Alt Left: Is Anti-Semitism Leftwing or Rightwing?

Antisemitism has always been a rightwing, conservative, and even reactionary philosophy. Paranoid Jews who scream anti-Semite every ten minutes like to go on and on about leftwing anti-Semitism, but there’s never been much of it.

They usually lead off with Marx’s On the Jewish Question, supposedly an anti-Semitic work. Except that it isn’t. Marx as Jewish himself. His father was a rabbi for Chrissake.

And he was no self-hating Jew. He didn’t care about them one way or the other. The article is an attack on the Jewish religion in which he says Judaism essentially boils down to the worship of money. There’s a lot of truth to that statement.

The paranoid Jews then go on about anti-Semitism in the USSR, of which there was little. In fact, the penalty for anti-Semitism in the USSR was the death penalty. Yitzhak Rabin, former Israeli Prime Minister, said the USSR was the most Jew-friendly state ever. It was “anti-anti-Semitic” as he put it.

The Jewish accusations go into the lamentable Rootless Cosmopolitan campaigns of the early 1950’s, but these were set off by Zionists and not Jews. Nevertheless, they were anti-Semitic in effect.

Then they mention the Doctors’ Plot in which several of Stalin’s Jewish doctors were executed for planning to poison him to death. Jews have always maintained that this was an anti-Semitic frame-up. But there is good evidence that such a conspiracy not only existed but may have killed Stalin.

There have been a few other cases of Left anti-Semitism, but they’re mostly outliers.

The nonsense about Left anti-Semitism all comes from the pro-Israel crowd, heavily Jewish but also including many conservative Gentiles like Trumpian Republicanism.

You can certainly hate that shitty little country without hating the Jewish guy next door. I mean he has no involvement in Israel’s crimes. So he supports Israel? So what? So do 57% of Americans, overwhelmingly Gentiles. You can’t go around hating everyone who supports something unpleasant. You’ll die a hermit.

Conservatives from the 1920’s on traditionally opposed liberals, hated Communists, and were deeply worried about the modern movement which waged war on much of traditional family values in the West. An anti-Semite who does not go on and on about “Jewish Communists” or Jewish Bolsheviks is a rare bird.

These tropes are the leading edge of anti-Semitism to this very day, although anti-modernism and anti-liberalism are also very strong and are often tied together as a war against cultural liberalism, said to be a Jewish creation.

Anti-Semitism has always been conservative if not reactionary. There’s never been much in the way of Left anti-Semitism. Marx said a few things, but he was not an anti-Semite. The early anarchists had a few sharp words, but the Jews in the Pale had behaved badly for centuries, ruthlessly exploiting the Gentile peasants who lived there.

Anti-Semitism has a very long pedigree in Russia, and Russian Jews return the favor by being some of the worst Jews of them all. Many are simply criminals. The Russian Mafia was 1/3 Jewish when Jews were 3% of the population. Russian Jews delight in drinking Bloody Marys, toasting each other while proclaiming that they are drinking the blood of their Christian enemies. Nice people.

There was a temporary anti-Semitic phase in the USSR and Eastern Europe after Stalin died in the anti-rootless cosmopolitan campaigns. This had started even when Stalin was alive.

Stalin was not an anti-Semite – indeed, he had a Jewish wife – but he did crack down of Soviet Jews. People asked him why and he said, “But you do not understand. It is not that they are Jews. It is that they are all Zionists!”

The USSR supported Israel at the start, but Israel quickly turned to the West, and the USSR logically reacted badly to this. Many East European Jews, while forming significant parts of the postwar Communist regimes, also spied for the West against the Soviet bloc. The Israeli media crowed about this when it was revealed after 1989.

So Stalin had some reasons to be suspicious. And he may indeed have been poisoned, and if he was, it may indeed have been by his doctors, who were mostly Jews. You see Stalin’s anti-Zionist campaign had infuriated Soviet Jews.

The argument of the Doctors’ Plot in which Jewish doctors were accused of a plot to poison Stalin was that these doctors were doing this as revenge for Stalin’s anti-Zionist policies. Some of these doctors were executed.

It turns out they may have not gotten them all though because a good argument can be made that Stalin was later poisoned to death by his own physicians. The poisoners were said to be Jewish doctors.

There is some anti-Semitism on the Russian Left, especially in the Communist Party, but it just a symptom of a larger societal infection.

There are some anti-Semites on the Arab Left, which they try to disguise as anti-Zionism.

However, as one who was active in PFLP (an armed Palestinian Marxist group that fights Israel) circles in the US for a while, I can tell you that a lot of these people were simply anti-Semites. Granted Jews had not been very nice to their people, but their anti-Semitism was way out of line. For instance, most of the PFLP people I knew were Holocaust deniers.

There is a lot of anti-Israelism on the Left, especially the Western Left, but it’s more anti-Israelism than anti-Semitism.

I’m an Israel-hater myself. US Jews aren’t squatting in Palestine, so I don’t understand why they’re relevant to the Israel issue, except that they tend to support Israel, but most folks support their people anyway, so they can hardly be blamed.

There is little true anti-Semitism in the Western pro-Palestine movement. The people who run it are hard Leftists and people like that are very sensitive to charges of anti-Semitism.

The movement is heavily policed for anti-Semites, the most notorious of which are rooted out and tossed out of the movement. The Solidarity Campaign gets called anti-Semites 50,000 times a day anyway by hysterical Jews merely for being anti-Israel. No point adding to that and worse, giving their enemies ammo by moving into real deal anti-Semitism.