Is David Icke anti-Semitic?

Some years ago, I watched a good friend of mine having a rather incongruous debate with some well-meaning but fundamentally clueless opponents of jews and Israel over whether or not David Icke - yes the guy who promotes the weirdest conspiracy theory I have ever had the displeasure to read the case for about intergalactic shape-shifting reptiles ruling the world - was anti-jewish or not. The case that these proponents of the 'David Icke is anti-jewish' proposition were making was based on the assumption that because David Icke has been critical of Israel and places the Rothschild at the centre of his weird 'theory' about the so-called 'elite': this meant he was an opponent of the jews too.

Now I don't propose to make an exhaustive or even comprehensive study of Icke's voluminous and incoherent writing here, but rather to summarise his actual views on the subject via quoting his own words and indicate whether they can be construed as anti-jewish or not.

To start with Icke does indeed believe that intergalactic shape-shifting reptiles do indeed rule the world and are engaged in a diabolic conspiracy to 'enslave mankind' as 'robots'/'zombies', which he usually ascribes to be a form of 'fascism'. Central to Icke's theory is the role of the central bankers - or what we could call high or international finance - who use the power of their almost infinite wealth to push the reptilian agenda (gained through control of the major currencies of the world) and that Icke's identification of the principal agent of these intergalactic shape-shifting reptiles is the famous house of Rothschild.

Now the Rothschilds - as every schoolboy knows - are possibly the most famous and certainly the most self-publicising of several major historic and current jewish banking dynasties. This on the face of it seems to suggest that Icke believes that the jews are central to this intergalactic shape-shifting reptile conspiracy doesn't it?

This is until we read what Icke says in his key work 'The Biggest Secret':

'The reptilians have used the white race as their main route to global control, but they have crossbred with all races including the Chinese, Japanese, Arabs and those known as Jewish. All this allows the reptilians to control apparently unconnected people and organisations. It is the extraterrestrial version of members of the same secret society working in many places of influence, while the rest of the population have no idea that they are connected.' (1)

Now this clearly indicates that the jews as a group are not part of the 'elite' that Icke envisions, but rather are a human group like any other that has its leaders replaced by 'cross-breeds' between said intergalactic shape-shifting reptiles and humans.

That Icke's sole focus is on the Rothschilds as being one of these 'cross-breeds' and not the jews is made clear soon afterwards in the same work:

'They all come from the same source, this Aryan race, which seems to have originated on Mars, and the reptile-human bloodlines operating covertly within them. What we call the Jewish race also originated in the Caucasus region and not, as claimed, in Israel. Jewish historical and anthropological sources have shown that only a few of the people known as Jewish have any genetic connection to Israel. In the 8th century a people called the Khazars living in the Caucasus Mountains and southern Russia had a mass conversion to the Jewish religion. Later when that empire folded, these same people made their way north over a long period of time to settle in other parts of Russia, Lithuania and Estonia. From there they entered Western Europe and eventually the United States. The Rothschild family is one of these bloodlines. These are the same people who justified the takeover of Arab Palestine after the last war by saying that ‘God’ had given them an ancient right to that land as his ‘chosen people’. In truth their original homeland is the Caucasus region and southern Russia, not Israel. See ...And The Truth Shall Set You Free for a detailed and sourced account of this story and the secret society manipulation that was behind the creation of Israel, or Rothschildland as it really is.' (2)

Now aside from the fact that Icke is using racialistic language to convey his ideas: when we look at what he is actually saying we can see that the jews are to him a people like any other and that he endorses the Khazarian origins theory of the Ashkenazim even though this is very much a minority intellectual position among historians of the jews. (3) Further Icke completely ignores the series of migrations that we now know provided the biological nucleus of the Ashkenazim or that through the centuries Sephardim periodically interbred with the Ashkenazim in their traditional lands and vice versa. (4)

Basically, Icke is asserting that Israel came into being by the machinations of the Rothschild family - who are jewish-reptilian 'cross-breeds' - who are manipulating the jewish people (who are merely passive actors in their own history) and have in doing so created the 'fascist' state of Israel, which is really ruled by the quasi-omnipotent Rothschild dynasty.

Indeed, in his mentions of Judaism and jewish interpretations of the Tanakh Icke is decidedly neutral towards the jews themselves.

For example, Icke writes that:

'In the same way, an initiate of the esoteric knowledge will read the Bible differently to a Christian or Jewish believer. The initiate will recognise the symbolism, the numerology and the esoteric codes, while the believer takes the text literally So the same text acts as a means of passing on esoteric knowledge to the initiated and creates a prison-religion for the masses who are not initiated. Great scam.' (5)

In the above we can see that Icke clearly differentiates between the religious believers in Judaism and Christianity and what he perceives to be the 'truth' about the Bible in general as well as religions across global human history.

Even when he seems to get polemical about the jews Icke never attacks them per se, but only their jewish-reptilian ruling class.

For example, he writes that:

'It was in Babylon, that ancient capital city of the reptile-Aryan priesthood and hierarchy, that the Hebrew priests, the Levites, began to create a manufactured history which obscured the truth of what really happened. I mean, ask yourself, is a Brotherhood who arranged for the destruction of ancient knowledge and libraries all over the world going to write down the true history in their texts or are they going to produce the version they want the people to believe? During and after their stay in Babylon, with its wealth of inherited knowledge and stories from Sumer, the Levites mixed truth, often symbolic truth, with fantasies and this concoction became the foundations of the Old Testament. The so-called Israelites did not write these texts or agree with what they said. Even if you accept they even existed, the Israelites had long dispersed by the time the Levites inked their pens. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, which together make up the ‘Jewish’ Torah, were all written by the Levites or under their supervision during or after their period in Babylon. This bunch of human sacrificing, blood drinking fanatics and black magicians, who you would not trust to tell you the time, compiled the law which Jewish people to this day are supposed to follow. Likewise many Christian fanatics quote this stuff as the word of God! It is not the word of God, it is the word of the Levites under the direction of the reptile full-bloods and crossbreeds of the Babylonian Brotherhood.' (6)

Once again if strip away his slightly pejorative language about the Levites (the original jewish priestly class) being 'human sacrificing, blood drinking fanatics and black magicians': we can see that what he is actually arguing here is that the Torah is the result of a deliberate attempt by the jewish-reptilian 'cross-breeds' to 'manufacture history' for which the jews are the principal - if not the only - victim.

Icke confirms this on the same page when he writes that:

'The story of the Israelites and Jews is largely a fantasy - the veil behind which the truth has been hidden. No-one has been ‘had’ more comprehensively over these thousands of years than the people who have considered themselves Jewish. They have been terrorised, used and manipulated in the most merciless and grotesque fashion by their hierarchy to advance an Agenda which the Jewish people in general have not even begun to identify. There is no greater example of this manipulation than the way the reptilian bloodlines like the ‘Jewish’ Rothschilds funded and supported the Nazis.' (7)

So then according to Icke: the jewish people are actually the victims in his intergalactic shape-shifting reptilian cosmogony and further he is arguing that the jews are being controlled by a Rothschild 'cross-breed' bloodline, which he incidentally also believes (against all the scholarly and even popular opinion) to have been descended from the Rothschild family. (8)

The purpose of Hitler according to Icke was apparently to bring about the 'Holocaust' of the jews so that the jews could create Israel, which he repeatedly describes throughout his writings as a 'fascist state' (i.e., using the old leftist myth about Hitler being funded and brought into power by the German aristocracy and business elite to benefit themselves). Icke doesn't really get too much farther than this in his ideological ramblings given that the closer we get to the present in his timeline: the vaguer his knowledge of the direction and extent of the supposed intergalactic shape-shifting reptilian conspiracy appears to be.

Strange that!

Indeed - contrary to all evidence and his own twaddle about the Khazarian origin of the Ashkenazim - Icke doesn't even believe the jews exist as a separate people as he tells us that:

'Hebrews were not Israelites or Jews, they were initiates of the Egyptian mystery schools, or at least their founders were. No wonder it has proved impossible to identify a genetic Hebrew or Jewish ‘race’.' (9)

Icke further holds that the intergalactic shape-shifting reptiles - as previously intimated - have it especially out for the jews.

To wit:

'The consequences of all this for the people who have called themselves Jewish, and for humanity in general, have been quite appalling. The Mosaic Law, the law of ‘Moses’, is the law of the Levites - the law of the reptilian full-bloods and crossbreeds of the Babylonian Brotherhood.' (10)

Indeed Icke's (plagiarized) repetition of classic anti-jewish themes such as some of the more lurid anti-gentile passages in the Babylonian Talmud is coloured by his belief that the jews didn't write those lines, but yet they have suffered for something the intergalactic shape-shifting reptiles wrote.

Icke tells us that:

'But this is not just a grotesque diatribe of racism. Look again. It is the very attitudes that the Draco reptilians and their underlings have towards humans. Remember this horrific stuff was not written by Judeans or ‘Jews’ as a people. They are victims of these beliefs, not the authors.' (11)

Icke then again restates his belief that the jews are the passive victims of the reptile conspiracy rather than active agents in when he tells us that:

'This Levite racism is not followed by the overwhelming majority of Jewish people and many have rebelled against the strict race laws that demand that Jews only interbreed with Jews. Most people who call themselves Jewish are brought up from birth to be the frightened, indoctrinated puppets of this vicious Levite hierarchy which has metamorphosed as the Pharisees, the Talmudists and the extreme Zionists of today, controlled by the fanatical rabbis dispensing the ‘law’ of the Levites of Babylon on behalf of the reptilians. Most people who follow the religions spawned from these sources have no idea of their true origin or agenda.' (12)

And just to confirm once again that Icke doesn't believe the jews to be a separate people and that they are the victims rather than the origin of the problem in his world-view:

'They are not concerned for their followers, be they Jews, Roman Catholics, Muslims, whatever. Nothing emphasises what a sham all these religions and races really are than the present day peoples we are told are ‘Jewish’. As Jewish writers and anthropologists have said, there is no such thing as the Jewish race. Jewishness is a faith, not a race. The whole concept of a ‘Jewish’ people was manufactured as a cover story.' (13)

With that I want to bring this sideline article to a close: in part because I simply find it impossible to read Icke's work without wanting to claw out of my eyes at the sheer ludicrousness of its claims based on nothing more than common secret society conspiracy milieu material as an addendum to Icke's belief about intergalactic shape-shifting reptiles.

However, to summarise this issue: we can point out that Icke believes that the attitudes that the jews are not actually a problem as they are a people who have been misled by the jewish-reptile cross-breeds among their elite. Who have then directed them to follow ludicrous laws and believe in their own inherent superiority over gentiles so that they can be persecuted in order to create a fascist jewish state and further that the jews aren't really a people anyway, but rather have been made to believe they are by the evil reptilians.

I am afraid such ideas anti-Semitic, but they are lunatic!

References

(1) David Icke, 1999, 'The Biggest Secret', 1st Edition, Bridge of Love: Scottsdale, p. 46

(2) Ibid., pp. 59-60

(3) See Kevin Alan Brook, 2006, 'The Jews of Khazaria', 2nd Edition, Rowman and Littlefield: New York, pp. 226-227 ; Icke's sourcing is typical for authors of this position in that he cites Arthur Koestler's 'The Thirteenth Tribe' as being authoritative and much like his citation of Waddell's long-discarded work it seems to be based on the kind of books that enjoy high circulation rates among the believers in a secret society conspiracy milieu.

(4) For a useful summary see Michael Toch, 1994, 'Jewish Migrations to, within and from Medieval Germany', pp. 639-648 in Michael Toch (Ed.), 2003, 'Peasants and Jews in Medieval Germany: Studies in Cultural, Social and Economic History’, 1st Edition, Ashgate: Burlington

(5) Icke, Op. Cit., p. 79

(6) Ibid., p. 81

(7) Ibid.

(8) http://www.davidicke.com/icke/articles/hitler.html; which he seems to have endorsed from the jewish Illuminati believer Henry Makow (http://www.davidicke.com/articles/illuminati-mainmenu-57/614-why-do-the-illuminati-hate-jews)

(9) Icke, Op. Cit., p. 84

(10) Ibid., p. 86

(11) Ibid.

(12) Ibid., p. 87

(13) Ibid., p. 88