My latest: the new Jew haters

The Left is antisemitic.

It was not always thus. The manifestations of Jew hatred – both hardcore (Aryan Nations, Ku Klux Klan, Heritage Front et al.) and fringe (Jim Keegstra, Malcolm Ross, et al.) – were almost always on the Right. Not so long ago, either.

Something changed. For sixty years, the Anti-Defamation League did polling in North America about antisemitism and its malevolent variants. Year after year, the polls showed that young people considered themselves progressive. They passionately opposed racism and antisemitism.

Five years or so ago, there was a shift. Progressive young people still considered themselves anti-racist – but they started to associate Israel with racism.

Israel, young progressives eventually told ADL and other opinion-seekers, was a fascistic, colonial, apartheid state. The reality was otherwise: a quarter of Israel is Arab, and about 45 per cent of the Jewish population is from Africa or Asia. Non-white, in other words.

It didn’t matter, because hate is always disinterested in reality and facts. To oppose Israel was to oppose racism, young progressives told themselves. Every Israel-hating protestor you now see in our streets – every bit of “anti-Zionist” libel you see on social media – can be traced back to that lie: Israel is white supremacist empire, subjugating and oppressing the impoverished, brown-skinned people who were there first.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a renowned Israeli author. He shakes his head when asked about the antisemitism that has now infected the Left and young people in the West, like a virus that defies any vaccine. “There’s been a progression of accusations against Israel,” he says. “Beginning with colonialism, moving to ethnic cleansing, accelerating to apartheid – and now culminating in genocide. And there’s nowhere else to go after genocide.”

“That is their ultimate goal,” Klein Halevi says of those who have persuaded young progressives to embrace a lie. “Because if Israel is a genocidal state, like Nazi Germany was, then Israel becomes incapable of waging a legitimate war of self-defence. Because a genocidal state has no right to self-defence.”

It is not just young people who have been seized with this hateful virus, of course. It is seen everywhere in this country – even with those who have power. Those who, without exception, are on the ideological Left.

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