By Daniel Greenfield
@ Sultan Knish Blog
After
Hamas supporters vandalized a synagogue with a swastika, leftist
cheered this prototypical Nazi act as a progressive commitment to human
rights.
“A swastika clearly has a deep and painful history for
the people in our community, it’s a symbol of hatred and death,” Rabbi
Ethan Witkovsky of Temple Beth El said.
However Malcolm Harris, a
former Occupy Wall Street activist and author of ‘Palo Alto’ and other
books published through Hachette, explained that swastikas were
progressive now.
“Israel’s genocide has literally reversed the
meaning of a swastika on a synagogue from a Nazi threat to a
condemnation of genocide,” Harris, who also writes for The Nation and
Wired, argued.
Harris claims that he viewed vandalizing a
synagogue with a swastika as “an anti-zionist condemnation of Israeli
genocide.” And if vandalizing synagogues with swastikas, the ultimate
symbol of Nazi behavior is only “anti-Zionist”, not antisemitic, then
there really is no difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and
between leftist anti-Zionists and Nazi antisemites.
David Austin
Walsh, a postdoc at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, who
has a book on the “far-right” coming out from Yale University Press, chimed in,
“I’ll stipulate for the sake of argument that tagging a synagogue with a
swastika has an ambiguous or multivariate meaning. How are we to
determine which is the intended meaning?”
Marshall Steinbaum, an
Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and a Senior
Fellow at the Jain Family Institute, whined that, “I wish we lived in a
world where spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue still meant Nazis”.
In the UK, where the London Met Police had previously arrested and threatened anti-Jihad protesters
for flying the St. George’s flag, an officer explained to a Jewish
woman complaining about swastikas at a pro-Hamas hate rally that the
swastikas needed to be viewed in context.
In
certain contexts, such as Neo-Nazi rallies, swastikas might be bad, but
when leftists and their Islamist allies aim swastikas at Jews, these
Neo-Neo-Nazis were actually progressive.
While the debate about
whether vandalizing synagogues with swastikas and waving swastikas at
Jews was antisemitic, the progressive swastika was making its way around
the world.
A swastika, along with “Free Gaza” was painted over the home of
Holocaust survivors in Belgium while outside Temple Beth Israel in
Philly, two women scrawled a swastika and the “from the river to the
sea” call for destroying Israel and exterminating the Jews. A Swastika
alongside a Star of David was drawn on the University of Michigan Hillel
building where Jewish students attend events. Instagram comments on the
student paper from many students defended the vandalism as a statement
against Israel and in support of the terrorists.
Islamist and
leftist movements who defend Hamas and its mass murder of Jews on Oct 7
could hardly object to the swastika which is a mere symbol. What’s
worse, burning entire families alive, raping women and holding them
hostage, or drawing a few lines on a wall?
Once the Left had
accepted the legitimacy of Hamas atrocities as “resistance”, all that
was left was redefining the swastika as a righteous repudiation of Jews
and Israel.
The “reversal” of the National Socialist swastika
from a symbol of the worst kind of evil to a progressive symbol is
itself a symbol of the mainstreaming of antisemitism on the Left.
This was not something that happened overnight or in the aftermath of Oct 7.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the state of the American Left had seen it coming.
After
the Hamas kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teens in 2014 that
foreshadowed Oct 7, Steven Salaita, a Muslim professor whose “academic
work” tried to connect American Indians to the ‘Palestinians’, tweeted
support for the murder of the teens and other Jews.
“If it’s
‘antisemitic’ to deplore colonisation, land theft, and child murder,
then what choice does any person of conscience have?” Salaita tweeted.
“Zionists: transforming ‘anti-semitism’ from something horrible into
something honorable since 1948.”
When the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign withdrew its job offer to him, academic associations and the media
rallied to Salaita’s defense. The American Association of University
Professors, the Modern Language Association and the Middle East Studies
Association celebrated a man who had tweeted that antisemitism was
becoming “something honorable”.
The Chicago Tribune provided
Salaita with a platform to claim that he wasn’t really defending
antisemitism. Salaita received a six figure settlement, the chancellor
who fired him was ousted and the violent bigot’s latest book about the
incident is due from Fordham University Press.
Flying a progressive swastika is the climax of making antisemitism into “something honorable”.
The
path to the progressive swastika and the “honorable antisemitism” had
plenty of stops that all involved mainstreaming antisemitism while
swearing up and down that it was only anti-Zionism. The media
mainstreamed hate sites like Mondoweiss where editors and contributors
admitted that, “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, but I can understand why some are” and “Liberals like to deceive themselves about Jewish power.”
The DSA, which has led the campaign for Hamas, had invited a representative of Melenchon’s Communist allied
party from France, who claimed that when a “man of the left” is “called
an anti-Semite, it means he’s not far from power.” That same party
became the only one to refuse to condemn Oct 7 and political figures
from the party accused Israel of killing its own children.
In
2014, academia and the media were justifying antisemitism. By 2024,
they’re rehabilitating the swastika as a progressive symbol. And this
change is about more than the Jews.
Jews tend to be the canaries
in the coal mine. Fanatics and totalitarian movements may start with the
Jews, but they never end there. The Jews are just a convenient inciting
incident.
Both the Nazis and Communists understood that the
persecution of Jews would legitimize the worse crimes they intended to
commit. When the Nazis began rounding up and killing Jews with no
protest, it became easier to justify the killing of the German disabled
and mentally ill, and later the larger eugenics program that would have
wiped out the Slavs and many other peoples. And when the Communists
began shutting down synagogues and executing rabbis, it became easier to
justify the takeover of the church and to build a cult of personality
around Stalin.
While there are single-issue antisemites out
there, major movements that start waving fascist or progressive
swastikas don’t intend to limit their plans to just killing Jews. The
Jews are a symbol of the power they want, as Melenchon put it, and the
justification for it, as Islamists contend.
Hamas, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, originally financed by the Nazis,
claims that it just wants to destroy Israel. But other arms of the
Brotherhood tried to seize control of the entire Middle East during the
Arab Spring, have been integrated into Al Qaeda, and operate in America
and Europe to aid Islamic terrorists around the world. When they
brandish the swastika, it’s not cautionary, it’s aspirational. And the
same is true of their leftist allies.
By defining the Jews as the
new Nazis, leftist movements like the DSA justify the mass murder of
the Jews, and the violent tactics they use to seize power to fight the
Jews. But the DSA’s vision of totalitarian socialism, National Socialism
one might say, will not end with the Jews.
The swastika, whether
used as a banner or a symbol of reversal, mainstreams antisemitism, not
just to call for the murder of Jews, but for the killing of all those
who stand in their way.
The progressive swastika is a symbol of death for Jews and for everyone else.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading. "
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