Mick Hartley

Shalom Lappin at Fathom – The Nazification of the Postmodernist Left:

Since the Hamas terrorist attack of 7 October 2023, Diaspora Jews have found themselves under sustained assault on a variety of fronts, from much of the radical left, and its Islamist allies. People who pose as guardians of equality and anti-racism are leading violent demonstrations praising mass murder attacks against Israelis. They are urging the exclusion of all Jews who do not endorse their views from the mainstream of the social order. How did it come to pass that such a significant portion of the contemporary radical left now resembles fascist and Nazi groups of the past?

It's a long piece, but well worth reading in full.

The radical left transferred its allegiance from secular third world national liberation movements to radical Islamists as a new and potent vehicle for anti-colonialism. This move was facilitated by a significant transformation in the New Left itself. In the past 30 years it has morphed from a movement inspired by a revised version of Marx’s vision of a revolution based on class, and on Western Enlightenment values of reason, freedom, and equality, into a postmodernist ideology defined by the identity politics of ethnicity, gender, and indigenousness. This shift moved the theoretical foundations of the radical left from political economy to critical theory, ethnic and gender studies, and postmodernist doctrines of cultural relativism. Addressing the injustices inflicted on ethnic and gender groups by White European racism and colonialism became its focus. European colonialism is regarded as the source of all racism and injustice, while non-European colonialism, such as the Ottoman Empire, and Soviet domination of central Asia, are disregarded as irrelevant.

Indigenousness is fetishised as the condition of original innocence, despite the fact that it has no clear substance for many of the areas to which it is loudly applied. This is most glaringly obvious in the case of the Middle East and North Africa, which have been subject to continuing invasions, and influxes of populations, over the past four millennia. The notion of a stable cohesive native population in these territories is a historical fiction. The Muslim Arab conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century subordinated Jewish, Byzantine, and Aramaic speaking Christian communities to Arabisation and Islamic rule. It also Islamised Persia. Their conquest of North Africa and Iberia extended forced Arabisation to Egyptian, Greek, Berber, and Visigoth peoples. Turkish speaking people moved from central Asia into Anatolia in the eleventh century. The Ottomans subsequently imposed Turkish rule and settlement on large areas of the Middle East, Armenia, North Africa, Cyprus, and the Balkans, which they incorporated into a large Islamic Empire. The sequence of invasions and population flows in these areas throughout ancient, Medieval, and modern history renders the notion of an indigenous population in these regions largely without content…

Under the guise of promoting diversity and equality, the identity politics of the postmodernist left has overturned the broad coalition-building agenda of classical progressive movements. It has replaced it with the worship of ethnic and gender difference, based on inherited virtue conferred by a history of European colonial dispossession. The purpose of this exercise appears to be not the creation of a social order that provides fully democratic institutions and genuine equality to all its members, but a permanent acknowledgement of original sin and past guilt by the descendants of the colonisers, and those who benefit from the privileges that they enjoy.

But yes, read it all.

The events following 7 October 2023 should have made it abundantly clear that, contrary to official assurances, Jews are no longer equal citizens in the polities that they inhabit in most of the Diaspora. The attitudes of the postmodernist left have penetrated large areas of the public domain. They are now infesting the public school system in many places, making life intolerable for many Jewish children in non-Jewish schools. Boycotts of Jewish artists, writers, and performers have taken hold in large swaths of publishing and cultural life. Discrimination in hiring has now become a visible issue. Many mainstream institutions avoid engaging with clearly identified Jewish figures or agencies for fear of cancellation and violent protest. Calling on the traditional political and civil authorities to protect Jews from attack or exclusion in this sort of environment is seeking to respond to the growing threat with a phantom limb.

In order to develop viable strategies for ensuring survival in the current situation, Jews in the Diaspora will have to come to terms with the fact that they no longer have a natural, assured place in their host countries.