Mick Hartley

Heather MacDonald, interviewed at Spiked:

The left tries to diagnose the anti-Semitism we’re seeing on campuses now as the old kind of anti-Semitism. But they are not the same thing. This is best illustrated in a speech given in late October last year by the now-defenestrated Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard. She stated in her speech that Harvard has always had a problem with anti-Semitism – a problem that it has never overcome. She then argued that we are now dealing with this long-standing anti-Semitism, in an attempt to create a continuity between that and the incidents of anti-Semitism since 7 October. She tried to draw a direct line from the genteel, protestant anti-Semitism of the early 20th century, which excluded Jews as non-Christian outsiders, and the anti-Semitism among Harvard’s pro-Palestine students today.

Around the same time, Milton R Konvitz – a professor at Cornell University – gave a talk on the intersectionality of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and racism. His theory was that there is an inherent overlap between these three forms of discrimination. This begs the question: what kind of group is going to be capable of this triumvirate of hate? It’s white people. It’s the white MAGA supporter. That’s the only group that ticks the box. And yet this is not the group we’ve seen on campuses and all over the world preaching anti-Semitism. They are not the ones chanting ‘From the river to the sea’.

Gay is making a similar point. She conflates the upper-class WASPs who used to go to non-Jew country clubs with those who are out there now singing ‘Long live our martyrs’. The intersectional left is deliberately conflating these movements to distract attention from the fact that this wave of anti-Semitism is a completely different phenomenon. And that it has more to do with Islamism than with Trumpism.