so if people didn't hear what happened in calgary, essentially:
yes, that is a nazi salute. yes, that is the leader of Iran.
what is not visible in this photo is the pro-palestine protestors he was standing with. in the videos that circulated, you can see a blonde woman in a keffiyeh walk up to him, say something, and then walk away. there are people with keffiyehs and pro-palestine signs all around him.
they are the people who concern me the most. they claim to be pro palestine, pro justice and peace and equality. a man, standing in their protest, did a nazi salute, and none of them stopped him.
i'm a jew and the descendant of holocaust survivors and victims. if someone did a nazi salute in my vicinity and it was safe to do so, i would go bat shit on them.
so why did no one stop him?
i feel like is is emblematic of how antisemitism spreads among pro-palestine leftists. they don't set out to be antisemitic. they don't want to be antisemitic because its wrong to be prejudiced. but the antisemitism begins to slip through the cracks. they usually don't know enough about jewish people, jewish history, or antisemitism in general to counter it. the effect is slow, but damning. eventually these antisemitic symbols lose their meaning, become less important. so even in the face of something this overt, people don't stop it.
all i can say is that its truly disgusting that people turned the very real, longstanding oppression of palestinians by the israeli state into an excuse to spread violent, hateful, and harmful rhetoric at the expense of jewish people around the world.
and i would also like to say: my grandmother grew up in communist poland, raised by a holocaust survivor mother who had lost her own mother and sisters, likely to the nazi death squads east of Poland, the Einsatzgruppen, as they were trying to flee. Her father may have never met her, having died in the polish people's army around the same time she was born. all her life she wanted to come to canada, because it was safe and bountiful. she brought her family here, and i've always felt lucky for it. now we have people throwing up nazi salutes in our streets to celebrate the attempted bombing of our family members.
antisemitism is a plague.
