Ominous Developments on the Antisemitism Front Prompt New Video Campaign
While an imaginary phenomenon becomes its own political issue (with criminal penalties), I ask the IHRA to explain how it isn't just a big, malevolent, Jewish conspiracy.
Well, this will come as a shock to no one. The number of Internet searches on the word “antisemitism” is exploding, according to Google Trends. Unlike antisemitism, itself, which has been reported rising in the United States now for a remarkable 133 years in a row, the antisemitism search surge on Google only began this past October. But that isn’t surprising either, given the plain intent of the media to distract Americans from the atrocities we are paying for in Gaza.
Israeli soldiers executing unarmed families at point blank range? Don’t look at that. Look over here at the real suffering—the pain caused when someone threw a Palestinian flag over a menorah. Children buried alive under the rubble of their homes? A trifle compared to the atrocity of a “from the river to the sea” chant being audible in a Jewish student’s dorm room.
And quite the surge it’s been.1
The above screen shot of a Google Trends search result on December 14, 2023 shows a sharp and dramatic spike in web searches for the word "antisemitism." We are only halfway through December (the reason the line is dotted at the far right) and, already, we are exceeding November’s total. And November’s total far exceeded the previous most noticeable spike, which occurred about a year earlier—around the time Kanye West said (publicly) he was going “death con” on the Jews.
And if you look at the searches performed on Google’s “News” search function, the current surge is twice as dramatic.
I take this to mean that while interest is skyrocketing among those regular web search users looking for information about events in which “antisemitism” was a component, for example, “kanye west” “antisemitism,” there was a proportionately much greater surge driven by those who believe “antisemitism” itself is newsworthy—who are looking for news about antisemitism.
If that’s the right interpretation, it’s an ominous one.
“Antisemitism” is no more real than “enemies of the people” were real in Russia a century ago. Both are political fictions. And being imaginary isn’t the only thing they have in common. Both were constructed for political purposes and both are used as political weapons. Both pejoratives can be applied to just about anyone, and neither is subject to the constraints of verifiability. Both are Jewish in origin. Both seek state power and both wield it against fellow citizens.
In Bolshevik Russia, an accusation of “enemy of the people” subjected the accused to immediate execution on the spot. In the United States, there is an army of individuals—apostles of antisemitism—seeming to act as one entity with the single, shared goal of making an accusation of “antisemitism” in the US in the 2020s more resemble in consequence what an accusation of “enemy of the people” did in Russia in the 1920s.
So we see in the United States “antisemitism” becoming as central to the political discourse as taxes, education, immigration, and race relations—it’s becoming big. Look for everyone at the next Oscars to be taking a stand against antisemitism by sporting yellow six-pointed ribbons. We’re in climate change territory.
Side-by-side with this centering of “the antisemitism issue” we see increasing penalties for it. An accusation of “antisemitism” has long carried substantial social and financial costs, of course, just as it did in Russia in the years leading up to the murderous Bolshevik take-over. But it now in the West increasingly carries the threat of criminal penalties for the accused, as well.
I can’t think of anything more sinister than the simultaneous development of these two phenomena.
A major abettor in our slide toward a new Bolshevism of utter destruction is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and their definition of “antisemitism.” —and here I was going to lay out the details of the IHRA definition and how it will lead to our enslavement. But I’ve already done that. So, I was feeling a little impatient and wondering how awareness of the seriousness of the situation could be turbo-charged—spread much faster to many more people. And I lit on the idea of making short, informative videos.
Short videos, apparently, are a better vehicle for this kind of public awareness effort than the interminable essays I tend to produce, so I thought it was worth a try. I’ve been working on them, but a short video is more work than I anticipated and, clearly, a charismatic video persona is not one of my natural gifts.
I’m uploading the draft versions to a restricted page before publication to get feedback . To help ensure input is from committed allies, I’ve made the restricted page as well as the chat/feedback feature accessible to paid subscribers only.
Very exciting.
In the course of researching the IHRA for the videos I came across some perplexing aspects of that Sweden-based international organization. So I sent them an email asking for clarification:
To: press@holocaustremembrance.com
From: Me
Subj: Your work on preventing genocide
Date: 2023-12-19 12:31 PM
Hello, I'm writing a piece for Odysseus Unsheathed concerning your definition of antisemitism. While researching that piece I learned that your organization is concerned also with genocide and working to make "never again" a reality.
On your website, it reads:
The Holocaust is eminently relevant to the present day. A well-informed understanding of the Holocaust, the paradigmatic genocide, can help in comprehending and addressing other genocides, mass atrocities, and human rights violations.
While your organization claims it has a “well-informed understanding” of the genocide of Jews by Nazis in WWII, and provides extensive educational materials on such to children and policymakers around the world, a critic might wonder how well that understanding has helped your own organization in "comprehending and addressing other genocides." A search on the word "Nazi" on your website returns 53 pages of results, but a search on the word "Bolshevik" returns nothing.
The Bolshevik genocide of Russian Christians began 16 years before Hitler came to power in Germany, didn't even slow down during WWII, and continued 42 years after Germany surrendered. But even though that holocaust dwarfed the Holocaust in every category of atrocity, murdering eleven times as many innocent human beings, there isn't a single mention of the Bolshevik genocide anywhere on your entire website.
Given this enormous blind spot in the IHRA's view of history, there is reason to wonder what to make of IHRA Chair Ann Bernes' statement in June of last year, “We mustn’t forget that we are bound together in this work not only by choice, but also by the facts of history.” When the "facts of history" are distorted by the gross omission or denial of such relevant facts as the communist genocide of 66 million innocent Russians, one wonders, then, what cause it is in that you are "bound together."
The question becomes particularly important in light of the role your organization assumes for itself in Article 13 of the 2020 IHRA Ministerial Declaration:
We, the IHRA Member Countries, recognize that understanding the unprecedented nature of the Holocaust is essential to the prevention of genocide and mass atrocity crimes. IHRA expertise is relevant to historically informed policymaking and addressing contemporary challenges.
If there is anything on which we can all agree, surely it must be the paramount importance of preventing genocide and mass atrocity. The IHRA purports to undertake that noble cause, using its "core competencies in education, remembrance and research about the Holocaust… [to] guide educators, scholars and activists responding to emerging mass atrocity crimes today." To that end, "deploring the extensive loss of life and rejecting the gross Holocaust distortion being used to justify it," in 2022, "IHRA Honorary Chairman Professor Yehuda Bauer stressed the importance of all IHRA Member Countries showing their support for Ukraine."
With such a quick response to the mass atrocity in Ukraine, I was dismayed to discover the IHRA hasn't yet condemned the mass atrocity ongoing against the Palestinians in Gaza. Indeed, a search of the word "Palestinian" on your website produced only one mention. It was from a 2018 statement, "IHRA Chair's Statement on Antisemitic Comments by President Mahmoud Abbas." Here it is in its entirety:
As Chair of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, I was dismayed and very worried by the comments made by Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, on 2 May in which he used antisemitic stereotypes in public discourse, falsely claiming that the Holocaust was a result of Jews’ “social function” and purported association with loans and banking.
Making mendacious allegations about Jews controlling the economy is one of the typical examples of antisemitic stereotypes denounced in the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. Attempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide is a clear case of Holocaust distortion as spelt out in the IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion.
These comments make the importance of IHRA’s mission to safeguard the record of the Holocaust and to counter Holocaust distortion even more evident.
The international community must uphold the terrible truth of the Holocaust against those who deny it. We must strengthen the moral commitment of our peoples, and the political commitment of our governments, to ensure that future generations can understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences."
Ambassador Sandro De Bernardin, IHRA Chair
One might characterize the selectivity of your historical facts as weaponization and the cause for which it serves as malevolent, given the IHRA's silence on the genocide of the Palestinians. Your "Working Definition of Antisemitism," adopted in 42 Western nations, is endorsed by every major Jewish organization. How do you answer those gentiles who would point to this as evidence of a malicious worldwide Jewish conspiracy?
Craig Nelsen
I’ll post their response if I receive one.
Google calculates the number of times a particular term was searched as a percentage of all terms searched. It then sets equal to 100 the point at which that term reached the highest percentage in the given time period, plotting the rest of the time periods relative to that.
"An anti-Semite used to mean a man who hated Jews. Now it means a man who is hated by Jews." Joseph Sobran
"Thug culture is not warm and welcoming to white civilization."
Given the amount of anti-white venom our friends in Hollywood have been spewing for decades, it's a credit to blacks that relations between blacks and whites are as civil as they are.