From The Rhineland To Poway
The Events of this Weekend Show Why Muslims and Jews In The West Are Forever Linked and We Must Stand Together
Few holidays hold as much promise for liberatory mass politics as Passover. Every year, we come together at a table of Jews and curious gentiles to note the story of exodus, a story of an exploited labor force grasping for freedom. For my small lefty Jewish community, we look to take this foundational story of our ancestors’ struggle for liberation as a jumping off point for the forms of bondage that we both struggle against and benefit from in the present moment.
It is, without a doubt, the most impactful and meaningful of the Jewish holidays for a broad swath of my fellow members of the Jewish diaspora, particularly in an age of rising authoritarianism and a growing sense of “civilizational conflict” among conservatives a6nd cultural reactionaries. At our Seder we used the Jewish Voice for Peace’s Haggadah, with ample breaks for reflections on solidarity, social justice, and the innumerable struggles for liberation we must commit to in order to live up to the promise of Exodus.
Little did we know, between our vegan matzah, bitter horseradish, and plentiful cans of seltzer, that a despicable act of violence was being perpetrated by a 19 year old man who was radicalized online through the work of shitposting racists in venues like 8Chan’s /pol message board. John Earnest came into the Chabad of Poway Synagogue in suburban San Diego armed with an ideology of White Christian Supremacy and a gun to disrupt Saturday services with an act of mass violence, killing Lori Kaye as she jumped in front of the Rabbi in an act of selfless dedication to her community and faith.
Sadly, these kinds of hate crimes are becoming an all too commonplace event. It was only a handful of months since another White Christian Supremacist gunned down another group of worshipers in a Synagogue in Pittsburgh. It has been even less time since the Christchurch massacres against Muslims in New Zealand, and it is through the manifesto of John Earnest that we can see a growing ideological formation built around Islamophobia, Antisemitism, and White Supremacy. In fact, Earnest himself claimed to have been inspired by the Christchurch shooter, as well as claiming to have attempted arson at a nearby mosque.
The revelations of the shooters ideology, particularly his simultaneous hatred of both Muslims and Jews, should not be surprising to someone like me who used to look at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatemap for casual bathroom reading, but it highlights the brutality of the modern white supremacist movement’s beliefs. To them, both Jews and Muslims are a scourge of foreign origin that look to infect society with our sharia law and Cultural Marxism. Nevermind the fact that Jews and Muslims have been present in “the West” for longer than capitalism, whiteness, or Protestantism has existed.
These historical realities seem to be lost on a large swath of the American right. Texas Senator Ted Cruz seemed more willing to call out a bad cartoon and the “antisemitic left” than members of his party who regularly traffic in antisemitic stereotypes around figures like George Soros. And while there have been leftist figures in history who have trafficked in Antisemitism, their powers have been massively overstated by figures like Cruz.
Few figures, however, had as nonsensical and offensive of a reaction to this modern day attempted pogrom than the co-host of The View and Joy Behar’s least likable co-worker, Meghan McCain. On ABC’s This Week, she thought it was time to blame “both sides” before the victim of this hate crime had her body in the ground. Considering how Meghan started sobbing about how “personal this is to me” a few months ago when a Muslim Congresswoman voiced light criticism of the far right Israel lobby, she should know that Jewish funerals happen within days of the person’s passing. Here’s what McCain said:
“I do think that when we’re having conversations about antisemitism we should be looking at the most extreme on both sides and I would bring up Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and some of her comments that got so much attention and in my opinion Nancy Pelosi wasn’t hard enough in her response in her trafficking of antisemitic language…”
Perhaps Miss McCain, sitting in her comfortable studio coasting on her father’s laurels, is not aware of my people’s history before 1967. Perhaps she just didn’t know the fact that the Poway shooter was a virulent Islamophobe along with being an antisemite. Perhaps she just can’t compute how conspiratorial hatred of one racialized religious minority can lead to other forms of genocidal hatred. Maybe that’s why she is constantly fanning the flames of Islamophobia in the name of Jewish solidarity, all the while not realizing she is empowering the same hateful bigots who murder the innocent.
In the Christian west, this is a decidedly ancient phenomenon. The oppression of western Jews has correlated with the struggles of western Muslims for over a millennia, from the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition to the rise of Fascism. Focusing your response to a modern day pogrom on a Muslim congresswoman’s comments about a partisan lobbying group is not just missing the bigger picture, but actively empowering the ideological project that caused this crime in the first place.
Let’s look at one of the defining moments in European Jewish history, the Rhineland Massacres. Occurring in 1096, these massacres are considered one of the earliest forms of antisemitic mass violence, resulting in the slaughter of entire communities, with itinerant knights even breaking down doors of Churches to murder Jewish people being shielded by sympathetic bishops and priests. The impact of these events cannot be understated, as they instilled a rightful fear of persecution and subjugation within the Ashkenazi Jewish community up to my own grandparents. In fact, even while our ancestors who survived these horrors were forced to move east thanks to persecution and economic restrictions, they continued to speak a variant of Medieval German, known as Yiddish, up until the late 20th century.
This all occurred in the context of the first Crusade, a historical period set off by the leader of the Eastern Church in Constantinople looking to ‘reclaim’ the holy land with the aid of Roman Catholics after Muslim conquest from Byzantine rule. Nevermind the fact that while it was far from a modern multicultural society, the holy land of this era was open to Christian missionaries and Jews were not prosecuted, as both faiths were fellow Abrahamic religions. The Pope in Rome, Urban II, agreed to work in aid to the quickly shrinking Byzantine Empire.
In the shadow of the first major multi-civilizational conflict of the second millennium, the perpetrators of the Rhineland Massacre were on a mission from God to kill and conquer the infidels. Yet, there were infidels in their midst. Not just any infidels, but the murderers of Christ! In a sense, the actions of these crazed itinerant knights were the first John Earnests. Through the fuel of a dual hatred towards Jews and Muslims, they made an ideological bonfire our tears will never be able to put out.
Miss McCain may not just want to look at medieval history for context. Her husband, Ben Domenech, is the co-founder and editor of the Federalist. A right-wing publication that trafficks in reactionary social politics but with a vaguely respectable sheen, The Federalist serves as a gateway drug for the ideological project that drove John Earnest to his murderous rampage.
Case in point: the publication’s use of the phrase “cultural Marxist.” The Federalist doesn’t just have a few contributors who use the barely coded antisemitic term, but has an entire easily searchable section on dedicated to it. While it may seem like a phrase borne out of the pit of hell known as the “intellectual dark web”, cultural Marxism is a concept with roots going back to at least 1930s Europe, where Nazis and fellow anti semitic fascists would describe a rising tide of communists, social democrats, and labor organizers as agents of a Jewish conspiracy. Originally described as “Cultural Bolshevism” (or Kulturbolschewismus’ in the original German), this concept shifted from blaming the most prominent leftist political party of the era to encompass the most prominent leftist intellectual, and ethnic Jew, of the 19th century, Karl Marx.
In John Earnest’s manifesto, he speaks explicitly with this language. He speaks of being unable to live without trying to stop Jews from spreading Cultural Marxism, echoing the Federalist, Jordan Peterson, and even Jews like Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro. While you cannot hold every pundit accountable for the actions of their fans, these rehashed John Birch Society conspiracies are becoming an all too common revelation after these acts of reactionary political violence.
It’s not enough to just privately mourn for the victims in Poway. It is up to all of us to observe the ways this slippery ideology spreads. This means rejecting, full stop, talk of civilizational conflict, be it between the east and west or Christendom and the Islamic world. It may require my fellow Jews to come to terms with our own complicity with atrocities carried out against Palestinians in our name. It certainly won’t be easy, but if the history of western antisemitism and Islamophobia can show us anything, it’s that our dreams of dignity and a just prosperity will only be made real together.
Ben Udashen is a childcare worker and writer based in Seattle. He hosts the Unpopular Front podcast, a weekly look at the heavy challenges of politics with a light touch.
