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Our Democracy Wasn’t Ready for Irony

Gaza war protesters are turning this moment into a Vietnam thing, and Democrats will suffer because of it.

B Kean
6 min readApr 20, 2024
Courtesy of Aljazeera

Antisemitism is real. But antisemitism is also a term that has long been misused, and today, it is being manipulated to silence legitimate protests against a war that long ago stopped looking like a response to a terrorist attack and more like a war — dare I say it — of genocide.

Why can’t a person be anti-Israeli policy without being labeled “antisemitic?” The reaction we see on the far-right and even among some Democrats is that if a person speaks out against the Israel bombings of Gaza, then that person is immediately labeled anti-Semitic. People are being blackballed and losing their careers in this McCarthy-esque moment that simultaneously and quite ridiculously threatens to end American democracy as a result.

An anti-democratic reaction to how people choose to speak out against war ends the democracy that overreacted. Yes, it is a historical moment steeped in sick and sad irony.

The European Union’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism has led to widespread restrictions on the rights of assembly and freedom of expression, according to research from a rights…

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B Kean
B Kean

Written by B Kean

The past holds the answers to today’s problems. “Be curious, not judgmental,” at least until you have all the facts. Think and stop watching cable news.

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