Jake Wallis Simons is editor of The Jewish Chronicle, which bills itself as the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper.
Mr. Simons’ latest commentary is titled “Why liberals have ended up cheerleading for jihadism”. It is lengthy – but every word is worth reading.
Here is a particularly salient part, describing the, er, “progress” of Jew-hatred over the years, and how absurd it has always been:
When it comes to the Jews, the dogma of these elites is expressed as what I have dubbed “Israelophobia”, or the newest version of the oldest hatred. One of the hallmarks of anti-Semitism has always been its ability to appropriate the moral language of the day to masquerade as a virtue.
In the Middle Ages, it expressed itself as an expression of Christian devotion, targeting the formerly Chosen People as the killers of Christ. Responding to the rise of rationalism, in the 20th century it assumed the language of pseudo-science, justifying the extermination of Jews by portraying them as a subhuman race.
After these ideas were discredited, in the West at least, by the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism moved on to inhabit the language of politics, targeting Jews not for their religion or their race, but for their national home. That is Israelophobia.
In recent years, this has become the predominant expression of Jew hatred. Pushed through this prism, the oldest hatred fans out into a spectrum of social justice terminology that – in the traditional style of anti-Semitism – disguises bigotry as virtue.
In former times, Jews were derided as bloodsuckers, misers, arch manipulators and heretics. Today, they are accused of the cardinal sins of the progressive movement: white supremacy, genocide, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and racism.
Reality has little to do with it. The Palestinian population has grown fivefold since the establishment of Israel; if there was a genocide, it has been pretty inept.
More than half of Israelis are non-white; that would be a strange species of white supremacy.
Israel was formed alongside many new nation-states (Syria and Lebanon, India and Pakistan) in the post-colonial period, after the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the withdrawal of the British mandate; that’s the opposite of colonialism.
An Arab judge has sent a former Israeli prime minister to prison for corruption; that would be highly unusual for an apartheid state, to say the least.
Yet the falsification persists. Take the old myth of the Jewish baby killer. In previous centuries, Jews were blamed for murdering Christian children to use their blood in rituals. Today, the “Zionists” are accused of relishing the killing of children – even as Hamas beheads Jewish babies while Israel warns Gazan civilians to evacuate before it strikes.
There you have it. An excellent explanation of an ancient hatred that is every bit as alive today as it was millennia ago.
How I wish Mr. Simons was wrong about any of this.
