Many of those who insist that Anti-Zionism isn't antisemitism genuinely appear to be convinced that it isn't.
Should we believe them? After all, we don't tend to believe white people who insist that they are not racist any more, even though in the main they do seem to understand what racism is, or at least used to be.
A majority of Anti-Zionists on the other hand don't seem to grasp what antisemitism is at all. They seem to think it's a less important and possibly unnecessary sub-prejudice within racism, a misdemeanour version of the offence, so to speak, which they feel has to be primarily about skin pigmentation and relative oppression (at the hands of Europeans).
It's not. It is the symbolic attribution of blame on the Jews and Jewishness for the worst evil your own codified worldview has been able to come up with. At base scapegoating, but often something that becomes far worse as it veers away from the facts.
This is why Jews have been Christ-killers, pitiless capitalists, unrooted cosmopolitans living beyond nationalist sentiment, polluters of the Aryan line and now, racist colonialists, perhaps even Nazis — surely the most historically-libelous form of antisemitism yet conceived.
Each time the sin attributed to Jews is different, and so too is each strain of antisemitism, but these distinctions don't somehow invalidate the charge.
Your antisemitism might not be the same as previous variants of the mental pathogen, but it belongs to the same lineage. Projecting onto Jews the antithesis of your own ideal is always going to be antisemitic, and the more fanatical this creed, the more likely that your antisemitism will be both irrational and vile.
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