At first glance, Candace Owens and Clementine Ford would appear to have little in common.
The former is a brash American right-winger best known for offending snowflake students and hanging around with fruitloop rap star Kanye West.
The latter is every Melbourne lefty’s favourite feminist whose gauche man-bashing has them chortling into their macchiatos.
Owens’ fan base is mostly hard-right millennial men in ill-fitting suits who call feminists “feminazis”.
Ford’s followers come from the faux-radical chattering classes who mistake having tattoos for a personality and who probably think anyone who isn’t a feminist is a Nazi.
Chalk and cheese, right?
Not so fast. There’s something that ties these two women together. For all their differences of opinion and style, they have a deep spiritual connection.
It’s this: both have tumbled, headlong, into the cesspit of Israelophobia. Both have become obsessed to an unhinged degree with the world’s only Jewish nation. Both have said things about Israel that cross the line from criticism into blind bigotry.
Both are proof of how frazzled a person’s mind can become when they swim in the poison waters of conspiracy theory.
All eyes are on Owens and her planned speaking tour of Oz in November.
Some want her banned from the country. Jewish groups in particular are not happy that someone who has spouted so much wicked drivel about Israel and the Jews might make waves and money in Australia.
I think Owens should be free to come. I’m against the denial of visas on the basis of the applicant’s ideological beliefs. Let her embarrass herself before the eyes of the good folk of Oz with her motormouth ranting about “those people”. Her own dumb utterances will harm her far more than scrapping her visa.
I understand my Jewish friends’ concerns, of course. Owens’ conversion to the crank cause of Israelophobia has been speedy and shocking.
She once might have been an interesting if overly strident voice on the dissident right. But now she sounds like every other loon who lurks in the grim underbelly of the World Wide Web where the Jews get blamed for everything.
She whispers darkly about a “ring in Hollywood” and “also a ring potentially in DC” who are all doing “horrific things”. I wonder who she means?
She has sneered at “political Jews and “DC Jew[s]” who play the anti-Semitism card “to basically silence people”. Oh those wily Jews with their tyrannical ways.
She says the US is “being held hostage by Israel”. This is a classic example of anti-Semitism dressed up as anti-Zionism. It has the appearance of a political critique but really it’s a modern twist on the medieval belief that Jews control everything. Owens is so deep in the sewer of Jew obsession that she has even whitewashed some of the crimes of the Nazis.
She recently described as “bizarre propaganda” the idea that Josef Mengele conducted experiments on Jewish kids at Auschwitz. No wonder the oldest known survivor of Mengele’s evil butchery – Annetta Able – has added her voice to the chorus calling for Owens to be banned from Australia.
Here’s a dark irony, though: I bet some of the more leftish Aussies who want Owens to be kept out of the country are fans of Ford. Even though her views are also – how should we put this? – iffy.
No, Ford’s blather is not quite as nasty as Owens’. She has not played down Nazi crimes or madly wrung her hands over “political Jews”.
Yet on Israel, on the allegedly unique evil of this one tiny nation, Ford’s views are chillingly similar in both substance and tone to the deranged effusions of Owens.
Indeed, just this week, as people were poring over the nutty things Owens has said, Ford said something that every decent, reasoned person will baulk at.
“I don’t for a second believe that Hamas executed those hostages,” she said in a comment on Instagram. “Israel’s desperation stinks,” she continued.
Think about what’s being said here. Ford is suggesting that the Jewish state is lying when it says six of its citizens were brutally slain by the anti-Semitic army of Hamas.
She is referring to the discovery of the bodies of six Israeli hostages in one of Hamas’s hellish lairs in Rafah.
Israel says they were executed in cold blood by their captors as the Israel Defence Forces approached.
Ford’s unevidenced claim that Israel is lying implies Israel is a uniquely deceitful nation. A nation so mendacious it will spread untruths about the deaths of its own people in order to … what? Cover up the truth that it killed the hostages?
To my mind, this is not criticism – it’s prejudice. It builds on, and potentially inflames, the bourgeois bigotry that views Israel as the most morally twisted of states.
Perhaps Ford thinks the idea that Hamas’s fascists murdered six hostages is “bizarre propaganda”, just as Owens says of the idea that Germany’s fascists experimented on Jews.
News flash for you both: fascists kill Jews. It’s what they do. It’s their favourite thing.
Ford’s comments benefit Hamas. She’s essentially absolving Hamas of the crime against humanity it committed in that tunnel in Rafah.
Two of the hostages executed by Hamas were women. One of those women was just 24 years old. One is forced to wonder if Ford, when she was an up-and-coming feminist, ever imagined that one day she’d be making excuses for fascist men who put a bullet in the head of a 24-year-old woman for nothing more than the fact that she was a Jew.
Ford is not alone in her sick betrayal of the women of Israel.
Across the Western world, feminists who for years depicted everything from a drunken come-on to a wolf whistle in the street as patriarchy in action have said nothing about Hamas’s rape and slaughter of Israeli women. Shame, shame, shame.
The way Ford has spoken about Israel in recent months grimly echoes the dark mutterings of Owens.
She has described Zionists as “monsters”, “sadists” and “ghouls”. When it comes to the “Zionist ideology”, she says, there are “not enough babies in the world who could be bombed” to satisfy it.
To some of us, this sounds like the medieval conviction that Jews love killing children.
Indeed, Ford says Palestinian children have been “ritually maimed” by Israel. Ritually? As in ritual sacrifice? This is seriously disturbed stuff.
And who can forget her role in the doxxing of 600 Jewish creatives? She helped to disseminate the leaked personal details of Jewish discussants in a WhatsApp group. As a result, some of the Jews received death threats. One was forced into hiding.
I’m not sure even Owens has done anything as despicable as that – to not only feverishly obsess over the Jewish nation but also to publish a list of the Jews who support that nation.
The descent of both Owens and Ford into the toilet of Israelophobia tells a depressing story about our times.
It confirms that on both the right and the left there are virulent strains of conspiratorial thinking and barely concealed bigotry.
The crank right and conceited left have merged into a kind of pincer movement, with Israel and Jews as its targets.
To counter these swirling hatreds, we need the decent folk of the right and the left to come together and say: “No. Never again.”
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