Mugged by Leftist Anti-Semitism

Nick Cohen is not Jewish but has felt the scourge of anti-semitism. This form of anti-semitism is however, not the traditional form of racism by religious extremists and right wing fanatics. This is the insipid form of anti-semitism that comes from those who call themselves of the left but ... Mugged by Leftist Anti-Semitism.

To explain away a global phenomenon as a rational reaction to Israeli oppression, you have once again to turn the Jew into a supernatural figure whose existence is the cause of discontents throughout the earth. You have to revive anti-Semitism.

The alternative is to do what the left used to do. If you look at the list of late-20th-century leftist causes I have mentioned, you will see that the left, for all its faults and crimes, was against fascism. It used to know that the powerful used racism to distract the powerless, as they do to this day in Egypt, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, where the deployment of Jew hatred is positively tsarist. Although I know it's hard to credit, the left also used to know that the opponents of fascism, including the opponents of Saddam, had to be supported.

But the liberal left has been corrupted by defeat and doesn't know much about anything these days. Marxist-Leninism is so deep in the dustbin of history, it is composting, while social democracy is everywhere on the defensive. Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Christian fundamentalism are beating it in the struggle for working-class and peasant minds. An invigorated capitalism is threatening its European strongholds. There's an awful realisation that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton may be as good as it gets. The temptation in times of defeat is to believe in everything rather than nothing; to go along with whichever cause sounds radical, even if the radicalism on offer is the radicalism of the far right.

In 1878, George Eliot wrote that it was "difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Jews] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print". So it is again today. Outside the movies of Mel Gibson, Jews aren't Christ killers any longer, but they can't relax, because now they are Nazis, blood-soaked imperialists, the secret movers of neoconservatism, the root cause of every atrocity from 9/11 to 7/7.

It's not that the left as a whole is anti-Semitic, although there are racists who need confronting. Rather, it has been maddened by the direction history has taken. Deracinated and demoralised, its partisans aren't thinking hard enough about where they came from or - and more pertinently - where they are going.

PHOTO: A so-called "leftist" from Free Gaza examining the "concentration camp" at Gaza created by the nasty zionist entity or this is why those idiots are so delusional.