The last thing you need to read about Grace Tame:

Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender

The Iranian regime’s history of abuse against Jews maps neatly onto the DARVO model. DARVO is a tactic used by abusers to evade accountability by reversing the roles of victim and offender. As a survivor of sexual assault and advocate for victims, Grace Tame will no doubt understand this tactic.

DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender, where the accused denies the behaviour, attacks the person confronting them, and claims to be the true victim.

In the immediate aftermath of attacks on Jews worldwide, Iranian-backed misinformation campaigns frame Israel and the Jews as the perpetrators of violence against their own people. These misinformation campaigns spread libels about something they call “Zionism”.

These antizionist libels do not describe Zionism, Israel, or Jewish statehood. The Zionism of Tame’s imagination is a phantom. A strawman. A bag stuffed with today’s most hated concepts: colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.

These libels fester into conspiracies that stigmatise the Jewish state and Jewish people worldwide. When violence erupts, the stigmatised, libellous, false construction of “Zionism” has already dehumanised the Jews who are attacked. The moral weight of the shooting of Jews or the burning of synagogues and healthcare services is denied because those it affects have been sufficiently dehumanised.

This cycle maps perfectly onto all eras of anti-Jewish violence. Libels misconstructed Judaism for centuries, stigmatising Jews as ungodly well-poisoners. Jews were cast as the inverse to the context’s most tightly held virtues—they lived in either Christian or Muslim states, as Jews are the only non-evangelising, non-colonising, non-conquering Abrahamic tradition.

In a time when church and state were bound, the Jew was considered neither of the Church nor of the state. Judaism was framed therefore not different, but in opposition to the key identities that marked citizens as members of a legal and moral collective. They had refused new and better spiritual and moral truths. Judaism was considered an oppositional, evil, corrosive force, libels about Judaism stigmatising all Jews.

Imaginations roamed free.

Conspiracies about killing children and blood sacrifices led to violence against Jews, and the immorality of this violence was denied because the Jew had been sufficiently stigmatised by libellous constructions of ‘Judaism’.

This happened again from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, this time under the false construction of “semitism” as an element of Jewishness that corrupts and pollutes—a sullied nation within a nation, an ethnic rot within Europe. The first antisemites, like Wilhelm Marr, who popularised the word as a form of ‘critique’ in 1879, considered the antijudaists of the past crude and went out of their way to denounce religious persecution.

Today, people like Grace Tame have sided with the abuser. The repeating cycle of libel, conspiracy, stigma, violence, and denial is ratified by DARVO. The act of violence is denied, the victim attacked, and the reversal of victim and offender is sculpted masterfully by disinformation campaigns engineered by the perpetrator.

Some consider it remarkable that people like Grace Tame are capable of siding with abusers.

For Jews, there is nothing remarkable about this cycle, nor the DARVO tactics that turn well-meaning people into monsters.

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