Young Progressives are Embracing Antisemitism Based on Lies
“To oppose Israel was to oppose racism, young progressives told themselves.”
You only need to look at what’s happening on college campuses to know this is true.
Warren Kinsella writes at the Toronto Sun:
Young progressives persuaded to embrace Jew hatred based on lies
The Left is antisemitic.
It was not always thus. The manifestations of Jew hatred – both hardcore (Aryan Nations, Ku Klux Klan, Heritage Front et al.) and fringe (Jim Keegstra, Malcolm Ross, et al.) – were almost always on the Right. Not so long ago, either.
Something changed. For sixty years, the Anti-Defamation League did polling in North America about antisemitism and its malevolent variants. Year after year, the polls showed that young people considered themselves progressive. They passionately opposed racism and antisemitism.
Five years or so ago, there was a shift. Progressive young people still considered themselves anti-racist, but they started to associate Israel with racism.
Israel, young progressives eventually told ADL and other opinion-seekers, was a fascistic, colonial, apartheid state. The reality was otherwise: a quarter of Israel is Arab, and about 45% of the Jewish population is from Africa or Asia. Non-white, in other words.
It didn’t matter, because hate is always disinterested in reality and facts. To oppose Israel was to oppose racism, young progressives told themselves. Every Israel-hating protestor you now see in our streets – every bit of “anti-Zionist” libel you see on social media – can be traced back to that lie: Israel is white supremacist empire, subjugating and oppressing the impoverished, brown-skinned people who were there first.
Yossi Klein Halevi, a renowned Israeli author, shakes his head when asked about the antisemitism that has now infected the Left and young people in the West, like a virus that defies any vaccine.
“There’s been a progression of accusations against Israel,” he says. “Beginning with colonialism, moving to ethnic cleansing, accelerating to apartheid – and now culminating in genocide. And there’s nowhere else to go after genocide.”
“That is their ultimate goal,” Klein Halevi says of those who have persuaded young progressives to embrace a lie. “Because if Israel is a genocidal state, like Nazi Germany was, then Israel becomes incapable of waging a legitimate war of self-defence. Because a genocidal state has no right to self-defence.”
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Comments
Woe unto you if you lost Soviet support during the Cold War!
I by no means advocate the destruction of Israel, and I believe that its hard blow against Hamas and Hezbollah to be completely justified. Gaza danced in the streets and handed out candy on 9/11/01; I shed no tears if Gaza got what happens if you poke the bear.
But the Soviet Union was an early supporter of Israel’s independence struggle (needle dying Britannia!), voted for partition of the Palestine Mandate (agreed: it was not an independent state), and gave up on Israel only when it sensed a better opportunity in Nasserite-Ba’ath Arab nationalism.
Someone near and dear to me was very pro-Communist. Everything the Soviets did was understandable to him as a “blow against fascism”, and he was dismayed when the Soviet Bloc collapsed. I also saw his evolution from pro-Zionist to anti-Zionist (approaching anti-Semitism). I do not believe that this person was alone on the Left.
“It was not always thus. The manifestations of Jew hatred – both hardcore (Aryan Nations, Ku Klux Klan, Heritage Front et al.) and fringe (Jim Keegstra, Malcolm Ross, et al.) – were almost always on the Right. Not so long ago, either.”
Do NOT buy or perpetuate the left’s “Halftime in America” lie.
Pretending that the KKK was ever anything but a long-tailed Democrat “resistance” against Republican-imposed black citizenship is being historically gullible. Same for the Aryan nonsense, which was no more right wing here than it was in the original National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
Yes, it was always thus. There was significant antisemitism on the right, but just as much on the left. What changed is that it almost disappeared on the right, while becoming more open on the left.
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