Mark Victor Hanson: The New Anti-Semitism

I have written over and over ad nauseum about my concern for the anti-semitism growing throughout Europe and even in America ..... on the far Left side of the spectrum. My concern in Europe, at least, is that the too smart by half crowd at the top emboldens the simmering far right crowd with their tacit agreement to look the other way at Islamist thought-tyranny and actual terror. While the far Right agrees with the Muslims about hating Jews (it's something everyone can agree on, it seems) the far Right also hates the invasion by the Muslims of their superior culture. The far Right is gaining traction even as the far Left fiddles, enables and tacitly approves through wrong-headed moral equivalence and multi-culturalism.

In America, the Right (except the very fringy of the fringe) overwhelmingly supports Israel in particular and Jews in general. The bastions of so-called enlightened thought--the academy, the art and literary world, journalism, and government--have become havens of hate. The hate is delicately prepared and presented with a sophisticated flair. Many people eating the delicacy, delight in believing they are trying something new and demonstrating their worldliness (not to mention being so "in" because it also involves hating Bush) not realizing they are chomping on good old anti-Semitic garbage.

Victor Davis Hanson over via Real Clear Politics calls this anti-Semitism, post-anti-Semitism.

We're accustomed to associating hatred of Jews with the ridiculed Neanderthal Right of those in sheets and jackboots. But this new venom, at least in its Western form, is mostly a leftwing, and often an academic, enterprise. It's also far more insidious, given the left's moral pretensions and its influence in the prestigious media and universities. We see the unfortunate results in frequent anti-Israeli demonstrations on campuses that conflate Israel with Nazis, while the media have published fraudulent pictures and slanted events in southern Lebanon.

The renewed hatred of Jews in the Middle East - and the indifference to it in the West - is a sort of "post anti-Semitism." Islamic zealots supply the old venomous hatred, while affluent and timid Westerners provide the new necessary indifference - if punctuated by the occasional off-the-cuff Amen in the manner of a Louis Farrakhan or Mel Gibson outburst.

The dangers of this post anti-Semitism is not just that Jews are shot in Europe and the United States - or that a drunken celebrity or demagogue mouths off. Instead, ever so insidiously, radical Islam's hatred of Jews is becoming normalized.

It is with growing unease that I watch this phenomenon. The blithness with which the Left disparages the Jews at the same time approving of those who murder Jews is disconcerting. What I find even more disconcerting is the cognitive dissonance I see in some Jews.

It defies imagination, as a non-Jew, seeing this toxic brew bubbling again, but it is bubbling. As a Jew, it must feel inconceivable that the notion "never again!" is being tested. It is my fear that the testing has only begun. If the enemy cannot even be named, if the enemy cannot be identified (you were my friends) how can action be taken? I am talking of America now. And I'm not talking about military action.

Have you heard the voices of protest? When the protesting does happen, if media silence ensues, does it really happen? While a big contigent went to the UN to protest Iran's sociopathic ruler's hate mongering, the press didn't acknowledge it. Jewish suffering isn't newsworthy, but the Palestinians is newsworthy. Hezbollah's losses are newsworthy.

And the voices of protest are protesting the wrong thing: the intellectual elites, some Jews, are selling the Jews out by giving everyone a voice--even murderous thugs. In their supreme betterness, they somehow believe that allowing everyone to spill their feelings, all feelings are valid. It's psychobabble of the worst kind--humanizing the inhumane.

We can kill jihadists. Hezbollah fighters can be wiped out (and if we didn't worry so much about collateral damage would be), but the real trouble are the stooge foot soldiers doing their master's bidding. Even Iran's neo-Nazi leader isn't the root of the problem. The root is right here in America and at the top of the European rulership. In a vain search for fairness, the Left is selling the Jews and ultimately their own cherished freedoms away. The Left is identifying their own perceived oppression with that of another group of indulged malcontents.

Who ever thought that leaders of free thought would become the very embodiment of oppression?