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Or sign-in if you have an account.An anti-Zionist Orthodox Jew holds a sign during a protest outside of the Parliament Hill in Ottawa Tuesday Nov 16, 2010. Photo by ANDRE FORGET/QMI AGENCYConservative panjandrum Ben Shapiro told attendees at a debut Toronto symposium on anti-Zionism last Sunday that anti-Zionists are so committed to the premise that Israel, alone of the nations, is unworthy of existence, that they cannot make their case without lying: “They must lie about Israel, lie about its army, lie about its enemies, and ultimately lie about Jews themselves.” True, but how they lie falls along a spectrum.Enjoy the latest local, national and international news.Exclusive articles by Conrad Black, Barbara Kay and others. 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Plus, special edition NP Platformed and First Reading newsletters and virtual events.Unlimited online access to National Post.National Post ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition to view on any device, share and comment on.Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.Support local journalism.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one account.Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.Enjoy additional articles per month.Get email updates from your favourite authors.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Access articles from across Canada with one accountShare your thoughts and join the conversation in the commentsEnjoy additional articles per monthGet email updates from your favourite authorsSign In or Create an AccountorDecent people are not recruited to anti-Zionism by the cretinous behaviour of the “Death to the IDF” rabble. But they are susceptible to the blandishments of the more-in-sorrow ideologues and thought leaders that gussy up their anti-Zionism with custom-made “theories” and “reports” whose thrust just happens to demonize Israel.This newsletter from NP Comment tackles the topics you care about. (Subscriber-exclusive edition on Fridays)By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againFor an extreme example of the type, in 2005, Hebrew University sociology student and ardent anti-Zionist Tal Nitzan began work on a Master’s thesis examining the (presumed) systemic rape of Palestinian women by the IDF. To her chagrin, Nitzan couldn’t find a single documented case of rape by any IDF soldier. Undeterred, she adjusted her thesis. The IDF were now still bent on humiliating Palestinian women, but her new “theory” had them accomplishing this by refusing to rape them. Nitzan wrote: “The lack of military rape merely strengthens the ethnic boundaries and clarifies the inter-ethnic differences — just as organized military rape would have done.”For a more famous and recent example, Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, with a known tendency to ski off his professional piste and down into rabbit holes, is still weathering blowback from high-integrity critics for his May 11 opinion column, “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” In it, he compares “the horrific abuse inflicted on Israeli women on Oct. 7” to sexual violence against imprisoned male Palestinians he says is happening “day after day.” His charges are unreliably sourced, and he did not ask the Israel Prison Service for comment, yet claims sexual violence is, as a United Nations report put it, “standard operating procedure” in Israeli prisons. Kristof’s acceptance of implausible unverified personal accounts of rape by purpose-trained dogs is especially repulsive and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.Ironically, Kristof began his column with the thesis, “It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.” But it’s not simple at all when perceived through a political lens. Indeed, Kristof’s whole column belies his own assertion, as his clear “whataboutist” intent is to deflect attention from the uniquely sadistic features of October 7’s sexual violence — gross sexual torture and mutilation, necrophilia, forced family participation — in order to indict the entire nation of Israel for the crimes of individual rogue officers. Such crimes are deplorable in Israel, but no different from abuses practiced at prisons all over the U.S.Kristof crossed the line from bias to propaganda, which is presumably why even the woke-leaning New York Times did not follow his “scoop” with a report in the news section.Then there’s academic Naomi Klein, Canada’s leading Marxist public intellectual, who chose a more inventive and sophisticated form of whataboutism in a lengthy feature she wrote for The Guardian in October 2024, titled, “How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war.”Klein alludes up front to Hamas’s “surprise and bloody attacks,” although that is her essay’s last allusion to Hamas or any specific attack details. Her beef is with Israel’s and the Jewish diaspora’s response to the event. For Nitzan, non-rape was a weapon of war. For Klein, that weapon is Jews’ excessive “memory culture,” that is, the tendency to turn traumatic events into educational experiences through art and technology.Israelis and diaspora Jews’ continuous mourning over October 7 disturbs Klein. She says that she herself “openly grieved the Israeli citizens killed” on October 7, but “many also pointed out that Palestinian lives are systematically treated as ‘ungrievable,’ ” whatever that means.Klein harps testily and at length on Holocaust memorialization. Klein finds the promoted nexus between October 7 and the Holocaust extremely annoying, because this linkage (quite properly) likens Hamas to the original Nazis. In the anti-Zionist playbook Klein cannot abandon, it is only permissible to invoke the Holocaust in its inversion form, where Israelis are the new Nazis, Palestinians the new Jews.Klein is particularly hard on the documentaries and exhibitions that show footage from the invaders’ GoPro cameras, or that recreate scenes of violence such as the Nova Exhibition. Focusing only on your own group’s suffering can, she claims, “provide rationalizations for genocide.”Here is my summary take on Klein’s train of logic: October 7 was bad, but the aesthetic and commemorative expression of Israelis’ trauma is worse. Jews’ obsession with “remembering” their own trauma excludes Palestinians’ aspiration to “re-member” Israel (that is, to make it whole again in their eyes) by re-turning and re-placing Israeli Jews, which is justifiable, because colonialism.And therefore, Israel should suppress public grieving. But Israel won’t listen to Klein. And therefore Israel, by encouraging all this memorialization business — “using a genocide in the past to justify a genocide in the present” while “in the grips of a nuclear-armed colonial revenge frenzy” — is guilty of genocidal intention. And therefore, Israel has no right to exist.I daresay Klein’s suavely constructed, but absurd thesis, supported by cherry-picked ideological clones, including the anti-Zionist Israeli NGO Zochrot, will find favour with the leftist Guardian choir. I’d therefore love to see a Klein-versus-Shapiro debate, where a mixed-opinion, open-minded audience can assess and judge the arguments on their merits. Over to you, Munk Debates.National PostX: @BarbaraRKay Get the latest from Barbara Kay straight to your inbox Join the Conversation This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.