Why do some anti-fascists have a problem with Jews?

Brendan O'Neill I 25 June 2024 I The Spectator Australia

Is it still okay to ‘Punch a Nazi’? I’m asking for a friend. In fact, I’m asking for many friends who watched those violent protests outside a synagogue in Los Angeles over the weekend and wondered to themselves if that old left-wing slogan about walloping bigots still holds. If it was acceptable to punch alt-right Jew-haters back in the 2010s, then why not the keffiyeh-wearing variety of today who taunt Jews at their very place of worship?

What a thin excuse for mobbing a synagogue

‘Punch a Nazi’ was the cry of every self-styled anti-fascist a few years ago. It was mostly bluster – none of these coddled, vegan kids of privilege was really going to raise a fist to a Proud Boy or even one of those alt-right loudmouths who’d turn up on campus to make fun of feminism. But they sure liked saying they would. In response to the white supremacist?Unite the Right rally?in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, antifa counter protesters chanted: ‘Punch a Nazi in the mouth!’

Where are these big talkers now? Where are these progressives who were so horrified by the Unite the Right slogan of ‘Jews will not replace us’ that they threatened to smack anyone who uttered it? Why are they not now puffing up their thin chests in response to the new breed of protester who doesn’t only say disgusting things about the Jews but actually turns up to their temples to mock and terrify them with talk of ‘intifada’?

That’s the thing: it’s the old antifa types who are?doing this. Yesterday’s self-styled defenders of Jews are today’s persecutors of Jews. The Nazi-punchers have become the Nazis. They had better hope their old rallying cry doesn’t still apply, otherwise they might need to pound their own faces.

To be clear, I don’t want to see anyone punched outside a synagogue. But then, I don’t want to see protests of any kind outside a synagogue. What happened in LA at the weekend was horrifying. It took place at the Adas Torah synagogue in the heavily Jewish area of Pico-Robertson. ‘Pro-Palestine’ protesters turned up with Palestine flags. They chanted about intifada. One was heard saying, ‘There is only one solution – intifada revolution’.

Let’s be clear about what this was: the intimidation of Jews masquerading as political protest. The protesters said they picketed the synagogue because a real estate event was taking place inside, at which people were browsing houses for sale in Israel. They were bartering in ‘stolen land’, the keffiyeh crowd insisted. What a thin excuse for mobbing a synagogue. The fact is this: if you are screaming at Jews as they enter their house of worship, you are not one of the good guys.

In fact, you are reminiscent of some of the worst guys in history. To holler at Jews about ‘intifada’ eight months after an ‘intifada’ claimed the lives of more than a thousand Jews in Israel is Jew-baiting, plain and simple. It is cruelty, not activism. It is more a mini-pogrom than an act of protest. If being ‘progressive’ now means rubbing Jews’ noses in an act of apocalyptic violence that claimed the lives of a thousand of their co-religionists, then I guess I’m not progressive anymore.

The gathering at the Adas Torah synagogue was worse than anything the old alt-right did. Yes, those hard-right edgelords and neo-Confederates who were big in the 2010s were an enemy of moral decency. They were anti-women, anti-black and anti-Jewish. The neo-fascists who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 chanted openly anti-Semitic slogans.

But they did not start actual, physical fighting outside synagogues, leading to the grim sight of Jews with bloodied faces in the city of Los Angeles in 2024. No, it was the left that did that. A left which, bizarrely, seems to have thrown its lot in with Hamas. Which seems intent on hounding Jews. Antifa now feels, well, fa.

It feels to me that there is insufficient outrage over the intimidation of Jews in LA. The ‘anti-racists’ are silent. Millennial leftists for whom Charlottesville was a radical awakening seem nonplussed by the horrendous events at the Adas Torah. Perhaps Jew-taunting is okay so long as you wear a keffiyeh while you’re doing it. Clearly that’s where the alt-right went wrong.

President Joe Biden has condemned the protest at the synagogue. It was ‘appalling’, ‘unconscionable’ and ‘anti-Semitic’,?he said. It is good to hear these strong words. But one cannot help but wonder why he hasn’t devoted himself to rooting out this modish, leftish anti-Semitism, like he did with the alt-right anti-Semitism of the 2010s. In response to the Unite the Right rally,?Biden promised?to combat the ‘venom and violence’ of this new hatred and save ‘the soul of our nation’. And today’s Jew-hating? Will you go to war with that, too?

Anti-Semitism is reaching crisis levels in America and Europe. Attacks on Jews have shot up. Synagogues have been mobbed and graffitied. We’ve seen ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters hunting for Zionists on the New York subway and marchers in London demanding further ‘jihad’ against the Jewish State. It seems one pogrom wasn’t enough. It’s time we got serious – very serious – about this hatred that hides itself in the Palestine colours.

Author: Brendan O'Neill