Anti-Semitism Is Not Satire, Babylon Bee

Last updated on: October 29, 2018 at 3:42 pm by Morgan Guyton

Anti-Semitism Is Not Satire, Babylon Bee 2018-10-29T15:42:48-05:00 Morgan Guyton

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Photo from Babylon Bee: October 22, 2018

If anyone on the Internet remains blissfully unaware, the Babylon Bee is a Calvinist satire website that makes fun of gay people, transgender people, feminists, Joel Osteen, Jen Hatmaker, and other people they disdain. Sometimes they write things that are funny. But often, their satire is pretty mean-spirited and cruel. A whole lot of Christians share their stuff on the Internet. But this past week, they did something that is starting to get them in a lot of trouble.

They made a satirical piece about George Soros being the Moses of the Honduran refugee caravan. In other words, they used his Jewishness as the centerpiece of their satire in a time when far-right evangelical Christians are peddling conspiracy theories about rich liberal Jews. Their post came out a week ago on October 22. Five days later, a deranged gunmen who specifically blamed Jews for bringing refugees to the United States murdered 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue.

This isn’t the first time Babylon Bee has had a piece about George Soros this month. Earlier in October, they made a joke piece about how Soros had been the Jew who paid Judas to betray Jesus. Here’s a screen capture of some of the casual anti-Semitism in their comment section.

Anti-Semite Ken Lewis says there is a “common link” between the “spirit” that inspired Judas, the priests, and George Soros. That’s true; they’re all Jewish. And the conservative evangelical readers of the Babylon Bee are so completely immersed in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that they don’t see anything unusual or problematic about equating rich liberal Jews today to Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus.

It doesn’t matter what the Babylon Bee was trying to accomplish or who they were trying to make fun of. Somebody in the comment section thought it was hilarious that Babylon Bee was trolling the evangelical anti-Semitism that almost all of its faithful commentators were obliviously perpetuating. There’s nothing hilarious about it, whoever Babylon Bee was making of. Every time somebody uses George Soros as a bogeyman, whether satirically or not, they are rekindling the centuries-old rich Jew conspirator trope. And they are creating the ecosystem that prods mentally unstable white men to commit anti-Semitic acts of terrorism.

So unless you think that making jokes about anti-Semitism that motivate terrorism is hilarious, do not ever share anything from the Babylon Bee again.

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October 28, 2018

Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory is a Widespread Deadly Sin

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