This Woman Started A Fight With Me
"I noticed you're a Jew"
“I noticed that you’re a Jew. Why didn’t you mention the Zionists?” the woman asked me.
There was an aggressive edge to her voice, primed for a fight. I had been speaking about cultishness to an audience of 1,000 vegans at the Vegan Camp Out festival. Although my speech - which criticised binary thinking and cancel culture - brought a hefty applause from the majority, it clearly irked a cultish minority in the audience.
A space was set up for me outside the tent to meet and converse with attendees who were for the most part cordial and curious. Then came bounding in a woman who - she told me - had just been listening to a podcast about the cult of Zionism.
Here’s a small part of my talk:
“Well. How do you define Zionism?” I asked her, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, while also doing my best to remain calm amid the aggressive “I noticed you’re a Jew”, which - as you might imagine - many Jews are primed to interpret as hostile. Depending on time and place, one’s noticing that one is a Jew has often been the end of one’s line.
“Zionism?” she replied, “Well, why is it that only one religion - the Jewish (sic) - should have their own country!? No other country in the world has a religion in charge of it!”
“What if I told you that you’re standing in one?” I asked.
She was becoming heated, in front of the growing crowd. “What, England?!”
“Yes, you are aware of the Church of England.”
“Oh well then you’d have to believe that King Charles is the head of state!”
“Yes,” I said, starting to understand that this person wasn’t the intellectual powerhouse they had initially presented as. “And what of the 50 Islamic countries that surround Israel?”
“Oh,” she said, deflated.
Apartheid
Like most of us when losing an argument, her mind scanned the scraps of the podcasts she’d consumed. “But you talk about cults,” she replied. “What about genocide? What about apartheid!?”
I replied by pointing out that she’s absolutely right to mention cults - because she is in one. Cultishness manifests itself when groups begin inoculating their ideas from outsiders by spouting thought-terminating clichés. In Scientology, if someone attacks the concept of evil intergalactic warlord Xenu, members simply shout “suppressive person”.
No critical thinking needed. The thought-terminating cliché suffices.
In the anti-Zionist cult (note: many anti-Zionists are not cultish, as I’ll explain below), the terms Zionist, Genocide and Apartheid have joined From the River to the Sea as its leading thought-terminating clichés. These are insults that fall apart under even the scrappiest of scrutiny, but - when repeated as a mantra by large groups - reinforce a cultish mind virus in the mob.
Just as I might ask somebody claiming “trans women are women” what they mean by “women”, I went with: “What do you mean by apartheid?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” she replied. “Like South Africa!”
I explained what anyone who has done the slightest research already knows. That 21% of the Israeli population is Arabic, 18% are Muslim and there is a rich mix of Bedouins, Druzes and Christians that make up the population. The culture and ethnic blend is represented in the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) as well as among their celebrities and sports teams.
This is a far cry from Islamic countries surrounding Israel, who kicked all the Jews out. The idea that there is an apartheid in Israel akin to what happened in South Africa isn’t just wrong; it’s demeaning to black South Africans, just as it is to purveyors of truth.
The reason the term apartheid began (insidiously) being used is because Israel continues to occupy the West Bank. When Israel left Gaza - the other portion of Palestine - in 2005, Hamas took charge and began shooting countless rockets into Israel and murdering its people. This has of course disincentivised Israel from pulling out of the West Bank, lest that even larger region is conquered by hostile terrorists.
Whether or not this constitutes ‘apartheid’, it’s disingenuous to use a word that deliberately conjures images of racist South Africa as a means to subvert (in the woke hierarchy of victimhood) the ancestors of the Jews who fled the Holocaust and countless pogroms from victim to racist aggressor.
Genocide
The term genocide does this, too. It attempts to make hypocrites of the ancestors of the survivors of a genocide. It’s an abysmal thing to do. I asked my woman aggresor to look into the incredibly fast population growth in Palestine and to compare it to the actual genocide that wiped out my forefathers. This all happened in living memory - and 80-90 years on, the Jews still haven’t recovered their population to pre-Holocaust numbers.
Reality
Many innocent people are being killed in Palestine as the result of a war that its terrorist government started in the most gruesome way imaginable. Hamas hide their weapons and soldiers beneath schools and hospitals, both to deter Israel from attacking with its full might and to win a PR war when innocent people die. Despite this, it is estimated that the ratio of innocents to combatants killed in this war is significantly lower than expected in any other modern war.
Coleman Hughes breaks down the numbers here:
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This isn’t to say there’s no argument to be made against Zionism. Zionism is an ideology. Like all beliefs and convictions, it deserves to be inspected; torn apart, even. There are zealots - including evangelical Christians - within the movement who insist Israel is some kind of holy land that must be populated by religious Jews. This fervency has led to countless religious, antagonistic cultish Zionists settling illegally on the West Bank.
There are decent and indecent people in all groups.
But what the woman did next absolutely floored me:
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