Why such a surge of worldwide antisemitism

 by  Alan Dershowitz (originally posted Feb 17/19)

Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews?

Why have we seen such an increase in anti-Semitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in western Europe?

To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators.

False.

The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans: by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and other Europeans, both Western and Eastern.

If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis, the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims.

In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout western Europe toward Israel should surprise no one.

“Oh no,” we hear from European apologists. “This is different. We don’t hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We are left-wing, so we can’t be anti-Semites.”

Nonsense.

The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire to Karl Marx, to Levrenti Beria, to Robert Faurisson, to today’s hard-left Israel bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Mars to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler.

The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red – victims of extremism whether it be the ultra-nationalism of Khmelnitsky to the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.

“But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can’t be anti-Semites?”

Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo. Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite.

He denies that the Holocaust is historically proved but he believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzah. And he thinks it’s “rational” to burn down synagogues.

Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber!   “But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians,” the European apologists insist, “and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog.”

No, you’re not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime?

Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups.

Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt?

Oh, wait! The Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan .. Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September, when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don’t remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns — because there weren’t any.

When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho-hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Maale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam parts ways with Scarlett Johansson for advertising a soda company that employs hundreds of Palestinians

Keep in mind that Oxfam has provided “aid and material support” to two anti-Israel terrorist groups, according to the Tel Aviv-based Israeli Law Group.

The hypocrisy of so many hard-left western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable based on the sordid history of Western Europe’s treatment of the Jews.

Even England , which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939, which prevented the Jews of Europe from seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine .. And Ireland , which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.

The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves.

Theodore Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe’s Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew hatred and return to their original homeland, which is now the state of Israel …

None of this is to deny Israel’s imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, must less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups including the Palestinians.

Nor is this to deny that many western European individuals and some western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their forbearers were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors.

As author Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents’ Europe were covered with graffiti saying, “Jews, go to Palestine” Now they say, “Jews, get out of Palestine”, by which is meant Israel …

Who do these western European bigots think they’re fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents’ old biases.

Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people. Many doing so are the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

For shame!

March 23, 2019 | 53 Comments »

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3 Comments / 53 Comments

  1. I wrote this today:

    “This is a quote from a James P. Pinkerton on Breitbart today

    “The Russiagate conspiracy exposed a fake new trifecta. First, reporters and their allies hate Trump; second, they over-trust their sources; and third, they have such a strong reason to believe anything bad about Trump that they end up as dupes, playing unwitting roles in a conspiracy theory.”

    It is very important for me to note that in the Russia Dossier affair that the leading role was played by RINOs like the Bush Family, by the Democrats and the Hillary criminal family, and this in conjunction with the hated our common hated enemy the British, because I am Irish. My people were and are very seriously wounded by the British ruling class and so were/are yours. This is because and as if to highlight the historical damage the BRITISH MI6 agent Steele played a huge role in this situation. The problem is intensified because the newly elected Trump had to work with his chosen VP Pence, and Pence has been a serious issue from the beginning, working to set up General Flynn, who was the key man in the military of the US who nearly alone recognized the issue of Jihad, and that the normal and correct thing to do was support Saddam, support Gadhafi and support Assad against the Jihad, an alliance very real but a critical alliance too.

    Remember that Mussolini was as far as I can gather not an antisemite but passed laws in order to accomodate the Nazis in Germany…This comes into a discussion I have been having (near the end of the comments which are being split at the 50 mark but it is a simple number 1 back)
    https://www.israpundit.org/why-such-a-surge-of-worldwide-antisemitism/comment-page-2/#comment-63356000204971

    The bottom line of this discussion is that the essay by Marx on the Jewish Question has been so systematically lied about by people like Prager but here there are many, and I have exposed well that Marx was a great defender of the Jews against Bruno Bauer. The lesson of this is that I defend President Trump against these Fascists like Pelossi allied with AOC and Omar, but that does not mean that he and all of Breitbart, especially a British character there called Delingpoole, who attacks politically school children, how crude and odious, do not lie totally on the issue of Global Warming and Mass Extinction. See my initial work on http://www.trotskyist.org which sadly is no more than a sketch.

    That brings me to my initial point. It is much better to have a programme, agreed by like minded people, and a party, and fight for that inside of the workers and especially youth movement. I have told Laura before that I have s special attachment to the Jews because the Irish Jews were treated very badly by the Irish republicans, that should not have been, and was an issue totally of LEADERSHIP. Most of the Irish Jews came from Latvia and especially Lithuania. I want that story to be told in Ireland and also at the same time be exposing the Big Lie of “Palestinianism”.

    I was rushed when I wrote my question last night but really I am not sorry it took that form because many of the best Jewish people today in America are (speaking very generally) of the intellectual middle class and they are separated from socialism etcetera partly because they think it is all about what goes on in their own individual heads. Individualism is the main enemy. We have to remain true to our individuality but also to know we have to band together to change things. So I asked what is your position? And definitely there is no unity of purpose at all. Yet I see a huge ferment among young Jews today in America and the emergence of the RINOs against President Trump, actually it was long before he was elected, and then the rapid change of the Democrats into a Fascist type definitely antisemitic party…this is causing huge repercussions and there is simply no answer from capitalism nor is there a Trotskyist Party, the likes of wsws is really an antisemitic outfit. This is an incredibly difficult situation.”
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/203619173451221/permalink/578675289278939/

  2. Adam

    I quoted it March 24 6.36

    This essay is fundamental because the Marx haters, who in a definite way are also antisemites, at least no friends of the Jews in an historical sense, make a bee line to extract from the essay, when Marx goes into his deep ironizing mode, a phrase here or a phrase there…the fascists do this to President Trump all the time. The bottom line in this essay is that Marx was fighting AGAINST the antisemite Bruno Bauer, was fighting for political rights for Jews in Prussia (the huge issue of the times), and also as if that was not enough was lauding fully the AMERICAN SYSTEM set up by the Founding Fathers of making religion a private matter.

    On the other point there is some truth but it is debatable. Marx was already well on his way. He played with Proudhon for a while, in the way you might do with somebody you meet until you find out and think more on what they are saying and doing. In that regard. The important thing is that anarchism is what you have in all of this fascist left movement around AOC and anarchism was tested out in the struggle in Spain against Franco and despite all their words they ended up joining the Spanish Popular Front and caved in to the Stalinism, gravedigger of the Revolution in all regards. As a result Franco won with the most grave consequences. Jews have an historical interest in Spain.

    My interest is partly in how far the bourgeois of today have twisted the truth of this essay. If they can lie so copiously on this then they can do the same on Global Warming also with disastrous results. There is no end to these lies. So I defend President Trump against Meuller, Steele and these Fascist criminals, but there is need for a great pursuit of “The Truth” in all things.

    The following essay although I had no connection with the individual and disagreed with most is a pillar of truth on this issue. The Trotskyist like I am can disagree partly, in total, and yet see important progress being made, as here.

    “Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Anti-Semitism – Robert Fine – Engage Journal Issue 2 – May 2006
    November 4, 2015 — David Hirsh
    Let us explode the myth that Karl Marx was in some sense anti-Semitic in his critique of capitalism. The myth arises in part out of the inability of a very diverse array of commentators to read Marx in the original, in part out of a deafness to the uses of the ironic style in Marx’s writings, and especially out of the presupposition of an intimate association between revolutionary socialism and anti-Semitism. From his earliest writings Marx sought to develop a radical critique of all existing conditions which distinguished itself from other forms of radicalism by its complete and explicit rejection of any anti-Semitic coloration.

    There were to be sure, strong anti-Semitic currents on the European left in Marx’s time, but Marx defined himself and his own radicalism in opposition to such currents. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the ‘left’, if we can call it thus, was a battle ground on which anti-Semitic and anti-anti-Semitic currents battled with one another right up until the Dreyfus case in France. The position of Marx was one which clearly and distinctly had no truck with anti-Semitism in any form and his particular supplement was to show that anti-Semitism was a symptom of deep political problems within what might broadly be called the communist or anti-capitalist movement. On the whole, Marx did not see anti-Semitism as a motivating force on the left but rather as a sign of other political and intellectual deficiencies.

    Marx’s 1843 essay On the Jewish Question was an important and early case in point. In this essay Marx’s aim was to defend the right of Jews to full civil and political emancipation (that is, to equal civil and political rights) alongside all other German citizens. The target of Marx’s critique was one of the mainstays of the young Hegelian movement, a well-known radical by the name of Bruno Bauer. In the previous year Bauer had written a text calledThe Jewish Question, in which he argued that Jews had to give up their Judaism if they were to become worthy of equal rights. His core argument was this: that as long as Jews remain Jewish, they are too consumed by Jewish self-interest and communalism to be worthy of full citizenship. In effect, Bauer was calling for opposition to the nascent movement for Jewish emancipation in Germany. His long essay was replete with anti-Semitic themes: if Jews were ill-treated in the Christian world, they provoked this mistreatment by their obstinacy; Jews were not hated because they were misunderstood since true understanding ought to lead to hatred; Jews had lost interest in the progress of man and concentrated entirely on personal advantage; Jews had evolved no moral principle from their suffering; and so forth.

    Marx affirmed the claim of Jews to full civil and political rights regardless of whether or not they choose to remain Jewish. While Marx was a critic of all religions and religious sects, including Judaism, he affirmed the right of everyone to practice religion freely without state privilege or discrimination. There was no reason to make an exception of the Jews. There could be no freedom from religion without the freedom to be a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Moslem, etc. while at the same time being a full citizen of the state. While Bauer echoed the generally prejudicial representation of the Jew as ‘merchant’ and ‘moneyman’, Marx’s riposte was that in the modern world ‘money has become a world power and the practical spirit of the Jews has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples’. In other words, why pick on the Jews? If the practical spirit of Judaism is moneymaking, as Bauer suggests, this hardly distinguishes Jews from the great array of non-Jewish entrepreneurs, merchants and bankers who have risen to ascendancy in contemporary society. The idea that the Jew is fundamentally more rooted in money making than the Christian is as wrong-headed as the idea that the Jew is less eligible for civil and political rights. Historically, it is true that many Jews played a significant role as ‘middlemen’ – between landowners and tenants, state and tax payers, capital and consumers – and that a few Jews (like the Rothschild family) played a significant role as international bankers; but Marx insisted that this progressive role played by Jews in the development of capitalism was coming to an end and the practical spirit of money-making was as general as the growth of nation states, national banks and national capital.”
    https://engageonline.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/karl-marx-and-the-radical-critique-of-anti-semitism-robert-fine-engage-journal-issue-2-may-2006/

  3. @ Felix Quigley: Actually, Felix, Marx was influenced by Proudhon in his early years as a socialist, athough he eventually broke with him. This is what Wikipedia says about their early intellectual relationship: “In one of his first works, The Holy Family, Marx said: “Not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat”. However, Marx disagreed with Proudhon’s anarchism and later published vicious criticisms of Proudhon. Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy as a refutation of Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty.”