In its coverage of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Trump Tower protest, Fox News obscured the Jewish identity of protesters—while echoing antisemitic conspiracy theories and racist tropes.
Anti Zionist is not anti Semite.
But Zionism is anti-Semitic.
Fox News’s hesitancy to identify JVP is a striking contrast to Fox’s general proclivity for naming enemies. A search on FoxNews.com for the “New Black Panther Party,” a fringe Black nationalist group, yields more than 100 results; compare that to less than 30 hits on AP‘s website. A Search for “Dylan Mulvaney,” a trans influencer who was targeted in a mass-hate campaign in 2023, yields more than 5,000 results on Fox, compared to AP’s 50. Fox News thrives upon enemies—but Jewish Voice for Peace is different. As an openly Jewish-American group, JVP challenges Fox News’ narrative that protests against genocide in Gaza are rooted in antisemitism. “We organize our people and we resist Zionism because we love Jews, Jewishness and Judaism,” JVP’s website says. “Our struggle against Zionism is not only an act of solidarity with Palestinians, but also a concrete commitment to creating the Jewish futures we all deserve.”
JVP protests never get coverage. That’s why they usually protest in high traffic areas, like Grand Central, to get them most attention from passers by.
Being anti-Semitic and pro-Israel is already a cognitive dissonance overload. Finding out that actual Jewish people don’t like war and genocide is way too much to process.
I’d argue that most anti-Semites are probably fine with a Jewish ethnostate if it means no Jews in whatever country they’re from.
The inconsistency lies with their application of who is “ethnic” and needs to “go back where they came from.” They ignore the fact that white people are not indigenous to North America.
Obligatory Sartre quote regarding anti-Semites:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Not really. Anti semites want Jews to go away. Israel is away. There is no inherent contradiction in them supporting Israel. In fact, there is significant ideological alignment between anti-Semitism and Zionism, as both tend towards ethnononationalism.
