Since the scenes of Jews being hunted, beaten and kicked as they lay on the ground pleading for mercy in Amsterdam, antisemites have sought excuse, or that weaselly insinuator ‘context’, in the reported behaviour of a number of Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligans, who are said to have attacked a taxi, tore down a Palestinian flag and sang anti-Arab chants.
Video footage reportedly shows rioters chanting ‘kankerjoden’, Dutch for ‘Jewish cancer’
I wrote in the wake of those events that any Israeli fan who engaged in such yobbery is to be condemned but that their actions did not justify a modern-day pogrom that plunged Israelis and other Jews into a night of violence, fear and dread. Not least because users of private messaging apps had urged a ‘jodenjacht’ (‘Jew hunt’) prior to the violence. Amsterdam belongs to the pogrom tradition in another sense: pogroms have almost always been blamed on a pretext, real or invented, by which the Jews invited their bloody fate. The progressive position, as I understand it, is that there was no pogrom in Amsterdam but if there was, the Jews started it.
And what do you know, they’re at it again. Last night, four days after those events, disorder broke out again in Amsterdam, with a tram car set on fire and clashes between rioters and police. Video footage reportedly shows rioters chanting ‘kankerjoden’, Dutch for ‘Jewish cancer’. But how could this be? All those discord-sowing Israeli football fans are long since back in Tel Aviv. Did they manage to spark this riot from 2,000 miles away? Boy, the Jews really are all-powerful.
‘Jew hunt.’ ‘Jewish cancer.’ We have heard this language before. It prompts revulsion because we know where it comes from and where it can lead. But among some of our number, generally speaking the educated and progressive-minded, the outrage is directed instead at the targets of these epithets. Many Western left-liberals, and particularly those who have spent any time at those madrasas of militancy, the universities, espouse views on Israel and Zionism that would get you asked to tone things down a bit at Friday prayers in Tehran.
But this is about more than fashionable anti-Zionism or sympathy for the Palestinians taken to an extreme. Calls to hunt Jews or chants of ‘fuck the Jews’, for which ‘Jewish cancer’ is a colloquialism, could easily come from gangs of skinheads. But progressives suspect that skinheads are not the culprits in Amsterdam, and so there is barely a murmur about the reappearance of Völkisch rhetoric on European streets.
This is why progressives, with honourable exceptions, are useless in the fight against antisemitism. They are only prepared to man the trenches against certain enemies in certain circumstances and where doing so is not considered low-status. Show them a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and they’ll work themselves into a fit of denunciation against both the antisemites and anyone trying to downplay their bigotry. Show them ‘Jew hunts’ where they suspect the perpetrators are Muslims, North Africans or Arabs and all of a sudden ‘both sides’ is no longer excuse-making for racist thugs but the fair-minded and responsible thing to say. This is your brain on intersectionality.
When your worldview divides eight billion people into ‘victim’ and ‘oppressor’ based on their group identity, and where conceding exceptions to these rules would cause your entire ideology to collapse in on itself, you are forced to ignore or dismiss the wrong kinds of victims and diminish or excuse the wrong kinds of oppression. As long as progressives remain wedded to identity politics, Jews will continue to be the wrong kinds of victims and the best they can hope for is conditional solidarity whenever antisemites go on the hunt.
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