Israel is a “settler-colonial” project! It visits “genocide”, “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid” on its Palestinian residents and neighbours! It is “imperialist”, “white-supremacist” and “Nazi”, and that goes for every “Zio” the whole world over!
So runs the entirely normalised set of buzzwords in use by the extremely online pro-Palestinian movement who are all, naturally, experts on the history and society of the region.
Except most of them have learned their slogans in the dim-witted but powerful world of anti-Zionist social media. Thus, their actual knowledge (less than zero) is in inverse proportion to their towering passion for cheerleading terror against Jews.
Last week saw one of the most sickly comic examples of what happens when a generation of activists lives in the murk of lies that is TikTok.
A woman who goes by the handle Ambamelia filmed herself rampaging around the city of Montclair in New Jersey, attacking Efi’s Gyro, a Greek restaurant known as the “friendliest restaurant in town”, tearing down its flags and yelling: “Free Palestine, b—-” and: “you know damn well there’s a genocide. You know there’s a genocide. I’m taking this s— down.”
Her coup de gras, as employees went outside to deal with her? “I don’t stand for this. There’s genocide. And I don’t stand for Zionism. They’re killing children”.
Does one want to laugh or cry that this person, just one of millions who “don’t stand for Zionism” and believe the anti-Semitic blood libel that the Jews kill children with particular zest, confused the Greek flag with the Israeli one?
I think the appropriate response is a little bit of both, but with a check on the levity. This is a sign of a bone-chilling combination of lethal ignorance and ill-intent towards the Jewish state.
They fuel each other in the grimness-go-round that is ever-amplified by the millions and millions who drink this stuff in, and don’t know better.
Some pity them for their ignorance, but I think it’s a choice. The truth is also out there: the Ambamelias of the world just don’t want to hear it.