So there is now a new anti-Semitism, but this should not surprise us. Anti-Semitism lacks a fixed shape that recurs through time; rather, it is like a virus that mutates to fit the characteristics of the host. When Europe was Christian, anti-Semitism took the form, “I don’t hate the Jews as such, I only hate them because they killed Jesus Christ.” Then when the Enlightenment began, the trope became, “I don’t hate the Jews as such, but I resent them, not for murdering Christ, but for, in effect, inventing him.” With the rise of socialism, it became most galvanizing to say, “I don’t hate the Jews as such, but I hate those who are the major stakeholders and enablers of this new system of plutocratic global capitalism. If many happen to be Jews, this is their fault, not mine.” At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when the life sciences came into being and scientific racism followed in their wake, the line changed yet again: “I don’t hate the Jews because of their religion or even their economic role, but their race is heterogeneous and can only corrupt other, superior races.”
Today, of course, none of these mutations work, all their predicates having been discredited. So the virus has mutated again, this time entering the age of the pure-political, the ideological. The new sales pitch of anti-Semitism has three simple, but formidable elements. First, the Jews, at least insofar as they do not publicly denounce Israel, deserve to be hated because they support a detestable state that is leading the world to catastrophe. Second, they deserve to be hated because, in order to legitimize their despicable state they have invented the crudest and most immoral of frauds—if not the Holocaust itself, then at least the myth of its “singularity.” And third, they deserve to be hated because, in inundating us with the memories of their dead, real or imaginary, they overshadow the real victims, the real “Jews” of today, the Palestinians.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2008/09/01/the-task-of-the-jews/
