@PaxAeterna and @martymcfly24
If you were to find out any person you are "protesting" had killed or starved anyone, then have at it.
However, targeting random Israelis and Jews around the world for “protest” is racist because you’re not holding individuals accountable - you’re attacking people based on ethnicity or nationality.
The crowd doing this are not doing something noble.
They're harassing a 12-year-old kid in a Jewish school, chasing a woman down the street for wearing a Star of David, or vandalising a bagel shop in London.
What exactly does that achieve? You think Netanyahu’s checking Twitter and thinking, “Oh no, someone spray-painted ‘Free Palestine’ on a synagogue in Toronto, better rethink my military strategy”? No - you're just making life hell for some ordinary person who has zero influence over any government.
If you scream at a Chinese person on the street because you don’t like what the CCP is doing, you’re a racist.
If you attack a Muslim because of something done in Pakistan or Iran, you’re an Islamophobe.
And if you corner some random Israelis over what’s happening in Gaza, you’re an antisemite.
It’s not “just protest.” It’s targeted hostility against an ethnic group that’s already been demonised, scapegoated, expelled, and murdered for centuries.
And far from being benign, you are actively causing harm. I have no control over what the Israeli government does. You have none either. But what you do have control over is your own actions.
I've listened to this kind of racist crap for two years now and watched people justify their disgraceful behaviour over and over again. This morning a video is going around of a podcast where a group of young people admired hitler and opined that the Jews should think carefully about what they did to deserve the Holocaust.
The incremental steps of justifying and normalising bigoted behaviour always leads here, and anyone defending it is actively part of it.
There is a war in Gaza right now. People are suffering and dying. That is what happens in wars. Protest the war all you like - just have the moral clarity to do it at the Israeli embassy or outside parliament.
Stay away from synagogues. Leave Jewish kids alone. Stop harassing holiday makers or trying to punish Jews around the world. It isn't hard. We've morally navigated dozens of wars and conflicts in this country without targeting random citizens but where Jews are concerned people's brains seem to switch to lunatic.
I don't buy the performative morality for a minute. I think people who engage in these behaviors are caught up in lust of it all. They weren't embarrassed in the 1930s. They were proud. They felt moral about it and they used identical rationalisation to the ones I'm hearing today.
It makes me thoroughly embarrassed to be British that people still think the rules of morality, equality and justice apply to everyone...except Jews.