Pro-Hamas protesters are heirs to decades’ worth of anti-West propaganda By Ruth Wisse
https://nypost.com/2024/08/19/opinion/pro-hamas-protesters-are-heirs-to-decades-of-anti-west-bile/
Oct. 7 is widely recognized as “the deadliest day for the Jews since the Holocaust,” yet some Americans — notably the tens of thousands marching on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week — are celebrating the cloning of Nazism.
Last century, the United States led the fight against those massacring the Jews. Yet today’s college students are cheering on Hitler’s successors.
Many American Jews were “shocked, but not surprised” when antisemitism shot up virulently here on Oct. 8.
Campuses that should have protested the mass murder, rape, infanticide, torture, beheading and kidnapping of peaceful civilians rallied instead against Israel, home to almost half of the Jews left in the world.
It was the same antisemitism we have seen for more than a century — so no surprise — but a shock to many when the rhetoric came from the political left.
In the early 20th century, fascists won American adherents by appealing to ultra-nationalism, the same impulse that brought Hitler to power and made him chancellor of Germany in 1933.
Antisemitism, an anti-liberal movement conceived in the 1870s, accused Jews of exploiting emancipation and citizenship to “conquer Germany from within.”
It blamed Jews for corrupting German culture, dominating the professions, exploiting the economy as capitalists and ruining it as communists. Nazism added another thread: that they polluted the Aryan race.
This all-purpose ideology of grievance and blame found fertile ground in America during the Great Depression. Fascism’s appeal to the ideal of a purer nation won support from the likes of industrialist Henry Ford, aviator Charles Lindbergh and radio priest Charles Coughlin.
But German Americans did not burn the American flag: They sought an alliance with a stronger United States. Germans who taught at American universities were generally anti-fascists, liberal refugees from Hitler.
By the time Hitler croaked in his bunker, two new strands of anti-Jewish ideology were coming together, attacking Jews not for living among the nations, but for recovering their homeland in the land of Israel.
Antisemitism evolved as the Jews did. Three years after the Shoah, as the Jews resurrected their nation, the Arab League organized around the goal of destroying it.
Theirs was not a regional war, but a holy jihad and a modern ideological struggle against the democratic West.
As long as the belligerents needed a scapegoat, anti-Zionism, like antisemitism, deflected public dissatisfaction by incriminating a vulnerable minority, and directed violence with license to kill against a common foe.
Opposing Israel as a surrogate for America allowed Arab leaders to simultaneously court Americans, assuming they would sacrifice the Jews for their political interests.
Anti-Zionism was equally useful to Communists.
The Soviet Union opposed both religion and nationalism, so it targeted Judaism as the ultimate incarnation of both. Jews, already dispersed around the world, were deemed “reactionary” for wanting a return to Zion.
Communist infiltration into America was so deviously successful that it conscripted many Jews and liberals into its ranks as “useful idiots” who promoted Stalinism while claiming to advance universal brotherhood and peace.
At the same time, the Soviets sought an alliance with Islam in the Middle East and hailed the anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine as the start of an Arab revolution.
The Soviet Union forged the by-now-familiar slanders that Zionism was imperialism, and the Jews were colonial oppressors.
On Nov. 10, 1975, the United Nations, led by its Soviet and Arab blocs, passed a resolution calling Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
It was “a day of infamy,” according to then-Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan — yet that belief now governs much of the American academy, media and parts of the Democratic Party.
Antisemitic coalitions powered the rise of Nazism. For the past half century, anti-Zionism has done even better forging Pan-Arab-Islamist coalitions in the Middle East, at the UN and within the Western democracies themselves.
This ideological war against the Jews and Israel differentiates it from other current conflicts, like the equally evil Russian invasion of Ukraine: Little Israel is the proxy for mightier America.
No intersectional campus coalitions celebrate Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine; no Russian thugs pursue Jews in Brooklyn, or burn Ukrainian flags with America’s.
That’s because anti-Zionism is the ideological arm of the civilizational struggle against what is left of the free world, with the United States as its ultimate target.
It may be a perennial, but it has never penetrated and threatened this country so violently before.
It intends to destroy if it is not stopped.
Ruth Wisse is professor emerita of Harvard University and author of “Jews and Power.”
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