Protesters during the March for Palestine in London Photo: PA
Brighton with its vibrant gay scene, vegan restaurants and MP Green is one of the most liberal cities in Britain. Unsurprisingly, it is also a repository of fashionable Hamas support.
Following the terrorist group's inhumane massacre of Jews last weekend, a wave of rallies took place across Britain – not in support of the victims, not the killers. However popular these demonstrations were among the fashionable left, it is no exaggeration to say that they disgraced our country. But one example from a seaside town stands out.
Gathered just 24 hours after the barbarity began, the speaker declared: “Yesterday there was victory.” Adding insult to injury, she described the carnage as “so beautiful and inspiring to look at”. The crowd applauded.
This was more than just a moral outrage. Since Hamas is a banned terrorist organization, it could be criminal. On Friday, a 22-year-old woman was arrested by counter-terrorism police on suspicion of supporting Hamas at a rally.
The scale of Islamist brutality has emerged in recent days. The murder of babies, revealed in a disturbing photograph boldly published by The Telegraph this week, shocked the world.
Children were abducted, abused and tortured. In a powerful interview, an Irish father said he was relieved to learn his eight-year-old daughter had been found dead. He couldn't bear to think about the alternative.
Different images struck different people.
In my position as editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I was shown footage and images that others did not have. One clip in particular, shot by a terrorist with one hand while committing his crime with the other, has since involuntarily flashed into my memory. He gouged out the corpse's eyes with a stick.
These actions are glorified by liberals in Britain.
How did we get here? How did society reach a point where the more progressive you are, the more likely you are to support such savagery? This requires an urgent cultural reckoning.
Blaming and reveling in the Jews for their own massacre is the most blatant example of the corruption that has quietly polluted the bloodstream of the body politic for decades.
The oldest hatreds
The Jews are always the first victims of human darkness, but the rot goes much further. It spreads down from the progressive elite who sit at the top of our institutions – universities and civil service, broadcasters and advertising agencies, theaters and museums – from where they spread their creed into society.
These “progressive” Activists” , as thinktank More in Common calls them, make up about 13% of the UK population. But they wield disproportionate power, making many common and reasonable beliefs taboo.
Their dogma can be seen in the pronouns on NHS staff's shoelaces, in the transgender flag outside the Royal Opera House, in the sea of Palestinian flags at Corbyn's Trades Union Conference and countless other places.
Their worldview includes fixed positions on race , gender, decolonization, sexuality, slavery and Palestinians. While much of this causes real harm, especially to teenagers and Jews, these ideological positions are indicators of social status, not genuine moral positions. These are luxurious beliefs.
It is striking how closely this group adheres to these orthodoxies. Since this is a matter of identity, it is almost unthinkable for devotees to hold some of these views but not others, and it is very difficult for them to change their minds. Last week Jeremy Corbyn appeared unable to reconsider his view of Hamas as “friends” even after the massacre.
Let's return to Israel, the Gaza Strip and Brighton. When it comes to Jews, the dogma of these elites is expressed in what I call “Israelophobia,” or the newest version of the oldest hatred. One of the hallmarks of anti-Semitism has always been its ability to use modern moral language while masquerading as virtue.
In the Middle Ages it expressed itself as an expression of Christian devotion, viewing the previously chosen people as murderers of Christ. In response to the rise of rationalism in the 20th century, he switched to the language of pseudoscience, justifying the extermination of the Jews by portraying them as a subhuman race.
The hallmark of anti-Semitism was its ability to appropriate the moral language of the time, masquerading as virtue
After these ideas were discredited, At least in the West, due to the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism began to develop. to inhabit the language of politics, targeting Jews not for their religion or race, but for their national home. This is Israelophobia.
In recent years this has become the predominant expression of Jew hatred. Through this lens, ancient hatreds are distilled into a spectrum of social justice terminology that—in the traditional style of anti-Semitism—masks bigotry as virtue.
In earlier times, Jews were derided as bloodsuckers, curmudgeons, manipulators, and heretics. Today they are blamed for the cardinal sins of the progressive movement: white supremacy, genocide, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and racism.
Reality has nothing to do with this. The Palestinian population has grown fivefold since Israel's creation; if there was a genocide, it was rather inappropriate.
More than half of Israelis are non-white; it would be a strange kind of white supremacy.
Israel formed along with many new nation-states (Syria and Lebanon, India and Pakistan) in the post-colonial period, after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the withdrawal of the British Mandate; it is the opposite of colonialism.
Arab judge sends former Israeli prime minister to prison for corruption; this would be, to say the least, highly unusual for an apartheid state.
However, falsification persists. Take the old myth of the Jewish child killer. In previous centuries, Jews were accused of killing Christian children in order to use their blood in rituals. Today, “Zionists” are accused of taking pleasure in killing children – even as Hamas beheads Jewish babies while Israel warns Gazan civilians to evacuate before it strikes.
Nazi propaganda
It's still so dark. But an important question remains: why has anti-Semitism managed to find such a foothold, particularly on the political left? The answer to this question lies in the confluence of different cultural currents.
Before we turn to them, we must recognize that the left, with its instinctive opposition to the establishment, has always been vulnerable to the anti-Semitism that places such emphasis on the supposed Jewish authorities.
We can see this at the very roots of the movement. One of the first British leftists was the 18th- and 19th-century pamphleteer William Cobbett, whose book Country Walks was never out of print.
Ideologically idiosyncratic, he was a staunch champion of the underdog, campaigning for expanded voting rights and lobbying workers' rights at the height of the industrial revolution. He became a hero of later leftist intellectuals, including Karl Marx and Michael Foot.
Yet Cobbett was a virulent anti-Semite. Moreover, he represented the blurring of hatred of Jewish Christians (there is “something hateful in the very nature of the ceremonies which they have the ignominy of calling religious,” he wrote) with conspiracy theories that connected Jews with hidden financial forces (he blamed agricultural crisis “Jewish money” in the City of London).
His beliefs also corresponded with the first manifestations of the new anti-Semitism, which reached its full expression at Auschwitz. German nationalism of the late 19th century was suspicious of urban politics and capitalism and idealized rural life. It was also conspiratorial and anti-Semitic. All this resonated with Cobbett's worldview. It is noteworthy that in the figure of the first left one can recognize the beginnings of Hitlerism.
Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Egyptian group and the instrument of extremism of Haj Amin al-Husseini. Photo: SAID KHATIB/AFP
Fast forward to today: the pernicious hatred of Jews later unleashed by the Third Reich is reflected in formulated Israelophobia. Progressives in Brighton.
This part of the story began in 1941. As the Wehrmacht advanced from North Africa toward the Middle East, Berlin strategists began to wonder about the strategic value of Islam. The Nazis successfully turned the German people against Britain and Russia by accusing them of being “double strongholds of Jewish power”; if the Arabs could be manipulated in the same way, they could fuel anti-British nationalism in the Middle East and hasten the defeat of the Allies.
A group of Islamists were recruited to Berlin to collaborate with Nazi propagandists. The leader of this pack was the peacock Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, an extremist who waged a gang war against Palestinian moderates. That same year, he met Hitler with great pomp and ceremony and received a Nazi salary, becoming an ardent supporter of the Final Solution.
Husseini's task was to synthesize Koranic anti-Semitism with the anti-Semitism preached by Hitler. As a result, propaganda spread throughout the Middle East in thousands of hours of radio broadcasts.
The tone of one example from July 1942 – when the first Jews arrived in Sobibor and Auschwitz – is striking. The presenter stated: “According to the Muslim religion, protecting your life is a duty that can only be fulfilled by destroying the Jews. This is your best opportunity to get rid of this filthy race that has usurped your rights and brought misery and destruction to your countries.
“Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their shops, destroy these vile supporters of British imperialism.”< /p>
The paper of extremism was lit in the region, which continues to burn today. Moreover, it provoked the bloodshed that befell Israel last week.
After the war, Husseini became one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Egyptian group that became a new vehicle for his hatred. Although viewed by many progressives as a kind of Che Guevara organization, Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
This is evidenced by the official charter of the group. Article 32, which cites the conspiracy theory that the Zionists want to take over all the territory between the Nile and Euphrates, states: “Their plan was outlined in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” To say that it was influenced by Nazi propaganda is not enough. This is Nazi propaganda.
Other branches of the Muslim Brotherhood include al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, both of which use methods similar to those we saw in southern Israel, from beheadings to burnings .
This jihadist hydra threatens both Israel and the world. The West, as well as the Arab countries and most of Africa. Not only Islamism flows through its veins, but also Nazism. This is what Western progressives espouse: an ideology born in Nazi Berlin that led not only to the massacre in Israel, but also to the 23 murders at Manchester Arena and others on the streets of London.
The Socialist Ideal
There was another one, a more direct entry point for Israelophobia on the political left. Let's turn our gaze to Moscow. Let's go back to Israel's early years: the state was the darling of the left around the world.
Even before the Second World War, Guardian editor and progressive politician C. P. Scott lobbied the British government on behalf of Zionism. “I was convinced of its value not only for the Jewish people, but also for other peoples,” he recalled.
Fast forward to the present, however, Israelophobia has become, as the American cultural theorist Susie Linfield put it, “almost immutable.” ticket to enter leftist discourse.” What stifled the progressive romance with Israel? The answer lies in the Kremlin.
The Jewish state began as a socialist ideal. After her birth in 1948, Stalin became the first to recognize the country de jure. However, during the Cold War, Soviet views of the country quickly soured as it was drawn into America's orbit; after the Six-Day War of 1967, Soviet sympathy and support completely went to the Arabs. Aggressive.
Between 1967 and 1988, the KGB launched a massive disinformation campaign called SIG, short for Zionist States, or Zionist Governments, which flooded the world with Israeli-phobic paranoia centered around the Soviet worldview. and goals.
The KGB chief in charge of this project was Yuri Andropov, who later briefly became the country's leader before his death in 1984. Ironically, he hid his Jewish origins all his life.
SIG was a staggeringly complex operation. . Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former head of Romanian intelligence and the highest-ranking spy ever to defect from the former Soviet bloc, was one of the culprits.
Jeremy Corbyn appears unable to reconsider his view of Hamas as “friends” even after the massacre. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
The group of ideologists who put forward ideas for the new falsification campaign was known under the strange name “Zionologists”. Although they lived in the USSR and worked for the communist regime, many of them held old, xenophobic and Russian ultranationalist views, which they learned to express in Marxist-Leninist terms.
Propaganda efforts included millions of newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and books. The founding text of “Beware of Zionism!” Yuri Ivanov, published in 1969 and reprinted several times. It sold 800,000 copies and was released in at least 16 languages, from English, Arabic and French to Polish, Ukrainian, Estonian and Slovak. This material spread to the West, where it lodged itself in the minds of people like Jeremy Corbyn.
A little-known truth is that all the Israel-phobic stereotypes circulating today – which accuse the Jewish state of things like racism, White supremacy, ethnic cleansing, colonialism and apartheid were developed by the Kremlin during the Cold War. Their persistence in modern culture is a testament to the skill of the Zionologists who translated ultranationalist thought into leftist language.
It was a perfect example of horseshoe politics. In 1973, a Paris court convicted Robert Legagne, a member of the French Communist Party and an employee of the Russian embassy in Paris, of inciting racial hatred. His crime was publishing anti-Zionist propaganda in a left-wing French magazine controlled by the embassy.
During the trial, it was sensationally revealed that the allegedly left-wing article included entire passages with typos taken from a far-right 1906 pamphlet written by a member of the Black Hundreds sect responsible for inciting pogroms in Tsarist Russia. The word “Jew” was simply replaced with “Zionist”.
Other communist publications in Britain included the Straight Left newspaper, founded in 1979. The newspaper was run by Seamus Milne, who later became known as Corbyn's spin doctor. It was imbued with Israelophobia.
The precursor to the rhetoric heard on the streets of Britain last week repeatedly praised Palestinian terror against civilians, presented as a revolutionary struggle.
“The PLO found great support in the Third World and the socialist camp, with the USSR at the forefront.” ,” the publication exulted.
The Iranian Revolution, a victory for the fascist theocracy, was applauded and described as “the anti-imperialist struggle of the people for independence, freedom and social justice.” When the Iranians took 52 Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979, Straight Left supporters believed it was “a pretext to create a new wave of anti-Iranian hatred.”
The Role of American Identity Politics
The Straight Line can be drawn from Kremlin agitprop through publications such as the Soviet Weekly and the Straight Left, to today's expressions of support for Hamas in Britain.
Along the way it merged with Nazi propaganda, absorbed in joining forces with groups such as Hamas in the Middle East.< /p>
This was especially evident when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labor Party.
At the time, on a Facebook page called “Jeremy Corbyn Leads Us to Victory,” a Labor Party spokesman posted a photograph of New York Times journalists with their faces covered in Jewish symbols, implying that they were serving a Zionist agenda.
Another called Hitler “the greatest man in history”, adding that it was “disgusting how much power the Jews have”; another commented: “It's the super-rich families of the Zionist lobby who control the world”; another called the Nazis' six million Jewish victims a “big lie,” echoing the Holocaust denial that was another key feature of the Russian disinformation campaign. Nazi and Soviet propaganda was frighteningly effective.
Another cultural current that has led to this unusual alliance between the left and jihadism is American identity politics. The UK chapter of Black Lives Matter shared an image of a Hamas bulldozer tearing down a border fence, criticism of the Balfour Declaration and posts blaming Israel. Given what we know about BLM, this is shocking, but hardly surprising.
Black Lives Matter criticized for sharing information about Photos of Hamas Photo: John Nguyen/JNVisuals
However, at the beginning of the civil rights movement, the Jewish community stood shoulder to shoulder with Martin Luther King. As a result, the synagogues were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan.
This closeness also had a Zionist dimension. Golda Meir, Israel's first female leader, noted in her memoirs that “we Jews share with the African peoples the memory of centuries of suffering.” She recalled that many years ago Herzl himself vowed: “As soon as I witness the redemption of the Jews, my people, I also want to help in the redemption of the Africans.”
However, after the militant Malcolm X replaced Martin Luther King as the dominant figure in the black liberation movement, this solidarity became strained.
Malcolm X tended to associate Jews with power and often lapsed into anti-Semitism. Throughout his life, he attacked what he called “Zionist dollarism,” condemned Israel, and called Jews a race of white oppressors. The Black Power movement was not friendly towards Jews.
Fast forward to the present: the radical racial ideas of America in the 1960s and 1970s have become an all-consuming political ideology that has spread throughout the West. Because critical race theory, the philosophy behind the social justice movement, asserts that “racism equals prejudice plus power” (a concept coined in 1970 by American psychologist Patricia Bidol-Padwa), it teaches that whites cannot experience racism.
< p>Non-black minorities, such as Jews, cannot be targeted, even if they are targeted at higher rates than blacks. Whoopi Goldberg took this logic to its absurd conclusion in 2022 when she declared on television that the Holocaust “was not about race” because it involved “two groups of white people,” even though Nazi ideology explicitly defined Jews as racially inferior people.
Similarly, in April Diane Abbott was suspended from the Labor Party after writing in the Observer that Jews could not face racism because they were just “white people with peculiarities, like redheads.” . “.
It's comforting that she was convicted so quickly. But the ease with which she ignored two millennia of anti-Semitism, even forgetting the Holocaust, demonstrates how ideology is often perceived as reality by the left. It also demonstrates how widespread American identity politics has become in Britain and throughout the Western world.
The whole thing is a mixture of aristocratic liberalism, globalism and old-fashioned socialism, accompanied by a sort of emphasis on race. This is usually only seen on the far right.
Would those Brighton leftist doors be opened to an Israeli child fleeing a Hamas killer? Would they have sheltered Jews during the Holocaust? Would they have become criminals?
The “culture wars” are often derided, but there is no longer any meaningful social struggle. Our country is in danger of becoming a zombie version of itself.
Israelphobia: The Newest Version of the Oldest Hatredby Jake Wallis Simons (Constable, £12.99) is out now. now
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