Antisemitism is a rotten term for the “longest hatred” that targets the Jewish people. For a start, there is no such thing as “semitism” to be “anti.”
The word “antisemitism” was invented by a 19th-century Jew-hater, Wilhelm Marr, who wanted to invest this prejudice with the spurious characteristic of race in order to appeal to a society that increasingly defined itself in scientific terms.
Today, with Jew-hatred having reached unprecedented global levels, the inadequacies of “antisemitism” are becoming ever more manifest. Many wrongly believe that it’s just another form of racism. Few understand that it’s a uniquely paranoid, deranged and murderous mindset.
Because Judaism and the Jews are so poorly understood, few recognize that this unique people is victimized by a unique prejudice. And few acknowledge that the prejudice changes shape as societies change.
Used for the sake of convenience, “antisemitism” fosters further misunderstanding over the issue of Israel. People assume that prejudice against the Jewish people is against Jews as people. Few understand that Judaism isn’t a private confessional faith as the West understands religion to be.
They don’t realize that Jewish religious identity is rooted in the Land of Israel, where the Jews were historically the only people for whom it was ever their national kingdom. So they fail to grasp that Israel is at the very heart of Judaism. Denouncing the right of the Jews to the land is to attack Judaism itself.
But because “antisemitism” is associated with bigotry against Jews as people—and specifically with genocidal Nazism—people bridle when it’s used to describe their hostility to the State of Israel.
In other words, demonizing Jews and wishing they would disappear from the world may be beyond the pale, but demonizing Israel and wishing it would disappear from the world is just fine.
In his new book Israelophobia, published next week, Jake Wallis Simons takes this false distinction apart. The Jew-hatred that is now at epidemic levels throughout the West focuses overwhelmingly on the Jewish homeland
Simons, the editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle for which I write, does an outstanding job detailing the astounding tsunami of falsehoods, distortions, double standards and vilification engulfing Israel. Although atrocities and human rights abuses are taking place all over the world, this obsessional campaign is directed only at Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East.
Israeli products are boycotted, its speakers hounded off campus, its businesses vandalized and its behavior singled out for lies, slander and double standards at the U.N. With the Palestinian cause having become the default position of progressives, the left makes common cause with the world’s worst dictatorships to attack a democracy that protects the rights of women, gays and other minorities.
Reasonable and reasoned criticism of Israel is, of course, entirely proper, just as with any other country. But this onslaught is neither reasonable nor reasoned. So why is Israel abused in this hallucinatory way?
To what he calls the newest form of the oldest hatred, Simons has given another name: Israelophobia. This, he writes, has three characteristics: Demonization, through which Israel is smeared as evil and a threat to the world; weaponization of social justice as a Trojan horse for hatred of Jews and their national home; and falsification, or parroting the lies of Nazi or Soviet propaganda.
All this has twisted the Western mind. As Simons observes, the sheer number of committed Israelophobes and the force of their disinformation, fueled by state-sponsored propaganda from Berlin to Tehran, has established a powerful gravitational pull sucking in ordinary people.
As a result, indefensible assumptions about Israel and the Jewish people—such as “Israelis behave like Nazis towards the Palestinians,” the “Jews have too much power” and “Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes”—have become mainstream and produced a kind of herd immunity to common sense.
Some of these falsehoods are positively surreal. Israel is seen as white even though a (small) majority of its Jews are dark-skinned. In 2018, Mark Winston Griffith, executive director for the Black Movement Center in Crown Heights, New York, suggested that Jews were being attacked on the streets of Brooklyn because Jewishness was “a form of almost hyper-whiteness.”
In 2020, after the killing of Gorge Floyd, synagogues and Jewish shops in America were vandalized and attacked with “free Palestine” and obscene anti-Israel graffiti, while in France, Black Lives Matter demonstrators screamed “dirty Jews,” echoing the same chants that filled French streets during the Dreyfus affair a century before.
“In short,” writes Simons, “whether Jews count as non-white, white to hyper- white, privileged or oppressed, colonizers or indigenous, has become a matter of Schrodinger’s Jew: The label shifts on the basis of the agenda. And when it comes to the social justice movement, that agenda is invariably hostile to [the Jews’] nation state.”
In fact, “social justice” and identity politics are positively rooted in anti-Jewish prejudice. The malicious stereotype of rich, powerful Jews oppressing the vulnerable has been embedded in the left since Marx.
“Intersectional” identity politics, in which groups use spurious claims of victimization to gain power over other groups, patterns itself on claims of antisemitism that social justice warriors believe Jews deploy to mask their own misdeeds. Victim culture is thus founded upon anti-Jewish prejudice and its fake claims are exposed by real bigotry against Jews, which must therefore be denied.
Appallingly, the social justice agenda has been endorsed by a majority of American Jews. Simons takes bitter aim at Jewish progressives, for whom, he caustically observes, the Israelification of antisemitism must be a relief. They gain acceptance on the left through “auto-denunciation,” adopting the left’s default Israelophobic narrative while holding their Jewish heads high.
The question is why this supremely perverse onslaught against Israel is happening. Most obviously, it is a product of the left’s current stance against colonialism, imperialism and racism, which is associated with Israel simply because “intersectionality” promotes the monstrous charge that Jews are white-skinned, capitalist oppressors.
And, of course, there’s the vital role of the media in promoting Palestinian Arab lies and distortions as the truth, demonizing Israel by omitting to report Palestinian Arab attacks on Israelis and focusing only on Israeli strikes in response. The media thus present Israel as a wanton and indiscriminate killer, even though its armed forces do more to safeguard civilian lives when it carries out counter-terror operations against its enemies than any other army in the world.
The most powerful passages in Simons’s book demonstrate how both Nazism and the Soviet Union further weaponized antisemitism against Israel. The Soviet Union, which used anti-Zionism to weaken the West by driving wedges and sowing discord, disseminated staggering amounts of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda, depicting Judaism as a vicious and inhuman religion that had spawned “fascist Zionism.” This malevolent narrative is now parroted by the left.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, turned Palestine’s Arabs into Hitler’s forces in the Middle East committed to the genocide of the Jews.
This linkage continues to influence attitudes in the Arab world. Nazi imagery of Jews as spiders, dogs, octopuses, snakes and bloodsuckers remains widespread in Palestinian and Arab media, while the Mufti is the self-professed hero of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.
As the American historian Jeffrey Herf has observed, this association has poisoned Western universities and “aligned the western left with the afterlife of Hitler’s Nazi party and its larger designs for the Middle East.”
The West’s historic Jew-hatred and current unhinged animus against Israel are joined at the hip. By using a new word to reflect this, and through careful and detailed research, Jake Wallis Simons has delivered a powerful blow against the big lie through which the Western left tries to wash from its hands an indelible stain.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
This article originally appeared in IsraelNationalNews.com.
The obsessive focus on Israel is also predictable due to demographic changes. In 1948, only about 5% of the world’s Jews lived in Israel. Today roughly 50% do- Israel has easily overtaken the United States as the largest Jewish population. Israel also has the only Jewish community of any size that is growing, due to both natural increase (Israel is perhaps the only developed country that has never had sub-replacement fertility) and through the ingathering of exiles. Ironically, the Arabs themselves contributed mightily to the success of Zionism, as did the hostile countries of the Soviet Bloc- their Jewish populations fled en masse to Israel. There were one million Jews in the Arab World in 1948- today there are fewer than 5,000, mostly in “tolerant” Morocco, which has perhaps one one hundredth of its former Jewish population- who ethnically cleansed whom?
When you think of what the world was like when Judaism came on the scene it was a revolutionary concept. It proclaimed that the individual is responsible for their actions before God. Ponder that. It’s truly a breathtaking concept.
That seminal concept flies in the face of all totalitarian movements and ideologies that work to subjugate and destroy individuality.
It is my assertion that the very existence of that one brilliant concept poses a threat to everything that the radical Left stands for.
Sadly, this hatred now bubbles up on the non- left as Musk and other talking heads scream at the ADL, which has long been a far left and itself anti-Israel/anti Jewish human beings. It’s association with Al Sharpton is all you need to know.
These realities about that organization are purposely ignored so that social media platforms ( GAB, Twitter, Red Voice Media) can scream at “ all Jews.” The comments section on frequently read non-left sites (Revolver, Gateway) sounds like WW II German Nazi propaganda.
The left has Jew hate at its foundation. The non-left blames the Jews for the left, somehow. Once again, we Jews can feel like hated refugees on a boat with no friendly port in the USA. Or we must embrace Israel further, which I certainly do, and become self sufficient warriors.
We miss President Trump. Things are deteriorating here since the 2020 fiasco. This author may eschew his style, but we Americans pray for a chance to have him back in 24. He supported Israel ( more than other presidents), he had support from most of the American non-left and so American Jews were safer.
President Trump has impeccable style.
To be critical of the Israeli government is easy. I do it all the time for their appeasement of Islamofascist terrorists and LeftTwats.
The insane attacks on the Israeli people is to be nothing but a continuation of the thousands of years of racism. The Islamofascist colonists are not being treated as they should be. For their genocidal actions. But to say that is “hasbara” and makes one a government propagandist
The LeftTwats that support these genocidal invaders are themselves targets of their pet project.
Islamophpobia is anti Semitism pure and simple
“Islamophobia” is simply a made up word to tar people who are critical of Islam as being mentally ill and thus to discredit or silence them. It is hardly a “phobia”, i.e., an irrational fear, to be critical of a religion whose stated goal is to place, through conversion or conquest, the entire world under its law (sharia), has hundreds of verses calling for the murder of unbelievers in its holy book (the Quran) and has been behaving accordingly for 1700 years. So use of the word “Islamophobia” is a word that should be banished from usage.
It must be noted that anti-Jew and anti-Christian hate is rooted in islam.
Allah is satan.
Antisemitism was part of Christian holy Scripture before the Koran was written.
Jew-hatred comes from the far Left, far Right, and Islamic extremists.
Allah means God. There are huge numbers of moderate Muslims. Consider the Iranian protesters and the majority who support them.
Sure, Christian scriptures written by Jews (all of the New Testament authors other than Luke) were full of antisemitism. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on..
Lol! Melanie, you mentioned Marr. Wow! Daniel avoids that name like the plague even when he mentions anti-semitism and heads down the same old cul de sac: the responses to such Daniel articles are always predictable and identical—but Daniel can’t close the conversation or make matters clear because he won’t mention… that German journalist, as he correctly calls him. Well, cats out of the bag now. I could say A LOT, but I won’t.
I agree with Ms Phillips. I also can’t stand the term “antisemitism”. It’s weak and totally inaccurate.
The term I use, and one that I believe is much more accurate, is Judeophobia.
Of course there is a difference. Majority of Jews aren’t from Israel and have no ancestral or genetic connection to that region. Those Jews are European per their DNA and are converts to a Middle Eastern religion called Judaism.
So, being critical of Israel is. It being bigoted towards Jews.
Yes there is a distinction. Namely the overwhelming amount of Jews are not from Israel nor do they have any ancestral ties to that country. Those Jews are from Europe and adopted a Middle eastern religion.
This is nonsense on so many levels. I’m tired of trying to educate people like you. Read a book.
All,
The rebellion of Satan and his angels and man’s rebellion against God and His Son — the Christ is the oldest ancient hate.
This is the key to answering the question Melanie Philips posed, but didn’t answer:
“The question is why this supremely perverse onslaught against Israel is happening.”
The “Why” is spiritual.
It’s the only explanation for why so many people who have absolutely nothing else in common (and have other reasons to hate one another) would team up to attack the Jews via the Jewish state.
In one sense, it isn’t really about the Jewish people. It’s a hatred for the Jewish God, and the promises He made to our people.
Anyone who is skeptical about the spiritual driver should read The Rainbow Swastika, a free e-book that traces today’s globalist Jew-hatred back to an occult doctrine from a spirit guide, which is revered and promoted by the UN.