Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
For the last several years, in the wake of proliferating online anti-Semitism from the “alt-right” and especially after the shootings in Pittsburgh and Poway, the conventional wisdom has been that the most dangerous Jew-hatred is a right-wing phenomenon, intimately bound up with white-supremacist fanaticism. The neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” epitomized that paradigm. So did Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh mass shooter, who declared that “all Jews must die” and railed against immigrants.
But anti-Semitism is equally a phenomenon of the left. In our hyperpolarized environment — as I can testify from personal experience — many liberals choose to denounce Jew-hatred only when it can be pinned on the right, while diehard conservatives prefer to focus on anti-Semitic tropes that crop up on the left. Immediately after the Jersey City murders, Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib was quick to pin the bloodshed on “white supremacy" — obviously unaware that one of the killers was a follower of Black Hebrew Israelites, a hate group.
When it comes to hating Jews, left and right make common ground. The far right spins deranged conspiracy theories about a Zionist Occupation Government that controls US foreign policy, while the far left paints AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, as a uniquely malignant force. “This absence of a dividing line between left and right when it comes to anti-Semitism,” observed Emory University’s renowned historian Deborah Lipstadt, “was evident when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke clicked ‘like’ on Representative Ilhan Omar’s tweet claiming that American support of Israel is ‘all about the Benjamins baby.’”
If the long, bitter history of anti-Semitism teaches anything, it is that “the oldest hatred” can take any shape and adapt to any ideology. Nazis or Communists, Christians or Muslims, Trump backers or Trump foes, white extremists or black extremists — hostility to Jews grows in any soil. And if you condemn anti-Semitism only when it comes from the team you oppose, you haven’t condemned a thing.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/12/30/opinion/jew-haters-right-left/
But anti-Semitism is equally a phenomenon of the left. In our hyperpolarized environment — as I can testify from personal experience — many liberals choose to denounce Jew-hatred only when it can be pinned on the right, while diehard conservatives prefer to focus on anti-Semitic tropes that crop up on the left. Immediately after the Jersey City murders, Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib was quick to pin the bloodshed on “white supremacy" — obviously unaware that one of the killers was a follower of Black Hebrew Israelites, a hate group.
When it comes to hating Jews, left and right make common ground. The far right spins deranged conspiracy theories about a Zionist Occupation Government that controls US foreign policy, while the far left paints AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, as a uniquely malignant force. “This absence of a dividing line between left and right when it comes to anti-Semitism,” observed Emory University’s renowned historian Deborah Lipstadt, “was evident when former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke clicked ‘like’ on Representative Ilhan Omar’s tweet claiming that American support of Israel is ‘all about the Benjamins baby.’”
If the long, bitter history of anti-Semitism teaches anything, it is that “the oldest hatred” can take any shape and adapt to any ideology. Nazis or Communists, Christians or Muslims, Trump backers or Trump foes, white extremists or black extremists — hostility to Jews grows in any soil. And if you condemn anti-Semitism only when it comes from the team you oppose, you haven’t condemned a thing.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/12/30/opinion/jew-haters-right-left/
