There has been a wave of vandalism of posters placed in various locations of Israelis who were kidnapped by Hamas, other terrorist groups, and “civilians” on October 7.
While I haven’t done a rigorous statistical survey, anecdotally I and others have noticed that the poster-rippers and other violent anti-Israel protesters disproportionately are young women.
There are many more examples posted at StopAntiSemitism, Canary Mission, and elsewhere on Twitter.
They have smug grins and a glee on their faces just like the sadists who tortured and mutilated Israelis on October 7. The posters for them are a proxy for Jews in the flesh. If you wonder how “normal” people can turn into barbarians, you are witnessing it in real time.
The posters attract these deranged haters like flies. They just can’t help themselves.
Why not just walk on by? Why not put up your own posters? Why the need to destroy? They are taking out some life frustration and letting loose the demons within them on Jews who are victims.
I read a really good description of what is at least part of the problem, by Antonio García Martínez writing at The Tablet:
The poster-rippers are merely physically enacting what most of the Western left thinks, which is that Jews cannot play the role of victim, no matter what atrocities they’ve suffered. Their ethnic antagonists, the Palestinians, have that role reserved for them, so don’t bother us with your tales of woe, Israeli Jews, no matter how sinister….Westerners view the Middle East with a new wokified Orientalism: It’s an exotic stage on which to project (if not enact) their own political dramas around identity and oppression. The problem is that the liberal mind cannot imagine what’s inside the illiberal mind….
A lot of people are waking up to the dehumanization of Jews through CRT/’anti-racism’/DEI. We’ve been screaming about it for years. We even started a website to document how deeply the racialized pathology has spread (CriticalRace.org).
But we’re just “right wing” so we never penetrated the broader and mostly liberal American Jewish community. Now that Bari Weiss is writing about it, though, its okay for liberal Jews to call out the DEI monster:
People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as Jamie Kirchick concisely put it in these pages: “Muslim > gay, Black > female, and everybody > the Jews.”What we must do is reverse this….The answer is not for the Jewish community to plead its cause before the intersectional coalition, or beg for a higher ranking in the new ladder of victimhood. That is a losing strategy—not just for Jewish dignity, but for the values we hold as Jews and as Americans….It is time to end DEI for good.
It’s no coincidence that so many of the poster-rippers are in college or work at colleges. That is where the DEI-indoctrination is the most intense.
This is not a working class phenomenon.
This is a DEI-addicted illness.
Of course, there are other factors. Some are motivated by traditional Islamist Jew-hatred, some by traditional leftist-Jew hatred, some are just deeply unhappy and disturbed people with deep emotional problems who have found someone else to make miserable.
Mentally healthy people just walk by a poster they don’t like. Psychopaths and sociopaths tear them down, and when you throw in DEI-infused dehumanization of Jews, you get the anti-Israel movement we now have.
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