The @ACLU human rights head rails about "Jewish supremacy." A brief history of that term.

Jamil Dakwar is the director of the ACLU Human Rights Program. He is a lecturer at various New York colleges. He formerly worked for Human Rights Watch.

And this human rights leader uses language that mimics that of antisemites of the past 150 years.

He tweeted:

Ah, so it's "Jewish supremacy." I'm not sure how that explains the exception Israel made for the Miss Universe pageant, or the Flag Football championships, which both occurred after Israel shut down travel (and caused grumbling among Jews who couldn't visit Israel.) 

It isn't the first time Dakwar has used that phrase. When Ilhan Omar issued a clarification for her comparison between the US/Israel and Hamas/Taliban, she said “I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems.”  Dakwar responded, "disappointed she had to clarify her statement and affirm that Israel is a democracy with well-established judicial system. Israel, at best, is a democracy for Jewish citizens with well established legal system protecting Jewish supremacy and institutional racism."

The earliest mentions of the phrase "Jewish supremacy" I could find werereferring to Germany in the 1880s.

The Chicago Tribune, December 12, 1880, discussed the German Anti-Semitic League:

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The following year, newspapers reported about German clergy railing against "Jewish supremacy."

In 1892, proud German antisemite Hermann Ahlwardt was placed on trial for defamation when he claimed that arms manufacturer Ludwig Loewe & Co. was a Jewish-French conspiracy to sell defective rifles to the German army to weaken the country. During the trial, witnesses in his defense openly spoke of Jewish supremacy schemes: (London Times, December 7, 1892)

Ahlwardt was sentenced to five months in prison, but never served, because by the time the trial was over he was elected to the Reichstag, running on an antisemitic platform.

In 1895, he visited the United States to preach Jew-hatred:

The next prominent person to preach about Jewish supremacy was antisemite Henry Ford, who often used that phrase in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent:

And German antisemitism which used that phrase continued, before and of course during the Nazi era.

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The charge of "Jewish supremacism" went out of fashion for a while, but it came back, as antisemitism always does:

Nowadays, however, the phrase "Jewish supremacy" is used far more often by the Left than the Right. 

One would think that people who claim to hate Nazis and antisemitism - and who are very sensitive to microaggressions - would be a little more reluctant to use a phrase that was proudly used by right-wing antisemites for well over a century. One would think that people whose very jobs are supposed to support human rights would be skittish about using such a term that has been used as an excuse to murder millions of Jews. 

However, the modern antisemites enthusiastically embrace the language of the old-style antisemites, because they share their goals. 

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