Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz is an allegory. Beneath a children’s story is a story about political authority, illusion, courage, and identity. In a standout moment, Dorothy’s dog Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals that the powerful, mysterious Wizard of Oz is an ordinary man working the levers of a machine that manufactures the illusion of great, wise power. A charlatan behind a curtain is behind the spectacle.
The scene has become a metaphor for demystification. I have used the allegory in my essays on transnational corporate power. So have others. For the antisemite, the real power is the Jews. He imagines he is Toto pulling back the curtain.
One question that occurs to me, knowing that the Wizard’s commands were those of a charlatan: were Dorothy and her companions right to kill the Witch of the West? The Wizard told them to. They did not question the command. Dorothy wanted to go home to Kansas, where the outside world mattered very little. Did the man behind the curtain manipulate Dorothy?
We’re told a similar story about Israel. Let the Islamic Republic of Iran be the Wicked Witch. The US under Trump has waged war on her. Is she wicked? Americans are told that Kansas will be safer if the Islamic Republic is vanquished. But is this really something that Israel wanted that does nothing to make Kansas safer?
We see Donald Trump on the platform, but behind the scenes, is the President being manipulated by a huckster? Suppose he were; why should we assume it’s Benjamin Netanyahu? This is obvious to the antisemite. Netanyahu is the true Wicked Witch of the West. Why is this? Because he is a Jew.
The ancient hatred has no rational basis. Thinking about it rationally, Christians should admire Jews as a people. Israel is an advanced civilization rooted in Western values and, in many ways, is connected to the sources of Western civilization. Christianity would not exist without Judaism. Jesus was a Jew. He preached from the Old Testament. The Apostles and Paul were Jews, as were many of Jesus’ disciples. Christians view Jesus as the Messiah the Old Testament predicted. The line is straight through. Yet many Christians see in Jews their enemy.
Judaism is not a proselytizing faith. Gentile Christians are not required to become Jews to follow Christ. At the Council of Jerusalem, Paul freed Christians from many of the distinctive prescriptions of Jewish culture—circumcision, food laws, and the ritual/calendar regulations that marked Jewish identity. However, this did not mean that Gentiles were free from the moral obligations Judaism established. Why would they want to be? The Christian Bible includes the Old Testament, and preachers preach from it.
Paul freed Christians not only from Jewish ceremonial customs, but, since Jewish civil law is Israel-specific, those dwelling beyond Israel were also not required to follow Jewish civil law. But Christians were released neither from the Jewish moral code nor from belief in the Jewish god Yahweh. Thus, Christianity carries with it the deep core of Jewish law, reason, and spirituality. Turning one’s back on the spirit of Judaism is turning one’s back on Christianity.
Beyond religious obligation, Jews have contributed to Western civilization in many ways that recommend their way of life. However, adopting the Jewish way of life is not a matter of opting in. Judaism, along with Roman law, is the legal foundation of Christian societies and secular societies whose moral systems are based on Christian ethics, which are themselves rooted in Jewish morality. Judaism is woven into the fabric of the West.
More than law and morality, capitalist logic originates in Judaism. Profit-making, expanding capital through investment, and wealth accumulation are Jewish traits. Both Karl Marx and Max Weber showed that the Protestant Reformation made Jewish commercial practices available to Christians. As a result, the Western world became an economic powerhouse. In time, capitalism became the rational foundation of the world system.
Israel’s technological achievements have produced a military superior to the forces arrayed against it in the Middle East. Shouldn’t Western men find this admirable? There are dozens of Arab countries, many of which have historically refused to recognize Israel or have sought its destruction. However, attempts to overthrow the Israelis state have repeatedly ended in military defeats. Moreover, in the defense of its citizens, Israel has conducted itself ethically. Ethical conduct in war marks moral integrity. This, too, men of the West should find admirable.
Jews are, in many respects, a self-made people, and that ought to impress anyone who values self-actualization and self-determination. Jews provide a model of thinking and acting that men of other faiths—or men of no faith at all—would do well to emulate. So what explains why Jews are hated so much? Antisemitism is on the rise, so this is an important question to examine.
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One source of that hatred is Islam, which compounds the problem of Western antisemitism, especially as the Islamization project unfolds. It is a strange development that Westerners would tolerate Islam in its mists, yet Muslim enclaves are springing up everywhere. Some Westerners are championing Muhammad’s cause—on the left and the right.
One would think that a country like America, with a majority of its citizens subscribing to Christianity, would find Islamophilia to be rare. Islam presents itself as the only true religion while claiming inspiration from Judaism. Islam revises the histories of Judaism and Christianity to recast the Judeo-Christian tradition as the story of Islam, forcing the traditions it claims to derive from into the Islamic frame. Why is this not offensive to all Christians?
According to Islamic teaching, the Jews distorted God’s original message. According to the Qur’an, God sent Muhammad an angel who conveyed a new revelation that superseded Judaism—thus correcting the record. Jews, despite being the ancient people of the Book, became enemies in the eyes of Islam because the Old Testament is distorted. The Old Testament is a distortion because Jews are deceivers. This is a tautology common to religious thinking. Antisemitism is therefore inherent in Islamic thought.
Christianity has its own history of antisemitism, and this history leads some Christians to side with Islamic forces that seek to destroy Israel. What is the source of Christian antisemitism? One part of it is the fact that Jews do not accept Jesus as the Messiah. That is their prerogative: Judaism is their religion; if Jews do not accept the claim of someone who says he is the Messiah, they don’t have to, any more than Christians have to accept Jewish denial of the core Christian claim. None of this changes the fact that Christianity is intrinsically connected to Judaism. Thus, a ready source of antisemitism is Christian estrangement from its religious roots.
There is more to the explanation. As noted in the introduction, Jews are a highly successful people, and many non-Jews are poor, often because they do not try to succeed or were raised in environments where success was not a priority, or perhaps environments that lack the means and culture to succeed. When a person who has failed in life sees a successful out-group, he may come to resent those who belong to it. This is a sad failure to take responsibility for one’s own fate that manifests itself in attributing that fate to the other.
Of course, not all Jews are successful. Nevertheless, Jews as a group have been stereotyped as clannish, working collectively to exploit everyone around them to create wealth at the expense of Gentiles. To the extent that one could say a Jewish capitalist exploits labor, the same could—and should—be said of a Christian capitalist. Singling out an ethnic group for special condemnation in a system one rejects is prejudice sui generis. For the antisemite, the problem is not capitalism, but Jewish capitalism.
Rather than seeing successful Jews as models of achievement, people who resent them treat Jewish success as evidence of something sinister, and the stereotype makes it easy to single out Jews. If one is truly anti-capitalist, then envy should apply to successful Christians. However, Christians who resent success cannot easily portray other Christians as an alien group because they are also members. The slaveowner uses the same strategy in a racialized system: the white worker sees himself in the slaveowner and thus is less aware that he is in much the same position as the black slave. At least he is not owned, he tells himself during moments of faithlessness.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, developed most fully in On the Genealogy of Morality, describes a psychological condition that arises when people who feel powerless, injured, or unable to act directly against those who frustrate them—those whom they have come to believe are responsible for their situation—turn their hostility inward and then transform it into a moral judgment. Unable to express their aggression through action, they reinterpret their situation so that their own weakness becomes a virtue. In a word, they make themselves into victims. In doing so, they keep themselves down.
The crucial point in Nietzsche is that ressentiment does not merely produce resentment; it reverses values, allowing the powerless to achieve a kind of psychological revenge by declaring the qualities of their perceived oppressors morally corrupt. Jews become puppet masters who determine the fates of the marionettes they manipulate. The antisemite sees himself as Toto in The Wizard of Oz, the animal who pulls open the curtain to reveal to the companions the charlatan working the levers of power. The conspiracy theorist has special powers of perception—and that makes him a special man. At the very least, he has this. Those who disbelieve him are rubes. They have been conditioned to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” They are sheep, and the wolf moves unnoticed among them.
Adolf Hitler understood this. Instead of regarding successful Jews as models of achievement, he knew that those who had failed in life or were dissatisfied with their situation could be mobilized against Jews. He exploited ressentiment to pull ordinary Germans under his sway. This is the scapegoating phenomenon, where in primitive cultures all the people’s problems are heaped onto the back of a goat who is then driven out of the village. Jews have been subjected to scapegoating more than any other ethnic group in history. That they have steeled themselves against it is yet one more thing to admire about Jews.
Today, ressentiment has led some Christians into an alliance with Muslims. This is an unfortunate alliance. And it is strange. What these Christians do not seem to recognize is that, like the Jews whom they loathe, Muslims also do not believe that Jesus is divine. Nor do they believe the man was crucified. What god would let that happen? (To misunderstand the crucifixion is straightaway a reason to reject the authority of Islam.) Jesus is regarded as a prophet, to be sure, but not the final prophet. Muhammad is the final prophet, and his teachings are God’s final word. Anything that Christians or Jews say that contradicts Muhammad’s revelation is therefore negated by it.
In the Islamic worldview, it is not only Jews who are understood to have distorted God’s message; Christians have done so as well. Yet Islam distorts Christianity. As we have seen, the Qur’an contradicts Christianity’s central claims. If the Qur’an is perfect, if it is God’s final revelation, and if Muhammad is God’s final prophet, then the New Testament must be regarded as either flawed or fraudulent. One cannot reconcile the New Testament with the Qur’an: if the Qur’an is true, the Gospel is a lie. Why would Christians ally with those who see them as liars? Moreover, if the Gospel is true, then Islam is a lie. It works both ways.
Christians who think that Muslims are their friends have allowed their antisemitism to undermine their capacity for reason and abandon their faith. They are allying with those who deny the truth of their god. This is not the same as Jews refusing to accept the claim that Jesus is the Messiah. The Jews came before Christians and Muslims, and Muhammad came long after Christianity was established. Christian doctrine makes Jewish morality available for non-Jews. Shari’a negates Jewish law and Christian ethics. Anger at Jews for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah is an in-house squabble. Islam is the yard.
We see a similar phenomenon among some left-wing progressives and their alliance with Muslims. Consider, for example, Queers for Palestine. If queer people think that, in an Islamic world, they will be permitted the freedoms they currently enjoy—or even be allowed to live at all—then they are living in a delusion. Explaining how that delusion came about requires a much longer conversation (which I have had in articles published on this platform), but, briefly, it is a product of postmodernism, postcolonial studies, and an anti-Western sympathy in which anything that opposes the West is regarded as good. When people have the same enemies, then they suppose they are one people in cause. Except Muslims don’t see it that way. They see useful idiots.
Antisemitism has produced a strange alliance among far-right Christians, Muslims, and progressives, the latter of whom are also broadly anti-white—even if most of them are white themselves. Via this tortured mix, the far-right and the far-left end up advancing the goals of Islam. Their hatred for Jews is so profound that they support an ideology that seeks an end to Christianity and liberal democracy. Hatred blinds them to that fact. The left was already predisposed to topple the pillars of Western civilization. Antipathy towards the Jews accelerates this end—if we allow it to.
This is an extremely dangerous development in world history. The Wicked Witch of the East is alive and well. So is the Wicked Witch of the West. She is not America, but America’s enemies. So is her sister. And who is actually behind the curtain? Not the Jews, but the transnationalist corporation. And transnationalism knows no ethnicity. It is, moreover, godless. It knows only power and privilege. It does not appear at this point that negotiation with witches is possible.
