Member-only story
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.
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…
