An Open Letter to Sid Ryan, President, CUPE Ontario
Dear Mr. Ryan:
I notice that at the latest anti-Israel "protest" in Toronto, the one where "protesters" were heard to shout ‘Hitler didn’t do a good job’ and ‘Jewish children, you are going to f*cking die’, you once again mounted your high horse, draped yourself in a cloak of self-righteous concern for Palestinians, and insisted with all the passion of Richard Nixon avowing "I am not a crook" that you are not an "anti-Semite"-i.e., that you do not "hate Jews."
I am not the least bit sorry to have to tell you, sir, that you are in the grip of a serious misapprehension.
Your ability to delude yourself arises, largely, I think, from confusion over the term "anti-Semitism." As an all-purpose description for "Jew-hate," it is an anachronism that has the scent of stale history about it. As such, it captures all the Jew-hate from the past, but enables those whose hatred of Jews stems from their detestation of Israel, the Jewish state, to wriggle out of the charge that they, too, are haters.
For the sake of clarity, perhaps it is time to retire "anti-Semitism," or, at least, to use it only to refer to a specific phase of historical Jew-hatred. You see, Mr. Ryan, in the grand panorama of world history, there have been three distinct periods, or phases, of Jew-hatred (Judenhass):
Phase I-anti-Judaism-was the irrational hatred of Jews because of their religion. That phase, in Europe at least, brought us deranged theories about Jews poisoning wells, doing unspeakable things to Communion wafers, and murdering young Christian lads in order to use their blood as the moistening agent in Passover matzahs. It also brought rampaging locals to wreak vengeance on "the Jews" by murdering them and/or forcing them to find somewhere else to live.
Phase II-anti-Semitism-was the irrational hatred of Jews because of their "race". This hatred appeared in the late 19th Century, the product of the then-trendy junk science of Eugenics. Jews were said to belong to one of the lower "races," a claim that Adolf Hitler embraced when he sought to improve the human gene pool by ridding the world of Jews. He almost succeeded as, harvesting centuries of Phase I Jew-hatred, he initiated the murder of two thirds of Europe’s Jews, a crime that has come to be known as
the Holocaust.
Phase III-anti-Zionism-is the Judenhass of today, the obsessive and irrational hatred of Israel, the Jewish state that arose from the ashes of the Holocaust, and which was supposed to forestall its recurrence. It
hasn’t worked out that way. Instead, Israel has become the "Jew" of nations, the cynosure of an all-consuming obsession shared by Muslims and Leftists who long for Israel’s demise. For far too long, Phase III Jew-haters have managed to evade the charge that they are Jew-haters-Arabs, for example, by
saying that, as Semites, they cannot possibly be "anti-Semitic"; the broader category by claiming that all they seek is "justice" for Palestinians, i.e. an end to "the Occupation" and the "reclamation" of their "stolen" land.
So the next time, Mr. Ryan, you find yourself encouraging CUPE members to support a boycott of Israeli academics and only of Israeli academics (suggested question for your witch hunt: "Are you now or have you ever been a Zionist?"), or in the midst of a sea of anti-Israel "protesters," some of whom are calling for the completion of Hitler’s Final Solution, perhaps you could look at it like this: you are a Phase III Jew-hater, a participant in the continuation-the culmination-of what historians have dubbed "the longest
hatred."
