I’m Actually Only 4% Straw, 96% ‘Criticism Of Israel Isn’t Antisemitism’

By Jack Straw, scarecrow

Popular culture has given rise to the misconception that as I am a person of straw, that material accounts for all the contents of my stuffing, but the real figure seldom gets higher than one twenty-fifth of my total volume; the remainder consists of contentions that Israel-haters trot out to demolish problematic claims that Israel advocates have not in fact made, then declare victory in the argument.

On occasion the composition shifts, as some contents settle, get blown away, or otherwise escape the confines of my clothes. New material most often represents the “stop calling legitimate criticism of Israel antisemitism” variety, but here and there I get treated to “a Jewish theocracy isn’t the answer to Muslim theocracies” or “why don’t you condemn Israeli displacement of Palestinians.” My favorite, though, has to be the “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” that get bandied about. If I had a funny bone they would definitely be located there.

It wasn’t always like this. When I first began my career as a straw man, most of my stuffing was in fact straw. But the reality of economics meant that the ubiquity of fallacious arguments about Israel soon rendered straw expensive by comparison, and the farmer knows his finances. Now the straw is mostly for aesthetics around the seams and at the hems.

My colleagues and I have discussed this, and we agree that for the foreseeable future there’s little chance we’ll go back to being predominantly straw: there are just too many fallacious arguments wielded against Israel, with more manufactured all the time. One of the straw men in a neighboring field reports that almost half his stuffing consists of “ethnostate,” “new Nazis,” “right to resist military occupation,” and “illegal under international law,” and that he hasn’t seen actual straw in almost fifteen years. One guy a few fields over has never seen the actual stuff; he’s made entirely of discarded “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism” contentions.

None of the stuffing is particularly robust, as demonstrated once when Jordan Peterson was passing by once and all the scarecrows in the vicinity fell apart, but it’s so cheap the farmers still prefer it to bona fide straw. Even the newer stuff – “restricting BDS is a violation of the First Amendment” and “boycotting BDS is suppression of dissent” – just flies away if not secured well inside the clothes.

Even the flying monkeys aren’t interested in us anymore, but at least the crows don’t react any differently.

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