Antisemitism, the stain
The stained, the contaminated. He, she who is placed and exposed before the eyes of others as an object of opprobrium, as a scapegoat, as the easy and vulgar explanation: as the summary of all their fears, their biases, their insecurities, their mediocrities, their inabilities, their bad fortunes, their stupidity. The ones marked with a perennial guilt, with the small and ordinary universe of words and images that make up the tragic farce: the greedy, bloodthirsty, scheming, filthy, hook-nosed, stained people.
This false caricaturing of a group of people has managed to impose itself on the reality of individuals, of singular existences, which are reduced to an easily identifiable stereotype. Even more terribly, those to whom this fabrication is directed can easily act upon this stereotype, since the humanity of the Jews is buried under the guise of a lie, of convenient hatred.
Act. Yes, because that is what all those words, those speeches, those tweets and posts, are urging: there is a problem, they say, and therefore, it must be solved; ergo, act. And what to you do with a stain? You erase it. What to do with a contaminating agent? You eliminate it.
So, the words and images invent a problem that asks for a drastic and absolute solution. The words and images ask for mass murder. That is antisemitism: a call for genocide. A call that made for a long time. Too long. When an antisemitic remark, text, image is posted, pronounced, broadcasted, that old call is strengthened by the false idea of validation, of consensus, of legitimacy. At this point, no excuse is valid – neither ignorance, nor the trite and woolly alibi of the freedom of expression, nor anything else: no platform can claim ignorance, nor claim a lack of definition of what antisemitism is and is not. There is a definition, in case anyone isn’t clear on that – even after so many academic papers written on the subject, even after history – what antisemitism is, and what its tools are, and how it camouflages itself in a false political correctness. Almost two thousand years of aversion directed against the Jewish people have exposed all the tricks that hate keeps in its hat. There’s no possible deception in there anymore. Well, that is unless someone chooses to be deceived by that clumsy artifice… And then, why would anyone be willing to be deceived if not to justify their own limitations and failures, to exonerate themselves (and thus also those who feed them hate) from their responsibilities?
An imposed birthmark made with indelible but very evident ink… Marked by that, a People suffered the consequences of the language that designed that hate and conceived the persecutions, ghettos, pogroms, and gas chambers. And now, it suffers the denial of the existence of this system of symbols, of signs – or at least, the obvious manifestations of its content, of its function – that the executors, the torturers, the violent barmen, the bureaucrats turned into butchers, understood very well indeed.