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What about the Jews?

by Lewis Loflin


Developments since World War II and the Holocaust have been especially fast-paced and portentous. Here are four of the most significant shifts:

From right to left: For centuries, anti-Semitism was the hallmark of the right and merely episodic on the left. To take the ultimate examples of these trends, Stalin's Judeophobia was peripheral to his monstrous project, but Hitler's was central to his. Even a decade ago, this pattern still basically held true. But recent years have witnessed a rapid and global realignment, with the mainstream right increasingly sympathetic to Jews and Israel and its leftist counterparts cooler and more hostile.
From Christian to Muslim: Christians developed the abiding tropes of anti-Semitism, (such as greediness and ambitions to world domination), and historically Christians killed most Jews. Therefore, Jews regularly fled Christendom for Islamdom. In 1945, this pattern abruptly changed. Christians came to terms with Jews, while Muslims adopted both the old Christian themes and murderousness. Today institutional anti-Semitism is overwhelmingly a Muslim affair. One result has been a steady reverse exodus, with Jews now fleeing Islamdom for Christendom.
From religious to secular: What began as a rejection of the Jewish religion evolved over the centuries into a bias against the supposed Jewish race, (thus, our continued use of the nonsensical term anti-Semitism) and lately has evolved into anti-Zionism, or hatred of the Jewish state. An astonishing 2003 poll in which Europeans found Israel to be the leading threat to world peace indicates the depth of this new sentiment.
The conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism: Jews and Americans, Israel and the United States - they have merged in the minds of many around the world, so that one prejudice routinely implies the other one too. The two hatreds also share a basic feature: neither is susceptible to rational argument, so each is better understood as the symptom of a psychological disorder than of some arcane political logic.

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