Recently we have witnessed the rise of the New Left which identifies Israel with the establishment, with acquisition, with smug satisfaction, with, in fact, all the basic enemies … Let there be no mistake: the New Left is the author and the progenitor of the new anti-Semitism. (Former Israeli former minister Abba Eban, writing in the American Jewish Congress Bi-Weekly in 1973)
Berlin, Paris, Brussels, London, Manchester, Malmo. Just a few of the European cities where the hallmarks of fascism are routinely exhibited by the radical Left.
Irrational, emotional, anti-Semitic, and engaged in violent confrontation against the Jewish people and democratic institutions – say hello to the exponents of left-fascism.
Driven by an extreme post-Marxist, post-colonial ideology, left-fascists are engaged in a long war against Israel – both as a state and as a collective noun for the Jewish people. Viewed as an agent of imperialism and a model of obsolete “Old Testament” principles, Israel is fair game for post-Marxist intellectuals and activists who despise Jewish self-determination and Judeo-Christian ethics.
Left fascism – which is best exemplified by the boycotts, divestments and sanctions movement – is an infantile philosophy that views the world in crude dialectic terms: Israeli/Palestinian; rich/poor; fair/unfair; the West/Islam; war/peace; strong/weak.
It is no surprise, then, that Israelis are seen as rich, powerful Westerners (despite the poverty of many Jews in Israel). The Palestinians are poor, defenceless Muslims (which overlooks the fact that many Gazans are millionaires). This type of thinking, far from being progressive, is curiously blinkered and reactionary. It leads to situations where the post-Marxist Left finds itself excusing Saddam Hussein's cruelty for the simple reason that he was a symbol of resistance against America and Zionism.
2014 may turn out to be the year when Europe’s Jews faced the most sustained attack since the Second World War. Boycotts of Jewish businesses, arson attacks, physical and verbal abuse – all of this is the culmination of a sustained campaign of hatred which began more than forty years ago when a bomb was placed in the Jewish Community Centre in Berlin. The date was 9 November 1969, the anniversary of Kristnallnacht.
The group responsible for the (failed) attack on the Berlin Jewish community was the Tupamaros West-Berlin, a German-Marxist organization, which was trained by Palestinian terrorists in Jordan. A year later, members of the group joined the equally vile Red Army Faction, a violent revolutionary cell that operated in Europe until 1990s.
Ulrike Meinhof, co-founder of the Red Army Faction, equated anti-Semitism with anti-capitalism, and attempted to justify the Holocaust in crude Marxist terms: “Auschwitz,” said Meinhof, “meant that six million Jews were killed and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were considered: money-Jews.”
The Left’s obsession with money and Jews might explain why today’s BDS radicals are so keen to disrupt the economy of Israel. By attacking “money,” they attack Israel and vice versa. (In 1979, the Workers Revolutionary Party accused Britain of selling out the Palestinians to “Zionist money power.”) The equation – “Israel=(blood) money” – is a repackaging of the old canard that Jews control the banks, the film industry, America, the world. Jewish businesses are justifiable targets (in the view of anti-Semites) because Jews are never just Jews, they are “money Jews.”
Does the Far Left believe that anti-Semitism actually benefits socialism and that capitalist democracy can only be defeated by wrecking Jewish businesses? The answer, it seems, is yes. The overlap between the boycott of Jewish shops and the violent demonstrations against G8 and Nato summits is confirmation that a dangerous populist ideology is being played out on the streets of Britain and Europe.
Robert Wistrich, professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University, observed this trend back in 2004. In an interview with Manfred Gerstenfeld he asserted that globalization has given rise to an anti-globalist Left that is “viscerally anti-American, anti-capitalist, and hostile to world Jewry.”
Indeed, it is alarming how many intellectuals and activists on the hard and soft Left believe that America –apparently in cahoots with the so-called Jewish lobby – is some kind of imperialist capitalist monster that creates war in order to finance the military-industrial complex.
This racist attitude towards the US and American Jews is best typified by a feverish speech made by George Galloway MP at the start of the second Iraq War.
According to Galloway, it was “vitally necessary” that the Left ally itself with radical Islam. This is possible, he said, because both “have the same enemies.” These enemies include the “Zionist,” American and British “occupation of poor countries mainly Muslim countries.” In Galloway’s worldview, both the Left and Islam share the same goal of opposing the “savage capitalist globalization which is intent upon homogenizing the entire world.”
The convergence of left-fascism and Islamic extremism is probably the biggest threat facing Jews today. It is, of course, reminiscent of the Nazi-Soviet pact in which both Hitler and Stalin (two of the 20th century’s biggest anti-Semites) agreed to mutual non-belligerence. But while the non-aggression pact lasted a mere two years, the contemporary red-black alliance (which has little in common except for their hatred of Jews and capitalist social democracy) has lasted a great deal longer and is actually strengthening. The relentless boycotts of Jewish businesses by anarchists and Islamists is proof of this.
In an age where political discourse is dominated by name-calling, it is important that left-fascists are called out for what they are: anti-Semitic anarchist thugs who are violently opposed to Europe’s social democracies.
Likewise in the 1920s and 1930s, the Nazis were opposed to Germany’s post-WWI Weimar Republic, which was seen as decadent, bourgeois and “Jewish.” The collapse of the Weimar democracy led to the horrors of war and the mass killing of Jews and other “unacceptable” minorities. In the 21st century, we must be on guard against those who wish to plunge us back into the chaos of anarchy and murder.