“The Jews wanted war, and now they have it. … Every Jew is our enemy in this historic struggle,” Joseph Goebbels wrote on November 16, 1941. One recent antisemitic slur didn’t sound so different: “This doesn’t seem [to be] a war against terror, this doesn’t seem anymore a war about defending Israel, this really at this point seems it’s a war against humanity itself,” Chef José Andrés told Martha Raddatz last Sunday, April 7. Not only did Raddatz have no pushback, ABC quoted the dehumanizing trope for its print headline.
As John-Paul Pagano explained in a 2018 article in Tablet, this portrayal of Jews as anti-human is a hallmark of the kind of conspiratorial thinking that underlies the most lethal forms of antisemitism:
Most forms of racism today depict their victims as subhuman—an “other” that is something less than “us.” But as with all conspiracy theories, the anti-Semite regards his object of obsession—the Jews—as an “other” that is both inhuman and anti-human. Meaning that Jews are so hideous and evil they revel in abominable practices no society could tolerate while, at the same time, exerting a supernatural control over the society that is forced to suffer them.
Anti-Semitism doesn’t stop at segregation or exploitation. The Jews are a kind of cosmic oppressor who must be resisted and destroyed.
More specifically, as a recent study showed, the portrayal of Jews as people with exceptional capacity for malevolence became a focus of Nazi propaganda after July of 1941, when the Holocaust began.
That this type of rhetoric, claiming that Israel is at “war against humanity itself,” is now finding its way into the mainstream of American dialogue on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, should concern everyone.
Andrés must have been unaware that military expert John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, has explained that Israel “has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history,” and that military expert Brigadier General (Ret) Mark Kimmitt, former Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, said that Israel uses “extensive procedures … to enforce tough standards aimed at minimizing civilian deaths and protecting infrastructure.” Nor does he seem to know that White House National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby has said of the steps Israel takes to avoid civilian casualties, “there are very few modern militaries in the world that would do that. I don’t know that we would do that.” Nor did Raddatz point these things out to Andrés or to her audience.
Andrés didn’t have a bad word to say about the Hamas operative who allegedly boarded one of World Central Kitchen’s vehicles and fired into the air before the tragic April 1 incident in which seven workers from his NGO were killed. When Raddatz asked Andrés about the IDF’s finding that a Hamas operative had fired from an aid truck, Andres replied, “Every time something happens, we cannot just be bringing Hamas into the question.” Nevermind, I guess, that Hamas started this war and uses civilians as human shields. Let’s not bring them into this.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism includes applying a double standard to Israel among its examples. On August 29, 2021, a US drone strike in Kabul killed ten civilians, including seven children, as the US attempted to leave Afghanistan. It was deemed a mistake, and no US troops were punished. On December 12, 2013, a US drone strike hit a wedding party in Yemen, killing twelve people and injuring 24. The US refused to acknowledge these civilian deaths. On April 7, 2011, a NATO “friendly fire” strike in Libya killed five fighters, and a week earlier another NATO strike killed 13 people including ambulance workers.
And on October 3, 2015, the US hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital, killing 42 people. A US aircraft, “fired 211 shells at the hospital compound over 29 minutes before commanders realized the mistake and ordered a halt.” The incident was deemed a mistake, and while 16 members of the military were disciplined, none faced criminal charges or court-martial.
As Brendon O’Neill wrote in the Spectator, “We make mistakes, they [Israelis] commit crimes. We err, they murder. We should be forgiven, they should not.”
But Andrés doesn’t just unconsciously apply a double standard to Israel – he openly embraces doing so: “If somebody knows suffering that’s the people of Israel. If somebody really understands the meaning of suffering, if somebody should be holding the highest standards of humanity, I will say that’s also the people of Israel.” In other words, according to Andrés’s warped logic, because Jews have been persecuted and slaughtered in the past, they should allow themselves to be slaughtered in the present without fighting back. ABC and Raddatz had no problems with this.
Unsurprisingly, Rolling Stone, which, with Noah Shachtman’s departure, is back under the leadership of Sean Woods, saw fit to amplify this Nazi-esq slur with its own headline. When Woods was last at the helm of the music magazine, in 2021, he ran six biased stories about Israel in the eleven days between May 17 and May 27, while Israel was fighting a war in which Hamas indiscriminately launched over 4000 rockets at Israeli civilians. (Woods is also the editor responsible for Rolling Stone’s now-retracted reporting on the University of Virginia rape story.)
The deaths of the workers from World Central Kitchen are tragic and Andrés is entitled to his grief over the incident. But that grief does not give license to the types of comments that he made to Raddatz on Sunday.