Caitlin Johnstone || Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley) || Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz made some very revealing remarks during an appearance at the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly on Sunday, expressing frustration with the way younger Jews are dismissing pro-Israel arguments because of the carnage they’ve seen in Gaza.
“We are now wrestling with a new I think generational divide here, and I think that’s particularly true in that social media is now our source of media,” Hurwitz said. “It used to be that the news you got in America was American media, and it was pretty mainstream; you know it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is the global medium; its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them; they find them on their phones.”
“It’s also this increasingly post-literate media; less and less text, more and more videos,” Hurwitz continued. “So you have TikTok just smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us cannot have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything that we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments, and they are just seeing in their minds: carnage. And I sound obscene.”
Hurwitz went on to say that Holocaust education has begun backfiring, because it has been giving young people the wrong impression that genocide is always bad.
“And you know I think unfortunately, the very smart bet that we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit because, you know, Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism,” Hurwitz said. “Because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews, and they think oh, antisemitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people. So, when on TikTok all day long, they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, Oh, I know the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel. You fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.”
Hoo boy. Lots to unpack here.
It’s just so fascinating to see a former White House speechwriter making so many of the points that anti-Zionists have been making for years, but taking the exact opposite meaning from them:
- The mainstream legacy media has always hidden anti-Israel views from the public — and that was a good thing.
- Social media has now given Palestinians the ability to expose the truth about Israel’s abuses — and that’s a bad thing.
- People aren’t falling for the Zionist spin and narrative-diddling anymore because they’ve seen the carnage in Gaza with their own eyes — and that’s a problem.
- People who learned from Holocaust education that genocide is wrong have been applying those same lessons to the genocide in Gaza — and this means they’re “confused”.
Hurwitz isn’t denying Israel’s abuses or framing its genocidal atrocities as the problem, she’s just coming right out and saying that people obtaining information and moral clarity about those abuses is the problem. The atrocities aren’t wrong, what’s wrong is people seeing those atrocities and calling them what they are.
I love the way she complains that she looks “obscene” for trying to lay out arguments and narratives justifying the Gaza holocaust for people who’ve seen the “wall of carnage” from the genocide. I mean, yes. Yes obviously you’re going to look obscene if you try to tell someone why raw video footage of massacres, mutilated children and emaciated bodies is actually showing something that is justifiable and acceptable.
You can’t stand in front of a pile of child corpses justifying their murder and then whine when people ignore your spinmeistering and keep staring at the tiny bodies. That’s like murdering an entire family and then telling the cops, “But you’re not listening to my reasons for killing them!” They’re doing the normal thing while you are being obscene.
There’s a viral clip of this tirade going around Twitter and I was curious if Hurwitz had said anything after the video segment ended which might have made what she said sound less horrible, so I went to check out the original video on the Jewish Federations of North America’s Youtube channel, and nope. It didn’t get any better.
Hurwitz went on to say that people are wrong to carry the lessons of Holocaust education into opposition to Israel’s genocidal atrocities because the Holocaust was Nazi Germany blaming Jews for all their problems in the same way people think Israel is the source of all the world’s problems today.
She then mourned the way western Jews “re-imagined Judaism as a Protestant-style religion” in order to integrate into western society rather than retaining a strong identity that is loyal to the state of Israel.
“The problem is, we’re not just a religion,” Hurwitz said. “We’re a nation. Civilization. Tribe. Peoplehood. But most of all we’re a family. And so if you are a young person raised in America who thinks Judaism is a Protestant-style religion, then the seven million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists. So my co-religionists, if I look at them and they’re not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?”
“But that’s a category error,” says Hurwitz. “The seven million people in Israel, they are not my co-religionists, they are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists, it’s easy to slide into anti-Zionism. You don’t necessarily have that connection to them.”
Hurwitz is saying here that Jews around the world should be loyal to Israel no matter what Israel does, not because that’s the moral or truthful position but because Israel is where their loyalties belong.
I don’t know about you, but if my siblings were murdering civilians I would immediately become their enemy. I wouldn’t defend my brother if he was going around shooting children in the head like IDF snipers have been doing in Gaza, in fact I would feel a special responsibility to stop him exactly because he is my brother. Genocide doesn’t magically become acceptable if the perpetrators are your “siblings”, unless you are a sociopath.
It’s just incredible how hard Zionists have been freaking out about the way Israel has lost control of the narrative these last two years. More and more often we’re seeing them say the quiet parts out loud as they frantically scramble to manage perceptions and manipulate minds around the world.
Many things which used to be hidden are finding their way into the light.
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