Important Read By Joseph Massad Adds Historical Context To Deeply Entrenched Western Antisemitism

The article isn’t some classical rehashing of Holocaust trauma brought on by a mysterious group of exclusively evil Europeans known as the Nazis. Nazis might have put on some sort of mask to hide from public view these days, but western antisemitism is alive and well, although still lightly masked, except the mask is slowly blowing away with each American bomb that gets dropped on Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, etc, etc. I want to go even further to say that western antisemites have successfully co-opted a niche group (ok, maybe the group isn’t so niche these days) of “secular” “Jewish” leaders to serve as west-funded pawns to fight the “civilized world’s” battle for power over a critical region of the world.

A couple weeks ago Joseph Massad, a professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York, penned a great article about how not only age-old western antisemitism, but also how western imperial powers opportunistically built Israel on the backs of millions of exterminated Jews. In a way, if you peel off this “dual-purpose” nation-state veneer gifted to Israel by the antisemitic west, you’ll clearly see that this state serves primarily as a heavily militarized extension of western powers and secondarily as reparations to atone for the grave crimes committed by Europeans against Jewish people.

Once historians have a chance to get a closer look at the blood-soaked genocidal books detailing the latest unfolding conflict, I think one big revelation will be the fact that western antisemitism resurfaced like an old itch that needed to be scratched so deeply until the blood started to flow. Historians will learn that old-school antisemitism was aided by a “new” form of antisemitism that’s also sometimes referred to as Zionism. The entire revelation once pieced together will be riddled with ironies galore, of course. Needless to say, the sooner real practitioners of Judaism can figure out how to cut the cord with Zionism, it will not only reveal who is hiding under the masks concealing Zionists, but also help Judaism begin its long & painful path to recovery. I’ll have to save what will happen to Arabs and more specifically Palestinians for another post.

Anyway, I think it’s finally time to plug the opening paragraphs Joseph Massad’s article directly below:

One of the more remarkable aspects of the history of Zionism is that the majority of European Jews rejected the movement from its inception in the early 19th century until the Second World War.

What had begun as a Protestant British project to convert European Jews to Protestant Christianity and ship them to Palestine transformed in the last two decades of the 19th century into a European Jewish project.

Even so, the movement failed to gain traction among European Jews in contrast to its popularity then among European and American Protestants and especially Europe’s imperialist leaders.  

It was not until the Nazi genocide of European Jews that a majority of European and American Jews were swayed and began to support this colonial-settler movement that enjoined Jews to self-expel and colonise Palestine.  

Please read his full article at the Middle East Eye >>>