By now you have probably seen the Super Bowl ad produced by Robert Kraft's Blue Square Alliance Against Hate.
When was the last time that you heard anyone use the epithet "dirty Jew?"
Well, it's going to happen a lot more now, as a result of this commercial!
In the real world, Jewish students are called genocidal racists. And not by bullying students, but by teachers. In many schools and universities, frameworks used in DEI and decolonial programming categorize Jews as privileged oppressors and supporting Israel is supporting apartheid and genocide.
Being proud Jews helps. Knowing the facts helps. But in the end, how can a student fight something like this on his own?
He cannot. Because the problem isn't the bullying. The problem is that schools, and universities, and NGOs, and most of the media, have abandoned their mission to tell the truth.
But it is even worse than that. Because no one is even learning what truth means. As I've been mentioning, in significant parts of academia, especially within decolonial and critical frameworks, coherence within the ideological system often functions as the operative test of truth, displacing correspondence with external reality.
As I've been working on my Derechology framework based on Jewish thinking, I've been exploring basic questions. One of those questions is as basic as it gets: what is truth? The gold standard is the scientific method, but even the methods scientists use are not provable. Math is based on axioms that are asserted and not provable, science uses methods like deduction, induction and abduction that are pretty good but not proof.
Jewish thinking says that absolute truth exists but is not knowable to man, only to God, so we can only approximate truth and approach it asymptoticly. Modern philosophy is starting to catch up, specifically critical realism which was only developed in the 1970s is very similar.
But this brings up an interesting and critical issue. Typically falsehood is defined as "not truth." But if we cannot know absolute truth, how can we define falsehood?
I have been arguing that falsehood requires its own epistemology. We cannot always prove absolute truth. But we can identify frameworks that contradict themselves, that rely on missing preconditions, that fail to produce necessary consequences, or that depend on structurally impossible assumptions. When a theory survives only because contrary evidence is reinterpreted as further proof of oppression, it ceases to be an explanatory model and becomes a closed narrative system.
This is a very high level of what I'm developing, but the point is that today's academics, pundits, many politicians and students are basing their opinions of Israel on things that are provably false - but they are consistent with other false ideas about Israel, which creates a self-perpetuating coherent framework that is all based in the end on lies. Yet they do not even have the tools to prove them false.
I've been showing that these accusations are structurally false. For example, I've used these methods to show how the idea that Israel is a settler colonialist state is false (and that the claims of settler colonialism itself are provably false as well.) I've shown that the claim that Israel is guilty of genocide is impossible not because of counter-arguments but because for it to be true it depends on assumptions that are impossible to be true. These coherence-based arguments are, in the end, indistinguishable from conspiracy theories.
Today's antisemitism is not simply based on lies. It is based on people not even knowing how to determine falsehood. And we need to return academia to become what it is meant to be - seeking truth - before we can uproot antisemitism at its core.
It is a little more difficult that square blue stickers.
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