You are right about it being confirmation bias, but I am aware of it. I’ve intentionally blocked out family members and former friends over antisemitism, and I’ve realized that once I gained more control over my life, such as by graduating from school and college, and having the ability to not associate with family. I do not currently live in the deep south, but I have a lot of family living in the thick of the bible belt. I no longer talk to them because of their support of cryptofascism. The only people I discuss politics with are close friends, who range from liberal to radical left, people at protests, immediate family as general talk, and random people online in political communities that skew left, or have no particular bias but have strict “no fascism” rules. Other than occasionally keeping tabs on fascists on twitter, I don’t have very much exposure to fascists.

However, as I live in an area where the antisemites have to be very mask-on, and they are counterintuitively pro-zionists. This is because the popular breed of fascism near me is christofascism and christian nationalism. These people want the state of isreal solely because it fulfills a prophecy in the book of revelation. Many of them also want jewish people to be expelled or killed, being literal fascists or hyper-christian. They are both antisemitic and zionists.

But the fact that I have comformation bias in the anecdotes at the beginning and end of what I said is not important.

What I was hoping to point out is a lot of the supposed antisemitism I see is not in fact antisemitic, it’s just antizionist. For instance, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free” is often called antisemitic (it is even called hate speech by the ADL), but it is not, it is anti-zionist. Attempts to conflate this phrase used by activists with antisemitism only seeks to attempt to silence them, showing that protests against zionism is walking on egg shells. Calling for an end of apartheid structures that limit the freedom of movement of palestinians to small sections of the state is not calling expelling jewish people, or somehow referring to space lasers, or whatever.

To go to specific examples, there is the van that drove around Harvard with activist’s faces on it labeling them as antisemites. From what I’ve heard through a friend who currently attends Harvard, those are simply anti-zionist activists. Other supposed antisemitic acts during anti-zionist protests at harvard were intentionally spun that way. From what I heard, at a die-in protest, a jewish student walked over the protestors, and one of them supposedly complained to an organizer that they had been stepped on by that student. In response, the organizers forced that student to leave. That friend told me that some local news reports called the protest antisemitic because a jewish student was forced to leave it, but from what he told me it was for a valid reason, being that the organizers wanted to keep their protesters safe from being stepped on.