Street Fighting Men The left-wing roots of anti-Semitism
Johnson, Paul
Street Fighting Men The left-wing roots of anti-Semitism BY PAUL JOHNSON EFT-WING ANTI-SEMITISM, so prominent and potent today, is sometimes presented as a new phenomenon, provoked by the...
...On the terror front, President Bush has taken the offensive, and since 9/11 not a single attack has occurred on L.S...
...This was regarded as "exclusive" and "elitist," and the violent reaction to it was populist...
...But with Washington's coffers full, the economy booming and his presidency swamped by scandal, Clinton tacked to the left during his last two years in office...
...The number of pages in the Federal Register—a proxy for the regulatory burden—ballooned...
...The Jews supplied the courts with rare luxuries in peace and, in war, arms, munitions, horses and, not least, gold coin and bullion to pay for them...
...By taste he was a Hegelian and a follower of Bruno Bauer, the anti-Semitic leader of the Hegelian left...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...Since Jews and "near Jews" constituted one-tenth of the population of the Roman Empire, and a vital element in its trading system, from the Upper Nile to the Lower Rhine, it is unlikely that authority ever wished to pick a quarrel with the community in normal times...
...But Hitler certainly continued to believe it...
...Rising imports are a sign that the U.S...
...The Papacy thought that they were cursed but, as such, necessary witnesses to the truth of the Gospel...
...So there was no attempt to exterminate them...
...Anti- Semitism goes back to the third century B.C., and the first incidents seem to have occurred in Egypt, in the Greek trading city of Alexandria...
...Descended from rabbis on both sides, he never had a Judaic education and always hated Jews, especially the rich members of his own family...
...However, a bottom-up approach that adds so-called "component" data—consumption, investment, trade etc.—points to as much as 7.0 percent growth in the third and fourth quarters...
...On the 364 others they were an essential part of the papal financial system...
...THE RUN-UP TO THE First Crusade, when the crusaders, young yobbos and unemployed, led by landless knights and exaltes—the stuff of violent revolutions—attacked Jewish communities in the Rhine on their way to Jerusalem...
...URTHER LEFT, HOWEVER, yet another layer of anti-Semitism emerged, thanks to Karl Marx...
...Hence Jews were usually protected and cherished by the ruling class, especially in commercial countries...
...My top-down models of the economy—which use monetary and fiscal policy as inputs—suggest a 4.5 percent to 5.5 percent growth rate over the next 18 months...
...The NASDAQ has climbed a remarkable 70 percent from its bottom in October 2002...
...Through mid-August, 719 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 companies announced dividend increases, up from 550 during the same period in 2002...
...NDEED THEY WERE VALUED...
...But what they fail to see—or to admit—is that a surge in imports subtracted 1.1 percent from GDP in the same period, while drooping inventories took out almost another whole point...
...And as we now learn from Richard Miniter's new book Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror, the seeds of 9/11 were planted then as well...
...Trotsky said angrily: "I am not a Jew...
...It was provoked by the Jewish refusal to make religious compromises in accordance with the prevailing culture of eirenism, in which all men genuflected to the religions of others, as a matter of ecumenical courtesy...
...It was succeeded by neutrality turning gradually to hostility as Israel reacted to growing Arab terrors by fierce military reprisals...
...Effectively he was the founder of the modern Palestinian movement, the precursor of Yasser Arafat and the earliest theorist of Arab terrorism...
...Money is the alienated essence of man's work and existence: this essence dominates him and he worships it...
...It was the basis of his anti-Semitic theory which represented the radical side of the Nazi program...
...Bismarck had his court Jews to finance his wars and the unification of Germany under Prussia...
...Since Jews and "near Jews" constituted one-tenth of the population of the Roman Empire, and a vital element in its trading system, from the Upper Nile to the Lower Rhine, it is unlikely that authority ever wished to pick a quarrel with the community in normal times...
...Hence since America and Israel are the ultimate villains, being both populist-democratic and capitalists as well as aggressive, their opponents, whether Saddam Hussein, Al- Qaeda or anyone else, enjoy a certain sympathy, and their ability to inflict damage on the American-Israeli colossus, whether by suicide bombing or other methods, is seen as morally justified...
...Christians, bifurcating from Judaism in the late first century A.D., and engaging in acrimonious exchanges thereafter, added a second tier to the archaeological layer of anti-Semitism which accumulated throughout history...
...The real religion of the Jew, he said, was not Judaism but "huckstering...
...It was and is a substitute 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 for thought...
...Anti- Semitism, therefore, was at the heart of Marx's philosophy...
...Then in 2003, while Senate moderates dickered, House Ways and Means Committee chairman Bill Thomas and the Bush team engineered the best supply-side tax cut that the U.S...
...A new factor intervened in the 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the demise of international Communism as an active force, left the United States as the sole superpower and free enterprise, symbolized by the U.S., as the only ideology...
...He expanded it from hatred of Jews into a general hatred of capitalism...
...The family ensured that Nelson's sailors in the Mediterranean and Wellington's redcoats in Spain were up-to-date with their pay and regularly supplied with provisions...
...He supported free trade, a capital-gains tax cut and welfare reform...
...The first International Anti-Jewish Congress met in Dresden in 1882, more following at Kassel in 1886 and Bochum in 1889...
...to the mid-nineteenth century, regarded the Jewish community as an asset to be "farmed...
...I am an internationalist...
...OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29 STREET FIGEMNG MEN Jews or Zionists the most likely force to undermine Britain's authority in the Middle East, and therefore backed the new state of Israel when it came into existence in 1947-8...
...But in the last decades of the twentieth century, this fraternalism disappeared...
...It is likely that Stalin, as a student, read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic work adapted by the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, from a French pamphlet of the 1860s aimed at Napoleon III, which had nothing to do with Jews...
...For example, third quarter real GDP climbed by 3.1 percent at an annual rate...
...This was, as a rule, the attitude of other medieval rulers...
...Fortunately, George Bush arrived in Washington, cutting taxes even before the 2001 recession was officially recognized...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 In hard times mobs of peasants and urban proletariat could be whipped up against them—a discovery which Martin Luther exploited...
...No one knows what the future will bring, but risk premiums are steadily being wrung out of corporate stock and bond markets, suggesting that the world is once again becoming a safer place...
...But such displaced Sephardi Jews joined the Ashkenazi Jews in the mercantile communities of the Low Countries and Central Europe, where they were welcome and prospered...
...His real God was not Jehova but money...
...He soon realized his mistake and changed sides...
...But pagan Rome, while 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 Street Fighting Men PAUL JOHNSON OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27 STREET FIGHTING MEN periodically persecuting Christians, rarely troubled the Jews, regarded as law-abiding and valuable citizens...
...It was conclusively exposed as a forgery in 1920...
...Stalin labeled Trotsky a "cosmopolitan," the abrasive Soviet code-word for Jew, and had him murdered...
...Already, those changes have hugely altered the investment landscape...
...This stealth tax hike combined with a deflationary Fed policy and collapsing equity prices, threw the economy into recession...
...PAUL JOHNSON coined the term "anti-Semitism" and founded the Anti- Semitic League...
...ITLER USED anti-Semitism in various ways, particularly to undermine the British Empire at what he regarded as its vulnerable core, the Middle East...
...In 1878 the Hamburg anarchist pamphleteer Wilhelm Marr On one day of the year a sermon was preached against them...
...But in good times they were safe...
...They had to be destroyed to make the world a paradise on earth...
...Thereafter the Israelis were able to look after themselves, build up the best army and air force in the Middle East, and make their own nuclear weapons, plus their means of delivery had enjoyed widespread support on the Left, especially in the British Labour Party and among French Socialists...
...Like antiSemitism, the Marxism of Das Kapital blamed all the ills of the world on certain categories of people—not just Jews but industrialists, landlords, middlemen...
...During the second quarter of 2003, information processing equipment and software...
...This theme was taken up by Arab extremists after the formation of Israel and, with increasing hysteria, after the successive defeats the Arab states suffered at the hands of the Israel army...
...On one day of the year a sermon was preached against them: on the 364 others they were an essential part of the papal financial system...
...More Jewish intellectuals were killed in Soviet Russia in the Thirties than in Nazi Germany, which they had the good sense to leave in time...
...in December 1941...
...But it was a costly step, economically, and generally all rulers, led by the pope, tolerated Jews and used them...
...The Jews, they argued, ran America, and Israel was their bridgehead in Arab territory It is significant that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion remained on sale in Arab versions throughout this time, and in 2003-4 was scheduled to appear on prime Egyptian TV in 41 episodes...
...HE EUROPEAN and American Left have not yet adopted anti-Semitism in an open form, but take refuge behind anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel's actions...
...Immediately Jews became eligible for the British parliament in the 1850s, a Rothschild was elected the member for the City and spokesman of the financial community...
...This version of the plot has the advantage that it allows prominent Jewish intellectuals in the tradition of Trotsky (and Marx) to go along with it...
...But by then Israel had won the war and established itself as a viable state...
...41P—NTIL THE 1956 Suez War and the 1967 Six-Day War established Israeli military supremacy, Israel In the early twenty-first century antiAmericanism and antiSemitism blended together, forming a continuum of hate...
...Only his death saved the Russian Jewish community...
...It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value...
...Moreover, the popes, effectively rulers of Rome from the fifth century A.D...
...Not only did he give it de jure recognition, even before America did so, but he instructed the Czechs to supply Israel with all the weapons, including desperately needed fighter aircraft, and munitions it needed...
...economy is strong...
...The Jews were a "stiff-necked people" who "refused to bow in the House of Rimmon...
...Call it the Bush Boom...
...The Jews were a "stiff-necked people" who "refused to bow in the House of Rimmon...
...Bubble-touting pessimists relentlessly assaulting investors with forecasts of deflation, a 5000 Dow and years of sub-par growth have completely missed the boat...
...But Jews were never safe in the Communist world...
...Moreover he was corrupting the whole of society by his secular faith: Money is the jealous god of Israel beside which no other god may exist...
...He thought the Anti- Semitism was at the heart of Marx's philosophy...
...ECONOMICS BRIAN S. WESBURY Welcome to the Bush Boom ETWEEN 1995 AND 1998, William Jefferson Clinton governed as if he believed his own words: "The era of big government is over...
...Bracket creep drove effective tax rates upward, from 1993 to 2000, nearly doubling the number of people paying the top marginal rates of 31 percent or more...
...And more tellingly for the future, high-tech spending is rocketing higher...
...Christians, bifurcating from Judaism in the late first century A.D., and engaging in acrimonious exchanges thereafter, added a second tier to the archaeological layer of anti-Semitism which accumulated throughout history...
...This conjunction was not new...
...In Vienna, the radical Christian Socialist Karl Lueger founded an anti-Semitic party, electing his first deputy in 1886, and virtually controlling the lower house of the diet by 1895...
...He expanded it from a hatred of Jews into a general hatred of capitalism...
...Anti- Semitism has always had a radical element, a flavor of the streets, even when deliberately incited by the ruling class, as in Tsarist Russia...
...This was regarded as "exclusive" and "elitist," and the violent reaction to it was populist...
...The Mufti's alliance with Hitler misled Stalin into one of his most serious mistakes...
...Hitler had argued that "international Jewry" controlled America and justified his "final solution" after he declared war on the U.S...
...has seen since 1981, dropping the rate on capital gains to its lowest since 1933 and on dividends by 60 percent...
...But the familiar conspiracy theory makes its appearance, linking Washington to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, with "oil interests" as a further binding factor...
...Government spending contributed nearly half of that—proof enough to the pessimists that something is wrong...
...The New Era was born, and high-tech entrepreneurs created wealth at an amazing rate...
...Money is the self-sufficient value of all things...
...The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world...
...In the early twentieth century, Jews were prominent in the Communist movement...
...soil...
...Pessimists are clinging to even the flimsiest pieces of data to argue that the economy is hurting...
...Anti-Americanism, popular among the European left throughout the Cold War, together with its own self-hating version within the U.S., now entered a new and virulent phase powered by a sense of absolute despair...
...An exception was Spain, where Jews were expelled or forcibly converted from the 1490s, the Inquisition having one of its chief tasks to detect and punish those who secretly reverted to Judaism—an exception extended to Portugal when it was absorbed by the Spanish crown...
...low inventories presage a rebound in future production...
...Another 134 historically non-dividend paying companies announced they will begin...
...Marx replied in his first serious work (1844), "On the Jewish Question," arguing that it was not the answer, for the problem was not religious but social and economic...
...Medieval Christianity was ambivalent about the Jews...
...In east-central Europe they acted as estate-agents to the Polish earning landowners, the hostility running g millions the peasants of acres...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...They renounced their Judaism, as had Marx...
...His artisanal and lower-middle-class supporters were the same kind of people who backed Hitler's National Socialist Party in its early stages...
...In this negative mood, anti-Americanism, irrational, wholly destructive, violently emotional and protean in that it could easily be made to fit the circumstances of the movement, was the perfect formula to fill the Left's vacuum of thought...
...Anti- Semitism has always had a radical element, a flavor of the streets, even when deliberately incited by the ruling class, as in Tsarist Russia...
...There his chief ally was the Mufti of Jerusalem, who led the Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine and the Zionist community in 1936, and who later was sponsored by the Nazis to stir up trouble in Iraq, Syria and Egypt...
...Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities...
...Occasionally secular princes, in financial trouble themselves, and to curry favor with impoverished nobles, expelled the Jews, confiscated their property and canceled debts—this was what Edward I of England did in 1290...
...In, but 1 German-speaking territories there were "court Jews," in effect an administrative class, especially in finance, known variously as Hofagent, Hoffaktor, Hofjude, Hofproveditur, Kabinet-faktor and Kommenzienvat, etc...
...Hostile elements included needy nobles who had got into debt with Jewish money-lenders, lower-middle-class townsfolk who saw Jews as unfair competition, and peasants who were taken in by atrocity stories about Jewish ritual murders, spread by fundamentalist clergy, especially monks and friars...
...Street Fighting Men The left-wing roots of anti-Semitism BY PAUL JOHNSON EFT-WING ANTI-SEMITISM, so prominent and potent today, is sometimes presented as a new phenomenon, provoked by the behavior of the Israeli government...
...It was provoked by the Jewish refusal to make religious compromises in accordance with the prevailing culture of eirenism, in which all men genuflected to the religions of others, as a matter of ecumenical courtesy...
...The new radical anti-Semitism, therefore, is the latest evidence of the "flight of reason" on the Left, "bringing forth monsters" that Hitler himself would have admired...
...In 1843, Bauer demanded that the Jews solve "the Jewish problem" by renouncing Judaism...
...Policy is the only thing that matters, for security and the economy alike...
...But the consequence was the rise of another layer of anti-Semitism, urban, industrialized and populist, reinforced every time there was a financial crisis and a surge of anger against the rich...
...Jewish ability to raise large sums of money and transfer them safely over hundreds of miles made the court Jews—especially Samuel Oppenheimer (1630-1703)—indispensable to the Habsburgs during the Thirty Years War, the great struggle against Turkey in the 1670s and 1680s, and then in the wars against Louis XIV...
...Anti- Semitism goes back to the third century B.C., and the first incidents seem to have occurred in Egypt, in the Greek trading city of Alexandria...
...The Left had now no faith, no belief in a Utopian future, no allies to admire, no heroes and no causes to promote...
...Nearly all the prominent Jews in Stalin's Russia were killed in the great purges, and in the "Doctors' Plot" of 1952-3 Stalin was preparing a much wider attack on Jewish professionals, akin to Hitler's "final solution...
...Hence in the early twenty-first century, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism blended together, forming a continuum of hate...
...Also operating is the old principle of "my enemy's enemy is my friend...
...What the Oppenheimers did for the Habsburgs, the Rothschilds did for England in the long war against Napoleon...
...Purely negative and destructive emotions were also the characteristics of anti-Semitism in all its various historical manifestations...
...Yes, the cuts phase out in just a few years, but there is no reason to think that they will not be extended...
...Paul Johnson's books include A History of the Jews, A History of Christianity, and, published this month, Art: A New History...
...But pagan Rome, while 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 Street Fighting Men The left-wing roots of anti-Semitism BY PAUL JOHNSON EFT-WING ANTI-SEMITISM, so prominent and potent today, is sometimes presented as a new phenomenon, provoked by the behavior of the Israeli government...
Vol. 36 • October 2003 • No. 5
