The driver of Western Jew-hatred
Jew-hatred in the Diaspora is out of control and escalating.
Melanie Phillips
In Los Angeles last Sunday, a vicious mob swarmed the Adas Torah synagogue and violently assaulted pro-Israel counter-demonstrators and Jewish locals.
With many faces masked by keffiyehs, the mob prevented Jews from entering the synagogue. The attackers used pepper spray and bear spray. Some of their victims required medical treatment.
It took an hour before the police finally pushed back the attackers. Then the mob, chanting calls for “intifada” and the destruction of Israel, moved on to target two smaller synagogues attended by Iranian Jews. Targeting these synagogues showed that the mob’s real agenda was not to attack Israel but to attack Jews. This was not a protest against policy but an antisemitic onslaught against people.
It’s routinely claimed that the violence and intimidation perpetrated by mobs in the name of “Palestine” ever since the Oct. 7 Palestinian Arab pogrom is anti-Israel rather than anti-Jew. This is a demonstrable fiction.
Jews are being actively discriminated against in the literary and cultural worlds with publishers refusing to publish Jewish authors and with the homes of American Jewish museum directors vandalized.
Jews are being picked on by companies such as the firm of British plumbers that refused to work for someone because she had opposed the BDS movement and given “cover to the State of Israel.” And Jews are being personally attacked or abused by individuals or institutions.
In London this week, several students at the Jewish boys’ school Hasmonean were attacked at an underground station. The mother of one of the boys said one was kicked to the ground, another was elbowed and hit his head against a wall, and a third pushed towards the edge of the platform amid shouts of “Get out of the city, Jew!”
At the annual meeting of the British Medical Association, a female doctor was heckled with repeated shouts of “shame” after she said she was Jewish. Around one in 10 policy proposals being put forward at the meeting was removed from the debates on legal grounds because it related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and was said to risk “being perceived as discriminatory, more specifically antisemitic.”
The BMA was accused of becoming a “vehicle for Jew-hatred.” Such is the scale of this bigotry among doctors that some British Jews are now hiding their Jewish identity when admitted to a hospital.
The notion that such unambiguous attacks on Jews are an unfortunate but essentially fringe by-product of the “protests” over “Palestine” is a bad misreading of the situation. What’s been unleashed in the West ever since the Oct. 7 atrocities is an insurrection against the Jews that isn’t marginal to these “pro-Palestine” demonstrations and antisemitic incidents. It’s fundamental.
The alliance between left-wingers and Muslims that’s behind such attacks has been put down to “intersectionality.” This is the doctrine of overlapping victim groups that divides society into victims and oppressors, based on a Marxist view of the powerful and the powerless in which Jews are deemed to be the most powerful of all.
This venomously distorted and paranoid characterization of the Jews makes “intersectionality” itself a prime source of antisemitic bigotry. However, the Palestinian cause that’s promoted not just by these extremist culture warriors but also by the entire “progressive” world is innately anti-Jew.
This is not confined to Hamas. The Palestinian cause itself is based on the aim of exterminating Israel and falsely appropriating historic Jewish identity in the land of Israel as its own. The Palestinian cause writes the Jewish people out of their own history.
That program of cultural extermination is what all who support the Palestinian cause are actually signed up for. They may heatedly deny it. They may believe they are supporting two states existing in harmony side by side. They may claim that most Palestinian Arabs merely want to live peacefully alongside their Israeli neighbors. They may tell themselves there would be peace in the Middle East if it wasn’t for Israel’s “right-wing” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
They are delusional. They have not merely contributed to the madness that is now sweeping the Western world; they have sanitized and legitimized it. They have enabled the world to claim that Palestinianism is respectable because it is anti-Israel and not anti-Jew.
This was never true.
The Palestinian Arab agenda targeted Jews from the start. During the Nazi period, the Mufti of Jerusalem—Haj Amin al Husseini, who declared Islamic holy war against the Palestinian Jews—allied with Hitler and pledged that if Germany won the war, the Mufti would exterminate every Jew in the Middle East.
Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, hero-worships al Husseini and teaches Palestinian children that their highest goal is to murder Jews and take their land. The P.A. couches its murderous incitement against Jews in the language of Islamic holy war and Nazi-style demonization.
The Palestinian Arabs are the true heirs to the Nazis. As a consequence, well-meaning people in the West who fondly believe they are supporting Palestinian rights are, in fact, supporting Islamo-Nazis.
Politicians who hand on heart profess their horror at today’s upsurge in antisemitism but push a state of “Palestine” that will have the power to destroy the Jewish state—and who then punish Israel for resisting this—are themselves deeply complicit in fueling Jew-hatred.
President Joe Biden has condemned the mobbing of the Los Angeles synagogue as “appalling,” “unconscionable” and “antisemitic.” Yet his administration does everything it can to prevent Israel from eviscerating the “appalling,” “unconscionable” and “antisemitic” regimes of Hamas and Hezbollah, while also forbidding Israel from striking the head of the genocidal snake in Tehran.
Moreover, not only does America continue to fund the P.A. despite its murderous Jew-hatred, but the Biden administration also continues to promote the Islamo-Nazi entity as the worthy rulers of a post-Gaza war Palestine state.
In Britain, the Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer, who is expected to become prime minister in next week’s general election, has written affectingly about sharing Israel’s current trauma through his wife’s Jewish relatives.
Nevertheless, Labour’s election manifesto suggests, albeit in ambiguous and deniable form, that a Labour government might unilaterally declare a state of Palestine—a supremely hostile act that would greatly imperil Israel’s security still further and is promoted by those who want the Jewish state gone.
In a party election broadcast, Starmer also pledged to London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, that a Labour government would have a “zero tolerance approach” to Islamophobia.
Since “Islamophobia” covers any criticism of the Islamic world, Labour’s policy appears to mean stamping upon any critic of Islam with the force of law, including anyone who dares call out the wildly disproportionate level of Jew-hatred in the Muslim world.
The never-ending war between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel has been created and perpetuated by the West’s behavior in sanitizing, excusing, legitimizing, funding and incentivizing the Islamo-Nazis and their preposterous, mendacious, brain-frying “Palestinian” cause.
In The Wall Street Journal this week, Seth Cropsey, president of the Yorktown Institute and a former U.S. deputy under-secretary of the Navy, wrote that Iran has activated a network of global Islamist sympathizers to ramp up public pressure on Israel as an essential element of its strategy of attrition to destroy the Jewish state.
Tehran’s goal, he wrote, is to get Western politicians to back a ceasefire. “By slowing the conflict down and splitting Israel from the U.S. and its allies, Iran aims to make Israel an international pariah,” he said.
The Palestinian cause has been manipulated by Iran into a wedge issue. It has turned America against Israel, lined up liberals with Islamo-Nazis, and set Jew against Jew. And after Iran finishes with Israel, the West is next.
Palestinianism hasn’t just been used to give a veneer of respectability to Jew-hatred. It is being weaponized against civilization.
