While the physical violence of the new Jew-hatred is largely the work of young Muslims, the ideological violence against Jews is the work primarily of leftists, battlers against racism, professed humanitarians, and liberals (including Jewish ones). A review of Bernard Harrison's The Resurgence of Antisemitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion.

The Resurgence of Antisemitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion
by Bernard Harrison
published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2006
Ppbk., 240pgs.
ISBN-10: 0742552276
ISBN-13: 978-0742552272

According to the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910), "Anti-Semitism is a passing phase in the history of culture." Since that sanguine declaration, anti-Semitism has had several very good rolls of the dice, culminating in the destruction of European Jewry. So horrendous was this event that a Jesuit priest once lamented, with touching simple-minded nostalgia, that the Holocaust had given anti-Semitism a bad name. Does the tenacity of anti-Semitism through the ages prove that, as their enemies claim, the Jews are indeed a very bad lot, or that, as England's chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks says: "Anti-Semitism exists whenever two contradictory factors appear in combination: the belief that Jews are so powerful that they are responsible for the evils of the world, and the knowledge that they are so powerless that they can be attacked with impunity." This combination of an enormous image (Christ-killer, for example) with ridiculously small numbers has proved irresistible to predators.  The "new" anti-Semitism is by now the subject of at least half a dozen books, published in America, England, France, and Italy. Their shared conclusion, set forth from a variety of perspectives, is that the physical violence of  the new Jew-hatred is largely the work of young Muslims, but that the ideological violence is the work primarily of leftists, battlers against racism, professed humanitarians, and liberals (including Jewish ones).

Bernard Harrison's superb new book — which deals almost entirely with the drift of liberals and leftists into fascist anti-Semitism — brings to the subject a new authorial identity, a different academic background, a distinctive and (despite the topic) exhilarating voice.

This is the first book on contemporary anti-Semitism by a gentile (of the British sort). According to Harrison, his gentile identity not only contradicts a major premise of the new anti-Semitism, i.e., that only Jews support Israel, but has also made him privy to the expression of anti-Semitic prejudice, political as well as social, by apparently respectable academic people, "when Jews are absent." (80) (I must, however, add that if Harrison hears more of this in England than Jews do, his ears must be badly singed by now. I heard more anti-Semitic remarks, privately uttered, during my three years in England than in my other 67 in America, including the deep South.)

Harrison is a philosopher trained in "habitual skepticism, bitterly close reading, and aggressive contentiousness contributed by forty years in the amiable sharkpool of analytic philosophy." His merciless deconstruction of anti-Israel invective and smug cliché coming from the New Statesman, Guardian, Independent, BBC, and other bastions of anti-Jewish sentiment in England reminds one of the kind of literary scrutiny that in this country was pioneered by the New Critics (Brooks, Warren, Heilman) who arose in the thirties and dominated English studies until the seventies. He demolishes bad reasoning as they demolished bad poems.

Typically Harrison scrutinizes the statements of Israel-haters for internal contradictions, inconsistencies, specious reasoning, misstatements of fact, and outright lies. To read the fulminations of such people as John Pilger or Robert Fisk or Jacqueline Rose concerning Israel ordinarily requires the mental equivalent of hip-boots; Harrison, however, approaches with a scalpel and dissects their ravings with surgical precision. He devotes all of Chapter Two, for example, to a single infamous issue of the New Statesman of January 14, 2002. The cover showed a tiny Union Jack, placed horizontally, being pierced by the sharp apex of a large Star of David, made of gold; below, in large black letters, was the question, posed with characteristic English understatement: "A Kosher Conspiracy?" It was right out of Der Sturmer; and the articles that followed it had at first suggested to Harrison that he entitle his analysis of them "In the Footsteps of Dr. Goebbels;" but then he decided that would be "inadequate to the gravity of the case."

Among the many left-liberal canards, slanders, slogans, and clichés that Harrison dismembers in the book are the following: "Israel is a colonialist state;" "Israel is a Nazi state, and the Jews who support it are as guilty as Nazi collaborators were;"  "Anybody who criticizes Israel is called an anti-Semite;" "Jews do not express grief except for political or financial ends;" and so on and on ad nauseam. Some will say that, in response to these vicious or insane allegations, the best response would be: "Why did you kill your grandmother?", i.e., merely to go on the defensive is already to concede defeat. Harrison thinks otherwise, and those who do wish to engage the current enemies of the Jews and of Israel would do well to attend carefully to what he says.  Take, for example, the way in which he draws out the implications of the Israeli-Nazi equation, without which people like Noam Chomsky would be rendered almost speechless. The first is that to demonize Israel or Zionism is to demonize the Jews as well. The second is that, "To attach the label 'Nazi' to Israel, or to couple the Star of David with the swastika is not just to express opposition to the policies of one or another Israeli government. It is to defame Israel by association with the most powerful symbol of evil, of that which must be utterly rejected and uprooted from the face of the earth."

It is this Manichean tendency of contemporary left-liberal defamers of Israel that for Harrison is its defining trait. An old literary accusation against liberals is that they cannot comprehend tragedy, in which a hero is divided against himself, or two rights contend against each other; but instead prefer melodrama, the simplistic struggle of good guys versus bad guys. Thus the central claim of the new anti-Semitism is that, from a humanitarian's perspective, the State of Israel is evil incarnate, to a degree that transcends the wickedness of any other state that exists or ever existed. But the overriding question of Harrison's remarkable book is why liberals, more than any other political group, have been drawn to this moral absolutism and mistaken their anti-Semitism for a moral virtue. The much-trumpeted (and largely self-induced) "plight of the Palestinians" can hardly make even the "Top Twenty" list of the world's current misfortunes. Contemporary liberals may be keen to address the endless list of grievances of  Islam — the Religion of Perpetual Outrage — but even here the Palestinian issue is not at the top. When Zacarias Mussaoui, the only person to be tried (in April 2002) for the 9/11 massacres, gave his 50-minute oration in court, "he called for the return of parts of the world to Muslim rule, including Spain, Kashmir and Chechnya," and then also prayed "for the destruction of the Jewish people and state and the liberation of Palestine." Perhaps liberals sense that only prayers number four and five stand a good chance of being answered.

Harrison consistently criticizes contemporary liberals who have allowed their moral indignation on behalf of Palestinians to pass into something "very hard to distinguish from anti-Semitism of the most traditional kind;" yet he just as consistently refrains from calling them anti-Semites. (He does, however, wonder whether, in their dreams, they call themselves anti-Semites.) Thus the editor of the New Statesman who approves a cover worthy of Streicher, one Wilby, is "an entirely honest, decent man," and both Dennis Sewell, whose essay on the Anglo-Jewish "Kosher Conspiracy" is worse than Goebbels, and others like him belong to the rank of "sincere humanitarians." Two factors seem to lead Harrison into implying that one can have anti-Semitism without anti-Semites. One is his assumption, oft-repeated, that liberals and leftists in the past were almost always opposed to anti-Semitism. But surely this is open to question. In France, for example, the only articulate friends of the Jews prior to the Dreyfus Affair were conservative writers who denounced anti-Jewish attitudes as "one of the favorite theses of the eighteenth century." Nineteenth-century French leftist movements had been outspoken in their antipathy to Jews until the Dreyfus Affair forced them to decide whether they hated the Jews or the Catholic Church more, and so they become Dreyfusards. In England, the famously liberal Dr. Arnold called English Jews "lodgers" and wanted them barred from universities and citizenship. Gladstone would refer to Disraeli as "that alien" who "was going to annex England to his native East & make it the appanage of an Asian empire;" Ernest Bevin, Labor Foreign Minister from 1945-51, was notoriously short of sympathy in the Jewish direction.

But perhaps there is a more positive motive at work in Harrison's delicate epithets for his adversaries. He seems to believe in the humanist ideal of self-correction, according to which a man vacillates between his ordinary self and his best self, and can be wooed by reason into embracing the latter. Let us hope that he is right. My own, darker view is that ultimately philosophy is no more than character. If Harrison believes that he can reason into decency people like his fellow philosopher Ted Honderich, an English import from Canada who espouses "Violence for Equality," and effusively sings the praises of Palestinian suicide bombers, I wish him joy of his efforts. Deductions have little power of persuasion.

Despite my quibbles, Harrison's book is one of the necessary and indispensable utterances on the subject of the new, liberal anti-Semites (as I would call them), the people who are busily making themselves into accessories before the fact of Ahmadinejad's plan "to wipe Israel off the map." The fact that this eloquent and elegantly argued book has until now been largely ignored by book review editors is itself testimony to the liberal dogmatism and dictatorialness that Harrison has so vividly portrayed.

The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism is available on Amazon.com.