At The BFD we’ve been warning for months that anti-Semitism is undergoing a horrifying resurgence in the West – and that it’s mostly rearing its ugly head on the left of politics.
No-one is foolish enough to deny, of course, that anti-Semitism is a persistent, festering canker on the fringes of the far-right. But its not-so-sudden re-emergence on the left (I first recall the Village Voice writing on the subject around 1992) is a disfiguring boil right on the nose of the mainstream left.
While too many Jews have remained blindly rusted on to the left, some are finally starting to take notice.
Anti-Semitism, the ancient hatred of Jews, is on the rise in Australia…[and] creeping into our politics. Frequently associated with the extreme far right, anti-Semitism is emerging in a newer and more recent form on the political left, which has become increasingly obsessed with anti-Zionism and the existence of the state of Israel.
Left-wing critics of Israel — who are suspicious of supposed Jewish influence in finance, politics and the media — are becoming increasingly vocal in Australia. They rail against the alleged capitalist financial depredations by Jews and they question the legitimacy of a Jewish national state.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has noted in its annual report on anti-Semitism a steady rise masking itself as anti-racism. EJAC also has catalogued numerous anti-Semitic remarks made by those in the ALP and the Australian Greens.
The EJAC traditionally leans leftwards. That even they are taking the left to task shows how badly the situation has got.
The ALP has been spared the travails of its Jeremy Corbyn-led British counterpart…but many Labor-held seats contain religiously conservative Muslim populations hostile to Israel and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
Labor’s problem is exacerbated because in some of the seats it needs to hold (such as in western Sydney) there is growing support for the Greens, a party that maintains an intense hostility towards Israel and a very strong commitment to the Palestinians…Left-wing anti-Semitism seems paradoxical because of the left’s longstanding and historical commitment to eradicating all forms of racism and discrimination.
The left’s self-conceit that they somehow cornered the market in anti-racism is just one of their more laughably obvious myths. But the mask of holier-than-thou leftism has been ripped away by its blind obsession with the bigoted bullshit of identity politics.
In its basic form, anti-Zionism holds that the state of Israel should not exist. In its more extreme forms, it denies the concept of a Jewish peoplehood entitled to self-determination and the right of a lawfully constituted state to safeguard the security of its borders and its people.
Soviet anti-Zionism promoted theories of a global conspiracy funded by Jewish money committed to wreaking political and economic havoc in Western countries.
When the post-World War II generation of the left began to emerge in the 50s and 60s, it absorbed this propaganda into its own world view…It is a world view to which many on the political left — such as Corbyn in Britain, the so-called “Squad” of Democrats in the US congress, and the Australian Greens.
The standard, dissembling employed by anti-Semitic leftists is to parrot the canard that they are only criticising Israel, not Jews. This is just so much self-serving horse-puckey.
Criticism of Israel’s government and its policies is not anti-Semitic. Many Israelis themselves are openly critical, as a visit to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, will confirm.
But criticism that denies the legitimacy of Israel itself or questions the supposed motives of the Jewish people is abhorrent anti-Semitism.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/ageold-hatred-of-jews-reemerges-out-of-left-field/
Leftists can piously waffle all they like that they are “not anti-Semitic, just anti-Zionist”, but when prominent left-wing academics are screaming abuse and waving money in the faces of elderly Jewish women, the putrid truth is undeniable.