Antisemitism is not merely the belief that Jews influence things. There would be nothing wrong with such influence if Jewish culture were a good thing. Indeed, the influence is real, and it is a good thing. Christianity is founded on Judaism. Christianity does exist without the God of Abraham. Christian ethics is an extension of Jewish morality, which played a major role in shaping Western civilization and the emergence of individual liberty and private property.
The West is what it is because of the ideas that underpin it, and these are, in a major way, Jewish ideas, interwoven with Greco-Roman ideas that merged with the philosophical inquiries of Ancient Greece. Jewish morality and the entailments of the Greco-Roman pillar—engineering and science, practical governance, and the legal systems of the Roman Republic—explain why the West is the most affluent and technologically advanced civilization in world history. Your good life is indebted to it.
The core of antisemitism is, therefore, not the influence of Jewish ideas and Jewish practicality per se but the belief that there is something wrong with these ideas and, moreover, that there is something evil about Judaism, which is why the ideas are wrong, and why, therefore, Jewish influence must be suppressed. The condemnation of Jewish influence is a paradigm of the well-known fallacy of “poisoning the well.”
Antisemites poison the well by reducing Jewish influence and interests to a supposed essence of Jewishness, an essence rooted not in ideas but in the people themselves, which is marked as a genetic evil. Indeed, the origin of the fallacious tactic of poisoning the well is itself a medieval antisemitic libel during the Black Death that accused Jews of deliberately poisoning public wells to spread the plague. Another prominent medieval libel accusing Jews of being “baby killers” is known as the blood libel. We hear this charge leveled against the Jews today.
Crucially, antisemitism is different from that which motivates the suppression of objectively bad ideas, such as those of Islam. Islam is a political ideology like fascism. Islam is not an ethnic identity. The Islamic system has contributed nothing morally to Western civilization. The Qur’an is a bad plagiarism of Judeo-Christian ideas, which it deforms in the retelling. It is antisemitic at its core.
Christian Arabs present no problem for the West. It is the Muslims who are the problem, and this is because a Muslim is an adherent to a system of bad ideas. It is not the individual Muslim who is evil (the man can be saved), but the belief to which he subscribes that is the problem. By contrast, for antisemites, the evil of Judaism inheres in the Jewish people. Islamophobia is a propaganda term designed to stifle criticisms of Islam.
When the far-right blames Thomas Massie’s blowout loss in Kentucky to decorated war fighter and patriot Ed Gallrein on AIPAC, it is saying that Jewish citizens of the United States participating in government (AIPAC and other Jewish-American groups that supported Gallrein are US-based) is a bad thing because Jews are bad people. Why else would it be wrong for American Jews to participate in their republic?
This is the same argument Adolf Hitler made, and here it is appropriate to raise the problem of National Socialism, which is resurgent. Hitler repeatedly claimed that Jews, despite being a small minority in Germany, exercised disproportionate influence over areas such as academia, culture, finance, media, and politics. These claims were central to Nazi ideology and propaganda. They rested on Hitler’s belief—and he was hardly alone in this belief—that Jews are an existential, racial evil—not merely a disliked ethnic group, but a parasitic, destructive race fundamentally opposed to nature, Aryan humanity, and German survival. We are once more hearing the rhetoric of parasitism leveled at the Jews.
This is, by the way, the reason the whiteness of Jews is denied: they cannot possibly be part of the white race from this warped worldview. Sadly, some Jews today deny their whiteness in an attempt to escape the anti-white prejudice inherent in woke progressive ideology. I wrote about this many years ago (see Jews are White. So Are Arabs, and its many links to other essays). But woke progressive ideology is on the run, so hopefully the phenomenon of self-loathing wanes.
The far right in America today—Tucker Carlson, Candice Owens, Nick Fuentes, Ian Carroll—and their comrades-in-spirit on the left—Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian, the Free Palestine crowd—are antisemitic because they believe there is something evil about Jews as a people. They no longer hide their pathological loathing of Jews. They have come out of the shadows because they see antisemitism returning to popularity. All the better, since we now see them clearly for what they are.
There is a dark convergence underway in which the elements of National Socialism are being reconstituted. This development is especially alarming in its alignment with Islam, an organically antisemitic and fascistic ideology. This convergence explains why Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie are so opposed to preemptive war to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons and degrade their capacity to wage proxy war against Israel and the West. They know that if Israel falls, then Islam will be emboldened. But they are too obsessed with see Israel fall to be concerned about that.
One must have noted that the far right hysteria concerning Massie’s defeat in Kentucky says nothing about Massie’s alignment with CAIR, an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood operating in America to subvert US domestic and foreign policies. The toleration of CAIR and the network of Islamic Centers across the country is itself an indication that the nation does not fully grasp what time it is. Would we have allowed the Nazis to set up recruitment and training camps in the United States during WWII? We are at war with Islam. Wake up, men of the West.
The resurgent antisemitism in America sees Jews and not Muslims as the problem because of this loathing of Jews as a people. It deranges them, as it deranged Germans under Hitler. The derangement during the dark days of National Socialism led to the extermination of millions of Jews. Paradoxically, antisemites deny or downplay the Judeocide, even while their rhetoric is favorable to the destruction of the Jews. They do this to weave into consciousness the presupposition that Jews are so diabolical that they—the Jews—would exaggerate the lethal hatred against them.
If we allow antisemitism to once again gain momentum, we will have forgotten what we said after the Holocaust. We said, “Never again.” I am committed to that slogan. I’m calling out antisemitism where I see it. So should you. Jew-hatred is an assault on reason and good moral order.
Good riddance to Green and Massie. Good on the Trump Administration for purging the Republican Party of antisemites. And Trump is doing more than that. He is recommitting the Party to the strengthening of Western hegemony while disentangling the United States from the transnational network that represents the true threat to the future of free peoples everywhere.
This is why Trump is so hated by the left, even if they don’t know why their hearts are so filled with hatred. The moment is flushing out the antisemites. The choice is ever clearer. Either a man stands with the Judeo-Christian West (I say this as a life-long atheist who recognizes virtue) or he stands with its enemies. If that sounds Manachean, then that’s because the situation is dark-and-light. There is no shade.
I have long been a critic of the Reductio ad Hitlerum arguments. I wrote about this fallacy during Trump’s first term as president, when his efforts to secure our borders were depicted as Hitlerian. When the left compares Trump to Hitler or MAGA to fascists, when it declares immigration detention centers to be concentration camps, and remigration as ethnic cleansing, when it compares Jews to Nazis and accuses Israel of genocide and baby killing, the fallacy is obvious. None of these claims is true. What I am describing in this essay is not an instantiation of the fallacy. It is the thing itself. And the thing itself is the evil we must vanquish.
freedom and reason 