is flat, and why drinking energy drinks are healthy for you.

The idea that Zionists became a slur associated with evil is about as goofy as saying Red Bull is a drink that promotes longevity.

Zionism: The right to self-determination on ancestral homeland for Jewish people, who are indigenous to Israel.

Reality can be quite distorted, to put it mildly, and some people need to crack open a few history books, to put it more bluntly.

Knowing people will not take the high road and read those books, we work with the silliness that we have.

A headline from Politico reads, “Sex therapist accused of antisemitism loses Democratic runoff for Texas House seat” and then the article goes into how the progressive candidate faced condemnations from within her own party.

We’re not just talking about right wingers here, if you haven’t noticed.

People like Galindo will say things like, and I paraphrase, “We’re not talking about Jewish Zionist Jews, we’re talking about Jewish billionaire pedophile Jews, regardless of religion.”

I feel like these people are dancing around it. It’s like Prince when he changed his name.

I’m not talking about Jews, I’m talking about the artists formally known as Jews but are basically Nazi genocidal pedophiles, according to Al Jazeera and other reputable sources. So vote for me.

It’ll be some other words five years from now. It’ll be something like “Gooba” and the influencer will say, “I’m talking about Goobas here, not Jews, my cousin’s best friend is a Jew.”

Meanwhile the picture of said Gooba will be a man wearing a yarmulke walking down a street in Crown Heights.

Zionist Orthodox Goobas working on building the next Auschwitz — Photo by Aharon Luria on Unsplash

So if this isn’t Jew hatred, it’s some pretty hardcore rabbit holes. It’s a bubble that paints Jews or Zionists or Goobas as something as evil as the thing we all know to be (obviously) evil (like Nazis).

Maybe you are a conspiracy theory lover.

Maybe you had a bad experience with someone of the Jewish faith or your culture is anti-Jew (as some are).

Maybe you have very little knowledge of Jews and don’t want anything in your life to be contaminated by Jewy-ness because there is a perception of filth.

So just like anything else, I look at a group I don’t know much about, and I think about them. What good have they done and what have they contributed to society?

These are my thoughts, and call me crazy.

There was a cartoon I saw many years ago, I think it was made in the 90s, and the concept was that aliens were trying to co-exist with us, but they looked like insects (roaches) and so our instinct was to kill them. Part of the problem was that we didn’t know how to communicate with them and I remember at one point in the show, we learn that there is a specific movement which is how they communicate. When we are able to communicate, it is no longer a disgusting insect, but another reasonable animal we can appreciate and share our planet.

Now, you might be asking, “what good has the roach done?” Similarly I wonder why we shouldn’t kill mosquitos because they cause us pain and disease and yet they don’t seem to contribute anything positive to our lives.

This might be the counterargument, but also we haven’t figured out how to communicate with mosquitos either so perhaps we know not yet their purpose other than to be annoying.

People belonging to different religions, whether Jewish or Muslim or Christian, have a purpose. They contribute to the world in positive ways. Maybe we should stop reading down the damned rabbit holes of such and such political internet personality, and start looking at all the good?

That might be, like in the cartoon, a way we can start having a better relationship than just looking at something as disgusting (insects!) or evil (Zionists!).

You wouldn’t hurt a lady, would you? Photo by Duong Thinh on Unsplash