The left has a problem with “Virtuous” Antisemitism

Observers of recent events wouldn’t be foolish to conclude that the last several months have been perilous for Jews, and upsetting for gentiles who would like to see the security of Jews preserved (I am of the latter). Between the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and another round of rocket attacks perpetrated by Hamas, we are reminded that anti-Semitism is not an old doctrine to which societies of a distant past would cling. It exists as a relentlessly persistent source of evil. Given this continued evil, one is inclined to ask: How, in the 21st century, does this morbid ideology continue to attract adherents? Ignorance of history may suffice some as one reliable explanation. As Maggie Astor of the New York Times reports, knowledge of one of the most depraved representations of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, is in an appalling state of decline. Relaying findings from a survey published on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Astor shares that “ Thirty percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust.” She continues: “ Forty one percent of Americans, and 66 percent of millennials cannot say what Auschwitz was.” Finally, “52 percent of Americans wrongly think that Hitler came to power through force.” Evidencing the poor state of education, this demonstrates that the endurance of anti-Semitism can be somewhat attributed to pedagogies that haven’t effectively disseminated its causes or consequences. Wholly ascribing the constancy of anti-Semitism to inadequate education, however, would be a simple deduction that omits the more significant problem of conspiratorial thinking.

Anti-Semitism and Virtuous Anti-Semitism

With the fanatical ideologues that have risen to prominence over the last few years, the political landscape is ripe for conspiracism. As it demolishes one’s wherewithal to reason, conspiratorial thought is intrinsic to radicalism as it dictates an unwavering devotion to a farcical grand narrative. For anti-Semites, this manifests as the imaginary fear of a world dominated by Jewry, as shown in the forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Written from the perspective of the power-hungry, scheming Jew, a passage reads:

For us, there are not checks to limit the range of our activity. Our Super-Government subsists in extra-legal conditions, which are described in the accepted terminology by the energetic and forcible word - Dictatorship. I am in a position to tell you with a clear conscience that at the proper time we, the law-givers, shall execute judgment and sentence, we shall slay and we shall spare, we, as head of all our troops, are mounted on the steed of the leader. We rule by force of will, because in our hands are the fragments of a once powerful party, now vanquished by us.

It is a fact of history and contemporary politics that this pernicious characterization of the Jews has been advanced by figures on both sides of the spectrum. In spite of this, the Right is most often jeered with demands to atone for anti-Semitism. This is disingenuous but so integral when it comes to the pontificating of the modern Left. For inasmuch as they refuse to proffer any clemency to the Right for its history with the affliction, they refrain from accepting that it’s also ubiquitous among their own kind. One reason for this is that anti-Semitism’s most notorious practitioners, the Nazis, made it a central tenet of their philosophy and are often associated with the Right. In a 1919 letter, Adolf Hitler outlined his views on Jews in Europe, commenting that Jewish power was the “power of money,” and that Jews only utilized institutions insofar as they could fulfill the Jewish “lust for gold and domination.“ Almost indistinguishable sentiments are conveyed in the writings of the Left’s cherished prophet, Karl Marx. In his 1844 essay, “On the Jewish Question,” Marx elucidated that “huckstering” and “money” was the religion and God of the Jews. Since aspirations for financial power were sacrosanct to Judaism, Marx explained, “Jewish emancipation” (by which he meant power) was an obstacle to the human emancipation that he envisaged in a Communist organization of society. This type of society, he asserted, “would make the Jew impossible.” Faced with this inconvenient revelation, Leftists often charge its revealer with scaremongering, stressing that Marx was only “being ironic” and wouldn’t ever traverse this territory. When these defences don’t achieve their goal, the only recourse is to vacuously request that one “contextualizes” Marxian coquetry with anti-Semitism. By which they mean the visceral contempt for the Jew is only in the context of a Marxist critique of class differences under capitalism. The irony is that if a right-winger asked that their disparager “contextualize” their anti-Semitism, their request wouldn’t be met with much conviviality. Now, it’d be foolhardy to aver that Marx’s anti-Semitism was as catastrophic as Hitler’s since Hitler’s portended the corpses that accumulated by 1945; however, their rhetoric contained a comparable antagonism towards Jews for the privileged position they held that halted the ambitions for an infallible Aryan race (Hitler), and a classless, collective-organization of society (Marx). Anti-Semitism in its right-wing form is more blatant, whereas Leftist anti-Semitism is subtle as it’s obscured by the romanticism of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ideas that possesses a seductive moralistic quality. With this said, anti-Semitism can be deemed virtuous if it’s concealed through one’s support for the greater cause of the downtrodden and oppressed.

Anti-Semitism as “Hating Whiteness”

The false belief that the hazardous versions of anti-Semitism are confined to fringe forces on the Right has probably reached its apotheosis during this preposterous age of wokeness. In their bombastic effort to find racism everywhere, Leftists will disregard specific behaviour if being forthright will jeopardize their visions of a perfectly realigned intersectional world. Such is the reality when it comes to anti-Semitic utterances by those who are members of an aggregated group that’s participating in the oppression Olympics. The group that sits atop this vicariously erected hierarchy appears to be Blacks. The theoretical premise of intersectionality propounds a deleterious, Manichaean worldview that is infatuated with power structures. Consequently, as Sohrab Ahmari writes, concepts of objective truth and Western traditions of justice are reduced by the Left to an “imposition of white, male privilege.” In this vein, anti-Semitism among Blacks or other minorities shall be measured as a matter of privilege. These assessments are daft as they put forth a predetermined conclusion that nullifies any further debate over the universal application of moral standards. This line of thinking has seeped through into mainstream culture due to academics granting it intellectual legitimacy. Two doyens of this analytic framework, Gina Miranda Samuels and Fariyal Ross-Sheriff, posit that intersectionality “challenges us to take a multisystemic approach to understanding privilege and oppression within structural macrolevels, as well as how these same social identities become reified or transcended on more micro-interpersonal levels.” After deciphering the academic jargon, it’s clear that the method sees virtue in pitting different groups against one another. This line of thinking suggests that as Jews gradually become successful, they’re transcending their victimhood and adopting the treacherous idiosyncrasies of whiteness and all its attendant commitments, like upholding the repressive system against Blacks. The beloved Leftist intellectual, James Baldwin, articulated this mindset in his 1967 essay, “ Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” Limning Black anti-Semitism as “understandable” and “inevitable” due to the perception that Jews held significant control over many pillars of American life, he argued:

It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew. It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home. Going, with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighbourhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter. Nor can it help the relationship between most Negroes and most Jews when part of this money is donated to civil rights. In the light of what is now known as the white backlash, this money can be looked on as conscience money merely, as money given to keep the Negro happy in his place, and out of white neighbourhoods.

It’s a mundane rationale, but it’s enough to satisfy intersectionalists who gleefully interpret such anecdotes as confirmations that their power-based conceptions of society emit any discernible wisdom. With intersectionality comes the apathy towards the antics of Minister Louis Farrakhan, who has addressed accusations of anti-Semitism with the dim-witted, repulsive defence that he’s not an anti-Semite, but an “anti-Termite.” It has been commonplace for Farrakhan to dehumanize Jews, while garnering praise from thousands who have witnessed his toxicity with astounding insouciance. By sifting through his catalogue of misdeeds and gaucheries, one could assemble a compendium. For the sake of brevity, I will enumerate a few. On numerous occasions, Farrakhan has expressed his admiration for Hitler, blamed Jews for the Holocaust and has lambasted them with the false charge that they were “key-players’ in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Responses to criticisms of Farrakhan’s infractions have been routinely dishonest. In a letter rebuking Anti-Defamation League Director Abraham Foxman’s advice to Black Americans to denounce Farrakhan, Def Jam founder Russell Simmons berated Foxman, calling him “misguided” and “disrespectful.” He even went as far as claiming Foxman’s actions would “help spread anti-Semitism rather than end it.” It mustn’t have occurred to Simmons that the best method to confront prejudice is to recognize it, and disassociate one’s self from its peddlers, which was what Foxman was urging him to do. Even critics of Farrakhan downplay his antics as inconsequential since he doesn’t hold the reins of American power. Bentley Addison of the Forward writes that Farrakhan has no “institutional power” and doesn’t have the ability to “create any sort of systemic change.” Therein lies a gap in the logic of intersectional postmodernism. People like Farrakhan may not have power in the conventional sense, but to contend they don’t shape minds in a way that has a percolating effect on the body politic is inane. People will continue to be inveigled by the narrative that Jews have had a hand installing Black progression as long as figures like Farrakhan are allowed to proselytize it with no pushback. And it will hold grave consequences for Jewish-Black relations as it has historically. Pacifying Black anti-Semitism due to one’s tendency to minimize it as a manifestation of Black aggression towards white supremacy leads to further cultural degradation, and deprives Blacks of the proper agency that would help them solve issues in their communities.

The Palestinian “Resistance”

The most callous example of “virtuous” anti-Semitism is the animus toward Israel. Branded as fervent advocacy for Palestinian rights, the pathological hatred of the Jewish state evinces the lobotomizing of Leftists. Their compulsion to view acts of Palestinian terrorism as scrupulous resistance demonstrates how they obfuscate the plainly factual to further their cause. Supporting the malevolent for the sake of indulging one’s loathing for Western civilization---of which Israel is seen to be an outpost--- has provided a salubrious dose of intellectual opium. This outlook on the Israel-Palestine conflict is deep-rooted in academia through the field of “settler colonialism.” Though it can provide worthwhile insight when it’s not distorted by dogma, it exists mostly as a Marxist exercise in masquerading virtue signalling as scholarship with the intent of legitimizing the uprooting of Western liberalism. Applying this framework to Israel suggests that Zionism at its core is rooted in the abuse of Palestinians and colonial ambitions. This impels the Left to support an anti-Semitic cause, which, in turn, emboldens it. Casting Israel as the main miscreant, the field’s practitioners put forth their judgment that Israel is a colonial state that deserves comeuppance; thus, Palestinian violence is something to which onlookers should be sympathetic. Denouncing Zionism as an imperialist plot, scholar Lorenzo Veracini claims in his book Settler Colonialism, that Palestinian removal is a “foundational category in Zionist thought.” Veracini is, in fact, purveying a common straw man about Zionism. Like anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Jewish history should know, as founded by Theodore Herzl, Zionism is purely a movement to relieve the Jews of persecution by resituating them in their ancestral homeland. It’s necessary to note that “settler colonialism” was established in the leftward tilting academy of the 1960s following Israel’s triumph in the Six Day War that led to its expansion. This marked a transformation in the perception of Israel from a country trying to protect itself to a crass, imperialist aggressor. One of the first studies of Israel from a settler colonialist perspective is Maxime Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?. In this rendering, Rodinson argued that the real motive of Zionists was to exploit the land and the Arab population for their own societal benefits. Since this has become ingrained in Leftist philosophy, anti-Israel activists perceive any attempt by Israelis to secure their borders as “ethnic cleansing” and “dehumanizing the Palestinian resistance.” The “settler colonial” narrative then paints the conflict as merely a territorial one. This is hogwash. Bret Stephens indicates that Israel’s strike during the Six Day War was a preemptive response to pledges by several Arab states to erase it as a state. For the 50 years following, the Left have accused it of “occupying” areas like Gaza and the West Bank. This runs contrary to reality since Israel has disengaged from these areas on numerous occasions, and has offered the Palestinians a state (most notably in 2000 at Camp David, and in 2008, which also included the generous offer of 93% of the West Bank), to no avail. Palestinians from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas have rejected these proposals and continue to encourage hostilities. The popular allegation that Israelis are ethnically cleansing the area of Palestinians is comical. In December 2016, the UN warned of rapid Palestinian population growth, predicting that the population would double to 9.5 million by 2050. Other factors contradict depictions of the conflict as a territorial one since claims of Palestinian indigeneity are suspect after closer examination. In a study of Palestinian ancestry, Dr. Alex Joffe found that the evidence for “Jewish habitual and cultural continuity” undermines Palestinian arguments, and that the Palestinian connection to the embattled landmass is more so a product of Arab colonialism and migration “to the Southern Levant between late antiquity and the 1940s.” So, with all this in mind, what is the true source of Palestinian malice towards the Jewish state? The answer: anti-Semitism fostered by an Islamic theology that presupposes that Jews have no right to sovereignty. In the hadith, the Prophet Muhammad professes that: “ To be protected from Islam, the Jew must submit to Islam.” Imploring Jews to capitulate to his authority, he demanded: “ You need to know that the Earth belongs to Allah, and I intend to expel you from this land. If you have property, you should sell it; otherwise, you had better remember that this land belongs to Allah and Muhammad.” Echoing Muhammad’s dictations in the hadith, Hamas has a charter in which Article 7 proclaims that the “Day of Judgement will not come about until the Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews).” With the nature of Israel’s adversaries bespeaking a lack of interest in syncretism, it should come to no surprise that a fraction of the migrants to Israel were 850,000 Jews who were expelled from Arab countries. Likewise, the maltreatment of which the expulsion was a culmination, as Tunisian Jew Albert Memmi attests, was a reason why Arab Jews were considering the establishment of a Jewish state before Zionism was established in Europe. Needless to say, the so-called “decolonization” of Israel would be disastrous for these Jews. The Islamic aspects of Arab anti-Semitism have a nationalistic undercurrent that intensified under the influence of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who, distressed by the prospect of the emerging Jewish state, found common cause with his Nazi brethren during World War Two. A proponent of the Protocols, al-Husseini declared Jews had no right to pray at the Wailing Wall, and declaimed that they had substantial control over the British colonial government that allowed them to “encroach” on Muslim populations. Looking for allies to help counter the British and the creation of Israel, he allied with Hitler. In a meeting on November 28, 1941, Hitler obliged the Mufti’s request for aid and assured him that Nazi Germany was dedicated to the “destruction of the Judeo-Communist empire” and the “Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere.” Through this connection, al-Husseini flooded the Arab world with Nazi propaganda and “anti-Jewish incitement” to help in his endeavour to see “victory over Judaism” and to drive Jews “out of Arabia.” By no means an anomaly in the historical trajectory, subsequent Palestinian leaders have carried on his legacy. In Fatah’s doctrine--- the organization founded by the infamous PLO leader Yasser Arafat---the belief that Jews have no right to their autonomy is spelled out as it states that Israel is an “aberrant mistake” and that upon its extinction, Jews will be promised security in a Palestinian state if they agree to live subordinate as a “tolerated minority.” This anti-Semitic ideology, unfortunately, prevails in Palestinian society due to radical leadership and indoctrination. For example, television programs are broadcast regularly that show Palestinian youth vowing to “crush the Zionist’s soul.” These truths can be uncovered by a perfunctory reading of the available material. Yet Leftists remain steadfastly in their delusion that the Arab cause is solely an anti-colonial one akin to those led by Gandhi instead of one founded in opposition to Jewish freedom. As a result, left-wing politicians will mischaracterize Zionism in order to separate it from true Judaism, while being supportive of groups like Hamas; students launch virulent attacks against Israel and Jews as university committees endorse “Israeli Apartheid Week”; and academic organizations like the American Studies Association deem themselves virtuous when they participate in boycotts of Israeli professors and institutions. Galvanized by a belief in false pretenses, the Left’s perspective on anti-Semitism is perverted by a myopic obduracy when it comes to highlighting their opponents’ foibles. This is then exacerbated by an instinctual urge to come to the defence of those they see as the victimized class. Thus, causing them to absolve themselves and the “victimized” of the responsibility to overcome any anti-Semitic inclinations. Ultimately, this begets anti-Semitism’s continued influence as it’s cloaked in the Left’s moralism that gives it a greater appeal.