It must take years of cyber-archaeology to unearth the artefacts that explain how the hyperreal surpassed the real and how bots became more sentient than the warm-blooded humans clapping back.
And yet we must turn to @matrixreloaded on 31 August, 2020. “People on here will tweet anything. ‘Charlie Brown had hoes.’ No he didn’t. That isn’t true.”
It could take a dissertation to unpack the genius of this expression. In the days of old media, one needed a legion of public relations experts and psychologists, working with mountains of sociological research, to use advertising, journalism, and spin to craft new narratives and suppress existing ones, seeking to elect new politicians or to tell the world that tobacco isn’t harmful.
No longer must one engage in such laborious massaging of ideas into society–merely putting statements contrary to all known truth, no matter how baseless, into pixelated existence, baptising them with the worthiness of public consideration, no backstory or complex philosophical trickery needed.
Those left in the dusty academic world are helpless in opposing these bizarre declarations–devoid of irony, cleverness or even a mythology with a deeper meaning–like an ineffectual hall monitor or a pedestrian yelling “slow down” at a Ferrari speeding 100 miles per hour in a residential area.
It’s too late. It’s out there. And there’s nothing your books or quaint scientific method can do about it. At least 500 accounts retweeted it in the first few minutes, and the click rate will be exponential.
Tylenol can cause autism. JFK Jr. is still alive. Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Charlie Brown had hoes.
While Israel enjoys military supremacy over Palestinians, Lebanon and Iran, the country has never been so weak in the global popularity contest, reduced to a pariah.
Antizionism is no longer for old-school leftists and Arab leaders. The concept of a Jewish garrison state unrestrained by humanitarian conventions is now offensive throughout the West, even among more and more Jews.
Hasbara–or Israeli public diplomacy–is in crisis. The hard power of discrediting journalists, academics and activists has less bite, nor does the soft power of promoting Israeli gay pride parades or images of attractive women in IDF uniforms. Tactics are shifting.
Enter Adam Louis-Klein. The public has come to know the McGill anthropology student who felt compelled to defend Israel after the 7 October attacks.
Louis-Klein’s calling card is not that he simply defends Israel or the concept of a Jewish state, but that he actively vilifies Antizionism. Anything other than the Jewish national destiny in historic Palestine isn’t a political enemy but a moral one.
On social media, his posts appear to wildly depart from the liberal, rational scholar he otherwise purports to be. In one post, he writes:
Judaism is not supremacist, but it is aristocratic. It represents a form of thought that is ancient and, in some ways, in tension with modern democratic norms. In this vision, Jews are called to constitute a kind of priestly class–indeed a kind of spiritual and moral elite within a larger cosmic order.
In another post, Louis-Klein asserts that Israel is “the origin of Jewish destiny.” He goes on
Just as God placed the sun at the center of the solar system, He placed Israel at the center of human life on earth. This cannot be changed. It can only be accepted.
In a cartoon posted to his Facebook page, Israel is depicted as a battered wife cowering from her mean, violent husband, who represents Antizionists, as if Israel, the military badass, is defenceless against chants in the streets of London and New York.
While not obviously affiliated with a major Zionist organisation, an older observer might be eager to write him off as a random crank in the comment section. But that is the whole point of this new media era: You don’t need to be an established figure. You just get online and start posting.
As a result of his efforts, Louis-Klein has been promoted throughout the Jewish press and many podcasts, including Jonah Platt’s Being Jewish, whose title, by virtue of his mission, is meant to also mean Being Pro-Israel (Molly Crabapple, Peter Beinart, Yuval Abraham and Mitchell Plitnick have yet to be interviewed, for example.)
Louis-Klein even penned an article in the prestigious pro-Israel US magazine The Atlantic, arguing for a left-wing rejection of anti-Zionism. He wrote:
Anti-Zionism recoded the left’s concern with abuses of state power and the rights of minorities into a hatred of the Jewish state, just as the classical anti-Semitism of the 19th century recoded right-wing concern with the integrity of the nation and foreign influence into a hatred of Jews as a dispersed, stateless minority. But the internationalism that transformed Israel into a beacon of “ultranationalism” and “fascism”—the Soviets reveled in Holocaust inversion and in the depiction of Israelis as Nazis—would itself become a global system of oppression, subjecting one small state to an endless trial of elimination.
Discussions of whether anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism obscure the fact that anti-Zionism, as it actually exists, remains genocidal in intent, demanding the erasure of a national group protected under international law. The Genocide Convention protects all national groups, including those based on shared citizenship. Discrimination against Israelis qua Israelis—and the “Zionists” who appear as their proxies—is a moral wrong.
And there we have it. We can just say things and those thoughts take on a life of their own.
If there are people calling for the ethnic extermination of Jews in historic Palestine, they are marginal–most will say they want historic Palestine to exist as a single state where all groups are respected and governed democratically–like a normal country.
No rational person thinks Irish republicanism means the genocide of Protestants in the northern counties, that a Bosnia for everyone means the end of the Serbs, or that erasing dhimmitude for Iran’s minorities (like Jews) means some kind of elimination.
Of course, Louis-Klein is not alone. Just recently, the group JewBelong said that when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani “calls Jews ‘monsters’” he was including those who voted for him. But Mamdani never said that.
He did call AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying organisation, monsters, however. But it doesn’t matter pointing this out. Correcting the record no longer works. Charlie Brown had hoes.
In other words, since Israel advocates don’t want to argue whether we should strive for states that treat all people equally regardless of their religion, nationality or ethnicity, the new ground is to simply assert that Israel has no Godly obligation to exist differently.
So what are you going to say? Oppose God?
Will this work? People like Adam Louis-Klein are certainly making themselves known. And they’re likely to keep going.
Photograph courtesy of Duncan Cumming. Published under a Creative Commons license.
