Phil Nottingham

Agreed. Here's mine. Why Antisemitism Persists It may strike us as strange that one of the most important battles of our age is against a spectre we thought had been comprehensively defeated eighty years ago, but it is entirely consistent with the dominant intellectual trends of our age that antisemitism should rear its head once again. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks brilliantly pointed out it, antisemitism is an “ever-mutating virus”. The quirk of our age is that most of those infected with the current strain of the pathogen cannot see that they are carrying it. It’s not simply a form of racism analogous to anti-black prejudice in America. Neither is it mindless hatred and bigotry. Nor is it a dislike or disgust for a particular set of religious practices. Antisemitism is a very particular meme in ethics: one which holds that the Jews, by rejecting the moral orthodoxies of a given culture, are the source of evil in the world. It is the practice of treating the Jews as scapegoats for cosmic injustice, instead of reasoning through the actual causes. And it keeps emerging, in different guises across the generations, whenever the founding articles of faith of a given philosophy are called into question by reality. When the rains don’t fall; when the messiah doesn’t return; when universal prosperity doesn’t arrive from a social system you expect to create it; when acting in line with your ethical framework leads to death and destruction rather than peace and happiness; when those you deem to be blameless victims commit monstrous acts — who can you blame? People of intellectual courage look inward. They examine their assumptions, reckon honestly with their mistakes, and revise the deeply held ideas that no longer make sense of the world in front of them. People of intellectual cowardice look outward. They find someone to blame for the incongruence between what they think should be, and what is. And for this task, the Jews fit the bill perfectly. Why The Jews? To the antisemite, the Jews represent the perfect other: A small group of largely successful outsiders who deviate from the majoritarian ideological dogma. To the ancient polytheists, the Jews were the strange monotheists eschewing the cultural norms of the day. When societal tensions emerged, suspicion turned to those who wouldn’t assimilate. To the Medieval Christians, the Jews were those who rejected the moral teachings of their own messiah. When Europe became a benighted, hierarchical, crisis-prone society punctuated by frequent violence and disease, accusations mounted against those who lived by a prior doctrine. In early Islam, the 7th-century Medinan period cast the Jews as liars who falsified scripture and refused to recognise the truth of Mohammed -- a community whose refusal to ratify the new revelation made them theologically intolerable. In 11th-century Granada, the sight of wealthy, successful, prideful Jews with Muslims serving under them was taken as a subversion of the natural moral order — one that could only be set right through murder and the seizure of property. In 19th-century Russia, the Jew was the strange neighbour in the shtetl who would not share bread, and supposed author of the capitalism and revolution unsettling the empire. When autocracy buckled under the strains of reform and industrialisation, the Jew was made to bear the weight of every dislocation the empire could not comprehensively explain. In Nazi Germany, racial pseudoscience and the Russian conspiracy myth fused into state doctrine. The Jew was at once a biological contaminant of the national body and the secret author of every humiliation Germany had suffered. What earlier ages had answered with pogroms and expulsion was answered with industrial murder. Under Stalin, the Jew was cast as the “rootless cosmopolitan” — the disloyal internationalist whose attachments lay outside the Russian motherland. After his death, “Zionist” became the master category instead of “Jew”, but the structure remained the same: a scapegoat explaining the gap between the world Marxism-Leninism had promised and the one it had delivered. Why Now? Antisemitism typically has two catalysts – Ignorance and societal upheaval. Right now we have plenty of both. Ignorance is being fostered by an education system that has largely abandoned rationality in the humanities and the arts, where only post-modern methods of analysis are taught. Feelings are treated as sources of deep truth, while reasoning and objectivity are taught as mere constructs and impositions. Meanwhile, a technological disruption has addicted everyone to their phones, with the act of reading books largely replaced by social media, podcasts and short-form videos. Instead of spending time with the considered words of great minds, we are marinating in the musings of narcissists. At the same time, we are going through a generational reordering of world power, and exciting but disruptive new technologies are arriving faster than institutions can absorb them. There are three distinct strains of antisemitism thriving today: Islamist, Progressive, and Nativist. Islamist Antisemitism The Islamist story centres on the emergence and influence of the Muslim Brotherhood. To Sayyid Qutb, the Jew was the cosmic adversary of Islam — the permanent enemy who, having refused Muhammad’s revelation in Medina, worked through every modern instrument of corruption to destroy the believing community. In his eyes, these are: Zionism, secularism, and the materialist West. When the Ottoman collapse abolished the Caliphate, the Arab world was partitioned by Christian powers, and Israel was established on Muslim land, the prospect of a universal Islamic political-religious order was called into question. Qutb’s response was to weld the classical Medinan polemic to the Protocols and the Nazi inheritance, producing the template for half a century of jihadist thought on the Sunni side and inspiring the revolutionary eschatology of Khomeini and his successors on the Shia side. For those who have bought into the worldview developed by Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb and others -- either Islam is not the final word of God, or the Jews explain much of Islam’s modern weakness. For a fundamentalist, the latter is psychologically easier to stomach than the former. Progressive Antisemitism The antisemitism of the contemporary Western left is rooted in structures of Soviet antizionism, with a post-colonial and post-structural framework provided by thinkers like Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Frantz Fanon grafted on top. The post-1960s Western left assembled a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding history as an ongoing struggle of marginalised peoples against imperial, colonial, and capitalist power. The framework promised that the dismantling of those structures would produce liberation — the freeing of the oppressed, the dissolution of unjust hierarchies, the arrival of a more just world. But the promised world has not been delivered. Post-colonial states have largely not flourished. The various national liberation movements have produced, in many cases, regimes more brutal than the ones they replaced. The Palestinians have not lived up to their assigned story -- of an indigenous people pursuing liberation through resistance to settler oppression – instead rejecting every offer of achievable peace in favour of barbaric, self-sacrificial violence. The explanatory pressure of the empirical record has to go somewhere. On October 7th 2023, it found the boiling point. The footage was its own argument: not the asymmetric struggle of guerrillas against soldiers but the deliberate massacre, rape, mutilation, and abduction of unarmed civilians, including children and the elderly, by fighters who livestreamed their work. The cognitive dissonance was so profound that something had to give – either the ideology or the scapegoat. Predictably, the ideologues found comfort in the same cowardly pattern: the failure of the moral framework would be explained by the persistence of an enemy whose elimination would allow the framework to succeed. Rather than the Jews, the Zionists (i.e. most of the world’s Jews) are the obstruction standing in the way of redemption, with Israel cast in this morality play as the settler-colonial outpost of imperial whiteness, an apartheid state committing genocide against beleaguered natives. The vocabulary is revised, but the Jew still serves to represent all of the great sins of the world which must be expunged. Nativist Antisemitism In the darkest online corners of the new American right is emerging a form of antisemitism where the Jew is seen as the agent of dissolution — the demographic engineer, the architect of liberal globalism that has unmade the country that was promised. Within this framework, nativist anxiety, theological-civilizational critique, and imported racial-nationalism have fused old-fashioned Christian antisemitism to European Great Replacement theory. In this story, America is the promised land, taken away from those of European heritage and sacrificed on the altar of liberal ideals. It appeals to those who feel they were promised life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but find themselves with none of the three, while others flourish. What’s the truth – that the extraordinary gift of the American inheritance is being squandered, or that America used to be great, and it is through the Jew that it has been unmade? For the man whose life is not going the way he feels he was promised, the latter is psychologically easier to stomach than the former. How Can We Fight It? Antisemitism’s enduring appeal is that it offers a reprieve from devastating introspection while dressing cowardice as righteousness. There are three fronts in which it must be defeated – the governmental, the societal and the individual. On the governmental level, we must admit that we are at war with a foreign hostile state, whether we like it or not. The IRGC should be proscribed, and every organisation that funds or carries out the work of the Islamic Republic of Iran should be closed, with assets frozen and operatives expelled. The state also needs to rediscover what freedom of speech is –the right to speak and write on any private platform that will have you, not the right to do whatever you want in public spaces. There is no right to intimidate others and damage private property. The moment a protest forces others out of a shared space is the moment it is no longer peaceful. On a societal level, it’s incumbent on all of us to simply say “no”. Call out lies, refuse to be intimidated into silence, and challenge those who deem their views to be unchallengeable. And most importantly, on the individual level: we must each recommit ourselves to intellectual courage. We must all face cognitive dissonance honestly, be willing to challenge our own assumptions and deeply held views, and have the humility to know that none of us is above unwitting bias and prejudice.

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The one move the Iranian regime has left

This is my favourite.