A Clear Case of Projection

“Anti-Zionist” Hamas huggers flip the script

Agents of the International Zionist Conspiracy, detained by Palestinian patriots

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The inimitable Caitlin Johnstone has become my go-to girl for sampling the swampy depths of postmodern antisemitism. She can be relied upon to present it in all its leering ugliness, and on some murky subconscious level that may even bother her. For one of Johnston’s recurring themes is that the real evildoers are Israel and its supporters, who are engaged in genocide and the massacre of children. They, not she and those like her, are “the worst people in the world.”

Whipping oneself into a fury over these imaginary crimes is certainly one way of distracting attention from the fact that genocide the massacre of children, etc., is the actual policy of the side one supports. This is why, for instance, many staffers at the New York Times are mad about the paper’s coverage of what Hamas actually did on October 7. It was too “pro-Israel,” they protested. Apparently, every Hamas atrocity reported must be balanced by the tale of an equivalent Israeli atrocity. And since Israel is not in fact committing genocide or war crimes, these Israeli atrocities must be fabricated. Examples are the false report that Israel bombed a hospital in the war’s first days and the recent, also false, charge that Israeli troops opened fire on a crowd of unarmed Gazans who were just trying to obtain food.

And of course, the victims of those wicked Jews include the brave souls like Johnstone who speak truth to the International Zionist Conspiracy:

If you don’t interact with many Zionists in your day to day life or don’t have a large enough profile to be constantly swarmed by Israel apologists you might be unaware that this is happening, but the vitriol I’ve been seeing from Israel supporters on social media platforms since October 7 has been one of the most shocking and disturbing things I’ve ever witnessed.

This, coming from one of the vilest purveyors of antisemitic agitprop on Substack, provides a window into the fantasy world inhabited by the Western supporters of Hamas.

For of course, it’s Hamas that bears sole responsibility for the death and destruction in Gaza. But for its murderous October 7 attack on Israel, there would be no war. And Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas in Gaza is fully justified. What other nation on this planet would tolerate the presence on its border of a genocidal death cult?

It’s not as if Johnstone came slowly to her view of Jewish evil and bloodlust as the Gaza War unfolded. Here she is on October 8, 2023, at a moment when the bodies of the slain were still being recovered:

Ultimately this is just Palestinians doing what they feel they need to do out of total desperation, because they feel backed into a corner with no other options. And they feel backed into a corner with no other options because that does appear to be the case. There are a lot of people I could blame for their being in those circumstances, but the very last on that list would be the victims of the abuse themselves.

As a description of the Hamas worldview, this is bonkers. Hamas itself makes no bones about its core mission: the killing of Jews, to continue until the blood of the last one has soaked into the soil of river-to-sea “Palestine.” One may as well argue that the Holocaust was perpetrated by Germans desperate to save themselves from Jewish domination and with no other option but industrial genocide.

Incidentally, if you peruse Johnstone’s October 8 article, “A Population With Nothing To Lose,” you’ll notice that nowhere in it does the word Hamas appear. That’s what’s known as a tell. She obviously does not want her readers reminded of the fact that the Palestinian “freedom fighters” who invaded Israel were in fact members of a barbaric, homicidal terrorist group.

And that’s the group whose cause Johnstone and people like her support. No wonder they’re so eager to flip the script.

If Caitlin Johnstone were some tinfoil-hatted loon on the street, clutching at the sleeves of passers-by, demanding that they heed her Jew-bashing screed, she’d be a person of no significance. But as it is, she represents a significant body of opinion. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country whose minds are polluted with the same poison that leaks from Johnstone’s Substack newsletter. She has, to be sure, a rare talent for invective that other postmodern antisemites cannot match. But in substance there’s no daylight between her and luminaries like Cornel West and Jill Stein, fringe presidential candidates, who with Johnstone thrilled to the gruesome suicide of Aaron Bushnell.

Such is the character of the people who speak for “Palestine” in America: not perhaps the worst people in the world, though bad enough to trigger my gag reflex.