Is identity politics to blame for the rise of anti-Semitism?

Brendan O'Neill 19 December 2023 The Spectator Australia

Anti-Semitism is surging among the young. It is now positively hip to view Jews as ‘problematic’. Consider the recent?Harvard/Harris poll?which found that 67 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds in the US view Jews as an ‘oppressor class’. If that doesn’t send a chill down your spine, then I humbly suggest you read a few more history books.

The poll results have horrified observers, as well they might. ‘Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?’, people were asked. ‘Oppressors’, answered two-thirds of the Gen Z respondents. Welcome to the era of TikTok fascism.

The age breakdown in the poll is striking. The older Americans are, the less likely they are to fear Jews as oppressors. So where 67 per cent of youths think Jews are tyrannical, only 9 per cent of over-65s hold that foul view. Ninety-one per cent of older folk gave the right answer – that defaming Jews as oppressors is a ‘false ideology’.

Who will now deny that the politics of identity is warping young minds? The Oppression Olympics, with its ruthless sorting of every ethnic group according to their alleged victimhood or supposed privilege, has clearly nurtured a new inhumanity.

Who will now deny that the politics of identity is warping young minds?

It has convinced the young that people are either ‘oppressed’ or ‘oppressor’ – which is to say ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Black people, Muslims, trans folk – oppressed, and thus deserving of your sympathy. White men, ‘cishets’, Jews – oppressors, and thus deserving of your opprobrium. Under the banner of ‘anti-racism’, the world’s oldest racism has been rehabilitated.

The idea that Jews are an oppressor class directly echoes yesteryear’s dread of ‘Jewish power’. From the deranged ranting of fascists in the 1930s to the tub-thumping of radical Muslims more recently, the Jew as tyrant has been a depressingly common theme in anti-Semitism.

Who can forget that foul mural in London’s East End, which featured caricatured Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of downtrodden workers? There it was: the oppressor Jew. A vile 19th- and 20th-century trope that is now being resuscitated in PC language and fed to the young. It would be funny if it were not so tragic that young leftists fancy themselves as anti-fascists even as they spout the fascistic lie that Jews oppress the rest.

This goes some way to explaining why the fallout in the West from Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October has involved so much anti-Semitism. Menorahs in the UK have been attacked. Jewish-owned shops are being protested against. Jews in London and other cities have been assaulted.

To most of us, these are unconscionable attacks on Jews and their way of life. To others, terrifyingly, they are acts of vengeance against ‘oppressors’. For if Jews are an oppressing class, surely people have the right to rise up against them? To dehumanise Jews as hyper-privileged is to set them up for abuse and even violence. Political correctness paves the way for pogroms.

It starts to make sense why some radicals have even refused to condemn Hamas’s mass murder of Israelis on 7 October. When filtered through the warping lens of identity politics, that event starts to look less like a fascistic pogrom and more like an uprising of the oppressed against those oppressor Jews.

You could not ask for clearer proof of the misanthropy and bigotry that lurks in identity politics than the fact that even the worst act of racist violence of the 21st century so far can seem righteous to brainwashed people. This is where the past few decades of grievance politics, competitive victimhood and anti-whiteness have brought us: to a dire situation where a pogrom against the Jews can be interpreted as a rebellion against oppression.

‘Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people’, the German poet Heinrich Heine famously said. By the same token, where they denounce Jews as tyrants they will ultimately defend anti-Jewish violence as ‘liberation’.

We end up with the unholiest of alliances, between blue-haired overeducated youths in the West who think Jews are oppressors and the stiff Islamists of Hamas who promise the destruction of the oppressive Jewish race.

Maybe this is why the discovery of a?Hamas plot?to attack Jews in Europe has elicited so little angst among Europe’s supposed anti-racists: because, like Hamas, they view the Jews as a problem too. This could not be more serious. Action against anti-Semitism is required on all fronts in our society.

AUTHOR Brendan O'Neill