The New Faces of Antisemitism: Political Spectrum Conspiracies
Today, as it has been through the course of human history, reported instances of antisemitism are often met with a disproportionate amount of suspicion; whether it be reports of verbal, physical, or visual discrimination, antisemitism has become not a real form of racism, but rather a Jewish invention used to consolidate Israeli and Jewish domination. Modern antisemitism perceives the Jew as almost a mythical entity; as untouchable, incapable of being under any threat of oppression. The Jew has a hegemonic grip on the entire social organism, and is its only voice. Thus, it is only reasonable to assume that it’s the Jews that are the problem; they are the culprits of each every instance of antisemitism, fabricated for the purpose of gaining political points. Admittedly, this accusation pops up across the political spectrum. After all, antisemitism finds itself a perfect home in groups where suspicion of government and a predilection to conspiracies merge together easily into ideological dogma. But how do these instances of antisemitism manifest? Below are a few representative samples of antisemitic discourse from the UK by both left and right wing individuals:
In this tweet- which received close to hundreds of retweets and likes- there are two points in the tweets that I wish to point out: (1) the accusation that a British politician is funded and controlled by the fictitious Israeli Lobby, and (2) the politician has a hidden political agenda, an ulterior motive, to supporting reports of antisemitism.
The tweet quite shamelessly claims a Jewish-run ‘Israeli lobby’ has infiltrated British politics to enforce its dominance. The 2nd point uses another classic characterization of Jewish individuals; Ruth Smeeth, who is a Jewish Labour MP, has, according to this tweet, nefariously fabricated antisemitism occurring in the party in order to further a covert, secretive agenda. During the Nazi era, the Jews were said to be “conspiring behind the scenes to control the Allied powers”, while also spreading communism and moral indecency. Today, however, the left wing antisemite claims that the Jew conspires to maintain a right-wing, imperialist hegemony on the world. And they are cunningly quick to play the racism card in order to stifle criticism of Zionism and/or Israeli policy.
In this next tweet- another popular claim-antisemitism is disregarded as ‘crap’ and ‘false’ to de-legitimize or minimize the impact of such reports. The aim is to label ‘all’ instances of antisemitism as nothing but lies, to assume even before a report is made that the Jew has an ulterior motive; infiltrating political parties to push the Jewish agenda ahead of moral consideration. It comes with the view that the Jew works to create a ‘ never-ending’ Israeli apartheid, one which could spread across the world if governments are not careful. And because of this, the Jew is undeserving of sympathy, for he is a war criminal and morally abhorrent in his actions (as a representative of a state).
It doesn’t matter about the context, or the content, reports of antisemitism do not last long before they are buried by a barrage of angry tweets squawking whataboutery, using Israeli war crimes and Palestinian rights as the topic of deviation to discredit concerned Jewish voices and deflect from the issue at hand. It implies that every Jewish individual, from whatever country around the world, is to blame for the wrongdoings of a state’s foreign policy, and they are more loyal to Israeli interests than their own nation’s. Even Jews who publicly state they are not Zionists have come under attack by left-wing conspiracy theorists. For example, the picture of Corbyn shaking hands with a Rabbi has often been used by the far-left as a symbolic picture to show they do not have any problem with Jews. However, quite recently this particular Rabbi has come out publicly stating that though he is not a Zionist, he has still been racially harassed at a Labour committee. Here is a part of the report:
Many on the far left argue that criticism of Israel and Zionism is not antisemitic (as if they have the right to define what is and isn’t antisemitic in the first place), but this is just a sign of their ignorance when it comes to Jewish history and how antisemitism had manifested in the past: too often do these individuals, when making their arguments, end up referring to notions associated to Jewish world conspiracies, which are at the core of antisemitic theories. The word Zionist has been regularly associated with ‘land theft’ and ‘neo-colonialism/ imperialism’. It attaches onto Zionism a stigma with negative connotations whereby the very mention of the term can bring up fierce derision and anger. Zionism has become an insult, a slur — detached entirely from its actual original meaning.
Malia Bouattia, the former president of the National Union of Students, infamously stated in 2016 that the University of Birmingham was “something of a Zionist outpost in British higher education”, referring to the existence of Jewish student organisations within the university. She implied the existence of this organisation to be an infiltration of British further education, an eye for the ‘Zionist’ state of Israel to keep tabs on how the UK is thinking and teaching. This wasn’t an isolated incident, however: Malia was reported to have said during a speech in 2014 that when it comes to the “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets… resistance is resented as an act of terrorism”, which is just another clear-cut global Jewish conspiracy under the guise of ‘legitimate’ Zionist critique. What’s interesting about this particular vitriolic attack is the way Malia has paradoxically separated Zionism as Jewish self-determination from the identity of the British Jew by making Zionism an evil in of itself (and by never saying ‘Jew’ she can deny culpability down the road of having never having been actually antisemitic), while also linking ethnic Jewish ontology directly with Israel, purposely simplifying Jewish identity by implying that it has been formed solely from a zealous and fanatical Israeli nationalism; and that every Jew, no matter how complex his/her ancestry, answers to Israel because they are of Israel, and never to any other civil grouping. Her presumption that the Jewish organisations at the University of Birmingham have a motive to infiltrate the university through their ‘outpost’ is a vitriolic antisemitic remark and implies that Israel runs some sort of bizarre and elusive global web of Zionist creeds, or something. It is undoubtedly formed from conspiracy theory, for it offers believers- like Malia- a comforting totality of truth, to give them a fulfilling answer to how how the world works with a determinism that leaves no questions unanswered.
It is not dissimilar to what Marxism and socialism offers their acolytes when it comes to explaining the reasons behind various social and economic problems, and the solution to all of it (revolution); in that the economy is run by a power-hungry group of production owners (bourgeoisie) whom control the masses (proletariat) through a continuous dissemination of ruling class ideology by the superstructure [which they own]. In this concept of economic structure, there is a frightful parallel to the antisemitic idea of how Jewish bodies run the world, and how they keep the gentile white race poor and impoverished. All you have to do to get a model that represents the antisemite’s idea of economics is to replace the bourgeoisie with Jews in the model and replace the proletariat with the gentile, and there you have it. Both require an uncritical, undoubted faith in their moral position and their work toward the social ‘truth’, maintaining such fanaticism and blindness through reassurances from the echo chamber that they are the righteous ones.
Marxism and radical left philosophy has always been extremely vulnerable to penetrations of antisemitic thought; and because this is the case any populist social movement/political shift requires sufficient scrutiny and caution. While there are numerous instances throughout history where known socialist activists and communist party members were put in the same category as Jews by authoritarian politicians, there is another side of the radical left’s history, cluttered with instances of horrific antisemitism and state supported Jewish pogroms and evictions. It is an issue that exists due to anti-materialist nature of socialism- one that,naturally, resists profit-seeking business, private property and institutional privatization. In the last five hundred years or more, Jews in Europe and beyond were restricted from the respected top professions by governments and monarchies that were suspicious of the Jews (since various forms of disseminated literature would portray the Jew as dark, suspicious, deceitful, selfish, greedy, sexually degenerate, and most importantly, anti-Christian [Cople Jaher 1994]). As a result, Jews had to pursue occupations that were not traditionally respectable and not desired by the non-Jewish population, such as becoming merchants, moneylenders and smugglers for black markets. This remained the case in terms of Jewish employment, since they now had family established businesses in these industries. The Jews knew that they were never completely safe in their country, and that a pogrom or eviction could happen at any time, which may lead to all their wealth being seized. They had to work hard and build wealth and infrastructure in their society in order to remain useful to the governments or Kings. If they ceased to be useful, they no longer would have protection from the frustrated, impoverished gentile population. The Jews, often contained in ghettos or semi-autonomous areas of cities, were a close-knit community, working and developing as a community (its safer in larger numbers, after all). The sustained wealth the semi-autonomous governance of these Jewish areas, while in one way benefiting the Jews, created huge suspicions within the rest of society about Jewish influence and control. They were presented as holding sympathies with capitalism and bourgeois ethos, cuddling up to the Monarchy and the wealthy elites, putting the Jew on the wrong side of the class war. The Jewish livelihood took advantage of private ownership and self-control, which the rest of the population were deprived of; thus, the Jews were seen as different, outside of society, an ethnic elite, and the Marxist movements saw this position of the Jew as being on the side of money and capitalism .
It is necessary here to mention Karl Marx, for it is Marx himself who formed the rhetoric that entrenched antisemitism into the ideology of the radical left. In his paper titled ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx claimed that the Jewish desire for emancipation can never have solidarity with the desire for emancipation of the proletariat masses because the Jew sees themselves as the The Chosen, thus they will always be apart from the rest of society who are not ‘chosen’. Marx wrote that one cannot have class consciousness while also having a Jewish identity: “the Jew separates himself from the rest of humanity… and looks to a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind as a whole.” This is an unambiguous attack on the right of Jews to exist as Jews; not only does it make Jews an ‘other’, but it also excludes Jews from citizenry and the Kantian notion of universal rights of man; as Marx said himself, due to the choice that Jews make to be different from the rest of man, he wavers his right to have citizen rights. Marx also wrote in the Jewish Question that the Jews’ worldly God is nothing other than money and “their belief in money degrades all the Gods of other men”. The Jew has commodified the spirit of the common man by their faith in money, and they are just another head on the capitalist chimera to be cut off during revolution. The Jew has no place in a communistic society as a distinct ethnicity. So Marx gave the Jew an ultimatum: assimilate to the image of the socialist, ethnically neutral man- identified only by his class- and let go of personal religiosity or ethnicity that can only act as a form of dope. Thus, it isn’t difficult to see how present day socialism and radical left wing movements pick up and internalize antisemitism when the main paragon of their ideology was so fiercely antisemitic and placed Jews as the enemy of revolution and total social/ economic equality.
Right Wing Conspiracy: ‘ The Jewish Cancer’
Of course, it isn’t just the left that has a problem of endemic antisemitism . The far right (or the alt-right, as they are now called) are filled with people with antisemitic beliefs, consisting of (1) conspiracies about the philanthropist, George Soros (2) the promotion and propagation of race science and eugenics. The far right antisemite is more honest with their views, and less contradictory in their jew-hate. For them there is no need to maintain the facade of supporting anti- racism against all forms and social justice, as the antsemites in far left have had to do. They tend to be more overtly nasty with their racially-driven attacks and altercations on Jews. Their obsession with conspiracy-focused, fringe political websites such as the Daily Stormer/ Breitbart, and the culture wars they believe is raging on as we speak against ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘political correctness’, has galvanized contempt and disdain for Jews- who are believed to be, as a group, the masterminds behind Marxism, social justice and communism . They blame the Jew for pushing for global governance by expanding UN powers, and for inventing the forces of globalization- all of which has been funded by devilishly rich Jewish pillars, like George Soros.
Like with Left wing antisemitism, there is a real fear on the far right around the influence of Jewish lobbies on the international political community. They fear the impact the lobbies are thought to have on national sovereignty and wages in local jobs. But most significantly, the right wing antisemite believe Jews are a major influence in the moral and cultural degeneracy of modern society. For example, when Harvey Weinstein was reported to have sexually assaulted and raped numerous women as a big-time movie producer in Hollywood, the far right media and it’s allied twitter-sphere had an absolute field day conjuring conspiracies with Jews as the focal point of them. David Duke is reported to have said on the Harvey Weinstein scandal, “Harvey Weinstein story … is a case study in the corrosive nature of Jewish domination of our media and cultural industries.” However, Duke claimed this was just the tip of the iceberg, that the Weinstein incident was one piece of evidence pointing to a significant “assault on American culture” by the Hollywood establishment made up of a “massive hive of degenerate Jews” (Vincent Law, Altright.com).
George Soros- the Hungarian Jewish philanthropist- is another punchbag for far right pundits and conspiracies. He is claimed as being the puppet-master of ‘leftist dogma’, the Orwellian Big Brother perpetuating, among other projects, his magnum opus: liberal thought and social justice. A quick search on Google using the words ‘George Soros conspiracy’ provides me with over a million search results, most of them are badly written diatribe published on various nutty-looking websites and blogs. But out in the cosmos of the deep web exists a whole macrocosm of right wing discussion forums where communities of right-wing conspiracy theorists congregate and grow their fantastical theories into contagions, contagions which have been known to have infected the official channels of mainstream media a number of times. Soros is often their bogey man, someone determined to drown democracy in a swamp and tarnish the Trump ‘legacy’, further depriving them of their entitlement in obtaining the American Dream. Apparently Soros has singlehandedly put together the foundations for the Black Lives Matter movement, whole also organizing Antifa demonstrations across the globe, but especially in America. He often is said to have a major role in any movement or organisations that officially opposes Trump, criticizes the second amendment, is pro-abortion, supports trans rights, or opposed nationalistic, free-market capitalism. It was speculated by the conspiracy theorists that Soros was behind the firing of a number of alt-righters from the White House staff, instigated by his mole H.R. McMaster.
But how is this relevant to the discussion of right wing antisemitism? Well, Soros-and essentially any individual that advocates international cooperation, free and open trade- has been labelled a ‘globlist’ by far right pundits. The use of this word has a dark history, all the way back to the Nazis who blamed Jewish international forces as undermining the hardworking and honest Germanic, Aryan race of the once great Fatherland. Sound familiar? It should. Soros is the paragon ‘globalist’; he is Jewish, holds great wealth, and due to his progressive philanthropy is hugely influential in academia. Alex Jones, the self-satirising, popular radio host of Infowars, has often linked Soros to infamously known Jewish conspiracies by claiming the philanthropist- as devious as he is globalist- has a main goal: to destroy white, Western culture in America and beyond, and replace it with a bunch of ‘third world savages’. Of course the right wing antisemite- if they hold any public spotlight- does not explicitly say Jew or outright accuse world Jewry, for it is no longer fashionable to do so. They instead use the word globalist in the place of Jew, and they use it in order to release the sub-conscious Jew-hatred bubbling just under the surface into the stream of society’s discourse. Over the span of 2,000 years antisemitism manifested as paranoia of the Jewish people plaguing the rest of the population, of being greedy and selfish, dangerously smart with money, and obsessed with world domination. In the 21st century, the Jew has been forced onto the front line in the ideological battle between nationalism and globalisation, fighting supposedly for globalisation (just search ‘globalist’ on google and you’ll almost certainly come across articles and posts about influential Jews pulling their strings to bring down national structures and national culture). According to the alt-right, the Jew is a real threat to national security: Nigel Farage said on the radio in Novemeber 2017 that “there are other very powerful lobbies in the United States of America, and the Jewish lobby, with its links with the Israeli government, is one of those strong voices”. This plays into the hands of white supremacists and has given an official quote to support conspiracy theory; that the Jew is thought to be behind social justice warriors, fluid identities and various communistic Utopian experiments such as multiculturalism, affirmative action and state-provided welfare, which many right-wing Americans already are inclined to believe.
Another pillar of far right antisemitism is the resurgence of racial science and scientific racism across the Western world in the last decade and a half. The arguments and theories of racial science is nothing new. They have existed for a long time and have been consistently and thoroughly debunked throughout the ages. However, the movement of the alt-right and far right groups propping up in Europe has led to a revival of support of racial science as white supremacists, zealous antisemites and paranoid xenophobes search for scientific fact to defend their hateful beliefs. I mentioned earlier the far-right antisemite’s tendency to link supposed Jewish (globalist) infiltration on white Western society to a supposedly endemic moral, social and physical degeneration of a once proudly white society. It is a notion that views the Jew as a harmful race, biologically incapable of abiding to white lifestyles and white morality. The far right intellectuals claim that what they believe about Jews and other races is scientific fact. It is a fact, according to them, that black people are more prone to criminality, that gypsies are more likely to vandalize other communities, and that Jews have a peculiarly high intelligence and aims of world domination. They are quick to label and silence any critique as the work of a Liberal Utopian or science denier. While it is undeniable that certain genetic differences exist, the particular claims made by the far right is based on misrepresented science, cherry-picking of facts, and the decontextualization of statements made in reputable geneticists’ studies.
The right wing antisemite takes ‘evidence’ from various fields, most notably biology, genetics, evolutionary psychology and biodiversity and constructs a new deterministic science that explains ethnic difference and the socioeconomic issues in society purely through genetic heredity and human instances of careful selective breeding. They use measurements such as IQ and the bell curve to present these differences. However, the results, while showing clear differences, do not provide an explanation of how they have come to be. The alt-righter has been quick to align low levels of black intelligence to high levels of crime in black communities, ignoring entirely the environmental and developmental effects on IQ and brain development from ghettoisation, poverty and a striking dearth of education for ethnic minorities. The alt-righter instead concludes that the differences between races in IQ and on the bell curve shows, irrefutably, that there are innate, immutable racial differences when it comes to character and intelligence, a conclusion based on no evidence.
Kevin Macdonald, the former evolutionary psychologist, touted as the Neo-Nazi’s favourite academic, remarked in one of his writings that Judaism is not a religion but a genetic experiment; ‘a group evolutionary strategy’ he called it, aiming to make ethnic Jews outperform non-Jews so that they could undermine the mechanisms of the nation-state and marginalize the ‘native’ white peoples of the Western world. The theory runs parallel with classic conspiracies of the domination of world Jewry, achieved, according to Macdonald, as a result of superior Jewish intellectual ability. This is not a natural outcome, but a conscious attempt by the Jewish community; through ethnic isolation, ethnic nationalism and selective inter-breeding, they wish to create a superior race and undermine the ‘gentile’ white man. The evolutionary strategy has apparent total control over almost all academic institutions and is the only voice of contemporary social thought and intellectual discourse, especially within the social sciences, which have denied social Darwinism. The dominant Jewish bodies do not want non-Jews to be aware of social Darwinism and racial science because then the common man will know the truth of their situation, subsequently actualize and mobilize to compete agasint Jewish ability that maintains their dominance of both intellectual fields and high status occupations, limiting opportunities available to the gentile, who, though are the majority of the population, are naturally less conscientious and organised than the Jewish agencies of socialization. According to Macdonald the growth of secularism among Western Jews has left a need in them for a substitute belief system; and so emerged Liberalism, the new ideal and thought experiment. According to the right wing antisemite, liberal thought now controls the ‘commonsense’. This concept is taken from the ideas of Antonio Gramsci and is defined as the beliefs and opinions supposedly shared by the mass of the population. It is this that liberal thought dominates and remains to do so as it is the socially accepted ideology that has been socialised into all of us through family, school, work and the other agencies of society. As its origins are placed in the hands of the Jews, they are to blame for such ideological impositions and other forms of ‘social engineering’ associated with Liberalism, such as multiculturalism.
Jews have also been associated with the change attitudes towards sex, pleasure and marriage, moving society away from traditional views based on Christian values; through their invention and propagation of psychoanalysis (popularly seen as a ‘Jewish science’) they have normalised sexual perversion. The aim of psychoanalysis is, according to the right wing antisemite, to undermine Western culture and spread a plague by romanticising taboo and sensationalising ‘sin’. It is true to the extent that psychoanalysis was developed and used predominately by Jewish academics and practitioners in its formative years, and that it grew out of “ traditional Jewish intellectual skills previously committed to taxing religious study…poured into various cultural projects of the time, including, if not especially, psychoanalysis” Frosh (2004). Freud, and his Jewish contemporaries, formed his ideas with a public and explicit Jewish pride, a sense of ‘chosenness’ and ‘genius’ coming from his Jewish ethnicity, which may have further fanned the antisemitic flames of past and present day use of psychoanalysis as an attack on Jewish intellectualism. But a more important factor was the far right idea of the Jewish sexuality and Jewish masculinity, which psychoanalysis discusses positively: “The Jew was seen as having a kind of rabid yet damaged sexuality, manifested in the male Jew’s circumcised state (and, though Gilman discusses this less, the female Jewess’ oriental-like sultry sexuality) and through modes of insanity which were basically hysterical in form and were caused by incest and early seduction” Frosh (2004). The Jew has created- through inbreeding and early introduction to sexual perversion- a genetic race of degenerate humans with unusually high intellectual abilities but an incapability of assimilating to the moral values of gentile society due to their biology and upbringing. The disappearance of Christian values and the subsequent universal acceptance of ‘Jewish’ sexuality has castrated the gentile citizens in a society that has introduced liberally on the streets what was once seen as perverse sexual behavior (transexuality, polygamy, pornography); it is now waved through by the Jewish flag-bearer as acceptable for the whole of mankind.
