When You Cannot Invent, Boycott
Harry Liberman
Image created via AI
There is a hollow, cyclical predictability to history’s oldest hatred. When societies stagnate, when ideological movements fracture under the weight of their own creative or moral bankruptcy, they inevitably return to a familiar reflex: boycott the Jews.
It is a coping mechanism for the envious—a desperate attempt to mask intellectual deficits by tearing down the architect of the foundation. Today, we are witnessing the modern orchestration of this ancient malice, wrapped in the glossy packaging of contemporary social justice. But strip away the progressive lexicon, and the core phenomenon remains unchanged:
Jewish inventions enjoy 100% approval; Jewish survival, not so much.
This is the painful, enduring paradox of antisemitism.
Societies enthusiastically adopt the theological, scientific, medical, and technological breakthroughs developed by Jewish minds while simultaneously marginalizing, boycotting, or seeking to eradicate the Jewish people themselves. Comparing the antisemitism of the Nazi uprising in the 1920s and 30s to the global surge in anti-Jewish hatred post-October 7, 2023, reveals striking historical parallels. They function as mirror images of hatred, meticulously adapted to different eras. They are simply different varieties of the same shiny red apple, plucked from the exact same poisonous tree.
Consider the historical hypocrisy.
The Nazi regime infamously denounced modern physics—including Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking work—as “Jewish Physics” (Deutsche Physik). Yet, as World War II progressed and desperation set in, the Third Reich quietly utilized Jewish-developed technologies, medical discoveries, and industrial processes whenever it served their military or survival needs.
Fast forward to the post-October 7 landscape.
Modern antisemitism manifests primarily in aggressive calls for sweeping Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns targeting Israel and Jewish institutions.
Yet, notice where the boycott lines are conveniently drawn.
Activists screaming on Western campuses and city streets do not discard their smartphones, which run on microprocessors designed in Israel. They do not reject the USB flash drives that store their data, the advanced agricultural technologies (like drip irrigation) that feed the planet, or the life-saving medical devices and pharmaceuticals developed by Israeli and Jewish innovators.
They demand the deletion of the Jew, but greedily retain the genius of the Jew.
The social dynamics driving these two eras, though separated by nearly a century, share deeply entrenched tribal mechanisms. In both periods, localized or regional anxieties are immediately projected onto a global Jewish conspiracy. In the 1930s, Jews were scapegoated for Germany’s economic collapse and the humiliation of World War I. Post-October 7, Jewish communities worldwide—from Toronto and London to Sydney—are held collectively responsible for defending themselves against the Islamic sponsors of terrorism targeting the State of Israel.
The result is identical: a massive, terrifying spike in global hate crimes, institutional exclusion, and physical assaults.
The only real difference lies in the branding.
In the 1930s, targeting Jews was framed as a patriotic, scientific duty to “cleanse” and protect the Aryan nation.
In the modern landscape, the harassment of Jews is cloaked in the sanctimonious language of human rights and anti-colonialism.
Traditional anti-Jewish tropes—conspiratorial power, media manipulation, and blood libels—have been seamlessly rebranded using modern terminology. Just as the Nazis attempted to separate the “genius of the state” from its Jewish contributors, modern extremist rhetoric attempts to strip Jewish history of its indigenous ties to the Levant, actively rewriting historical narratives to deny Jewish identity, trauma, and cultural longevity.
To understand this obsessive compulsion to appropriate and then erase Jewish identity, one must look at the very architecture of Western and Middle Eastern monotheism. From a historical and theological perspective, Judaism stands completely on its own. It is an indigenous, ethno-religious tradition that evolved independently over millennia. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) outlines a unique, self-contained covenant between God and the Israelites. Its laws, historical chronicles, and prophetic texts do not rely on any prior world religion to validate its framework.
Judaism does not require subsequent faiths to justify its existence, fulfill its prophecies, or explain its theology. It stands fully complete within its own scriptures, oral traditions (Talmud), and cultural history.
Islam, by contrast, cannot exist in its current form without the historical and scriptural framework established by Judaism.
By definition and in practice, the foundational texts of Islam represent a massive theological appropriation of Jewish identity. The Quran adopts the vast majority of major Jewish figures—including Abraham (Ibrahim), Moses (Musa), David (Dawud), and Solomon (Sulayman)—reverencing them as essential prophets.
However, in the Islamic narrative, these historical Jewish figures are systematically stripped of their specific national covenant with the Jewish people.
They are recast as “proto-Muslims” who submitted to Allah. Historical Jewish specificities are completely erased and replaced by a universalized Islamic history. Mainstream Islamic theology justifies this by claiming Tahrif (falsification)—positing that the original Torah was divine but corrupted by Jews over time, positioning Islam not as an appropriation, but as the ultimate “correction” of the original faith of Abraham. Because Islam positions Muhammad as the “Seal of the Prophets,” its theological legitimacy is structurally dependent on the prior existence and recognition of those earlier Jewish figures.
Without the foundation of Jewish monotheism, the core narrative of Islamic succession lacks its primary context.
From a secular historical viewpoint, Islam’s origin story reflects a “new movement” that desperately tried to anchor its legitimacy in the ancient, deeply respected tradition of Judaism. When an illiterate Muhammad fled to Medina in 622 CE, he initially sought an alliance with the established, literate Jewish tribes of the oasis, even commanding his followers to pray toward Jerusalem.
But the alliance collapsed on a hard reality: the Jewish tribes rejected his prophetic claims.
Judaism and its concept of prophecy were bound by strict scriptural guidelines, and the era of biblical prophecy had concluded centuries before Muhammad was born illiterate in 570 CE. When the custodians of that ancient tradition refused to grant him the validation he sought, the theological strategy shifted from emulation to elimination. The direction of prayer was turned away from Jerusalem toward Mecca, and the early Islamic movement moved to expel, subjugate, or execute the very Jewish communities it had initially sought to partner with.
Whether it is the theological revisionism of early Islamic history, the state-sponsored boycotts of the Nazi regime, or the venomous campus protests of the 21st century, the underlying pathology remains constant. It is the rage of the successor tracking the survival of the original. When a movement lacks the capacity to eclipse the moral, theological, or technological endurance of the Jewish people, it defaults to the weapon of the insecure: erasure through boycotts.
But history has proven that while shiny red apples of hatred look formidable on the branch, they eventually rot from within.
The innovations, the spirit, and the indigenous truth of Judaism have outlived the pharaohs, the caliphates, and the Third Reich.
They will outlive the modern boycotters, too.
Credit to Bernie !
This text is an excerpt from a blog commentary or a user response regarding the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, specifically referencing content from a website called Planck’s Constant run by a blogger named “Bernie.” [1]
https://plancksconstant.org/blog1/boycott_israel/
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