Anti-Semitism was the greatest stain on the 20th century, but it was the doing of the Nazis. While Germans were killing Jews, the rest of the world held no such threat for them. Today we are facing the reality of anti-anti-Semitism. It is not comparable to Nazi genocide, of course, but it is de-stabilizing, distorting, unhistorical, and unfair.

Anti-anti-Semitism is as real as films, the media, and political correctness. The idea that anti-Semitism exists is the cornerstone of anti-anti-Semitism. Even though there is not the slightest evidence of anti-Semitism in the USA--if anything the opposite, or active pro-Semitism, is true--American movies harp over and over and over about anti-Semitism, to such an unnecessary extreme as should make any rational person think that Jews live in a constant state of sob-sobbing self-pity.

Anti-Semitism entails discrimination. Discrimination involves harm done to a group and to say that Jews are being persecuted in America, Russia, or anywhere today is laughable, like hearing Nixon rant against Jews even as he named Henry Kissinger, a former refugee from Nazi Germany, secretary of state. Concrete examples of anti-anti-Semitism are legion. Three recent ones can serve to make the point.

The former prime minister of Malaysia, Mohammed bin Mahathir, said something to the effect that Jews were globally very influential. He also said they were a tiny minority that hired others to fight for them. There was a hue and cry, although, perhaps because Israel was at the time at the height of its indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, not as loud as would have been expected. Was Mahathir lying? He was rather guilty of under-counting and of exaggeration: Israelis cannot be accused of hiring others to die for them and there are many more Jews in the world than Mahathir apparently thinks. On the numbers issue Mahathir himself was probably the dupe of anti-anti-Semitism, one of whose basic tenets is the ridiculous claim that there are only two or three million Jews in America.

The president of France, Jacques Chirac, came down flatly against the wearing of headscarves by Muslim female students in the French public schools system. Shortly afterwards, a journalist (not Jewish) in an international English-language daily turned the issue, lo and behold!, into one far overshadowed by anti-Semitism. And this on the anecdotal basis, common in these cases, of an obviously very unshy Jewish young girl who claimed that she was being insulted in school because she was more intelligent than her classmates.

Finally, super-star Mel Gibson released a movie in which Jews appear as both plaintiffs and jury in the trial and execution of the Jewish prophet Jesus Christ. Gibson used every promotional gimmick in the book and in particular he got prominent anti-anti-Semitists in a huff, which is as much as to have the greatest Jewish hypester on your side. For months there was a whirligig of anti-anti-Semitic indignation. The film grossed big.

Historical anti-Semitism

An anti is always against something. Historically, there is no denying that anti-Semitism is real. And this is where one gets to the very delicate quid of the matter. Anti-Semitism has existed since the time of Israel in Egypt at least, although some passionate anti-anti-Semites might claim that Jews-to-be were hounded out of Amurru (the first known name of Palestine/Israel) because of their race. But then there has been anti-Gallicism, as in the Sicilian Vespers (1282), and there has been anti-Italianism in so many places--Constantinople and the USA, to cite two--it would be impossible to do a meaningful catalogue of these and similar antis. Even in our shrunken world, foreigners are generally distrusted everywhere. Jews both blend and insist on being noticed as different. Some people are offended by this. Others take it in their stride, which is as it should be.

There are two important reasons why anti-Semitism is historically more significant than anti-Gallicism or anti-Italianism. One is that Jews lost their homeland when Roman emperor Hadrian expelled them collectively and Judaea became Palestine (135), a name incidentally first used in writing by the Greek historian Herodotus long after the foundation of the kingdom of Israel (ca1000 BCE). (Hadrian also re-named Jerusalem Aelia Capitolina, a name that didn't stick.)

From the Diaspora on, Jews were foreigners everywhere, and unlike Frenchmen or Italians, they had nowhere to return to. Jews, or Frenchmen or Italians for that matter, are not crybabies that go scampering away at the merest sensing of dislike, although Zionism was at least in part founded on some such caricatural representation. Its founder, Theodore Herzl, did not himself experience discrimination other than perhaps verbally. Millions of Russian Jews fled pogroms but many more remained. The infamy against Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was unmasked much faster than normal death-sentence review processes in America.

The other and more important reason for the historical prominence of anti-Semitism is the Holocaust. Some associate the origins of the word genocide with the wholesale disappearance of the Armenian population of eastern Turkey in 1915, estimated at 1,600,000. Turks argue that there was no genocide. Whether there was or not, Kurds, who are Muslims and themselves a much put upon minority in some countries of the Middle East, were not for nothing in the killing of Christian Armenians. But genocide in our times has become synonymous with the Holocaust, the fundamental grounds claim of anti-anti-Semitism. This association is valid only up to a point.

The real sense of the Holocaust

Did the Holocaust take place? Were Jews specifically as a group targeted and murdered by the Nazis? These two questions, though seemingly equivalent, are in fact quite different. In the sense of the arbitrary mass murder of defenceless human beings, the Holocaust is undeniable. And Jews were indeed singled out for extermination by Nazism. But Germans also tried to exterminate all Gypsies and all communists. There was no attempt to kill all Poles, because the Germans couldn't have done it with the means at their command, but probably as many Poles as Jews were killed during the same lapse of time in approximately the same territories. Therefore when it is said that this specifically eastern European Holocaust took place, this has to mean the Holocaust of Gypsies, communists, Poles, and Jews. The anti-anti-Semitist position is that the Holocaust was about Jews and basically and mainly about Jews. And this belief is not true.

Anti-anti-Semitism holds that not only were Jews targeted by Nazism but that they were also nearly exterminated and that total genocide was avoided by a hair's breadth. This again is false. Yes, Germans did kill millions of Jews, and, yes, of course, Nazi ideology and propaganda was anti-Semitic through and through. However, there is also abundant if not overwhelming evidence that European Jewry survived the Holocaust in large numbers. How many it is not possible to say because in the light of the carnage in Poland and Russia to do a count of survivors seems obscene. But even the least sociable of city-dwellers in Europe or the Western Hemisphere knows dozens of survivors or descendants of survivors of the Holocaust. Ironically, in one of the articles attacking Gibson's Christ movie, most of the Jews interviewed were children of survivors of the Holocaust.

A most palpable and surprising instance of Jewish survival in the heart of Nazi Germany, was that of the wealthy and illustrious Viennese family of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. One could be justified in thinking that, because of their prominence, the Wittgensteins would have been among the first of Hitler's Jewish victims, yet they survived on the strength of an Aryan certification. Wittgenstein himself, considered one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers, who was in England during the war, never condemned Hitler or Nazism.

The impression of an exclusively Jewish Holocaust comes from various circumstances. The Pale was an area of dense Jewish settlement, dating from the Middle Ages (1000-1100), possibly earlier (if the Turkic Khazars did indeed convert to Judaism and became sedentarized), around a geographic axis from Vilnius to Lviv but overlapping extensively into Poland and Russia. When Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia partitioned Poland in 1939, most of The Pale remained on the communist side.

Jewish undercounting and the killing of the Jewish poor

More than an anti-Semite, Stalin was a cynic. His best chum was Lazar Kaganovich, a former Jewish cobbler, and much of the NKVD was staffed by Jews. The notion that communist and Stalinist state terrorism was the doing of Russian Jews is not entirely without basis. The greatest Soviet state terrorist, after Stalin and Lenin, was Trotsky. There is not the slightest evidence that Jews suffered under Stalin any more than the rest of Russians. The Jewish migration during the latter years of the USSR was mostly of agnostic Jews who claimed they were tyrannized by not being allowed to eat matzah on Fridays. Many must have been kicking themselves at the sight of the Jewish super-billionaires that sprouted in Russia in the 1990s.

The first wave of mass killings of Jews during World War II began with the defeat of Poland. Operation Barbarossa, or the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, quickly occupied the Pale and unleashed the second and more murderous wave of killings, also the one which engulfed as many non-Jewish victims as Jews. The only particularity of the killing of Jews was that it represented a much higher proportion of the Jewish population than that of the other groups the Nazis wanted to exterminate; and if one counts communists as a social set apart, even this claim is moot, for no communist survived long in German clutches. Poles were dying at a higher rate than before. The Gypsies had probably been mostly rounded up, if not killed, another reason for the non-particularity of the specifically Jewish Holocaust. Nevertheless, the Nazis wasted the Pale in a way they could not do with Poles and Russians because of their numbers.

The anti-anti-Semitic sequestration of the Holocaust as solely the near total extinction of European Jewry is partially based on the Jews' own tendency to undercount themselves. Undercounting is a result of trying to blend in. Undercounting went on strongly in America, strikingly in a basically Jewish city like New York. Gordon is as English a surname as you'll find. It originally meant a bald hill. In Brooklyn there are hundreds of Gordons, all Jewish, which seems to indicate a kind of balancing act in which probably Polish or Russian Jews masked their identity yet did so in such a glaring way as to make it unmistakable.

However much undercounting you do of pre-World War II Jewish populations in Europe, it is indisputable that the great extermination camps--Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka--were built to kill Jews. With the exception of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most capacious of the lot, all were located in Poland, and four of these in the Lublin area, in the heart of the Pale. An expert estimate is that the minimum number of victims in these six camps was just over 3,000,000. The standard six-million figure for the Jewish Holocaust is a gross estimate of a top limit. It probably is an instance of overcounting. Comparing the facts for eastern Europe with the over-all picture (admittedly speculative) of the "Jewish Holocaust", one cannot but cautiously express the misgiving that it was mostly poor Jews, those who remained in the ghettoes of the Pale after countless of their co-religionists emigrated to America, who bore the brunt of Nazi genocide.

But anyway you look at it, the Jewish people, rich, middle-class, or poor, was the object of horrendous persecution and mass murder during World War II. In this sense no one can begrudge anti-anti-Semitism its prejudices. But the issue cannot rest here, because anti-anti-Semitic dogmas have generated, and still generate, pernicious political fall out.

Israel is a fact of real life. To hope or wish for the destruction of Israel is not as reprehensible as just plainly unrealistic and stupid. Arguably, Israel is on the whole the most de-stabilizing international influence since its inception in 1948-49. Whether Israel would have come into being if Hitler had not been in power in Germany before, it is impossible to say for certain. It provokes a queasy feeling to say so, but Israel is a reactive byproduct of Nazism. Zionism even had its own version of a Nazi in the brilliant, hate-mongering Vladimir Jabotinsky, the very distant prototype of the somewhat less extremist Ariel Sharon. Jabotinsky never wielded power, which might have had a braking effect on his brazen anti-Arabism. Jabotinsky rebelled against the starry-eyed, possibly hypocritical, Zionist view that Jews and Arabs could get along. Herzl might have said that any Jewish homeland would do, in Patagonia or in Siberia, say, but he probably did not mean it.

Anti-anti-Semitism as a morally bankrupt ideology

The eviction of Arabs by Jews in Palestine is not a singular historical phenomenon. In the aggregate of history, peoples have evicted or imposed themselves on other peoples time and again, too many times to count. In the 20th century alone, Turks expelled Greeks from western Anatolia and Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was born in Salonika, a city from where all Turks were expelled by Greeks. Kemal created a country where he himself had not been born. After World War II, the ancient German provinces of Silesia, Prussia, and Pomerania became totally or mostly Polish. (It must be mentioned that Prussia comes from the Borussians, a Baltic people the Germans more or less did away with in the Middle Ages.) Lithuania's outlet to the Baltic is Klaipeda, formerly German Memel. Besides, Israel did not evict all Arabs and even today one sixth of the population of Israel is composed of Arabs.

But no matter how many justifications one can find for anti-anti-Semitism, it remains an ideology that pretends to have moral rights on the Holocaust and that uses these "rights" for unfair and harmful political ends and even for monetary gain, which is the ultimate denial of any moral authority deriving from the Holocaust. Zionism as a set of political beliefs ceased to be valid once its goal, Israel, had been achieved. It got a boost from the Holocaust, but it was not engendered by anything even remotely resembling the Holocaust.

In a general and trivial sense, anti-anti-Semitism comes down to the rejection of any criticism, sometimes even the mention itself, of Jews. In a specific and body-count sense, it is the reflex rejection of any critique of Israel and its policies, and, in the present time, of the Israeli de facto partition of the West Bank.

Just as the Holocaust has been used in the last ten years or so for lawyers, mainly Jewish, to make millions upon millions of dollars while assuming the upright stance that they are imparting moral lessons to the world, so Israel and its unconditional supporters (by no means all Jews) have never had qualms about using the Nazi slaughter of Jews to justify Israel's abominable treatment of Palestinians and the stomping on accords and negotiations to accommodate rights Israel has taken by main force from Palestinians. Anti-anti-Semitism is to blow away the Oslo accords and pretend that they never existed and to call Palestinian resistance "terrorism" and Israeli terrorism the "right of self-defence".

In shibboleth-loving America, the phrase political correctness had a vogue, still is occasionally used, but mostly it is now considered trite and passé. In its prime, political correctness was much used to castigate the emphasis on empowering minorities, notably as in cultural studies. With their fame for brilliance in general--I once talked to an Israeli taxi-driver in New York excusing himself for being a taxi-driver--Jews always have figured among the opponents of higher-education quotas. The first challenger of a minority-preferment university program was a rejected Jewish applicant, who had his obviously empathetic Jewish attorney.

Now, quotas may or may not be good, and some of its greatest foes are successful blacks, but political correctness has always been around in the post-war USA in the form of anti-anti-Semitism. Because of the power of anti-anti-Semitism no one dared to put on it the political-correctness tag, which was imbued with superciliousness and mockery. Anti-anti-Semitism had the super-clout to escape from the disdain showered on political correctness even though it was itself the essence of political correctness. But it gets worse.

Because of the specifically Jewish Holocaust, anti-Semitism is reputed to embody the acme of anti-racism. Legal and illegal discriminatory racism has been perhaps the greatest historical crime committed by American society within itself. Orthodox Judaism, with its dogma about the maternal transmission of Jewishness, is no less racist, theoretically, than the obtuse and pathetically ignorant Nazi Aryan dogma. The greatest hypocrisy of anti-anti-Semitism is that it would immediately shout "racism" and "anti-Semitism" while standing foursquare for the right of Jews to be as racist as they please.

Most of the foibles of anti-anti-Semitism are harmless. But as long as Israel continues to invade the rights of Palestinians and as long as America backs Israel to the hilt, anti-anti-Semitism is going to be the theoretical arm of the greatest sabotage of peace in the world today, very likely the originary cause of 9/11 and surely of the endless and unwinnable American war on terror.