Reply to a Zionist Troll
The following is a little piece of hate mail dropped like a psychological dumb bomb into my inbox the other day…
Dr. Block —
When did you start becoming a self-hating Jew like Larry David, Joy Behar and decades before, Woody Allen?
Your CounterPunch commentary reflects self-denial of facts, mostly one most liberal/progressives love to bury: Israel was attacked on October 7th. I won’t go into gory detail, but you might want to look up the carnage Hamas produced against young women on the concert grounds that day and ones not seen since.
As a Free Beacon journalist, I wouldn’t waste characters interviewing you regarding your hatred of Natanyahu or the actions of the IDF. Instead, should I see you on the campus of UCLA, USC with the bands of anti-American insurrectionists, only then will I approach you to explain your sordid viewpoint.
Until then, I personally hope Israel finishes the job and rids the world of Hamas, Hezbollah and every Iranian-backed proxy you defend.
Sincerely,
Aimee Hawkes
After a short bout of laughter, tears and tossing my falafel, here is my response (may it help you to create your own mental Iron Dome against any Zionist psycho dumb bombs tossed your way)…
Dear Ms. Aimee Hawkes,
Thank you for your email. It’s always illuminating to hear from my readers, even when they troll me with nasty Zionist tirades like yours.
I must say that your first question, “when did you start becoming a self-hating Jew?” is as rancid as week-old borscht. It also incorrectly presumes that I am one. I’m not sure what the litmus test is for “self-hating Jew,” but I doubt I’d pass, as witnesses to my beautiful Bat Mitzvah, teen summers in Israel and Camp Ramah, Har Zion Temple wedding presided over by two Rabbis, popular Israeli TV show (1998 – 2003), big bacchanalian Purimschpiels and hot-wax Hanukkah parties can attest.
A self-questioning Jew, yes, but self-hating? Nah. I’ve long loved many aspects of Jewish culture, from Queen Esther to the Marx Brothers (including Karl) to the soulful prayers of Kol Nidre. Polytheistic libertine that I am, I could never “hate” my Jewish roots. I do hate war, genocide, apartheid, but I don’t hate people… least of all myself.
My hatred for war – but not people – inspired those Counterpunch articles you reference, including my first seriously anti-Zionist apartheid piece in 2021; stepping up the pace a bit with an Anti-Zionist Hanukkah, Purim, and a tribute to The Burning Soldier – since Israel stepped up its pace to genocide in 2023-24, as you well know, my dear Ms. Hawkes.
Not that we’re friends, but I doubt the Jewish celebrities – canceled and/or acclaimed – that you namedrop “hate” themselves either. They are practitioners of the rather Jewish art of self-deprecation and, like me, they question things – as the Talmud encourages us to do.
So, who are these “self-hating Jews” of which you speak?
Maybe you?
It seems to me that the true “self-hating Jews” among us are the Zionists. Why else would you feel the need to steal land, murder, mass-murder, practice apartheid, even commit genocide, and then lie, lie and lie some more to try to cover it up?
The religo-Zionist world-view, that they are “chosen” by God, strikes me as a vain effort to compensate for this nagging, unflagging, self-hating, inferiority complex, with myths of superiority, making them special, exempt from the rules.
Now, with no rules to restrain them, the “Chosen People” are attempting to mitigate the self-hate that fuels them by waging genocide against the natives of the land they’re trying to conquer.
How’s that working for you?
Zionists seem to self-hate so much (often, I must say, with good reason), it’s unbearable, so they project their self-hate onto others – the Palestinians, the Iranians, the American student protesters, the Amalekites, Esau, Ishmael and all their innocent children. There are no innocents when you hate yourself so hard, you can’t get the stains of self-hate out of your soul no matter how much you kill, and then try to wash your hands with excuses…
You are the Zionist Lady MacBeth.
The sheer, blood-soaked futility of the Zionist cry, “We will defeat Hamas!” echoes Shakespeare’s most damnable, guilt-ridden villainess’ notorious line, “Out damn spot, out, I say!”
Or maybe it’s not just a spot, but a bloody hell like the artist Jonathan Yeo painted around King Charles.
It must be a kind of bloody hell for you too, Ms. Hawkes.
As for me, I have lived a long and pretty comfortable, agnostic Jewish life among people of all faiths (sort of like Palestine used to be!), though I must confess, arrogant, bombastic Zionists like Bibi (who went to school in Philly near where I grew up) have given me the creeps since Hebrew school.
I was an antiwar girl – attending Vietnam war protests at local colleges with my older draft-age brother – and the Zionist Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were the great warriors of our time.
At least, our Hebrew schoolteachers taught us they were great, the world’s most “moral” army. Ha! Even as a kid being fed fake news with my fried matzah, my stomach cramped with the unpalatable presence of this serious contradiction. If this “God” of ours had commanded, “Thou shalt not kill,” how could any killing – let alone a killing machine like the IDF – be moral?
When I visited Israel with Zionist Camp Ramah, I asked my counselors: Why was “a land without people for a people without land” actually inhabited by these people – these Palestinians that Israel’s motherly prime minister Golda Meir said simply didn’t exist (“there is no such thing as Palestinian people”)?
My counselors muttered that all these people were “Bedouins,” and chastised me when I returned from a free afternoon in Jerusalem riding around the Garden of Gethsemane on the back of the motorcycle of a young Palestinian man I’d met in a café. They would have been livid to know that we also shared a kiss.
Later, I learned the “D” in IDF was really an “O” for “occupation,” inflicting horrific death, destruction and trauma on the occupied, from apartheid to genocide. I didn’t know the extent of Israel’s atrocities for years (and I regret to admit I didn’t want to know), but now we see it every day on our screens, despite the mainstream media’s attempts to obfuscate the wretched truth.
And what about the occupier? What about those who support the occupation? What about you, Ms. Hawkes?
As a sex therapist in private practice since 1991, I’ve talked to hundreds of PTSD-afflicted veterans of multiple immoral American and Israeli wars and occupations. Many occupiers (especially the leaders) are stone-hearted sociopaths – but others (the more *normal* ones) are afflicted with great regret, self-hate and depression.
Deflecting their self-hate onto the occupied, they might develop sadistic urges laced with morbid, fetishistic kinks. We see this on perverse display in the IOF soldiers who steal and play with panties, bras and high heels belonging to dead or fleeing Gazan women whose homes they just demolished. Some dance wildly between bombing missions, trying to flaunttheir erotic vitality. The worst relish humiliating and torturing Palestinian prisoners. We’ve seen it before in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and now we see it on steroids in Gaza and the West Bank.
You speak of the “carnage” wrought by Hamas’ prison break on October 7th – as though it came out of nowhere, instead of 80 years of Zionist mass-murder, oppression and occupation – and no, I do not support Hamas (for the umpteenth time), and no, I don’t want to live amongst them under Sharia law. Nor do I want to live under Christofascism, Judeo-fascism or any religious law. I tried living with the Chabad Lubavitchers and the Amish Mennonites; neither worked for me. I’m a pro-bonobo sexologist, and I shouldn’t have to accept murder and mass-murder (especially odious when it’s the powerful killing the weak), in exchange for my sexual freedom, should I?
And yes, I did “look it up” multiple times, and I found that many of those “gory details” of October 7th have turned out to be Israeli hasbara (propaganda), and some of the worst violence – such as the burned-to-the-ground kibbutz and Nova parking lot – appears to have been committed by the IOF’s “friendly fire,” shooting and firebombing wildly and indiscriminately, as this most “moral” army tends to do in general, and in particular on that terrible bloody Saturday when so many rusty, unprepared reserves were called in.
As for Hamas, it seems they were mostly trying to kidnap Israelis for leverage in prisoner exchanges, and they also killed many people, which is a terrible crime, but they did not put babies in ovens. This Zionist hasbara is still being repeated though it has been utterly debunked (often by Jews).
Indeed, I feel like we’re in the middle of a Jewish Civil War. On one side are anti-Zionist Jews like me who feel the “Never Again” message we all received growing up means “never again for anyone,” while the Zionist Jews see “Never Again” as only for them. Along with Christian Zionists, they see Zionism itself as so *sacred,* absolving guilt for all crimes in its name, from apartheid to genocide, ecocide, scholasticide and even, a kind of Jew-icide that is killing all that is good about Judaism and stoking anti-Semitism worldwide.
And that’s the idea, isn’t it? Stoke anti-Semitism, conflating it with anti-Zionism, so more Ashkenazi Jews will “make Aliyah” to Eretz Yisrael where we can be “safe.”
Ha. That gig is so up. At the moment – though it could change if Zionism somehow prevails – we Jews are way safer here, there and anywhere other than Israel. Case in point: Israel’s Philly-schooled prime minister would rather wage genocide than negotiate to get the Israeli hostages back home safely.
As this Jewish Civil War deepens and widens to way beyond the Jewish people, I have no doubt that my side – the side of peace and justice for all and “never again for anyone” – is the right and even the righteous side.
The problem is your side has all the guns.
But my side has the Jewish college students standing up for Palestine, with fellow students of all faiths. Just as I am ashamed of Bibi “Natanyahu” (as you so charmingly misspell it), these Jewish students for Palestine make my heart swell with pride and gratitude.
These students are beacons of light in this dark tunnel through which we’re now riding, when our leaders are failing us, as we face the dismal dilemma of the Orange Turd (check out The Mirror’s interview with me about Stormy Daniels spanking him first in that Tahoe hotel room and more recently in a New York courtroom) or Genocide Joe… Maybe Stormy should spank Joe!
Seriously, the students seem to have spanked – or had some impact – on old AIPAC-corrupted Joe, since he withheld the most destructive 2,000-pound bombs from his already obscenely expensive and destructive billion dollar of “aid” package to Israel – even while Lindsey Graham is calling for Israel to nuke Gaza.
Being a Yale grad (where I taught Sunday school with Hillel), I’m particularly proud to see young Bulldogs camping out (if only we’d had tents at our sit-ins!) at Beinecke Plaza, demanding that Yale divest the portions of its endowment invested in the stocks of military contractors, which make the weapons Israel is using to destroy Gaza.
Yale President Peter Salovey, with whom I’ve chatted at several class reunions, is famous for coining “emotional intelligence” or “emotional quotient” (EQ). Now he must use all the EQ he can muster to navigate between the students’ very reasonable, humanitarian requests and the demands of running a huge corporate university in bed with war, the weapons industries and Israel. I hope Peter’s EQ rises to the occasion – and he divests!
As for these “interviews” you conduct on college campuses “as a Free Beacon journalist [you call that journalism?],” no, you need not interview me; I’m just a humble anti-Zionist sexologist. You should interview the students – the Jewish ones, the Palestinians, all of them and their professors protesting this genocide. They are heroes, and your interviews – despite your warped views – could be historic.
Speaking of warped, when you call these students “bands of anti-American insurrectionists,” I think you’re confusing them with those wannabe “insurrectionists” who, on January 6th, 2021, invaded our Capitol to stop an election. The students are just hanging out on their own campus, practicing their First Amendment rights, protesting their universities’ investments of their tuition money in the War Machine.
And what an education they’re getting! The college presidents who have called the police on these peaceful student protesters – acting with brutal, militaristic aggression ranging from the horrific to the ridiculous – have just given their students a crash course in the workings of the Military-Industrial-Academic complex. Lesson 1: these presidents and their staffs work for the War Machine – not for the students they pretend to serve, and certainly not the faculty that they are willing to have shackled and tackled by cops just for expressing concern for their students. Talk about sick kinks!
You say you hope that “Israel finishes the job.” What “job” is that? Eradicating Hamas? How? The main guys are in Qatar. Moreover, Hamas – whether or not you call it “Hamas” – is an idea, like “resistance,” not a lifeform you can kill.
Even if you could “finish” Hamas, that wouldn’t be enough to cool your raging self-hate; there’s also “Hezbollah and every Iranian-backed proxy.” Some Zionists call the student protestors “Iranian-backed proxies”… so that’s a big “job.”
Because let’s get real: The “job” you hope to “finish” is genocide, the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians – and maybe Lebanese and Jordanians – from the River to the Sea. Because your settler-colonial self-hatred is fueled by greed; you want to steal the land, bulldoze the bodies, clear the rubble and rebuild Gaza into an Israeli Disneyland, as the religious fanatics sacrifice a “blemish-free red heifer,” and Zionist oil rigs suck up that offshore gas, and bulldozers carve out that Ben Gurion Canal, putting a capitalist gleam on America’s sacred military outpost in the Holy Land. Is that your dream? Your depraved nightmare brought to life by Palestinian death?
Who knows if you will pull it off in our increasingly dehumanized, dystopian world, but one thing I do know…
You won’t wash away the self-hate nor the blood on your hands, my dear Zionist Lady MacBeth.
Stop self-hating! Actually, it’s the month of self-love (May): Merry Masturbation Month! So, enjoy a little self-love, Ms. Aimee Hawkes.
Give yourself a hand. And stop stealing land. Masturbation Not Occupation!
Break the shackles of self-hating Zionism. Be Bonobo. Free Palestine! And love yourself.
Sincerely,
Susan Block, Ph.D.
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