Riding 'antisemitism' bogey, TIME magazine dubs Zionist génocidaires victims

By Press TV Staff Writer

TIME, a bi-weekly American news magazine, is at it again: celebrating genocide, vilifying the victims and eulogizing the perpetrators. It was Hitler in the past and now it’s the Israeli regime.

The cover story of the New York-headquartered magazine’s latest issue is titled ‘The New Antisemitism’ written by Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor and author of ‘To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People’.

The article revolves around the hackneyed claim of antisemitism in the West, collating it with anti-Zionism, in order to whitewash the Israeli regime’s genocidal crimes against Palestinians in Gaza.

Citing notorious pro-Israel lobby groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, the TIME cover story argues that the cases of antisemitism have “tripled” in the US over the previous year.

“For 15 million Jews around the world, its resilience engenders fear, pain, sadness, frustration, and intergenerational trauma going back to the Holocaust and beyond,” reads the story, a clear attempt to project the regime in Tel Aviv, settlers and Jews in diaspora as “victims.”

The TIME cover has triggered a myriad of reactions from social media users, with some pointing out that the magazine, owned currently by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, has done it in the past as well.

Pehlam, a user on X (formerly Twitter), shared the picture of the latest TIME cover with the magazine cover from 1939 when Hitler was chosen as ‘The Man of the Year.’

“Time magazine supported genocide in 1938 making Adolf Hitler, “Man of the Year,” she wrote.

“Time magazine supporting genocide in 2024 by labeling those opposed to the genocide of Palestinians “Antisemitic.”

Ambreen Dadabhoy, a university professor based in California, in a post on X, said Time magazine “decided to endorse genocide with a cover story.”

“Anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism,” she wrote.

Arnesa Buljusmic-Kustura, a genocide researcher, said the gist of the TIME article is that the “new antisemitism” is “criticizing Israel as a settler-colonial state rooted in white supremacy b/c Jews were not considered white by Europeans. But race is socialized and changes over time.”

An X user Talaa, a Palestinian law student at Harvard University, came up with a detailed thread, describing the article by the Harvard law professor as “inaccurate and intellectually dishonest.”

“Feldman’s core argument is that that old European antisemitism has evolved into a “new antisemitism,” one which calls Israel a colonial, imperial, & white supremacist project. His argument relies on misinformation & obfuscation,” she wrote, focusing on five main claims made in the article.

Feldman’s claim that “the application of [of settler-colonial theory] to Israel is a secondary development”, Talaa asserted, amounts to “misinformation.”

“The founder of settler colonial theory, Patrick Wolfe, treated Palestine as a paradigmatic example of settler colonialism,” she wrote, sharing excerpts from his 2006 piece “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.”

On Feldman’s other claim that early Zionist settlers should not be conceived as colonialists, the Palestinian student said “early Zionist leaders (Zeev) Jabotinsky and (Theodor) Herzl wrote openly about Israel being a colonial project,” and noting that the main group coordinating Jewish settlement of Palestine in the late 1800s and early 1900s called itself the “Jewish Colonization Association.”

She quoted from an article by Palestinian writer Mohammed Al-Kurd published in The Nation, who wrote that there was no need to cite Herzl to prove Zionists have colonized Palestine.

“Zionists have colonized Palestine without the need to cite Herzl. I know this because I live it, because the ruins of countless depopulated villages provide the material evidence of calculated ethnic cleansing,” Al-Kurd wrote.

Talaa, in her reaction to the TIME cover, said the author “inverted the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians, starting it from when the regime came into existence not the violence before that.

“In other words, he defines our ethnic cleansing as our RESPONSE to our ethnic cleansing.”

She also slams the author for not unequivocally acknowledging that the genocide is unfolding in Gaza, with nearly 30,000 people killed and more than two million others displaced.

“This point isn’t even worth disputing. It is genocide. We know it. He knows it. Israel knows it. Here’s a database of Israeli incitement to genocide, but we don’t need Israeli leaders to tell us what our 30,000 dead already do,” she wrote.

Alon Mizhari, a Jewish author and blogger, also took to X to denounce the “weaponization of the term anti-Semitism,” which he said is “one of the principles of this (Gaza) war.”

“So how has the term antisemitism been corrupted to support this genocide, and Israel’s occupation? And outrageous actions and behaviors by political Jewish leaders? Actually, this, as a philosophical method, isn’t very complicated or new,” he wrote.

He coined a new term “reverse antisemitism”, which implies that Jews can do no bad or evil things.

“If antisemitism meant, historically, that Jews are bad, or evil, and can only do bad or evil things, reverse antisemitism is the philosophy contending that Jews can do no bad or evil things at all, ever. This is where we are right now, at this bizarre and bloody juncture.”