https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/15/liberal-left-cheerleading-jihadism-hamas-israel-conflict/The oldest hatred
Jews are always the first victims of human darkness, but the rot goes much further. It spreads downwards from the progressive elites that sit at the top of our institutions – universities and the civil service, broadcasters and advertising agencies, theatres and museums – from where they cascade their creed into society.
These “progressive activists”, as the More in Common thinktank has labelled them, comprise about 13pc of the population in Britain. But they exert disproportionate power, rendering many common and reasonable beliefs taboo.
Their dogma can be seen in pronouns on the lanyards of NHS officials, the transgender flag outside the Royal Opera House, the sea of Palestinian flags at Labour conference under Corbyn and countless other places.
Their worldview includes fixed positions on race, gender, decolonisation, sexuality, slavery and the Palestinians. Although much of this causes real harm, particularly to teenagers and Jews, these ideological positions are signifiers of social status rather than authentic moral positions. They are luxury beliefs.
It is striking how closely this group adheres to these orthodoxies. Because it is a question of identity, it is almost unthinkable for devotees to hold some of those views but not others, and very hard for them to change their minds. Last week, Jeremy Corbyn appeared unable to revise his vision of Hamas as “friends” even in the aftermath of the massacre.
Back to Israel and Gaza and Brighton. When it comes to the Jews, the dogma of these elites is expressed as what I have dubbed “Israelophobia”, or the newest version of the oldest hatred. One of the hallmarks of anti-Semitism has always been its ability to appropriate the moral language of the day to masquerade as a virtue.
In the Middle Ages, it expressed itself as an expression of Christian devotion, targeting the formerly Chosen People as the killers of Christ. Responding to the rise of rationalism, in the 20th century it assumed the language of pseudo-science, justifying the extermination of Jews by portraying them as a subhuman race.
A hallmark of anti-Semitism has been its ability to appropriate the moral language of the day to masquerade as a virtue
A hallmark of anti-Semitism has been its ability to appropriate the moral language of the day to masquerade as a virtue© Provided by The Telegraph
After these ideas were discredited, in the West at least, by the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism moved on to inhabit the language of politics, targeting Jews not for their religion or their race, but for their national home. That is Israelophobia.
In recent years, this has become the predominant expression of Jew hatred. Pushed through this prism, the oldest hatred fans out into a spectrum of social justice terminology that – in the traditional style of anti-Semitism – disguises bigotry as virtue.
In former times, Jews were derided as bloodsuckers, misers, arch manipulators and heretics. Today, they are accused of the cardinal sins of the progressive movement: white supremacy, genocide, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and racism.
Reality has little to do with it. The Palestinian population has grown fivefold since the establishment of Israel; if there was a genocide, it has been pretty inept.
More than half of Israelis are non-white; that would be a strange species of white supremacy.
Israel was formed alongside many new nation-states (Syria and Lebanon, India and Pakistan) in the post-colonial period, after the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the withdrawal of the British mandate; that’s the opposite of colonialism.
An Arab judge has sent a former Israeli prime minister to prison for corruption; that would be highly unusual for an apartheid state, to say the least.
Yet the falsification persists. Take the old myth of the Jewish baby killer. In previous centuries, Jews were blamed for murdering Christian children to use their blood in rituals. Today, the “Zionists” are accused of relishing the killing of children – even as Hamas beheads Jewish babies while Israel warns Gazan civilians to evacuate before it strikes.