Oh, happy day! I’ve had a new pro-Zionist-anti-Semitic insult thrown at me

by Martin Odoni

Ah, I feel like I have come-of-age every time a vintage slur is hurled at me for the first time. This is not to say it does not hurt, but at the same time, I take a kind of pride in realising that I must be having an effect if people resort to it.

I am sure regular followers of this blog will be aware of my Jewish heritage, but also of my opposition to modern Israel. (See here if this is news to you.) They will also probably be aware of some of the insults Zionists have hurled my way due to their primitive-minded idea of what constitutes ‘treachery’. I have been called an ‘Arab shill’, a ‘Kapo‘, the all-time classic ‘self-hating-Jew’, and others.

(Israel-supporters claim they are victims of abuse, but they sure dish it out.)

But yesterday – this will again sound familiar to long-time readers – a certain bullying Zionist by the name of Jonathan Hoffman was on social media calling me a ‘JINO‘. Before anyone asks, no, he was not accusing me of being a naval oceanographer. (That would have hurt!)

Jonathan Hoffman sure has remarkable amounts of hatred in his heart for Jews, given his insistence that he works for the protection and betterment of Jews.

JINO in this context is an acronym for ‘Jew-In-Name-Only’, meant as a pejorative. In fact, many people use it to mean a ‘non-practising Jew’, and were it ever used that way about myself, I would cheerfully nod. I am irreligious, and have not practiced Judaism since before my teens; I am a Jew ethnically only.

But in this context, Hoffman is declaring, as though he is the High Judge and Grand Jury to The Gates Of Jewry – or… something – that because my opinions do not conform to his expectations, I do not ‘count’ as Jewish – a No-True-Scotsman fallacy if ever there was one. The precise terminology is different, but in all important respects, its meaning and intent correspond with all the other insults mentioned above. This is the first time, as best I can tell, that anyone has used this particular slur to describe me.

So… win.

It really does not bother me particularly in itself, as ‘Huffman’ really is such a futile gust of hot air that his insults are more amusing than damaging, despite his intent. I am curious though that he keeps posting comments to articles and links about Israel that I share on social media. After previous exchanges, it has become clear that Hoffman is spying on my Facebook Timeline, given how frequently he makes unsolicited interventions. I even set a trap for him the other week, by wording a post specifically to provoke a comment from him, and he duly obliged. He followed that up by saying he was never at the stupidly-notorious Jeremy-Corbyn-Hajo-Meyer meeting in 2010, before saying he was, before saying Meyer, a survivor of Auschwitz, was an ‘anti-Semite’.

And Hoffman calls me a liar?

Jonathan Hoffman says he wasn’t at the Corbyn/Meyer meeting, then says he was, then calls Meyer, an Auschwitz survivor, an anti-Semite. What more need be said?

Wow, he is obsessed! Am I scared though? Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr……..

No.

I should mention what yesterday’s argument was about. Hoffman, being a fanatical Zionist, and thus a toxic opponent of any politician who sympathises with Palestinians, insists that the latest contrived anti-Semitism accusation against Jeremy Corbyn – alleged to have laid a wreath on a memorial to the Black September terrorists who attacked the Munich Olympics of 1972 – must be true. As Mike Sivier has pointed out, there are about one hundred-and-fifty reasons why it is probably not.

As I say, a term like JINO does not bother me much, but Hoffman, by speaking in this way, has demonstrated that he is anti-Semitic. Not a ‘self-hating-Jew’, note, just a Jew who hates a lot of other Jews for Jewish-related reasons. Being a Zionist, this should hardly be surprising, even though it is to many people.

Zionism is anti-Semitic by its very nature. It is intolerant of Jewish dissent, as Hoffman has helpfully demonstrated. But more than that, it is, as I have explained more than once, anti-Semitic in its method. Zionism’s main strategy is to take Jews away from the rest of humanity, and put them all together in one place, somewhat cut off from everyone else. Is a world in which no Jew lives anywhere near anyone else not exactly what anti-Semites have always dreamt of?

I would go even further, and yes, sadly this may get me into more trouble over the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of ‘anti-Semitism’, as I will compare Israeli policy to Nazi policy. Truth to tell, Zionism is so anti-Semitic that it is barely distinguishable from the first stage of Nazi Lebensraum. Consider; Adolf Hitler’s plan to make all of Europe a ‘living space’ for Nordic/Aryan people started with attempts to force all Jews out of Europe. Zionism wants to transplant all Jews from Europe – and everywhere else – into Israel. There is little distinction there, and this was why the Haavara Agreement with German Zionists was in Hitler’s interests. A tragic irony; three years after Hitler’s vile, anti-Semitic vision seemed thwarted forever, ending in his own suicide, the greatest victims of his racism actually advanced the first stage of his work for him, by establishing Israel. (And by confiscating land from Palestinians to transfer to Jewish settlers, Israel is now performing a program that is ‘LIABuN‘ – Lebensraum-In-All-But-Name – with the particular land used for ‘living space’, and the identities of the peoples involved, being the only differences.)

But Zionists foolishly imagine they are solving anti-Semitism. They never even realise that their aims are precisely those that anti-Semites have wanted for millennia.

Given the IHRA definition, is it wrong to say all this? I would say no, the IHRA definition, in its present form, requires all of this be said, as the dangers in its wording cannot be highlighted without mentioning details like these.