World Jewry is besieged by a campaign of Islamist antisemitism designed to bolster the islamists’ “dream of a world without Jews.” Tactically, as with the Soviets before them, the Islamists draw support from postmodern Western intellectuals and cultural Marxists susceptible to their propaganda and psychological manipulation. To them, the Islamists package raw antisemitism as principled antizionism to gain legitimacy, dodge accusations of bigotry, and subvert the West from within. Coming with unprecedented scale and scope, the new wave of antisemitism clothed as antizionism is both fearsome and daunting. But this ominous assault was anticipated some 3,000 years ago in a similarly hostile socio-political environment with the same locus: Iran. The Tanakh sends a message to the Jews from across millenia to not despair, and instead to rally, unite, and act defiantly to overcome the threat.  

Antizionism seeks to deny Jewish indigeneity and sever Jews from the land of Israel. It’s fueled by contrivances ranging from genocide libel, deicide themes, and false tropes. In essence, antizionism is the coding of the State of Israel, its people, and all those associated with them, as inherently evil. It’s an “innovative” restructuring of antisemitism originally developed by the Soviet KBG. Says author Kathleen Hayes, it’s “the latest chilling form of supersecessionism — the impulse to eliminate Jews to redeem the world.”

Antizionism emerged as the most sophisticated form of Jew-hatred by masquerading as political criticism. It framed Israel as a “colonial apartheid project,” which “effectively tainted Israel with the sins of the West for Western leftists, making it an effigy against which leftists could redirect their self-hate for the West.” The Soviets–who worked to “instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world”– separated antizionism from antisemitism with the help of a small number of token Jews to lend it legitimacy. But, says former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky,

“In Russia there was no difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Soviet Jews knew that [the] anti-Zionist campaigns were campaigns against Jews.”

Today’s antizionists launder their ideology with semantic distortions that elide their libels of Israel with historical internal........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)