A few years ago, I was nearly shot by a local anti-Semite. I was working at my computer when there was a sharp roar and I looked up to see that a bullet hole had magically appeared in my wall a couple feet above my head. My neighbor, toying with an AR while drunk, popped a cap by accident -- or at least that was his story. This particular individual was a rabid anti-Semite who belonged to a Christian Identity cult group, was an avid reader of the Protocols and similar trash, and had a habit of setting up a desk in front of his house to harangue passersby about the grand Jewish conspiracy.
A few years earlier, I had a female acquaintance who fancied herself a writer. She was a non-citizen, an immigrant of German background. When she learned that I was working on a book about the Holocaust, she went into overdrive in an effort to get me to drop it. As events wore on, certain remarks and references fell into place, making it apparent that Daddy had been an active SS officer, that he had been assigned to one of the camps, and that, in any case, the Jews got what was coming to them. (“They were taking over the banks! Something had to be done!”) She’d hit the immovable object, and spent the next year or so trying her damndest to sabotage the book’s publication and otherwise interfere with my writing career (The heavy irony here is that many of the people she was contacting were themselves Jewish).
You can gather from this that my esteem for these types is less than zero. So you can imagine my thoughts concerning the fact that anti-Semitism is now being mainstreamed by the universities, the Democrats, and the Left in general.
The U.S. will never become a new Reich. In our 250-year history, Jews have been killed by mobs exactly twice – Leo Frank, lynched by a mob in Atlanta in 1915 for a crime committed by somebody else (a Black man who confessed on his deathbed), and Yankel Rosenbaum, murdered by a Black mob egged on by Al Sharpton and David Dinkins in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in 1991. Anti-Semitism is not an American disease (the way anti-Catholicism is). It has required the import of European leftism to bring the ancient evil of Jew-hatred into the mainstream.
Which does not mean that action should not be taken. These people don’t just disappear even after their efforts have been stymied. The shooter was arrested, but pled out to a lesser charge and received probation. He fled the neighborhood shortly afterward. The wannabe writer applied for and got American citizenship (after years of disparaging the U.S. in favor of Deutschland, Canada, and even Yugoslavia). While they’ll never take control of the country (pesthole states such as California or Michigan may be another matter), they can cause plenty of social damage and human misery, particularly since neither the authorities nor the institutions (e.g., Harvard and MIT) show any inclination to control them.
We cannot simply leave it to the Jewish community. Jews survived in the Old World largely by taking their beatings and walking away. They were so outnumbered, and their oppressors so barbaric (the Cossacks, the Cathars, the Prussians, etc.) that they were left with little choice. As a result, Jewish culture has settled for an ingrained quietism, a fatalism that has not yet been left behind even after a century and more of American life.
But the U.S. is a different place, and these are different times. It’s often said that the Jews are canaries in the coal mine, representing the first warning sign of encroaching tyranny. Anti-Semites are threats to us all, whether they ‘re from Harvard, the NAACP, or the East Pancake, Arkansas, Aryan Liberation Front.
The first step is that Jews must abandon the Left. As I’ve mentioned previously, Jews became involved with the Left largely due to historical accident. Jewish emancipation in Western Europe during the 19th century coincided with the rise of the Left. They were natural allies, European Jews looking for support from all quarters while the leftists as political outcasts were eager to recruit anyone. Supporting Jewish hopes was a small price to pay, particularly since they could be cast aside as soon as leftists gained power, which is largely what occurred. Leftists have maintained the loyalty of the Jews by hiding their true feelings.
Anti-Semitism within the American Left is largely the product of intersectionality, the concept that all aspects of leftist activism – Blacks, Latins, gays, Muslims, and whatever -- are interwoven and must be mutually supportive. All leftists must accept and support all left-wing constituencies no matter what contradictions might exist. Civil rights activists must support abortion, union members must support gun control, and gay rights activists must support the Palestinians (despite the fact that they’d one and all be given a brief flying lesson if they were to be caught out in much of the Muslim world). This is how the Left asserts itself and gains power. It’s a Third Millennial version of the Popular Front politics of the mid-20th century, in which liberals, communists, social democrats and what have you were all called to do their part in fighting the bourgeois (which, in practice, meant putting the commies in power).
It follows from this that any leftist who buys into intersectionality – which is all of them – is objectively (as any good Trotskyite would put it) an anti-Semite. You can’t duck this or contradict it. If you support the American Left, then you support Hamas, which supports annihilating Jews “from the river to the sea.” There are consequences for holding such ideas, and those consequences will be forthcoming.
The flip side of this is that no American Jew who supports his community, who values his heritage, can honestly call himself a leftist. This despite the fact that most American Jews (the ultra-orthodox excepted) were raised in liberal-left traditions. It’s a difficult thing to overturn the convictions of a lifetime, but it has to be done. As it stands, American Jews are in the ghastly position of collaborating with those out to destroy them
Conservatives need make it easier. While it’s clear that the American center right has always been open to anyone no matter what their ethnic or religious background – as we saw, for a while anyway, with the neocons -- little effort has been made at outreach (likely because conservatism up until the mid-20th century was a WASP phenomenon, and WASPs just didn’t do outreach, whether to Blacks, Jews, Italians, or – God forbid – the Irish). This is over. The remnants of the WASP ascendancy have largely declared war on MAGA populism, so we won’t be losing much by brushing aside what remains. That includes eliminating the last vestiges of anti-Semitism (which do exist, as anyone who has ever confronted a Zero Hedge comment thread is well aware). We can start by hard-pedaling the simple truth that anti-Semitism is now leftist.
We need to inform the Jewish community as to what we can offer them -- our protection, above all, assurances that we will stand by them, as Americans, against any enemies that threaten them, whether domestic or emerging from some third-world hellhole. We must also make the effort to understand Jewish concerns and considerations. The Jews have one of the longest and deepest moral traditions in the human record, much of it in writing in the form of the Talmud. It wouldn’t hurt anybody to become more familiar with it.
In this, as in much else, the Left has abandoned the moral high ground. Last week they opened up new horizons in hypocrisy and contradiction by accusing Donald Trump of familiarity with Mein Kampf after weeks of failing to let out a peep against the droves of campus punks calling for genocide against the Jews. (Not to mention even younger ones in grammar schools.) They are vulnerable here. I’ll only add that by allying with the Jewish community, populist conservatism will dominate American politics for the rest of the century.
It’s time for American Jews to walk away, and for populist conservatives to pick up the sword of St. Michael.
Image: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service
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