On October 7, 2024 – precisely one 12 months into the United States-backed Israeli genocide within the Gaza Strip that has now killed greater than 53,000 Palestinians – the Washington-based Heritage Basis unleashed a coverage paper titled Undertaking Esther: A Nationwide Technique to Fight Antisemitism.
The conservative assume tank is similar drive behind Project 2025, a blueprint for consolidating government energy within the US and forging the all-time right-wing dystopia. The “nationwide technique” proposed by Project Esther – which is known as for the biblical queen credited with saving the Jews from extermination in historical Persia – principally consists of criminalising opposition to Israel’s present genocide and exterminating freedoms of speech and thought together with a complete lot of different rights.
The primary “key takeaway” listed within the report is that “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian motion’ is a part of a worldwide Hamas Assist Community (HSN)”. By no means thoughts that, in actuality, there isn’t any such factor as a “world Hamas Assist Community” – simply as there isn’t any such factor because the HSN’s alleged “affiliated Hamas Assist Organizations (HSOs)” that the Heritage Basis has additionally taken the freedom of inventing. Amongst these alleged HSOs are outstanding American Jewish organisations corresponding to Jewish Voice for Peace.
The second “key takeaway” of the report is that the so-called HSN is “supported by activists and funders devoted to destroying capitalism and democracy” – a curious alternative of phrases, little doubt, from a assume tank that’s doing its finest to eradicate what stays of US democracy as we converse.
The phrase “capitalism and democracy” seems no fewer than 5 instances within the report – though it’s not fairly clear what Hamas has to do with capitalism apart from governing a Palestinian territory that has for greater than 19 months been on the receiving finish of billions upon billions of {dollars}’ value of US-funded navy destruction. From the attitude of the arms trade, at the least, genocide is capitalism at its finest.
And as per the genocidal logic of Undertaking Esther, protesting the mass slaughter of Palestinians is basically anti-Semitic – therefore the necessity to pursue the prescribed nationwide technique of “extirpating the affect of the HSN from our society”.
The October publication of the Heritage Basis report occurred on the watch of President Joe Biden’s administration, which the assume tank recognized as “decidedly anti-Israel” regardless of its complete and utter complicity within the genocide in Gaza. The report included many recommendations on the best way to “fight the scourge of antisemitism in america … when a keen Administration occupies the White Home”.
Quick ahead seven months, and a latest New York Instances analysis signifies that, since US President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, “the White Home and different Republicans have known as for actions that seem to reflect greater than half of Undertaking Esther’s proposals”. These vary from threats to withhold gargantuan sums of federal funding for US universities that refuse to silence resistance to systematic slaughter to efforts to deport legal US residents for the crime of expressing solidarity with Palestinians.
Along with allegedly infiltrating US academia and disseminating “anti-Zionist narratives throughout universities, excessive colleges, and elementary colleges, typically underneath the umbrella or throughout the rubric of range, fairness, and inclusion (DEI) and related Marxist ideology”, Undertaking Esther’s authors contend that “the HSN and HSOs have mastered the usage of America’s liberal media surroundings [and] are fast to realize consideration for any and each demonstration, regardless of how massive or small, from each community throughout the nation”.
And that’s not all: “The HSN and HSOs have made prolific and unchecked use of social media platforms, corresponding to TikTok, throughout the complete digital ecosystem to spout antisemitic propaganda.”
To all of those ends, the coverage paper affords a complete host of suggestions for the best way to stamp out the home pro-Palestine motion in addition to humane and moral attitudes generally: from purging “HSO-supporting college and workers” from instructional establishments to creating “potential demonstrators worry affiliation with HSOs” to banning “antisemitic content material” from social media – which in Heritage Basis jargon after all means anti-genocidal content material.
And but despite all of Undertaking Esther’s ruckus over the ostensibly existential anti-Semitic risk posed by the HSN, it seems that “no main Jewish organizations seem to have participated in drafting the plan, or publicly endorsed it since its launch”, in line with a December article within the Ahead.
A information outlet catering to American Jews, the Ahead reported that the Heritage Basis had “struggled to draw Jewish supporters for its antisemitism plan, which seems to have been assembled by a number of evangelical Christian teams”, and that Undertaking Esther “focuses completely on left-wing critics of Israel, ignoring the antisemitism issues from white supremacists and different far-right teams”.
In the meantime, in an open letter printed this month, influential American Jewish leaders warned {that a} “vary of actors” within the US are presently “utilizing a purported concern about Jewish security as a cudgel to weaken greater training, due course of, checks and balances, freedom of speech and the press”.
Now, if the Trump administration appears to be taking Undertaking Esther and operating with it, it’s extra out of concern for propagating a white Christian nationalist agenda that utilises Zionism and anti-Semitism prices to its personal extremist ends. And this, sadly, is just the start of a much more elaborate venture.
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