Michael Roberts, AI: just one big trade

 

AI: just one big trade

by Michael Roberts

Goldman Sachs, the mega investment bank, reckons that AI is just “one big trade on the US economy”. And the AI investment bubble is getting even larger. In the last week, the AI model maker, Anthropic, announced that it was issuing shares to potential investors in what is called in stock market jargon, an Initial Public Offering (IPO).  Anthropic was following Elon Musk’s Space X planned IPO of a humungous $1.8trn.  This would value SpaceX in the market at 92 times its annual revenue! 

Alphabet, Google’s parent, also plans to raise $85bn in equity funding — its first stock offering in more than two decades. Together, these three giant IPOs could command a combined valuation of around $4trn. That’s one-third of all the value of US IPOs since 1980 (inflation-adjusted)! And yet SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are all currently loss-making and the commercial potential of AI models and, in the case of Space X in going to Mars, remains unknown.

AI is one big trade for the US stock market investors and one big bet on the US economy.  That’s because the amount of capital investment being made by the companies called the ‘hyperscalers’ into AI models, data centres and other AI equipment is staggering. As a share of US GDP, it is now set to far surpass the 19th-century railroad build-out.

Back in December 1996, then Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan characterised the boom in technology, media and telecom stocks as showing signs of “irrational exuberance”. Almost 30 years later, we can say the same about the AI boom with bells on. This investment boom is already much larger than the dot.com internet investment of the late 1990s ever was. In 2025, US businesses invested almost $1.5trn in IT equipment and software. At the peak of the dot.com bubble, it was $466bn, or $829bn when adjusted for inflation. The hyperscalers Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle plan to invest hundreds of billions in the next five years in data centres to provide the computing power to run these AI models. Capital investments are expected to rise by 20 per cent a year, a growth rate never seen before in this industry.

US GDP growth is now driven almost exclusively by rising tech spending. If this starts to drop, the US economy will enter recession very quickly — even if tech investments decline only by a little bit, say 4 to 6 per cent, as happened after much smaller tech booms in the 1960s and during the 2009 recession.

As I showed in my last post, US corporate profits have risen significantly. But according to Brian Green in a recent post, around 80% of the increase in US non-financial corporate profits came from Nvidia and hyperscalers. The stock market is increasingly concentrated in a handful of AI‑linked stocks, which now account for roughly 40 per cent of the S&P 500’s market capitalisation, according to Bank of America data. Headline profitability is being flattered by a small slice of the economy earning extraordinary returns from the scramble to build AI capacity. The risk, then, is that the economy, the profit cycle and the stock market “are all leaning on the same narrow pillar. If the expected returns on AI infrastructure and platforms are questioned, the fallout may not stop at a few richly valued technology stocks.”  

As I have pointed out in previous posts, up to now the massive investment in AI has been mostly funded by the profits already being made by the hyperscalers. But given the impossibility of finding enough additional revenues to self-finance their capex plans, hyperscalers and their hardware providers are increasingly using external financing to fund them.

The first game is ‘circular financing’ ie by cross-investments between Microsoft, OpenAI, and others.  In essence, a cash-rich hyperscaler like Microsoft buys hardware from Nvidia, AMD and other suppliers. Nvidia then uses that revenue to buy a multi-billion-dollar stake in OpenAI. OpenAI then uses this cash to secure compute in Microsoft data centres.  Microsoft itself also invests in OpenAI and enters into a mutual revenue share where some of OpenAI’s revenues flow to Microsoft and vice versa as the two companies use each other’s products.  Assuming that Microsoft spends $100bn to order hardware for data centres, Nvidia, AMD and other suppliers can recognise this $100bn as revenues. They then use that cash to invest in OpenAI (for example), which then uses this money to book data centre capacity with Microsoft. Microsoft recognises this OpenAI investment as revenue, thus effectively turning its $100bn expense into billions of revenue!

Even this is no longer enough, and increasingly, hyperscalers have started to resort to borrowing to raise the cash for investment. The US tech giants are issuing debt all over the world. Google/Alphabet is leading the charge.

So first, they invested with their own funds; then in each other; then they borrowed from the banks and so-called private credit funds; and now they are putting the risk of success or failure on investors in the stock market.  If all this investment fails to deliver the expected returns, it will hit the financial sector and the wider economy big time.

But don’t worry, say the AI companies and hyperscalers, revenues are expected to grow 15 per cent annually. If we make the heroic assumption that there are no costs, then this additional revenue is the profit these companies are expected to make from their additional investments in AI data centres. Yet, even under these extremely optimistic assumptions, the implied return on investment is highly negative for all except Amazon.If the hyperscalers need to generate, say, a 10 per cent return on investment, they would have to find an additional $2-5tn in revenue a year. That’s a tall order for a group of companies that currently generates revenues of just $1.5tn per year. The other option is that the planned investment in data centres, computer chips and other areas never materialises — maybe as equity investors turn more cautious on the sector, or if debt funding for data centres becomes harder to get. A JP Morgan analysis found that more than 60% of data centre capacity planned for completion in 2027 isn’t yet under construction, and another 7% is delayed. What will happen if these companies announce cutbacks on some of their investment plans?

Will the AI heroes, OpenAI and Anthropic deliver the returns that the hyperscalers and their investors hope and expect? Corporate CEOs are optimistic. Over the last three years, since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, they claim that cumulative productivity gains have been in the order of 0.3% to 1% per year. For the next three years, they  estimate productivity gains to accelerate to 1.4%, with executives in the US  and UK far more optimistic than in Germany and Australia.

These productivity gains, they reckon, will be achieved by shedding labour.  Business leaders expect headcount in their firms to drop by about 0.7% in the next three years, again with executives in the US and the UK expecting far more pronounced drops in employment than executives in Germany and Australia. In the last three years, the same executives saw no employment impact from AI.  So this is all expectation. Moreover, the Business Trends and Outlook Survey of the US Census Bureau shows that companies with 50 employees or more show no more growth in AI use since Q2 2025. Businesses are still unsure how to use AI effectively and are increasingly worried about the drawbacks of AI when they use it.

Those drawbacks include ‘hallucinations’ (ie fictions made up by the AI model), which are inherent in LLMs. One study found that for a training set of 32,000 words, the average hallucination rate in LLMs was 6.8%.  When that was expanded to 128,000 words, the average hallucination rate rose to 10%.  That’s a lot of correction time and monitoring for human workers.

Another problem is that because LLMs are designed to be good at everything, they are not very good at any one thing compared to specialised apps. One report on using AI in software development found an explosive impact at the start, with coders creating or editing almost 300 per cent more files, but that boost was halved to 150 per cent by the time companies got the number of pieces of work submitted for review, and that in turn shrunk five-fold to a roughly 30 per cent uplift at the point of full software releases.

Moreover, when researchers looked at whether AI-assisted increases in software production have led to increased usage by clients, they found little evidence. The marked increase in mobile app releases over the past year has not been accompanied by any increase in downloads — most of the new apps fail to capture even a modest audience.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has burnt through some $6bn, rising to $17bn in 2026. By 2028, inference (training) costs alone are expected to grow to $121bn and losses are projected to be $85bn. Anthropic’s cash burn is much smaller, but was still $3bn in 2025. Unless the companies that build LLMs can find large amounts of new revenue in the next couple of years, the losses will increase exponentially, especially given the fact that current price charged per ‘token’ is not the true cost of compute.  If AI companies were to charge the cost price per token, the losses may decline, but demand for LLMs may decline even more. 

Despite this, the hype around AI remains so big that essentially all private investments in the US are now in tech hardware and software. Over the last three  years, the average annual growth in IT equipment investments has been 11% and 8% in software. Meanwhile, investments in all other parts of the US economy put together have declined by 1.6% per year.

The US economy today really is two economies in one. There is the tech economy and then there is everything else. Over the last four quarters to the end of Q1 2026, 93% of US GDP growth is due to tech investment alone (although much of the purchases are imports and not produced domestically).

This is a bubble waiting to burst. In the aftermath of the TMT bubble, private fixed investment dropped more than 12.7% between 2000 and the end of 2002 as a recession took hold in the US. In the initial year after the TMT bubble burst, tech investments dropped 12%, while fixed investments in general dropped 7.6%.

Gita Gopinath, former chief economist at the IMF, has calculated that an AI stock market crash equivalent to that which ended the dot-com boom, would erase some $20tn in American household wealth and another $15tn abroad, enough to strangle consumer spending and induce a global recession. This is also the view of the IMF. The IMF fears that AI firms could fail to deliver earnings commensurate with their lofty valuations. The collapse of previous investment booms knocked about 1 pp on average of US real GDP growth. Even a moderate correction in AI stock valuations would reduce global growth by 0.4%. “ Combined with lower-than-expected total factor productivity gains, and a more significant correction in equity markets, global output losses could increase further, concentrated in tech-heavy regions such as the United States and Asia.” Another study found that even a very mild drop in tech investment of just 3% would cut US real GDP growth by 1%, or half the current rate.  The impact would be greater in Europe.

None of this is to conclude that AI will not at some point deliver with higher profitability for the companies involved and higher productivity for the US economy as a whole.  But that will not happen before there is a bursting of the investment bubble – as there was in the railway mania of the 1870s and in dot.com bubble of the late 1990s. As other studies have shown, it will take a decade or more for AI to become a generalised technology that delivers.

For working people, AI poses a different problem.  For capital and the mega media companies, the aim is to make AI a profitable technology, but that can only be done by shedding labour and by stopping any attempt to regulate its applications and use. If AI is to succeed for capital, it will only be at the expense of most working people and their families.

Sikhs and Other Indians Fought Heroically For Britain in Two World Wars.

Richard Mellor

The movie clip above is not connected to the commentary below from Andy Singh Baines. I added it to give some idea of the important role the Indian people, and all the colonised people played in WW1 and WW2 fighting for the British. Nigerians and other colonial people were a huge section of the British armed forces, this is so of the Irish as Ireland was England and then Britain's first colony before British capitalism colonised India, or parts of Africa. 

Laurence Fox, the right wing racist British actor had made disparaging remarks about a Sikh soldier appearing in the movie 1917, claiming it was "forced diversity." One can imagine the insult this is to Indians and the Sikh population in general. Having grown up in a military family and in the UK after Myanmar and Nigeria, I would not have known of the contribution Indians played in fighting for Britain against the Nazi's and Japanese Imperialism. My father, though a conservative, talked often of the heroism of these people especially the Gurkhas.

The right wing forces in the UK that are attacking immigrants and siding with Neo-fascists and white supremacists are being looked to by many English people who are completely unaware that their safety and freedom as members of a parliamentary democracy was defended by immigrants or their parents who are being vilified in the UK today.

I am very much in agreement with Andy Singh Baines' comments below.

*************

Andy Singh Bains

 

During World War One, over 65,000 Sikhs served in the British Indian Army, comprising 22% of its forces despite only being 2% of India’s population. During World War Two, over 300,000 Sikhs served in that same army. Together, over 83,000 Sikhs died in both wars. 

These facts are being used by Sikh politicians in Britain right now to critique the rhetoric of the far-right and to console racist and backward sections of the population by showing that Sikhs are “loyal citizens” that can be trusted and that many of them “sacrificed their lives for democracy in Britain.” 

In reality, these two wars were fought not for “democracy” - as Lenin showed, democracy under capitalism has always been, like in ancient Athens, simply democracy for the slave-owners - but instead, these wars were fought for the selfish interests of the British Empire, and thousands of Sikhs, alongside thousands of other Indians, were just seen and used as cannon-fodder for imperialism. After all, how could they have been fighting for “democracy” when Indians were being denied their basic democratic rights and India remained a colony of Britain tied in shackles? 

As an aside, this simple fact was even lost by the Communist Party of India which, under orders from Stalin and the Soviet bureaucracy, discouraged Indians from struggling against the British because it “disrupted the war effort against fascism.” As a consequence, the Communists, who had grown very popular among the masses for their heroism in the previous period, during the 1920s and 1930s, now became sidelined from them. 

Meanwhile, the native bourgeoisie, wrapping itself in the cloak of Gandhi who gave the famous “Do or Die” speech which sparked the Quit India movement (1942-45) or what the Governor-General of India referred to as “by far the most serious rebellion since 1857,” took firm control over the political leadership of the anti-colonial struggle. In 1946, the mutiny of 10,000 sailors in the Indian navy, which was spreading to other sections of the army and which sparked solidarity strikes and riots throughout the subcontinent, from Mumbai to all the way in Karachi, was heading in the direction of a national liberation war for independence against the British. 

The leaders of Congress Party and Muslim League, however, condemned the uprising, seeing it as detrimental to a negotiated settlement with the British, which would ensure a safe transfer of power from the imperialists to the native bourgeoisie. With the road to revolution blocked, the pendulum swung toward counter-revolution: the partition of the country, and the bloody communal violence that accompanied it and left millions dead.

Returning to earlier, the only way to ensure the safety of migrants and fight the far-right is through the unity and revolutionary struggle of the working class against capitalism, a system which breeds racism to divide and disorient the common people and turn their attention away from the real cause for worsening living standards. The problem is not that people coming into the country, looking for a better life, are exhausting already limited resources. There are more than enough resources to go around. The problem is that the capitalist class, the millionaires and billionaires, are hoarding most of it. The problem is a system which puts the interests of a few ahead of the collective interests of humanity as a whole. 

Not Using Self Check at Safeway is a Political Act.

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

We are all busy. Life is stressful. But we can resist in so many small ways. Don't use self checkout, you can't be in that much of a hurry. And talk to other folks in line. 

Remind them that you don't work here. Remind them that the jobs here are union jobs with benefits, important in the US with no health care and poor public services. Tell them that if we all do this there will be no jobs left for our children and grandchildren. 

And most of us are just working folk, we won't be pop stars, (most musicians won't be either, they'll make good music) basketball stars, or move about in the company of the Bill Gates, Onan Musk's and Mark Zuckerberg's of this world. We should carry our identity as workers proudly as society functions because of us.

Fight back against their war in the workplace and their ideological war aiming to convince us, against our best instincts, that the free market is efficient and works for all of us. Fight back any way you can.

 

When we take these small steps, in other words, not passively go about our daily lives as if we have no power, it changes our immediate environment. It creates discussion. Even if we accomplish very little in the short term, in the long term we make headway. We talk to one another, we question technology, the technology that in the long run makes us redundant and those that it does not make redundant it increases their pace of work and the rate of exploitation. 

We inevitably think about the real problem and that it is not technology but the class that owns it. 

Most of us are not happy with the way things are. But we are isolated, distracted by the mass media, the obsession with sports, sex, religion and so on. I should add, I like the first two, but obsession with anything is not healthy. 

The media is owned by the same group of people that own the supermarkets and big stores, the airlines, the building of homes that, in essence is human shelter. They own the means of producing our food and they own the water needed to produce it. Yet they are not in the business of food production. Marx explained it so well:

“A schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.” 

This class of people spends billions of dollars trying to convince us that our basic instincts about the world are wrong. It is this that makes us sick, depressed. Fighting back changes this as confronting the school bully does, even if he wins on that day he will find a different victim. Rejecting the narrative has the same effect.

 

I'll share these statistics below once more. They are from rom a year or two ago. We are not what the billionaire's media says we are. We know what we want but do not know how we can get it or that we can get it at all. That is a huge dam that will be breached at some point, the idea that we can't change things. We will see some huge battles ahead I am convinced of it.

 

Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do “such a poor job” of representing the American people that “a third major party is needed.”  Gallup

 

According to a Gallup survey…… 62 percent of Americans now say that the federal government should ensure that all Americans have health coverage, Dec 2024

 

 Nearly four times as many voters

support increasing public transportation funding as support reducing it. 

70 percent of respondents agree that “providing people with more transportation options is better for our health, safety, and economy than building more highways.” 

 

We know what we need.

Reprinted from the UK socialist website Left Horizons.

 

Trump desperate for exit from Iran War

4 June 2026

By John Pickard

In the first major rebuke for Donald Trump, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a ‘war-powers’ resolution this week, blocking Donald Trump from carrying out more strikes on Iran without congressional approval.

Trump will ignore the resolution, of course, and being passed by a small majority of 215 to 208, it will be subject to presidential veto. But it is an indication – yet another straw in the wind – of the underlying shift in US politics that Trump has engendered by his ill-conceived war on Iran.

The war, now well into its fourth month, is costing the USA around $2bn a day and the burden of that – and all the rest of Trump’s policies – is being borne by American workers, in terms of higher living costs, greater insecurity and more uncertainty.

The war is extremely unpopular among US voters and even two months ago polls showed that 56 per cent of Americans “opposed” or “strongly opposed” the war. Now that Trump is in a position where he has clearly ‘lost’, in the sense that he has not ‘won’ and the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, those polling figures will have skewed even more against him. His own personal approval rating has fallen, according to the New York Times (June 4) to -20, with only 37 per cent approval.

New York Times graphic, showing increasing NEGATIVE polling for Donald Trump

Measuring their Iran adventure by bombs dropped, ordnance deployed and the destruction of military (and many civilian) targets, Trump and his ‘Secretary for War’, Pete Hegseth, are crowing non-stop about a great ‘victory’. But it has become clear that the Iranian regime, whilst being severly wounded, is far from defeated, and in some respects is in a stronger position than it was before the bombing began on February 28.

Unsophisticated and cheap armaments

Iran has discovered that with relatively unsophisticated and cheap armaments – and to some extent by bluff – it has been able to close the Strait of Hormuz, depriving the world, not only of crude oil, but of many by-products of oil refining that are essential to agriculture and industry. Perhaps persuaded by Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, Trump clearly thought the attack launched in February was going to be a short ‘regime-change’ operation, much like the kidnapping of Maduro from Venezuela. In the event, it has left Iran with a powerful lever – complete control over the Strait – which it did not have before.

Meanwhile, the OECD has warned that the war is causing huge damage to world capitalism. “Failure to resolve the energy crisis in the Middle East” the Financial Timesreport says, “would plunge the world into a ‘dark scenario’ of tumbling growth and sharply higher interest rates…”

Even if there was a full agreement between the USA and Iran, today, and even if the oil began to flow ‘normally’ from the Gulf, it would still take months before oil and oil-products were flowing as they were before the war. A drop in world economic growth is already baked into the projections outlined by the OECD. What we will see developing in the coming months is what future historians will call the “Trump recession” and the longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed, the deeper will be the recession.

Trump’s negative poll rating sinks to a new low

The OECD economic prognoses, as well as the unpopularity of Trump in the polls, will inevitably have an effect. The economic cost of the war and the increasing likelihood of it being translated into anti-Republican sentiment in the mid-term elections in November constitute a significant pressure on the White House.

Despite Trump’s narcissistic tendencies, his inability to accept criticism and his surrounding himself with yes-men, at least a part of the message from the polls must be getting through. The problem for Trump, however, is that it is very hard to dress up a catastrophic failure in policy as a roaring success.

But dressing up a huge failure as a victory is exactly what his negotiators are trying to do in their contacts with Iranian representatives. It is likely, therefore, that the current ‘truce’ will last some time, as Iran plays ‘hardball’ over the closure of the Strait.

 Over the coming weeks, Trump’s team is likely to be forced into loosening sanctions on Iran and perhaps accepts Iranian/Omani control of the Strait yet being careful to not to appear to give too much ground. Even on the question of Iran’s nuclear programme, it is now unlikely that the US will get anything more than a few face-saving clauses written into an agreement. However humiliating the small print might be, Trump will shout loud and long about his great ‘victory’.

If Trump’s war on Iran seems to be approaching an ignominious end, it is also true that it has accelerated a general shift of US and world opinion against Israel, especially over its genocidal destruction of Gaza. Netanyahu, and a significant part of the Israeli right-wing establishment, believe that a policy of ruthless military aggression and expansion is in the best interests of the Israeli ruling class.

But Israel has depended over the decades on unstinting financial and military support from the USA, without which it would not be a Middle East super-power. Now that Trump is so desperate to extricate himself from the swamp of the Iran war, and with the Iranians demanding that Lebanese Hezbollah are part of any agreement, Trump has been obliged to sharply rebuke the Israeli leader over its policy in Lebanon.

Trump to Netanyahu: “you’re fucking crazy…”

According to a report in the Financial Times, Netanyahu called off a planned major bombing campaign in Southern Beirut, after an angry phone call from Donald Trump three day ago. “He later confirmed US media reports that he had told Netanyahu: ‘You’re fucking crazy.’ According to Axios, he added: ‘Everybody hates Israel because of this’ — an account that the White House did not dispute”.

Netanyahu and the Israeli military will go back on any commitment they might give to Trump. In wartime – and Israel is nowadays in permanent wartime – the IDF has always used ceasefires and truces as a means of gaining tactical advantage to use later. But in the longer run, the Israeli political establishment, and Netanyahu personally, will not avoid the earth-moving shift in world – and US – public opinion against them.

Shift in American sympathies from Israelis to Palestinians

The US Pew Research organisation revealed recently, that 60 per cent of US adults had an “unfavourable” view of Israel, up from 53 per cent last year. The figure is higher among younger Americans. In contrast, a Gallup poll found that more people sympathised with Palestinians than with Israel. Both polls indicate an ongoing shift in public opinion.

All the political processes we have outlined here are ongoing and, if one does not look carefully, may seem invisible and by their nature they are protracted shifts. It is likely that the Iran/US truce and associated negotiations will continue for many weeks before any agreement is reached. Likewise, in the short term, there is little possibility that the Israeli military aggression in Lebanon (or Syria) will end.

Gaza, meanwhile, has been utterly destroyed, leaving its two million population squeezed into an area around a quarter of its original land; living in tents and dependent on welfare just to stay alive They are still, we might add, subject to regular bombing by Israel. In the West Bank, Palestinians are subjected to constant state-sanctioned and settler-organised pogroms, driving thousands of Arabs off their land and farms.

It would be wrong to suggest that US imperialism, much less the current occupant of the White House, will make a U-turn on the policies it has pursued in the Middle East for decades, or to suggest that the Israeli right-wing, so dominant in its domestic politics, will somehow ‘moderate’ its goals.

But as Marxists we do need to recognise when important subterranean shifts are taking place, in the world and in the USA. These shifts will become more evident and be more significant in the future. As Marx once said, the “old mole of revolution”burrows away, and if we know what we are looking for, we can begin to see the tremors on the surface. 

Opinion. Anti-Semitism: What it is and What it Isn't

Source: Jewish Voice For Peace

John Clarke

Toronto

5-4-26

I know I'm a glutton for punishment but I feel I must explore a particular element of the debate on the left a little further. This is the question of whether drawing attention to anti-Semitism gives comfort to the enemy and undermines Palestine solidarity. 

 

Previously, I suggested that it was important to properly distinguish between the false claim that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic and real and actual anti-Semitism. We may define the latter as hatred of hostility towards Jewish people because they are Jewish.

 

I want to stress that anti-Semitism plays a particular role within the political ideology of Zionism. Firstly, it is exceptionalized to a degree that is quite remarkable. Hatred of Jews is cast as being an utterly unique and eternal form of prejudice that can't be compared to other forms. As a racist ideology, Zionism takes this approach with complete confidence since the only suffering that matters is Jewish suffering. If you go to the +972 podcast page, there's a great interview with Nurit Peled-Elhanan, in which she explores the process of indoctrination on this question that the Israel school system inflicts on students.

 

The whole idea, of course, is to present the stolen Palestinian land that became Israel as, not only a reclaimed homeland, but as a vital place of refuge from an anti-Semitic hatred that can never be overcome.

 

Actually, anti-Semitism is a component part of an edifice of racism that has been developed over centuries. Like, Islamophbia, it began as a form of Christian religious hatred towards unbelievers, with Jews being especially reviled as 'Christ killers.' 

 

However, with the advent of 19th century racism, antisemitism changed its form. Now, with all human beings who were not white considered inferior, Jews were not so simply deviants in matters of religion but were a form of sub-humanity incorrigibly given to destructive forms of manipulation and conspiracy. Present day replacement theory, in presenting Jews as conniving enablers of the immigration of Black and Brown people into 'white' countries, expresses this clearly.

 

Having removed antisemitism from its proper context in order to justify a colonial project, Zionism goes on to create an entirely false version of this prejudice. Anti-Semitism is no longer primarily a question of hating Jewish people but it becomes a label that is placed on hostility to the political ideology of Zionism and its settler-colonial expression. This is sometimes referred to as the 'new anti-Semitism.'

 

This distortion of anti-Semitism soon leads to a situation where the attempt to stifle Palestine solidarity takes priority over challenging real and actual anti-Semitism. In fact, the latter is perversely welcomed. Zionism's 'founding father,' Theodor Herzl, actually declared that 'the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.'

 

This contradiction abounds today and we see examples of it all the time. When a right-wing killer murdered people at the Tree of Life synagogue, in 2018, because he thought Jews were assisting Central American refugees, the Israeli ambassador to the UN said that, as terrible as this was, it was still important to understand that support for Palestine was the main anti-Semitic threat.

 

Elon Musk's use of the Nazi salute has become infamous, yet the Zionist Anti-Defamation League dismissed this as 'an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.'

 

One of the leaders of the Freedom Convoy, Pat King, has expressed the vilest anti-Semitic sentiments, even claiming that Hebrew might become Canada's official language. Yet, as these fascists paraded, complete with Nazi symbols, the main Zionist bodies in this country, with an eye on right-wing Conservatives who supported the Convoy, were remarkably restrained in their response and failed to condemn the undertaking.

 

Of course, Israel's supporters, by treating Palestine solidarity as anti-Semitism, generate a completely inaccurate picture of the issue. They will undoubtedly use any incidents to try to stifle any criticism of Israel, as they did with the Bondi Beach attack in Australia and, as they are doing with shootings at synagogues here in Toronto. 

 

We, however, have no interest in distorting things. We understand the place that anti-Semitism occupies in the broader racist construction and see the difference between the false version and the real thing. Not only can we, on a principled and effective basis, make clear our opposition to anti-Semitism but, in doing so, we can expose the Zionists' cynical selectivity and their unpardonable readiness to disregard manifestations of hatred that actually do pose a threat to Jewish people.