Jew-haters of the 18th century - where Jews were primarily considered Christ-killers (or the Islamic equivalent of "killers of prophets") - would not recognize the "scientific" antisemitism of Wilhelm Marr asserting that Jews were racially inferior and criminal. They would be mystified at the idea of the traditionally weak Jews in ghettoes being the Elders of Zion controlling the world.
Jew-hatred is insidious because it changes with the times, to claim that Jews are guilty of whatever the worst crimes of the age are. Today, that would be racism, violation of human rights, white supremacy, and colonialism.
But to Peter Beinart, in a discussion in Germany last month, antisemitism is exactly the same as it was in the 1940s, as he defines it here:
"By antisemitism I mean a kind of classical definition that says you don't like Jews because they're Jews, right, you say they have too much power, they stick together too much, you know, they're trying to rip everyone off, whatever."
As a master propagandist, Peter first frames the argument before he makes it. But he uses a false framework, and he knows it. He repeatedly says "classic antisemitism" because he knows that antisemitism does change, and today's antisemitism is as different from that of a hundred years ago as that one was from a hundred years before that.
The examples that he uses are telling as well. Beinart doesn't mention that classical antisemitism also says that Jews enjoy killing Christian children, that they poison the wells of the non-Jews, that they control the world politically. But he doesn't want to mention those examples in his definition, because the audience might realize that modern antisemites on the Left say that the Jewish State enjoys killing Palestinian children, that Israel poisons Palestinian water supplies, and that Zionists control the Western world.
Modern antisemites accuse the Jewish state of everything the "classic" antisemites accused Jews themselves of doing. Mentioning that fact would undercut Beinart's thesis that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism.
His absurd extrapolation that Zionists are themselves antisemitic itself fits the pattern of how antisemitism morphs. After the Holocaust, antisemitism became a major social crime. So of course, anyone who supports Israel must be guilty of that crime, because Zionists and Israelis are guilty of every social crime, by the Left's definition. Beinart then twists reality to ensure that Israel is guilty of antisemitism just as Jews have been guilty of every social crime in history.
Beinart's selective definition of antisemitism is itself proof that anti-Zionism is modern antisemitism.
