The term "intersectionality" has gained prominence - initially on
the nation’s campuses and now well beyond academia - as signifying the
supposed shared, "intersecting," predicaments of racial and ethnic
groups, particularly “people of color” (and to a lesser degree women and
sexual minorities), victimized by white male racism and its history of
imperialism, colonialism, exploitation and slavery.
Promoters of the intersectionality concept have sought to use it to
forge a common political agenda among at least some of the groups deemed
as falling within the intersectionality rubric, to mount a shared fight
against these groups’ perceived oppressors. But perhaps the most
substantive campaign mounted by intersectionality allies - most notably
elements of the African-American community and of the
Islamist/Palestinian community in America - has been to themselves
become oppressors, targeting American Jews for defamation, intimidation
and physical attack. In doing so, they have joined forces not only with
the Far Left in America, which has almost invariably used Jew-hatred as a
political tool, but also with white extremist groups, including white
supremacists and neo-Nazis, sharing with them anti-Jewish rhetoric and
memes, tactics and mutual support. Together, intersectional allies have
generated the astronomical rise in attacks on Jews and Jewish
institutions in present-day America.
Consideration of the roots of this intersectional alliance and of
what drives each party’s anti-Semitism casts light not only on the
dynamics of the current assault on American Jews but also on the reality
that that assault is not simply derivative of hostility towards Israel
and Zionism. Rather, American Jews are a primary target and the
anti-Israel animus is at least as much derived from hatred of American
Jews as vice versa.
Even before the recent increase in anti-Semitic incidents, FBI
statistics on hate crimes in America had consistently shown that Jews,
representing less than 2% of the American population, had been by far
the religious community most victimized by such crimes. (The most recent
annual statistics, for 2020, showed 57.5% of religion-based hate crimes
were against Jews. The next closest targeted community was Muslims, who
were the victims of 8.8% of such crimes.) That pattern, and the
anti-Semitic predilections of the groups perpetrating it, have long
pre-dated those groups’ coming together in part under the
intersectionality mantle.
American Anti-Semitism and the Red-Green-Black Alliance
The four major sources of attacks on Jews in America are white
supremacists, black nationalists/supremacists, Muslim and Palestinian
supremacists, and progressivist/Marxist ideologues.
The American institution most associated today with anti-Semitism is
academia. The professoriat, particularly in the humanities and social
sciences, consists almost exclusively of leftists, many among them
proponents of Marxist ideologies, an integral element of which has
virtually always been, as it was for Marx, anti-Semitism. (Anti-Semitism
was used cynically by Marx and his adherents as an instrument of class
warfare, a way of winning over the proletariat to Marxist doctrine by
representing the hated Jews as the proletariat’s enemy and communism as
its ally against the Jews. The current cynical leftist use of “critical
race theory” and incitement of racial division to advance class conflict
is a variation on the same tactics.) The anti-Semitism on today’s
campuses is promoted mostly in the guise of anti-Zionism, with Jews
targeted for being supporters of the Zionist project, and this line of
attack adopts many of the anti-Zionist memes popularized by Soviet
propaganda: Israel as a colonial state, as a racist state, as a project
of Western imperialism. (As with the Soviet Union, one motive for the
campus progressivist/leftist attacks on Israel, complementing the
anti-Semitism element, is the fact of Israel being a close ally of the
United States.)
The recent Israel-Gaza war, launched by an organization, Hamas,
which openly declares as its religiously required objective the murder
of all the world’s Jews, saw faculties across the nation defending Hamas
and vilifying Israel. This was hardly surprising, given widespread
faculty support for the Hamas-linked Boycott, Divestment and Sanction
(BDS) campaign against Israel, aimed at crippling the Jewish state
economically. As noted by AMCHA, the leading organization monitoring
campus anti-Semitism, the extent of attacks on Jews on a campus
correlates closely with the degree of faculty promotion of BDS on that
campus; and across the nation other adults on campus have done little to
counter the anti-Jewish animus or the hateful acts that professorial
support for BDS generates. Militant faculties, supine and indifferent
administrations, and student bodies knowing little and easily
indoctrinated by activist teachers, create a witch’s brew of Jew-hatred
that pollutes campuses and spills out into the wider society.
Islamism, or Islamic supremacist ideology wedded to Jihad, has
almost invariably had a prominent following within the faith and has
tended to come to the fore in the context of difficulties in the Muslim
world. Thus, European colonial inroads into that world and the embrace
of Western culture by many in, for example, the Muslim Middle East, led
to an Islamist reaction. According to that reaction, the end of Muslim
expansion and the success of European political and cultural
encroachment were made possible by Muslims falling away from rigorous
adherence to their faith, and the remedy lay in rededication to militant
Islam and Jihad. This comprehension of Muslim religious duty, most
notably represented by the Muslim Brotherhood, spread rapidly in the
Arab world in the early twentieth century and well beyond that world
subsequently.
The breakup of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman
Empires in the wake of World War I led to the League of Nations
fostering the recreation of national homes for peoples that had been
part of those empires - among others, a recreated Poland, Finland,
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and joint Czech and Slovak homeland in Europe
and mandates for Arab homelands in Syria and Iraq and a reestablished
Jewish national home in the Holy Land. The last, the Zionist project,
was welcomed by some Arab and other Muslim leaders. But the response
among many, in the Islamist spirit, was that the prospect of that
weakest of peoples regaining an independent presence in the heart of
what had become the Muslim Middle East was a further demonstration of
how far Muslims had fallen from their former heights and how necessary
was a violent, Jihad-driven reaction.
Israel’s establishment and the failure of subsequent attempts to
annihilate the state, together with anti-Jewish propaganda that has
drawn heavily on Nazi and other European stereotypes and caricatures,
have only increased the anti-Jewish animus in the Arab and wider Muslim
world, with polls of opinion in Muslim states often yielding levels of
anti-Jewish bias close to 100%. In Muslim countries not even involved in
the conflict with Israel, a Pew poll still found very high levels of
such bias; for example, in Turkey, at 73%, Pakistan, 78%, and Indonesia,
74%. This level of hatred has translated into almost universal Muslim
support, until relatively recently, for the Palestinian Arab rejection
of all compromise with Israel, all offers of a two-state solution, and
insistence that nothing short of Israel’s annihilation will satisfy
Palestinian demands. No Palestinian leader has ever indicated a
willingness to tolerate the Jewish state’s existence within any borders.
The Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has stated this
explicitly many times, and Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood,
has, as noted, insisted it will settle for nothing less than the murder
of all the world’s Jews. Only relatively recently have significant
voices in the Arab world, still a distinct minority, criticized this
stance.
The increased immigration to the United States of people from
nations where anti-Semitism is virtually universally embraced, as well
as from the Palestinian territories where promoting Jew-hatred is the
leadership’s most prominent, and successful, policy and where that
hatred is pervasive in media, schools and mosques, has contributed
significantly to anti-Israel militancy in America and to attacks on
American Jews and Jewish institutions. Leaders of mosques in America
have repeatedly called for attacks on Jews. (Mohammed Al-Azdee, an
Iraqi-born associate professor of communication theory at Bridgeport
University, has documented the extensive use of weekly sermons by imams
in American mosques to promote Jew-hatred and incite anti-Jewish
violence.) In addition, the influx of students from places in the Arab
and broader Muslim world where anti-Semitism is endemic, students often
supported by nations such as Qatar that invest extensively in promoting
Jew-hatred in America, has figured in the expansion of the Hamas-linked
BDS movement and in attacks on Jews on the campuses. If some Arab
leaders now take issue with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish campaigns, their
voices are more than countered by those in the American professariat
who support those campaigns in the American version of the red-green,
leftist-Islamist, alliance so prominent in Europe.
In the African-American sphere, proponents of the black radicalism
of the 1960's and ‘70's, drew, according to their wonts, both on far
left ideology and on imagined Islamic affinities, and both sources fed
their promotion of Jew-hatred. The Nation of Islam, particularly under
Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semite with the widest following in America,
has likewise, of course, promoted Jew-hatred. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
University Professor and Director of the Center for African and African
American Research at Harvard, wrote in 1992, in an article entitled “The
new black anti-Semitism is top-down and dangerous,” of how a recent
survey had shown that blacks were twice as likely as whites to hold
anti-Semitic views and “that it is among the younger and more educated
blacks that anti-Semitism is most pronounced.” This was, and continues
to be, a reflection of the anti-Semitism promoted by the heirs of the
‘60's and ‘70's radicals and by groups like the Nation of Islam. As
Gates points out, it is anti-Semitism in the service of advancing both
sources’ agendas of black separatism and supremacism, much like the Far
Left’s anti-Semitism has been in the service of advancing its Marxist
agenda. That more educated blacks have also been exposed to, and
influenced by, the anti-Semitism of the professoriat and the campuses
has only exacerbated this trend of greater anti-Semitism particularly
among the so-called better educated. The high rate of Jew-hatred among
American blacks has figured in the myriad attacks on Jews and Jewish
institutions by blacks, most notably in Brooklyn and other parts of New
York City, and even in the murder of Jews, in recent years in Jersey
City and Monsey.
Black advocates of militant separatist, supremacist, anti-American
agendas have long been open to joining with other minority groups
embracing similar agendas, and campuses have been particularly fertile
arenas for fostering such alliances. Islamist/Palestinian BDS activists
on campus, particularly Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), have,
in turn, been more than happy to cultivate the support of
African-American students under the intersectionality umbrella. The
professoriat has also been instrumental in promoting the
intersectionality scam, the notion of the common predicament
particularly of “people of color” vis-a-vis abuse by dominant whites.
The tack once more serves the Marxist faculty by advancing communal
divisions, sowing conflict in a way that simply appealing to class
differences could not, and so advancing the Marxist agenda.
Faculties have also worked with Islamist colleagues and students to
link the latter’s anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activities to the
intersectionality bandwagon, with Palestinians now regarded as people of
color facing - again, in the meme created and popularized by Soviet
propaganda - Western colonialist usurpers. With black groups on campuses
and beyond more than willing to embrace the linkage, the red-green
alliance has been expanded into a red-green-black anti-Semitic
intersectionality alliance. Faculties, often financed by foreign
entities such as Qatar, have also been active in the production and
dissemination of curricula for public and private grade schools that
convey the intersectionality alliance’s anti-Israel and anti-Jewish
message. That dissemination has become a widespread project of the
red-green-black alliance, infiltrating schools across the nation.
The Israel-Hamas War
The recent Israel-Gaza war, the fourth triggered in the last
thirteen years by Hamas rocket attacks on Israel, showcased
intersectionality’s most notable example of concerted joint endeavor,
its targeting of Israel and Jews, and the penetration of that shared
endeavor even into the halls of Congress.
Hamas’s missile barrages, aimed at Israel’s civilian population,
doubly fit the internationally recognized definitions of war crimes, by
virtue of their objective of killing civilians and by virtue of their
using Gazan civilian areas as launching sites for their attacks, thus
endangering Palestinians in Gaza. Hamas justified its most recent
initiation of hostilities by claiming it was responding to Israel’s
seeking to expel Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of
eastern Jerusalem and also to Israel’s allegedly attacking the Al Aqsa
Mosque and other Muslim sites on the Temple Mount.
The Sheikh Jarrah issue relates to some of the Jewish property that
was seized and held as “enemy property” by Trans-Jordan after it
conquered the eastern part of Jerusalem in 1948 and killed or expelled
all Jews living there. Following the 1967 war, Israeli courts confirmed
Jewish ownership of the property but granted Arabs residing there the
status of protected tenants, able to remain and even pass the right of
residence on to their heirs as long as they paid rent. In recent years
the tenants have refused to pay rent and it is in response to this that
the courts have for some years ordered the vacating of the property.
This is one element of Hamas’ trumpeted casus belli.
The other Hamas justification for initiating the war, that Israel
was threatening Al Aqsa, has been a rallying cry for virtually a century
by Palestinian leaders seeking to instigate murderous attacks on Jews.
In 1929, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, then the
most prominent figure among Palestinian Arabs, used the claim to
choreograph assaults on Jews that took some 130 lives. According to
reports at the time, such as those by Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre
van Passen, Husseini also produced and distributed bogus photographs of a
supposedly demolished Jerusalem mosque in hopes of stoking anti-Jewish
sentiment in Egypt and elsewhere.
Since Israel regained control of the Temple Mount, the holiest site
in Judaism, in 1967, it has allowed Muslim authorities to administer the
area and has prevented Jews from worshipping on the Mount. Yet claims
that the Jews were destroying Al Aqsa have continued in efforts to
trigger anti-Jewish violence.
The events on the Temple Mount that preceded Hamas’s missile attack
on Jerusalem entailed the storing of rocks and explosives in Muslim
religious sites to be used for attacking Jews in the area, including
Jews praying at the Western Wall at the base of the Mount, and
subsequent clashes between assailants and Israeli police. This is
Hamas’s other excuse for unleashing war.
Both Hamas justifications were embraced by the
black-Islamist/Palestinian intersectionality alliance and its Far Left
campus allies.
Leaders of the Black Lives Matter organization condemned Israel in
the context of the fighting and declared the organization’s “solidarity
with Palestine.” For some years BLM leaders have embraced the
Hamas-linked Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement against Israel and at
times have called for Israel’s annihilation. In the last year, Black
Lives Matter “demonstrators” have vandalized synagogues and Jewish
businesses in Los Angeles and elsewhere. They have done all this while
playing up the intersectionality connection between African-Americans
and Palestinians. The assertion by BLM leaders of their immersion in and
embrace of Marxist/Communist ideology represents another stream of
Jew-hatred shaping the organization’s actions. BLM support for the
genocidally anti-Semitic Hamas in the recent war is thus of a piece with
the organization’s longstanding and much-reiterated positions.
A number of African-American members of Congress echoed BLM’s
intersectionality-infused pro-Hamas stance. Congresswoman Ayanna
Pressley opined: “Palestinians are being told the same thing as black
folks in America: there is no acceptable form of resistance.” It’s not
clear if she meant the rocks and explosives stored on the Temple Mount
for attacking Jews, or Hamas missiles, or both, should be recognized as
acceptable forms of resistance. Congresswoman Cori Bush likewise drew an
analogy between blacks in America and the Palestinians and seemed to
justify Hamas’s missile barrages as part of “the fight for Palestinian
liberation,” which she saw as “interconnected” with the struggles of
African-Americans. Congressman Jamaal Bowman also took up this supposed
interconnection: “Enough of Black and brown bodies being brutalized and
murdered...” He characterized the events in Sheikh Jarrah and on the
Temple Mount as “violently evicting families from their homes...” and “A
show of strong force during prayer... Destroying holy sites...,”
echoing obviously absurd Hamas lies.
Of course, a number of other members of Congress likewise blamed
Israel for the recent hostilities and either explicitly or implicitly
sided with Hamas. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Muslim Congresswomen
with histories of trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, predictably came
out with attacks on Israel. Omar essentially called for Israel’s
destruction. Tlaib characterized the Palestinians as passive victims of
Israeli aggression. Neither mentioned Hamas’s missile onslaught. Both
women have invoked the intersectionality link with African-Americans to
buttress their anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agendas.
Representing the anti-Israel agenda of the red-green-black
alliance’s progressive/Far Left contingent, a number of whose
Congressional adherents signed an anti-Israel letter during the war,
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortes suggested that Israel’s response to the
Hamas missile barrages was somehow an attack on Palestinians’ “right to
survive” and that Hamas’s missiles were defending that right.
Twenty-five members of Congress signed the anti-Israel letter,
initiated by Representatives Marie Newman and Mark Pocan and again
condemning Israel with absurd charges and without referencing Hamas’s
initiation of the war or intentional targeting of civilians. Of the 25
signers, 17 had also sent letters of congratulations and support in
November, 2019, to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on
the occasion of its gala celebration. (Ilhan Omar was a featured speaker
at the event.) CAIR had earlier been named by the FBI as an unindicted
co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial for providing
backchannel financial support to Hamas and being part of a group set up
by the Muslim Brotherhood for that purpose.
On the nation’s campuses, beyond the many faculty resolutions
condemning Israel and siding with Hamas, student groups reflecting the
intersectionality red-green-black alliance likewise passed anti-Israel,
in effect pro-Hamas, resolutions and demonstrated in support of that
agenda.
On the streets of cities across the nation, Jews and Jewish
institutions were attacked by Palestinian/Islamist assailants often
joined by intersectionality allies.
The White Supremacist Connection
The tsunami of anti-Semitic acts that accompanied the recent war
also underscored another element of the red-green-black alliance’s
intersectional Jew-hatred: Its links to neo-Nazi and white supremacist
Jew-hatred. Ostensibly, the anti-Semitism of African-American groups
such as the Black Lives Matter organization and its Congressional
auxiliary is grounded in Jews being white and beneficiaries of white
privilege; and the anti-Semitism of Islamist/Palestinian allies of black
Jew-haters and Jew baiters is due to Israeli colonialism and, again, a
response to white imperialism; and both groups’ leftist/Marxist allies,
on and off campus, either tacitly or explicitly endorse these rationales
for attacks on the Jews. But the concerns about white privilege and
white imperialism and white supremacism somehow have not prevented the
intersectionality alliance from finding common ground with neo-Nazis and
white supremacists.
The recent attacks on Jews by intersectional allies, culminating in
the attacks around the war, and the frequent association on social media
of intersectional allies’ anti-Israel and anti-Jewish memes with praise
of Hitler, have led a number of commentators to look at the connections
between those allies and far right anti-Semites.
With regard to Islamists and Palestinian leaders, there is not far
to look. The Muslim Brotherhood, virtually from its inception, viewed
European fascism, including Nazism, as a model for building an
anti-Western movement and exposing and challenging the perceived
corruption, decadence and vulnerability of the Western democracies. The
Nazis’ targeting of the Jews converged with the Islamist animus against
both Christians and Jews but particularly against the Jews, whose
achievements within Western societies were seen as further evidence of
the West’s decadence and as a further insult to Muslims for having been
bested and overtaken in political and military power by those societies.
Jews were also seen, as in fascist Europe, as a vulnerable and despised
target useful for advancing a political movement. As a phrase
popularized by Islamists, to capture a strategic sequencing of targets,
puts it: First Saturday’s people, then Sunday’s people.
Among Palestinians, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, again the grand mufti of
Jerusalem who in 1929 had used the claim of a threatened Al Aqsa -
Hamas’s justification for the recent war - to orchestrate deadly attacks
on Jews, a decade later was supporting Nazi operations in the Middle
East. He subsequently went to Berlin, where he remained through much of
the war as Hitler’s guest - perhaps the original intersectionality -
recruiting southern European Muslims for the SS and broadcasting calls
to the Arab world to support the Nazis and kill Jews. He also planned
with Nazi officials arrangements for the extermination of the Jews of
the Mandate after what was anticipated to be Rommel’s Afrika Korps’
conquest of Egypt and advancement eastward. Al Husseini remains a
revered and inspiring figure for Palestinian leaders and their
followers.
As does Hitler; and not only among Palestinians but in the wider
Muslim world, particularly where the Muslim Brotherhood and its
offshoots, such as Hamas, have political and cultural influence and a
following. Statements from Palestinians and others in the Muslim world
to the effect that Hitler was right, or that he didn’t kill enough Jews,
or that the world needs a Hitler now - views that many would imagine
are limited to neo-Nazis and white supremacists - are common in that
world, as is the publication and wide dissemination of Mein Kampf. They
reflect what has long been popular sentiment. Recently in the news has
been the Biden Administration’s decision to resume funding of the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near
East (UNRWA) to the tune of about a quarter billion dollars, despite
UNRWA’s involvement in aiding Hamas and promoting anti-Israel and
anti-Semitic hatred in its schools. A new report by UN Watch, “Beyond
the Textbooks,” documents the involvement of over 100 UNRWA “educators”
in such hate-indoctrination and cites a UNRWA math teacher in Gaza,
Nahed Sharawi, “who shared a video of Adolf Hitler with inspirational
quotes to ‘enrich and enlighten your thoughts and minds.’” As noted
earlier, the use of Nazi caricatures of Jews and other elements of Nazi
propaganda are likewise widespread and popular in the Palestinian and
wider Muslim world.
The work of Mohammed Al-Azdee, the professor of communication theory
who has studied the sermons of imams in American mosques and documented
the frequency of their incitement against Jews, was reviewed in an
article by Ben Cohen (Algemeiner, July 20, 2021) in which he reported in
greater detail on Al-Azdee’s research. Cohen notes that, according to
Al-Azdee, “Key [to the anti-Jewish content of the sermons] is the
linkage between the nature of antisemitism among Islamists and that of
the Nazi regime in Germany.
“Bridging these two worlds, Al-Azdee points out, were a series of
theologians and political leaders, such as Sayyid Qutb, the chief
ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the middle of the last
century; Hajj Amin al-Husseini... and the late Al Qaeda chieftain Osama
bin Laden, whose 2002 letter to the American people informed them that
they could not be considered ‘innocent of all the crimes committed by
the Americans and Jews against us...’
“‘There are links to major antisemitic traditions,’ Al-Azdee said.
‘Nazi propaganda shaped Arab antisemitism, and in my data analysis you
can see the pattern of alignment between Nazi and Muslim antisemitism.
The khutbahs [sermons] are about Jews, but Jews represented as “Der
ewige Jude” — “The Eternal Jew,” the German title of a 1940 propaganda
film backed by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels, which
purported to unveil a global Jewish conspiracy against Germany.’
“The range of antisemitic themes pushed by the imams examined by
Al-Azdee also conformed to the various Nazi obsessions about Jews, from
possessing unaccountable economic power to corrupting the morals of
society. As Sayyid Qutb venomously put it, ‘from such creatures who kill
and massacre and defame prophets, one can only expect the spilling of
human blood and of dirty means that will further their machinations and
evil.’
“According to Al-Azdee, for Qutb and other Islamist ideologues,
antisemitism was an ‘integral component of the Islamic state,’ much as
it was in Germany under National Socialism. That view is buttressed by
antisemitic quotes from the Qu’ran as well as from the hadiths, or
sayings, of the Prophet Muhammad, describing Jews as the descendants of
‘apes and pigs,’ urging their execution on the ‘Day of Judgement,’ and
labeling them as ‘filth’ — a term that in the Muslim world, Al-Azdee
said, refers explicitly to human excrement.”
Among African-Americans, there have also long been pro-Nazi and
pro-Hitler contingents. This has particularly been so within black
separatist and supremacist movements. As Daniel Greenfield relates, in a
recent article entitled “Hitler’s Multicultural Supporters,” Malcolm X
“welcomed the leader of the American Nazi Party... to a Nation of Islam
event.” Malcolm X also met with leaders of the KKK, and he met as well
with and spoke positively of Haj Amin al-Husseini. Farrakhan, amid his
Jew-baiting rants, has declared that, “Hitler was a very great man,”
and, of course, he has parroted Nazi characterizations of Jews as
sub-human. The virulent anti-Semite Stokeley Carmichael/Kwame Ture
asserted, “We must take a lesson from Hitler”; and, “I’ve never admired a
white man, but the greatest of them, to my mind, was Hitler.” At a time
when black separatism is again in vogue, cheered on by academia and its
promotion of separate black living quarters, social spaces, even
graduation ceremonies, it is not surprising that pro-Nazi and white
supremacist anti-Jewish tropes would be more prominently incorporated
into some arenas of black political discourse.
(And the cross-fertilization goes in the other direction as well.
For example, a July 2 news article noted that, “An unknown person or
group distributed antisemitic propaganda at the University of Washington
that read: ‘Remember the slave trade? 78% of slave owners were ethnic
Jews. 48% of Jews were slave owners. Dismantle kike supremacy. End white
guilt.’” The white supremacist flyer was citing spurious claims
promoted by the Nation of Islam.
(As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote in his 1992 article on black
anti-Semitism, “...the bible of the new anti-Semitism is ‘The Secret
Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,’ an official publication of the
Nation of Islam... One of the most sophisticated instances of hate
literature yet compiled... It charges that the Jews were ‘key
operatives’ in the historic crime of slavery, playing an ‘inordinate’
and ‘disproportionate’ role and ‘carving’ out for themselves a
monumental culpability in slavery... [I]f readers actually [checked out
the authors’ claimed sources], they might discover a rather different
picture... They might find out - from the book’s own vaunted authorities
- that, for example, of all the African slaves imported into the New
World, American Jewish merchants accounted for less than 2 percent, a
finding sharply at odds with the Nation of Islam’s claim of Jewish
‘predominance’ in this traffic.”
(White supremacists and neo-Nazis have also taken up
Islamist/Palestinian tropes. What we have is white supremacists and
black supremacists as well as Islamist/Palestinian supremacists sharing
and trafficking in each others’ anti-Semitic fabrications and
calumnies.)
Intersectional Jew-Hatred’s Priority Target
The recurrence of white supremacist and neo-Nazi themes in the
intersectionality alliance’s assault on American Jews, and the history
of those themes in both Islamist/Palestinian anti-Semitism and
African-American anti-Semitism, underscore an essential but almost
universally overlooked aspect of present-day American anti-Semitism:
that while hostility to Israel and Zionism is often the excuse put
forward by perpetrators of today’s epidemic anti-Semitism, particularly
those who are part of the red-green-black alliance, American Jews are
not a secondary target, attacked for their supposed support of Israel,
but are a primary target.
Islamist/Palestinian assailants of American Jews on the nation’s
campuses and beyond are certainly haters of Israel and desire her
annihilation. But Muslim Brotherhood anti-Semitism predated Israel and
transcended Zionism. As noted, its focus has been to promote its
comprehension of Islam’s proper place in the world, as the world’s
exclusive creed and culture, and to promote advancement towards that
goal at least in part through Jihad. Attacking the Jews, pursuing the
objective of their extermination worldwide, the acknowledged intent of
Hamas, has been embraced as religiously required and strategically
useful. It is useful for discrediting and undermining those in the Arab
and broader Muslim world who seek cooperation with a Jew-tolerating
West. And it is useful in helping divide and weaken the West by
demonstrating Jihadi power against a vulnerable Western-allied minority
and by sowing internal division and discord and undermining Western
resistance to Islamist penetration. Hamas leaders have stated on a
number of occasions that the pursuit of Israel’s destruction is only a
small part of the organization’s intent and that the ultimate end is
Islamic domination of the entire world. If there were no Israel,
Islamist anti-Semitism would still thrive. And, again, the Islamist
hatred of Israel is in large part derived from the perception of the
Jews as the weakest and most despised of peoples and their
reestablishment of their national home in the middle of the Muslim world
as the most intolerable insult to the proper order of things.
And the current anti-Semitism emanating from blacks on campuses and
from some black groups and organizations derives even less from concerns
about Israel and Zionism. If the key were genuinely, as the Black Lives
Matter organization and its Congressional followers assert, about
Palestinians being people of color and Israelis being white - itself an
absurd distinction - then identification with Hamas would be more than
countered by the reality of Hamas’s Middle East and African Islamist
allies being responsible for the death of literally millions of people
of color, black Africans, and the enslavement of hundreds of thousands
more, over the last half century - Christians and Muslims and followers
of local religions. The anti-Israel animus would be more than countered
by the reality that many of the black African nations victimized by
Islamist terror have turned to Israel for help in fighting the
onslaught.
A much more realistic appraisal of black anti-Semitism in recent
decades is provided by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., again in his 1992
article: “But why target the Jews?... The answer requires us to go
beyond the usual shibboleths about bigotry and view the matter, from the
demagogues' perspective, strategically: as the bid of one black elite
to supplant another... It requires us, in short, to see anti-Semitism as
a weapon in the raging battle of who will speak for black America --
those who have sought common cause with others or those who preach a
barricaded withdrawal into racial authenticity... The strategy of these
apostles of hate, I believe, is best understood as ethnic isolationism:
They know that the more isolated black America becomes, the greater
their power... And what's the most efficient way to begin to sever black
America from its allies? Bash the Jews, these demagogues apparently
calculate, and you're halfway there... Many American Jews are puzzled by
the recrudescence of black anti-Semitism, in view of the historic
alliance between the two groups. The brutal truth has escaped them: that
the new anti-Semitism arises not in spite of the black-Jewish alliance
but because of that alliance.”
And so too for the Far Left, progressive/Marxist, wing of the
red-green-black alliance, in academia and beyond, which has always
targeted Jews as a way of advancing its class warfare agenda and
weakening the societies it wants to overthrow. It is largely the
anti-Semitism directed towards American Jews that is primary, the
targeting of Israel secondary.
And, of course, the anti-Semitism of the neo-Nazis and white
supremacists is focused on American Jews with the objective of ridding
the nation of Jews, rendering it Judenrein.
Many people are reluctant to look at this reality that the current
epidemic of anti-Semitism in America is not, in fact, essentially
derived from hatred of Israel. In particular, there are many American
Jews who identify with the left and are loathe to fully acknowledge the
red-green-black alliance’s role in today’s anti-Semitism. They also
prefer to believe, when obliged to acknowledge that role, that the
primary target is Israel, that that somehow lessens the ugliness of the
bigotry, and that, additionally, if they voice their own criticisms of
Israel, they will be able to exempt themselves from being targeted by
this Israel-related anti-Semitism. Within minority populations under
siege, there are always segments that seek to delude themselves about
the nature of the attack and about their own ability to assuage the
attackers or at least deflect the onslaught away from themselves. But
such self-delusions come at a price. If today’s plague of rampant
anti-Semitism in America is to be effectively countered, its sources and
its objectives - particularly the role and the aims of the
red-green-black intersectionality alliance, American society’s most
pervasive and mainstreamed font of anti-Semitism - must be honestly
acknowledged and forcefully challenged and fought.
