The Deep Depths of Ideological Depravity: Comparing the Holocaust to the Covid-19 Vaccine
Everyday the extreme combination of human evil blended with stupidity astound me. Meanwhile: Palestinians celebrate a mass murder of Israelis with fireworks and candy.
Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. Among the most important pieces from this first wave:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
Is Qatar the Most Terrible State in the Middle East? Or Is Iran Worse?
7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred
Why This Bible Thumper Is Going to Keep Using Plenty of Profanity
How Multi-Faith Mysticism & Maimonides Can Bring Peace to Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Everyone
This is the seventh installment in Volume II, intended as another 30 installments exploring the many manifestations of Jew Hatred and the issues surrounding it in America and globally. See the previous installments in this collection below.
Martin Luther King, Jr: An American Hero and Courageous Zionist Voice
Talking to These Students Gave Me Hope in this Dark, Dark World of War and Hate
Why I Don't Expect the Palestinians Will *Ever* Make Peace with Israel and Thus Gain Statehood
The Antisemitism of Ron Paul's Far Right Anarcho-Capitalist Ideological Cult
When Holocaust Trivialization Manifests in the Wrestling World
2 Numbers Which Reveal the Overwhelming Level of Human Devastation Wrought by the Holocaust
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
I had already written and scheduled another post for today on an expression of antisemitism which served as an effective example of one of the varieties of far right Jew Hatred which I have written about recently. But I was so disgusted by two other related stories this morning that I’ve decided to reschedule that one for next week so I can instead highlight the horrors emerging instead.
Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day so I ended up publishing two installments in this antisemitism and culture series rather than just one. The first was on the subject of Holocaust trivialization, highlighting a post a friend had written in condemnation of a female wrestler posing in a Nazi uniform. The second was a by-the-numbers explication of why trivializing the Holocaust was so deeply offensive - I laid out the huge percentage of the European Jewish population who had been murdered and the fact that numbers of Jews alive today still had not recovered to 1939 levels. I then cited disturbing poll results of the huge numbers of people in both America and other countries who were ignorant of this history, doubtful of it, or even expressing approval of the Nazi ideology which led to it.
And what did I receive in response to this second post when I shared it on Twitter? This came from a right-wing commenter who first started responding to my writing over a decade ago when I worked within the bowels of conservative online media:
Oh dear Lord. Not Bob too. When he had started following me recently on Twitter - telling me he had decided to join once Elon Musk had bought the company - I worried that he was probably way more right-wing than I was now and thus likely to have bought into some new crazy crap. But for months he’d been mostly harmless and hadn’t brought up any anti-vaccine nuttery. Alas, I shouldn’t have given him the benefit of the doubt:
“The jab” — often I wish my eye rolls could make some sound to express my sentiment of annoyance and disgust more loudly and overtly.
I knew I was wasting my time trying to even talk with him about this, but isn’t that what Twitter is primarily for at this point? Conversing with crazy people possessed of insane ideologies?
See how the intense right-wingers’ made-up problems come to distract them from real ones?
It was time to make clear to him exactly where I stood on this and why:
Readers of this series may recall that the right-wing media movement’s embrace of Covid denialism and anti-vaccine propaganda was the nail in the coffin that finally pushed me to abandon the cause and shift to a Zionist focus:
My outright dismissal of his position inspired Bob to announce he was now unfollowing me, which I promptly did to him in return:
I then made myself as clear as I possibly could how little his vow to unfollow meant to me:
But he continued picking a fight of course - he had only joined Twitter to troll people with his far right crackpottery - dropping a meme which he’d regularly bragged about and now had achieved with me:
To which I agreed:
Then he tried to change topics, but it would just add fuel to the fire of my critique of his amoral populist-nationalist “MAGA” ideology:
Then I tied both the Trump sycophancy and the Covid vaccine denialism together:
Evil, amoral right-wing keyboard warriors are always claiming to want to “debate” and whining about how their opponents refuse to take seriously and “debate” their nonsense:
Well, I don’t “debate” with amoral ideas so stupid and destructive that they belong well outside the bounds of reasonable disagreement. My “mike drop” which he has been unable or unwilling to respond to:
This whole series on Antisemitism and Culture began with me making the point that Trump’s dining with three antisemites last year was symbolic of how the larger partisan GOP and right-wing ideological movements which had anointed him as their savior were now too deeply amoral for me to support in any way. I noted in this post here how still even after the Kanye-Fuentes-Yiannopoulos dinner - December 14 - a full 70% of Republicans still liked Trump:
As I put aside the worthless back-and-forth with the Holocaust-to-vaccine comparer, another more important story drew my attention, I24 News reported: Palestinian towns celebrate murder of 7 Israelis in Jerusalem attack:
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza on Friday night celebrated a terrorist attack that killed seven Israelis and wounded at least three others at a synagogue in east Jerusalem.
Videos posted on social media overnight showed Palestinians chanting in the streets, setting up fireworks and firing guns, cars honking and people giving out sweets after the terrorist attack. Palestinian media also reported celebrations in Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, as well as parts of east Jerusalem and Gaza.
…
Israel’s UN ambassador Gilad Erdan condemned these celebrations calling them “disgusting.”
“On the day that the world remembers the horrors of the Holocaust, Palestinians are celebrating the murder of innocent Israelis in Jerusalem with fireworks and dancing. This is the result of decades of Palestinian incitement and hate that the world ignores,” he wrote on Twitter.
As I considered this Islamist celebration of the mass murder of Israeli Jews, I couldn’t help but juxtapose it with the depressing back-and-forth with the proud Trump supporter I’d just had. After all, he did also respond to another of my threads yesterday making clear where his sympathies lied:
When I stumbled into the conservative movement in 2009 this story of Palestinians celebrating in the streets the news of the killing of Jews on International Holocaust Remembrance Day would have been big news. At the time, so-called conservatives regularly wrote about Islamist terrorists and loudly supported the Jewish state’s need to defend itself.
But where have priorities shifted now? Into this sort of Covid vaccine denialism horse shit and endless Trump sycophancy no matter how low the man’s morality falls. I’ve seen how writers I once worked alongside and followed closely for their advocacy against Islamist groups have now totally shifted, focusing on and condemning Fauci to the level they once spoke about Osama bin Laden.
This is such a sad, sad morally confused species no matter where one looks across the globe. It’s almost too much for me to bear the extent to which so many people will be in denial of real problems to make up fake ones, and to which others will openly celebrate the barbaric slaughter of the innocent.