Explaining Antisemitism

“Antisemitism is a question I’ve been asking myself all my life because I don’t understand it,” said 96-year-old Bunny Grossinger, “I have no understanding of why people hate Jews.” The frail New Yorker’s question has intrigued countless scholars over the years, and baffled thinkers and laymen alike for generations. While there might be debate over the reasons for the oldest hatred’s longevity or the trigger for the recent spike, there is no disputing the fact that this singular derangement has gone mainstream.

Antisemitism is everywhere and it is on the rise - from the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue massacre and swastikas sprayed on Jewish cemeteries, to the murder of Sarah Halimi and BBC journalist Tala Halawa’s tweet stating “Hitler Was Right".  

Social media is ablaze with antisemitic references and countless furious debates, including J K Rowling’s bitter Twitter exchange with Simon Maginn, who demanded Jews explain their anger at Corbyn’s comments, referring to it as 'synthetic outrage’. Rowling’s poignant reply echoed the sentiments of many: “How dare you tell a Jew that their outrage is 'patently synthetic’?” she asked. “How dare you demand that they lay bare their pain and fear on demand for your personal evaluation?”, and her knockout question, “What other minority would you speak to this way?”

Antisemitic incidents are being reported throughout Europe - they hit an all time high in Austria, while Germany has banned the Hamas flag in a bid to halt the disturbing rise. Tens of thousands of French Jews have fled to Israel, while in Belgium, a soccer star was under investigation after a video of him leading supporters in an antisemitic song went viral. 

In the UK and the US, Jews have been “singled out for assault in the street and in restaurants,” commented broadcaster Melanie Phillips, “baited on social media or from passing cars, their synagogues attacked and their children harassed in school.” So alarmed are American Jews that demand for self-defence courses has skyrocketed, synagogues carry round the clock security as standard, and residents in some Jewish neighbourhoods dare not venture out after dark. The incidents are too numerous to mention but include targeted vandalism, rabbis stabbed, verbal abuse on public transport and more - the footage of an LA orthodox Jew running for his life, chased by a speeding vehicle, sent shivers down many Jews’ spine, evoking a chilling reminder of pre-WW2 Germany.

In Britain, a convoy of vehicles descended on Jewish neighbourhoods with loudspeakers blaring, “F*** the Jews, rape their daughters,” while pro-Palestinian demonstrations featured distinctly anti-Israel hatred and even a policewoman chanting ‘Free Palestine’. Jewish UK teachers left unions in protest of schools’ pro-Palestinian bias and there were reports of protests taking place within school grounds. So concerning was the tension that education minister Williamson has sent a message to headteachers alerting them to the alarming rise in antisemitism, and reminding them of their “legal duties regarding political impartiality.” His words were echoed by PM Boris Johnson, a former kibbutz volunteer, who extended his support to Britain’s Jews.

Half of British Jews now conceal visible signs of Judaism in public. We heard from Jewish parents who hide their children’s Jewish background when registering them for school, Jewish university students who keep their Judaism quiet, kippah-wearing individuals who were physically attacked on London’s streets and Jews for whom emigrating to Israel remains a serious option.

Antisemitism has gone mainstream

There was a time when it took an Israeli military conflict to wake the antisemitic demons but this is no longer the case. The past few years have seen the longest hatred turn into an ever-present constant within society.

“Whenever Israel is engaged in conflict,” former Brexit candidate Yosef David has told me, “you see Antisemitism rise. Jews in the diaspora have come to expect the temporary rise in anti-Jewish sentiments and anger, but what we saw during Guardian of the Walls was unlike previous waves - this felt like grass-roots hatred that touched the heart of Jewish neighbourhoods.” Seeing this, David added in alarm, “I must tell you that I worry for the future.”

I first interviewed Jewish Orthodox David in 2019 when he contested Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington seat, as mounting allegations over the Labour leader’s Antisemitism dominated the news.

“It was clear that we were not posing a threat to Corbyn’s safe Islington majority,” explained David, “choosing a Jewish orthodox man as a candidate was the Brexit Party’s way of making a defiant statement on behalf of UK Jews.”

The Conservative national election win came as a huge relief to British Jewry and David was quick to tweet his heartfelt thanks to the British public for sending the message that “Jews are welcome in this country.” It soon became clear, however, that Corbyn’s electoral loss failed to end the growing anti-Zionist sentiments - not only is Antisemitism alive, it is louder, bolder and more vicious than many Jews can remember. 

Corbyn’s rise to the Labour leadership has, according to academic Dave Rich, personified “a widespread left-wing hostility to Israel that alienates many Jews.” To this I would add that Corbyn helped legitimise Antisemitism - as Labour leader he turned down the invitation from his Israeli counterpart Herzog to visit YadVashem, and his name was linked to countless anti-Zionist incidents including laying a wreath on the grave of Munich Olympics massacre perpetrators. Most importantly, the Labour leader’s alleged Antisemitism has grabbed the news headlines for so long that it created the false impression that Antisemitism is the sole domain of the radical left.

“This is far from the truth,” explained Joseph Cohen of the Israel Advocacy movement, “Antisemitism is not the reserve of a small fringe minority; it is deeply rooted within society. We are witnessing a spike whenever Israel is involved in conflict, but Antisemitism is an ongoing issue.” 

Cohen’s words are backed by a 2021 Campaign Against Antisemitism survey showing that forty-five per cent of British people hold antisemitic views, agreeing with at least one of six antisemitic tropes presented to them such as ‘Jews control the media’, ‘Jews chase money’ and ‘Jews talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda’. 

“Antisemites’ tone is considerably more threatening,” added Cohen, who points to “a disturbing increase in the use of ‘classic’ medieval antisemitic imagery, including emotive portrayals of Jews as child and baby killers.”

Kippah-wearing Cohen was physically attacked as he and his friend left a London restaurant recently. “They attacked us because we are visibly Jewish,” shaken Cohen tweeted soon after the assault, adding, “We got away with grazes and bruises but the next person they attack might not be as lucky.”

Antisemitism is unlike other hatreds

Before we discuss the recent spike, we need to clarify two things. 

First, we need to ask why attacks on Jews do not trigger the same sense of alarm and outrage within society at large as do attacks on other minorities. Ask yourself: if a convoy of vehicles descended upon a predominantly black or Muslim neighbourhood, and through loud megaphones screamed calls to rape black/Muslim women, what would the public response be? 

Second, we need to acknowledge that antisemitism is unlike other hatreds. This disturbingly obsessive hatred has been spreading its poisonous narrative for so long that it has actually become an entity in itself. 

“Jew-hatred is a cultural element deeply imbued in Western cultural consciousness with a millennial history behind it,” says professor Evyatar Friesel of The Hebrew University. “It represents a factor by itself that over the centuries has undergone adaptations to the changing cultural environment, while remaining the same Jew-hatred - in modern times it has turned secular and racist.”

From the biblical tales of Abraham and Haman, through countless pogroms, expulsions, humiliation and crippling discrimination, all the way to genocide and Hitler’s Final Solution - the Jews always rose from the ashes, not just to survive, but to flourish and thrive. 

It is this very ability to succeed against the odds that poses a conundrum in the minds of many because it goes against the perception of a minority being a failure. “Jews are the cog in the machine that doesn’t fit,” broadcaster Dave Rubin told Lotuseaters.com, “Jews have extraordinarily survived for thousands of years, through tradition, culture and belief, and that is completely against the left’s want for monolithic thought with their minorities oppressed.” 

Furthermore, argues former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, “if you have an ideology that says white people can’t be victims, and Jews are white people,” then “Jews don’t count.”

The Jews’ ability to flourish has been a source of intrigue for many over the years, including Mark Twain who in 1899 wrote, “If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race … properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.” 

Commenting on Jews’ producing some of the world’s greatest names in “literature, science, art, music, finance and medicine,” he wisely notes that they have done it “with their hands tied behind them,” against all odds.

“All things are mortal but the Jew,” concluded Twain, “all other forces pass, but he remains - what is the secret of his immortality?” According to Albert Einstein, “the Jewish group has thrived on oppression and on the antagonism it has forever met in the world - here undoubtedly lies one of the main reasons for its continued existence through so many thousands of years.” 

Remaining dignified and civil, hard-working, educated and family-centred, Jews learnt to accept their misfortune as their fate and rested on their intellectual prowess to make their way in the world. They often turned to bitterly cynical humour for relief - from the famously battered Tevya the milkman asking God why he cannot choose a different people once in a while, to Dershowitz’s poignantly telling joke of two 1930’s Vienna Jews reading the newspaper - one reads the Yiddish paper, while the other is engaged in the Nazi propaganda organ Der Stürmer. “Why are you reading that Nazi rag?” asks the first. “I used to read the Yiddish newspaper, and all it talked about was how Jews are suffering,” replied the other, “being fired from their jobs, being subject to pogroms and starving - now I read in the Nazi newspaper that we control the world, I prefer the good news.”

Joking aside, what actually turned the Jews into the people of the book in the first place? What gave them that famous intellectual edge? 

It was actually the rabbis who, in 70BC, transformed Judaism into a religion of literacy, with their decision that every Jewish man should be able to read and independently study the Torah. The enforcement of literacy in a mostly illiterate, agrarian world, has led to the Jewish economic success and intellectual prominence in the subsequent centuries up to today, explained The Chosen Few authors Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein.

Coupled with a tradition of fiercely independent thought, this cemented education and knowledge at the heart of the Jewish culture - central to Jewish families to this very day. It also cultivated the tradition to ‘think outside the box’, which, according to Eckstein, is a significant part of Israel’s phenomenal success as a start-up nation.  

From the bible to the Squad

The mutating ancient antisemitic tropes and conspiracies centre around the idea of Jews being different. Biblical Haman told king Ahashverosh of “a people scattered among the nations whose religion is different and they do not practice the king’s religion.” Haman’s proposal was to “kill them all, to eliminate them from boy to old man to babies and women.” Centuries later it was Hitler who asserted that Jews “as a folk, it has special intrinsic characteristics which separate it from all other folks living on the globe.” 

One prominent trope of many is that of covert dominance, first noted in the biblical story of Joseph, where Jews were accused of taking over the government. It evolved into the made-up Protocols of the Elders of Zion, promoting the wild invention of Jews plotting world domination through a secret international shadow government. This has, in turn, evolved into the present-day conspiracy of Jews as privileged whites, controlling banks, industry, the media and governments. Recent examples of this include Nick Fuentes’ now-deleted tweet, “Palestine isn’t the only country under Israeli occupation,” and Sandra White of the SNP tweeting a caricature of Rothschild as a sow with CIA, MI6, Al Qaeda and Israel as its sucklings piglets. 

Another prominent trope is that of Jews’ genocide and blood-thirst - dating back to the 12th-century ritual-murder-charge which took place in Norwich, England, where a boy named William was found dead in the woods. Monk Thomas of Monmouth accused local Jews of murdering him in mockery of the crucifixion of Jesus, and soon the myth began to circulate that each year, Jewish leaders choose a country and town from which a Christian would be apprehended and murdered. From then on, when a Christian child went missing, it was not uncommon for local Jews to be blamed and tortured for a ‘confession’. Some Christians even believed that the Jews’ red Passover wine was actually blood and that Jews mixed blood into their matzo. 

Centuries later, 49 Jews were murdered in the 1903 Kishinev pogrom following a ‘blood libel’ against the Jewish community. The horrific events marked a historic landmark for the Jewish people. The pogrom inspired Bialik’s haunting poem On The Slaughter, and the eternal line, “revenge for the blood of a little child - has not yet been devised by Satan.”

More recently, social media platforms have come under fire for hosting blood libel related content. The ADL has in 2014 demanded Facebook remove “Jewish Ritual Murder” pages. The most recent incarnation of this cruel blood libel is that of Jews as Zionist, white European colonials, committing genocide against ethnically native Palestinians.

One particularly cruel lie paints Jews as water-well poisoners. Dating back to the dark ages it emerges nowadays through anti-Israeli bodies such Breaking The Silence, which blamed Israel for poisoning Palestinian villagers’ water supply. Israeli journalist Ben Dror Yemini’s investigation of the accusation has led him to an alleged 2004 incident where several Palestinians lodged a complaint over chicken carcasses thrown into a well. “Breaking the Silence talked about the poisoning of the entire water supply,” concluded Yemini. “This never happened,” they talked about the "entire village being evacuated for a period of several years and this also never happened.” It should be noted that Yemini’s conclusions are rejected by Breaking The Silence.

The topic of lies relating to Jews and Israel is one this journalist knows well. Yemini’s book Industry of Lies is an in-depth look at “a fraud of historic, even epic proportions, when almost half of all Europeans believe that Israel treats the Palestinians just like the Nazis treated the Jews - prominent intellectuals chant deranged ‘apartheid state’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ mantras” and as a result, democratic Israel has to many people become the devil incarnate. 

“One of the most prominent and persistent stereotypes about Jews is that they are greedy and avaricious, hoping to make themselves rich by any means” explains the ADL. From the middle ages and the merchant of Venice, through Henry Ford’s alleged “oppression of the people by the financial practices of the Jews,” all the way to a 2019 journalist asking why US political leaders always defend Israel, to which representative Ilhan Omar tweeted the reply, "It's all about the Benjamins baby.”

Incidentally, Henry Ford has also republished the aforementioned Protocols of the Elders of Zion in The Dearborn Independent, presented as a factual piece in a series called “The International Jew: the World’s Foremost Problem.” 

Collective blame and critical race theory’s issue with the Jews

“From Haman, through the Holocaust, to present day,” says Asael Abelman of Shalem College, “Jews were blamed collectively and trapped by a blaming accusation from which there is no escape - a technique that turned Antisemitism into a political tool for groups of opposing views - Right and Left are paradoxically united over Jews’ blame.”  

Christianity too has applied the collective blame over the years, a sin for which it plans to publicly apologise. Next year marks the 800th anniversary of the 1222 Synod of Oxford, and the Church of England plans to offer its repentance over antisemitic church laws that ultimately led to the Jews’ expulsion from England. 

The 1290 expulsion was preceded by pogroms in York, London and other cities and towns, which exerted a level of barbaric cruelty never before experienced by English Jews. In 1190, Jews were killed in Lincolnshire and massacred in Bury St. Edmonds, while the pogroms taking place in 1190 York were so brutal they tainted the city’s name to eternity - the city’s entire Jewish community were trapped by an angry mob inside the tower of York Castle. Rather than wait to be killed or be forcibly baptised, the petrified Jews decided to meet death together - the father of each family killed his wife and children before taking his own life.

The deep hatred set the tone for generations to come, as evidenced by Antisemitism’s unfading potency and the unwavering clasp of the cruel blood libel.

Sadly, the church’s act of repentance will not halt antisemitism's march. This is because of progressive forces that have invaded denominations in America and Britain - what broadcaster Melanie Phillips refers to as “liberation theology, promoted by the World Council of Churches, whose neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-West attitudes [that] paved the way for liberal Christians to embrace the social justice agenda.”

The collective blame aspect also applies to critical race theory which, according to James Lindsay, has an issue with Jews. Lindsay’s Critical Race Theory’s Jewish Problem essay quotes Jewish Bari Weiss’s assertion that “by simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference, and so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed.” Zionism is refashioned as colonialism and Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews are the face of capital.

“Jews are flattened into 'white people’, our living history obliterated,” added Weiss, “so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely white on white crime.”

According to Lindsay, critical race theory distrusts Jewish success, believing “it must have something to do with having been granted access to the privileges of whiteness illegitimately, by betrayal, and at the expense of blacks.” It demands that (white) Jews accept and atone of their whiteness by recognizing it in themselves, acknowledging their de facto complicity in 'white supremacy,' critiquing their own unwitting participation, submitting to, and promoting the critical race theory worldview - “this, however, requires asking Jews to deny both their history and what makes them Jews in the first place.”

Christian Antisemitism meets that of the Muslim immigrants

“The spike in Antisemitism worldwide,” Israeli scholar Mordechai Kedar told me, “is a meeting of the traditional Christian anti-Jewish hatred with that of the Muslim immigrants.” Journalist Melanie Phillips too speaks of an alliance between the Islamic world and the Western left, “making common cause against the Jewish people, ostensibly over the Palestinian issue.”

Indeed, nothing unites the left worldwide more than the powerful consensus over Israel oppressing the Palestinian people. But many, including Dave Rubin, consider this nothing but a poor excuse for hatred. I put before Rubin a hypothetical situation of Israel signing a peace agreement with the Palestinians tomorrow, asking if antisemitism would then vanish. 

“Of course not,” he replies, “this is just an excuse - if you have an obsessive hatred for this tiny country, the way Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and AOC have, your obsessive focus of that place might have a little something to do with you not liking Jews.”

Professor Jarrod Tanny of the University of North Carolina attributes the rise, at least partly, to the growing number of people and institutions adopting the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. Most disturbing to antisemites, he argues, is the IHRA’s inclusion of the phrase “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.”

So is criticism of Israel always antisemitism? 

“The difference between anti-Israel and antisemitic is the difference between criticising Israel and hating it,” tweeted Dave Rich, who shared footage of pro-Palestinian demonstrators stepping violently on the Israeli flag and burning it amid jubilant cheers. 

But perhaps the question to ask is why is criticism of Israel so different from criticism of other countries? Why are the media and the UN obsessed with Israel? who can explain the astounding number of condemnations of Israel compared to the rest of the world? 

According to Christians United For Israel, “from 2012 to 2015, the UNGA adopted 97 resolutions criticising individual countries; 83 of which were against Israel. Director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer shows a staggering statistic of UNHRC Condemnations between 2006 and 2021, counting 14 condemnations for North Korea, 11 for Iran, 36 for Syria and 95 for Israel - Israel is apparently over 8 times worse than the state that Yeonmi Park escaped. 

In Israel, antisemites found “a socially acceptable way to hate,” explained Eitan Meir of the Zionist movement Im Tirzu. ”While old-fashioned Antisemitism is still not socially acceptable or politically correct, Antisemitism in the form of anti-Zionism is. That is how we have the situation in which international bodies like the UN consistently single out the world's only Jewish state, and how US congresswomen allow themselves to target Israel with impunity while giving a pass to the world's most egregious human rights' abusers.”

Anti-Zionism is antisemitism 

“Anti Zionism is Antisemitism,” asserted Benjamin Netanyahu, a “new form of Antisemitism” created by the establishment of the state of Israel. What we are seeing, added Netanyahu, is the ongoing attempt to deny the Jewish people the right to self-determination. His sentiments are seconded by the late Elie Wiesel who saw the existence of Israel as “the new Antisemitism’s oxygen”, and Dave Rubin who speaks of “dozens of Muslim-majority and Christian-majority nations in existence, but one tiny Jewish-majority nation that’s crazily small, and the world is ravenously focused on whether this country can exist, and whether Jews are allowed to live in it.”

The targeting of Israel is everywhere - from Billie Eilish facing backlash for saying "hi Israel" in a promotional video, to Nick Fuentes’ incessant narrative and a Google employee who used the phrase, "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” There is the NEA teaching union protesting against Israel’s “ethnic cleansing”, Ben and Jerry’s shunning Judea and Samaria, and countless other incidents such as the recent Philadelphia food festival that disinvited an Israeli food truck after organizers were heavily targeted by anti-Israeli activists.

The obsessive anti-Israel narrative is effective, argued Dr Yvette Alt Miller in Aish. By treating Israel as a pariah state and exposing it to constant defamation and distortion, Israel’s enemies have succeeded in making people “believe that Israel alone is some sort of monstrous, illegitimate country without equal in the world.” Activists and media outlets single out Israel for scrutiny and hatred “in a way that they would never apply to any other state, no matter how terrible the conditions there might be.”

This is a pivotal point to consider with regards to public perception of Israel. The BBC, CNN and their allies have over several decades created a twisted image of Israel, often divorced from reality. 

“Nothing in Britain bears more responsibility for the spread of the false anti-Israel narrative than the BBC,” noted Jewish activist David Collier - the narrative that was routinely echoed, repeated and magnified by countless outlets the world over. So potent is the distortion that Camera UK has a monitoring site dedicated to BBC’s anti-Israel bias. So persistent were complaints regarding the BBC’s anti-Israel rhetoric that in 2004 a report was commissioned to examine thousands of hours of the BBC's coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Penned by the broadcast Malcolm Balen, the 20,000-word document was never released. 

But it is not just the BBC. Collier cites Wikipedia as instrumental to the spread of an anti-Israel narrative. “Wikipedia is the 13th most visited website in the world,” probably influencing “more people than any other source on the planet and it is at war with the Jews,” he explained. “Every Wikipedia page that deals with the history of Jews or Israel is tainted,” added Collier, thus providing legitimacy to antisemitic arguments. Wikipedia’s rewriting of Israeli history “is part of the antisemitic strategy,” argued Collier, whose countless examples include the smearing of pro-Israeli advocacy groups with the addition of the label ‘right-wing’ to their description - teachers and academics use the information in Wikipedia to write material for schools,” added Collier, and this bias finds its way into the classroom and textbooks

Joseph Cohen has pointed to the New York Times’s contribution to the demonisation of Israel. “The New York Times showed the faces of children who died during the Israeli conflict but not those who died in other conflicts,” he explained, “this in itself plays right into the Jews as baby killers conspiracy.” 

The New York Times is also cited by Honest Reporting, with the stunning example of a September 2000 photo that also appeared on Associated Press and other major outlets. The photo showed “a young man, bloodied and battered, crouching beneath a club-wielding Israeli policeman” and the caption identified him as a Palestinian victim of recent riots, with the clear implication that the Israeli soldier was the one who beat him.”

The victim’s true identity was revealed when Dr Aaron Grossman of Chicago contacted the Times to say “that ‘Palestinian' is actually my son, Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish student from Chicago, he and two of his friends were pulled from their taxicab while travelling in Jerusalem, by a mob of Palestinian Arabs and were severely beaten and stabbed.”

When AP was alerted to the errors, it issued a series of corrections but the damage to Israel’s image was done.

A peculiar place

“Right now, Jews are in a very precarious and strange position,” said Bari Weiss. There is the far-right call of, ‘all Jews must die’ - for these Antisemites, Jews are ‘fake white people’. It is the conviction that motivated the infamous chants of 'Jews will not replace us' at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The far-left says that “Jews claim to be a minority, they say that they’re oppressed, but hold on, they’re white, they’re white-passing, they’re white-adjacent - more than that they support Israel, which is the last standing bastion of white colonialism in the Middle East, so in fact, not only are they not a minority and they’re not oppressed, they’re handmaidens to white supremacy.”

The situation is complicated further by the progressive scene that has in itself become a hotbed for antisemitism. A scene that is home to self-haters whose words are often used as ammunition by Israel’s enemies. Anti-Zionists often quote Jewish anti-Israeli activists such as Miko Peled and Norman Finkelstein, as well as Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the organisations Breaking The Silence and Betselem. Their words are quoted as some kind of validation of criticism of the Jewish state. Anti-Israel activists also quote notable Jewish figures such as Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky, among others.

Antisemites quote Jewish critics of Israel because they wrongly view Jews as one uniform group. Jews come from nearly every place on the planet, and hold a great number of often opposing views. It is wrong to assume that all Jews automatically agree on any given topic, be it Corbyn or Trump. Most Israelis, for example, support Trump but the majority of US Jews opposed him. 

It is also wrong to assume that all Jews hold a built-in obligation to defend fellow Jews’ views. Yair Netanyahu’s criticism of Jewish George Soros, for example, is not proof of Jews’ own Antisemitism, as some have argued. The son of the former PM's belief that “Soros organisations are destroying Israel from within, working day and night to rob Israel of its Jewish identity” relates to Soros’ globalist vision, not his Jewish background.

The precarious and strange place of diaspora Jews is referred to by Dave Rich as the ‘good Jew bad Jew’ dilemma. Rich gives the example of a Jewish Momentum member who is challenged for her views on Israel. “I have never even been to Israel and I boycott Israeli goods,” said the woman in a Momentum video, wondering why she is asked these questions. She is in fact saying that ‘you should not be antisemitic to Jews who boycott Israeli goods - they are good Jews,' commented Rich.

She then said that white British people need to be very careful about not using antisemitic language but Palestinians have the right to define their oppression in whatever words they see fit - “in other words,” said Rich, “if a Palestinian denies the Holocaust or claims that Rothschild runs the world, that’s not antisemitic, but if a white British person does, they are.”

The Soviet hand 

“The Soviet Union was definitely responsible for encouraging antisemitism in the global left and provided the anti-Zionist language through which to do this,” Dave Rich has told me. This is an influence that has been known through the revelations of Bezmenov but the disclosures of Romanian agent Ion Mihai Pacepa shed an alarming light on the spread of antisemitism in the West.

In 1979, former agent Pacepa defected to the West. In his books Red Horizons and Disinformation, he revealed how KGB operation seeded Muslim countries with anti-American, anti-Jewish propaganda during the 1970s. Many believe that the deeply rooted anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric seen today is the result of this Soviet infiltration.

The highest-ranking Soviet-bloc intelligence officer to ever defect to the West, Pacepa wrote of how Yuri Andropov, then-KGB chief, sent hundreds of agents to Muslim countries. Their mission was ’to persuade the Islamic world that Israel and the United States intended to transform the rest of the world into a Zionist fiefdom.’

It is worth noting that Andropov’s KGB leadership began just several months before the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel defeated Syria and Egypt, the key Soviet allies. Andropov has, according to Pacepa, decided to retaliate by training Palestinian militants to hijack El Al airplanes and bomb sites in Jerusalem.

Particularly shocking and telling is the revelation that Andropov commissioned the first Arabic translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a work of fiction, spreading the astonishingly powerful notion of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. In 1972 his agency received from the KGB an Arabic translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with the order to disseminate it within targeted Islamic countries.

Pacepa also spoke of how the KGB moulded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist and selected a personal hero for him, the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who collaborated with Nazi Germany. The KGB has asked Arafat to declare war on American imperial-Zionism - Arafat has apparently later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist call for battle but this was a Moscow invention. More importantly, it was a modern adaptation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a favourite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB, noted Pacepa, has always regarded the coupling of antisemitism and anti-imperialism a winning combination for spreading anti-Americanism.

The art of contradictory accusations - you can’t win

“They hate us not because they make up false accusations about us,” wrote Netanyahu’s hero Jabotinsky in 1911, “they make up false accusations about us because they hate us - this is why the false accusations are so numerous, diverse and contradictory.” 

The Zionist leader’s assertions of over 100 years ago remain painfully relevant. Antisemites hate the Jews for being a lazy and inferior race, but also for using their superior intelligence to ‘dominate the world’. Jews are hated for being pacifists and warmongers, revolutionary communists and exploiter capitalists. Possibly the most ridiculous is that of IDF soldiers being accused of raping Arab women, but at the same time being called racist for not raping Arab women. “You can’t win,” commented former IDF soldier Hen Mazzig, “if you rape an Arab, you’re dehumanizing them, if you don’t rape them, you’re dehumanizing them too - the alternative hypothesis, that Israeli soldiers don’t engage in rape because of professional strictures and moral scruples, isn’t even considered.”

You can’t win because, as Zarathustra’s Serpent puts it, “Antisemitism today is a bubble of lies that feeds itself, pushed by BDS, academics and the progressive Left online” - more accurately, the collective global progressive left which aims to eliminate Jewish and national elements from Israeli life. This is a Western-world phenomenon, including Israel, where, astonishingly, some radical leftists find the flag and the national anthem offensive. A self-hating Israeli film has just won a Cannes Film Festival prize, where the judges remarked on ‘the bravery of an Israeli filmmaker criticising his state’. Anyone with the faintest knowledge of Israel must laugh in disbelief at this remark. “The antisemite world loves seeing us in this self hating pose,” reflected one Israeli reader on the Cannes win, “Israel is an enlightened democracy with freedom of expression - the film was funded by Israel.” 

The left’s extreme has woken up the right-wing demons

Just as Jordan Peterson predicted, the left’s extreme has woken up the right-wing demons, as witnessed in Charlottesville’s chants of, ‘Jews will not replace us’. “Peterson is right,” Dave Rubin told me, “if you tell white people, and white Christian people, and white straight people that they’re evil by their very existence, well then eventually they are going to get some bad ideas into their system.” 

This is a pivotal point to bear in mind because, as Dennis Prager explains, the attack on Judaism is the attack on Western values. Antisemitism is the canary in the coalmine of society for a reason - the rising Jew-hatred and the unforgiving bashing of the Jewish character are reflective of a society in decline. 

“No healthy democratic society,” explained Professor Deborah Lipstadt, “has harbored antisemitism and remained a healthy democratic society - when you have antisemitism within a society, it means that people are subscribing to a conspiracy theory. Anybody who subscribes to antisemitism is already having doubts, ‘well, can I trust the government? the Jews are behind it.’” The danger to society at large is in the “sowing distrust in the fundamental institutions - if you believe they are fundamentally unfair in their foundation stone, then you don't trust in their democracy, and all of democracy is threatened.”

Last word

Antisemitism is possibly the cruellest conspiracy theory to ever plague this planet - its lies the most successful meme to intoxicate civilisation. 

Particularly disturbing is the blaming of Jews for their own tragic fate - throwing the fact that they have been abused wherever they dwelled as proof that there is something intrinsically evil within the Jewish spirit - so evil that it inevitably evokes hatred within every nationality and culture on Earth. 

It is time to break the silence and dispute made-up claims head on - this is happening with the likes of Camera, Honest Reporting, Hillel Neuer and The Jewminati, which dissects the narratives of Nick Fuentes and Abby Martin among others, exposing what it views as lies made about the Jewish state. 

It is time for the world to recognise that Jews do not now, or have ever, drunk Christian children’s blood; that Jews’ high presence within finance and the media is simply due to them being highly proficient at these enterprises, and that yes, Jews have ownership interests in papers such as The New York Times but “those newspapers,” as noted by Alan Dershowitz, “don’t promote Jewish ‘control’ of the world, indeed, they are often at odds with Jewish public opinion.”

Why do so many people hate Jews is a question haters should be asking themselves. When doing so they should bear in mind Rubin’s assertion that antisemitism “is simply about whether Jews can exist or not,” Dershowitz’s stark reminder that many countries “that were complicit in ridding themselves of their Jewish populations have come to regret their actions,” and Wiesel’s assertion that without antisemitism there would not have been Auschwitz.

They should reflect on John Adams’s conclusion that “the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation,” and Paul Johnson’s true observation that “all the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time - the Jews had this gift - to them we owe the ideas of equality before the law, both divine and human, of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person, of the individual conscience, and so of personal redemption, of the collective conscience, and so of social responsibility, of peace as an abstract ideal, and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.”

Surely gratitude for these gifts would be an appropriate response.

Hannah is a London based journalist covering culture and current affairs. She writes about photography, film and TV for outlets in the UK and US, and covers current affairs with particular interest in the Jewish world. She is also an award-winning filmmaker and photographer. Her films were screened in festivals worldwide and parts of her documentary about Holocaust survivor Leon Greenman were screened on the BBC.