The New, New Antisemitism

Black antisemitism is spreading in strange, dangerous ways. Why?

Victor Davis Hansen writes in American Greatness:

The old antisemitism was more a right-wing than a left-wing phenomenon—perhaps best personified by the now-withered Ku Klux Klan.

A new antisemitism followed from the campus leftism of the 1960s. It arose from and was masked by a general hatred of Israel, following the Jewish state’s incredible victory in the 1967 Six-Day War.

That lopsided triumph globally transformed Israel in the leftist mind from a David fighting the Arab Goliath into a veritable Western imperialist, neocolonialist overdog.

On campuses, Middle-East activism, course instruction, and faculty profiles are now virulently anti-Israel—and indistinguishable from anti-Jewishness.

When columnist Ben Shapiro spoke at Stanford University in 2019, left-wing posters were plastered around campus depicting Shapiro as an insect menace. A “BenBGon” bug spray bottle in Nazi fashion unsubtly suggested that a chemical agent is the best remedy to make sure Jews “be gone” from the premises.

The avowed socialist Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) retweeted the old propaganda boast, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Tlaib knew well “to the sea” could mean only the extinction of Israel itself and its 9 million Jews. She deleted her tweet—but only after an outcry of protest.

Anti-Zionists and leftist Palestinian activists Linda Sarsour and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—“it’s all about the Benjamins”—often made no effort to hide their antisemitism.

Yet now a dangerous new, new antisemitism is trending, predominantly among African-Americans—especially prominent politicians, celebrities, and billionaires.

The old trope that blacks inordinately were prejudiced against Jews due to past inner-city stereotypes of exploiting Jewish landlords has been recalibrated. It is now repackaged by black elites claiming that their careers are overly profitable to and orchestrated by “the Jews.”

It has been difficult to find any major black leader who has not trafficked in antisemitism, whether Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“tell them to pin their yarmulkes back”), Louis Farrakhan (“gutter religion”), or Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright (“Them Jews”).

Yet what is different about the new, new antisemitism is the open defiance, often even or especially when exposed.

Kayne West was met with pushback after warning, “I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Yet he trumped that by soon praising Adolf Hitler.

The Black Hebrew movement absurdly claims blacks are the real Biblical Jews, Jews the imposters. Black Lives Matter clumsily disguised its antisemitism when claiming Israelis were committing mass genocide in the Middle East.

When novelist Alice Walker was chastised for praising virulent antisemite David Icke (he claimed that Jews formed a cabal of “lizard people”), she too was unremorseful. Walker retorted that Icke was “brave” for publishing his nutty rants.

Rappers from Public Enemy and Ice Cube to Jay-Z and Kanye West all spouted anti-Jewish venom. And billionaires, from the late Michael Jackson to LeBron James, dabbled in antisemitic talk, the first in lines from lyrics, the second in retweets.

In the hate-crime statistics, blacks as perpetrators are overrepresented, and, as victims, Jews and Asians are overrepresented. “Knock out the Jew” occasionally resurfaces as a common sport among New York city black youth.

In our “woke” age, race is seen as an indemnity policy for any self-described victim. Thus even elite blacks, as the still oppressed, cannot be seen as oppressors against “white” Jews.

Wokeism’s competitive victimization often embraces Holocaust denial. That way, the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews in industrial fashion does not overshadow the need for a reparatory legacy to atone for slavery and Jim Crow.

When Whoopi Goldberg claimed the Holocaust was not about race and was, for a while, suspended from her morning chat show, she only temporarily apologized. Goldberg this week returned to claiming that the Holocaust was only a crime by white people against white people.

In her ignorance, she was oblivious that Hitler and the Nazis did not believe Jews to be fully human at all.

Among black elites in professional sports and entertainment, the belief that Jews inordinately are represented as agents, executives, or commissioners is considered proof of exploitation—and often ridiculously reduced to master-slave psychodramas.

Marquee professional athletes like Kyrie Irving, DeShawn Jackson, and the retired Stephen Jackson only reluctantly backed off their blatant anti-Jewish messaging.

Apparently, if the athletes of the NFL and NBA are approximately 60 percent or more African American, then they are merely diverse. But if Jews in the entertainment and sport hierarchies appear more frequently than their 2.4 percent demographic, then as a “cabal” they supposedly pose a threat to black livelihoods.

Black antisemitism is spreading in strange, dangerous ways.

Why? Woke orthodoxy offers cover by insisting supposed victims can never be victimizers. A leftist-dominated media hides or contextualizes the hatreds promulgated by its own constituents.

Jewish-American groups remain predominately liberal. And too often, they conveniently overlook black antisemitism, given the demands of left-wing intersectional solidarity.

So, expect the new, new antisemitism to grow more common—and more toxic.

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6 Responses

  1. It doesn’t make sense to say that the Nazis were not racists. Their whole philosophy was predicated on white supremacism and a link with designated areas, :Blut und Land’. Does Whoopi Goldberg even know what she is talking about? Were the Africans of Namibia and South Africa treated as equals? Does she believe of Hitler had triumphed Non-white people would have been equal and valued members of society? All these people don’t know what they are talking about.

    1. Facts don’t matter here, as they never have with bigots. In this case, facts are racist because they’re used by racists. And what is a fact for post-modern types anyway? Only a point of view.

      Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t need to know anything to be right. She’s just right and her skin colour confirms it.

    2. Although they certainly were “white supremacists”, it is as much characteristically American [“racism is only Black and White”] to call them that and see them mainly or wholly within that term as it was for Whoopi to deny they were racists because they were just killing other “white people”. If you’re a classic American racist and [mostly] focus on oppressing black people, or a classic American anti-racist and only really see white people oppressing black people, the result is the same. Only white people are racists, all white people are the same, no other people can be racists, and the only victims are black people. Granted, some do focus on other tangential aspects of “white supremacism”, but it never accumulates much strength.
      How to account for the Nazis in that schema? “White supremacists” who definitely believed white people should rule, but only after millions of white people were purged first who didn’t fit the profile, and who never had much occasion to do much to any black people outside handfuls in Germany and Western Europe, but rather spent their time killing millions of Jews [white people to the eye, surely, the way Americans always defined things; genetically half Italic anyway, we now know], and Slavs [white people by any definition other than that of the Nazis]. And who spoke mostly about building a “new” ‘master race’ built out of a narrow subset of “white people” after the bad whites were gone. The only People of Colour to fall under their grim eye in any numbers were the Roma. Ironically, heavily mixed with Slav and other “white people” and of Indo-Aryan origin, as we now know. Both white and “Aryan”, using a value of “Aryan” the Nazis knew, were not comfortable with, but occasionally took to heart.
      There is no way to fit that easily, into the intellectual framework of “white supremacism” as used in the US, nor does it in any way advantage people like Whoopi to do so.

  2. The odiophiles, lovers of hate, have placed their crass selves in a class of their own.. As biotic psychotics it is good that they openly display, voice, and express guilt at being their parents progeny. Easier to keep track of their misguided behavior wackiness. What a shame for their wasted talent.

    “… left-wing intersectional solidarity.” — more like ‘both-buttocked constipational solidity.’

    By the way, antisemitic biotics ought to be careful around Arabs who are Semites and are quite adept at taking violent umbrage when insulted.

  3. Is the NAACP an insult to the (non-existent) NAAPOC ?
    Are all people mislabeled as ‘White’ actually PPCP or PPPOC, i.e., Pale Pinkish Colored People, or, Pale Pinkish People Of Color.
    Why don’t we hate people based on their eyebrow-to-earlobe lengths ratio? Is it because they’re so easy to pluck and pierce pleasantly rather than hatefully?

  4. We don’t need any reason to hate people. All we have to do is listen uncritically to a bunch of “important” people – usually wealthy – explaining just how much they love the “common folk” unlike the designated targets-of-hate.
    Lets call leftism what it really is: the Politics of Envy.

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