The infantile Israelophobia of Ms Rachel

Don’t you just hate it when you accidentally like a social-media post calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews? Poor Ms Rachel, the gurning kids’ entertainer, committed just such a digital gaffe this week. She liked a post by one of her followers on Instagram that said ‘Free America from the Jews’. She later put out a tearful vid saying it was all an innocent mistake. She’d meant to delete the neo-medieval cry for a new Jew expulsion, not ‘heart’ it. Her thumbs let her down.

Most celebs would be given the benefit of the doubt in a situation like this. And we should give it to Ms Rachel, too. But her faux pas has caused a stink because Ms Rachel is a proper Gazaholic. Alongside entertaining toddlers on YouTube in her stupid dungarees, she has a side hustle in going absolutely mental about Israel. One minute she’s singing ‘Wheels on the Bus’, the next she’s holding forth on ‘genocide’ like some UN dignitary. And some people are wondering if it might actually make sense that a woman so feverishly obsessed with the Jewish State might also like the idea of Jews getting the fuck out of America.

It started when Ms Rachel posted a note on Instagram that said: ‘Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo, Free Iran.’ For me, that’s the most shocking part of the story. A preening, virtue-hoarding celeb mentioning countries that are not Palestine or Israel? Blow me down. Then someone replied with the following: ‘Free America from the Jews.’ And Ms Rachel gave it the thumbs up. After spotting her error she sobbed on camera, because of course she’s the real victim here. ‘Horrible!’, she said. I’ll say.

Look, I believe her. I don’t think she wants to ‘free’ America of its Jews. And I don’t think that even if she did think that, that she would go around liking such brutish Jewphobic sentiments on a public forum. Nevertheless, I have questions. Prime among them is this: how many times does a celebrity get to ‘accidentally’ say or share or associate with disgusting commentary about Jews before the rest of us are allowed to ask if something is up?

For this isn’t the first time Ms Rachel has committed a blunder regarding Jews. Last year she filmed a ‘Letter of the Day’ video with Palestinian journalist, Motaz Azaiza. This is someone who praised Hamas’s fascist pogrom of 7 October 2023. He has said openly anti-Semitic things. ‘May God curse the Jews themselves’, he once posted online. Hosting a man who cursed all Jews and then liking a post calling for all Jews to get out of America… To mangle Wilde: to make one such slip-up looks like misfortune; to make two looks like carelessness.

My main question, though, is less for Ms Rachel than for ‘the culture’. We live in unforgiving times, especially where issues of racism are concerned. Who can forget poor old Lady Susan Hussey, banished from Buckingham Palace for the crime of asking someone, ‘Where are you from?’. The Damocles sword of cancellation dangles precariously over all of us for such trifling speechcrimes as wondering if the Koran is bollocks (Islamophobia) or thinking immigration should be curtailed (racism). And yet you can openly rub shoulders with anti-Semitic people or anti-Semitic posts and the cancellers will look the other way.

Be honest: what fate would befall a kids’ entertainer if they hosted on their show a man who had once said ‘Fuck all black people’? And if they then liked a post on Instagram that said ‘Get all blacks out of America’? We know exactly what would happen. They would be savagely cancelled. The only time we’d ever see them again would be in a Netflix documentary 20 years hence about the much-loved kids’ clown who lost it all by chumming about with racist scum.

The exact opposite has happened with Ms Rachel. She may have exposed the kids who follow her to a man who once said ‘Curse the Jews’, and she may have liked a post calling for the mass expulsion of Jews from the US, but she will survive. And thrive. Cancel culture will lay not one finger on her. And we all know why: because Jews enjoy none of the protections of ‘political correctness’. Jews have not been granted access to the kingdom of liberal concern. Offending Jews is seen as a lesser crime than offending any other group. Ms Rachel will suffer no consequences so long as her blunders only touch on the lives and feelings of Jews.

The real problem is not Ms Rachel, who’s fundamentally just another celeb building a virtuous self-image from the rubble of Gaza. It’s the politics of identity. It’s that ideology’s ruthless demotion of Jews to the bottom of the league of identities. Scuff a page of the Koran and you’ll be had up for Islamophobia. Film a kids’ video with a man who said ‘Curse the Jews’ and you’re grand. There it is: the merciless neo-racialism of the woke era.

For me, the most striking thing about Ms Rachel is that she’s always in ‘kid’ mode. Whether she’s strumming her guitar for toddlers on YouTube or posting pained monologues about the ‘genocide’ in Gaza, she has that same hip-teacher demeanour. Which makes sense, because in both instances she’s pushing childish things – whether it’s a nursery rhyme for literal kids or a fairytale about evil Israel for the overgrown kids who swell the ranks of bourgeois Israelophobia. It’s logical that a playtime lady has become one of the main voices against Israel, because the whole anti-Israel schtick is a black-and-white fantasy best suited to the morally immature. The key blunder is not Ms Rachel’s – it’s everyone else’s for paying attention to her infantile moral posturing.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.