Despite there being a massive rise in recorded antisemitic incidents across the world, some people still find antisemitism difficult to see. A recent article by Talia Jane in the New Republic claimed that President Biden was wrong to invoke antisemitism when the home of the Jewish Director of the Brooklyn Museum was defaced with a red triangle and red paint, wrong to decry the antisemitism captured in a video of “Zionists” being ordered to leave a train carriage in New York and wrong to condemn a near riot outside an exhibit dedicated to remembering the victims of the Nova festival massacre.
According to Jane, the idea that these were antisemitic acts was “disinformation”. The man calling for Zionists to leave the train carriage did so “jokingly”, the comment was “a nod to the density of pro-Palestine protesters on the subway train.” Police in the city have called on the public to help them identify this man.
Those who are aware of just how bad antisemitism is may have found it particularly galling that Jane wrote how “claims of antisemitism where there is little to no evidence of that being the case actively hinder the fight against antisemitism and prejudicial hate more broadly.” Presumably when she wrote this she was thinking of antisemitism emanating from the likes of Nazis like Mark Collett as the “fight” she thinks is worth having. She might be dismayed to learn that such dismissal of antisemitic incidents is music to the ears of extremists on both the far left and the far right.
Veteran fascists like David Duke, Mark Collett and Nick Griffin would likely have agreed with much of what is written in that piece. Collett recently claimed that antisemitism is a just “trick” used “to silence criticism of Zionist or Jewish activity”. He further commented that “Zionist control of British politics is at an unprecedented level”. Meanwhile former Bristol University professor David Miller, generally considered on the opposite end of the political spectrum to Collett, recently tweeted: “The problem is that antisemitism is a ‘joke’ because it is not real. It’s a confection developed for more than 50 years by the Zionist entity.”
Collet, Miller and their ilk are extremists whose rhetoric was once confined to the periphery of acceptable discourse and whose activists were ardently at odds with one another. Now the two fringes have found a common language, anti-Zionism and its consistent attack line that the Jews are faking antisemitism against them to gain sympathy and power. Those very same denials of antisemitism that motivated generations of antisemites have moved to the pages of respectable media outlets. It should go without saying that denying incidents of antisemitism does nothing to fight antisemitism.
The Hamas operation Aqsa Flood, that saw the massacre of Israelis in their homes and at a dance festival, should have been the moment when people woke up to the genocidal intentions of Palestinian so called “resistance” groups. Instead it has opened a pandora’s box of antisemitism in the diaspora and it seems that only the Jews have noticed.
