Socialism, Antisemitism and Attacking Schoolgirls on a Bus

Antisemitism is so embedded in our institutions so when Jewish girls are attacked on their school bus just for being Jews nobody in those institutions gives much of a damn.

Nobody can doubt that, across the developed world, we have seen an increase in overt antisemitism. Much of this has worn the fig leaf of ‘Free Palestine’ and is positioned with the careful use of the term ‘Zionist’ giving the impression that people aren’t angry with Jews because they are Jews but rather that the ire is directed at Israel.

“JFS pupils have spoken of their horror after their school bus was pelted with rocks and rubbish by teenagers from another school who shouted “f*ck Israel” at them.

Two of the buses used by the school were attacked by a group of around ten teenagers from another school as they made a stop in Edgware, north London.

Four teenagers also jumped onto one of the buses, swore at the JFS children and filmed them before getting out and throwing things at the bus.”

This gives the lie to claims that this is just about Israel or Zionism. The children on the bus are targeted simply because they are Jewish and the children from that other school have been told that Jews are bad. This is clearly antisemitism and many seeing the events will assume that this is just schoolkids and that those attacking are Muslims or of Muslim heritage.

But there’s a deeper problem. The report above comes from the Jewish Chronicle and this racist attack on a school bus has gone more or less unreported outside the Jewish press and social media. This suggests that either such attacks are so commonplace that they no longer constitute news or else that a racist attack on Jewish children does not merit attention. In both cases what is revealing is that our nation is culturally antisemitic, not because we have a large Muslim population but because those who command the media agenda believe that, as David Baddiel wrote, Jews don’t count.

Antisemitism has been around a long time. People make a distinction between ancient and contemporary antisemitism but it is hard to distinguish, except in the choice of language, between the two forms. Shouting about Israel committing genocide seems modern because it uses contemporary language but this is little different from the old blood libel made even worse because the word genocide was coined by a Jewish writer trying to come to terms with the horror of the holocaust. Jewish people are the eternal other, a small community built on learning and persecuted out of ignorance, convenience and the corrupting idea Jews are responsible for the worst excesses of capitalism. Hating Jews is the racism acceptable to the left and, until the Nazis took this hate to its logical conclusion, the right.

Paul Johnson, in ‘A History of the Jews’, talks about the observation, usually associated with Lenin but first used by August Bebel, that “antisemitism is the socialism of fools”. Johnson remarks on the essential antisemitism behind this seemingly opposite claim:

“Behind this revealing epigram was the crude argument: we all know that Jewish money-men, who never soil their hands with toil, exploit the poor workers and peasants. But only a fool blames the Jews alone. The mature man, the socialist, has grasped the point that the Jews are only symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease is the religion of money, and its modern form is capitalism.”

The Jews are all capitalists but not all capitalists are Jews. Because, for reasons within the dogma of Christianity rather than the ideas of Judaism, Jews came to dominate the world of banking, the framing of Jews as the progenitors of capitalism is a simple step. After all without lending at interest there would be a lot less capitalism (and we would all be poorer) meaning that it becomes a very short step to conclude that the ending of capitalism requires that Jews stop being Jews. Or as Marx wrote:

“In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism…In emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.”

It quickly becomes clear that, because the roots of socialism lie in people’s dislike of the landlord, the moneylender and the merchant, they also lie in antisemitism since these were the businesses most associated with Jews. We see the persistence of this trope in those parts of modern antisemitism that point to Jewish (or Zionist) control of the media, sponsorship of politicians, and economic power. When Bradford Council, some years ago, debated the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. During the debate, the former Liberal Democrat MP, David Ward, in a speech opposing adoption, asked of the Jewish heritage proposer of the motion, “who is pulling the strings here?” Ward positioned himself as an ‘expert’ on antisemitism because he had done a masters degree on the subject. But his research, such as it was, rejected the IHRA definition because it recognises that criticising Israel qua Israel (as opposed, for example, to criticising the actions of Israel’s government) is antisemitic.

Of course, Judaism is not as Marx would have it, “huckstering”, a worldly cult of money, but an ancient and comforting faith treasured down the centuries. The jealous god of Israel is the god of Abraham and Moses not a pile of gold or a contract to lend money at interest. Yet this idea, that capitalism was created by others - the Jews - and used to exploit the rest of us - not Jews - is the central idea in the birth of what became modern socialism. The truth, of course, is that we created capitalism and the Jews that were part of us succeeded because we’d placed ourselves previously in the position where we were unable to compete in the market for providing capital:

“I hate him for he is a Christian,

But more, for that in low simplicity

He lends out money gratis and brings down

The rate of usance here with us in Venice.”

The words Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Jewish businessman Shylock reveal how the antisemitism founded on Jews as business people was firmly fixed in our culture hundreds of years before the great economic revolution of the 18th and 19th century. It should not surprise us therefore that modern antisemites attack businesses owned (or so they believe) by Jews:

“CCTV shows three masked men arrived at the office at 4:30am armed with hammers and a fire extinguisher filled with red paint. They very quickly smashed 12 ground floor windows and sprayed red paint everywhere, including inside the lobby. They then began to graffiti the word ‘Palestine’ on the wall but ran off when they were approached. The police are absolutely clear this is a hate crime, helped by the fact that the Palestinian action group have claimed responsibility.”

In the minds of many on the left, capitalism and Judaism are, as Marx insisted, twins. Instead of seeing that Jewish success reflects Judaism’s reverence for learning and hard work, these disciples of Marx choose instead to see exploitation, corruption and what, in old times, we’d call sin. Those images of the grasping, ugly, corrupting Jew remain with us. Not just in physical form but in the minds of millions. Much is simply ignorant presumption based on those old myths but this is supplemented by the repeated claims that Israel is uniquely evil, that it controls US and British foreign policy and that the reason for this is Jewish money.

Western socialists find it easy, because of those old myths about Jews, to believe that a Jewish state will be inherently a capitalist state so therefore created for reasons of exploitation and control. And because so many of socialism’s creators, most notably Marx himself, were antisemites the corpus of socialist literature valorises that antisemitism. Jews were the incarnation of commerce and, as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, another noted 19th century socialist still revered by students today, put it, the Jews “...have rendered the bourgeoisie, high and low, similar to them…”, they were and “unsociable race, obstinate, infernal…the enemy of mankind…we should send this race back to Asia or exterminate it.”

The roots of European socialism are, without question, antisemitic. This doesn’t mean that all socialists are antisemitic but it does help explain the ease with which people who consider themselves ‘of the left’ adopt antisemitic myths, lies and misinformation. If that picture of the world-controlling Jew is there in your mind believing that Israel, as a Jewish majority state, operates in bad faith becomes so much easier.

The left’s antisemitism isn’t just derived from the racism of socialism’s creators but the old myths about Jews, money and business act to support socialists in their hatred of Israel. And, of course, the secretive, hidden, string-pulling Jew is also there in people’s minds to remind them that the people running Israel aren’t simply trying (not always righteously) to defend their nation but are controlling people, money and policy to accrue power over the world. Antisemitism is so embedded in our institutions - media, government, police - that those in charge can no longer see it. So when little girls are attacked on their school bus just for being Jews nobody in those institutions gives much of a damn.