The title of this post is from a Facebook comment I saw about an article by Stephen Daisley at STV News (Scotland), Analysis: Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite. It’s so much worse than that.
Jeremy Corbyn is the likely new leader of the British Labour Party, someone I addressed in Likely British Labour leader’s creepy associations.
The Daisley article title addresses Corbyn, but the issue of how Israel hatred has become a polite-society way of expressing anti-Semitism is of much broader implication.
It’s why ostensibly “pro-Palestinian” rallies so often express blatant anti-Jewish verbiage, why Jews are harassed on the streets of Europe in the name of anti-Zionism, and why the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was birthed at the anti-Semitic 2001 Durban conference as Nazi-like caricatures of Jews were passed around.
It’s also why American Jewish musician Matisyahu was, alone among dozens of musicians, singled out by the BDS movement for a special political litmus test.
Here is an excerpt from the Daisley article, which explains much better than I can how centuries of Jew hatred now finds its expression and acceptance through the anti-Israel movement:
…. Anti-Zionism has removed much of the need for classical anti-Semitism by recycling the old superstitions as a political critique of the State of Israel. Why risk the ridicule that comes with quoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion when you can cite The Israel Lobby and win eager nods from academics and commentators? Why deny the Holocaust when you can throw it back in the Jews’ faces by fictionalising Gaza as a concentration camp? Why hurl rocks at a Jew in the street when you can hurl endless vexatious UN resolutions at Israel?Every pathology of the anti-Semite can be visited upon the Jewish state in the flimsy guise of “anti-imperialism” or “human rights”. It’s all okay because it’s “Zionism” you’re against and that’s not the same thing as Jews and what about Jews who are anti-Zionist. The hallmark of a bigot is seizing on dissonant voices within a minority community and using them to delegitimise the mainstream of that community. The exception becomes the rule and those whose only connection to Jewish communal life is signing onto letters to the Guardian denouncing Israel become more Jewish than everyone else….The Left’s unhinged antipathy towards the State of Israel has let loose ugly sentiments wholly unmoored from such legitimate criticisms. Israel is execrated as uniquely malignant and its enemies held up as plucky freedom-fighters or victim-idols. …Israel has become the Jew of world affairs, affluent, successful, provocatively different….
[Featured Image: Summer 2014, Pro-Palestinian protesters chant Jew, Cowardly Pig, Come On Out And Fight]
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