Kneecap have very ably described the activities of a rabid English political-media class urging each other on to ever greater acts of calumniation and spitefulness, as a festival of distraction. To avoid reporting on the actual Genocide, these base representatives of Regime ideology must make the perpetrators of the Genocide into victims.

And so, once again, the feelings of those carrying out the genocide are elevated to a supreme and unquestionable level of importance. The exquisitely developed sensitivities of settlers allow them to take offence at any challenge (even a challenge of the lowest stakes, such as losing Eurovision), while permitting them to maim, murder, torture and rape the men, women, children and babies of Palestine. Macdara has pointed out previously that the way to show loyalty to the zionazis is to adopt the most absurd position possible in their favour, but somehow things are getting worse. Presumably what we are witnessing is the extreme protection that must be given to them, given the undeniable enormity of their crimes. The unimaginable horror of the Genocide necessitates this extreme defence: a total ban on the thinking of critical thoughts, in fact of any thoughts at all. The alternative to this total closure of intellectual activity is imagined to be the collapse not only of the zionist entity, which no one actually cares about as such, but of the White World Order of Late Capitalism. That is the only way this evident irrationality can be made to make sense. 

The tool to accomplish this massive act of silencing is the charge of antisemitism. Antisemitism has been elevated to the highest point in white discourse: it exists at the apex of language, the place where speech itself must stop. To call something or someone antisemitic is to end discussion: no further examination is necessary. It is an act of pure castigation. It is dangerous and of course suspect to continue to engage with the actor so marked. This is not the present writer’s attitude: for him, antisemitism, as a real phenomenon, or as a word that is used as a blunt weapon by the Right, is generative of language—there is always more to say, there is always an analysis to be performed. 

But it is clearly a magic word in Late Capitalist discourse. Macdara has tried to think this through as best he can, and he only has the following analysis. His guiding question was: it is clear to him why the Holocaust was a bad thing, but why do, say, English people think it was a bad thing? In answering this question, let us consider that it is surely a surprise that the murderous White States actually fought against the nazis (though of course they had been keen to enable them at first). The nazis brought the tactics of European colonialism to Europe: it must be this that made them unacceptable to their neighbouring powers. They made too obvious what the European regimes had been doing for centuries, and in the case of antisemitism, how they had treated European Jews for two thousand years. In short, they were an embarrassment, a family member who says too clearly what everyone else is thinking, who flaunts their bad behaviour instead of maintaining the level of discretion expected. The single word antisemitic functions as a reminder of this excess of European colonialism that was so traumatic for the Imperialist countries. The zionists who left Europe were reestablishing the rightful state of affairs: brutality against non-Europeans; they were modelling the kind of appropriate Imperialism that the nazis had abandoned.

The nazi successor state has perfected colonial violence; this is permissible since the violence is practised in Palestine above all, but also Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran (as well as against the tiny number of dissident settlers that exist). The zionists still maintain the obsession with racial purity of the German nazis, but are protected by the talisman of antisemitism.