He is the most talked about European philosopher in recent years. The Slovenian Marxist who has repainted the communist class struggle with a pop patina, becoming the idol of all the "Occupy" movements, from Washington to London, Slavoj Zizek, could only side with Jeremy Corbyn in the British electoral contest
The two even resemble each other, with the beard of the veteran marxist, the definitely obsolete “ideological” clothes, the Twentieth-century verbiage. And Zizek did it with an article in the British newspaper The Independent, which brought him, again in tandem with his favorite political figure, the accusation of anti-Semitism.
In a column with an incendiary title:“There is no conflict between the struggle against anti-Semitism and the struggle against the Israeli occupation,” Zizek writes that “the trouble with Jews today is that they are now trying to get roots in a place which was for thousands of years inhabited by other people.” The Slovenian philosopher is very Corbynian in this.
British lawyer Anthony Julius, who defended historian Deborah Lipstadt from Holocaust denier David Irving, said that Corbyn's spokesman, journalist Seumas Milne, believes that the main political issue in the Middle East is “1947”, the year before the establishment of Israel.
After the ensuing outcry, The Independent replaced the phrase “the trouble with Jews today” with the phrase “the trouble with the settlement project today”. On Russia Today, Zizek wrote last May 25: “The sacred memory of the Holocaust is mobilized to legitimize the apartheid against the Palestinians”.
In the 440-page book “The Parallax View," Zizek devotes an entire section to the “dead end of anti-anti-Semitism”. Anti-anti-Semitism, writes Zizek, is one of the most serious dangers facing freedom of thought because it does not allow us to criticize Israel harshly without being accused of anti-Semitism. In an article for the British magazine New Statesman, Zizek explained that Israel's best hope lies in a “single state”. Dismantle the Jewish one. Throw it in the trash bin of history.
A few weeks ago, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, said he does not want the death of all Israeli Jews, but “only” the destruction of their “entity”. The ayatollahs have built solid bridges to the European intellectual community.