Middle-class Lefties are enabling Hamas. By Giles Fraser.
He was a fat bloke with a swastika tattooed on his beer belly and a teardrop inked beneath his eye. Let’s call him the cartoon fascist. The Guardian describes another: “a Port Vale fan supping a can of Stella Artois.” There were several hundred of them on Saturday, boorishly shouting “En-ger-land” around the Cenotaph. East to spot, easy to despise. And I do.
But, in an upside-down kind of way, the far-Left loves these types, because it helps them re-assert a comforting narrative about who the bad guys are and who the good guys are — they themselves falling squarely into the latter category. …
Such is the power of the cartoon fascist though, that he invites complacency; he allows “good people” to look in the mirror and believe they aren’t antisemitic. They chortle away at that Mitchell and Webb sketch of two SS officers asking “Are we the baddies?” thinking it refers to someone else. …
The war against Hamas has given people an alibi to say the most racist of things, and yet to retain all innocence in their own minds. And the more morally certain people are that they are right, the easier it is for them to miss their own complicity. During the month following the Hamas attack, the Community Security Trust reported the highest number of antisemitic incidents since they were formed in 1984 — a 531% increase from the same month last year. And I bet my bottom dollar that most of these incidents are not being conducted by, or even inspired by, Stella-fuelled cartoon fascists. …
Way beyond microaggressions:
At another London synagogue in St John’s Wood, Jews were abused as they left their place of worship. Cars flying Palestinian flags wound down their windows to shout insults and let off intimidating flares. A Jewish home in North London had red paint thrown all over it, designed to look like blood. On the “peace march” one Labour party member from Eastbourne carried a banner with a swastika entwined within a Star of David. Another chap wearing a keffiyeh over his face explained: “Hitler knew how to deal with these people.” Others thought it would be fun to cosplay with Hamas ensignia. … And hundreds of thousands marched through the centre of London many of them chanting “from the river to the sea” …
But drunk on their own righteousness … even the most well-intentioned are often complacently Hamas adjacent, and literally so, marching alongside those who feel justified to use the most glaring of antisemitic tropes on their banners: Netanyahu with devil horns, a Jewish snake wrapped around the world, calls to “globalise the intifada”. …
The antisemitism of the hard Right and the hard Left is easily spotted and readily damned. But it is the genteel, middle-class, soft-Left, hand-wringing antisemitism — the kind that wouldn’t dream of saying anything crass or extreme — that has been legitimised, has become high-status opinion even, on the streets of London. Do not think that your feel-good liberalism or soft leftism is any sort of prophylactic against your antisemitism. It isn’t.
The Nazis were socialist midwits who hated Jews, and so are today’s woke. Both groups hate economic competition, talent, and civilization. Both took over the government and corporations of the one of the world’s most advanced nations.
Same brutal cancellation tactics — never argue or persuade, just smash and silence. E.g. in London this week:
