Gone are the days of Europe, in the 1930s, when physical force was the weapon of choice employed to either silence or marginalize Jews. Nearly a century later, it has become the weaponization of words that is now being used to disenfranchise Jews from social engagement with others.
Take, for example, the experience of one particular Jewish UK student at Exeter University who, while attending a party, was verbally assaulted by another student, whose rage-filled profanity was hurled at her like a live hand grenade, intended to publicly denigrate her.
In Mathilda Heller’s recent article earlier this month for The Jerusalem Post, “One in five UK university students would not be open to Jewish roommate,” the disturbing event that openly occurred in front of many other university students succeeded in ousting the Jewish girl from the party.
No one is mentioned as coming to her defense or rejecting the “Zionist” slur placed on her or the accusation of being complicit with genocide, even though the girl claims no one knew anything about her. Taken at face value, her attacker’s demeaning ethnic characterization, followed by telling the girl to F*** off, was enough to send her away in tears.
In the face of such a lethal verbal onslaught, finding the courage to confront the blatant display of unbridled bigotry was nowhere to be found, but that is the extra-added bonus of verbal weaponry. It silences the victim, as well as the onlookers, who must think twice about coming to the defense of the one being terminated by words.
In another recent incident, Progressive influencer Kat Abughazaleh, who lost her bid for the Illinois 9th Congressional District Democratic Primary, also chose to weaponize her concession speech by saying, “F*** Trump, F*** ICE and Free Palestine.”
In this world stage of political weaponization, bigotry has made a return through performative intolerance, where angry words or verbal threats have the same intimidating force as guns or knives.
It was over a year ago that Noora Shalash, a former employee of The Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), was criminally charged after “harassing Jewish individuals by saying, ‘I want ISIS to kill all of you.’”
Jews in Ireland document 143 antisemitic incidents
In an article from the Post earlier this month, it was reported that Jews in Ireland have documented 143 antisemitic incidents in their country, the majority of which included verbal abuse, accompanied by vandalism, threats, discrimination, and exclusion.
But it’s not only isolated incidents that are heard at public venues, but there is also a well-coordinated campaign of “digital hate messages” being seen on every social media platform in existence today. Just scroll down the comments section of any one of them, including Truth Social, and the diatribe of vicious words is enough to send shivers down your spine.
This is the effective verbal war that is being waged against Jews. Anyone can spew their hate anonymously, taking cover on the Web, while adding their voices of hate-filled epithets to the already bustling climate of anti-Jewish sentiment.
Of course, the beauty of social media platforms is that they reach a maximum audience, with no geographic limitation, thereby globalizing the verbal intifada. It’s the coward’s way out, giving the nameless attackers instant immunity from prosecution while they influence and desensitize the viewers.
It’s a hate-crime which goes unpunished while effectively doing its public relations damage to an entire race of people. Don’t think for one minute that it is not changing hearts and minds, because when ideologies get wide audiences, they gain traction.
Sadly, in today’s world, substantiated facts, documented history, or contextual information are no longer important factors relied upon before coming to conclusions about subjects, hardly known to this generation of young people.
More trusted are their highly biased sources of information, which include the opinions of celebrities, peers, or the shifting moods of political trends. The feeling of safety in numbers also facilitates their need to remain a cohesive bloc, discouraging individual evaluation and personal conclusion, which accounts for so many of these young people choosing not to stray from the fold. That is why they adopt the more popular viewpoint among them.
When that ends up being the mentality, it’s no wonder that even the most morally sound, in their ranks, would not muster the courage to open their mouths at a party when someone is being unjustifiably verbally attacked without mercy.
You could call this verbal intifada a new-fangled education that has been unleashed, teaching its observers to remain robotically silent, lest they, too, pay the unbearable price of social obliteration from their peers or colleagues.
Regrettably, it is all too reminiscent of the Holocaust, which taught people that survival depended upon a forced compliance that came at the expense of turning off one’s conscience in deference to the insanity of others who have figured out that verbal intimidation is a formidable weapon, able to shut down one’s sincerely held beliefs.
That is where we’re at. But if you think about it, Westerners, unlike those whose Middle-Eastern tribes embrace violent terrorism, would prefer to wage war with their tongues, perhaps, believing that it appears to be less barbaric.
But that is where the delusion is most apparent. The deadly intifada, which wages war through the means of suicide bombers, rockets, or drones, is not much different from the verbal intifada, in the sense that both aim to destroy the targeted individual, one way or another.
Each intends to hermetically seal the surroundings of Jews while disenfranchising them from social participation in every arena available to others. So, while one concentrates on the physical body, the other focuses on destroying their existential validity. In that sense, one is as insidious as the other.
It is time to acknowledge that a verbal intifada is happening in our midst – no less dangerous than the physical one which has taken the lives of so many. We are at a moment in time when words do have the ability to harm just as much as sticks and stones!
The writer is a former Jerusalem elementary and middle school principal. She is the author of Mistake-Proof Parenting, based on the time-tested wisdom found in the Book of Proverbs, available on Amazon.