Judeapedia
Diversity, Dog Whistle, and Dreyfus: D Is For… (Part 5)
March 18, 2024

Diversity, Dog Whistle, and Dreyfus: D Is For… (Part 5)

The Judeapedia: The A to Z’s of the current moment, from Antisemitism to Zionism. D is for Dalet to Dual Loyalty, with some controversial stops along the way. Sources & further reading inside.

This is part of a series on antisemitism, Israel, Zionism, and current events in 2023-2024 (5784).

The intent of this series is to educate, dispel antisemitism and bigotry, and combat propaganda that endangers both Jews AND Palestinians. The misinformation around Israel and Jews is vast and ancient, well-designed, and widespread, and contributes directly to perpetuating the conflict and elevating violence above a peace process.

Disputation

Disputation is a form of organized “debate” about religion; historically before Protestantism, it meant Judaism was on trial and Jews had to defend themselves against charges that stemmed from antisemitic smears including deicide.

We are living through the biggest disputation in history: the TikTok Trials.

We see this play out in real time today on social media, with detractors claiming “Israel and Judaism aren’t interchangeable” while at the same time, accusing Zionists of only being Zionists because of religion. In doing so, they’re guilty of what they charge: Assuming Israelis and Zionists are only residents there (or supporters of a Jewish state) because of a religious charge from Torah.

This is as disingenuous as the original disputations of Barcelona and Paris; these “debates” led to the public burning of Talmud and Jewish texts, and Jews were then targeted by these nations, too, for expulsion and massacre.

We seem to be headed in that direction in the West, with the Golden Age of Jews in America coming to an end.

See: Comments. TikTok. Europe. Inquisition.

Distortion

There are outright lies about Israel and Jews, and then there are distortions. Sometimes these are half-truths, so not full disinformation. For example:

  • The Deir Yassin massacre. The new Israeli government investigated, condemned, and prosecuted responsible soldiers. Leaving this part out implies that it was planned, sanctioned, and occurs constantly. It does not. Was it horrific? Yes. But it doesn’t delegitimize Israel.
  • The Nakba narrative. Civilians are displaced in every conflict, and Israel did not start the 1948 war. Had Arabs agreed to a reasonable peace plan, there would have been no need for widespread displacement.
  • Plan Dalet. Plan Dalet was one document stating that if civilians fought Israeli troops in 1948, they should be expelled. The war was existential; 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem were being starved out by the Arab armies, intent on destroying every Jew.
  • Modern distortions. Conflating settlements with the entire creation of modern Israel; assuming any Israeli or Jew speaks for all of Israel or Jews (on both sides); calling Israel a “colony”, assuming Israelis are European and can go back there (as if there’s a European master country), while confusing the 19th-century term “colony” with displacement.

See Disinformation. Cognitive Dissonance.

Ahistorical. Bias. Disingenuous.

Diversity

We’ve looked at the demographics of Israel, as well as how mass displacement from both ethnic cleansing and genocide led to the creation of Israel as a diverse refugee state.

The Jews are a diverse people, with Jews of every race and nearly every nationality. Jews have lived in China, India, and across Europe and Africa for 2,000 years.

Israel is also one of the most religiously diverse places in the Middle East. The adjacent countries of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria are the top 3 in the Middle East in this category; the rest of the Middle East is incredibly homogenous, having driven out or forcibly converted most non-Muslims to Islam over time, and especially since the creation of Israel.

Israel is more religiously diverse than the United States (Pew Research Center, 2014). See Demographics, Displacement.

DNA

Asking to see Jewish DNA tests is race science. It’s racist.

DNA tests have nothing to do with indigeneity, for a few obvious reasons. Genetic admixture results from intermarrying, as well as sexual assault. Also, a DNA test doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about skin color, which seems to be what the Palestinian movement is basing its claim to all of Israel on. Jews aren’t white historically or socially in most places; considering Ashkenazi Jews “white” is a very recent development in the last decades and has more to do with us being in America than it does with history or genetics.

Indigeneity has nothing to do with skin color or DNA. The latest craze is for Palestinians and Arabs to show their DNA results with Canaanite DNA and claim that means they were always there. More than likely, it means they had ancestors who were Judean (Jewish) or Samaritan; Palestinian culture is Arabized, and while Palestinians can be considered indigenous based on some combination of mixing with the local population and a lost Jewish or Samaritan heritage, what these people are claiming is that they are indigenous and Jews are not, which is flatly wrong.

The other bold, recent claim is that Jews have “European DNA”. Jews, including Ashkeanzi Jews, have Levantine DNA; it’s closer to Mizrahi Jews who never left the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) than it is to European DNA. And as mentioned above, Jews with European DNA have it because of intermarriage or by force. And regardless, Jews are still from Israel and the Levant, regardless of genetic changes or how long they were forced into exile.

Dog Whistle

A dog whistle—like the training device at a frequency humans can’t hear—is a racist message used to garner support from one group while giving plausible deniability with others.

Doublespeak.

Doublespeak, from George Orwell’s 1984 about a fascist regime and its propaganda machine, is the concept of saying one thing while meaning another. This is in essence a dog whistle. It is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words.

Doublethink.

Doublethink is a process of indoctrination in which subjects are expected to simultaneously accept two conflicting beliefs as truth, often at odds with their own memory or sense of reality. Orwell coined the term doublethink (as part of the fictional language of Newspeak) in 1984; the word Doublespeak stems from this, but doesn’t appear in the novel.

A good example of Doublethink is protesting for peace and ceasefire, while also calling for Intifada and the destruction of Israel. (See ceastifada).

Dog Whistles are code. They arose in American politics in the 1960s when overt racism became increasingly untenable; “states’ rights”, “welfare queen”, and “real Americans” all refer to White supremacy and racial grievances.

Some examples of antisemitic Dog Whistles:

  • “Globalist” means Jews, as in Globalists control the media/vaccines/banks
  • “Zionists” means Jews, and allows you to say Zionists control everything, Zionists are Nazis/evil / must be destroyed
  • On TikTok and Twitter:
    • #thenoticing (as in, noticing “Jews control the world”
    • “Gnome Hunting”
    • The Echo: putting references to Jews in parentheses to bypass filters and hide bigotry, IE: (((them))) (((they))) (((banker))) (((rothschild)))

See Double Standard. Orwellian. Ahistorical.

Dreyfus

The Dreyfus Affair shook France in the last decade of the 1800s and was the big turning point for Europe’s Jews who began to realize they would never be accepted as full citizens in their host countries. This coincided with the burgeoning Zionism movement as a solution to not be at the whims of larger, Christian, antisemitic mob justice.

Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery officer, was wrongfully accused of espionage for the Germans. He was sentenced to harsh conditions on an island penal colony, and even when exonerating evidence came to light, it was covered up and the guilty party acquitted in a sham trial. Crowds cheered his acquittal, and he lived comfortably in exile until his death.

The entire affair rocked France and Europe; the scale of the coverup and persecution of a Jewish patsy, while ensuring both the guilty party and his pursuers went unscathed, came as imperial control in Europe continued to decline. The new governments were meant to be enlightened; this showed just how little had changed, and for Jews, especially, how unsafe they were. The French ruling class had protected a traitor to scapegoat a Jew, putting everyone at risk.

Dreyfus was finally pardoned, but only after a second sham conviction and much violence across France. Even with incontrovertible proof, men in power wanted to blame a Jew.

Druze

The Druze are an ethnic group living primarily in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, who are fiercely pro-Israel and serve in the IDF. Their heritage is Arab and their religious practices, kept a secret to outsiders, branched off from Islam over 1,000 years ago. So while Abrahamic, they are not Muslim.

The Druze people are evidence of Israel’s diversity and religious tolerance and part of the fabric that is the nation of Israel—where over 20% of the population is Arab. Most of Israel’s neighbors are strict ethnostates; the indigenous groups, like the Jews, have been either Arabized, completely converted to Islam—or ethnically cleansed entirely.

Under centuries of Muslim rule, the Druze faced fierce persecution and occasional massacres. Their relationship with the Jews wasn’t always rosy, either, and occasionally Druze attacked (Safad and Tiberius in 1600, and Safad again in 1838).

Today, the Druze people serve prominently in the IDF and vocally rejet Islamic extremism. They self-identify more as Israelis than as Arab, and are an integral part of the nation.

Dual Loyalty

American Jewish Committee writes, “Dual loyalty is a bigoted trope used to cast Jews as the ’other.’ When an American Jew’s connection to Israel is scrutinized to the point of questioning his or her trustworthiness or loyalty to the United States.” We see this playing out in the streets across the West today.

“By accusing Jews of being disloyal citizens whose true allegiance is to Israel or a hidden Jewish agenda (see Globalist), antisemites sow distrust and spread harmful ideas—like the belief that Jews are a traitorous ‘Fifth Column,’ meaning they are undermining their country from within.”
These notions led to the Holocaust.

AJC’s glossary of antisemitic terms, phrases, conspiracies, cartoons, themes, and memes.

Bobby
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