Left-wing anti-Semitism just keeps getting swept under the rug By Gary S. Branfman
Today’s climate of woke progressive political correctness, systemic racism, and social hypersensitivity encourages anti-Semitic events committed by non-right-wing groups to be swept under the rug of white supremacism.
I am amused by the distinctly divergent pretext for Jew-hatred from the Alt-Right and the Alt-Left. On one side of the “Anti-Semitic Spectrum,” we are blamed for the evils of capitalism, while the other side blames us for the hardships of communism.
There is no excuse for the lack of attention and condemnation placed on the increased incidence of anti-Semitism from groups not associated with white supremacy.
Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) get a pass when they claim that boycotting Israel is not at all different from boycotting Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.
When retired neo-Nazi-turned KKK leader David Duke praises black separatist Louis Farrakhan, we should heed prophetic wisdom: the enemy of your enemy is your friend. We are the enemy.
In 2019, two individuals associated with the blatantly anti-Semitic Black Hebrew Israelites plotted with handguns, assault rifles, and pipe bombs to murder 50 Jewish children in a New Jersey day school. They had to settle for a deadly shoot-out in a neighboring Kosher deli.
According to CBS News, over a ten-day period in 2020, thirteen blatant acts of anti-Semitism were committed in New York City and not one of the culprits captured on surveillance cameras was a white supremacist.
These heinous events hung on the heels of Hanukah, when, in New Jersey, five Jews were brutally stabbed, and a rabbi murdered — not by white supremacists.
When well-meaning liberal Jews declare, “We should all be Antifa,” are they naïve to the connotation? I am in total agreement that we, as Jews, in the spirit of Tikkun Olam, should oppose fascism. If the left is left unchecked, it will Tikkun Olam us into extinction. Borrowing a title and logos from an extremist left-wing group is problematic. Even if today’s “Antifa” designation represents loosely affiliated groups of individuals who oppose fascism, they are memorializing a group of Stalin loyalists born and bred in Germany and funded by the Communist Party.
Analogous to well-meaning individuals adopting the “Antifa” designation is this antithetical hypothetical: a politician endorses a political and economic theory of social organization and speaks of promoting it on a national level. I suspect that labeling his plan “National Socialism” would turn some heads.
Included among the Antifa groups are those who mounted an assault on Berkeley, California in 2017. In my youth, the University of California at Berkeley was the bastion of free speech and expression. Today, not so much.
During the confrontation designed to prevent the right-wing speaker Milo Yiannopoulos from addressing an audience, Antifa loyalists proudly displayed the two Antifa logos on flags, banners, and T-shirts.
The red and black “Antifa Circle” with three arrows was designed in 1931 by Sergei Tschachotin of the German Iron Front to represent anarchy. The “overlapping flag” design represents the merger of socialism and communism. Are these the philosophies being endorsed by today’s “we should all be Antifa” promoters?
These modern-day Antifa loyalists tossed Molotov cocktails, set off raging fires, and caused personal injury and extensive property damage to combat freedom of speech. Yet when Louis Farrakhan spoke on the very same campus, he was welcomed with open arms and a well attended catered reception. Is this not the epitome of a double-standard?
The anti-Semitic assaults on college campuses have continued. According to an article in Newsweek on September 11, 2020, “Jewish students and faculty have faced physical assault, discrimination, destruction of property, genocidal threats, suppression of speech, movement, and assembly, bullying and denigration[.] … [C]ampus haters have learned that if they couch their anti-Jewish animus in terms of anti-Zionism rather than ‘classic’ anti-Semitism, campus administrators turn a blind eye and allow the hate to flourish unabated.”
Do not allow white supremacy to obscure the condemnation of other racists and bigots. They will ferment, fester, and flourish while we turn the other cheek.
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