America’s Europeanizing Antisemitism American leftists are going the suicidal way of Europe. by Daniel Greenfield
https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-europeanizing-antisemitism/
America’s decline was a generation behind Europe. Now we’re where Europe used to be.
Why are Hamas rioters running around major cities? American cities are now also populated by unemployed grad students who alternate between sitting in cafes and throwing firebombs at police in their hip districts and mobs of foreign migrants squatting entire neighborhoods. The native working class is sinking into despair and drug abuse in the rural and industrial hinterlands even as those areas are being overrun by third worlders who dominate the local economies.
The older generation still remembers a glorious past while the younger generation never knew it. It exists in a world of transnational pop songs and has been taught that nationalism is the greatest evil. Military service and religious belief have become fringe attitudes to deplore.
An insecure middle class despairing of economic success has embraced socialism along with every cultural leftist fetish, and is alternately enthused and terrified of what it has unleashed. Every new degeneracy is added to the dogma of the ‘In This House’ lawn sign that defines what they have left behind and what they are headed toward. The latest addition is Hamas.
Europeanization has brought with it the cringing antisemitism that used to baffle Americans when they saw it in London, Paris and Berlin. Why did European elites celebrate ‘Palestinian’ terrorism? How could formerly great nations live in terror of what some Imam in the European version of Dearborn, Michigan thought about Israel, Mohammed cartoons or the next election?
Now we know.
The elimination of Jews from public life that began among European elites after 9/11 has come to America. It’s playing out in much the same way with furious denunciations of Israel and the normalization of Hamas. American college students in New York or LA chanting for Islamic terrorists are acting much the way their counterparts in London were doing 25 years ago.
Muslim mass migration is only part of the story. As is campus radicalism. Campus culture has become campus monoculture because higher education is becoming pointless. College students don’t go to learn anything useful, but as a coming of age ritual for a social class. There was a time when the American educational system was producing the next generation of scientists, now it’s producing the next generation of HR specialists and consultants.
America used to be a rocketship with a bureaucracy tying it down, now, like Europe it’s a bureaucracy which is occasionally baffled when a rocketship manages to unexpectedly take off.
The student radicals know that they’re bureaucrats in-waiting. Disguise their titles however they may, their job will be to write memos explaining why people shouldn’t do things. And few things are more likely to make Marxists out of them. It’s a misnomer to think that radicalism comes from the working class. Lenin, Marx, Fidel and Mao are among the many examples that show it’s the inept children of the upper classes who go on to become tyrants.
A generation ago, Europeans had no hope for the future and embraced destruction. The last time American college students were persuaded that Camelot had fallen and there was no future, they went mad. The new generation has long since been persuaded of it and they’ve being megadosed with radical politics and pharmaceuticals while they wait for the world to end.
Getting blonde Ivy League co-eds to chant for Hamas is not a heavy lift after their foremothers chanted for the Viet Cong who were killing their brothers and cousins. What is more revealing is the degree to which social elites and suburbanite liberals are willing to join in the antisemitism. Western radicalism stopped being aspirational once the decline kicked in and became cowardice and despair with white leftists outsourcing the violence to minority groups.
The leftists want someone to burn down society and take over, but they know it won’t be them. Whether it’s BLM or Islam matters less than living vicariously through the fall of the new Rome.
That timid radicalism could long ago be seen among Euros who loudly declared that America had it coming after 9/11 and then blamed their own governments when Muslim bombs tore apart their cities. Leftists have become Quislings whose only objective is finding an enemy willing to do the job of destroying capitalism and civilization that they no longer feel up to doing.
The tame liberal middle class applauds the spectacle with uncertain enthusiasm. They’ve been told that burning the cities and letting terrorists take over is the right side of history. Few of them are certain exactly how, but their unemployed kids and non-denominational clergy toting the rainbow symbols of their faith have assured them that this is the only way to redemption.
And at least all the rage, the carnage and the rallies make them feel like they’re winning.
Standing up to the foreign mobs assaulting their women, robbing them blind and taking over their countries is scary, but sneering at America and ranting about Israel is entirely safe. It’s even heartening because it makes them feel better about losing their countries to see some other civilized countries go down along with them. The peculiar thing about collaboration is that it’s rarely a shameful act. The collaborator feels a sense of pleasure and moral superiority.
Underneath it is that same sense of despair.
No one collaborates if they think they’re leaving a winning cause for a losing cause. The blonde co-ed chanting for Hamas in Boston or Brussels is attracted to what looks like the winning side. Islamic terrorists appear to have conviction and a plan to take over. To a lot of the future elites in a declining society that seems more appealing than the moral ambiguity all around them.
The pleasures of collaboration includes being able to participate in at least some of the shameful activities of the new movement. Aligning with Islamic terrorists licenses antisemitism. But then most radical causes do. Jews are an easy target, but only the first of many. The whole point of antisemitism is to normalize all the other horrible things that will come after.
Just ask Mohammed, Adolf and Joe. Or your average social media grifter who has rediscovered the wonders of Communism, National Socialism or a society based on human sacrifice.
Americans still mostly find this incomprehensible, but not nearly as much as they used to. The line between good and evil is often hope. The Brits, the Germans and the French used to believe that they were great peoples with a destiny to change the world. How many still do?
Obama wasn’t entirely wrong with his sneering dismissal of American exceptionalism. Every people does like to believe that it’s exceptional. But unfortunately only some are. The belief itself can keep a people going, but there comes a time when either the people or the belief become unsustainable. The British turned from the war to embrace socialism, to recede and decline, and you don’t have to squint to see America stumbling through government industrial subsidies, failed unionization, declining global power, loss of faith and finally all hope in the future.
Antisemitism is part of the package of decline. Societies on the upswing can be antisemitic, but obsessive rises in antisemitism are symptomatic of people searching for someone to take it out on. A liberal middle class embracing socialism and abandoning the future turns blinkered and confuses its newfound enthusiasms for sexual fetishes and foreign radicalism for dynamism. It spends all its money, takes vacations, gets drunk, and lives in a fug of perpetual student politics.
Eventually, despite generous doses of local vintages, reality sets in. There’s no right side of history to be found at drag queen story hour or the latest Welcome Refugees rally. The closing act of radicalism is to bring down the curtain on the unfortunate infected society. That’s the point at which people either wake up or scream at their Jewish colleague to stop bombing Gaza. As ugly as this sort of hate is for the Jewish upper middle class that is shocked when fellow parents, professors and colleagues turn on them: it’s uglier still for the perpetrators.
The nice old liberal ladies holding up signs urging Hamas to bomb Tel Aviv are not there because they expect a happy future. Their wandering hysterical self-righteousness has soured into malice. They know not so much whom they hate as what and whom they fear. They’ve lost their countries, their causes and their futures to the very people they hope will kill off the Jews.
The growth of this toxic fungus here is not just bad news for Jews, it’s bad news for America. Aspirational liberalism has given way to defeatist radicalism, feverish conspiracy theories about Russians controlling Trump, Jews controlling Congress, rising oceans and Facebook disinformation alongside UFOs, flat earths and every other sort of madness. These are all various flavors of despair projected into excuses for imposing tyranny and terrorizing people.
The normalization of Hamas in upper class American liberal circles is just another death wish. The arrival of European antisemitism isn’t a shot in the arm for the Left: it’s a shot in the head.
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