Antisemitism, a Convenient Hatred

The Huffington Post invites authors to publish articles about antisemitism but suppresses any critical responses. Antisemitism, a Convenient Hatred was one such written by Phyllis Goldstein and published a few days ago. It is a plug for her book, A Convenient Hatred: A History of Antisemitism. It is a short article with little that is not accepted in it, such as the role of Christianity in antisemitism, and the behavior of the church and European aristocracy. The real question is whose aims today is this hatred convenient for? Goldstein begins thus:

Many people thought antisemitism would disappear after the Holocaust, but it did not. Nor did it disappear when many Christian churches acknowledged that Jews were not responsible for the crucifixion. And antisemitism and other hatreds have persisted despite tough laws against discrimination, hate crimes and hate speech. To understand why hatreds endure, we have to confront history. Histories that are not confronted can never be reconciled and yet most people—including many Jews—know very little about the history of antisemitism.

Thereafter she goes back to those ancient histories mention above. What she does not address, and perhaps it was because the article was too short to do so, is the most relevant explanation today. It is that antisemitism is a valued tool of Zionism. I therefore pointed it out. The comment never got published! I wrote:

Modern antisemitism is being studiously promoted by Zionists and the Zionist state of Israel as the recent adverts calling upon Jews to return to Israel show. The notion of the fear of a future holocaust however goes right back to the Jewish scriptures. It is the fear generated by the strictures of the Mosaic law and emphasized by the Deuteronomic Historian. "Obey the law or be reduced to a remnant." The threat of such a destruction strengthens a community by emphasizing the bonds that unite it and distinguish it.

Zionists have made the most of this idea since the war, using the millions of Jewish dead to promote their own racialist and elitist, neo-fascist politics. Uri Avnery cites Yehayahu Leibowitz as having said to him, "The Jewish religion died 200 years ago. Now there is nothing that unifies the Jews around the world apart from the Holocaust." It defines goyim as potentially irrational mass murderers of Jews, generating distrust in the diaspora while promoting antisemitism and emigration to the Zionist state, and making "vengeance into an acceptable western value", according to Gilad Atzmon.

"The Jew" is the new God of the Zionist religion, Atzmon, a Jew himself, tells us, the idealized image of the suffering, innocent Jews of the Nazi death camps, they use for their political ends, though the Zionist Jews of Israel are the bullies of the Middle east today, backed by the world's big bully, the pro-Zionist leadership of the USA.