It’s easy to be over-sensitive in sniffing out alleged anti-Semitism. For instance, I’ve been accused of “peddling anti-Semitic tropes”, when I wrote a post quoting a Jewish conservative writer who likened leftist American Jews’ funding of radical (and often very anti-Semitic) black groups to the ancient Jewish Golem legend. It was a surreal experience for someone as philo-Semitic as myself, I can assure you.
I can understand, therefore, those leftists who complain that criticising the policies of the Israeli government doesn’t make them anti-Semitic. Of course it doesn’t. On the other hand, blindly parrotting the rhetoric of proven anti-Semitic movements and groups such as BDS or Hamas, is at best walking the barbed wire fence of a concentration camp.
And, as I’ve been writing for years now, unambiguous and often violent anti-Semitism is more and more metastasizing in the West.
Whether browsing through newspaper headlines or scrolling through Twitter, there is no escaping the grim reality that anti-Semitic hatred is again on the rise around the world, including here in Australia. In fact, it has broken into the mainstream in a way not seen in decades.
Experts say it’s not so much that the oldest hatred is back. Rather, it simply never left, but today those who harbour anti-Semitic beliefs are becoming much less inhibited in shamelessly expressing and acting on them.
When anti-Semitism is discussed in mainstream media circles, it’s almost always in the context of blaming the “far-right”. Not without reason, of course: Jew-hating has long been a persistent stain on the fringes of the right. On right-leaning social media sites like Gab, outright anti-Semites may be relatively small in number, but they are dismayingly vocal. Notoriously, Pittsburgh synagogue attacker Robert Bowers posted his intentions on Gab shortly before opening fire. (Yet, Christchurch mosque attacker Brenton Tarrant livestreamed his heinous killings on Facebook without the legacy media branding the site “anti-Muslim”.)
If it is a mistake for both the right to downplay anti-Semitism in their ranks, then it is even worse for the left to do so. Because, with the mainstream media solidly captured by the left, left-wing anti-Semitism is most easily normalised on the left. The left will rightly be aghast at former President Trump entertaining Kanye West in the wake of his anti-Semitism controversy (a bizarre act, given Trump’s obvious pro-Jewish mindset: his children are married to Jews, his grandchildren are Jewish, he was the first president in decades to have a Rabbi officiate at his inauguration, the first to visit the Wailing Wall, and he oversaw momentous shifts in normalising middle-east Arab states’ relations with Israel).
Yet, the left media turns a blind eye to the violent anti-Semitism infesting left-wing politics, more and more openly, at every level. From campus politics to mainstream parties like the Greens and UK Labour, anti-Semitism has become dismayingly normal.
Anti-Semitism is clearly evident both across the political spectrum and among the non-political. In fact, for these hateful people, denigrating Jews might be the only thing they have in common.
Ironically, it appears to be especially prevalent in so-called “woke” progressive circles – those who claim to be the moral arbiters on matters of racism and discrimination. For such people, Jews don’t count.
The ethnically-diverse Jews are denigrated by the left as “White-adjacent” (along with Asians and so-called “White Hispanics”); thus in the bizarre, Clown-World logic of the left, it’s impossible to be racist against Jews.
The perverse logic that underpins this stems from their over-simplistic formulation that “racism equals prejudice plus power”. From there it supposedly follows that Jews, whom they perceive as innately powerful – an anti-Semitic trope in itself – cannot be victims of racism. Meanwhile, members of perceived weak groups – including African-Americans, Muslims and Palestinians – cannot be victimisers.
Just coincidentally, of course, those three latter groups tend to be very, very anti-Semitic. Surveys show that black Americans at every socio-economic level are far more anti-Semitic than whites in America. Anti-Semitism is pervasive in Muslim nations — and violently endemic in Palestine.
The mainstreaming of anti-Semitism is being tangibly felt worldwide. Over 2020-21, anti-Semitic incidents in Britain increased by 78 per cent, in France by 75 per cent, and in the US by 34 per cent.
It’s hardly coincidental that that increase directly correlates to high levels of Muslim immigration. Even in Australia, Muslims are overwhelmingly represented as perpetrators in the dismaying increase of anti-Semitic incidents.
What can we do to halt this sickening phenomenon in its tracks (where, after all, has open anti-Semitism ever led to anything good)?
The first step is forming a consensus around its definition. This can be tricky because Jews are simultaneously a religion, an ethnicity and a people that possess a national homeland, Israel. This is where the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of anti-Semitism has been so helpful.
The IHRA definition takes a commonsense approach to the matter of anti-Semitism when it comes to Israel. While explicitly stressing that Israel and its policies can be criticised like any other country, it recognises that some extreme forms of such criticism may be anti-Semitic. This seems obviously necessary – too many extremists today merely substitute the words “Zionists” or “Israel” for the word “Jews” when spreading hateful tropes dating back millennia. For example, denying the Jewish people their right to self determination by claiming the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour or drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
The Australian
Another step is acknowledging and condemning anti-Semitism wherever it appears. That means, not just castigating leftist BDS fanatics, but equally serving it to rightists gibbering about the Rothschilds and Bill Gates’ mythical Jewish grandfather — who most definitely did not co-found the Rockefeller Foundation.