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Home » Why attacks on Jews lead to more Jew-hatred

Why attacks on Jews lead to more Jew-hatred

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve got something like twenty drafts of posts dealing with different aspects of Jew-hatred. The topic is so multi-faceted and so overwhelming that most of them have remained in draft form and never been finished and published.

But it’s a topic so important that I need to deal with it more often. Why is it so important, and not just to Jews? It’s an old saying but it’s true that the Jews are the canaries in the coalmine. Jew-hatred is the mark of a society that’s sick. It’s also a sign of evil, if you want to get metaphysical about it. And it’s one of the longest hatreds in the world, perhaps the longest hatred, and so flexible that it can shape-shift endlessly from old reason to new reason and back again.

There’s the envy part and the contempt part, the “Jews secretly rule the world and are trying to destroy the rest of us” part, the “Jews kill little children and use their blood to make matzoh” part and its current manifestation about Jews purposely killing Palestinian children in a genocidal war, there’s the ancient Islamic hatred of Jews and the ancient Christian “they killed Christ” part that sparked murderous pogroms against Jews, there’s the “Jews poisoned the wells” part and the “Jews want to destroy the white race” part and the “Jews are whites and colonist agents of oppression” part. I’m sure I’ve left some parts out, as well, but you get the idea[s]. Israel-hatred and its double standards are often a screen for Jew-hatred, which gives it a special oomph to which no other country is subjected.

But for the purposes of this post I’ll stick to one idea which I’ve seen expressed more and more often online by Jew-haters. It is, in my opinion, the main reason why Holocaust education not only doesn’t work these days to counter Jew-hatred but often actually works to amplify it. There is also the general tendency of today’s young people to say that the history they’re taught is a lie, but I think another very important part goes like this [my emphasis]:

One lesson … is not to indulge the “fantasy … that imparting information about the murder of the Jews of Europe will ensure its never happening again.” Showcasing one’s own weakness does nothing to placate illiberal enemies. To the contrary, what to the West looks like “innocence” appears more like an admission of guilt to those for whom violence is routine. “Something must be wrong with the Jews if they were selected as a target.”

Paul Berman would elaborate upon this point a decade later, analyzing the seemingly paradoxical success of grotesque Palestinian suicide bombings in turning world opinion against Israel. “Each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis,” because the liberal mind could not could not otherwise make sense of such depravity. “Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt.” Politics against the Jews—indeed against the West that abhors depravity—has only become more explicit over the last three years. If Hamas and the Gazans that followed them to rape and pillage could commit such unspeakable acts, Israel’s sins must be even graver than previously thought. American support for the iniquitous regime, moreover, could not be because it sees Israel as a decent nation and democratic ally, but because the United States is controlled by Zionists.

It seems a paradox, but it has its own logic. Among other things, it makes sense of evil – defining Hamas’ acts on 10/7 as not so much evil as motivated and in some sense justified. It makes order out of the chaos of human life. I’m speaking not of those who spread the lies and hatred with full knowledge that they are spreading lies and hatred, but those who accept the lies as truth and believe themselves to be virtuous in doing so. The argument is that if Jews are attacked far and wide, and have been for centuries, they must have deserved it and continue to deserve it.

Even some Jews succumb to the reasoning. It’s something like what happens with certain abused children: rather than believe the world can be so unjust, they believe that they themselves must have done something very very wrong to be treated that way.

Comments

Why attacks on Jews lead to more Jew-hatred — 20 Comments

  1. Several times I wrote and deleted long comments, trying to express my sadness and weariness about the prevalence, and seeming resurgence, of Jew-hatred.

    My words are insufficient.

    I am disgusted by the words and actions of the antisemites espousing hatred and far too often engaging in physical violence towards Jewish people and I am so very sorry that Jews living in 2026 are being forced, against all that is true, to relive the persecutions of their ancestors.

    God bless people, like neo, who use their voice and words to work to convince those with eyes to see and ears to hear of the vileness of this ancient hatred.

  2. Cui bono.

    1) All Western countries the world over have a Communist or Leftist/Green Alliance. Not one Right Wing Party is aligned with Islam but all Left Wing parties are.

    In Germany there are presently 125,000 Jews and 7,000,000 Muslims. Muslims outnumber Jews similarly in all Western countries except the US. If I am a Left Wing Party Leader, who are my voters and how do they benefit my party and how can I benefit them? In the Europe it’s an easy answer – there are tens of millions of Muslims and they receive enormous benefits for not working. If a Muslim commits a crime while yelling out loud so all can hear: “Allahu Akbar” the first thing that the local police department constable/chief says is ,”We are looking for a motive.” They are a 100% protected class and therefore if they don’t like Jews or Israel then our party does not and we need their votes.

    2) Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1925 and the second volume in 1926. He wrote it in Landberg Prison in Oberbayern (Upper Bavaria.) You can’t visit it because it is still an active prison. Iused to live in Bavaria as a spy so I drove by it. Mein Kampf mentions Jews 450 times in his 2 volumes, more\ than the word Germany. Let than sink in. In the end we all know how Herr Reichsführer’s Jew hatred turned out.

    Many people say they know all about Islam. When I hear that my first question every time has been: “So, when you read the Sira, what was your impression? Blank stares 100% of the time. I realize they know little of the Sunnah. I then say, “Well did you know that in Mohammed’s Sira – his biography the second half of the history – the Medina period is chock full of endless blocks of things Jewish. he didn’t like them.

    You can dismiss the evidence in the Sira and the 1500 years of war with the world by Islam using the swordto become the dominant political/religious ideology in some 56 countries – perhaps with the expception of the UAE. I don’t know many sensible Jews wanting holidays in Yemen, Iran or Pakistan

    So again cui bono, who benefits from Jew and Israel hatred, The USSR figured this out in the 1960’s by backing Nasser. They hated Israel from 1960 to end of the USSR in the early 1990’s. Hitler had Haj Amin al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem broadcast daily to the Arab World from Berlin. The US Emabassy made transcripts of his speeches. I have read many of them. They are just Jew hatred every day.

    Both the Third Reich, The USSR and its allies knew there were a few million Jews and billions of Muslims. Those numbers make for very cynical people who benefit from that ratio. They just won’t say it out loud.

    Cui bono? Muslims and the Left.

    The Chinese at their War College from 1998 on teach that the US is totally naive when comes to opposition ideologies and the harm they will do us while we sleep or shrug our shoulders. I agree with them when it comes to Islam as well as the DSA – I mean one is just another religious belief and the other is just sharing. I mean, right?

  5. So the atrocities committed by the Palestinians against Jews are proof of Jewish evil, but somehow it never seems to go the other way – the “atrocities” committed by Israel against the Palestinians are never used as proof of Palestinian evil. I’m not sure why not. I suppose this is one mystery that mankind was never meant to solve.

  6. “Jew-hatred is the mark of a society that’s sick. It’s also a sign of evil…”

    At the heart of hatred of the Jewish people lies hatred of God.

  7. Geoffrey Britain,

    This is an excellent piece by Andrew Klavan expounding on that: https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com/p/essay-4-antisemitism-is-the-devils

    It’s not a long essay and well worth one’s time. Two excerpts:

    One of my favorite Hollywood stories comes from Scott Eyman’s biography John Wayne: The Life and Legend.

    When Wayne was lying on his death bed, a group of friends came to visit him. One friend, named Al, was Jewish. Knowing the Duke was forever being accused of bigotry, Wayne’s son joked, “The reason Duke didn’t want to see you was because Al is a Jew.”

    The ailing Wayne smiled and pointed at the ceiling. “It’s the other Jew I don’t want to see,” he said.

    As the saying goes: It’s funny because it’s true.

    Antisemitism is the Devil’s Flagpole. It always marks the place where evil dwells. It adheres to no one political party, no particular race or nation. But wherever and whenever it appears, it is a signal that something is going very badly wrong in that place and time.

    There’s a simple reason this is true. The antisemites think they hate the Jew in front of them, but it’s that other Jew they really hate.

    and…

    The hidden truth rose to the surface as Christianity began to lose its grip on the European mind. It was only then that it became acceptable for antisemitic thinkers openly to turn their hostility on their real enemies: Christ and Christianity.

    Nowhere was this more apparent than during the late formation of the German nation in the 1800’s. It was in this period that German thinkers and artists became obsessed with trying to define the true nature of German identity.

    Arthur Schopenhauer believed Judaism had polluted Jesus’s wisdom with religious dogma. “It is to be regarded generally as a great misfortune that the people whose former culture was to serve mainly as the basis of our own were not, say, the Indians or the Greeks, or even the Romans, but just these Jews,” he wrote. Friedrich Nietzsche rejected Christian values as a “slave morality” that reversed the natural order in which the strong and successful wrote the rules. It was the slavish Jews, Nietzsche said, who “performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous charm for a couple of millenniums.” The composer Richard Wagner sought to revive the old Germanic gods and became an obsessively virulent hater of the intrusive race of Christ.

    This sort of thinking was still in play decades later, when Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Church Affairs Hans Kerrl said the idea that Christianity “consists of faith in Christ… makes me laugh.” He decreed, “God’s will reveals itself in German blood,” and “True Christianity is represented by the [Nazi] party and especially by the Fuhrer.”

    It is no coincidence that Hitler, in attempting to exterminate the Jewish people, destroyed instead the great European culture that had blossomed out of Christendom. He had stopped its heart.

    Today, we are living through another recession of Christian faith — though I suspect that tide is already turning. But in the moment, it does not surprise me that Jewish Americans must walk in fear on left-wing campuses, and suffer taunts and slurs from far right-wing posters on X. The left has turned from Christian charity to a perverse, racist, unforgiving funhouse reflection, which they call Woke. The far right has abandoned Christ’s preachments of love for a graceless Pharisaical orthodoxy about as Christian as burning a cross on a man’s lawn. The left chants genocidal slogans against Israel. The far right tweets “Christ is King!” at Jewish users with a venom that shows they mean the very opposite.

    Left and right, they are giving themselves away. It is not Israel they hate. It is not the Jews they hate.

    It is that other Jew — incarnate in Jesus Christ — whom they are desperately trying to expel from their sinful hearts and minds.

  8. Thanks to Neo, and to Rufus for posting those Andrew Klavan excerpts.

    I am appalled and nauseated by the Jew-hating breaking out in the USA. Particularly horrifying, for me, are the (few, at this point) conservative Christians going down this rabbit hole to hell.

    And thanks to John Galt III for pointing out cui bono. The left is selling what soul it had for money and votes. The Devil has had Islam in his grasp since its beginning.

  12. As an agnostic with some interest in history, I can only but agree with Geoffrey Britain here. Yes, there is something wrong with the Jews – they are God’s chosen, as was Christ himself. So of course the godless savages of the world will single them out, as they have no real purchase with God nor proof against Him. But their empty souls can most certainly burn Him in effigy, as they as well have no respect for all that is civilized. This too shall pass.

  13. People like Neo and those who comment on her blog have an urgent desire (among others) to understand those who are fundamentally not understandable. As people are different, there are different reasons for why they they behave as they do, although there may be common threads. Usually these different reasons cannot be boiled down simple, *actionable* explanations.

    Sadly, *no one,* and I do mean no one, is able to offer a solution, even a partial one. In a world where actual threat is at a historical low, where personal safety and comfort are at all time highs, the human mind seems compelled to find or invent injury, and simple reasons for that injury, usually involving the “other.” Scapegoating is as human as breathing. “Other” hatred recedes only in times of generational growth and advancement, when actual gains, excitement, and hope predominate. In times of adversity and, ironically, prosperity, it floods back when when life threatening – and trivial – concerns rise.

    We are in an objectively prosperous time, when minds free of survival concerns can range forth in any number malicious, hateful ways. It’s who they are. We can’t fix them. We can’t reason with them. We can only resist them and wait for a change of season. Or do what they did in the old days, which, while though no longer intentionally possible, could perhaps happen organically.

  14. Road Warrior: “So the atrocities committed by the Palestinians against Jews are proof of Jewish evil, but somehow it never seems to go the other way – the “atrocities” committed by Israel against the Palestinians are never used as proof of Palestinian evil.”

    That’s a very good point!

    However, I fear I think I know what the answer is – confirmation bias. People who are using Israel’s actions in war against the evils like Hamas are simply looking for a reason to justify their hatred against Jews.

    If it isn’t because of war, those haters would find some other excuse. Just look at the time before Israel turned basic necessities (such as water, electricity, etc.) over to the Palestinian Authority. Israel was accused of “occupying” Palestine. So, Israel turned those services over to the PA and then they were condemned for not providing those services.

    Israel would use targeted attacks on buildings that terrorist were using as a base. Notifying civilians beforehand; and Israel was condemned for destroying neighborhoods. So, then Israel found a way to use pagers to target specific Individuals (an absolutely brilliant operation in my opinion) and then Israel was condemned because the pagers would blow up in a marketplace near innocent civilians or the pagers would also kill terrorists’ families. And yet again Israel was condemned. No condemnation about the terrorists being around civilians or using the civilians as human shields ever!

    Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

  15. This fecundary need to consider the causes of Jew hatred.

    You write “There is also the general tendency of today’s young people to say that the history they’re taught is a lie….”

    I differ on this. The reality is the reverse with the young, I strongly think.

    From Howard Zinn on down, they’re taught a variety of oppression “just so” stories about the past. As Glenn Reynolds related to readers a decade ago, his daughter on HS graduation related her experience with history, she was taught that “slavery ended yesterday, but the Cold War was million years ago.”

    The young grow up believing in these comic book caricatures as True and factual.

    Time after time on YouTube.com, I encounter cynicism toward any fact that contradicts the received “wisdom” they’ve been taught.

    For example, take Steven Pinker’s 2011 tome, “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.”

    A young man declared skepticism towards the fact that UN Human Security Reports, from 2004 and after, documented rapidly declining violence with the end of the Cold War, continuing even during the height of war in Iraq during Fallujah in 2004!

    I’ve faced snark and innuendo attacks at my points, very stereotypically female tactics of disagreement and disparagement.

    The young’s attacks and attitudes on Jews is similarly bent and rent by stereotypical tropes.

    The only way I know to combat this tragic ignorance is by presenting confounding data. For example, racial supremacy was a white people’s invention? OK. But then how and why did Japan, under the dictator Tojo, wage a war of Japanese racial supremacy throughout China and Southeast Asia and Oceana? With many, many atrocities against civilians (and combatants) even worse than Germany did under Hitler?

    In other words, open minds just a bit by teaching them that history is a complex and tangled tale, in truth. And thus, comic book history is for children, not young adults.

    Still, thank you, Neo — for revisiting and reopening this gruesome game of idiocies today, as Jew hatred resurges.

  16. TJ:

    Depends on the age of the “young,” I guess, and where they were educated. Some areas taught traditional history until quite recently. Others did not. Obviously, I’m referring to the rejection of traditional history. Zinn’s whole message was that traditional history was a lie and he was correcting the lie. So those raised on Zinn were taught a new history rather than the traditional one that was being rejected.

  17. Two big reasons not yet covered:
    1) Hate is fun. Relatedly, hating together makes folks feel bound together, feel connected. This good feeling binding explains both irrational Trump hate & Jew hate. As Trump hate fades, the desire to find a new hate object increases, and lots of Trump haters are also Jew haters, including many who claim to merely oppose the Israeli govt policy, not hating Jews in general. Many such folk are likely lying to themselves to the extent that the hate-object is not as important as the communal hate-fest feelings.

    Talked about reasons include Jew success, tho 109 avg IQ superiority hasn’t been noted—less successful folk often want blame the more successful.
    The failure of Israeli occupation to create a nice Palestinian country is implicitly blamed on the Jews, not the Palestinians.

    2) The Jews have survived as a people thru their discrimination against marrying non-Jews. Such discrimination is often felt as: they think they’re better than us, yet they live among us. Most folk feel royalty & famous celebrities sort of don’t live among the normal folk, so the annoyance at the rich thinking they are better is less. Tevye exiling and leaving his third daughter, who loves a Russian, shows this amidst a common historical unjustifiable pogrom against Jews.

    Sadly, I have no great ideas to change either of these, nor the hate against success.

    Yet on Israeli policy I suggest much stronger & complete occupation of Gaza, de arming them all, creating volunteer work groups & paying for work. NOT paying any who don’t work, nor tolerate begging. Split Gaza into 5 cantons & have Israel attempt to act as a benign dictator, supporting human rights (other than voting).
    Hope that econ reconstruction creates a new, less Jew hating occupied Gaza.

  18. Yes, it is the oldest hatred. And more and more I am convinced that it is demonic. God chose this people and this made them the target of Satan.

  19. Antisemitism is a research topic.

    It’s also a practical problem.

    I deal with it with the 3 C’s:

    Be Courteous, Correct and Cautious.

    Learned that at a rough middle school.

    And, I have a Plan C, as well as a Plan B.

    Life goes on.

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