Modern day world wide anti semitism, paradoxically following the Hamas attack of Israeli community settlements and a Peace Festival on October 7 2023, has been largely based on new rationales These add to the older tropes justifying the millennia old hatred. All the justifications for Jew loathing can be defined by artificially creating 4 categories - The New Left, The Old Left, The New Right and The Old Right. Jay H. Ell will attempt to outline the philosophies of these entities.
Before expanding on modern global antisemitism its adherents and their theories, Jay H. Ell believes that the context of this phenomenon is germane to the discourse.
THE MIDDLE EAST STATE OF PLAY OF ACTORS CIRCA MARCH 2024
HAMAS is a self declared “freedom fighter” organization whose stated aim is genocide of the Jews and a Palestine “From River to the Sea”. Sinwar is at its head. There is appropriate world wide empathy for the Palestinians caught in the middle in Gaza,
ISRAEL is a democracy that currently has a right wing extremist government with two messianic figures who believe in “From the Sea to the River”. Netanyahu is at its head. There is scant empathy for the Israelis.
GAZA is a humanitarian disaster area for which there is joint culpability. History will decide who shoulders the overwhelming blame. The potential for starvation of the Palestinians has led the United Sates to acquiesce to a Security UNO Council resolution for an immediate cease fire for humanitarian aid and hostage release. Both of the latter have to be the priorities of the Israeli government. However the Netanyahu response is to to invade Rafah!. The invasion of Rafah is a war cry rather than an immediate necessity.
ISRAEL’S Netanyahu and his government have an 80 percent disapproval rating. They will be removed peacefully in a democratic election or by the Israeli Knesset. While there are determined moves to axe the Israeli Prime Minister, the reasons he has been accepted thus far are outlined in the blog CIVILIAN CASUALTIES - HAMAS, NETANYAHU, BIDEN, UNO ,AND THE SUNNIS, March 3 2024.
HAMAS came into power by force. Sinwar and Hamas won’t subject themselves to democratic change. Only force can remove them.
THE IRANIAN LED RESISTANCE, unlike Israel is not asked what their “day after” plan will be. Will it be the return of 8 million Jewish “colonialists” to countries of “origin” including Islamic states, gas ovens or slaughter Hamas style?
OCTOBER 7 2023 saw an attack unbridled in savagery and sadism on innocent Israeli citizens with the taking of over 200 hostages, The Israeli response was to eradicate the perpetrators, Hamas. The world response was to attack not only Israel but diaspora Jews regardless of what they believed.
The Middle East war has spilled over into internal politics, with, first and foremost Netanyahu running against Biden, Schumer running against Netanyahu and Trump running against Biden.
GLOBAL ANTI SEMITISM
For the first time in history Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora, (for practical purposes America and to a lesser extent Europe), have been the subject of widespread antisemitism Ironically the protagonists of this mantra for this modern day prejudice have differing rationales since anti semites themselves never admit they are anti semites. They always piously behold that “Some of their best friends are jews, even grandchildren”. Jews have been hated since time immemorial because of, what they believe, for all the myriad of evils they are allegedly responsible for and for being born.
Ironically too, the Jews of Israel and the Jews of the Diaspora, that support Israel, are in different worlds in their analysis of the status quo. As the podcasters in “For Heaven’s Sake” explained, the Diaspora’s understanding of the Israeli conflict is more like the Afghanistan and Iraq strifes while for Israel this is existential, for survival more akin to World War11. What both these Jewish constituencies are acutely aware of is that the Jews themselves don’t define who a Jew is, rather it is the anti semites that decide.
SELECTIVE MORALITY
While the invective started immediately after October 7 it has been fueled by the devastation of Gaza and the inevitable collateral damage that urban warfare brings. The situation is not helped by an obscene right wing government in power in Israel. However no one is calling for the end of Russia, Hungary or China because of their regimes. Russian immigrants in London are not being warned to go to the center of London because of the plunder of Ukraine. No Hungarian immigrant captain of a sport’s team is being axed in Australia because he is Hungarian. No children of ex patriots of China are being harassed in school or College in France on account of what the Chinese government is doing to the Uyghurs.
So why the Jews? The Jews who constitute 00.02 percent of the world’s population. Besides the hatred of the Old Right including Iran and its Resistance movement as well as the growing numbers of Neo Nazis, and extreme right wingers, what is the rationale of these people who come out in droves? While the anti semitic entities overlap in rationales it is useful to examine them as “purists”. The most disconcerting and ubiquitous of these is the New Left.
THE NEW LEFT
The New Left, including many Jews, no longer equate liberalism with Zionism, which in this instance is the right of the Jews, outside of the diaspora, to have their own state as voted by UNO in 1947. They equate the current Israeli extremist government with Zionism. They like the Israeli right wing believe that the two state solution is dead - they only see a Palestinian one and assume the Palestinians will allow the Israelis to live side by side with them in a happy democracy.
The New Left accepts implicitly that October 7 was a legitimate “freedom fight” with wildly inaccurate comparisons to the African National Congress struggle against apartheid. They exculpate Hamas, which is the dominant political and military Palestinian organization for the resulting carnage and starvation in Gaza when that was their objective to achieve victory, which indeed they have, in the propaganda war that followed.
Many of the liberal entities, that Jews disproportionately were involved in, have morphed into New Left entities. These include The Women Movement, Black Lives Matter and the ANC in South Africa. Jews stood side by side with Martin Luther King. They formed the first organization for the advancement of “colored people” in America. Ruth Bader - Ginsberg and Bella Abzug pioneered equality for women. For a lengthy essay on the subject see Frank Foer, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending: The Atlantic March 4, 2024).
The apartheid struggle in South Africa was awash with Jews on every level as the architect of true apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd warned, “That it hadn’t passed unnoticed how many Jews were in the opposition”.
As far as the New Left are concerned it is isn’t the Liberal Organizations that have changed it is The Jews, The Zionists. They are the ones that are out of step and not with the program. So the “Liberal Organizations” say nothing to the rape and plunder by Hamas. They ignore Hamas's sacrifice of the Palestinians much as the fellow travelers accepted Stalin’s genocide as part of the price to pay for a world wide Dictatorship by the Proletariat.. The LGBT groups in spite of the fact that they have marches in Jerusalem, proclaim “LGBT support ‘From The River To The Sea”.This regardless of the current draconian policies of The Resistance. Women, in Palestine are, to put it kindly, second class citizens while Israeli women are raped in the tunnels yet the silence of the world wide women movements is deafening. In the "day after" the moral police will be in control of women as they are today in Iran.
The New left argue with the arrogance and with certitude they have the power of history going forward much like the Fascists and the Communists did in the twentieth century. At their least radical they argue for a cease fire without mentioning the hostages….. They mock protagonists, even Holocaust survivors, who are supporters of the two state solution, as being out of date. They then lampoon liberals saying look who are on your side - the MAGA Republicans. The false equivalency if accurate would mean America and ISIS K are on the same page because they both are against Putin’s Russia.
They are wrong, liberalism like true democracy is a messy business. Once again there is a simplistic social engineering answer to a complex problem. For example they have no idea who will govern their one state where the Palestinians will be in a majority. Like Bibi Netanyahu they have no idea of the day after. It will just magically happen,.
However there is a philosophy behind all of this
INTERSECTIONALISM - THE BASIS OF THE NEW LEFT
There is no longer much love for liberalism, even if it has evolved to its present day form to the modern welfare state with the influence of the Enlightenment philosophers from Milton to Marx. Liberalism, it is argued is one dimensional while the new philosophy of “Intersectionanlsm” brings together multiple social factors. These factors such as feminism and race inherently combine to produce an identity that is subject to oppression that cannot be ameliorated. Attempting to fight racism alone, for example, is doomed to failure as it is interconnected with other factors.
The oppressed are marginalized. Societies are thus divided into the weak, oppressed, and the strong, oppressors, period. It follows that nothing can undo colonialism. It lives on as ineo colonialism. You have to side with the weak in their fight against the strong. Rationale and facts are irrelevant.
Similar to this line of thinking is Herbert Marcuse’s revisionist Marxism. He believed that where Marx got it wrong was that it was not a class struggle it was a subjugated identity struggle. Consequently he was heavily into rights for women.
Marcuse like the intersectionalists in their identity philosophies have been criticized for not taking individuals into account. That is the least of their problems. The upshot is the day after 10/7 there was no condemnation of the savagery rather the support of it.The underdogs had sought to regain their land. What followed was, inter alia, THE UNSURPRISING SILENCE AS ISRAELI WOMEN ARE RAPED IN TUNNELS. (See blog
January 27, 2024).
THE NEW RATIONALE OF ANTI SEMITISM - THE OLD LEFT
The Old Left are not so old. They have a new hypothesis as why the State of Israel is illegitimate. Their new mantra was articulated in 2001, 7 years before Israel’s last offer to the Palestinians for a Two State Solution and 4 years before Israel unilaterally ceded Gaza. Using the present day principles of what constitutes evil, The United Nations Conference on Racism declared that Israel was guilty of apartheid, racism, attempted genocide, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. Although this finding was subsequently reversed by the General Assembly it stuck. In another historical irony, the morally, politically and financially bankrupt South African Government seized on the Israeli defensive response a few weeks into the war to charge Israel at The International Court of Justice with the aforementioned crimes. (See blog January 15,2024 “IRAN’S NEWEST PROXY, SOUTH AFRICA, LIBELS ISRAEL AS GENOCIDAL”.
The late Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Jonathan Sacks interpreted that the basis for anti semitism morphed through the ages from Jews being different, for killing Christ, because they threw poison into wells, killed children to use their blood to make unleavened bread, were racially inferior, (still there today with the Old Right), were capitalists, were communists and now because they have a fascist state exhibiting the modern day evils on land stolen from the Palestinians.
THE NEW RIGHT
The basis of this philosophy is that truth is perception.The granddaddy of all this was the French philosopher Albert Foucalt.
Foucalt was into knowledge and its relationship to power. The elites controlled the masses by claiming they had the monopoly on facts and science, both of which they opined were subject to objective analysis. What these power mongers were claiming, Foucalt argued, was that the masses were ignorant. However, he continued, the masses’ perceptions were just as valid as the facts and science of the elites. (Look around - you may recognize the phenomenon).
The upshot of all this baloney is that Hamas’s attack was justified and what followed in Gaza is all Israel’s fault. (See blog: THE RATIONALE FOR REFRAMING THE ISRAEL/HAMAS CONFLICT,December 30, 2023).
AT THE END OF THE DAY
Once again the world is perpetrating a pogrom on Jewry which is novel in its rationales. Once again it is impossible for Jews to counter it, How do you prove that you are not poisoning the wells or that you aren’t in a secret plot to take over the world?
Joe Biden, the leader of America and the free world, needs every bit of support in this existential struggle between reality and madness in America, Ukraine and the Middle East. Now is not the time to be uninvolved. He is correct in making the 2024 Presidential election about “Who we are”. (See blog: "OLD"JOE IS JUST BID-EN HIS TIME, March 19, 2024.
The action of the United States in no longer shielding Israel politically on the world scene has yet to play out. The latter outcome coming after repeated warnings that Israel needed to have a valid “day after” plan and just could not continue hostilities with famine raging in Gaza and Israeli hostages languishing in the labyrinthine underground Hamas tunnel complex. Netanyahu better watch his false braggadocio because Biden can take his battleships and go home.
In the words of the composer, Irving Berlin, another American Jew, who wrote the biggest hit song in history,“White Christmas”, - “God Bless America”. He penned that too.
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