Liberal anti-Semitism returns with the return of socialism

Roger Kimball:
As people scramble to explain the sudden resurgence of socialism not only on America’s college campuses but also in the corridors of political power, it is worth noting the concomitant resurgence of anti-Semitism in those redoubts. The coincidence is not, as the Marxists like to say, an accident. The truth is that unfettered socialism, though based primarily on a demand for the abolition of private property, always comes riding on a current of anti-Semitism. Picking apart the conceptual reasons for this link is a complex business that I will leave aside here. But it is worth noting how impeccable a provenance the union enjoys. Consider this observation:

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. . . . Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time [and would] make the Jew impossible. . . . In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

Louis Farrakhan in his ‘Jews are termites’ mode? Nope. That’s old Karl himself in his classic anti-Semitic effusion of 1843, ‘On the Jewish Question.’

It’s worth keeping Marx’s views in mind as you ponder the rise of figures like Ilhan Omar, the young and comely Somali refugee who just took Keith Ellison’s House seat in Minnesota. Like many new Democrats, Omar was nurtured by the far-left Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. ‘Israel has hypnotized the world,’ Omar said on Twitter, ‘may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.’

Then there is the man she replaced, Keith Ellison, now the Attorney General-elect of Minnesota. ‘We can’t allow another country to treat us like we’re their ATM,’ Ellison said of Israel. ‘That country has mobilized its Diaspora in America to do its bidding in America.’

And let’s not forget the Democrat ‘It Girl’ herself, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has gone back and forth on the question of whether Israel has a right to exist at all but has been as never-varying as Dewar’s Scotch in referring to Israel’s ‘occupation’ of Palestine.

The efflorescence of anti-Semitism is always a bad sign in a culture, not least because it harbingers a spirit of thuggish intolerance and breakdown of faith in society’s mediating civil institutions. The old saw of being ‘anti-Israel, not anti-Jew’ does not quite ring true here, as the lefties’ language echoes the anti-Semitic tropes of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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There is a willful blindness to liberal anti-Semitism by the media that ignores acts of violence against Jews by blacks in New York or the clear anti-Semitism of Muslim politicians.  They have this false premise that all Jew hatred emanates from conservates who they falsely accuse of being fascists and Nazis.  I don't know any conservative Republicans who defend anti-Semitism.  If there are any, I don't know them.

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