Fascism might be better than the Left, suggests the New York Times:
"Some voters consider France Unbowed, which has members who have been accused of antisemitism, to be at least as dangerous as the far right.”
Given the unsubstantiated claims of Melenchon's anti-Semitism which match those that removed Corbyn, one might wonder about the dogwhistle of "Soros & rootless people without culture" (the traditional anti-Semitic reference to the Jewish people):
https://youtu.be/o-3-lN3bA9w?si=G3zQLvJUm35X4s8a
Why does this not trouble the Western leaders--
https://www.youtube.com/live/avIs4YrtM00?si=fWZQmC73J5rWCwYR
https://youtu.be/AYz88B_N10U?si=WUCbohnhiy_xE0nW
--- who embrace Italy’s Meloni today?
Why isn’t she anti-Semitic?
I suggest the answer is simple.
In the face of the daily atrocities recorded in Israeli policy in Gaza –
and now the West Bank—
the fact is that “anti-Semitism” is merely a term of abuse –
for anyone who dares to suggest that the Palestinians might be human beings.
Israel's curious embrace of European fascism today
is what this article by me tries to explain:
For Theodor Herzl tried to protect Jews from European ethnic nationalism by inventing Zionism as yet another, but with an homeland elsewhere, accommodating thereby the anti-Semitic claim that they did not belong in the West.
So the West it is that today admonishes bewildered Palestinians as they die, “Never again"! -- terrorising at the same time Israelis, who remain forever an anxious local gendarmerie, denied true freedom.
And, thereafter, in terrorising the Arab and the Muslim world, the West terrorises at the same time Israelis, placing them forever as anxious local gendarmerie, ever threatened, ever dependent on Western largesse, forever denied the possibility of real freedom.
Andrew Handler, wartime member of the Zionist youth Maccabi ha-Za’ir has shown (Dori: The Life & Times of Theodor Herzl in Budapest 1860-1878, University of Alabama Press, 1983) how the campaign for an ethnic Magyar-dominated Hungarian Kingdom had made up the lie that rule from Vienna had enabled the Jews to rob the Hungarian people.
Yet this very anti-Semitism was to inspire, paradoxically, as Handler has argued, the Zionist programme itself. On June 24, 1878, Győző Istóczy set out in the Hungarian Diet that the Jews would destroy Hungary and the “solution is none other than the restoration of the ancient Jewish state”. The Jewish Question was a national one, he said, of the “establishment in Palestine of an independent Jewish state”.
Handler points out the “striking similarity between key passages of Istoczy’s anti-Semitic screed A Palesztina Beszcd and Herzl’s Der Judenstaat” laying out the ideology of the future state of Israel.
For Herzl decided that the Jewish peoples of Europe could only gain safety by creating their own ethnic nationalism, & so adopted the anti-Semitic demand that Palestine become the Jewish homeland.
Authoritarian variants produced distinct European fascisms: although Germany is the most cited, we might look to France, turning in on itself after defeat at Sedan and the Paris Commune to look for an “enemy within” when it persecuted Alfred Dreyfus.
Despite that falsehood being exposed, anti-Semitism persisted, fortified by the colonial racism common to most European states; so years later it powered popular support for Petain & his Vichy collaboration with National Socialism, which rounded up Jews to send them off to be tortured and murdered, in the ‘Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv’ at the cycling stadium in Paris in July 1942. Maurice Papon, one of its high functionaries, was like most never punished; accordingly, he was to go on to torture Algerians and detain them in the same stadium in Paris in 1961 and organise their murder. Insufficiently acknowledged, this very anti-Semitism is reborn today as Islamophobia, serving to appease both traditional anti-Semites as well as survivors of genocide.
It is such French tradition that accounts for the surreal spectacle of the Sephardic Éric Zemmour reassuring the French that their ancestors had no responsibility for Shoah, even as his fellow right wing colleague Marine Le Pen endorses every Israeli act, yet ever silent on her own family’s rich anti-Semitic history; as well as the absurdity of how the “hijab question” has now become the central concern of French laïcité, rapidly occidentalising the Jews whom it so recently orientalised, orientalising instead Muslims, consistent with the creation of “anti-Semitism” as a matter of concern entirely distinct from other racism.
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