'We must dezionize because Zionism is a death cult. We must normalize massacres as the status quo'

Speaking at a pro-Palestinian rally in London, poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd unleashed a furious tirade where he equated Zionism with all the world's ills, calling to purge all institutions in Western democracies of this alleged monstrosity.  

Kicking off by accusing of Israel of perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, El-Kurd moved on to "the culprit," i.e. Zionism, a word that before 1948 had designated the aspiration for a sovereign state for Jews in their ancestral homeland, and thereafter has come to refer to the belief that the world's only Jewish state should not be violently eradicated. 

Yet El Kurd invests the word with the sinister overtones it has acquired in Cold War-era Stalinist and Islamist rhetoric, whose echoes in the language of today's activist circles in the West are unmissable. 

"This is a moment for transformation. There have been 30,000 martyres. This is our moment to transform the world," he called. "We must reject Zionism in all of our institutions because to be anti-racist is to be anti-Zionist." 

"It does not contain multitudes, it does not contain double meanings, it is not romantic. Zionism is apartheid, it's genocide, it's murder, it's a racist ideology rooted in settler expansion and racial domination and we must root it out of the world. We must de-Zionize because Zionism is a death cult." 

Signing off, the activist called to "normalize the massacres as the status quo."

The Anti-Defamation League said of El Kurd that he traficks in "unvarnished, vicious antisemitism. El-Kurd has accused Israelis of eating the organs of Palestinians and of having a particular lust for Palestinian blood. He has compared Israelis to Nazis, negated the historic Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, and vilified Zionism and Zionists."