Human Rights Watch racist propaganda, illustrated

The antisemitic Human Rights Watch report that says that Israeli Jews are guilty of apartheid features three graphics that purport to show how unequal the lives of Palestinians and Jews are between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.

Here's one:

This is propaganda. HRW chooses specific facts, ignores counter-examples, and even lies about the ones it lists. 

For example, pre-COVID, tens of thousands of Palestinians visited Jerusalem and even all of Israel for Ramadan. Scroll through Palestinian Facebook pages to see that a large percentage feature photos of them smiling in front of the Dome of the Rock.

Jews have received administrative detention.

Peaceful protesters in the West Bank do not get arrested - only people who encourage or participate in violence.

Jews have to jump through a great deal of hoops to build homes in Judea and Samaria, and there are often freezes - hardly ever publicized.

I made a similar poster to show how this propaganda works - by using the exact same methods to prove the opposite:

If anything, my cherry picked facts are more accurate than HRW's.

The other HRW graphics are equally deceptive. For example, they compare a Jew in an Israeli community to a Bedouin Israeli in an illegal Negev village. If Jews would build haphazard villages in the middle of state land, their homes would be uprooted far faster than the Bedouin structures have been. Even in Judea and Samaria, Israel has demolished Jewish communities built illegally. Israel has built new, recognized communities for the Bedouin, with infrastructure, and have offered to give them free houses and land plots. That doesn't happen to Jews!

However, HRW's infographics are far worse than just being filled with highly selected half-truths and propaganda. They actually cross the line into racism.

Look at the pictures they used to illustrate what Jews and Palestinians look like:

The Jews all have lighter skin. The Jews have light, straight hair. The Palestinians have darker skin and wavy/curly hair.

Both Ashkenazic and Mizrahi Jews tend more towards darker complexion and curly hair. In fact, traditional antisemites actually obsess over Jewish curly or kinky hair as proof of Jewish racial inferiority.

The new antisemites, represented by this Human Rights Watch report, say that Jews have no semitic features or dark skin. The new antisemitism wants to paint Jews as white supremacists, so instead of caricaturizing of Jews as swarthy and coarse as the old antisemites do, they characterize them as being fully white - in a universe where whiteness is something distasteful and darker people are the only righteous people.

This racism is an exact mirror image of racism in the "old" antisemitism. While these new antisemites stress how anti-racist they are, this is proof that they are no different from the old antisemites. The entire point of the illustrations is to subconsciously make the reader believe that only Arabs are indigenous and Jews have no ties to the land that they have prayed to return to for thousands of years.

Those with a worldview that white people are superior say Jews are not white. Those with a worldview that white people are racist say Jews are white.  What is the difference between these two types of racism and antisemitism?

I would say that this race-centered antisemitism is ironic coming from a supposed human rights group, but human rights groups have long ago shown that they support human rights only for those they deem worthy. Defining Jews as white leads to the conclusion that Jews do not have human rights worth fighting for. 

 

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