National Post -Anti-Semitism is now a creature of the left

People speak of anti-Semitism as if it were a monolithic evil. But it's not. There are two distinct strains of Jew hatred. Unfortunately, our society is still fixated on fighting the one that went out of style four decades ago.

The difference between the two begins with the way Jews are depicted. Look at the images on this page. The one on the left, a poster published in German-occupied Poland in 1941, exemplifies the Jew-hatred spouted by the Nazis. (The caption reads: "Jews and Lice: They cause typhus.") The image on the right, a poster circulated on Canadian campuses this week to mark "Israel Apartheid Week," typifies the more recent variant.

Aside from the obvious -- the language and style of illustration -- what crucial difference do you notice?

In the Nazi poster, the Jew is a piece of filth -- a rogue pathogen within gentile society. The image perfectly captures Hitler's view of Jews as a "bacillus infecting the life of peoples."

Now look at the image on the right. Aside from retaining the general sense that the Jew (or, to give the fig leaf its due, "the Jewish state") is a scourge upon the world, everything has changed. The Jew is no longer diseased and wretched. Just the opposite: He is an omnipotent, teched up superman, murdering a defenseless Palestinian child from above.

In this latter detail -- the use of a child victim to communicate the extent of the Jew's evil -- the anti-Israeli propaganda of today is similar to the posters and textbooks of the Nazi era, which often showed shadowy Hebrews menacing German children.

Every grudge held against JEWS by the left finds it's root because Israel has decided to live, if nothing else, as an ultimate refuge for the Jews, whose history in this world has been but one thing.

As in the Nazi era, the Jew isn't fully human -- but now he's an all-powerful Nazgûl instead of a pitiful Gollum.

What explains this radical transition in the presentation of anti-Semitic propaganda? Three factors.

The first is ideology: When the Nazis went down to defeat, they took with them the intellectual basis of "germ-theory" anti-Semitism -- the toxic notion that certain races or groups are genetically inferior or parasitical. In our era, to compare Jews to leeches is to announce oneself as a bigoted creature from society's discredited fringe.

The second reason is tied up with the history of Israel itself: After the Jews established their own state in 1948, it became impossible to typecast them as mere parasites contaminating foreign hosts. This was especially true after the Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel scored a crushing military victory against Egypt, Jordan and Syria -- not the sort of maneuver you'd expect from typhus-stricken old men.

The third reason is political: The leaders who find anti-Semitism useful today aren't extreme nationalists such as Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini (though Hugo Chavez admittedly has been wandering into that territory). Instead, they are radical Muslims -- and their allies in Western activist groups, who speak the tropes of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, anti-Americanism, anti-racism and all the other fashionable antis. In this left-wing intellectual climate, disparaging any race or religion per se is off limits. The preferred tactic is to disparage the allegedly colonial, imperialist, racist etc. nature of their actions.

It also must be admitted that the anti-Semitism of today is a lot more subtle than the old-fashioned variety: Except in clear cases of blood libel such as the IAH poster, it's often hard to tell where legitimate criticism of Israel ends and Jew-hatred begins. As a result, Jews themselves -- middle-aged university professors and career feminists, most typically -- are often drawn into radicalized campaigns against Israel, and sometimes even can be seen marching gullibly arm-in-arm with Kafiyeh-clad protestors chanting for Jewish blood in Arabic.

It's a disgusting spectacle, especially when you hear their maudlin rhetoric -- "massacre," "crime against humanity," "genocide," "holocaust," etc

There can be no mistake that those on the left today who buy into the idea that Israel is a colonialist, murdering western power guilty of state terrorism, are more than naively culpable. These people may be idealistic fools (perhaps like our president), but they are smart enough to figure out the truth, and have the means to do so.

These are, in the end, moral and physical cowards, afraid to face, argue down, and turn away those whose untrammeled consciences insist on harming us, and every value handed to us.

There MAY have been a time when Israel's struggle was not ours, but that time is long, long gone, and it's expiration may have been ordained by the very NATURE of the Arab/Muslim rejection of the Jews in their midst, of their one and a half millennium long treatment of them, and of their Quranic insistence of their racial view of Jews which finds its match today on the left.