Reflections on Anti-Semitism Following Gaza War

When Pope Francis hosted a joint prayer meeting in June with then-Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, some saw it as a significant step toward peace in the Middle East. In reality, it signaled that the situation had spiraled dangerously out of control, and that all was now in God’s hands.

Indeed, it was not long after that Israel and Hamas engaged in conflict with an intensity not seen since 2012.

Before we go any further, it is important to note that it has become customary for the media to only begin seriously reporting on conflicts like the summer’s Gaza war after Israel has responded to provocative attacks with a great show of force. Because of this, Israel is often wrongly portrayed as the instigator.

We could write extensively on the secret love affair and complicity between the Western media and terrorist organizations like Hamas. But what I really want to draw attention to is the rise of anti-Semitism fueled by this distorted coverage.

A quick survey of social networks reveals an overwhelming outburst of anti-Semitism in recent months, including calls for boycotts of Israeli products, refusals by European sports clubs to play in Israel, general anti-Israel demonstrations and even open approval of Hitler’s policy of exterminating the Jews.

As everyone knows, anti-Semitism was outlawed in much of the West following the Holocaust, but it has managed to live on within the matrix of leftist ideology, which has become a politically-correct medium for expressing anti-Semitism.

This sounds strange, but only to those who perceive anti-Semitism as an isolated phenomenon belonging to the period of Nazi rule. Anti-Semitism is not confined to the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe. It is a constant defining element of liberal political thought in the West.

Anti-Semitism in the West is very much related to a mythical fear of trade and the capitalist entrepreneur, who becomes an archetypical representation of someone who disturbs communal harmony and bears the properties of being foreign and impure.

But it was only with the widespread rise of capitalism and the accompanying emergence of the socialist movement in the 19th century that these sentiments assumed the form of political anti-Semitism, which proved itself even more dangerous than the earlier religious anti-Semitism.

It is a known fact that political anti-Semitism was first articulated by socialist theoreticians, who transformed the Jew into the embodiment of capitalism, thereby firmly embedding anti-Semitism within anti-capitalist conspiracy theories about evil bankers and the like as a foreign bodies infecting the social organism.

In their seminal work Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, authors Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalist demonstrated that the political Islam of today is nothing but an adjusted copy of modern totalitarian movements (Communism and Nazism).

It is no coincidence that the first modern radical Islamist movements emerged in Egypt, which was under the strong influence of the French Revolution. The founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, was highly influenced by the Enlightenment, Jacobin ideas and totalitarian European movements. Thus, he tried to reform the Islam according to the “spirit of the time”, ascribing the ideas of equality, freedom and brotherhood to the teachings of Mohammed.

Al-Banna’s prized student and the second most important ideologist of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyd Qutb, thought very highly of Lenin and Marx, and insisted that socialism is superior to capitalism. And this is where the secret ideological brotherhood between Islamists and Western liberals begins to reveal itself.

These two seemingly opposing movements are indeed ideological brothers in their respective struggles against the Jews and Israel as the embodiments of evil capitalism. Through their support for the Hamas, wrapped in maudlin human rights ideology, progressive Europeans can now finally fully express their own ideological heritage.

Western support for Hamas is really an expression of love for our own wicked past.

In reality, Hamas is today primarily supported not by a majority of Palestinians or Muslims in general, but by a liberal Western polity prone to totalitarianism and anti-Semitism. This Western movement supports Hamas’ fanaticism and terrorism by masking it as a struggle for human rights, and in so doing these European leftists actually return to their own dark totalitarian roots and their endemic anti-Semitism.

It is this ideological pact between Western leftists and Islamists that most hinders any hope for a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Israel.

Izvor: Israel Today