Attacks on Jews are real, not hoaxes

In the West, we are being subjected to a manipulation of reality that could have been scripted by Franz Kafka.

Last month, gay black actor Jussie Smollett claimed that he was set upon in Chicago one pulverizingly cold night by attackers who yelled racial and homophobic slurs, shouted “This is MAGA country,” poured an unknown chemical over him and placed a noose around his neck.

This bizarre account was then said to have been a hoax. Smollett reportedly paid two men to orchestrate the assault on him. He denied this, but has been charged with disorderly conduct and filing a false police report.

A lot of people now find themselves under an uncomfortable spotlight.

From the start, it was clear that Smollett’s story was far-fetched and inconsistent. Yet it was instantly leapt upon as unchallengeably true.

Democrat presidential hopeful Cory Booker tweeted that it was “an attempted modern-day lynching.” The Washington Post’s “Eugene Scott wrote that Smollett’s “experience” was “far too common for black gay men, particularly those who speak out against racism and sexism.” Actress Ellen Page urged people to “connect the dots,” accusing Trump and Vice President Mike Pence of hating gay people. Anyone who questioned Smollett’s story was denounced as a hatemonger.

There have been many claims of hate crimes that have been seized upon despite inadequate evidence.

In September, Christine Blasey Ford could recall few of the circumstances surrounding the sexual assault she said she endured as a teenager at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh, then a Supreme Court nominee. The Senate Judiciary Committee found not enough evidence for her claim. Despite this, anyone who questioned her story was accused of endorsing male violence.

Last month, as a result of edited video footage, boys from a Catholic high school demonstrating against abortion were accused of racially abusing an elderly Native American. The boys were subjected to hate campaigns; the school had to close for a day following the incident. When the full video was revealed, however, the boys were found to have been themselves the victims of abuse and intimidation by another group.

And let’s not overlook the attempts to prove that Trump colluded with Russia to “steal” a presidential election. Not only was no such evidence discovered, but it steadily emerged that elements of the FBI and Justice Department used Clinton campaign research to mount a spying operation on Trump in order to abort his presidency. Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who was fired last year, now says he plotted with others in the FBI to remove the president by any means necessary. These astounding claims have been largely ignored. As with many left-wing causes, factual evidence is dismissed as irrelevant. Whichever issue underpins the uproar of the day constitutes an incontrovertible fact.

So Blasey Ford had to be believed because of the incontrovertible “fact” that Kavanaugh was anti-abortion and had to be stopped at all costs.

The Covington boys had to be abusers because of the incontrovertible “fact” that Trump supporters in MAGA caps go out looking for minorities to beat up.

Even now, McCabe is still claiming that it’s possible that Trump is a Russian asset.

Asked about the claims that the Smollett story was a hoax, Booker doubled down. “Bigoted and biased attacks” were seriously on the rise, he said, and most terrorist attacks since 9/11 had been “right-wing,” a majority of them “white supremacist attacks.” So he avoided the issue of truth and swerved back instead to his overriding agenda: bashing the right.

Meanwhile, real attacks are being ignored. The night Smollett claimed he was attacked, a Jewish man in New York was beaten up by three thugs. Last October, The New York Times reported four times as many crimes against Jews as against black people. Anti-Jewish hate crimes outnumbered those against transgender people by a factor of 20.

But anti-Semitism is prevalent on the left and among the groups it favors. It gets in the way of the narrative that reframes reality to accord with left-wing shibboleths. So falsifications are justified on the grounds that they illustrate a “broader truth.” They are deployed to demonstrate tmoral superiority. Many on the left create right-wing monsters to prove their own virtue.

Washington Post editorial board assistant Nana Efua Mumford said she was brokenhearted to discover the Smollett story was almost certainly a hoax.

“The incident,” she wrote, “would be touted as proof that there is a leftist conspiracy to cast Trump supporters as violent, murderous racists. It would be the very embodiment of ‘fake news.’ And that reason, more than any other, is why I need this story to be true…”

It’s why American Jews who vote Democrat are silent about the anti-Semitism of people like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Having told themselves that Trump is a threat to Jews, black people and Muslims, they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that the most dangerous enemies of the Jewish people are on their own side.

Hoaxes are a false flag operation to cast as villains the victims, a hallmark of Soviet communism’s strategy of psychological warfare.

Israel is a prime example. The Palestinian narrative — cooked up originally by Yasser Arafat in cahoots with the former Soviet Union — is a hoax that blames its Israeli victim of appalling crimes of which it is innocent but of which the Palestinian perpetrator is itself guilty.

Hoax politics are an example of cultural totalitarianism that fries the brain and creates a climate of political, intellectual and moral chaos.

It’s why so many of us feel that the world has spun off its axis of reason altogether. And it’s why the anti-Israel and anti-Jew pathology that has erupted in the West is part of a broader and devastating cultural nervous breakdown.

Melanie Phillips is a British journalist.