What is "Antisemitism"?

 

At the same time that Israel is perpetuating a genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza, North American news media are almost equally transfixed with what they describe as an outbreak of "antisemitism" at pro-Palestinian rallies and, especially, on university campuses.  This division of resources would be problematic regardless, but it is infinitely more disgusting when the supposed "antisemitism" being discussed is nothing of the sort.  You see, IF the sight of Israel's genocidal barbarism against innocent Palestinians genuinely stirred the generalized hatred of all Jewish people (re: antisemitism) then news coverage of the resulting antisemitism would be obligated to report on the way Israel's behaviour was making things worse for Jewish people everywhere.  If people are gathering in the streets to protest what they quite naturally find to be the intolerably evil actions of a government subsidized and armed and treated as an ally by their own government, and then antisemites infilitrate these rallies and share their poisonous ideas with the people there, surely it would be a good idea to explain how Israel's sadism and cruelty has contributed to the crisis?

But when it is revealed that the "campus antisemitism" is a fabricated crisis;

Specifically, the reporters wrote, the presidents’ “lawyerly replies”—that it depends on the context of the speech—drew criticism from Jewish leaders as well as Democratic bigwigs, thus framing the ire not as partisan positioning against liberal academia, but a categorical defense of Jewish students against uncaring administrators.

But there are two big problems with the Times‘ framing: The calls for genocide were imaginary, and the presidents’ answers were not evasive, they were accurate reflections of the constitutional protections of free speech and the scope of university policies on harassment and bullying.

....invented by cynical operatives trying to silence criticism of Israel's mass slaughter of Palestinian men, women and children, ... then one is forced to throw their hands into the air and shout "Enough!!!"  Enough with the hypocritical, self-pitying whining!  Enough with the disgusting, cynical employment of the accusation of "antisemitism"!!!!

Why is the charge of "antisemitism" so effective?  What makes it so useful that mass-murdering racist scumbags deliberately missuse it in order to neutralize their political enemies?  Clearly it was the nazi Holocaust of the Jews in World War Two.  It was the cold, systematic, bureaucratized and industrialized targetting and murdering of Jewish people by an advanced European nation-state.  Six million innocent people were starved or worked to death, shot to death, gassed to death, and tortured to death in hideous acts of insanity mislabelled as "experiments."

Once again, the articulate Caitlin Johnstone lays it all out for us:

False accusations of anti-semitism are all Israel and its defenders have left. It’s the only tool left in their toolbox. Once you’ve exhausted the “But Hamas!” and “But October 7!” excuses they make for Israel’s deliberate butchery of civilians via airstrikes and siege warfare, false accusations of hating Jews is all that remains.

And it’s so sick, because it exploits a healthy impulse in those of us who oppose racism and genocide, and does so in order to defend racist acts of genocide. It causes people who care deeply about human rights to take a step back and say “Hold on, am I guilty of embodying the same hateful prejudices which led to the Holocaust?” and shuts us down and shuts us up, even as Israel rolls out its own holocaust against Palestinians.

It exploits a noble, healthy inclination we cultivate in ourselves in good faith in order to support the horrific genocidal nightmare in Gaza in entirely bad faith. It exploits our good nature to advance a profoundly evil cause. It’s despicable. It’s depraved.

I've read a fair bit of history and while it hasn't been limited to European and European-dominated colonial histories, my knowledge is still fairly Eurocentric.  At this moment I'm not sure if there's any other group of people with a history like that of the Jewish people.  A specific demographic, living within, but apart from, and often oppressed by a larger culture.  In the case of the Jews in Europe, that of the Christians. Obviously, India, China, the Muslim world, etc., have had foreigners living among them.  Or ethnic or religious minorities.  But whether there has been any people of a similarly sized population, dispersed across such a vast area, within an entity of such diversity as European Christendom, to have produced another community similar to the Jewish people, I honestly don't know.

So you have the Jewish people living as a minority within European Christian societies.  My knowledge of the Dark Ages in Western Europe and of the Byzantine Empire in the east is pretty scanty.  But let's put the start of the relationship of the Jewish people with Christendom at the 4th Century CE with Constantine making Christianity a state religion.  So, for about 1,700 years, the Jewish people have been a persecuted minority in Europe.  They suffered pogroms, inquistions, forced conversions, expulsions, humiliations, and human rights abuses.  All inspired by an antisemitism based on religious hatred and on political-economic expediency.

The religious hatred was based on the moronic misinterpretation of the New Testament which holds that it was the Jews who killed Christ.  The central message of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is that the Son of God died for our sins.  All of our sins.  The sins of humanity.  If you believe in all of that stuff, the role of Jews was necessary because Jesus was the son of the God of the Old Testament.  It was the Jewish people who were alone in worshipping the "one, true God."  There was no Christianity with its own priesthood and mass of followers to kill Christ because Christ was still in the process of building his church.  The Jewish people in Jerusalem killed Christ, not because they were Jews, but because they were the only people who knew anything about the prophecies he said he was fulfilling.  Again: If you're a Christian you believe that Christ died to redeem everyone from all of the sins of humanity.  And if you believe that it was the Jews who killed Christ because of their nefarious Jewishness, then you're an imbecile who doesn't understand the creed you claim to worship.

The political-economic factor was the early-Christian aversion to money-lending "usury" and the handing of that business to Jewish merchants (who were excluded from many other occupations in Christian societies).  Some Jewish money lenders became quite wealthy from loaning money to powerful feudal lords and kings.  Lower down the social-economic ladder, lesser Jewish merchants loaned to peasants and townspeople.  But there was always a danger that the powerful might find their debts to Jewish merchants to be impossible (or at least extremely inconvenient) to pay.  In these instances, they would allow the lower orders to use violence to escape from their own debts to local Jewish money-lenders (such as, for example, Shakespeare's "Shylock") and thereby terrify their own creditors into forgiving their obligations.  At some point Christian merchants (in places like Florence Italy etc.,) got in on the action themselves.  But the conspiracy theories about "Jewish Bankers" and "The Rothschilds" persisted.

A similar dynamic brought about "Jewish control of the media."  Barred from many occupations, a disproportionate number of Jewish people became performers, sometimes in travelling theatre groups.  They did this in the same way that Blacks, the Irish, Italians, got into athletics in the early-20th Century.  In the racist pecking order of 19th and 20th Century Europe and North America, Jewish people in entertainment could rise to leading positions.  When entertainment merged with mass media, the heads of movie studios and publishing houses and other such outlets could become wealth, powerful and influential.

I'll quote from that RollingStone piece linked to above:

Especially because, as it turns out, the real story of why there are so many Jews in Hollywood is, itself, largely about America’s long history of racism and antisemitism.

For centuries in Europe and America, Jews were shut out of most avenues to wealth. Until the 1800s, we were forbidden from owning land in most of Europe and barred from most guilds, industries, and professions. As a result, European Jews seeking upward mobility turned to urban, cosmopolitan occupations like trade, the lending of money (which was often forbidden to Christians), and, when they could, to emerging professions like law. Many also turned to theatrical entertainment, which was often regarded as too indecent (and, for men, “effeminate”) for respectable Christians.

...

The elite theaters refused to employ Jews, so Jews came to dominate vaudeville — and, eventually, the nascent film industry, which, like vaudeville, was seen as too vulgar, too working-class, too low-brow for good Christians to be involved with.

So, in the California of the 1920s and 1930s, these first-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe built their own power structures, their own studios, even their own country clubs, when they were shut out of existing ones. While there were many non-Jewish studios as well (Disney, for example, not to mention D.W. Griffith’s and Harry Aitken’s Epoch, which gave us the overtly racist, KKK-glorifying epic Birth of a Nation), Jewish immigrants founded Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Loew’s, and Universal.

Jews became disproportionately present not just among studio bosses but throughout the whole Hollywood enchilada (or bagel, I guess): agents, music moguls, lawyers, everybody. In Sandler’s words, “Tom Cruise isn’t [Jewish], but I heard his agent is.” Shunned by antisemitism, these formerly immigrant Jews created their own empire.

So much for that one then.

Racism comes from the delusion that humanity can be divided up into various races.  That Africans are different from Europeans and both are different from Asians.  At one point in its history, Europeans were obsessed with cataloguing the non-existent racial differences between their continent's myriad nationalities.  The British were distinct from the French, Germans were distinct from Slavs, Poles were different from Ukrainians, Italians were different from Greeks.  It was all nonsense, but Germans were supposedly bigger than the French, the British brain worked faster than others.  Later on, when they found themselves all mixed together in North America with many Africans and Asians, they decided to put their differences away and face their darker-skinned neighbours united as simply "white people."

But inventing inherent differences into various peoples dehumanizes them.  Oh, sure, racists have to admit that people of different races can breed with each one another, but "race" isn't "species."  This leads to the question "What IS race then?" but racist pseudo-scientists 

I'm not going to provide an entertaining list of the supposed qualities or contaminations of the world's "races" of people.  For the purposes of this blog post a summary of the nature of Jewish people according to antisemites will be provided.  From Catholic Popes to Anglicans to Russian Czars to Adolph Hitler, the Jews were seen to be a rootless, "cosmopolitan" race, dedicated to money and power and the destruction of the heresy of Christianity.  Instead of showing loyalty to the nations that excluded them, they kept to themselves.  They sought to rot European socieites from within through the introduction of such foul doctrines as "democracy" and, later, when "democracy" became respectable, "socialism."  (Their hatred of democracy gives antisemite French aristocrats a claim to ideological consistency.  Adherence to their stupid social order has no mass appeal though, and most Europeans now embrace democracy, and many of them also embrace socialism.)

If Jewish people were often on the side of revolution and reform it was because as a persecuted minority they saw the value of liberalism, human rights, social equality, and the rule of law.  Which is not to say that Jewish people were monolithic in their beliefs.  To believe that they are is to fall into the garbage thinking of antisemite conspiracy nuts who gibber about Jewish bankers trying to impose communism.

These morons and psychopaths who have worked themselves into a frenzy with their idiotic delusions are a genuine danger to Jewish people and to everyone else.  This piece of shit:

... is an abomination.  But as Caitlin Johnstone said above, the attempt by Zionist nazis to cynically use charges of "antisemitism" to defend turning Gaza into the Warsaw Ghetto and to silence their critics is disgusting. 

Links to something I was going to talk about but ran out of steam ...

https://jacobin.com/2023/01/israel-new-antisemitism-anti-zionism-ihra-definition-antony-lerman

https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism