Why left wing anti-Zionism is antisemitism By Daniel Greenfield

There is something striking about an Antisemitc radicalization on the left so extreme that after being accused of using organ thefts as a modern day blood libel, it actually tries to revive and legitimize medieval blood libels.

Leftists like Alexander Cockburn naturally claim they’re not Antisemitc , but rather Anti-Zionist. Indeed Alexander Cockburn published a book “The Politics of Anti-Semitism” dedicated to that premise. But as implausible as the premise that an enthusiastic defender of Saddam Hussein like Cockburn and so many of the left, who nevertheless obsessively attack Israel for human rights violations, are not displaying a clear double standard… the Anti-Zionist, not Antisemitc argument flies out the window when you’re publishing articles reviving medieval blood libels against Jews, sourced from the likes of “Israel Shamir”, the pseudonym of a Swedish Neo-Nazi, and another regular at Counterpunch, who writes articles about Jews with charming titles like “The Vampire Killers,” “Poisoning Wells,” “Kugel Eaters” and “Bloodcurdling Libel”.

Cockburn and his ilk though are simply the leading edge of left wing Anti-Semtism, dipping into the foulest wells of bigotry and unashamed to harvest the rotting fruit of Goebbels and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Like much of the European left, the American far left is beginning to abandon the “Anti-Zionism not Anti-Semitism” pretense for the pure “medieval” stuff, which helps them bring Muslims on board, while directly carrying the war to their Jewish critics. Embracing unabashed Antisemitism allows the left to discard any defensiveness regarding the double standard they maintain toward Israel, and simply damn Jews as a whole.

Hamas’ ongoing campaign of violence against Israelis

But that same attitude is pervasive in more subtle forms among the left in general. Take a visit by Mia Farrow to Gaza, where she naturally condemned Israel closing its border with the Hamas run territory. Did she stop to condemn Hamas’ ongoing campaign of violence against Israelis? Naturally.

Farrow also criticized militant rockets, advising Gazans “not to give the international community ammunition to view you in a negative way.” Stopping them, she said, could lead to greater international aid.

She did not condemn Hamas’ rocket attacks on civilian towns because they’re wrong. No, she condemned them because it gives biased people “ammunition” to see the otherwise non-violent and idealistic Hamas terrorists in “a negative way”. And of course if Hamas were to stop, there would be more aid coming their way.

The inherent double standard speaks volumes about Farrow’s view toward the right of Jews and Palestinian Arabs to live. But it’s hardly unique to a moderately obscure Hollywood actress, it has become a commonplace attitude on the left to presume that Israel has no right to defend the lives of its citizens, because those lives are somehow inferior to those of their attackers. It is of course not a new attitude, only an old attitude coming to the fore among the left once again.

Historically Antisemitism was a common approach on the part of the European left toward Jews, damned for their unwillingness to assimilate into the stream of workers, lawyers and peasants so dear to the left, and of course for their capitalism. The pamphlets and books of Socialists and Marxists regularly contained Antisemitc invective… long before they had managed to seize on Zionism as the issue. Marx himself used language toward Jews not too distant from what Goebbels would propound in the next century. In the early 20th century, Communists routinely supported Russian and Arab pogroms of Jews. In fact that support led to a New York boycott of the Communist rag,The Daily Worker by newspaper sellers that effectively destroyed its circulation.

Leftist Antisemitism began to decline somewhat in the 20th century as the left achieved its goals of destroying Judaism in Europe and America, and recruiting large numbers of Jews into the ranks of socialist movements. A variety of tactics was utilized from the straightforward purges of the USSR which utilized its “Jewish Section” to shut down synagogues, imprison and execute Jewish clergy and outlaw all Zionist movements; to using Socialist Anti-Jewish newspapers in Europe and America, such as the Forward aimed at a Jewish audience, that routinely mocked Judaism and promoted Socialism as the only answer.

Israel however represented a fundamental breach of the Socialist agenda that demanded that Jews assimilate, abandon their religious beliefs and work to build socialism in the countries in which they live. Instead Israel’s rebuilding gained a major boost from Jews who “turned their backs” on the German socialist and Russian Communist movements, and worked to build their own country instead. And that is a “Heresy” that the left has never forgiven the Jews for.

The agenda of the left was an end to ethnicity and religion, a one world government in which everyone would be brothers. Rebuilding Israel flew in the face of that agenda. It was separatist and nationalist, and when the USSR staked its bet on the Arab world—for the left, the deal was done. Israel was to be the enemy of the left. Passing time has exchanged the labels to conform with political trends. But behind all of them is the old classic Antisemitism of Karl Marx who blamed the Jews for popularizing capitalism, writing, “The god of the Jews had been secularized and has become the god of this world… Money is the jealous god of the Jews”

H.G. Wells, that great believer that all of mankind must be ruled by a benevolent one world state, stated the position of the left very clearly in “The Shape of Things to Come”. And that position is worth hearing, because beneath all the hypocritical nonsense about human rights violations that the left spews from every corner… it lays out the grievance of the left against the Jews… and how the left’s Antisemitism is linked to its Anti-Zionism.

The Jews had been able to keep themselves a people apart, eating peculiar food and following distinctive religious practices, a nation within the nation, in every state in the world. They had been a perpetual irritant to statesmen, a breach in the collective solidarity everywhere…

It might have been supposed that a people so widely dispersed would have developed a cosmopolitan mentality and formed a convenient linking organization for many world purposes, but their special culture of isolation was so intense that this they neither did nor seemed anxious to attempt. After the World War the orthodox Jews played but a poor part in the early attempts to formulate the Modern State, being far more preoccupied with a dream called Zionism… It emphasized their traditional wilful separation from the main body of mankind. It irritated the world against them, subtly and incurably.

H.G. Wells’ case against Israel is also his case against the Jews. They are one and the same, both damned for undermining the “collective solidarity”, for failing to be “cosmopolitan” and helping to link together the world into Wells’ envisioned socialist modern state.

And to this day, the left characterizes Jews as good or bad, based on their willingness to assimilate, abandon their distinctive religious practices and help create the “Modern State”. Good Jews help enable the “Modern State”. Bad Jews hold to religious practices and are Pro-Israel, and therefore undermine the “Modern State.”

It is also noteworthy that for all of H.G. Wells’ supposed progressivism and futurism, his view of the Jews was as filled with medieval bigotry as Counterpunch writing today about Jews drinking human blood. But then the progressivism of the left has always been a sham, its origins are rooted in a primitive dream of one state ruled by enlightened men who oversee the human rabble beneath their feet. A vision that is pre-modern and fundamentally hostile to the notion of individual rights rooted in independent republics.

And finally H.G. Wells envisions what the future of Israel and the Jews will be. It is also worth noting, because it is the same future that the left has been pushing Jews toward for a long time now.

And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community. The Jews were not suppressed; there was no extermination… but under the Tyranny there was never any specific persecution at all; yet they were educated out of their oddity and racial egotism in little more than three generations. Their attention was distracted from Moses and the Promise to Abraham and the delusion that God made his creation for them alone, and they were taught the truth about their race. The world is as full as ever it was of men and women of Semitic origin, but they belong no more to “Israel”.

That is the left’s envisioned Final Solution. No extermination, no “specific persecution”, just the end of the Jews as anything more than another DNA strand working its way through the genetic packaging of the human race. And they have succeeded all too well. The Soviet Union virtually wiped out Jewish identity and widespread secularism has done much of the rest in the West. Israel has become the holdout, the largest collection of Jews in the world.

And so the left is driven to destroy Israel. To wipe it out one way or another, and make room for the “Modern State”, in which there is no G-d, no bible and no room for a bunch of Semitic nomads who had the presumption to try and talk to Him. In which men are no more than smart apes, G-d is a figment of the primitive imagination and the only gods are the enlightened rulers of the One World State.

To understand why Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism are one, we need look no further than H.G. Wells who wrote, “Zionism is an expression of Jewish refusal to assimilate.”

That one sentence is the final thesis on the left’s ugly legacy of hatred for Israel and the Jews. It demonstrates why Anti-Zionism cannot be detached from Anti-Semitism, because behind it is a denunciation of Jewish identity. That is the ideological fuel behind the Anti-Zionism of both Western liberals and their Arab allies. The Western liberals demand to know why the Jews just won’t assimilate. The Arabs demand to know why the Jews weren’t happy being second class Dhimmis in their own country. Anti-Zionism is the denial of the rights of the Jews as a people based on Anti-Semitism, the denial of the equality of the Jews. That double standard joins Anti-Semitsm and Anti-Zionism into two words for the same idea, that the Jews should not exist.