Peter Beinart's anti-Jewish Purim propaganda ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Peter Beinart's anti-Jewish Purim propaganda

Master propagandist Peter Beinart has written a polemic in The Guardian, adapted from his most recent book, that can only be described as antisemitic.

He describes the Jews of the Purim story as being genocidal:

The book of Esther doesn’t end with Haman’s death. It continues because although Haman is gone, his edict to kill the Jews remains. The king can’t reverse it. What he can do is empower Mordechai and his kinsmen to take matters into their own hands. Which they do. “The Jews struck at their enemies with the sword,” proclaims the book of Esther, “slaying and destroying; they wreaked their will upon their enemies.” On the 13th day of the month of Adar, the Jews kill 75,000 people. They declare the 14th “a day of feasting and merrymaking”. With the blood of their foes barely dry, the Jews feast and make merry. That’s the origin of Purim.

Purim isn’t only about the danger Gentiles pose to us. It’s also about the danger we pose to them.

...My hope, this Purim, is that when Jews encounter the slaughter that concludes the Book of Esther, we shudder. And that from this revulsion comes a new dedication to ending the slaughter being committed in our name in the Gaza Strip.

Beinart admits that the Jews of Persia had no choice but to proactively attack those who wanted to wipe them out. The king cannot reverse the edict. What else could be done? Yet even so, Beinart wants to frame the Jews defending their lives as a genocidal attack. He doesn't use that word here but his comparison with Gaza and his separate embrace of the lie that Israel is guilty of genocide makes this clear.

The analogy between the Gaza war and the Purim battles is apt, for the opposite reason. Hamas' charter and Haman's edict were both to exterminate the Jews. In both cases the Jewish goal was to eradicate only those who will stop at nothing in their attempts to utterly destroy the Jewish community. That is not immoral - on the contrary, self defense against those who want to murder you is supremely moral. That is the Jewish perspective. The only genocides are the ones that Haman and Hamas planned.

Beinart is upset that secular Jews aren't aware of the entire Purim story and gloss over the brief war mentioned in the Book of Esther. So am I. The war was justified and the killings as described in the story were justified as well.

Peter Beinart is not the first person to accuse Jews of genocide in the Purim story. It is a staple of antisemites. Beinart's perversion is to make this accusation while posing as a committed Jew.

Beinart will quote Jewish sources when they are convenient for him. He writes, as a Jew, "We have largely stopped wrestling with what our sacred texts say about Jewish ethical responsibility. " Yet this is what Beinart himself is doing - ignoring what the sacred texts say about Jewish self-defense.

Beinart cherry-picks Jewish sensitivity to violence but ignores how tradition distinguishes between what is and is not allowed in battle. He knows quite well that the Hebrew Scriptures, Talmud and Jewish commentators are critical of misconduct and excesses in war and other violence. When Levi and Simeon slaughtered the residents of Shechem, they were criticized by Jacob and this was reiterated on his deathbed. The Jewish sages noted that God rebuked the angels for singing as the Egyptians drowned, with God saying, “My creations are drowning, and you sing?"

Yet there is no such criticism of war against Amalek - except of Saul for not following Gods instructions to destroy them totally. The war in Esther was written as a clear analogy to the justified - and commanded - wars against Amalek, as Haman is regarded as a descendant of that people. Indeed, no classical Jewish commentary says a word against the destruction of the enemies of the Jews in Persia, and the sages were not reluctant to criticize actions that they felt were immoral.

It isn't that Jews aren't sensitive to unnecessary deaths, as Beinart's libels imply. It is that there is a big difference between obligatory wars, such as those motivated by self defense, and wars that go beyond the necessity. The battle in Persia was clear in its goals and its morality, hence no criticism.

Beinart pretends that he is more moral than the Jewish sages he himself claims that are a source of his ethical stance. Instead of understanding and learning from the sages, he arrogantly pretends to be more virtuous than they are.

Worse, Beinart’s depiction of Jews ‘feasting with blood barely dry’ revives medieval blood libel imagery, a hallmark of antisemitic propaganda, while cloaking it in progressive critique.

And he has the nerve to promote his book with these antisemitic arguments while posing in front of the very sacred texts that he is throwing in the garbage.

Jews know quite well what the lessons of history are, thank you very much. Beinart's claim that Jews do not properly learn from their own traditions is nothing less than a sophisticated version of the antisemitic argument that the Jews should have learned more from the Holocaust.