Anti-Zionism as the ‘Acceptable Face’ of Antisemitism

By Hugh Fitzgerald | November 23, 2024

Those who denounce Israel for its nonexistent “ethnic cleansing,” and still worse, for its so-called “genocide” in Gaza, those who harass and beat up Jews for not reciting a pledge of allegiance to a “free Palestine” “from the river to the sea” — a call to destroy Israel and to replace it with a 23rd Arab state — those who believe that the Jews, unlike every other people, have no right to a state of their own, those who diminish or distort or deny the reality of the Holocaust, according to Swedish Professor Christer Mattson, are all antisemites, who disguise their pathological hatred of Jews as a well-justified animus against a “fascist colonial-settler state,” built on stolen land, that has no right to exist. He foresees a wave — a decuman — of antisemitism this coming year, fueled by the massive misreporting on the wars in Gaza and Lebanon. “Expert warns of a ‘perfect antisemitic storm’ masked as anti-Zionism in 2024,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, November 19, 2024:

The current global situation for Jews is a “perfect antisemitic storm,” Prof. Christer Mattson, director of the Segerstedt Institute at the University of Gothenburg, said at the 2024 European Jewish Association (EJA) Auschwitz delegation on Monday.

An expert on radicalization and antisemitism, Mattson explained how the idea of a perfect storm – a geological term referring to a storm fueled from different sources at the same time – can be applied to antisemitism.

In his speech, he drew on the different sources of antisemitism such as the far Left, the far Right, Islamism, and traditional Christian anti-Jewishness, among others. In 2024, Mattson said, all of these are active at the same time, contributing to the rise in hate.

Now, this antisemitism has taken the form of anti-Zionism, which those who hate Jews use to mask their hatred under an acceptable facade, the professor said.

He added that this masking has been prolific in regimes that wanted to make use of traditional antisemitism but without especially mentioning Jews, providing examples such as the USSR.

“Antisemitism is easier to sell without specifically referring to Jews,” he said….

Speaking ahead of the annual EJA visit of key diplomats and political figures to Auschwitz, 80 years since its liberation, Mattson said he did not believe that Birkenau was a death factory.

“It was a Nazi dream factory,” he said. “They mass produced their vision of a Europe without Jews.”

The professor stated that to “a large extent,” the Nazis succeeded.

He referenced the drastic decrease in the Jewish populations of European cities, such as Rhodes, Greece, which used to have a thriving Jewish population – at its peak, numbering around 5,000 – and which is now believed to be fewer than 20.

“Auschwitz is more present in Rhodes, in Germany, in Sweden, than it is in Auschwitz itself,” Mattson concluded.

Auschwitz is present — the Nazis have won — wherever we see the great diminishment, or complete absence, of Jews throughout Europe. Six million of them were removed by murder; the millions more who would have been the children and grandchildren of those six million who did not live to have them also must haunt us. How many writers, painters, philosophers, actors, singers, comedians, scientists, doctors, inventors, and of course perfectly ordinary salt-of-the-earth types, too, had their lives cut short, or never were born in the first place because those who would have been their parents or grandparents were murdered in the extermination camps?

Go to towns in Europe where thousands of Jews once lived, and where — as in the Greek city of Rhodes — only ten or twenty still remain. As Professor Mattson says, in such places “Auschwitz is present” because the Jews are absent. Right now there are 20 million Muslims who have “replaced” the Jews in Europe. They carry with them the virus of Islamic antisemitism into Europe, now grafted onto the traditional Christian variety, and have spread it everywhere. Mobs of Muslims in Amsterdam conduct a “Jodenjacht” or “Jew hunt.”At an Israel-France soccer match in Paris, both the Israeli players, and the handful of their supporters who dared to appear, are subject to antisemitic booing and catcalls. Jews have been, and are being, attacked on the streets of London, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Malmo, dappertutto. On American campuses, Israel is routinely denounced; Jewish students and faculty, who may have expressed no opinion about Israel, are vilified, harassed, sometimes physically attacked. So little has been done by university administrators to crack down on this antisemitism that masquerades as anti-Zionism, that Congress has felt it needed to step in, and thus the Committee on Education and the Workforce has held extensive hearings, and produced a 122-page report, on antisemitism on college campuses and the failure of administrators to deal with this new expression of the oldest hatred.

Is Professor Christer Mattson correct? Is there really a “perfect antisemitic storm” brewing behind the façade of anti-Zionism? I hope that he is wrong. I fear that he is right.