Nazism and the Antisemitic Left

What is the difference between the Left and the Right if they are both antisemitic? When does an action become ‘Nazism’? Is there a magic line delineated by a point on a compass that prevents us from damning the Left for its attitudes or behavior even though it may result in actions that are reminiscent of the Third Reich?  And if the end result of extermination or elimination or murder or death (or whatever euphemism we may wish to use) is specific to Jews (or their supporters) why should we refrain from bestowing this heinous epithet on their proponents?  And if the aim is to silence, delegitimize or eradicate those with whom they do not agree whether as people or as a national entity does the religion of the target group bare any relevance to the debate?

I do not differentiate between Right wing Nazis or Left wing Nazis for the simple reason that the systematization of killing starts with articulation.

When the end in practice, justifies the means, bewilderment is no excuse for post-factum ignorance.  An atmosphere of hatred, of lies and a narrative built around discredited 19th Century theories of materialism and 20th Century theories of post colonial guilt cannot justify the Lefts familiarity and comfort with a dehumanizing view of either Western Society or Jewish emancipation. This self-flagellation manifests itself in anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism and self-abnegation, at least in the latter case, amongst Western nations grown old, tired and frightened of their own shadow.

I do not differentiate between Right wing Nazis or Left wing Nazis because given the rhetoric of the extreme Left and their mouth-piece global newspapers, if I am Jewish or support Jews then the result is the same. Nazism does not have to mean an end in gas chambers, mass starvation or mobile death squads.  The philosophy that justifies ethnic or national extinction for Zionism, Israel or the Jews exists. It is Left wing and it is Islamic and in Britain it is embraced by many in the Liberal middle-class. William Buckley alleged that “in England antisemitism is not just a prejudice but a way of life.” I believe that it is precisely because every supporting lie is embraced with such ease, the epithet of Liberal or Left wing Nazi is warranted.

The philosophy of Nazism demonized Jews and Judaism; it rewrote the history of the Jewish people to exclude them from history and to exclude them from civilized society.  It denied Jews the rights it gave to everyone else.

That last paragraph neatly summarizes what the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), Pro-Palestinian, Muslim, and Liberal-Left wing Press embraces.

Jews that support Israel, Israelis that support Israel and Zionists are all damned before they even offer an opinion. That is what BDS is all about. If you cannot have an opinion then you cannot ever be correct.  That is the way the Nazis were ultimately so successful. Their pristine vision could not be questioned.

The aim of the post-Marxist Left is to debunk history or to simply rewrite history.  BDS is no more than a mouthpiece for Palestinian exceptionalism.  As Arabs they have the right to a globally unique, irrevocable and perpetual, refugee status and they are entitled to exploit their dishonestly obtained refugee prominence for its own antisemitic purposes.

It is time we stopped calling ourselves ZIONISTS because not having an obvious definition, it is too easily misunderstood and therefore, too easily damned. The fascists and the filled with hate announce that they are anti-Zionists, it is quite another thing to announce that they are anti-Israeli.  That is personal, and there are far better candidates for international opprobrium.  But as the extremes work their way towards the center even this barrier is disappearing because the extreme left (and in the UK this includes their Liberal allies) do not accept that Jews have rights equal to either Muslims or to Christians; to people of non-white skin or for that matter, to people of white complexion.

To humanize a people is to deny their interlocutors the opportunity to sit in absolute judgement.  They do not accept our humanity because a people of the heart and not of the mind are entitled to make the same errors as everyone else. We live in a world of black and white; of good and bad; we seem to need to experience a radical dualism of two halves in eternal or fundamental conflict. Or maybe, the issue is that evil needs an anchor by which it is able to ruthlessly focus the attention of the weak to the exclusion of any divergent views; mitigating or extenuating considerations.  So that evil may triumph, it needs its blameworthy scapegoat.

The logic of the anti-Zionist, in particular, the Jewish Uncle Tom, is that if Jews are a rational construct then they are also, and in perpetuity, the onlooker, the observer of society; the impartial other; both superior and detached but therefore uninvolved and incapable of personal emotional connection.  It makes hating ‘your own kind’ easy because prejudiced judgment becomes rational condemnation. If one is detached from the group and yet simultaneously part of that same group one is endowed with “privileged insight.” This is of course incorrect. A prejudiced mind is as blind to truth as an ignorant one is.

The bigot will always self-justify and the Uncle Tom will goose-step with those he or she is so desperate to imitate. It explains the cold contempt of the Judith Butlers and Noam Chomsky’s and lesser minds will, in their turn, emulate them.  To reinforce their hegemonic world view they encourage terror.

They flout the principle of academic freedom and they endorse censorship on campus.  By their uncompromising rhetoric and by their control of debate their appeal to free speech is a sham. They harass or shout down the target group, hate literature is distributed freely but they can incite violence because it is in support of a socially acceptable cause.  The accusation of attempting to stifle free speech is only levelled against those that attack the antisemites, rarely against the racists themselves. Noam Chomsky stated “antisemitism is raised as an issue because [Jews] want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control” (Robert Wistrich: From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel.) In fact, control is the issue but it is always the fascist who uses threats of intimidation and violence against the innocent to silence their opposition to persecution.  The Left learned how to apply the tactics of McCarthyism particularly well.  Violent Jewish Uncle Toms are particularly prone to intimidating other Jews with whom they do not agree. Recent U-tube videos of university demonstrations have highlighted this tactic.

Marxist writer August Bebel called antisemitism “the socialism of fools”. If a central assumption of the Enlightenment was that humanity was forward thinking and would ruthlessly strip away past superstition then the reaction to it is a romanticised and fictionalised reinterpretation of nativism – a jingoistic and ethnocentric blindness that is wilful in its rejection of progress. 350 or so years after the Age of Enlightenment began we may conclude that we continue to fight its agents of rejection who are enthusiastically led by extremists of Left and Right wing politics.

US academic Judith Butler, has sagely advised us all that “Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”   Hamas and Hezbollah are organizations that wage war on women; they kill gays, and murder those who leave the faith.  Their bigotry is only exceeded by their purity of primitive vision.  They hate that which is not them.  They represent the antithesis of modern civilisation. They are the barbarians at the walls of Rome but armed with 21^st Century weaponry.  Hamas and Hezbollah are social movements because they are first religious, then political movements. Their power base and their sacrificial lambs are the ignorant peasants they incite to lethal violence.   The Western, Judeo-Christian tradition has as its modern basis a progressive desire for equality.   The terms have been hijacked and are mocked by religious racists and their political allies on the Left.

The extreme left, like the extreme right; like any kind of extremism, it is a disease and like all diseases its influence begins around the periphery of marginalised society and gradually its contamination infects the centre.  It spreads out from the fringes, its dendrites spreading through the body politic until it has corrupted the entire corpus.

Since the 19th Century, Judaism has lost more souls to socialism than it has to the missionaries.  It cannot be lost to those with a sense of irony that the hatred of the secular neophyte has fuelled antisemitism and persecution and has been exploited by Judeophobic enemies across the secular-religious spectrum.

As a people it is the difficult questions we ask that define us. Groucho Marx quipped that he would not want to be a member of any club that wanted to have him. He was wrong. In order to affect society we do have to be part of that society; not the perennial onlooker, observing from the outside.

Many years ago I sat in class with a professor whose PhD in history was so specific she knew nothing about anything outside of her own area. In a class where she made an antisemitic throw away comment I stood up and I belittled the inadequacy of her education. Her superficial knowledge of the Jewish faith justified (in her mind) her prejudice but her knowledge was deficient, a wiser head would not have spoken.

So the question that we must ask, is how, could Western Society have arrived at the point at which we became intelligent ignoramuses? And how did we permit society to put the dunderheads in charge of our education system? How is it that we became so specialised that we actually stopped seeking out the truth?

If we are lucky, in a century from now, these questions will become a discipline of intense reflection that will trouble the best of our minds; because in the analysis lies the answer to how we lost the creativity and the reflection that showered us with all the benefits and graces of our Western Civilisation.