You've probably had to deal with a computer virus at some point. It likely didn’t seem like a virus at first, and you may have even installed it yourself, thinking it was something beneficial: a "System Scan" to free up space on your hard drive, say. In the background, it was doing something else: gathering information, learning your patterns, corrupting your whole operating system.
Antisemitic malware works in a similar way. It first presents itself as something noble: justice, compassion, solidarity with the oppressed. In some cases, it comes preinstalled with the ideology you were born into, but for others, it’s a program they voluntarily install. Before long, they’re giving Heil Hitler salutes and screaming genocidal slogans.
Nothing in the compilation video above will surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to the Free Palestine movement up close, but it should make uncomfortable viewing for politicians and media types who think criticism of the movement is just a misunderstanding. If pressed, they might call these people a few bad apples rather than the less inhibited elements of a sinister movement.
Of course, most people on a Free Palestine march are not giving Hitler salutes. The people in a curated video are at the extreme end, but we might fairly ask why this movement attracts so many antisemites. It isn't just the people in the video; it's also the “polite” ones who claim the label of anti-Zionism while focusing so obsessively on Israel that you can almost hear the same software whirring in the background.
As I wrote about recently, it’s not just thugs and morons who get caught up in the hate, but people who wear suits and wouldn’t dream of doing a Nazi salute (at least not in public) but who nevertheless feel the same vengeful hatred toward Jews. The malware infects people of all demographics and classes, but especially those who are already envious and vindictive.
The writer Dara Horn, in her article “Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies”, observed that:
“Free Palestine” had, even before October 7, become a kind of verbal swastika—not because of its meaning, but because of how it is deployed. Apart from its use in political or protest contexts, it has also been used as an online-harassment technique: Trolls tag any post with Jewish content—including material unrelated to Israel—with #FreePalestine, summoning more freedom fighters to the noble cause of verbally abusing Jewish teenagers who dare to post pictures of challah. This verbal vandalism made the jump to real life…and harassers now routinely scrawl it on Jewish communal buildings, shout it at their Jewish schoolmates, and scream it out of car windows at anyone wearing a kippah.
The irony is that they think they’re the anti-fascists, the morally sane ones correcting a terrible evil, when the opposite is the case.
It’s not just on the Left, although the left frames it as “compassion” because that’s their identity marker – the signature move in the status game. On the Right, we have the likes of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who seem to treat Hamas as a resistance group and blame the Jews for the world’s ills – and their own grievances, which are many.
There’s effective antiviral software for all this, and it’s called critical thinking. But that’s also the first thing a certain kind of university education drags to the trash can, if it was there to begin with. Too many universities, which once at least pretended to be about the pursuit of truth, now function like churches with a new theology formed of social justice slogans and critical theory. How easily antisemitism slots into that oppressor/oppressed framework, the easiest virtue-signal machine ever invented, overwriting critical thinking and corrupting the operating system it runs on.
A guide to five common deflections
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