‘United States of Israel? How the Great Liar Netanyahu twists America round his finger’ by Matt Carr was published on March 5 2015. It has not yet been deleted by Stop the War.
The title is using an antisemitic trope – playing into the ages-old idea, loved by antisemites, that Israel controls the United States – its banks, its media, or as here – its foreign policy.
The article makes the claim, too, but the hatred is between the lines. On the surface it’s simply an article attacking a world leader, in this case Benjamin Netanyahu –
‘one of the most repellent and dangerous politicians in the world today’, a man ‘who trades on fear and war, a cynical and amoral manipulator without a trace of honesty in his entire body, who lies as easily as he breathes’.
I think this is all fine: it’s not a compelling argument in itself, of course, simply levelling a series of insults at a politician, and personally I can think of many who are more repellent and dangerous. But it’s a valid enough opinion: Israeli leaders can of course be strongly criticized in such ways without any malice towards Jews being meant.
Carr also accuses Netanyahu – ‘the Great Liar’, as he calls him – of cynically invoking the Holocaust, the Munich massacre and more for political gain in his address to Congress.
The article then veers into much more unpleasant territory as he discusses the reaction of American politicians to Netanyahu’s speech and talks about the:
‘Zionist propaganda that it has been injecting into its veins for years’.
The image conjures up not simply an idea of Israel being a carrier of poison into America, but that it is doing so without Congressmen knowing. It evokes Manchurian Candidate-style brainwashing – and of course the antisemitic trope (beloved of the Nazis) that Jews secretly controlled the unwitting dupes of the world to gain power.
Carr continues the theme by presenting members of the US Congress listening to Netanyahu in terms familiar from 1950s science fiction. They are
‘glassy-eyed zombie-politicians…..sucking up Netanyahu’s fearmongering, warmongering poison like alien seed pods in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’.
Carr adds that they have also ‘had their minds well and truly snatched’.
This idea of Jews having such influence over others that they practice a kind of mind control has long been a favourite theme of antisemites, and is still used today. The theme runs through this article by Carr.
No cartoons of Jews with hooked noses or references to a world Jewish conspiracy, but here where antisemitism rests just below the surface, it is truly at its most insidious.
Jeremy Duns.
The real Stop the War 