Know Thy Enemy

Have you denounced anti-Semitism today? It is becoming de rigueur? Some foolish politician throws out an anti-Semitic slur and immediately all other fellow travelers are told that they must immediately denounce it, lest they be considered Neo-Nazi thugs. And then the question becomes how fervent the denunciation.

In our war against bigotry, we are constantly on the lookout for racist invective and are constantly working to remove the last vestiges of bigotry.

And yet, anti-Semitism remains, Joel Kotkin explains, the one remaining acceptable bigotry. Especially when we are dealing with black anti-Semitism. Or better, with Islamist anti-Semitism.

Even Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has a history, as a spokesperson for MoveOn, of anti-Israel sentiments, and other nominees also have a record of attacking Jewish “money and influence.” Democrat-dominated groups like the Anti-Defamation League of course rail against right-wing hate groups but seem reluctant to take on liberal anti-Semites like Al Sharpton and Ilhan Omar. As the Jewish magazine Tablet suggests, their mission to combat anti-Semitism continues to be shape by their predictably progressive bias.

And also:

The second, largely ignored, comes from the Left. The progressives and their media allies have had a field day with Trump’s nauseating repast but they are far less interested in combating anti-Semitism from progressives. This was evident in 2020, when the ADL and many mainstream Jewish groups openly embraced the anti-Israel Black Lives Matter, even while CEO Jonathan Greenblatt acknowledged the hateful views of many of BLMs supporters. Greenblatt, like most Democrats, has genuflected towards Al Sharpton, a past dealer in anti-Semitic calumnies.

And then, 

The third and perhaps the most disturbing face of antisemitism is neither left or right, but essentially black. This reflects the recrudescence of a dormant but persistent hostility that has characterized a century of relations between two prominent minority groups. African American communities, according to surveys, are the least admiring of Jews of all ethnic groups while many of their most prominent leaders—Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton—have all embraced, without much criticism, antisemitic tropes more recently adopted by such high-profile black celebrities as Kanye West and Kyrie Irving.

And, Kotkin continues:

But, contrary to the notions backed by the ADL and their claque in the mainstream media, Jews face an arguably bigger, if perhaps less lethal threat—at least in terms of politics, culture and education—from the Left. Two decades ago the famous Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld predicted that the main threat in the future would come from an alliance of Islamists and left-wing activists.

Today barely half of Europeans think Israel has a right to exist. The generally middle class Green Parties, which have emerged as big winners in Germany and across the continent, tend to support the BDS movement, with aims to demonize and eliminate the Jewish state. The German Greens regularly label Israel an “apartheid” regime. Many European leftists favor the actual destruction of the Jewish state, itself likely to generate a new Holocaust.

The NYPD reported 208 antisemitic hate crimes through September of this year—9 percent more than in all of 2018, and 41 percent more than all of 2017. Black people, not white nationalists, are committing a growing number of random attacks on both Asians and Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn, a place where neo-Nazis are hardly thick on the ground.

The lesson-- know they enemy.