Masks off

Last Wednesday evening, a young man toting a keffiyeh and unfathomable hate set out to hunt and murder those who had committed his ultimate crime: being Jews. After choosing a couple to point-blank execute, he eventually erupted with an unmasked face into the unmistakable classic phrase that we’ve all too regrettably come to know and wince at hearing: “Free, free Palestine!”

I won’t include the murderer’s name here, as his couldn’t matter less. He is simply one of thousands in this country and millions worldwide who share the same programming of this bigotry. But what this particular man did this particular week is to finally and unequivocally advertise for exactly what this movement stands.

From the beginning, the entire premise of the “Free Palestine” movement has survived on masking the hate in which it is rooted. Unlike the far right’s Jew hate, which is proclaimed loudly and proudly, this tactic inherent to the left relies on concealment of both reality and agenda to successfully manipulate its audience while still maintaining a surface label of progressivism. This is what makes it that much more sinister in its mission: that at its core, the movement is fundamentally based on sanitizing the very antisemitism that it promotes. It is the ultimate gaslighting of past and present to undermine the future, not just to Jews, but to its entire global audience.

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Through this movement, antisemitism is maliciously repackaged as anti-Zionism with a bilateral approach to the ultimate goal of dehumanization: to weaken and ostracize Jews through invalidation, and to popularize our degradation in greater society.

It is fundamentally an objective to sever Jews from Israel and Judaism from Zionism, and therefore sever, erase and rewrite our own narrative — making us homeless once again in not only land but society and history, and taking away our safety and security in the antisemitic world around us.

But this severance doesn’t only debilitate Jews. The recast makes its brand of bigotry more marketable, actual violence more palatable and the overall goal of our dehumanization absolutely acceptable.

Crimes of others against Jews are projected back onto us, and we are also blamed for resisting and fighting back against others’ attempts at our extermination. And in this distortion, because we are not allowed to acknowledge the hate occurring against us, we are not allowed to claim our own suffering.

Of course, when the theoretical goal of a movement is Jewish erasure, it is inevitable that it will eventually culminate in literal erasure of Jewish life.

This sadistic reality couldn’t have been exposed better than by last week’s murders. Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim weren’t murdered for their job titles or citizenship. This zealot didn’t ask to see passports or Ancestry.com results. And he most certainly didn’t bother to clarify whether or not they were safely anti-Zionist.

They were executed for the very reason this movement desperately tries to hide and spin as something else: solely on the assumption of being Jewish, and therefore, of being the ultimate criminals to humanity.

This finally ripped the mask off of a movement we already knew was a manipulative farce and succeeded in holding an uncomfortable mirror to the masses who insisted that context was required within Jew hatred. This barbaric culmination, indefensible on every level, has revealed both the foundation and endgame of everything upon which “Free Palestine” is built and therefore can never be acknowledged nor seen: the eternal truth that no matter the amount of propagandic perfuming, anti-Zionism is always rotting antisemitism.

Now, true to their revisionist strategy, the sociopathic clean-up crew must try to sanitize this undeniable crime and eliminate its antisemitic cornerstone in order to preserve their veneer. While the extent of this vicious savagery has been more than the human mind can come to terms with, the following grotesque sterilization of such surreal brutality continues to rival the original atrocity itself.

Although not as blatant as the narcissistic tantrums of protesters, much of the libelously complicit media continues to aid in harmful whitewashing by referring to the murdered couple as simply “Israeli embassy employees.” And while not inaccurate, that deliberately sidesteps the main issue and neatly excises the heart of the crime, as this terrorist did not know whether these individuals were Israeli nor embassy employees … he just thought that he was targeting Jews.

Another act of sanitization occurred as soon as the Free Palestine clan discovered that the slain man actually identified as a Christian. Believing that they now have their gotcha moment, they gleefully argue that the murderer obviously couldn’t only have been targeting Jews. Obviously this is pathetically ridiculous, as the man was still ethnically Jewish and looked as much. However, none of that matters, as the murderer was assuming that Jews would be coming out of a Jewish event.

Since shallow denial won’t land with anyone maintaining any basic level of awareness, we next have the timeless equivalency argument inherent to this movement. As usual, it is again argued that while unfortunate, these two deaths are really nothing compared to all of the thousands of daily deaths in the ongoing “genocide” in Gaza. Lest we forget, of course, that in this disingenuous cult, it is essential to equate undesirable casualties with desired executions in order to keep their bigoted fantasy afloat.

But, in the end, when there is nothing left to deny and excuse, it’s time to turn to the believer’s “resistance is justified” mantra. And so we are left with the dregs of those individuals who may not deny the actual crime, but instead deny its evil, clinging to the vile narrative that it was not only necessary, but venerated.

This is truly the sociopathic finale, completely digging in to human degeneracy. It is jaw- dropping and breathtaking to witness this foul circus take place, especially in light of the increasingly sickening details that emerge.

Saying, “Who cares? They clearly had it coming,” as he gunned down two innocent people in their backs.

“The murderer’s actions simply could not be helped,” while he unloaded his weapon into a still breathing woman.

“He did it for the good of Gaza,” as he reloaded in order to stalk and execute someone who did more for Gazan lives than he ever would, as she desperately crawled away for her own.

This last stage is not simply the only possible result, but the desired outcome of a malevolent virus intended to erase humanity — not just through active and targeted dehumanization of Jews, but slow and passive numbing to extinction of society’s human impulses, ability to feel empathy and vestiges of morality as a whole.

And in this, we have the true face of “Free Palestine” that has been purposefully masked for so long.

A collapse of any synthetic fantasy for coexistence, as it is essential to eliminate any who truly seek to end the conflict and hate that the movement is compelled to perpetuate.

A vacuum of all humanitarianism they seek to project, as all finite lives are expendable to preserve an infinite ideology.

The ugliest exposure of every insidious lie that they ever attempted to mask.

Masks off.

The facade has slipped more than was allowed, and the world got to see the face of “Free Palestine” that cannot be unseen. Though the cover will be just as quickly replaced and the narrative industrially cleansed to continue its pathogenic propaganda, it may be that the Free Palestine movement, determined to free the world of Jewish truth, has ironically begun to free itself from its own mask of deceit behind which it has hidden for so long. PJC

Sarah Kendis is a musician living in Pittsburgh.