Why liberals have ended up cheerleading for jihadism
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With its vibrant gay scene, vegan restaurants and Green MP, Brighton is one of the most liberal towns in Britain. It may come as no surprise that it is also a repository of fashionable support for Hamas.
Following the inhuman butchery perpetrated against Jews by the terror group last weekend, Britain has seen a spate of rallies – not in support of the victims but the murderers. As popular as these demonstrations were on the trendy Left, it is no exaggeration to say that they shamed our country. But one example in the seaside town stands out.
Gathering just 24 hours after the start of the barbarism, a speaker declared: “Yesterday was a victory”. Compounding the insult, she went on to describe the butchery as “so beautiful and inspiring to see”. The crowd applauded.
This was more than just a moral outrage. As Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation, it may have been criminal. On Friday, a 22-year-old woman was arrested by counter terror police on suspicion of supporting Hamas at the rally.
In recent days, the extent of the Islamist cruelty has begun to come out. The slaughter of babies, evidenced by a disturbing picture bravely published by The Telegraph this week, has appalled the world.
Children have been abducted, bullied and tortured. In one searing interview, an Irish father said that he was relieved to discover that his eight-year-old daughter had been found dead. He found the alternative unbearable to contemplate.
Different images hit home with different people.
In my position as editor of the Jewish Chronicle, I have been shown footage and images that others have not. One clip in particular, filmed by a terrorist with one hand while he perpetrated his crime with the other, has since been flashing into my mind unbidden. He was using a rod to put out the eyes of a corpse.
These are the acts being celebrated by liberals in Britain.
How did we get here? How did society reach a moment where the more progressive you are, the more likely you are to support such savagery? This demands an urgent cultural reckoning.
Blaming Jews for their own massacre, and revelling in it, is the most naked example of a corruption that has been quietly contaminating the bloodstream of the body politic for decades.
The oldest hatred
Jews are always the first victims of human darkness, but the rot goes much further. It spreads downwards from the progressive elites that sit at the top of our institutions – universities and the civil service, broadcasters and advertising agencies, theatres and museums – from where they cascade their creed into society.
These “progressive activists”, as the More in Common thinktank has labelled them, comprise about 13pc of the population in Britain. But they exert disproportionate power, rendering many common and reasonable beliefs taboo.
Their dogma can be seen in pronouns on the lanyards of NHS officials, the transgender flag outside the Royal Opera House, the sea of Palestinian flags at Labour conference under Corbyn and countless other places.
Their worldview includes fixed positions on race, gender, decolonisation, sexuality, slavery and the Palestinians. Although much of this causes real harm, particularly to teenagers and Jews, these ideological positions are signifiers of social status rather than authentic moral positions. They are luxury beliefs.
It is striking how closely this group adheres to these orthodoxies. Because it is a question of identity, it is almost unthinkable for devotees to hold some of those views but not others, and very hard for them to change their minds. Last week, Jeremy Corbyn appeared unable to revise his vision of Hamas as “friends” even in the aftermath of the massacre.
Back to Israel and Gaza and Brighton. When it comes to the Jews, the dogma of these elites is expressed as what I have dubbed “Israelophobia”, or the newest version of the oldest hatred. One of the hallmarks of anti-Semitism has always been its ability to appropriate the moral language of the day to masquerade as a virtue.
In the Middle Ages, it expressed itself as an expression of Christian devotion, targeting the formerly Chosen People as the killers of Christ. Responding to the rise of rationalism, in the 20th century it assumed the language of pseudo-science, justifying the extermination of Jews by portraying them as a subhuman race.
After these ideas were discredited, in the West at least, by the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism moved on to inhabit the language of politics, targeting Jews not for their religion or their race, but for their national home. That is Israelophobia.
In recent years, this has become the predominant expression of Jew hatred. Pushed through this prism, the oldest hatred fans out into a spectrum of social justice terminology that – in the traditional style of anti-Semitism – disguises bigotry as virtue.
In former times, Jews were derided as bloodsuckers, misers, arch manipulators and heretics. Today, they are accused of the cardinal sins of the progressive movement: white supremacy, genocide, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and racism.
Reality has little to do with it. The Palestinian population has grown fivefold since the establishment of Israel; if there was a genocide, it has been pretty inept.
More than half of Israelis are non-white; that would be a strange species of white supremacy.
Israel was formed alongside many new nation-states (Syria and Lebanon, India and Pakistan) in the post-colonial period, after the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the withdrawal of the British mandate; that’s the opposite of colonialism.
An Arab judge has sent a former Israeli prime minister to prison for corruption; that would be highly unusual for an apartheid state, to say the least.
Yet the falsification persists. Take the old myth of the Jewish baby killer. In previous centuries, Jews were blamed for murdering Christian children to use their blood in rituals. Today, the “Zionists” are accused of relishing the killing of children – even as Hamas beheads Jewish babies while Israel warns Gazan civilians to evacuate before it strikes.
Nazi propaganda
So far so dark. But an important question remains: why has anti-Semitism managed to find such a foothold on the political Left in particular? The answer to this lies in the confluence of various cultural streams.
Before we turn to those, we must acknowledge that the Left, with its instinctive opposition to the establishment, has always been vulnerable to anti-Semitism, which places such emphasis on supposed Jewish power.
We can see this in the very roots of the movement. One of the earliest British Lefties was the 18th and 19th-century pamphleteer William Cobbett, whose book, Rural Rides, has never been out of print.
Ideologically idiosyncratic, he was a staunch defender of the underdog, campaigning for the franchise to be broadened and lobbying for workers’ rights at the height of the Industrial Revolution. He became a hero of later Leftist intellectuals, including Karl Marx and Michael Foot.
Yet Cobbett was a poisonous anti-Semite. Moreover, he personified the blurring of Christian Jew hatred (there is “something hateful in the very nature of the ceremonies which they have the infamy to call religious”, he wrote) with conspiracy theories that aligned Jews with the hidden forces of finance (he blamed the agricultural crisis on “Jewish money” in the City of London).
His beliefs also aligned with the first stirrings of a new anti-Semitism that would reach its full expression at Auschwitz. German nationalism of the late 19th century was suspicious of urban politics and capitalism, and idealised countryside life. It was also conspiratorial and anti-Semitic. All this resonated with Cobbett’s worldview. Remarkably, in the figure of the early Left-winger can be recognised the stirrings of Hitlerism.
Fast-forward to today, and the noxious Jew-hatred later released by the Third Reich echoes in the Israelophobia articulated by progressives in Brighton.
That part of the story began in 1941. With the Wehrmacht advancing from North Africa towards the Middle East, strategists in Berlin began to consider the strategic value of Islam. The Nazis had successfully turned the German people against Britain and Russia by accusing them of being “twin citadels of Jewish power”; if Arabs could be manipulated in the same way, they could inflame the fuel of anti-British nationalism in the Middle East and precipitate an Allied defeat.
A team of Islamists was recruited to Berlin to collaborate with Nazi propagandists. Leader of the pack was the peacockish Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, an extremist who led a gangster war against Palestinian moderates. He met Hitler with great pomp and ceremony that year and was placed on the Nazi payroll, becoming an enthusiastic supporter of the Final Solution.
Husseini’s task was to synthesise Quranic anti-Semitism with that preached by Hitler. The resulting propaganda was spewed into the Middle East in thousands of hours of radio broadcasts.
The tone of one example from July 1942 – as the first Jews were arriving at Sobibor and Auschwitz – is striking. The presenter ranted: “According to the Muslim religion, the defence of your life is a duty which can only be fulfilled by annihilating the Jews. This is your best opportunity to get rid of this dirty race which has usurped your rights and brought misfortune and destruction on your countries.
“Kill the Jews, burn their property, destroy their shops, annihilate these base supporters of British imperialism.”
The touchpaper of extremism was lit in the region and it continues to flame today. Indeed, it fuelled the bloodletting that descended on Israel last week.
After the war, Husseini became one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Egyptian group which became a fresh vehicle for his hatred. Despite the fact that many progressives see it as a kind of Che Guevara organisation, Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So much is obvious from the group’s official charter. Article 32, which cites the conspiracy theory that Zionists wish to take over the entire territory between the Nile and the Euphrates, says: “Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” To describe this as being influenced by Nazi propaganda is insufficient. This is Nazi propaganda.
Other offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood include Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, both of which employ similar methods to those we have seen in southern Israel, from beheadings to burnings.
This jihadi hydra threatens both Israel and the west, as well as Arab countries and much of Africa. Coursing through its veins is not just Islamism, but Nazism. This is what western progressives have been cheerleading: an ideology born in Nazi Berlin that led not only to the massacre in Israel, but 23 murders in the Manchester Arena and more on the streets of London.
Socialist ideal
There was another, more direct entry point for Israelophobia on the political Left. Let’s turn our eyes towards Moscow. Rewind to Israel’s fledgling years and the state was the darling of Leftists around the world.
Even before the Second World War, the Guardian editor and progressive politician CP Scott was lobbying the British government on Zionism’s behalf. “I was convinced of its value, not only for the Jewish people but for other nations,” he recalled.
Fast-forward to the present, however, and Israelophobia has become, as the American cultural theorist Susie Linfield put it, “the almost non-negotiable ticket of entry into Left discourse”. What strangled the progressive love affair with Israel? The answer lies in the Kremlin.
The Jewish state was born as a socialist ideal. After its birth in 1948, Stalin became the first to recognise the country de jure. During the Cold War, however, the USSR’s views on the country quickly soured as it drew into America’s orbit; after the Six Day War of 1967, Soviet sympathies and support transferred entirely to the Arabs. Aggressively so.
Between 1967 and 1988, the KGB embarked on a massive disinformation campaign called SIG, short for Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Zionist Governments”, which flooded the world with Israelophobic paranoia, moulded around the Soviet worldview and objectives.
The KGB chief driving the project was Yuri Andropov, who later briefly became leader of the country until his death in 1984. Ironically, he hid his Jewish heritage all his life.
SIG was a mind-bogglingly sophisticated operation. Lieutenant-General Ion Mihai Pacepa, former head of Romanian intelligence and the highest-ranking spy ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc, was one of those responsible.
The group of ideologues who produced ideas for the new falsification campaign were known by the strange name “Zionologists”. Even though they lived in the USSR and worked for the communist regime, many held older, xenophobic and Russian ultranationalist views, which they learned to express in Marxist-Leninist terms.
The propaganda effort involved millions of newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and books. The founding text, Beware: Zionism! by Yuri Ivanov, was released in 1969 and reprinted multiple times. Selling 800,000 copies, it was produced in at least 16 languages, from English, Arabic and French to Polish, Ukrainian, Estonian and Slovak. This material was disseminated into the West, where it inhabited the minds of people like Jeremy Corbyn.
It is a little-known truth that all of the Israelophobic tropes in circulation today – which accuse the Jewish state of things like racism, white supremacism, ethnic cleansing, colonialism and apartheid – were designed by the Kremlin during the Cold War. Their persistence in modern culture is testament to the skill of the Zionologists, who translated ultra-nationalist thought into Left-wing language.
It was a perfect example of the horseshoe of politics. In 1973, a Paris court convicted Robert Legagneux, a member of the French Communist Party and employee of the Russian embassy in Paris, for inciting racial hatred. His crime had been to publish anti-Zionist propaganda in a Leftist French magazine controlled by the embassy.
During the trial, it sensationally emerged that the supposedly Leftist article included entire passages, complete with typographical errors, lifted from a far-Right 1906 pamphlet by a member of the Black Hundreds sect, which had been responsible for inciting pogroms in tsarist Russia. The word “Jew” had simply been replaced with “Zionist”.
Other communist-aligned publications in Britain included the newspaper Straight Left, founded in 1979. The paper was managed by Seumas Milne, who later rose to prominence as Corbyn’s spin doctor. It was saturated with Israelophobia.
In a forerunner of the rhetoric seen on the streets of Britain last week, Palestinian terror against civilians was repeatedly praised, framed as a revolutionary struggle.
“The PLO has found great support in the Third World and the socialist camp, with the USSR at its forefront,” it gushed.
The Iranian revolution, a victory for the fascist theocracy, was applauded, described as an “anti-imperialist people’s struggle for independence, freedom and social justice”. When the Iranians took 52 Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979, Straight Left’s take was that it was “an excuse for the creation of another wave of anti-Iranian hatred”.
Role of American identity politics
A direct line can be drawn from Kremlin agitprop through publications like Soviet Weekly and Straight Left to the expressions of support for Hamas in Britain today.
Along the way, it merged with Nazi propaganda, absorbed by aligning with groups like Hamas in the Middle East.
This was particularly evident when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party.
At the time, on a Facebook page entitled “Jeremy Corbyn Leads Us to Victory”, a Labour figure posted a picture of New York Times journalists with their faces covered by Jewish symbols, implying that they served a Zionist agenda.
Another called Hitler “the greatest man in history”, adding “it’s disgusting how much power the Jews have”; another commented, “it’s the super-rich families of the Zionist lobby that control the world”; another called the six million Jewish victims of the Nazis “a big lie”, repeating the Holocaust denial that was another key feature of the Russian disinformation campaign. The Nazi and Soviet propagandists have been frighteningly effective.
The other cultural stream that has led to this extraordinary alliance between the Left and jihadism is that of American identity politics. The British branch of Black Lives Matter has shared an image of Hamas’ bulldozer smashing down the border fence, criticism of the Balfour declaration and posts that blamed Israel. Given what we know about BLM, this is shocking but hardly surprising.
Yet at the beginning of the civil rights movement, the Jewish community stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Martin Luther King. As a result, synagogues were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan.
This affinity also had a Zionist dimension. Golda Meir, Israel’s first female leader, pointed out in her memoir that “we Jews share with the African peoples a memory of centuries-long suffering”. She recalled that many years before, Herzl himself had vowed: “Once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.”
Once the militant Malcolm X replaced Martin Luther King as the dominant figure in the black liberation movement, however, this solidarity became strained.
Malcolm X tended to associate the Jews with power and often veered into anti-Semitism. Throughout his life, he attacked what he called “Zionist-Dollarism”, deplored Israel and cast Jews as a race of white oppressors. The Black Power movement was not friendly to Jews.
Fast-forward to the present, and the radical racial ideas of 1960s and 1970s America have evolved into an all-consuming political ideology that has spread across the West. Because critical race theory, the philosophy behind the social justice movement, holds that “racism equals prejudice plus power” – a notion introduced in 1970 by the American psychologist Patricia Bidol-Padva – it teaches that whites cannot experience racism.
Non-black minorities like Jews are barred from victimhood, even when they are targeted more than blacks. Whoopi Goldberg pursued that logic to its absurd conclusion in 2022, when she found herself arguing on television that the Holocaust was “not about race”, as it involved “two groups of white people”, even though Nazi ideology explicitly defined Jews as racially inferior.
Similarly, in April, Diane Abbott was suspended from the Labour Party after writing to the Observer newspaper claiming that Jews could not face racism, as they were only “white people with points of difference, such as redheads”.
It is comforting that she was censured so quickly. But the ease with which she ignored two millennia of anti-Semitism, appearing to forget even the Holocaust, demonstrates how ideology often feels like reality on the Left. It also demonstrates how pervasive American identity politics has become in Britain and across the Western world.
All this amounts to a blend of patrician liberalism, globalism and old-fashioned socialism, accompanied by the kind of focus on race that is normally seen only on the far Right.
Would these Brighton Leftists have opened their door to an Israeli child fleeing a Hamas killer? Would they have sheltered Jews in the Holocaust? Would they have become the perpetrators?
The “culture wars” are often derided, but there is no more consequential social struggle. Our country is in danger of becoming a zombie version of itself.
Israelophobia: The newest version of the oldest hatred, by Jake Wallis Simons (Constable, £12.99), is out now
