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Posting an article headlined “Damn the Jews!”—even in quotation marks—is asking for trouble. An old friend emailed me with the subject header: “IN REGARD TO DAMN THE JEWS—sad to see you descend into dehumanized hatred.” She pointed out: “There are good Jews ....and bad Jews....good Muslims and bad muslims....good Christians and bad....Good Hindus and bad... Don't you think, Kevin, we are also individually each a mixture of good and evil?”

A colleague and occasional radio guest wrote: “Conflating Jews with Zionists is what Zionists do best. How could you?!!! You are, effectively, on THEIR side when you repeat their most important fundamental lie.” Other commentators made similar points, arguing for “damn the ZIONISTS!” instead.

My initial response was: “Did you read the article? The title is in quotes! It is a translation of the Houthi slogan! The article is (dark) humor!!!” My old friend admitted she hadn’t read the article and was just reacting to the headline. Others had read it but still found it offensive. I asked whether I should engage in some “literary self-criticism.” Several said “yes!” So here we go.

Literary Self-Criticism

Some writers, like Joyce, Kafka, and Pynchon, have whole industries of scholars interpreting their oeuvres. Others, like me, are condemned to self-exegesis, which I suppose is better than having no exegetes at all.

As Mikhail Bakhtin might say if he were alive and employed by a university that paid him to interpret the works of Kevin Barrett, “Damn the Jews!” is polyphonic. That means that the same phrase (“damn the Jews!”) includes echoes of different, opposing voices that impose different meanings on those words. In the title of my article, I put that phrase in quotation marks, a sign that someone else is saying them, to help readers figure that out.

From a Houthi perspective, and indeed from an Arab and Muslim perspective generally, “damn the Jews” or “a curse upon the Jews” or however you want to translate اللعنة على اليهود isn’t shocking or controversial, any more than a circa-1944 American saying “damn the Germans” would have been to American ears of that era. The Arab and Muslim worlds have effectively been at war with Israel and organized Jewry ever since the Jewish State’s genocide of Palestine began in earnest in 1947-1948—just like the American state was at war with the German state in 1944.

If you were an American who said “damn the Germans” in 1944, would anyone have taken offense? Would they have insisted “you should damn the Nazis, not all Germans! After all, there are good Germans and bad Germans…” I doubt it. Though there was and is a theoretical distinction between the German nation, consisting of all ethnically-German people, and the German state, few Americans cared much about that distinction in 1944, any more than most Arabs and Muslims care about the distinction between “the Jews” and the Jewish State today. That’s why saying “damn the Jews” in an Arab or Muslim context is uncontroversial.

Though I’m living in Morocco, where few are bothered by the Houthi anti-Jewish slogan, I write for an international anglophone audience dominated by Americans, but including a fair number of Arabs and Muslims from around the world. So I am hyper-aware that a phrase like “damn the Jews” is going to sound very different to different ears.

Americans, whose government underwrites the genocidal Jewish State, and who get their views from the Jewish-dominated media, have been trained to be hypersensitive to mythical “anti-Semitism.” In the USA, say anything remotely negative