My weekly JNS column was published today, in which I make an attempt to analyze the nature of the current wave of antisemitism and how it is both similar to and different from earlier iterations of the ideology.
One thing I omitted and perhaps needs a longer discussion is the progressive belief that, as a New York Times staffer reportedly put it, “I feel like everything is race.” That is, many progressives believe that race is the sole defining metaphysical force of existence.
This quite literally is Nazism. Usually, I don’t care for such comparisons, as they’re almost invariably inaccurate and hyperbolic, but if Nazism was based on anything, it was based on the idea that everything is race.
Obviously, progressive racism is very different from Nazi racism, in that it more or less turns the Nazis’ racial hierarchy on its head. Nonetheless, the foundation of the two ideologies is the same, and I do not think it is a coincidence that they both embrace an exterminationist antisemitism.
The head of the African Union just went on a shrieking anti-Israel rant, including a fairly disgusting moral equivalence between Hamas’s rampage of crimes against humanity and Israel’s attempt to achieve compensatory justice.
This will have some impact on the Western left, much as the recent diplomatic rebukes from South Africa have done. The main reason is the Western left’s general fetishization of the Third World, which is particularly potent in the case of South Africa. There is a reason the left cannot stop babbling about “Israeli apartheid.”
Of course, the right has its own kind of fetishization, and the two taken together add up to an unedifying Manicheanism. Put simply, the peoples of the Third World are generally regarded by the left as saints and by the right as barbarians.
Neither of these, of course, is even slightly accurate. To the extent that one can make any generalizations about billions of human beings, the peoples of the Third World are just like everybody else, which means that, at various times, they can be something like a saint or a barbarian—just as everybody else can—but no more than that.
Nonetheless, at least the right’s fantasy is self-evidently absurd and easily debunked. The left’s, on the other hand, is clouded by hypocrisy. For example, the left vilifies Israel for its (often exaggerated) connections with the apartheid regime in South Africa, but never mentions the ANC’s very strong connections to the Qaddafi regime in Libya and the PLO.
I do not believe that, by pointing this out, one indicts or exonerates either Israel or the ANC. Both were involved in a desperate struggle for existence, and in such situations, one cannot be very choosy. It does, however, acknowledge that sainthood is impossible, and this is probably a good thing.
South Africa and the African Union’s current conduct underlines this point. Whether subjectively or objectively, they are giving aid and comfort to a genocidal terrorist movement and attempting to save it from destruction. In addition, they are using language that incites hate and violence against Jews—including the relatively large South African Jewish community—and defames Israel in a manner they would never tolerate if directed at themselves.
All of this forces or ought to force us to acknowledge that the mere fact of being from the Third World grants no indulgences. The peoples of the Third World are just as capable of being biased, prejudiced, racist, and antisemitic as anyone else. Their bigotry should carry no more weight or respectability than that of an affluent Westerner and ought to be condemned accordingly.
Sainthood and its discontents are also a major factor in the widespread and frankly absurd phenomenon of politicians, activists, and journalists constantly claiming that, along with a wave of antisemitism—the existence of which they only begrudgingly acknowledge—there is also a wave of Islamophobia sweeping the United States.
The problem is that this simply isn’t true. As far as I can tell, there have been some isolated incidents, but no wave of Islamophobia. For example, there are no mobs of thousands rampaging through New York City calling for the annihilation of all Muslims. By contrast, both statistics and the evidence of our eyes prove that there is now a concerted, conscious, and well-funded campaign underway led by radical Muslim Americans and their leftist allies to destroy the American Jewish community.
The need to lie about this is, of course, partly driven by the need to conceal that it is happening at all or, if denial proves impossible, to justify and legitimize it. However, it is also due to the fact that radical Muslims and leftists have long since been appointed—mostly by themselves—as saints, and saints by definition cannot be guilty of anything. As a result, the persecutors must be recast as the persecuted, and the victims either erased or recast as monsters who deserve their own destruction.
This is satanic stuff, of course, but so long as the Axis of Antisemitism continues to control large sections of the media, academia, and the progressive movement, it will continue.