In a rather embarrassing spectacle, actor John Cusack was forced to apologize after he sent out a virulently anti-Semitic tweet. Though he may be just a dumb actor, the episode is a demonstration of how easily harboring deep hatred of Israel can lead somebody to spread anti-Semitism.
This is a pattern of behavior that we've seen manifest itself at the New York Times, on college campuses, in the halls of Congress, and in the violence directed at Jews throughout the world.
The latest controversy occurred Monday night when Cusack, the 1980s movie icon, sent out a tweet that could have come out of the Nazi propaganda archives. It featured a giant arm with a Jewish Star of David, with the hand literally crushing a group of people. It features a quote attributed to Voltaire, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." In reality, Voltaire never said that, and it's actually a quote that most people attribute to neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Kevin Storm.
If the illustration that Jews were crushing people and controlling the world weren't enough, Cusack had to add, "Follow the money."
As Yashar Ali cataloged, before claiming a "bot" got him, Cusack's initial reaction was to defend his posting of the neo-Nazi image as merely legitimate criticism of Israel:
His eventual excuse read, "A bot got me- I thought I was endorsing a pro Palestinian justice retweet - of an earlier post - it came I think from a different source - Shouldn’t Have retweeted."
This is obviously not plausible, but still telling that his excuse also involved the idea that he was merely intending to support "Palestinian justice."
Even the most charitable interpretation — that Cusack merely meant to criticize Israel, and that he's a not very bright — is a good example of how the fostering of hatred of Israel can lead people to embrace anti-Semitism. As I've noted many times, criticism of actual Israeli policies is one thing, but the excessive demonization of the Jewish nation can easily lead people to spread some of the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes and also to the targeting of Jews.
It's more than Hollywood celebrities who are susceptible to this garbage.
We saw it with the New York Times which published a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon in its international edition, which no editors picked up upon, because it was seen as an attempt to criticize U.S. policy toward Israel. We see it in the anti-Semitism crisis taking over the British Labor Party. We see it at U.S. colleges, where anti-Semitic incidents were eight times more likely at campuses that had at least one anti-Zionist group, such as Students for Justice in Palestine. We see it in Germany, where a court ruled that the attempted firebombing of a synagogue was merely an expression of protest against Israeli actions in Gaza. We see it in the anti-Semitism that engulfed the Women's March and the D.C. Dyke March. And thanks to Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and her enablers, we're seeing it in the halls of Congress.
If Cusack and others are so consumed with hatred for Israel that they cannot avoid accidentally promoting neo-Nazi propaganda, excluding Jews, assaulting Jews, and spreading age old stereotypes about Jews, they seriously need to rethink things.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/john-cusack-shows-how-anti-zionism-is-a-gateway-drug-to-anti-semitism
2019-06-18 15:18:00Z
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