Maureen alerted me to Sian Cain’s Guardian article about Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth moved to Grasmere in 1799, living in Dove Cottage until 1808. Dorothy’s journals document their quiet existence: daily walks, afternoons with mutton pies, William’s headaches. The siblings composed poems and letters as they walked through miles of hills and thickets; on occasion visited by friends like Walter Scott, Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In a 1797 letter, Coleridge described Dorothy’s taste as “a perfect electrometer — it bends, protrudes, and draws in at subtlest beauties and most recondite faults.” Consider her description of daffodils near Gowbarrow Park:

I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew about the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.

Molly Worthen objects to the substitution of “I feel” for “I think.” She’s not just picking a nit.

The imperfect data that linguists have collected indicates that “I feel like” became more common toward the end of the last century. In North American English, it seems to have become a synonym for “I think” or “I believe” only in the last decade or so. Languages constantly evolve, and curmudgeons like me are always taking umbrage at some new idiom. But make no mistake: “I feel like” is not a harmless tic. George Orwell put the point simply: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument — a muddle that has political consequences.

Damn right. “I think” is something you can argue with. “I feel” not so much.

Yet here is the paradox: “I feel like” masquerades as a humble conversational offering, an invitation to share your feelings, too — but the phrase is an absolutist trump card. It halts argument in its tracks.

When people cite feelings or personal experience, “you can’t really refute them with logic, because that would imply they didn’t have that experience, or their experience is less valid,” Ms. Chai told me.

And for another reason, which is that they have already admitted it’s “just” a feeling, and only a bully would try to argue with a feeling. As Worthen says, it seems humble but actually blocks disagreement. Neat trick.

The problem here is not the open discussion of emotions. Ancient philosophers ranging from Confucius to the Greek Stoics acknowledged the role that emotion plays in human reasoning. In the 1990s, after many years of studying patients with brain damage, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio put forward a hypothesis that is now widely accepted: In a healthy brain, emotional input is a crucial part of reasoning and decision making.

So when I called Dr. Damasio, who teaches at the University of Southern California, I worried that he might strike down my humanistic observations with unflinching scientific objectivity. He didn’t — he hates the phrase as much as I do. He called it “bad usage” and “a sign of laziness in thinking,” not because it acknowledges the presence of emotion, but because it is an imprecise hedge that conceals more than it reveals. “It doesn’t follow that because you have doubts, or because something is tempered by a gut feeling, that you cannot make those distinctions as clear as possible,” he said.

But we feel as if it follows, so…loop loop loop.

This is what is most disturbing about “I feel like”: The phrase cripples our range of expression and flattens the complex role that emotions do play in our reasoning. It turns emotion into a cudgel that smashes the distinction — and even in our relativistic age, there remains a distinction — between evidence out in the world and internal sentiments known only to each of us.

Yes it does, and this (as you’re probably tired of hearing by now) is one of the reasons I’m not convinced by some claims popular with some trans activists – because of the way claims about internal feelings are treated as both sacrosanct and dispositive. Internal sentiments known only to each of us are inherently unreliable and incommunicable (the latter by definition). Internal sentiments known only to each of us are no basis at all for demanding “belief” from other people.

If our students have any hope of solving the problems for which trigger warnings and safe spaces are mere Band-Aids, they must reject this woolly way of speaking their minds. “Cultivating the art of conversation goes a long way toward correcting these things,” Dr. Lasch-Quinn said. “Instead of caricaturing someone who says ‘I feel like,’ we can say, what does it mean to say that instead of ‘I think?’ ”

We can, yes, but we should prepare to get a lot of shit in response. We’re expected to comply, not to think and not to ask.

Jacques Rousseau – who pointed out that story about Ntokozo Qwabe’s gloating triumph over a restaurant server to me – has some inconvenient observations on the reaction to Qwabe’s gloat.

First, what that reaction was:

Sihle Ngobese (SN) visited the restaurant, found the waitress – Ashleigh Shultz (AS) – and gave her the tip that the RMF table could (and should, unless they received terrible service) have given her, were it not for the fact that they objectified this woman as a placeholder for white oppression, despite knowing nothing about her, her politics, or her financial circumstances. (Something they of course should have been aware of is the likelihood that, as a waitress, she and some hypothetical intersectional movement might well find some common ground on the issue of class and privilege.)

…

Roman Cabanac and Jonathan Witt (who host the Renegade Report podcast on CliffCentral) started a Twitter crowdfunding campaign that ended up generating R44 778 in donations for the waitress in question. (Another crowdfunding effort also sprung up, generating an additional R15 000+.) [EDIT: Twitter user @GarethKourie points out that this second campaign has reached $5000, so, more like R70 000, meaning that AS has now been tipped around R115 000.]

Later on, we find out that the waitress has a mother who has cancer. This information was however not available at the time the campaigns started, so should be irrelevant to any analysis of whether the campaigns were appropriate or not – they were not generated to raise money for cancer treatment, but to offset her experience of abuse by RMF, and to demonstrate a moral counterweight to the callousness of NQ and his dinner companions.

I think you can sense where he’s heading – this kind of thing can turn into a version of the lottery, so it’s as well if the goods and bads of it are sorted out. Jacques doesn’t think they are.

Both of those goals could, in my view, have been achieved without creating the impression of a couple of (literally) white knights charging in to protect one of their own against the (literally) dark forces of RMF. And, creating that impression simply lends credence to one of the legitimate concerns of the RMF movement, namely that white South Africans (and people, in general) are far too unaware and unconcerned about the fate of black people compared to the fate of other whites.

And what could do a better job of demonstrating that than a windfall for a white worker stiffed by a black customer?

It’s of course true that it should, in theory, be possible to separate these issues from race, and to simply regard this as an act of generosity. But to think that people will (or even should) do so now in the political landscape that is South Africa is either naive or wilfull denialism. To refuse to countenance any criticism on this topic – as the Renegade Report hosts have done in their Twitter responses – is difficult to read as anything other than a commitment to making a point, rather than being humanitarians, even if the outcome of their commitment is a plus for humanitarianism, on balance.

That seems right to me. I think the point was worth making, but as Jacques says, it could have been made without the winning-the-lottery aspect.

This waitress is relatively undeserving of this gift compared to so many other people. The gesture can’t help but appear to be motivated less by generosity than by a vindictive “sticking to to NQ”, showing how much of a better person “we” (the donors) are.

And, as I said on Twitter, you’ll find that (or at least I find, and I eat out too many times every week) black waitstaff are routinely treated rudely, and (I imagine) tipped less generously than white ones, assuming that the level of expressed respect correlates with the level of financial support offered as tip. My claim is not that “if you can’t help everybody, you should help nobody” or something of that sort. Of course we are forced to pick our causes.

My point is that helping this one is a strike against the “fascist” RMF (as they have been described by at least one of the Renegade Report hosts), masquerading as charity, and that the optics of this case are exceedingly poor, serving to reinforce negative racial stereotypes.

It doesn’t help the argument to assert that some of the donors are black, or that this sort of argument is of the “social justice warrior” variety. The latter is a vacuous slur that completely escapes the force of argument in the sense that even if it’s true (and it is) that some folk concerned with social justice are knee-jerk thoughtless reactionaries, not all of them are. Arguments need to be addressed on their merits, not with cliches.

In short, it’s complicated, and a big windfall for the server isn’t necessarily the best response. It occurs to me to compare Kate Smurthwaite’s response to the nasty people who procured all the tickets to her Goldsmith’s show and then didn’t go, leaving her to perform for seven people – she requested donations to a charity for refugees, which got a windfall of several thousand pounds.

Read the whole post, because it’s excellent.

“Activism” gone wrong.

Cape Town – A controversial “Rhodes Must Fall” activist sparked an intense race row on social media this week after he posted about how he and other patrons at an Observatory restaurant confronted a white waitress.

Ntokozo Qwabe, who late last year made news for driving a campaign to remove a Cecil John Rhodes statue at Oxford University in the UK, said his friends returned a bill to the waitress saying: “WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND.”

She cried.

Wow. Brilliant. Withhold pay from someone serving food in a restaurant – that will teach the colonialists! Those people who serve food in restaurants have had all the power and money for far too long, and it’s about time someone took the struggle to them.

Another source has the Facebook post in which Qwabe boasted about this feat of punching down up.

LOL wow unable to stop smiling because something so black, wonderful & LIT just happened! And of course, the catalyst was a radical non-binary trans black activist – Wandile Dlamini – from the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Because trans activists have BEEN the ultimate blessers of this decolonial struggle!

To cut the long story short, we are out at Obz Cafe with the said activist, and the time for the bill comes. Our waitress is a white woman. I ask the said activist what the going rate for tips/gratuity is in these shores. They look at me very reluctantly and they say ‘give me the slip, I’ll sort that out’. I give them the slip.

They take a pen & slip in a note where the gratuity/tip amount is supposed to be entered. The note reads in bold: “WE WILL GIVE TIP WHEN YOU RETURN THE LAND”. The waitress comes to us with a card machine for the bill to be sorted out. She sees the note & starts shaking. She leaves us & bursts into typical white tears (like why are you crying when all we’ve done is make a kind request? lol!). Anyways, so this white woman goes to her colleagues who are furious. She exits to cry at the back & a white male colleague of hers reluctantly comes out to address us & to annoy us more with his own white tears telling us that he finds our act “racist”.

CNN reports on Vietnamese girls trafficked into China to be rape-married.

The villages along the Vietnamese-Chinese border are a hunting ground for human traffickers. Girls as young as 13 say they are tricked or drugged, then spirited across the porous border by boat, motorbike or car. Young Vietnamese women are valuable commodities in China, where the one-child policy and long-standing preference for sons has heavily skewed the gender ratio.

To put it simply, Chinese men are hungry for brides.

Of course, “valuable commodity” doesn’t mean “to be respected and well treated”; it means “to be paid a high price for.” The money goes to the pimp, and the “bride” enters a life of slavery.

Nguyen was just 16 when a friend’s boyfriend drugged her and smuggled her into China. She tried to resist a forced marriage. For three months, she refused, even though her traffickers beat her, withheld food and threatened to kill her, she says. Finally, she relented. She says her husband was kind to her, but she never stopped missing her family in Vietnam.

“My desire to go home was indescribable,” Nguyen said. “I agreed to marry the man but I could not stay with a stranger without any feelings for him.”

When her mother-in-law realized Lan was never going to warm to the marriage, the family returned her to the traffickers. They got their money back, Nguyen says, after which she was forced into a second marriage.

Heads they win, tails she loses.

The good news is, China is co-operating with Viet Nam in trying to stop the trafficking.

During CNN’s trip to the border, the government called and told us the police had just rescued five girls as they were about to cross the border with a trafficker. We met the girls, who are just 14 years old. They said they were promised $600 to go to work in China by a neighbor from the same village. They didn’t tell their parents they were going. The neighbor is now under arrest.

The Vietnamese police are sometimes able to rescue women even after they have crossed into China, by enlisting the help of Chinese authorities. Nguyen Tuong Long, the head of the government’s social vice prevention department in Lao Cai, says last year they rescued and returned 109 Vietnamese trafficking victims.

“Because of cooperation between the Vietnamese and the Chinese police, we have found and caught trafficking rings,” Nguyen says. “We’ve found women far inside China, at brothels where they’re forced to become sex workers.”

Slaves. Sex slaves, not sex workers. But it’s good about the trafficking rings.

H/t Freemage

Human Rights Watch did a big report in 2007 on Nicaragua’s total ban on abortions, including those to save the woman’s life, and its predictable results.

Nicaragua is one of only three countries in the world to maintain a blanket ban on abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, or life- or health-threatening pregnancies.[1]Such blanket abortion bans are incompatible with international human rights obligations, including obligations on the rights to life, health, and non-discrimination. Their imposition can, and most often does, have serious effects on the lives and health of women and girls.

Nicaragua’s blanket ban on abortion was initially enacted in November 2006 and reaffirmed in September 2007, and includes a ban on previously-legal therapeutic abortions.[2]It allows for prison sentences for doctors who carry out abortions under any circumstances-even to save a pregnant woman’s life-and on women who seek abortions, again, regardless of the reason. Although it appears that actual prosecutions are rare, the ban has very real consequences that fall into three main categories:

1. Denial of access to life- or health-saving abortion services;
2. Denial or delay in access to other obstetric emergency care; and
3. A pronounced fear of seeking treatment for obstetric emergencies.

The net result has been avoidable deaths.

It’s hard to think of a more thorough dismissal of women as people than this – a law forbidding hospitals and doctors to save the lives of women if their pregnancies are killing them.

At that point there had been no prosecutions that HRW or its informants knew of, but the fear of prosecution was having a terrible effect all the same.

It is impossible to ascertain how many women the blanket ban has prevented from accessing safe therapeutic abortion services and with what effect. Nicaragua’s Health Ministry officials told Human Rights Watch that they did not have any official documentation of the effects of the blanket ban and no plans for gathering such documentation.[18]

A medical doctor at a large public hospital in Managua, however, testified to one case:

Here [at this hospital] we have had women who have died. For example, [name withheld] came here and had an ultrasound. It was clear that she needed a therapeutic abortion. No one wanted to carry out the abortion because the fetus was still alive. The woman was here two days without treatment until she expulsed the fetus on her own. And by then she was already in septic shock and died five days later. That was in March 2007.[19]

Her life doesn’t matter, apparently.

Valerie Tarico has an extraordinary essay about what’s really behind the idea of “fetal personhood.”

The notion that life begins at conception is a variation on a very ancient cultural theme: penis worship.

I’m slow sometimes, but after years of writing about abortion rights it finally occurred to me that “life begins at conception” is one more version of a multi-millennial infatuation with the penis as symbol and proof that manliness is next to godliness.

Because it’s magic.

What creates the wonder of a new person? Forget about the maturation of germ cells, and the nine-month labor of a woman’s body, and painstaking parental nurture. It’s a sperm, a penile projectile shot forth by the ultimate organ of demi-divinity. Sperm penetrates egg and voila! A person! A new soul! All the extraordinary and unique value we accord to human life is created instantaneously.

Ahahahahaha – so it is. One touch of the penis and presto, a miraculous human being is formed.

They also insisted that a man’s magic wand could permanently transform a female from one kind of being to another, from a prized “virgin” into a worthless “whore.” In medieval Catholicism’s recipe for sexual hang-ups, the prior touch of a penis (or lack thereof) became the most defining aspect of a woman’s identity, economic value, and moral virtue. Penis penetrates female and voila! No longer a whole person! The same magic wand that made her valuable could also do the reverse.

Fundamentalists who are anchored to the Iron Age by sacred texts and patriarchal traditions still hold to this archaic view, though they may use updated terms like “licked lollypop” or “chewed gum”—and some do offer second chances through “born-again virginity.”

But at least in the West, millennials finally are catching on to how ridiculous the whole virginity thing is. As one Facebook meme put it recently, “I don’t believe in virginity. Why? Because nobody’s penis is important enough to change any part of my identity.”

Now that is the way to talk about identity.

Men read hate-tweets sent to two women sports reporters.

[W]ith its #MoreThanMean campaign, the Just Not Sports podcast is trying to make people understand that online harassment is very real, and very harmful.

This powerful PSA video features male volunteers reading hateful tweets (which they didn’t write) that have been sent to two Chicago-area women sports personalities, Sarah Spain, a columnist and radio host with ESPN, and Julie DiCaro, an update anchor for WSCR-AM 670 The Score and writer at the Cauldron.

The women had seen all the tweets before, but the men — who thought they were being recruited for a much more light-hearted, Jimmy Kimmel-style “mean Tweets” segment — had no idea what was coming.

Do they find it painful? They seem to…or maybe they just find it awkward, with the women sitting right in front of them.

The men’s faces fall, horrified and embarrassed. They stumble and struggle to continue. Most of them do, eventually, reluctantly, without looking the women in the eyes, because this is what they agreed to do for the video. A few of them just have to stop.

They apologize — for themselves, to their mothers, on behalf of the entire male gender.

The video concludes with the caption: “We wouldn’t say it to their faces. So let’s not type it.”

Online harassment of journalists and commentators falls hardest on women and people of color. It’s especially true for those who write about controversial topics.

But sometimes all a woman has to do to invite torrents of online hate is to remind people that she’s a woman — either by writing specifically about “women’s issues,” or by writing about topics, like sports, that some people don’t seem to think women should have opinions about.

The video is tough to watch. Which makes it a little easier to imagine how tough it is to read these kinds of messages every day.

Well if we don’t like it we can just stop being journalists and commentators, bloggers and essayists, writers and critics.

Alabama fanatics hope to get Alabama to emulate El Salvador in banning all abortions without exception, meaning even the ones that would save a woman’s life. Sorry, bitch, your life isn’t worth saving.

A co-sponsor of the bill, State Representative Jack W. Williams of Mobile, says the Personhood Amendment would allow Alabama voters to answer the question of whether or not life begins at conception through a referendum vote on the November ballot. If enacted as is, Williams says the bill will totally ban abortion at any time during pregnancy with no exceptions.

Ahem. Life is not the same thing as personhood.. The vast majority of life is not a person. No one disputes that fetuses are alive.

If the bill becomes law the Republican lawmaker from Mobile says Alabama would be the first state in the nation to enact a total ban on abortions.

“Oh I feel very personally. I’m all against abortion completely. I’ve lost a daughter myself I know how precious life is. I just don’t see how anyone can at four months abort a child and throw it in the garbage can when we’ll spend $1 million on a 4 1/2 month old preemie,” said Williams.

Well as long as he feels it personally, there’s no more to be said. Some guy’s feeling is all that counts.

Nick Cohen said yesterday “I told you so you fucking fools.” He did, yes. Today his article on identity politics appeared at Standpoint.

Everyone everywhere apologises to everyone else. Everyone demands the banning of everyone else. Societies where citizens bite their tongues and retract honestly-meant statements are neither particularly free nor particularly happy. And I don’t think our one will last.

Well racism can be honestly-meant, as can antisemitism. Some statements merit retraction. But I take Nick to mean that there’s a limit you fucking fools, and I agree with him there.

He points out the (absurd) absence of class in most identity check lists, and that an ex-miner with black lung disease is not obviously more privileged than say Sheryl Sandberg or Robert Mugabe. And then there’s the issue of specifics.

There is a distinction between believing in the value of anti-racism, say, or women’s rights, and defending a marginalised group regardless of what those who purport to speak for it say or do. Bertrand Russell’s “fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed” floors you if you cannot grasp it.

This is a real issue. I think much of the friction at the corner between feminism and trans activism is because of the tragic accident that a lot of Twitter trans activists happen to be assholes. It’s not because they’re trans, it’s because they’re assholes. You can be a disabled black lesbian and be a narcissistic bullying shit. In a way it’s a form of disprivilege to be a shit, but it’s also an oppression of all of us who encounter the shit.

What if the oppressed are not virtuous? What if a favoured group is the victim of racism one moment but sexist and homophobic the next? What if the rainbow coalition isn’t a coalition at all, but a collection of people of wildly different interests? What happens, in other words, when the colours of the rainbow clash?

The refusal to stick to principle and be against racism whoever the racist is, or be in favour of women’s rights regardless of whether the woman is white, brown or black, accounts for the hysteria on today’s middle-class Left. Feminists are banned as “whorephobes” or “transphobes”. Liberal Asians are derided as “house Muslims” and “native informants”. Jews are baited as “Zios”. Gay men are told they no longer suffer from the right kind of oppression.

Lesbians are hassled about the “cotton ceiling.”

There was a channel 4 program recently that discussed the popularity of reactionary views on women, gay rights, free speech and secularism among British Muslims, and ended with my friend Elham Manea.

This programme would not have been broadcast until recently because of fears of encouraging white racism. It is not an entirely disreputable way to think, even though it contradicts the journalistic duty to tell it like it is. I have good Muslim friends who are thoroughly secular but fear that any discussion of religious fanaticism will just encourage their white enemies.

Against them Channel 4 gave us Elham Manea, a Swiss Yemeni academic who put the case against turning a blind eye better than I ever could. She did not think it politically correct to tolerate cultures where husbands could tell wives, “If you don’t behave in a way that suits me, I will simply get another woman. If you get sick, I will get another woman. If you can’t have children, I’ll get another woman.” Or to allow sharia courts which have a “Taliban” interpretation of Islam to impose their verdicts on British citizens.

It is a sign of how corrupt our culture has become that it thinks it “liberal” to tolerate the oppression that shocks Manea and to denounce her and men and women like her as “Islamophobes”. The day will come when that corruption will sink it. Let us hope it is soon.

The past couple of days may have brought it a little closer.

And speaking of Bradford – let’s also speak of Liverpool. Suzanne Moore is one of many who wrote about the ugly class prejudice in the lies told about the Hillsborough disaster.

Finally, 27 long years later, the cold class contempt that Hillsborough came to signify is laid out for all to see. Those who died did not die because they were “animals” or drinking too much or behaving badly. They were unlawfully killed. Their families did not grieve too much because they were from Liverpool and therefore emotionally incontinent or full of working-class mawkishness; they grieved because they lost their loved ones in absolutely horrific circumstances. Still, to read the details of how these people died tightens my stomach. Of the 96 who died, 37 were teenagers. The reality is that the dead were all sorts of people from different backgrounds. But very quickly they became no longer individuals but part of a mob who somehow deserved this awful fate. As life was squeezed out of them, then too their humanity was taken from them by the police, by politicians and parts of the press.

The lies the police told to cover up the way they botched their job that day was that the people who died were a drunken mob who crashed through a gate without tickets. The reality is that the officer in charge ordered the gate opened and then did nothing to direct traffic to the sides where there was space.

It must be somewhat galling for those in power now to have to accept this ruling, for they do not hide their class contempt either. They have elevated it to actual policy: all schools must be modelled on the schools they went to, but with fewer resources. All hospitals must be run to make a profit. Taxes are for the little people. Those who don’t “get on” have only themselves to blame. An increasing range of theories come into play about why poor people are poor, which is never to do with lack of money but lack of civility. Or perhaps there is something wrong with their actual brains! Imagery of working-class people invariably invokes moral deprivation by showing a tendency to excess.

The Guardian’s 11 minute video is well worth watching.

In the Independent, Ben Judah says that to understand Naz Shah and the things she said you have to understand Bradford.

Because Naz Shah, and everything she said, is normal politics in Bradford.

Had Britain a writer as dark and politically incorrect as Michel Houellebecq, the French author of the dystopian novel Submission, in which France converts to Islam, he would, without doubt, set his first novel in Bradford. This would be his dystopian plot.

Along comes a by-election. A dark and unknowable force with a Dickensian name – Mister Galloway – descends on the unsuspecting, segregated, depressed Northern town. Suddenly he is everywhere, the white Scotsman, and the large and miserable Muslim population apparently think that by voting for him – a total outsider – they can change the course of conflict in the Middle East.

And yet it’s not a dystopian plot but reality.

George Galloway became Bradford West’s MP in 2012. By the time I started visiting the town in 2015, as a reporter for Jewish magazine Tablet, he had made local politics about Palestine. I contacted all the candidates vying to replace him. Most had photos exhibiting themselves at pro-Palestine rallies. One Labour hopeful responded, rather bizarrely, to my request for an interview with a video of herself speaking at a pro-Palestine rally. Naz Shah herself, whom I contacted over Twitter, stopped responding to me when I explained Tablet was a Jewish publication.

Within months, every local candidate was imitating the man in the fedora. Across town, in the constituency of Bradford East, the Liberal Democrat[ic] MP David Ward was using Twitter to question how long the “apartheid state of Israel” could last, and tweeting that he too would probably “fire a rocket” if he lived in Gaza. Later, he declared himself “#JeSuis #Palestinian” in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks on a kosher supermarket, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Naz Shah didn’t like Galloway, Ben Judah goes on, but he shaped her, as he shaped all other Bradford politicians.

When it comes to anti-Semitic comments, Shah is not even the worst offender. In 2014, former councillor Istiaq Ahmed, who works at the charity Shah chairs, posted on social media “Is Kosher slaughter in the Eternal Jew accurate?” – a link to an anti-Semitic propaganda movie originally commissioned by Goebbels. The YouTube channel that hosted it? ”HitlerMyFuhrer”.

The former Lord Mayor of Bradford Khadim Hussain commented on Facebook that Israel was “no doubt” arming Isis, and shared another Facebook post that complained that the deaths of millions of Africans are not taught in schools but “your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler”. The list goes on and on.

It’s a popular trope that anti-Zionism must not be confused with antisemitism, but by the same token, Jews must not be confused with Zionists. It is very far from the case that the six million Jews Hitler killed were all Zionists.