“Israel is running the world, Israel is running the show.”
Superannuated guitar demiurge Eric Clapton made this shocking and counterintuitive revelation during a recent interview, and of course the has-been rock deity is by no means the first to say this. Claiming that the Jews secretly run the world has been a staple charge of Jew-haters since the publication of the infamous czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and before that, but it’s particularly bizarre and striking for Clapton to drag out this particular canard at this point, when the entire world is ganging up on Israel, its foremost ally has betrayed it, and all the international organs of “justice,” or what passes for justice these days, are intent upon preventing the tiny Jewish state from defending itself. If Israel is running the world these days, it’s doing an extremely poor job of it.
The Jerusalem Post reported Tuesday that Clapton, who has recently been playing a guitar emblazoned with the flag of “Palestine,” not only claimed that Israel is running the world, but also expressed enthusiasm for the sometimes violent pro-Hamas demonstrations that have been breaking out on college and university campuses all over. “I was so enthused about what was going on at Columbia [University] and elsewhere,” said the aged adolescent, and who wouldn’t have been enthused?
What has been happening at Columbia is enough to fill any hardened Jew-hater with enthusiasm. Outside agitators broke into and occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, the main building on campus. Pro-Hamas protesters assaulted a Jewish student. University administrators allowed a student who spoke openly about killing Jews to remain on campus for months. Protesters on campus proclaimed “We are Hamas.” The situation got so bad for Jewish students that in late April, Rabbi Elie Buechler, co-director of the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) for Columbia University and Barnard College, told Jewish students on April 21 to go home and stay there until the campus environment improved to the extent that they weren’t physically threatened simply while walking to class.
Clapton evinced no concern whatsoever for the harassment and endangerment of Jewish students. He was only angry that some elected officials had had the temerity to call out several university presidents, including Columbia’s President Minouche Shafik. “And then what I couldn’t believe, because it freaked me out, were the Senate [sic; the hearings were in the House of Representatives] hearings, which were like the Nuremberg trials, you know?” he said.
What? The Nuremberg trials? Was Shafik hanged right after the hearings for her weak and tepid response to antisemitism at Columbia? Clapton, who became famous as much for his battles with heroin addiction as for his guitar playing, doesn’t seem to notice the self-contradiction in his statements. He apparently saw the House hearings on antisemitism as evidence that the Jews run the world, even though nothing whatsoever came of them to stop that antisemitism from continuing and becoming even more widespread and mainstream. Yet if Israel really runs the world, why was there antisemitism on campuses in the first place? Why did the Israelis run the world so poorly that they couldn’t prevent a tidal wave of anti-Israel sentiment from engulfing the world in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 jihad massacre of 1,200 Israelis?
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Clapton, who first played London’s Royal Albert Hall eight months before Joe Biden entered law school, is 79 years old. He is part of a generation that styled itself as the conscience of the world, warriors for justice and equality against an entrenched and self-serving establishment. Like many of his contemporaries, Clapton appears not to have noticed that the anti-establishment rebels of the 1960s have become the establishment. The outsiders of the hippie days are now the dominant mainstream. Israel doesn’t run the world; Clapton’s fellow socialist internationalists run the world, and they’re busy running it into the ground. The UN, the EU, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and the government of Israel’s erstwhile foremost ally, the United States of America, have all come out against Israel.
Far from running the world, Israel is now nearly isolated in it, and stymied in its efforts to eradicate Hamas and definitively erase the jihad threat against its citizens. If Eric Clapton really cared for justice, he would be speaking out strongly for Israel today. Instead, he is retailing tired old antisemitic conspiracy theories that look more absurd today than they ever did. Like so many of his senescent contemporaries, another Sixties idol has proven to have clay feet.
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