“Judeophobia Explains the Pro-Palestinian Hysteria of the European Left”

Proche-Orient ^ | October 2, 2002 | Marc Tobiass

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

Agreed.

[Cicero]

I agree with the interviewer. I don't think this is a Spanish problem, it's a problem of the European intellectuals. Sure, Spain expelled the Jews in 1492, but it did so mainly because it saw them as Fifth Columnists for the Muslims who were still threatening their coasts--forerunners of the Barbary Pirates. So the greater antipathy historically was toward Islam.

If you look at actual history, some Jews bear some responsibility for modern antisemitism. It didn't all simply come down from older Christian antisemitism. For whatever reason, Jews in Russia, Poland, and Europe gravitated to the visionary left, to anarchism, syndicalism, Communism, and all sorts of revolutionary movements. A Jew assassinated Tsar Nicholas II, and Jews were in the vanguard of many of the violent Communist revolutionary groups that multiplied over Europe and Russia. Trotsky and Linvinov were two prominent Jews involved in the Leninist revolution. In the 1930s a good deal of violence was committed on innocent people by Communists as well as Nazis. The atrocities of the Jewish revolutionary dictator Bela Kun in Hungary are one instance.

As these things usually work out, people everywhere got angry at being terrorized and assassinated by revolutionary Jews, but unfortunately they took vengeance on the much more visible religious Jews with their distinctive clothing, although these Jews had nothing whatever to do with the atrocities of "progressive" Jews.

Please note that I am not saying that modern antisemitism was justified, or that for the most part the Jews who were the targets of antisemitism were guilty of anything, but that to a degree antisemitism was provoked by the activities some very prominent Jewish revolutionaries.

By contrast, absolutely nothing explains the antisemitism of the left today, beyond sheer ideology and idiocy. It just seems as if the left always has to hate and blame somebody, and the Jews have simply drifted into their gunsights.

[Julia Olsen]

Rahola’s explanation is very psichoanalytical, confused and confusing. For Jews, everything is explained by judeophobia, what is also an empty explanation. I could explain in the same way as Hispanophobia or Francephobia the support for Basque terrorism by certain press of other European countries, and I could also explain communism as phobia about capitalism, and any other thing explained by phobia about something or somebody. This is part of the same phenomenon, not referred specifically to Jews, but to everyone who suffers what other people (not all the left) consider as a romantic fight against capitalism or imperial oppression.