JH1.0 – The Antisemitism Virus

Over the last couple of years, and especially since 7 October 2023, people have tried to explain the explosion of antisemitism across the Western world in political, sociological and psychological terms. Some have blamed activist movements. Some have pointed to foreign funding, universities, legacy media, social media, or the wider collapse of moral confidence in the West. I’ve even made some of those arguments myself.

But lately I’ve begun to wonder whether we’ve been looking at this the wrong way and whether extreme antisemitism is better understood not simply as a political opinion or social trend, but as something more like a virus, an infection, or even an addiction? No, it doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories – but it shares enough of the features of all of them to make the comparison useful.

It spreads. It flares up. It clusters. It produces recognisable symptoms. And once it takes hold, it can be very hard to dislodge.

The root cause of this ‘virus’ is not complicated. Strip away the slogans, the jargon, the moral posturing and the disclaimers, and what sits underneath is the same thing that has always sat underneath antisemitism: hatred of Jews. Everything else – the symptoms – come later.

And those symptoms aren’t hard to spot. At the mild end they appear as coded language, selective outrage, lazy slogans and the ritual insistence that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. At the more advanced end, they become much uglier: an inability to tolerate dissent, a compulsive need to justify the unjustifiable, a dependence on conspiracy theories, and a complete refusal to test those theories against reality.

In the most extreme cases, it looks like something close to public derangement. Screaming. Hissing. Contorted faces. Profanity. Verbal abuse. Intimidation. Sometimes violence.

If you want to watch these symptoms play out in real time, social media is often the cleanest laboratory. Post something calmly pro-Israel and watch what happens. Within minutes the infected will arrive. Not to reason. Not to discuss. Not to persuade. But to spit venom and to spew profanity. And not just bad language. Sustained, obscene, degrading profanity aimed at the person rather than the point in a tirade of filth-laced abuse hurled with a level of fury wildly out of proportion to the discussion.

Your comment threads will quickly be full of people who cannot make a coherent argument without reaching for verbal violence. Private messages dripping with such vile obscenity that you realise very quickly you are not dealing with a rational mind engaged in disagreement. You are dealing with someone in the grip of something they can no longer control.

This is how we know that we are dealing with more than a difference of view. People who simply disagree, may argue – they may even get heated – but they remain recognisably rational. They listen. They engage. They’re capable of conceding a point and can be persuaded by evidence. People infected with the Antisemitism Virus cannot. Their position is not sustained by reason. It is sustained by hatred and protected by fantasy.

This is why conspiracy theories are so central to the condition. They are not the cause. They are the alibi. Like an alcoholic ‘bargaining’ with themselves to justify their next drink they use the excuse that they are doing something ‘noble’ to justify their hatred of Jews. And so we get the same deluded litany of slogans over and over again: genocide, occupation, Zionazism, false flag operation, apartheid, colonialism, secret control. The terms change slightly. The tune never does. And no matter how many times these claims are examined, disproved, dismantled or exposed, they cling to them with religious devotion because, without them, the real condition would be exposed.

Like any virus, this one flares up under certain conditions. Highly publicised events involving Israel will do it. Mainstream media coverage will do it. A pro-Israel post will do it. Put enough infected people together, online or in the street, and the symptoms amplify. The rage intensifies. The slogans harden. The delusions deepen. And since 7 October 2023, it has never gone back into remission.

So here’s the Clinical prognosis: Antisemitism Virus

Primary condition: hatred of Jews.
Secondary symptoms: emotional volatility and unrestrained rage, profane personal abuse, conspiratorial thinking, repetitive slogans, inability to process contrary evidence, fixation with Israel out of all proportion to any stated principle.
Common progression: coded hostility -> obsessive fixation -> verbal aggression -> dehumanisation -> intimidation or violence.
Prognosis without intervention: eventual global infection with only limited immunity.

So what is this condition really? A virus? An infection? An addiction? While it exhibits features of each of these but can’t be explained by any one of them because is darker and more primeval than all of them.

In another age, people might have called it demonic possession. In our age, we prefer safer language. We call it Activism. Progressivism. But when a condition produces irrational hatred, compulsive lying, moral inversion, ecstatic rage and an almost supernatural resistance to truth, sooner or later honesty demands that we call it what it is. It is evil.

If you want to understand more about where that evil comes from, why it keeps resurfacing, and why hatred of Jews remains one of the most enduring and revealing signs of spiritual darkness in human history, check out my new book at www.prophecyshock.com