Like most extremist movements, that which has coalesced around the pandemic has a much longer pedigree. The problem has become so acute in Germany that last week that Felix Klein, the federal government’s commissioner tasked with combating anti-Semitism, urged all German cities to follow the example of Munich, which last June banned the “Judenstern” from coronavirus demonstrations. At their demonstrations in Europe and the United States, you will see anti-vaccination activists wearing yellow stars marked with words like “unvaccinated”-a deliberate invocation of the “Judenstern,” or “Jews’ Star,” that Jews living under Nazi rule were forced to wear on their outer clothing as a mark of their “subhuman” status. These movements have also become breeding grounds for the latest twist in the appropriation of the Holocaust. In tandem with the inevitable souring of that debate, some sectors of the anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination movements have become breeding grounds for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories blaming powerful Jewish interests for deliberately spreading the virus. Thus we arrive at “They Own the Media,” a protest song for the coronavirus generation.ĭuring the coronavirus pandemic, there have been legitimate disagreements about the efficacy of blanket lockdowns and their impact on civil liberties. Because these beliefs are predicated on the existence of a secret conspiracy that most of us are too blind to see, they are natural bedfellows of older forms of political paranoia like anti-Semitism, which variously holds the Jews responsible for the death of the Messiah, spreading the bubonic plague during the medieval period and sparking two world wars. Over the last year, Morrison has released a stream of songs protesting the lockdown, including one that was co-written with another baby-boomer legend, Eric Clapton. Instead, he has swerved into Jew-baiting from the extremes of the right-specifically, the movement to depict government policies such as lockdowns, mandatory mask-wearing and vaccination drives as the opening salvo in an offensive to bring the world under the heel of a globalist cabal. Van Morrison, however, has not traveled along the BDS route, which veers leftwards. Many well-known musicians, like the producer Brian Eno and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, have embraced the BDS cause and the anti-Semitic tropes that it incorporates equally, other rock musicians of similar repute, like Nick Cave, deserve a mention for being just as vehement in opposing the effort to socially distance the Jewish state on the international stage. In recent years, the issue of anti-Semitism has intersected with the world of music through the BDS campaign that seeks to isolate Israel. However, far more interesting than the content of such views are the circumstances in which an individual with extraordinary creative talent, like Morrison, comes to embrace them. “They” can be whichever malign social force you want them to be, and in the world of conspiracies, that all too often means the Jews, either as “Jews” or in the guise of “Zionists,” “bankers,” “vaccine patent owners” and similarly generic labels designed to sound sinister. Who is being referred to by “they” is never actually specified because conspiracy-mongers like Morrison use the dog-whistle technique. “You ever try to go against them, you will be ignored.” And so on, until we get to the chorus: “They control the media, They control the media, They control the media, They control the media.” “They own the media, they control the stories we are told,” sings Morrison.
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