Jew-haters' three new reasons for their hatred

A while back, an LITD commenter asked, in the course of an exchange in which Judaism was an element, why Jews have always come in for such a noteworthy degree of prejudice and persecution.

Bernard Henri-Levy, in a piece at The New Republic, takes a look at the justifications the haters have put forth at earlier times in history:

Anti-Semitism was pagan when, during the Roman empire, the Jews were resented for having a religion that took the magic out of the world. 

It was Christian during the centuries of the crusades, the Inquisition, the Medieval pogroms, and beyond—when the Jews were blamed for the suffering and death of Jesus Christ.

It was anti-Christian after people—following d’Holbach, Voltaire, the Enlightenment, and Voltaire’s slogan, “Let’s crush the infamous” (by which he meant the intolerance of organized religion)—began to reproach the Jews not for having killed the son of God but for having invented the One God, and thus, in a way, the son. 

It was socialist, anticapitalist, and pro-worker at the time of the Dreyfus Affair in Paris and of the anti-bourgeois socialism of the founding fathers of French socialism. The deviation laid at the door of the Jews then became their supposed conspiracy, orchestrated from the heights of “Jewish finance,” to oppress those whom anti-Semitic propagandist Édouard Drumont described as the small and humble.

It became racist as soon as modern biology took its place in the circle of the sciences, bringing with it the fad of categorizing human beings by their physiological characteristics. “We couldn’t care less whether the Jewish people killed or created Christ,” went this new form of anti-Semitism. “We don’t give a damn about the alleged misdeeds of its anti-worker plutocracy. But that the Jews are a race—an inferior one!—that is injecting its venom into races superior and pure, that worries us; that is unforgivable.” 

In short, it looks as if the world’s longest-running form of hate has never stopped searching for the right formula. 

He then says that the cataclysms of the 20th century caused our species to momentarily recoil at what it meant to play out such sentiments.  However, raw anti-Semitism is back, and Henri-Levy says it will rest on three predicates:

That system will hinge on three main tenets:

1. Jews are detestable because they are inseparable from a detestable state. This is the anti-Zionist tenet. 

2. Jews are all the more detestable because the cement that holds that state together is the belief in a persecution that may well be imaginary or, at the very least, exaggerated. This is the negationist tenet, the tenet of Holocaust denial.

3. By operating thus and cornering the market on the world’s available reserves of compassion, the Jews heap on top of that twin injury the insult of rendering humanity deaf to the sufferings of other peoples, beginning, of course, with the Palestinians. This is the tenet of competitive victimhood. 

Never mind that every one of these tenets is vile and deranged. Never mind that each is complete and demonstrable idiocy, and that its idiocy has been demonstrated many times over. And never mind the evidence—with respect to the third formulation, in particular—that it is specifically when the Holocaust is borne in mind and taken to heart that we recognize massacres for what they are and take up arms against them—in Bosnia, Darfur, Rwanda, and elsewhere.

These tenets serve only one purpose, which is to permit anti-Semitism once again to be heard and thus, once again, to be spoken. 

These arguments have only one virtue, which is, as with the old arguments about a God-killing, God-bearing, or racially impure people, to render acceptable that which was becoming unacceptable.

The new phase of world Jew-hatred really gained steam after Israel's victory in the 1967 war, and the annexation of East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria.  Once an entity in this world shows that it is capable of fending for itself, it is no longer any use to the Left as a poster child for victimhood.  Then came Arafat's swashbuckling performance before the UN general assembly in 1974, and the Left had its new beleaguered demographic to champion.

That's an odd thing about Leftists.  They hate military uniforms on Americans, but think they're cool when worn by an Arafat, Castro or Ortega.

So the Jew is seen as some kind of powerful player on the world stage, even though he is driven out of Europe, humiliated on US college campuses, and threatened with annihilation in his own land.

All of a piece with the agenda of imposing an upside-down reality on our species.