RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/09/now-they-wont-even-let-jews-grieve-in-peace/

Remember the Westboro Baptist Church? They were the fundamentalist fruitcakes who would picket vigils for slain American soldiers with technicolour placards declaring ‘God Hates Fags’ and ‘Thank God for Dead Soldiers’. Well, there’s a new mob of grief-intruders in town. There’s a new gang of hateful trespassers on other people’s sorrow. They’re not quite as God-bothering, not so homophobic, but they’re every bit as ghoulish. It’s the ‘pro-Palestine’ set on university campuses.

This week, something truly appalling took place at Columbia University in New York City. A vigil for the 1,200 people butchered by the fascists of Hamas in southern Israel on 7 October was noisily interrupted by the Hamas fanboys of the cranky Columbia left. ‘Fanboys’ is not hyperbole. Some were chanting ‘Resistance is glorious!’. This was on Monday, on 7 October, the anniversary of Hamas’s pogrom. If you are singing the praises of a ‘resistance’ one year after that ‘resistance’ slaughtered more Jews in one day than anyone else has since the Nazis, then you are a Hamas fanboy, you are a fellow traveller of fascism.

Jewish students and their allies had gathered to pay tribute to the dead and stolen of 7 October. They prayed for the Jews murdered by Hamas and demanded the release of the Jews Hamas still holds captive. They assembled on Columbia’s South Lawn. They displayed giant milk cartons featuring images of the Israeli hostages and a collection of teddy bears covered in red paint symbolising those who were murdered. Their lamentations were soon interrupted, though. Their murmured grief was punctuated by the shrill cries of Columbia’s legion Israelophobes. ‘Israel go to hell!’, these radical Westboro Baptists screamed.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/anti-semitism/anti-semitism-in-the-antipodes/

The appearance of anti-Semitism in Australia, a country remarkable for its absence of anti-Semitism, raises several questions. Ignited by the Israel Gaza war and fuelled by a combination of ignorance, the current anti-Western zeitgeist of the Left, and some major failings by the Australian Jewish community and by Israel itself, the result has been an upsurge in anti-Semitism in social media, left-wing politics and the public domain. We have seen blatant breaches of the law by way of public demonstrations and damage to property both public and private. The encampments on Australian university campuses, aping those in the United States, and the damage caused to politicians’ electoral offices, have continued unabated since October 7, 2023.

Three fundamental propositions should be stated at the outset. First, we have a right of freedom of political expression which lies at the root of our democracy and, subject to well-established legal constraints, should never be interfered with.

Second, where the exercise of such legal expression contravenes the law, the perpetrators should be charged and prosecuted. The current public displays of support for Palestinian solidarity are notable for their blatant breach of state laws criminalising hate speech, unlawful assembly and causing damage to property, and also of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act of the Commonwealth. It is beyond belief that no prosecutions have been instituted by state or federal police forces, which calls into question our faith in the rule of law.

Third, criticism of Israel, however ill-informed, is not anti-Semitic. We are currently hearing repetition of the words genocide and apartheid. Genocide has a specific meaning in law and its use to describe the horrific civilian deaths in Gaza is not accurate. Similarly, the use of the term apartheid to describe Israel, which has over two million Arab citizens enjoying full civil rights and an Arab justice on its supreme court is also not accurate. Both terms are pejorative and ignorant, but not anti-Semitic.

Perhaps more interesting is the relationship between Australian Jews and the State of Israel. The vitriolic debate between Sir Isaac Isaacs and his supporters and Professor Julius Stone over Zionism and a home for the Jewish people came to an end with the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Jews have lived in Australia since the arrival of the First Fleet and numbered approximately 25,000 at the time of the Second World War. They were mainly born in Australia or Britain, and considered themselves Australians of the Jewish faith. Their Judaism centred on synagogue membership and religious worship in a country which was highly sectarian, with a division between Protestant and Catholic. Multiculturalism was a term as yet uninvented. Post-war immigration introduced large numbers of European immigrants including European Jews who were the survivors of the Holocaust. By the 2021 Census the Jewish population of Australia was estimated to be around 117,000 or roughly 0.5 per cent of the population. The existence of over 300,000 Australians who are not Jewish but have a Jewish ancestor indicates the extent of assimilation.

At the time of the 2021 Census 57 per cent of Australian Jews were Australian-born, which is smaller than for the general population, which was at 71 per cent. It follows that most Australian Jews are post-war immigrants or their descendants. This makes them conscious of a need for a Jewish refuge as a protection from anti-Semitism, an attitude embedded in their psyches. Some Jewish schools and Jewish youth groups foster a love of Israel as a central part of Jewish identity, which reinforces a cultural as opposed to a religious affiliation. It is not surprising, therefore, that a study carried out by Monash University in 2017 of 8621 Australian Jews found that 69 per cent identified as Zionist and that the security of Israel was the most immediate issue of concern unifying them. The fact that 81 per cent of respondents ranked Israel above a belief in God (46 per cent) demonstrates the move away from religion and towards cultural identity.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/08/129680the-woke-dehumanisation-of-jews/

That there is more to identity politics than just preferred pronouns or demanding more culturally sensitive university courses has been amply demonstrated since the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Woke activist groups – including LGBT activists, Black Lives Matter, feminists and eco-zealots – responded to this barbaric event by becoming Hamas cheerleaders. They had no hesitation in communicating their hatred for Israel in a language riddled with anti-Semitic tropes.

The narrative promoted by the identitarians rarely recognises Jews as a historically oppressed people. On the contrary, Jews are frequently cast in the role of oppressors and even as white supremacists. This outlook echoes the age-old trope that asserts that Jews possess vast global power. It fuses this traditional claim about Jewish power with contemporary identitarian obsessions about white privilege and white supremacy.

Since the ascendancy of identity politics, Jewishness has become what sociologist Erving Goffman characterised as a ‘spoiled identity’. A spoiled identity is one that lacks any redeeming moral qualities. It is an identity that invites stigma and scorn.

Since the turn of the century, anti-racist activists have gone to great lengths to associate ‘whiteness’ with negative characteristics and unattractive features. Mention the term ‘white men’ on a university campus or TV show and it will be met with groans and sneers. This negative framing of white identity has also impacted how Jewish identity is perceived and represented. In an interesting account of this development, Pamela Paresky has coined the term the ‘hyper-white Jew’. Jews are often portrayed as a unique, hyper-white community who have far more privileges to check than others – including other white people.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/07/the-west-has-turned-its-back-on-jews/

In the wake of last year’s 7 October pogrom, and amid rapidly rising anti-Semitism, most Jews are even more convinced of the importance of the Jewish State and the need for greater solidarity. As researchers such as Tufts Eitan Hersh and others have demonstrated, the Hamas assaults have led many in America to emphatically embrace their Jewish identity.

Yet, increasingly, these same Jews find themselves isolated and widely demonised. This reflects how much Jewish influence in the US, as I suggested almost a year ago, is itself ‘peaking’. Certainly it’s clear that Jewish media power has faded, as evidenced by the consistently biased coverage against Israel in places like the New York Times, the BBC and the Washington Post. Similar bias has become embedded in the internet, as seen by Wikipedia’s new negative description of Zionism.

As Israel faces an existential challenge, diaspora Jews confront a rising wave of anti-Semitism unseen since the 1930s. Politicians and the media alike emphasise the parallel rise of Islamophobia. Yet two-thirds of all religious hate crimes in America were directed at Jews, despite them accounting for just two per cent of the population. Last year in New York, there were over 100 anti-Semitic crimes in November and December, almost 10 times the number of equivalent crimes committed against Muslims.

Jews are frequently discovering that any sympathy for Israel now means cancellation. The progressive political and cultural establishment increasingly seeks to eliminate ‘Zionists’ and elevate those Jews, like journalist Joshua Liefer, who excoriate the Jewish state, and non-Jews like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who embrace a radical, anti-Israel perspective.

Even in traditional haunts, such as Brooklyn bookstores, elite campuses and big Jewish cities like Los Angeles, Jews no longer feel safe. Today, they are inextricably identified with Israel, whether they like it or not.

This merging of Jewish and Israeli interests seems inevitable. Already, a majority of all Jewish children live in Israel. By 2030, Israel could become, for the first time since early antiquity, the home to a majority of all Jews. This is somewhat hard to digest for left-of-centre or secular Jews, given the nature of the current Israeli government with its dependence on messianic nationalistic and ultra-religious allies. Yet, despite the relative unpopularity of Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration, the vast majority of diaspora Jews – 80 per cent in America – support the Jewish State, as do the vast majority of Jewish college students.