Last week I published an article noting that although technology industrialist Elon Musk probably ranks as the most powerful and influential individual in the Western world, he recently humbled himself, deeply apologizing for some of his casual criticism of Jewish activities and pledging to mend his ways.
Traveling to Israel, he met with that country’s president and posed for photo-ops with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, promising to combat “antisemitism” on his Twitter platform. A few weeks later he undertook a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, making even stronger commitments to Jewish leaders, denying that he harbored any antisemitism in his own heart, and publicly declaring that he regarded himself as “aspirationally Jewish.”
These remarkable events reminded me of that famous incident of the Middle Ages in which Emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire had “gone to Canossa” and prostrated himself before Pope Gregory VII, seeking forgiveness for his challenge to the supreme authority of the Catholic Church:
Elon Musk Goes to Canossa Ron Unz • The Unz Review • February 12, 2024 • 5,400 Words
Musk was only the latest and most extreme example of the many wealthy and powerful Gentiles who have publicly bent their knees in submission to Jewish power. Even if totally spurious, accusations of “antisemitism” have often proven fatal to the careers of even the highest-ranking individuals, and shortly before Musk’s submission, two presidents of Ivy League universities were politically brow-beaten and then forced to resign over their unwillingness to prohibit pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses, a sudden purge that was absolutely unprecedented in the history of American academia.
This is certainly an odd situation, warranting careful analysis and explanation. The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti- Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.
But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro- Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands.
These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require.
It is rather surprising for the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world to be loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.
I think that part of the answer to this puzzle may be found in a famous literary work from a couple of generations ago. In 1962 British writer Anthony Burgess published his dystopian black comedy novel A Clockwork Orange, which was soon made into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name directed by Stanley Kubrick. The protagonist was Alex, a violent young hoodlum, and according to the plot government operatives subjected the miscreant to aversion therapy, severely conditioning him to avoid certain thoughts and behaviors lest he become physically ill.
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