A toxic undercurrent of anti-Semitism has run through the left for decades. The Greens in particular have repeatedly weaponised anti-Jewish stereotypes against their opponents. But the explosion of blatant Jew-hatred since October 7, from Clammy Fraud sneering that she “just don’t care” about the mass-rape of Jewish women and circulating a ‘Jew list’ doxxing Jewish-Australians, to the Greens (again) posing proudly with people calling for the genocide of Jews, has been nothing short of astonishing.
Where did this all come from?
Frankly, ’twas ever thus. George Orwell, who shamefacedly admitted to having held to an irrational, low-level anti-Semitism himself, wrote in 1945 that, while Hitler had made open anti-Semitism unfashionable to publicly admit to, nonetheless there was a great deal of anti-Semitism in Britain on the right and the left. Yet, while “people will go to remarkable lengths to demonstrate that they are not antisemitic” (consider how many times leftist have piously intoned that ‘I’m anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic!’), their public protestations are undermined by their own behaviour. Orwell wrote that, at a 1943 ‘interfaith’ service at the St John’s Wood synagogue, “as I well knew, some of the men sitting round me in the synagogue” had also spouted anti-Semitic views.
If it walks like an anti-Semite, pay no attention to how indignantly it quacks that it’s not.
So, we find ourselves at a point where viciously anti-Semitic Muslims are walking arm-in-arm with...
Many who genuinely perceive themselves to be decent, moral, compassionate and open-minded and whose social and political outlook is generally progressive.
There are always exceptions, but there is an explicable correlation between where one sits on the political spectrum and the likelihood that antisemitic views are held.
This has been enabled by the grim confluence of secular humanism and the Marxist doctrine of ‘intersectionality’. Secular humanism holds at its core the principle that ‘man has an innate ability to act ethically and justly’. At the same time, intersectionality arranges the world according to a ‘Victim Totem Pole’, with Muslims, and especially ‘Palestinians’, way, way, up at the top.
How can the modern left reconcile these two views? They can’t. So they descend into the sort of cognitive dissonance that engenders such obvious lunacies as ‘Queers for Palestine’.
Our youth are taught that Israelis are powerful, white, colonial oppressors and Gazan civilians are dark skinned, weak and dispossessed. It is not to the point that this is all errant nonsense. Intersectionality has, tragically, become the most seductive ideology in modern Western tertiary institutions […]
Rather than confront a painful reappraisal of the ideology they have imbibed, a humanist can more readily understand such despicable behaviour by attributing to the perpetrator a valid reason which justifies or apologises for it. In short, the victim is blamed for being victimised. This moral inversion is a means by which the secular humanist can explain away real evil while preserving his core beliefs […]
Because humanism espouses universal fraternity and benevolence, all peoples must be regarded as equal. No religion or culture may be regarded as superior to any other. The humanist is therefore faced with a second dilemma. How can this core principle be reconciled with unprovoked violence and brutality by any one particular religious group? In order to preserve this unsound core belief, violence, and brutality are excused as part of a ‘cycle of violence’, a pernicious term which attributes equal blame and similar behaviour to the victim without any honest attempt to analyse and attribute blame where it is due. It ignores the distinction between (and hence morally equates) an immoral or evil act and a moral or justified one. Again, the best contemporary example is the clear distinction between the intentional unprovoked rocketing by Hamas of Israeli civilians and the tragic but unintentional deaths of Palestinian civilians caused by legitimate defensive measures taken by the IDF.
The grim consequences of incompatible left-wing values were obscured for decades because older secular humanists were still raised by a generation steeped in church-going Judeo-Christian values. But, once the sneering Boomers started having kids that social cushion was gone. Now, we’ve had two generations raised without God – and it shows.
