I didn’t bother writing about the ‘Day of Hate’ because it was yet another obvious troll by the alt-right.
These have played out the same way over the years.
And they always announce something grandiose that the media is bound to report on and will make everyone concerned look foolish. Or, ‘wrongfooting’. Nobody ever bothers to learn anything from it because the alt-right and the media feed off each other. The media gives the alt-right publicity and the alt-right gives the media clickbait. Both the Neo-Nazis and the media walk away happy while everyone else is worse off.
The Goyim Defense League, a marginal Neo-Nazi group, has the numbers to stage individual low-level publicity stunts, they don’t have the numbers for any kind of Day of Hate. Neither do any of the other current alt-right ventures, Students for Ye, Groypers, etc. But the announcement came right after two shootings of Jews in Los Angeles, so it wasn’t surprising that Jewish groups which weren’t clued it on took it seriously. Or that law enforcement reacted with increased vigilance.
The media should have known better. But that’s usually true.
The aftermath of the ‘wrongfooting’ was followed by the vocal insistence of some in the conservative world that GDL doesn’t exist or that the whole thing was made up by the Jews who were concerned about it.
That’s equally wrong.
GDL exists insofar as it’s a small bunch of antisemitic trolls. The Day of Hate was never anything other than a publicity stunt that it could never pull off in real life. It was real and it wasn’t. Its only power lay in getting people to talk about it.
Despite several synagogue shootings by white supremacists, there are people who vocally insist that there’s no such thing as antisemitism on the right. It does exist. Campus antisemitism and racist attacks directly affect more Jews, but a gunman walking into a synagogue and opening fire is still very real. As are Neo-Nazi groups.
Two things are possible at the same time. The Nazis and the Communists were both evil. Hitler and Stalin were both monsters. You don’t have to excuse one to condemn the other. That’s what the Left does. It loudly denies that antisemitism exists on the Left or that it’s insignificant compared to the Right. We’ve seen the consequences of that denial and those lies. It’s not wrong to be aware of antisemitism wherever it comes from. It’s wrong only to pay attention to it selectively the way that the Left does, focusing on Neo-Nazis, and not on, Rep. Ilhan Omar or the BDS movement.
Antisemitism is real on both sides, but it also thrives on publicity. When to pay attention to something is a judgment call. But paying attention to trolls when all they’re after is publicity is usually a bad idea.
{Reposted from FrontPageMag}
