Politic?

The Classic Anti-Semitic Tropes ... and Beyond ... Back by Popular Demand

"There's an ideological pattern that is common."
"The world is seen as in a bad shape, and what hinders it becoming a better place are the Jews."
Gunther Jikeli, European anti-Semitism expert, Indiana University

"Today, mainstream European and North American politicians, even presidents, premiers and prime ministers, don't hesitate to flirt with or embrace overtly anti-Semitic messages and memes."
David Nirenberg, dean, Divinity School, University of Chicago

"Globalization and especially the crisis of 2008 have strengthened a feeling of being at the mercy of mechanisms that we do not understand, let alone control."
"From there it is only a small step to classical conspiracy theories, which have always formed the core of anti-Semitism."
Stefanie Schuler-Springorum, head, Center for anti-Semitism Research, Berlin

Graves at the Jewish cemetery in Quatzenheim, near Strasbourg, France, have been desecrated with swastikas.

Anti-Semitism was in bad odour after the Second World War in a world that convinced itself it was utterly horrified at the spectacle of surviving Jews released by their liberators from Nazi death camps, more dead than alive, telling their stories of brutality and inhuman torment when the world turned its face away from the suffering of Jews under the Third Reich and felt twinges of guilt when it was revealed what their fate had been; slave labour and mass extermination. And while not all Jews were murdered, half of the world's population of Jews was eliminated from the gene pool.

An elimination from which world Jewry has never recovered. What it did recover, however, was its ancient homeland, and to it flocked the remnants of European Jews who had survived the Holocaust, along with those Jews who had long been integrated into the Middle East living in Arab countries for thousands of years, but disinherited with the creation of the State of Israel. Diaspora Jews living abroad as North Americans or in the Pale of Settlement transferred their allegiance to the Jewish state to fight for its existence. And fight they did, against the arrayed military forces of their neighbours.

As long as Jews were viewed as a pathetic rag-tag underdog struggling to resist world forces of mass destruction, the left championed their cause. Once it became obvious that the weakling had been reborn as the defiant survivor refusing to succumb to new efforts to eliminate it from the world stage the attention it began to draw was that of the bully, disinheriting Arab Palestinians from land that was once the homeland of Palestinian Jews.

Anti-Semitism has surged in recent years in France. A man holds a placard reading "I am afraid but I am here" during a gathering on Place de la Republique in January 10, 2016 in Paris.

France reported a 74 percent spike in anti-Semitic incidents in 2018 with over 500 incidents reported, spurring President Emmanuel Macron to name it the worst level of anti-Semitism since World War II, while in Germany in the last several years, violent anti-Semitic attacks rose by 60 percent, according to government statistics. No word whether those same government statistics point out that the rising tide of anti-Semitism matched the renewed influx of Muslims into those countries.

The virulent hatred of the growing Muslim migrants into Western Europe has fuelled the embers of anti-Semitism to match the flames of the war years. Jews had always warned that they were the proverbial canary in the mine, that whatever happened to Jews would eventually broaden to include the general population in existential threats. Europe has grown accustomed to the occasional random terrorist attack, hastening to reassure their Muslim populations they are not held to blame for the lunatic violence of a few hardened Islamists.

A crowd holds up placards and British flags as they gather for a demonstration organized by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism outside the head office of the British Opposition Labour Party in central London on April 8, 2018. TOLGA AKMEN/Getty Images

Couched in language that ensures evasion of casting blame, anxious to escape charges of "Islamophobia". Lest we think that anti-Semitism is increasingly widespread despite the increase of incidents, polls indicate otherwise; it is imported and nativist bigots that thrive in their ancient enmity toward Jews in an atmosphere that seems more pervasively permissive leading to brazen displays of Jew-hatred given greater credence as long as it is couched in blame for the plight of the Palestinians.

Leftists now enjoy reviling Israel, while far-right political figures are fascinated that a tiny state -- becoming increasingly conservative in its readiness to portray itself as right-leaning in a neighbourhood that respects might, not right, when to lean too far in the direction of appeasement one is tarred with the brush of cowardice, inviting further attacks -- is winning its battle for the minds and support of the hesitant to commit.

In black communities where, during the civil rights movement, Jewish leftists formed the core of non-Black support for Black empowerment, the sentiment has turned completely around. Where Martin Luther King was firm in his support for Israel and condemnation of anti-Semitism, his successors now revel in reviling Jews and blaming them for all that has gone wrong for the Black community, before and and since liberation.

In this Feb. 27, 2017, file photo, Rabbi Joshua Bolton of the University of Pennsylvania's Hillel center surveys damaged headstones at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Philadelphia. The shooting rampage that killed more than 10 people at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018, is being decried as the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history. Yet the carnage, however unprecedented, is not an aberration: Year after year, decade after decade, anti-Semitism proves to be among the most entrenched and pervasive forms of hatred and bigotry in the United States. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Larma, File)

Blacks, Muslims, feminists, Latinos, intersectionals, the LGBTQ-2 community, yellow-vesters -- even anti-Vaxxers -- all love to loathe Jews, accusing them of conspiracies to commit all the wrongs in the world, even while in Israel all those very demographics enjoy equality status and freedom denied them elsewhere in the world, particularly in Islamic societies. Being anti-Israel, anti-Semitic is in vogue and it reeks its stench throughout the communities of the left.

"The Left calls the tune, and just as the Left settled in on abortion in the early 1970s and marriage redefinition in the ’90s, it has now settled in on opposition to Israel – not merely the policies of its government, but its very existence as a Jewish state and homeland of the Jewish people."
Princeton scholar Robert George