Fighting the Satanic Jew for Palestine

The title of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book on the resurgence of anti-Semitism in our time, “The Devil That Never Dies,” can also be read as a not-so-veiled allusion to the centuries-old demonization of Jews as devilish or satanic. What began in the Middle Ages was revived by the Nazis, and remains popular among today’s neo-Nazi Jew-haters.

Crush Zion Der Sturmer

Screenshot from the blog “Crush Zion!” with a reproduction of a page from the Nazi publication Der Stürmer
describing Jews as “enemy of the world” and “Satan;” posted on June 5, 2014.

Unfortunately, however, one doesn’t have to venture into the darkest recesses of the Internet to encounter the contemporary expression of this age-old demonization of Jews: prominent Palestinians are not ashamed to denounce Jews or Israelis as “Satan,” and neither are supposedly progressive “pro-Palestinian” activists.

One of the most recent examples emerged when campaigners for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement at the University of California, Davis, celebrated a student government resolution to divest from Israel by harassing their opponents. Several reports on the incident highlighted the role of Azka Fayyaz, a member of the UC Davis student senate, noting that she had previously “helped display a poster likening Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Hitler.”

Netanyahu=Hitler Satan

A closer look at the poster reveals that Netanyahu’s picture was not only defaced with a Hitler moustache, but also with red horns. The poster thus combines the among self-described “pro-Palestinian” activists popular association of Israel/Zionism with Nazis and the on social media widespread demonization of Netanyahu as #Satanyahu. Other examples of this double demonization include tweets by Mary Hughes-Thompson, the co-founder of the “Free Gaza Movement.”

Netanyahu Nazis Satan

Netanyahu Hitler Satan2

Unsurprisingly, the #Satanyahu hashtag is often used with disturbing imagery, as in the case of self-described “progressive” “liberal” Twitter user bennydiego:

Netanyahu Satanyahu1

“Satanyahu” is also a term that easily overcomes language barriers, as illustrated in the screenshots below: the first is from a German language blog that denounces “Satanyahu” as “the butcher of Gaza”;  the other two examples are from a popular Spanish language Twitter user (almost 100,000 followers) whose tweets are supposedly meant as “parody”, but are quite obviously very serious when it comes to Jew-hatred and conspiracy theories.

Netanyahu Satanyahu German

Netanyahu Satanyahu Spanish

Netanyahu Satanyahu Spanish2

While leading activists like Ali Abunimah are generally prudent enough to avoid openly anti-Semitic slurs, the disturbing material that can be found in tweets that use “Satanyahu” is a direct reflection of the relentless anti-Israel incitement put out in the service of the Palestinian “cause.”

The “Satanyahu” image of “the butcher of Gaza” pictured above is the visual expression of claims that Israel ‘harvests’ the ‘souls’ of Gaza’s children and other frequent denunciations of Israel as ‘child murderer’ that litter Abunimah’s tweets and blog posts. Consider just the following examples from a recent attack by Abunimah on Eyal Naor, Israel’s Deputy Consul General to the Pacific Northwest.

AA child murder etc

In the thread that followed, Abunimah repeated his slurs, claiming that “trolling people on Twitter in defense of child murder and land theft” was Naor’s job and that “the truth about your racist, land-thieving, child-murdering apartheid entity is indeed hateful.”

Abunimah has repeatedly attacked Avi Mayer, Director of New Media at The Jewish Agency, in similar terms, denouncing him as a “[d]isgusting hasabarist” who was “feverishly trying to justify child murder” and was himself an “American terrorist and child-murder accomplice” who had “abandoned his homeland & joined foreign terrorist ‘IDF’.”

It almost goes without saying that Abunimah also uses his blog at the Electronic Intifada to spread the libel that Israel is guilty of “‘three genocidal wars’ on Gaza since 2008.”

While Abunimah himself may not use the popular “Satanyahu”-meme, the content he promotes on social media is clearly reflected in the disturbing material found in posts that do use the 21st-century version of the centuries-old demonization of Jews as associated with satanic evil.