Responding to the rise of anti-Semitism within Britain’s Labor party, and the way the global left has turned viciously against Israel, Jamie Palmer dissects the thinking that leads some to decry every form of bigotry except that directed against Jews:
A lot has been written in recent months about the unwelcome resurgence of political correctness and identity politics and the exasperating doctrines of the social-justice left. I will simply make the curt observation that the “progressive stack”—an organizing principle designed to foreground the voices of those deemed to be “marginalized”—has not been kind to Jews.
This is partly because those in charge of arranging ethnicities into a hierarchy of oppression are still trying to decide whether or not Jews should be considered “white” and therefore “privileged,” and, as such, undeserving of the social protections from racism afforded to other minority groups (as though it were within their rights to define the Jews in the first place). . . .
As the recent wave of stabbings and car-rammings [in Israel] has demonstrated, the left is simply unmoved by Palestinian terror. Anti-Zionist Jews . . . will of course continue to be warmly welcomed and invited to join the left’s tireless struggle against the baleful power of the Zionist entity and Jewish capital. For anyone and everyone else, unconditional support for the Palestinians and hostility to the state of Israel—not just for what it does, but for what it is—are now the sine qua non of authentic European leftism. . . .
For this to change will require a stark reappraisal of what the left values as well as what it despises, and the courage to interrogate some of its most sacred articles of faith. Regrettably, at present the appetite for this kind of painful self-criticism remains negligible.
Read more on Tower: http://www.thetower.org/article/the-holocaust-the-left-and-the-return-of-hate/