Mick Hartley

As Alvin H. Rosenfeld tells us in his article today at Tablet, there was a "swastika epidemic" across West Germany in 1959-60, with swastikas and antisemitic slogans appearing  in over 20 towns and cities, targeting synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, and Jewish-owned shops. But it wasn't what it seemed: 

After the worst of that seemingly spontaneous torrent of raw Jew-hatred subsided, it was discovered that some of the neo-Nazis responsible for the spread of the swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans had been recruited by the KGB, which had launched an ambitious disinformation campaign against West Germany carried out by Soviet secret agents in East Germany. The Russian aim was to expose the newly denazified German state as still incorrigibly infected by Nazi ideology and thereby weaken its alliance with Western nations. For a short time, the operation succeeded, as questions were raised about the true character of West Germany: Was the successor to Hitler’s Germany in fact a liberal democratic state worth supporting or not?

Now we have a new swastika epidemic – or at least another outbreak of antisemitism.

Unless one’s mind has been altogether corrupted by a steady diet of ideological obscenities, certain words and symbols should never be used when referring to Jews. One of these, for reasons that should require no explanation, is “gas,” but within 48 hours of Hamas’ massacre of some 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, a crowd outside the opera house in Sydney was already shouting “gas the Jews.” Shamefully—and yet the people who hurl these murderous taunts feel no shame—the same obscenity and others like it are sometimes sounded by people waving Palestinian flags on campuses and in anti-Israel street demonstrations. Kaffiyeh-clad, some are young people from Middle Eastern countries studying at American colleges and universities. Others, sometimes also sporting kaffiyehs, choose to be allies with those chanting “from the river to the sea” and “intifada revolution.” They see themselves as combatants in today’s culture wars, pitting the “oppressed” against the “oppressors,” with Israel and Jews condemned as being on the “wrong side” of this simplistic but popular equation. The slide from there to an embrace of full-throated anti-Zionism and antisemitism is often quick and easy.

It will take a while to sort through all these developments, but a few things are already clear. Haters need to hate, and antisemitism, always in recruitment mode, is readily available, open to all, and a common, easily accessible hatred. Those who embrace it on social media, college campuses, on the street, in the entertainment and sports worlds, and elsewhere, quickly find like-minded allies and probably believe that those they hate and are dedicated to hurting won’t hurt them back. That may have been true when Jews were set upon in the past. It is not true of Israeli Jews. When they are hit, they hit back, and hard. For that, they and Jews everywhere are hated even more.

The most potent sign of that visceral hatred is the return of the swastika. Expect to see more of them, this time not just as an antisemitic symbol but also an anti-Israel one. Just as the “swastika epidemic” of 1959-60 revived a latent Jew-hatred among people in Germany and elsewhere, something dangerously similar is occurring in the aftermath of Hamas’ savage attacks of Oct. 7. As I write, bomb threats have been made against hundreds of synagogues in 17 American states. The threats are no doubt a ruse, but they are typical of the aggressively mean-spirited passions let loose across the United States and around the world. If we do not quickly and effectively find ways to restrain this growing hatred, the future prospect for Jews and others may become more frightful than it has been since the 1930s.

The link with the 1959-60 "swastika epidemic" is something of a stretch. The antisemitism now doesn't need to be planted by the Russians as it's already there and has been for years, bubbling away with the help of an alarming historical ignorance and the new positioning of Jews as "ultra-white" top oppressors, all pushed along by Islamists who, as we see on the endless Free Palestine demonstrations with their cries of support for Hamas and the Houthis, are the idiot left's latest best friends. And the swastikas now are aimed at Israel.

But, as Rosenfeld doesn't say, there is that Soviet connection still, as Izabella Tabarovsky reminded us the other day. Much of the current language of antisemitism, including the Holocaust Inversion – Jews as the new Nazis, etc. – comes directly from late Soviet propaganda.