The Rise of Progressive Antisemitism

Jew hatred and the Left

Andrii Koval/iStock/Getty Images Plus

By Obaid Omer

If, after the October 7th terrorist attacks in Israel committed by Hamas, you were surprised by the global outpouring of support for Hamas and their kidnapping, rape and murder, you have not been paying attention. The excesses of the progressive Left and their affinity for Islam have been on public display since 9/11.

The support of Hamas and the antisemitism that is proudly on display on Campuses across the West, in K-12 education, trade unions, psychological organizations, and many other institutions is being carried out by a decidedly left-wing progressive faction. Some will argue that the Muslims involved in these pogroms are far right as they are fundamentalists. In essence, I agree, but the reality on the ground does not match this narrative. The Muslims are speaking the language of decolonization and Intersectionality, two decidedly progressive left-wing ideas. 

The socialist Left has been siding with Islam and against the West since the late 80s. Nick Cohen's book What's Left: How the Left Lost Its Way does an excellent job of chronicling how the Socialist Left went from focusing on Marxism to anti-imperialism. The struggle of countries in the Middle East against the US and the West was perfect fodder to rage against US Imperial aspirations. By the early 90s, Intersectionality was gaining momentum, and Post-Colonialism, which had been around since the 70s, was getting new life. These two lenses suited the new progressive Left born out of the old Socialist-Left. 

Islam has also, at certain moments, embraced Communism and Socialism. South Yemen was a Communist Islamic republic. The Iranian revolution would not have succeeded without the aid of Communist students at universities in Iran. Communists aided the Baathists in Iraq to gain power. In both cases, after they had done their jobs, the Communists were killed. The Muslims saw them as useful idiots. Before the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan had a Communist government. The Communists from The USSR didn't feel any brotherhood with their comrades in Afghanistan when they laid waste to that country. 

I bring up these links between Islam and the far-left to show how the side that used to stand for civil liberties ignored the fundamentalism of Islam and eventually came to be anti-Semitic.

Intersectionality is inherently anti-white and antisemitic. It focuses on skin colour or other immutable characteristics. It claims that the system in the West is a naturally white supremacist system, and those who succeed in it are aiding white supremacy. In her 1991 paper, Mapping the Margins, Kimberle Crenshaw says that we must do away with the liberal order and start a politics based on identity. This focus on your identity and all the ways you are oppressed leads people to look for an oppressor. The oppressors are all those who succeed.

In the aftermath of George Floyd, The Smithsonian shared a graphic which listed the characteristics of white supremacy culture. The graphic included professionalism, love of the written word, either/or thinking, a sense of urgency, reason, and logic. Capitalism is also thought of as being part of white supremacy culture, as is private property. This graphic has been around since the 90s. Intersectionalists used it. 

By claiming that these characteristics were inherent to white supremacy, those who showed these characteristics were said to have taken on whiteness. Jews were the first minority to have the mantle of whiteness thrust upon them. In her book, In Defense of Looting, Vicky Osterwei notes that Jews were the face of capital in their neighbourhoods during the riots in the 60s because they protected their businesses. During the Floyd riots, synagogues were attacked, and many prominent pundits said that Synagogues were just property and property is whiteness, so the vandalism was acceptable. Since its inception in the late 80s, Intersectionality has slowly become the lens most of the humanities in higher education have used. 

Post-colonialism started in the late 70s after colonialism had ended. Most of what came out of the field was describing how the former colonies should divest themselves of colonial thinking. Several of the post-colonial scholars used the work of Franz Fanon in their writings. Fanon, in his book The Wretched of the Earth, says that colonized people must get revenge on their colonizers before they can be truly free. In the opening, written by Sartre, it mentions bathing in European blood.

By the 90s, you started seeing a crossover between post-colonialism and Intersectionality. To rid oneself of whiteness, one must decolonize the mind. Recently, there has been talk of decolonizing libraries, curricula, education, and medicine. The language of decolonization is used in MENA to counter any movement to bring in Enlightenment values. These values were called a new form of colonialism.

With both Intersectionality and Post-colonialism attacking the Western Canon, universities became more hostile to the whole enterprise of the Enlightenment. This happened slowly at first, but from 2000-2012, it gained speed and "conquered" more ground in academia, government, and journalism. 2012-2016, more and more HR departments hired those with an Intersectional lens. After 2016, with most of the media's focus on Trump, the woke left consolidated power and took over most of the institutions we relied on to help us make sense of the world in which we live.

The left, during this time, saw Israel more and more as a colonial power. The Jews in Israel were the oppressors, and the Palestinians were the noble savages. This, of course, became applied to Jews around the world. Take the incidents of Roseanne Barr and Whoopi Goldberg. Roseanne said an  Iranian woman looked like she was in makeup for Planet of The Apes, and she lost the show she created. Whoopi, on two separate occasions, said that the Holocaust was white-on-white violence and was not comparable to the horrors of slavery. Whoopi was suspended for a couple of weeks.

In 2019, during Hanukah, there were numerous attacks on Jews. The worst one was in a small town in New York. A rabbi was killed in his home, and a synagogue was attacked. The story the next day was about how Jews should not be consumed by whiteness and blame the black community.

Since 2018, I have been seeing openly that Anne Frank was just a white girl using white girl tears to get sympathy. I kept seeing things about Jewish white privilege. After the Tree of Life shooting, the New York Times published a piece about how the majority of anti-Semitic attacks in the previous two years were committed by left-leaning people. Yet, they weren't reported on because they didn't fit the narrative of evil right-wingers.

Since ~1997, when the first Ph. D.s and Masters students started graduating with the Intersectional lens; more and more of our institutions were taken over by this thought. If the government wanted someone to work on racism, they hired someone who looked at the world through the Intersectional lens. As Intersectionality took over the humanities, all other organizations, including governments, had their worldview clouded with the broken lens of Intersectionality.

The Canadian government is the perfect example of how Intersectionality and Post-colonialism can overrun a government. By the time Trudeau got into power, all of our civil service was already basing some policies on either post-colonialism, Intersectionality or both. When Trudeau came into power in October 2015, he made Intersectionality a cornerstone of his government. He formed a new ministry, The Ministry of Inclusion, Diversity and Youth. The mandate for this new ministry was to ensure that all of the government was anti-racist, paying special attention to anti-black racism, even though antisemitism was, and still is, the number one hate crime in Canada. With this, the government's de facto policy is that Jews are white and have privilege. 

Almost immediately, Trudeau's Islamophilia became apparent. In 2015, he announced a gender-balanced cabinet because it was 2015. In 2016, at an Eid celebration, Trudeau visited a mosque. At the mosque, he praised the segregation of women by commenting about the sisters on the balcony and how great it was. Also, in 2016, his government pushed through Motion M-103. The motion, which is not legally binding, focused on Islamophobia and laid the groundwork for the censorious legislation we have now.

In 2018, when a girl made up a story of an Asian man stealing her hijab, Trudeau was on the scene right away and condemned the action. This caused some protests against the Asian community. After it came to light that the incident was a lie, there was no apology from Trudeau to the Asian community.

In the past few years, there have been several incidents that point to growing antisemitism in the Liberal Party. In 2021, after rockets from Hamas hit Israel and Israel retaliated, there were pro-Hamas protests around the globe, and Jewish people were chased in the streets of cities, including Toronto and Montreal. Trudeau's first reaction, in a now-deleted Tweet, was to warn people against being Islamophobic. In 2020, when the trucker convoy protest started in Ottawa, there was a pro-Hamas protest in Toronto. In contrast, the truckers were called Nazis, racists and fascists because a few people were carrying swastikas to make a point that Trudeau was turning Canada into a fascist state; there was silence about the pro-Hamas protest, even though there were plenty of swastikas and people chanting "From the river to the sea." 

This past July, it came to light that Trudeau's Liberal government hired a raging antisemite named Laith Marouf to teach our national broadcaster anti-racism. Marouf repeatedly tweeted about wanting to kill Jews. He had also been under investigation by CSIS, the Canadian spy agency. A Liberal MP brought the Tweets to the government's attention in July, but nothing was done until August. No one lost their jobs. All ministers involved passed the buck. Marouf had his funding suspended but is technically still under government contract. 

Liberal MP Iqra Khalid has on two occasions given the same antisemite awards. She has attended camps where antisemites were speaking. While in college, as a member of the Muslim Students' Association, she spread antisemitic tropes. Khalid was the architect of M-103.

Omar Alghabra, another Liberal MP, attended a dinner hosted by yet another Liberal MP that featured antisemitic speakers. The newly appointed Islamophobia envoy has made antisemitic statements and was stopped at the last minute from attending an event which featured antisemites.

It took Liberal MPs days before they made any comments about the pro-Hamas protests going on across Canada. Most of the comments were milder than any comment made against the truckers. And again, all the comments against the protests warn against Islamophobia, even though the demonstrations target Jews.

While the organizers of the trucker convoy are in court facing criminal charges, the Emergency Measures Act was enacted, and people had bank accounts frozen, Trudeau will do nothing about the open calls for the death of Jews going on in the streets of Canada today. Trudeau is more concerned about the only base he has left, the woke and fundamentalist Muslims, than he is about seriously combatting the open antisemitism in Canada.

After the claim of unmarked graves at a former residential school in  Kamloops, the story spread that Canada had committed genocide against the First Nations. Flags were lowered to half-mast for months. No bodies were found. The truth of the residential schools is a lot more complicated than the narrative that Trudeau and the media spread.

In the aftermath of the story breaking, dozens of churches were vandalized and some burned. Trudeau used the language of decolonization, saying that the anger is understandable from a colonized people. This is the same rhetoric used by those defending Hamas' actions. 

With their embrace of Intersectionality, the Liberal Party sees Muslims as brown and oppressed and Jews as white and privileged. They are unable to deal with the unbridled antisemitism we are seeing from Muslims and their supporters. Unfortunately, Canadians have seen fit to elect a racist, censorious government three times. Hopefully, it won't happen again.

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Obaid Omer is the creator of the excellent Dangerous Speech Podcast!

Thanks for reading. For more background on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, read the 4-part essay series by Woke Watch Canada contributing editor

James Pew

. Start with the introduction essay Israel, Islam and Settler Colonialism.

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

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