Every Conspiracy Everywhere All At Once

By Seth Mandel

Thursday, January 04, 2023

 

Jews have often noted that conspiracy theories about us openly contradict each other: at one moment, we’ll be accused of being communists; in another, they’ll hate us for being capitalists. But social media today means we live in the era of what I’d call Kitchen Sink Anti-Semitism: Like the movie that cleaned up at the 2022 Oscars, it’s everything everywhere all at once.

 

A month I ago I wrote about how Israel’s haters love to accuse the Jewish state of genocide because it’s the ultimate way to universalize the Holocaust and deny the particular destructive animus toward the Jews. Since then, such discourse has become ubiquitous: just yesterday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had to field a question about it at a White House briefing, and there’s even been a lawsuit filed against President Biden for his supposed complicity in the “genocide.”

 

But then there’s the fact that Princeton University just concluded a semester in which a Near Eastern history course assigned the book by Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar featuring the classic blood libel of Israeli organ-harvesting. As Jonathan Marks noted in Commentary in 2016, Puar herself rejected the “genocide” accusation, saying: “The Jewish Israeli population cannot afford to hand over genocide to another population. They need the Palestinians alive in order to keep the kind of rationalization for their victimhood and their militarized economy.”

 

And so it is that the Jews are simultaneously guilty of genocide and of perpetuating a multi-generational campaign of evil that precludes genocide. Both of these allegations coexist within the same cohort—academic anti-Semites—in psychopathic harmony.

 

Much has been made this week of infamous “antiracist” activist Saira Rao communing with the spirit of Joseph Stalin, tweeting: “Realizing how many American doctors and nurses are Zionists and genuinely terrified for Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, South Asian and Black patients — even more than usual. And usually it’s bad.”

 

This is Stalin’s “doctor’s plot” updated for the DEI generation. After the 1948 death of Andrei Zhdanov, at one time considered a likely successor to Stalin, the dictator began crafting a narrative in which subversive Jewish doctors posed a threat to Soviet leadership, with the requisite arrests and torture that followed such accusations.

 

Popular progressive activist Bree Newsome defended Rao before coming upon a conspiracy theory Newsome found more exciting. Palestinian-American filmmaker Lexi Alexander posted her reaction to the unsealing of names and documents involved in the sex-trafficking case of the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein: “I don’t think the Epstein list is a distraction from the genocide, it (and whatever else Israel has on powerful people) is the reason this genocide was allowed to happen.”

 

To which Newsome added, “It’s all connected!!”

 

Yes, we’re just skipping through time here, from the doctor’s plot to the “international pedophile ring” theory. Right-wing influencer Morgan Ariel reached across the aisle to echo the same allegation, though with a Protocols of the Elders of Zion twist: “The Zionist Jews controlling our planet are all pedophiles.” She also added some scholarly gloss: “Read the Talmud and it will all make more sense.”

 

Far be it from me to suggest Ariel, a self-described “Lioness for Jesus Christ,” may have missed something in all her Talmud study, but we’ll have to agree to disagree.

 

The Jewish people have been accused of pretty much everything under the sun over the course of human history. And if you scroll through an afternoon or two of political punditry, you’ll see absolutely all of it.