Originally Posted by
BCR
Anti-semitism on the left is largely regarding Israeli policy. Were I a Jew in America, I would find the new rabid strain of anti-semitism on the right more concerning. The anti-semitism on the right was always more centered around religious differences. I think of Pat Buchanan or Billy Graham’s taped conversations with Nixon as typical right anti-semitism. As a Jew, that type of anti-semitism wouldn’t concern me because those people always had a strong belief on protecting Israel, if only for their own belief system.
Now, the GOP is becoming more secular. Their acceptance of Trump is exhibit 1-100. A bunch of religious conservatives voting for Trump given his brazen immorality would have never happened 15 years earlier. I was with a girl out in rural Pennsylvania a few weeks ago for a funeral. A friend of hers is married to this dude who owned a motorcycle shop that was having a cookout that day for a local charity. So we get there and I’m getting introduced to all these biker dudes, and I’m guessing 75% of these dudes had a swastika tattoo. And their wives. And customers walking in dressed well weren’t repulsed by this whatsoever, and I’m kind of looking at this scene and thinking when did this happen?
You’d usually see that if you were with a bunch of dudes who had did heavy time in prison, but that wasn’t the case with this group. These were just typical rural guys having a charity cookout, had all these kids around, were solid dudes by all appearances and had jobs and weren’t convicts. These guys are 100% on your side of the political fence. These guys aren’t posting on the internet like FPS or any of the conservative anti-Semitic posters here. The problem is much larger than you realize. When I was dating that girl out in the country, over the course of a single year, I saw an increasing rise of FPS-style posts popping up on her Facebook all the time. Things that would have been verboten in culture a decade ago were being commented on by soccer moms and other seemingly normal people.
As a Jew, I’d be concerned about the intersection of the left’s anti-Israel feelings regarding policy and tolerance towards Islam meeting this new right whose feelings on Jews are more similar to standard racism. As a non-Jew, I find it alarming because I have seen more anti-semitism in the past five years than in the previous 40. I don’t think it’s at critical mass yet, but it’s growing rapidly. Trump, personally, I don’t believe is anti-Semitic in any real way, but he goes for the easiest target when he’s angry to rile his supporters and has these rallies railing against the media, which is largely Jewish, and these guys in rural America are getting a very specific message out of it.
Almost all tragic outcomes in history occur when there is a confluence of different factors that bring together disparate people and cause them to focus their angst on a certain common target. History has a way of repeating itself, and when you see one side disliking a group in a theoretical policy based sense, and their opposition hating the same group on a more primal level, it can lead to really bad outcomes.
The issues in the UK are more likely simply a numbers game. They have a hell of a lot of Muslims. Here, this is something different. Jews hold tremendous wealth and power so they might be able to turn the tide on it, but you are in bed politically with a group that is much larger than you realize. I’m not saying the left offers you a better choice as that presents a different problem, but I’m not going to be shocked if you start to feel an anti-semitism when you travel domestically that kind of shocks you if you find yourself in rural America. I’m noticing these type of people adding Jews to their rants against blacks and Mexicans.
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