Jew hatred and pragmatics: The State of Israel and Apartheid

Frustrated people tend to project their own frustration onto others, turning their frustration into some form of hatred. There are many ways to distort reality, so that a potential audience will always receive a message of hatred, without using the word “hate,” but rather by using completely different arguments, usually arguments that would activate the mechanisms of empathy among the listeners, trigger their emotions, and unconsciously sow hatred. In this psychological warfare, Israel haters break world records.

The attached picture (photographer: Michael Jacobs), a relatively new picture in the Amsterdamic landscape (a location that serves as a fertile ground for Israel haters), perfectly serves this goal. And when no one stops the hatred — it grows bigger, develops and improves, until the goal is achieved.

I will not refer here (again) to the fact that these false displays are supported by the Dutch authorities. You can read this in my previous post. I do not even intend to refer to all of the text here – I will address each of the eight “arguments” presented in it, to turn Israel in the eyes of the world to a state of criminals, in future posts. Here, I will concentrate solely on the last “argument”: apartheid.

The word “apartheid” was originally created in Afrikaans, and was first introduced in South Africa in the late 1940s. Its meaning is “separation”, and it represents the racial segregation that was run in South Africa between 1948 and 1990. This separation was characterized by a set of race laws, such as the prohibition of intermarriage of whites and blacks, assigning high-level positions to whites only, and other similar rules.

The word “apartheid” consists of two parts: “apart” + “heid”. In Afrikaans the first part means “separately,” while the second part is a suffix indicating nouns, similar to the suffix “hood” in English (such as in the word “neighbor-hood”). That way, the lexical blend became a new term, which received the meaning of “separation”, and stood for the policy of the regime in South Africa during these years: the rule of the white minority over the black majority.

Africaans, as is well known, is the official language of South Africa – one of several. And not just an official language, but that of the Dutch founders of South Africa. Oops … Dutch? Those who now permit the use of the very same word that they invented themselves for a specific, political, situation, while diverting the context and turning it against Israel and against the Jewish people? Ironically, yes. In Dutch, the meaning of the apart + heid combination is the same as in Afrikaans: separate + noun suffix = separation.

The use of the term “apartheid”, with all its negative connotations, to describe the situation in Israel – is clearly, and intentionally, wrong. Unlike in South Africa until the 1990s, Israel has no legal prohibition on intermarriage of any kind. There is also no limit on minorities in Israel to apply to (and achieve) senior positions; I know some personally. There is no law prohibiting the entry of minorities into public places – parks, beaches, playgrounds, etc., as was customary in South Africa. In fact, Israel does not discriminate against any minority at all.

This linguistic use of the word “apartheid”, together with the false visual “evidence”, does the job well: the word “apartheid”, having an original negative connotation, along with a few pictures of dead children from Syria and Iraq, and with some images of blood, usually not authentic blood, presents Israel as a subhuman state, and the Israelis as monsters, or as displayed on the sign – as criminals. The intentional misrepresentation of Israel as an apartheid state attributes to it characteristics of racial discrimination, ban based on origin or nationality, and the like.

Jew-haters do not reject any means that would help deport Jews from wherever they might be, since Jews are undesirable and never have been. This system of lies – the visual “evidence”, and the misleading linguistic abuse, is widely displayed in various forms (but with the same principals) all over the Netherlands, Europe, and other places worldwide. The approval (and support) of these actions by the Dutch authorities, conducted by the same people who originally invented the word “apartheid”, shows that the opportunity to harass the Jews will never be missed. Yes, again.