https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2024/04/the-new-anti-semitisms-debt-to-the-nazis/
Anti-Semitism keeps evolving. In its current iteration, unimaginatively known as the New Antisemitism, it retains many of the traditional tropes found in the previous five stages of Antisemitism dating back over 2000 years, and these shouldn’t need to be rehearsed here. What is innovative in its new form is the way in which these traditional libels have been welded to the dominant discourses of the far Left, so that ‘the Jew’ has been conflated with colonialism, imperialism, global capitalism, racism, apartheid, genocide and even, in the cruellest of historical inversions, with Nazism!
Having found a comfortable home on the progressivist left, the New Anti-Semitism tries to obscure its exterminationist position by speaking in code, as did the Nazis, where, e.g., ‘placing the Jews under active control’ meant transporting them to the death camps for extermination. Similarly, the New Anti-Semites insist they are not Anti-Semitic just anti-Zionist, seeking to obscure the fact that the now ubiquitous protest chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, is code for the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people. While it is (barely) possible that this is not known or of much concern to all the Greens and ALP politicians, media commentators, academics, university administrators, the ACTU, school teachers, local councillors, Trotskyites, celebrity protesters, Islamist fellow-travellers, and other useful idiots who mouth this slogan, its meaning goes back at least as far the Third Reich’s racial policies, Hitler and the Nazis’ plans for the Final Solution, and the genocidal aspirations of their Arab disciples.
‘The Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ was, of course, official Nazi code for the genocide of the Jews, across Europe and beyond as far as Nazi power could reach. The plan was mapped out at the January 1942 Wannsee Conference of high level Nazi officials responsible for its implementation, but its roots lie deep in the history of Antisemitism and especially into Hitler’s own hyper-paranoid worldview. This found notorious expression in Mein Kampf , in which he fulminated about “the black-haired Jewish youth, with satanic joy in his face, lurks in wait for the unsuspecting [Aryan] maiden whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.” Joseph Goebbels similarly denounced ‘the Jew’ as “the enemy of the world, the destroyer of cultures, the parasite among the peoples, the Son of Chaos, the incarnation of evil, the ferment of decomposition [and] the decay of humanity.” Such sentiments are echoed today regularly in mosques, on social media, and in protests (with apparent immunity from sanction by the police, the courts, or the AHRC), and one wonders to what extent the New Anti-Semites identify with these Nazi caricatures, or are aware where their ideological allegiances might carry them.
