The Iran War has exposed the anti-imperialism of fools

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at all the dweebs online saying, ‘I ain’t dying for Israel’. From the phrenologist virgins who follow Nick Fuentes to the cockless ‘communists’ of the post-class left, the cry goes out: ‘We won’t fight for that evil state.’ Guys, calm down. No one’s asking 5”4 fascists to fight for anything. Israel isn’t in need of an army of flabby genderfluids who can’t even read a JK Rowling tweet without needing a self-care day. You’re fine. Stand down.

Yet while it might be dumb, this showy pre-emptive draft-dodging has a serious side, too. The self-regarding refusenikes who dread being dragooned into war by ‘Isra-hell’ tell us something important about what passes for ‘anti-imperialism’ these days. Which is that it is obsessed, to a feverish degree, with the Jewish State. From the crank right to the woke left, they’re convinced that the tiny Jewish nation, the size of Wales, is the cause of every war and the source of every ill. And now it even has its beady eyes on their precious lives. Behold the anti-imperialism of fools.

The war in Iran has unleashed yet another round of frothing Israelophobia. If anything, it feels even more unhinged than the wild hate for the Jewish State that flooded our streets and institutions during the Gaza War. The digital right and the bourgeois left are as one in their belief that Israel is leading the Western world by the nose to fight its child-killing wars in the Middle East. You don’t need to be an expert on the frenzied conspiracism of the fascist era to smell the tropes in this dungheap of faux-analysis.

We now know, says the Very Online right, that the Jewish State is the puppetmaster of mighty America. ‘We are an occupied nation’, said Candace Owens, giving voice to that vile old prejudice that the Zionist war machine is the secret controller of our psuedo-free nations. The only reason we’re bombing Iran is because the Zionists are ‘demanding it’, she says. It’s a view echoed by Tucker Carlson. How can ‘this tiny country’ compel ‘the world’s great superpower’ to do its destructive bidding, he mused.

It’s all Epstein-related, cries the digital swarm of Jew-haters. Operation Epic Fury – the name America has given its strikes on Iran – has been rechristened ‘Operation Epstein Fury’ across social media. As the Jerusalem Post reports, there have been ‘hundreds of thousands’ of tweets on ‘Operation Epstein Fury’. The Epstein files were ‘wielded by bad actors’, it says, as proof that ‘Zionists control politics… and that Israel and the Mossad are part and parcel with paedophila’. And now the war with Iran is gabbed about as a murderous stab at a cover-up, a typically deceitful effort to drag the world’s eyes from the crimes of ‘the Epstein classes’. Killing children to distract attention from the rape of children – oh, those Jews.

This dystopic vision of America as the bitch of the Jews, the trembling victim of Mossad paedo blackmail, has been everywhere since the war with Iran began. Fuentes voiced it most starkly, titillating his army of bigoted followers by saying the US is ‘under a hostile occupation’. ‘We are occupied by a hostile alien force’, he says, ‘and they have so much control [that] they are able to send our sons and daughters… to kill and die for their agenda’. You couldn’t fit a cigarette paper between such crazed claims about ‘Zionist’ control of America and the Nazi belief that ‘international Jewry’ had its tentacles in all of German life. The Jews are ‘the ferment of decomposition’ in all nations, said Goebbels. Replace ‘Jews’ with ‘Zionists’ and you could say the exact same thing all over the internet, and instead of being called a Nazi you’ll be hailed as ‘anti-war’.

The idea that Israel is the poison in the well of humanity has trended on social media. Oddball fanboy of theocrats Jackson Hinkle got tens of thousands of likes for stating: ‘Israel is the enemy of humanity.’ As the Iran War ramped up, the Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa said: ‘If Earth is a living organism, Israel is her ebola virus.’ Fascists once likened Jews to typhus; now we’re told the Jewish State is like ebola. Time and again, we see ancient prejudices rehabilitated under the banner of ‘criticising Israel’.

Strikingly, some left-wing voices have shared Fuentes’ rant about the Zionist ‘occupation’ of America. This is a literal anti-Semite who has said Jews ‘have no place in Western civilisation’. The left has gone from saying it’s racist for a white dude to wear his hair in dreadlocks to cosying up with a lowlife Jew-hater who once called the Holocaust a ‘Jewish bedtime story’. The cult of Israelophobia has made bedfellows of hard-right braggarts and blue-haired losers.

It actually makes sense that Fuentes’ hysteria about a ‘Zionist Occupied Government’ – or ‘ZOG’ – would get leftists hot under the collar, for it is of a piece with their own foolish ‘anti-imperialism’. For years now, the supposedly anti-war left has been myopically obsessed with the Jewish State and its nefarious mastery of the minds and armies of the Western world. ‘End Zionist control of UK politics’, their banners cry. They view the Jewish nation as uniquely evil, as madly bloodthirsty, as ‘the pigs of the Earth’. Jews as pigs? You can call that anti-imperialism if you like – I call it something else.

The woke left, like the crank right, has been upping the ante since the war with Iran started. Witness the speed with which the Jewish nation was blamed for the horrendous bombing of the girls’ school in Minab. The effluent of Israelophobia bubbled up across social media, as hotheads insisted this was an ‘intentional’ attack by a demented state that slaughtered kids in Gaza and now longs to slaughter them in Iran. Yet it seems, according to analysis by the New York Times, that the strike was a terrible accident by the US military. Still, why let anything as pesky as the truth get in the way of breathing life back into the medieval libel that says Jews love butchering innocent kids?

The treatment of Zionism as the moral rot of humanity is hatred masquerading as pacifism. It’s the staggering back to life of an ancient animus for Jews, thinly disguised in the rags of ‘anti-imperialism’. It is anti-intellectualism of the most brutish variety. As one observer says, depicting America as a ‘mindless golem animated by its supposed masters in Jerusalem’ is not ‘serious geopolitical analysis’ – ‘it’s the stuff of fever swamps’. It wilfully overlooks the geopolitical drivers of America’s action in Iran – not least in relation to China – in preference for damning the Jews as the eternal wreckers of peace and decency.

In the early 20th century, we had the ‘socialism of fools’. That was a term used by principled leftists to describe the tendency of socialism to descend into the barbarous belief that the Jews were the hidden hand behind capitalism. Now we have the anti-imperialism of fools, the equally rancid idea that the Jewish State is the secret force behind war and instability. You expect us to believe it is coincidental that all the things fascists once said about the Jewish people – all-controlling, toxic, bloodthirsty – are now said about the Jewish nation? Sorry, I’m not buying it. To me, it feels like old, lethal hatreds have simply found a new costume to put on.

Is there a serious discussion to be had about the West’s actions in Iran? Unquestionably. This is a dangerous moment, calling for calm heads and cool analysis. But instead we see the old, wheezing sickness of Jew-baiting in the mask of anti-imperialism. This hatred on the homefront requires our urgent attention.

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 new book, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy, is out now. Find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.