In 1889, a notable French artist named Adolphe Willette ran as an explicitly antisemitic candidate in the 9th arrondissement of Paris for legislative elections.
The campaign poster included "The Jews are only powerful because we are on our knees! 30 million French people are their trembling slaves. It is not a question of religion, the Jews are a different race, hostile to our own... Judaism, there is the enemy!"
Notice how these antisemites were careful not to appear to be bigoted - their problem, they claimed, was not with Judaism as a religion, but Jews as a race, dedicated to destroying France.
Of course, the broken "Talmud" tablets on the ground show that they hated Jews as a religion too, but even these avowed antisemites didn't want to appear to be bigoted. They came up with a convoluted distinction between "good Jews" and "bad Jews" and claimed they only hated the Jewish race.
It seems strange today to see a political poster that is so suffused with hate, and a candidate who fully expects that a campaign centered on antisemitism would attract voters. Certainly that belongs to a time long gone, right?
Nope.
Yesterday, a small group of people who are alarmed at the weakening of the Democratic Socialists of America started a new slate of candidates for the DSA National Political Committee - to save the DSA by appealing to antisemitism (which they pretend is anti-Zionism.)
One of the primary issues facing our organization right now is our flagging membership numbers. Our organization's membership numbers have seen a substantial decrease from a high of over 94,000 constitutional members in April 2021 to a little over 78,000 constitutional members today. In reality, the number of members who are currently members in good standing and have paid their dues has decreased to 57,000 members.This trend is not one to be dismissed or ignored. Rather, it must be accepted as an ongoing problem that needs to be diagnosed and further addressed before DSA finds itself facing a full-blown membership crisis.
So how best to shore up an American socialist group than to appeal to their naked hate of Israel?
Anti-Zionism as an organizing principleFighting Alongside Liberation Struggles to Dismantle Zionism & Imperialism: Recognizing that the US is a linchpin of imperialism and racial capitalism globally, we as a slate prioritize solidarity with liberation struggles, including those of indigenous peoples from Turtle Island to Palestine, and strive for an organization that takes material action against imperialism....We must develop relationships of accountability with grassroots formations as the BDS Working Group has done with Palestinian grassroots formations in diaspora and in Palestine. To best do so, we support the proliferation of grassroots BDS campaigns, such as the BDS Working Group’s No Appetite for Apartheid campaign...
The focus on hating Israel as a unifying theme for an American political group reflects the exact same kind of single-minded hate that the antisemitic political parties in Europe tried to take advantage of from the late 1800s through World War II. Just as Jews were regarded as the source of all the people's problems then, the Jewish state is regarded the same way today. They prioritize hating Zionism over workers' rights, or racism, or fighting capitalism - and they are convinced that this is a winning strategy to attract socialists to their platform.
Another DSA group recently released a statement saying that they believe that Israeli Jewish civilians - including children - should be treated as military targets under international law. Essentially they called for an open season on murdering Israeli Jews.
So it appears that there is some support in the DSA for a platform that is based on hating Jews.
Just as with Willette, the "anti-Zionist" candidates would insist that they have no problem with Jews per se. And their justification for their focus on hating Jews living in the Jewish homeland is just as absurd and transparent as Willette's.
History may not always repeat, but it sure plagiarizes a lot.
