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Why Left Wing Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism

Posted: 18 Oct 2009 10:45 PM PDT

In a clear demonstration of just how "progressive" they really are, the
Anti-Israel left is hard at working trying to revive the medieval blood
libel. First the Swedish
daily Aftonbladet repeated Palestinian Arab propaganda about medically
impossible organ thefts, and then the left wing Counterpunch magazine run
by Saddam supporter Alexander Cockburn printed an article actually
using medieval blood libels against Jews as proof. There is something
striking about an Anti-Semitic radicalization on the left so extreme that
after being accused of using organ thefts as a modern day blood libel, it
actually tries to revive and legitimize medieval blood libels.

Leftists like Alexander Cockburn
naturally claim they're not Anti-Semitic, but rather Anti-Zionist. Indeed
Alexander Cockburn published a book "The Politics of Anti-Semitism"
dedicated to that premise. But as implausible as the premise that an
enthusiastic defender of Saddam Hussein like Cockburn and so many of the
left, who nevertheless obsessively attack Israel for human rights
violations, are not displaying a clear double standard... the
Anti-Zionist, not Anti-Semitic argument flies out the window when you're
publishing articles reviving medieval blood libels against Jews, sourced
from the likes of "Israel
Shamir", the pseudonym of a Swedish Neo-Nazi, and another regular at
Counterpunch, who writes articles about Jews with charming titles like
"The Vampire Killers," "Poisoning Wells," "Kugel Eaters" and
"Bloodcurdling Libel".

Cockburn and his ilk though are simply the
leading edge of left wing Anti-Semtism, dipping into the foulest wells of
bigotry and unashamed to harvest the rotting fruit of Goebbels and the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Like much of the European left, the
American far left is beginning to abandon the "Anti-Zionism not
Anti-Semitism" pretense for the pure "medieval" stuff, which helps them
bring Muslims on board, while directly carrying the war to their Jewish
critics. Embracing unabashed Anti-Semitism allows the left to discard any
defensiveness regarding the double standard they maintain toward Israel,
and simply damn Jews as a whole.

But that same attitude is
pervasive in more subtle forms among the left in general. Take a visit by
Mia Farrow to Gaza, where she naturally condemned Israel closing its
border with the Hamas run territory. Did she stop to condemn Hamas'
ongoing campaign of violence against Israelis? Naturally.

Farrow also criticized militant rockets, advising Gazans "not to give the
international community ammunition to view you in a negative way."
Stopping them, she said, could lead to greater international
aid.

She did not condemn Hamas' rocket attacks on civilian towns because they're
wrong. No, she condemned them because it gives biased people "ammunition"
to see the otherwise non-violent and idealistic Hamas terrorists in "a
negative way". And of course if Hamas were to stop, there would be more
aid coming their way.

The inherent double standard speaks volumes
about Farrow's view toward the right of Jews and Palestinian Arabs to
live. But it's hardly unique to a moderately obscure Hollywood actress, it
has become a commonplace attitude on the left to presume that Israel has
no right to defend the lives of its citizens, because those lives are
somehow inferior to those of their attackers. It is of course not a new
attitude, only an old attitude coming to the fore among the left once
again.

Historically Anti-Semitism was a common approach on the
part of the European left toward Jews, damned for their unwillingness to
assimilate into the stream of workers, lawyers and peasants so dear to the
left, and of course for their capitalism. The pamphlets and books of
Socialists and Marxists regularly contained Anti-Semitic invective... long
before they had managed to seize on Zionism as the issue. Marx himself
used language toward Jews not too distant from what Goebbels would
propound in the next century. In the early 20th century, Communists
routinely supported Russian and Arab pogroms of Jews. In fact that support
led to a New York boycott of the Communist rag,The Daily Worker by
newspaper sellers that effectively destroyed its circulation.

Leftist Anti-Semitism began to decline somewhat in the 20th
century as the left achieved its goals of destroying Judaism in Europe and
America, and recruiting large numbers of Jews into the ranks of socialist
movements. A variety of tactics was utilized from the straightforward
purges of the USSR which utilized its "Jewish Section" to shut down
synagogues, imprison and execute Jewish clergy and outlaw all Zionist
movements; to using Socialist Anti-Jewish newspapers in Europe and
America, such as the Forward aimed at a Jewish audience, that routinely
mocked Judaism and promoted Socialism as the only answer.

Israel
however represented a fundamental breach of the Socialist agenda that
demanded that Jews assimilate, abandon their religious beliefs and work to
build socialism in the countries in which they live. Instead Israel's
rebuilding gained a major boost from Jews who "turned their backs" on the
German socialist and Russian Communist movements, and worked to build
their own country instead. And that is a "Heresy" that the left has never
forgiven the Jews for.

The agenda of the left was an end to
ethnicity and religion, a one world government in which everyone would be
brothers. Rebuilding Israel flew in the face of that agenda. It was
separatist and nationalist, and when the USSR staked its bet on the Arab
world-- for the left, the deal was done. Israel was to be the enemy of the
left. Passing time has exchanged the labels to conform with political
trends. But behind all of them is the old classic Anti-Semitism of Karl
Marx who blamed the Jews for popularizing capitalism, writing, "The god of
the Jews had been secularized and has become the god of this world...
Money is the jealous god of the Jews"

H.G. Wells, that great
believer that all of mankind must be ruled by a benevolent one world
state, stated the position of the left very clearly in "The Shape of
Things to Come". And that position is worth hearing, because beneath all
the hypocritical nonsense about human rights violations that the left
spews from every corner... it lays out the grievance of the left against
the Jews... and how the left's Anti-Semitism is linked to its
Anti-Zionism.

The
Jews had been able to keep themselves a people apart, eating peculiar
food and following distinctive religious practices, a nation within the
nation, in every state in the world. They had been a perpetual irritant
to statesmen, a breach in the collective solidarity
everywhere...

It might have been supposed that a people so widely
dispersed would have developed a cosmopolitan mentality and formed a
convenient linking organization for many world purposes, but their
special culture of isolation was so intense that this they neither did
nor seemed anxious to attempt. After the World War the orthodox Jews
played but a poor part in the early attempts to formulate the Modern
State, being far more preoccupied with a dream called Zionism... It
emphasized their traditional wilful separation from the main body of
mankind. It irritated the world against them, subtly and
incurably.

H.G. Wells' case against Israel is also his case against the Jews. They are one
and the same, both damned for undermining the "collective solidarity", for
failing to be "cosmopolitan" and helping to link together the world into
Wells' envisioned socialist modern state.

And to this day, the left characterizes Jews as good or bad, based on their
willingness to assimilate, abandon their distinctive religious practices
and help create the "Modern State". Good Jews help enable the "Modern
State". Bad Jews hold to religious practices and are Pro-Israel, and
therefore undermine the "Modern State."

It is also noteworthy that
for all of H.G. Wells' supposed progressivism and futurism, his view of
the Jews was as filled with medieval bigotry as Counterpunch writing today
about Jews drinking human blood. But then the progressivism of the left
has always been a sham, its origins are rooted in a primitive dream of one
state ruled by enlightened men who oversee the human rabble beneath their
feet. A vision that is pre-modern and fundamentally hostile to the notion
of individual rights rooted in independent republics.

And finally
H.G. Wells envisions what the future of Israel and the Jews will be. It is
also worth noting, because it is the same future that the left has been
pushing Jews toward for a long time now.

And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this
antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its
kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were
completely merged in the human community. The Jews were not suppressed;
there was no extermination... but under the Tyranny there was never any
specific persecution at all; yet they were educated out of their oddity
and racial egotism in little more than three generations. Their
attention was distracted from Moses and the Promise to Abraham and the
delusion that God made his creation for them alone, and they were taught
the truth about their race. The world is as full as ever it was of men
and women of Semitic origin, but they belong no more to
“Israel”.

That is the left's envisioned Final Solution. No extermination, no "specific
persecution", just the end of the Jews as anything more than another DNA
strand working its way through the genetic packaging of the human race.
And they have succeeded all too well. The Soviet Union virtually wiped out
Jewish identity in Russia and widespread secularism has done much of the
rest in the West. Israel has become the holdout, the largest collection of
Jews in the world.

And so the left is driven to destroy Israel. To wipe it out
one way or another, and make room for the "Modern State", in which there
is no G-d, no bible and no room for a bunch of Semitic nomads who had the
presumption to try and talk to Him. In which men are no more than smart
apes, G-d is a figment of the primitive imagination and the only gods are
the enlightened rulers of the One World State.

To understand why
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism are one, we need look no further than H.G.
Wells who wrote, "Zionism is an expression of Jewish refusal to
assimilate."

That one sentence is the final thesis on the left's
ugly legacy of hatred for Israel and the Jews. It demonstrates why
Anti-Zionism cannot be detached from Anti-Semitism, because behind it is a
denunciation of Jewish identity. That is the ideological fuel behind the
Anti-Zionism of both Western liberals and their Arab allies. The Western
liberals demand to know why the Jews just won't assimilate. The Arabs
demand to know why the Jews weren't happy being second class Dhimmis in
their own country. Anti-Zionism is the denial of the rights of the Jews as
a people based on Anti-Semitism, the denial of the equality of the Jews.
That double standard joins Anti-Semitsm and Anti-Zionism into two words
for the same idea, that the Jews should not exist.