Anti-Semitism returns to gain mainstream traction
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The rise, or rise again, of anti-Semitism is by no means confined to Britain. Australian academic Peter Kurti warns rising anti-Semitism in Britain, US and Europe risks becoming “commonplace” here too.
In a policy paper for the conservative-leaning Centre for Independent Studies, Kurti attributes the phenomenon to a particular racist mindset among adherents of the postmodern political left. “Increasingly the left has become obsessed with anti-Zionism, which can be a mask for anti-Semitism,” he writes.
Corbyn might be regarded as the model. But Kurti says the state of Israel and Jewish people more widely have become the standard target in Australia as well for leftists in what he brands a “toxic mutation of an ancient hatred”. He argues the left’s unrelenting support for the Palestinian cause, including seemingly unqualified demands for the creation of a Palestinian state, treats Israel as a remnant of Western colonialism to the point of rejecting its legitimacy as a state.
Kurti cites a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Australia (366 last year or a 59 per cent increase across the previous 12 months as recorded by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry). He concurs with the ECAJ’s conclusions that these incidents stem from “left-wing rhetoric exaggerating the power of the so-called Jewish lobby”. The effect has been to “stoke far-right myths about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions”.
Anti-Semitism is rising again as the left vents against Israel.https://t.co/MNgS5fJyg3— The Australian (@australian) November 16, 2019
The Democratic Party Faces a Choice on Israel
The Sanders–Warren–Buttigieg trio display either hostility or ignorance, or possibly both, when they assert that US policy supports creating a Palestinian Arab state. To the contrary, the Trump administration, while not ruling it out, has explicitly not adopted this position — and it is the executive branch that sets foreign policy.
It is additionally deeply hypocritical that Senators Sanders and Warren have called for cutting aid to Israel over an issue of policy when, in September this year, both senators opposed President Trump’s cuts in aid to Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority (PA) and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
The PA has refused negotiations for nearly a decade and insists it will never return to them, refused to dismantle terrorist groups, refused to end the incitement to hatred and murder that suffuses the PA-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps, and has refused to stop paying salaries to blood-soaked, jailed terrorists and stipends to the families of deceased terrorists who murdered Jews. (These payments totaled $318 million in 2016).
The PA, moreover, has made the astonishing declaration that it regards US aid as a “political and moral right” on account of US support for Israel’s establishment in 1948. These policies adhered to by the PA diverge massively from the US position — unless Sanders-Warren-Buttigieg mean to changer that too. Yet none of these positions attracts even the suggestion from these Democrats that the PA deserves no or less US aid.
These new, diametrically-opposed positions will not long coexist in the same party. The Democratic Party is fast reaching the point where it must either succumb to the new radical leftist positions on Israel espoused by Sanders-Warren-Buttigieg (not to mention ‘The Squad’) or reassert its traditional, liberal support for the Jewish state.
A New Strategy on Campus: Blame the Jews
It remains only to note that blaming the Jewish state for every species of injustice is a feature of the campus anti-Israel movement, not an anomaly. At the City University of New York in 2015, multiple Students for Justice in Palestine chapters signed a statement against CUNY’s “Zionist administration.” The topics? High tuition and low wages for campus workers. Jewish Voice for Peace has since 2017 been running a “Deadly Exchange” campaign, the core of which is that Israel is responsible for police violence against blacks in America. The strategy is clear enough: if you blame the Jews—sorry, “Zionism”—for everyone’s ills, you can draw more allies into your movement.
Anti-Semitism, you see, is a potent political strategy. It’s even more potent when student governments ignore Jewish students and condemn, as the student Senate at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign did recently, the “equation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.” Four hundred Jewish students, including the lone Jew in the Senate, walked out.
Once, certain student governments were satisfied to make pronouncements about the Middle East without educating themselves about it. Now they have graduated to lecturing and condemning Jews who complain about anti-Semitism without educating themselves about anti-Semitism.
Kudos to Mr. Flayton for stepping forward and to the New York Times for publishing him. No doubt, some adherents of the campus left are beyond shame. But in my experience, even professed anti-Zionists are more thoughtful and persuadable than their public pronouncements suggest. They genuinely believe, perhaps because they rub elbows mainly with the 5 percent of Jews who do not have a favorable view of Israel, that the people who charge them with anti-Semitism are disingenuous.
They haven’t thought it through, but they’re not beyond help.



















