09 May 2025 Antisemitism Does Not Sanctify Morality. It Exploits It.
If the anti-Israeli outrage focuses on Gazan suffering during the war, why did the global wave of antisemitism erupt even before Israel attacked Gaza? With a low-level anti-Semite as our case study – let’s try to understand this.
Here’s a real event from this week: A Jew arrived at a hotel, and at check-in, was required to sign a statement that he is not a mass murderer or a rapist of refugees. In his response to inquiring media, the manager denied any connection to antisemitism: “For us, war is something distant; we’ve never met people who have killed. This is for our security,” he naively reassured. Only when that tourist gave the hotel a low rating on social media did the manager emerge with a pitchfork and a handful of advice, writing: “Stop the genocide and apartheid, follow international law, free Palestine!” There it is – the anti-Semite out of the bag.
Thousands of similar incidents occur worldwide every week, and this particular one takes place, not for the first time, in Kyoto, Japan. What does the Land of the Rising Sun, a country typically known for its hospitality, have to do with this antisemitic darkness?
It’s actually quite cute, this Japanese man who “never met a person who killed.” Not the Japanese who allied with Nazis and Fascists to destroy the world and was the last to surrender. Or the one who invaded China on a barbaric killing spree in which about 20 million Chinese civilians were murdered. Or the one who kidnapped hundreds of thousands of Korean women and girls from their homes and turned them into sex slaves sent to be raped by Japanese soldiers. Or the one who persecuted the ethnic Ainu minority for hundreds of years. That was his grandfather. He’s different. Three days with two bombs and one God turned him from cruel and violent to cute and pacifistic, a producer of home appliances who only fights natural disasters.
But false propaganda travels light, and neither the Yellow Sea nor the Gobi Desert will block its flight. “Genocide,” “apartheid,” “international law,” “free Palestine” – the Japanese man fires four falsehoods sent from the West in furious anger, and these are just the small ones. Above them, draped in royal splendor, stands the biggest lie of all: that antisemitism represents moral taste and conscience, that it safeguards the contours of global humanity, that it is caused by Israel, and that appeasement on our part will be met with appeasement toward us. Let’s peel back the layers of this deception.
The October 7th massacre ignited the imagination of Israel’s haters, and fires of rebellion were lit simultaneously around the world. In the two days following the massacre, and this is just a sample list: an Egyptian policeman shot and killed Israeli tourists, Jewish homes in Germany were marked with Stars of David, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at a Berlin synagogue, riots began on US campuses under the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” and in Sydney, New York, and London, antisemitic marches began that turned into violent riots. As mentioned, Israel was still on the defensive then, focused on collecting its dead, and the only genocide was in Beeri and Nir Oz.
Only when Israel responded with force and changed the balance of power in Gaza, and even more so after neutralizing Hezbollah, did the messianic ecstasy of killing Jews give way to “moral” calls for ceasefire and against human suffering. And when Israel subdued Hamas’s attack capabilities, the hate marches in world capitals subsided almost entirely. This proves: the wave of antisemitism did not arise because of Israel’s cruelty, but because of what was perceived as its weakness and as an opportunity to embark on a campaign of murder and rape against Jews. It was precisely Israel’s military superiority that calmed antisemitic spirits and dispersed the rioters back to their routine lives.
Let’s return to Japan, to Kyoto, and to the hotel gatekeeper who imagines himself as the gatekeeper of the world. He, who enjoys secure borders and abundant sushi – he’s not really the issue. What does he understand? He’s just an antisemite on duty who samples the lie and wears it proudly. He wanted to “protect” his guests? Asking at the entrance if there are weapons – that might be protection.Identifying a random Jew and forcing him to declare he’s not a war criminal – that’s an attempt to humiliate, to be condescending, and to discriminate. That’s being antisemitic in the spirit of Nuremberg, under a false moral mask and a brave samurai costume who, through a check-in signature, will thwart the next genocide. But if this works for some Western world leaders, why complain about a small hotelier from Kyoto who just wanted to protect himself from a Jew, and free Palestine?
By: Anat Vidor, WIZO President
