Woke Anti-Semitism

Anti-semitism never really went away. Now, it’s back with a vengeance. Around the Western world Muslim activists are fomenting violence against Jews. They are not just protesting; they are calling for the murder of Jews. 

Naturally, it is being led by the woke left. Apparently, Jews suffer from white privilege. Their successes in the world, like those of Asians, cannot have resulted from cultural values or even hard work. They can only have been produced by lying, cheating and stealing. 

And besides, Jewish success does not ring true to the virtue signaling democracy lovers. People who believe in the tyranny of the majority cannot understand why so few-- the Jews-- have so much while so many-- Muslims and other people of color-- have so little.

Writing from Great Britain Brendan O’Neill finds it somewhat paradoxical that woke leftists deplore feminists who believe that biological sex is real but are happy to embrace or at least to countenance overt expressions of violent Jew hatred.

Tis a puzzlement.

O’Neill opens thusly:

So the 21st-century left refuses to share a platform with feminists who think biological sex is real but they will rub shoulders with protesters who chant about killing Jews? This is the perverse position the woke left now finds itself in. It sees prejudice everywhere except where it actually exists. State a biological fact and they’ll brand you transphobic. Criticise the burqa and you’re an Islamophobe. Fail to take the knee to Black Lives Matter and its every potty political belief and you’ll be called racist. Wear a sombrero and you’re cancelled. But chanting death to Jews? No biggie. The woke warriors against racism and hatred will suddenly, magically go deaf. They’ll look the other way. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

Of course, the war against racism is not really a war against racism. It is a reconstituted Marxist attack on white capitalists-- a category that includes Jewish bankers, of course.

Dare we mention that we Americans voted Jeremiah Wright’s protege into the White House for eight years. Considering that Wright was not only bosom buddies with Louis Farrakhan but hated America and capitalism, we are not surprised that the presence of his protege in the White House legitimated anti-Semitism. Lest we forget, before there was Black Lives Matter-- an anti-Israeli, pro-Hamas group-- there was Black Liberation Theology.

Among the leading proponents of this idiocy was one Jeremiah Wright. As you know BLT was an offshoot of Liberation Theology, a South American unholy amalgam of Catholicism and Marxism, denounced and rejected by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. BLT militates for the overthrow of the white capitalist order. It seeks to organize the oppressed peoples of the world, especially black people, to take what is rightfully theirs. 

The woke left was perfectly happy with Obama administration contempt for Israel. It was perfectly happy to see that administration side with Iran and provide it with legitimate access to nuclear weapons. It will never forgive the Trump administration for trying to destroy the Iranian regime and for delegitimizing the Palestinian cause. For the record, in the Hamas charter, the Palestinian cause is defined as destroying the state of Israel and killing as many Jews as possible, both within and outside of Israel.

Obviously, this form of revolutionary leftism aims at the weakest link, the small international Jewish community. After that, it directs its ire against the white Anglo Saxon world, the place where free enterprise and the Industrial Revolution originated.

As for where this connection between Jews and Anglo-Saxons might have come from, why it was intrinsic to Nazi hatred. It was not just about hating the Jewish race, Nazis also despised the British, just as the Kaiser had in World War I, because they were culturally distinct from the Teutonic bullies from Mitteleuropa. The culture of British gentility was at serious odds with the culture of German thuggery. Obviously, Germany believed that it was stronger than Britain because it valued raw individual strength over decorum and social cohesion.

Anyway, O’Neill aims at the contradictions in current leftist thinking. Evidently, Jews cannot be victims of racism because they suffer from white privilege. As it happens, the same applies to Asians. 

Identity politics has helped to inflame and exacerbate contemporary anti-Semitism through its depiction of Jews as hyper-white, as uber-privileged, and we all know what privileged people deserve, right?

Criticism, censure, ridicule, possibly harassment. They definitely cannot be empathised with as victims of racism. That doesn’t compute for a woke left that has decreed that Jews are super-white, and therefore super-privileged, and therefore super-suspect.

So, the woke left is all in with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. They have also been trying to bring the war to the streets of the West. Presumably they blame their misery and the misery that afflicts the population of Gaza on Jews. It’s like blaming the black crime rate, and especially the black on black crime wave, on white police officers. Surely, no one was surprised to hear that BLM leaders support Hamas.

‘Silence is compliance’, the woke left is fond of saying. So should we take their silence on recent acts of anti-Semitism as a sign of compliance with this hateful ideology? People are setting fire to Jewish monuments in Germany. They’re driving through Jewish areas of London calling for the rape of Jewish girls. They’re parading through the streets with images of hook-nosed Jews. If this doesn’t concern the woke left, then it is clearly even more lost than some of us feared.