An Anti-Semitism of the Left

[Valin]

The New York Times:

Roger Cohen

MARCH 7, 2016

 

LONDON — Last month, the co-chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, quit in protest at what he described as rampant anti-Semitism among members. A “large proportion” of the club “and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews,” he said in a statement.

 

Chalmers alluded to members of the executive committee “throwing around the term ‘Zio,”’ — an insult used by the Ku Klux Klan; high-level expressions of “solidarity with Hamas” and explicit defense of “their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians;” and the dismissal of any concern about anti-Semitism as “just the Zionists crying wolf.”

 

(Snip)

 

What is striking about the anti-Zionism derangement syndrome that spills over into anti-Semitism is its ahistorical nature. It denies the long Jewish presence in, and bond with, the Holy Land. It disregards the fundamental link between murderous European anti-Semitism and the decision of surviving Jews to embrace Zionism in the conviction that only a Jewish homeland could keep them safe. It dismisses the legal basis for the modern Jewish state in United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947. This was not “colonialism” but the post-Holocaust will of the world: Arab armies went to war against it and lost.

 

As Simon Schama, the historian, put it last month in the Financial Times, the Israel of 1948 came into being as a result of the “centuries-long dehumanization of the Jews.”

 

The Jewish state was needed. History had demonstrated that. That is why I am a Zionist — now a dirty word in Europe.

 

(Snip)

 

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I'm afraid it is but a short step from Anti Zionism to Judenfrei