The Great 'Antisemitism' Swindle: How a Sacred Word Was Stolen to Silence Dissent
To speak of antisemitism is to speak of a unique and horrifying poison in human history. It is to invoke pogroms, ghettos, expulsions, and the smoke of Auschwitz. It is a word heavy with meaning, purchased with millennia of suffering. And that is precisely why its current debasement for cynical political ends is not just a strategic error, but a profound moral crime. We are living through the great ‘antisemitism’ swindle, a coordinated effort to hijack one of the most potent accusations in our moral vocabulary and turn it into a blunt instrument for crushing political dissent against the state of Israel.
Look no further than the recent moral panic at the Glastonbury festival. Tens of thousands of young people, witnessing a military campaign in Gaza that has been condemned by countless international bodies for its brutality, joined the performer Bob Vylan in a chant: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ This was followed by a chant of ‘Death to the IDF.’ The establishment reaction was immediate, hysterical, and utterly revealing. The festival itself, buckling under pressure, condemned the expression as ‘appalling,’ ‘antisemitism,’ and ‘incitement to violence.’ UK police are now assessing a criminal probe. Israeli government officials are lambasting the BBC for broadcasting it.
Let us be clear. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is a state military. It is not a synagogue. It is not a school. It is not a civilian community. It is an armed body carrying out the policies of a government. To chant for the ‘death’ of a military organization in the context of a political protest is a raw, angry, but fundamentally political expression. To equate this with a genocidal desire to kill Jews is a deliberate and malicious lie. It is an act of rhetorical alchemy designed to do one thing: shield a state’s military actions from public anger. By this twisted logic, chanting ‘Death to the Red Army’ in the 1980s would have been ‘anti-Slav bigotry,’ and protesting the US military during the Vietnam War would have been ‘anti-Christian hate.’ It is a transparently absurd argument, yet it is the central pillar of this new weaponized definition.
This definitional war is the core of the conflict, and it is being waged with ferocious intensity. In New York, State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani finds himself the target of a vicious smear campaign for daring to argue for a distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Intellectuals like Masha Gessen and publications like The New York Times are accused of a ‘whitewash’ by hostile media outlets for suggesting that frameworks like the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism—which explicitly allows for sharp criticism of Israel—should be considered. The message is brutally simple: there is no room for nuance. Any criticism of the political ideology of Zionism, any opposition to the policies of the Israeli state, will be branded as Jew-hatred. This is not an argument; it is a threat. It is the intellectual equivalent of a protection racket, where the price of avoiding a career-ending smear is total silence.
The tactics employed to enforce this silence are becoming increasingly desperate and ugly. The effort to link Glastonbury performer Bob Vylan to the Irish rap group Kneecap, and then to link a member of Kneecap to a past charge under the Terrorism Act, is a masterclass in McCarthyite guilt-by-association. This is the playbook of authoritarians: if you cannot win the debate on its merits, you paint your opponent as a dangerous extremist, a terrorist sympathizer. It is a smear designed to frighten away allies and poison the well of public opinion, ensuring that any discussion of Palestinian rights is immediately framed as a threat to national security.
Simultaneously, we are told of a new wave of ideological coercion in the arts, where performers like rapper Azealia Banks are allegedly being ‘pressured’ to ‘say Free Palestine.’ This is a cynical inversion of reality. It is a manufactured narrative designed to portray the pro-Palestine movement as an authoritarian mob, while ignoring the colossal, career-destroying pressure exerted by the pro-Israel lobby. For every one artist who feels pressured to show solidarity, there are hundreds who know that a single tweet critical of Israel could result in lost contracts, public condemnation, and the toxic, indelible stain of an ‘antisemitism’ accusation. The real cancel culture is the one that threatens to unperson anyone who steps out of line with the pro-Israel orthodoxy.
This enforcement is filtering down through our most powerful institutions. The ongoing lawsuit against MIT and the public flogging of the BBC are not signs of institutional complicity in ‘antisemitism.’ They are signs of institutional cowardice. They reveal universities and broadcasters terrified of being targeted by this well-funded, politically connected campaign. Instead of defending the principles of academic freedom and free expression, they capitulate, issuing groveling apologies and throwing their own students and journalists under the bus. They become agents of the very censorship they are supposed to resist, creating a chilling effect that radiates through society.
The great tragedy of this swindle is that it not only silences legitimate criticism of a nation-state, but it also renders the word ‘antisemitism’ increasingly meaningless. By crying ‘wolf’ at every political protest, every campus demonstration, and every critical op-ed, these bad-faith actors are dulling our collective sensitivity to the real thing. True, vile antisemitism—the kind that stalks synagogues and desecrates graves—is being drowned out in a sea of politically motivated noise. The word is being corrupted. A shield for the persecuted has been reforged into a sword for the powerful. And in doing so, its wielders are not only betraying the Palestinians whose voices they seek to silence, but they are also betraying the very memory they claim to protect.
