Facebook Bans Criticism of Israel as Anti-Semitic Hate Speech
Villainizing critics of
Israeli’s crimes
This past April a politically astute Native American historian, Tom “Big Warrior” Watts, was banned from Facebook for supposedly posting anti-Semitic hate speech.
The alleged hate speech was a reply he’d posted to a meme, which stated, “If you don’t support Israel you support the terrorists.” Tom replied, “That doesn’t make sense because Israel practices terrorism and supports the terrorists.”
For this post Facebook banned Tom for 30 days.
Facebook’s reaction to criticism of Israel’s practices against Third-world peoples, under the pretext of stopping hate speech, reflects a recent trend in the West of smearing vocal members of oppressed peoples as anti-Semitic who dare speak out publicly against Israel’s crimes, especially its crimes against the Palestinians.
Such notable Black political activists, as Angela Y. Davis and Marc Lamont Hill were smeared as anti-Semitic for just such public speech, and as a result lost civil rights awards and job positions.
As U. S. political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal observed in a February 24, 2019 audio post on Prison Radio:
“Why and how does it become anti-Semitic when communities of the oppressed support each other?...Neither Angela Davis, nor Marc Lamont Hill are anti-Semitic; they are anti-racist, anti-oppression and anti-imperialist. And no one—NO ONE—has the right to tell any oppressed people who they may—or may not—support.”
Palestinians are Semitic People
Many Jewish people themselves oppose Israeli’s policies against the Palestinians and others, including such prominent Jewish intellectuals as Noam Chomsky. Yet, Israeli’s anti-Palestinian propagandists like to pretend that they speak for all Jews, and use this pretense to portray those who speak against Israeli crimes against the Palestinians as anti-Semitic and enemies of the Jewish people.
How this has been achieved bears witness to the power and influence of this propaganda machine in turning reality on its head, by effectively erasing from world consciousness that the Palestinians are themselves a Semitic people. As are all the groups of Arabs and Hebrews of Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa or the Levant.
Furthermore, Israel is a state not a people. It is the people of the Levant who are Semites not the state of Israel. And by extension, practices of displacement and violent abuses of such peoples is anti-Semitism of the purest sort. In fact, under international law it is a crime called ethnic cleansing and genocide.1
The real anti-Semitism here is Israel’s policies targeted specifically at the Palestinians, such as its violent displacement of millions of Palestinians and theft of their land since 1947, which continues through summary razings of their homes, olive groves and even entire villages upon which illegal Israeli settlements are built; routine massacres of Palestinians by the Israeli military, including targeted killings of children as legitimate military targets; mass imprisonments of them; systematic bombing of their homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, celebratory events; confining them to refugee camps where food, medical supplies and other basic necessities are blocked from entry under brutal military occupation and encirclement and so on—policies which are designed to destroy them or drive them away by making life unbearable.
Not to mention the routine expulsions and outright apartheid and Jim Crow style conditions under which Arabs and dark skinned Sephardic and African Jews live within Israel’s borders—those who aren’t swept up in routine mass deportations.
Israel’s designs from the outset, as expressed repeatedly by its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, has been to consume much of the Arab territory of the region, including Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and so on, in what Ben-Gurion called the “Zionist aspiration.”2
This is why Israel has angled throughout its existence to incrementally seize, settle and annex surrounding territories while blocking Palestinian rights to return to land taken from them and their achieving statehood. An agenda that duplicates what Amerika did to Native Americans in its continental expansion and the German Nazis aspired to replicate in Central and Eastern Europe by displacing Poles, Slavs, Roma, Jews and others through pogroms, displacement and violent extermination of non-Aryans.
To expose the true face of Zionist designs in the Middle East is to unmask a hideous and truly anti-Semitic criminal agenda against Palestinians.
This is why anyone who speaks out in support of Palestinian human rights and against their blatant violations under Israel’s occupation, is subject to smear attacks and censorship. To turn reality right side up would be to recognize that today Israel is the greatest practitioner of anti-Semitism, and blatant racism. And all conscientious people have a right to speak out against these abuses.
End the occupation of Palestine!
Dare to struggle Dare to win!
All Power to the People!
Write to Kevin “Rashid” Johnson:
Kevin Johnson D.O.C. No. 264847
G-20-2C Pendleton Correctional Facility
4490 W. Reformatory Rd.
Pendleton, IN 46064-9001
1 The treatments and conditions under which Palestinians suffer in the Occupied Territories conform exactly to treatments banned under the 1948 Convention on Genocide.
2 See, e.g., Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, (Free Press, N.Y., 1986) p. 6; also, Simha Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, (Barnes and Noble; N. Y., 1979) pp. 265-266, where Ben-Gurion is quoted from an internal 1938 discussion: “[A]fter we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine. . . . The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine by a Jewish-Arab agreement.”
But Zionist aims extended far beyond Palestine. In fact they collaborated with the King of Trans-Jordan to militarily overthrow and partition the surrounding Arab states, which the Zionists then plotted to seize in war from Trans-Jordan. It was the discovery of this plot against them, and the violent displacement and denial of return of nearly a million Palestinians that actually prompted the Arab states to militarily intervene against Israel in May 1948. See, e.g., Avi-Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine (Columbia University Press: N.Y., 1988) p. 193, and many others. The common lie of Zionist propagandists is Israel was “attacked” by surrounding Arab states because they simply disbelieved that Jews should have a national territory, and were anti-Semitic.