Normalised anti-Semitism, even on the left

If only it were just the neo-Nazis. If only it were just Bulgaria, where Nazi thugs are threatening young Jews holed up in a hotel. If only they were the usual die-hard anti-Semites, with swastikas instead of brains and empty, shaved heads in the neo-Nazi style. If only. But anti-Semitism, hatred of Jews, disguised as anti-Zionism, has scaled the fence that kept it confined within the tainted sphere of the unacceptable and the unpresentable. In the deathly silence of a democratic and progressive culture that is increasingly vulnerable to the lure of a radicalised extremism no longer openly opposed, anti-Semitism – or rather, anti-Semitic violence – is spreading unchecked even on the left. Left-wing Jews are aware of this, and suffer terribly as a result. But the indifference of the bulk of democratic culture, of a degraded academic world and of a media system adrift, means that no one is even listening to them any more. In the space of a few years, anti-Semitic fury has become the norm. There is no longer any reaction. It is no longer fought against. Not even a card of solidarity is sent (or if it is, it is done half-heartedly, amidst yawns) to Liliana Segre, a child survivor of Auschwitz, when she is bullied by Francesca Albanese, who – armed with the honours foolishly bestowed upon her by left-wing local councils – goes so far as to deny the rapes of Jewish women in the hell of 7 October. It’s all business as usual. Normalised anti-Semitism. If only it were just the neo-Nazis in Sofia.

One of the latest examples of this normalised madness. A group of lecturers nostalgic for Stalinism arrogantly proclaim: whoever is to take up the post of Vice-Chancellor must compulsorily sign a declaration of anti-Zionist faith (anti-Semitic – it’s all the same now) and demonstrate their loyalty to anti-Zionist orthodoxy through an explicit act of passionate ‘opposition to genocide and Israel’s policy of constant aggression’, and, among other things, it is peremptorily demanded that they make “clear and binding policy commitments” to the ostracism of the Jewish state. But the professors at La Sapienza do not stop at these dogmas of anti-Zionist propaganda. No, they go far beyond that; and these very people—who, by virtue of their recruitment process and role, ought to have passed a test of cultural competence and absorbed at least a smattering of history from some book, the rudiments of a basic historical understanding if only out of respect for the poor students forced to attend these lectures of ignorance—instead ramble on about the alleged genocide as “the result of policies implemented in Palestine for 78 years”.

Or rather, it is not that they are rambling; they are simply echoing the most hackneyed claim of anti-Jewish fundamentalist Islamism, which equates the very birth of the State of Israel in 1948 (’78 years’ ago, to be precise) with the decisive stage of a genocidal project that is said to characterise Zionism by its very nature. That is to say, according to this narrative – which is now also plaguing Italian universities – Holocaust survivors such as Aharon Appelfeld, who fought against Arab countries on the side of the nascent State of Israel, are said to have transformed themselves ipso facto from victims of genocide into perpetrators of another genocide, within the space of just a few years. It is astonishing that the horrendous anti-Semitic undertones of this historical falsehood, propagated by the inquisitors at La Sapienza, are being ignored across the entire democratic and progressive cultural sphere. It is astonishing that not even the most authoritative press has shown the slightest hint of concern regarding this disproportionate attack on academic freedom, in which a candidate for Rector of one of Italy’s once-prestigious universities is being compelled to comply with the dictates of a handful of intolerant individuals. It is astonishing that the left can so easily fall back into the errors of the past. Except that in the past, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and Luciano Lama’s CGIL attempted (unsuccessfully) to stem the frenzied extremism that had taken hold with arrogance and violence at the University of Rome. Today, however, the institutional forces of the left – and a CGIL now in the wake of extremist groups that were once kept on the fringes – have become so subservient that they fail to see the anti-Semitic undertones that agitate and taint the diktat of the lecturers’ collective. The normalisation of anti-Semitism, in short.

Everything is normal, everything is acceptable, everything has been downplayed as a politically and culturally irrelevant phenomenon.

It is astonishing, after all, that in recent months we have waited in vain for a single word, just one word of regret from the PD secretary, Elly Schlein, because at the once-prestigious Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, a member of her party, Emanuele Fiano, was prevented from speaking – his only ‘crime’ being that he is a ‘Zionist’, in short, a Jew. What is more, Elly Schlein herself refused to accompany Fiano to a symbolic reparations ceremony at Ca’ Foscari alongside the Minister for Universities, Bernini, and did not even comment on the call by young members of the PD in Bergamo to ban the ‘Zionist’ Fiano – evidence, alas, of anti-Jewish contamination within a party whose majority, incredibly, refused to sign a bipartisan parliamentary resolution combating anti-Semitism.

And now we’ve even got blacklists, calls for people to snitch on Israelis – and even non-Israeli Jews who are ‘Zionists’. A campaign that bears an ever-closer resemblance to the plot of Ettore Scola’s film "Unfair Competition", when, in 1938, ‘pure-blooded’ Italians were required to boycott Jewish shops as part of the collective enforcement of fascism’s racial laws. This is no rhetorical exaggeration; it is exactly as described. On some platforms, in the run-up to the holiday season, a call has appeared urging people to fill in a questionnaire en masse, designed to report online and comprehensively record the presence of Israeli citizens or Jews in hotels, accommodation facilities and commercial establishments: a hunt for Jews on holiday. The aim of the questionnaire, amplified and circulated via numerous chat groups, was in fact to create a ‘map of Zionist tourism’. That’s right: a ‘mapping’ – a detailed list of Jews going on holiday – with hoteliers and other owners of accommodation facilities, zealous militants of the anti-Semitic cause, denouncing to the anti-Zionist Gauleiter on duty the unspeakable and sprawling tourist invasion by the Jewish lobby. Incidentally, the promoters of the initiative, ignorant as they are, do not even realise (though one need only read Giorgio Bassani’s "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis") that one of the injustices enshrined in the racial laws was the strict prohibition on Jews visiting holiday resorts. Yet the blacklists have attracted only lukewarm and distracted attention; democratic culture has remained silent. And the democratic culture remained silent, complicit, indifferent, and cynically acquiescent to the prevailing conventional wisdom that portrays the Jewish state as a bloodthirsty monster – the only bloodthirsty monster in the world – in the face of the exclusion (which was only reversed very belatedly) of LGBTQ+ Jews from Rome’s Gay Pride. Pro-Palestinian gay activists ought to know that Israel is the only state in the Middle East where it is permitted to march in a Gay Pride parade, yet they pretend not to know this. They ought to know that homosexuals in the Islamic countries surrounding Israel are persecuted, massacred and killed, and that homosexuals in Gaza have either been thrown from rooftops to the jubilation of Hamas thugs or are forced to flee and seek refuge precisely in Israel’s tolerant democracy, yet they pretend not to know. Democratic culture, once a bulwark against anti-Semitic excesses, turns a blind eye and a deaf ear. The bulwark has crumbled; the exclusion of Jews from Gay Pride does not provoke outrage. The blacklists targeting Jewish holidaymakers (not in Bulgaria, but in Italy) do not provoke outrage. The anti-Semitic diktat issued by lecturers at La Sapienza does not provoke outrage. Everything has become normal, without any barriers, without any opposition. The taboo surrounding anti-Semitism has been shattered, and the sewage flows undisturbed, with no civilised channel to contain it.

It is a long story, spanning almost three years now, in which the scourge of anti-Semitism and the momentous defeat of democratic and progressive culture have gradually swelled out of all proportion, to the point of normalising what was unimaginable before the Hamas pogrom. Even in the days immediately following 7 October – when, chronologically speaking, the ‘genocide’ had not yet taken place – the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin was threatened; in Barcelona, a hotel was attacked for the grave offence of being owned by a Jew; and at the ‘progressive’ Stanford University, an anti-Semitic professor had forced a Jewish student to remove his kippah and stand facing the wall so that he might personally experience the humiliation endured by Palestinians oppressed by Israel. Just a few months later, in early 2024, a Jewish student from Turin revealed that in Turin “almost nine out of ten Jewish young people have changed their habits”, “they have stopped attending university lectures, no longer wear a kippah in public places, do not use their first name and surname if they are typically Jewish, and do not use objects or clothing that could be linked to their identity”, and one of them was even “spat on because he was wearing a necklace with the Star of David”. An episode of blatant and abhorrent anti-Semitism, which is becoming normalised, yet has been completely ignored by the media and the political world. In other times, perhaps shielded by a veil of hypocrisy that still confined anti-Jewish hatred to the realm of the unspeakable, we would have expected vehement reactions from the highest institutions in defence of Italian citizens of the Jewish faith forced to hide, to blend in and to avoid attending the most turbulent university lecture theatres for fear of becoming targets of gangs of bullies who cannot even bear the sight of a Star of David.

And yet, not even a single statement saying something along the lines of: "Dear fellow Jewish citizens, you will be safe in Italy and we will not allow troublemakers to jeopardise your safety and cultural freedom". Nothing at all. Nothing from the left. Nothing from the right. Nothing from the government. Nothing from the Quirinale. The normalisation of anti-Semitism – even when disguised as anti-Zionism or, in the height of hypocrisy, as ‘criticism of Israel’s murderous government’ – is epitomised by this resigned silence. In the newspapers, the incident was dismissed as a marginal demonstration by a small group of insignificant ‘radicals’. And, after all, those same newspapers – and the political world, which sets its agenda according to the rhythms and formats dictated by the media, and above all by social media, now incapable even of defending itself against the grotesque – accepted as fact, as if it were a normal brawl between drunken football hooligans, the horrific hunt for Jews that broke out in Amsterdam in the autumn of 2024 following a match between the city’s team and Maccabi Tel Aviv. There are harrowing images showing how individual Israeli supporters were beaten up in the streets by radical Islamist groups as ‘dirty Jews’, identified by complicit taxi drivers who pointed out the Jews’ movements, and by complicit hotel managers who tipped off the gangs as to which Jewish guests to track down and beat up ten against one before they entered the hotel. ‘‘Clashes between ultras’ was the media’s talking point, and all because Israeli supporters had dared to boo the display of a Palestinian flag. Not a whisper of the vicious hunt for Jews. Not even a question mark. Not even the slightest critical distance from the newspapers that thunder daily against the dominance of fake news. There it is: the lie was in Amsterdam.

Naturally, people were still resorting to the dismissive rhetoric that shifts all the blame for the rise in anti-Semitism onto the shrill, discordant voices of marginal, extreme groups, the preserve of what are still small minority fringes. Then this final defensive barrier was torn apart until it vanished. During the march in Milan on 25 April, this time the fanatics – not just the usual ‘fringes’ on whom all blame is pinned – did not confine themselves to whistling and hurling abuse at the flag of the Jewish Brigade. They went much further: hundreds upon hundreds of enraged demonstrators surrounded the Jews guilty of having founded the ‘Left for Israel’ association, pelting them with spittle and shoving them without anyone stepping in to help; some even chanted the atrocious slogan ‘you’re failed bars of soap’, a corollary and variation on the theme so dear to the most obscene form of anti-Semitism: ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job’. This is no longer merely the spew of small neo-Nazi groups. On a verbal and symbolic level, it is rather the definitive fusion between Nazi-style anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, which uses anti-imperialist rhetoric as a shield to give vent to an anti-Jewish hatred that had been barely kept in check in the decades following the Holocaust. An aberrant fusion that manifested itself in a programme hosted by a ‘democratic’ figure such as Bianca Berlinguer, who proved incapable of challenging a second-rate comedian brimming with resentment over the string of failures that has marked his mediocre career. Namely Enzo Iacchetti, who, without the slightest semblance of a proper debate, took the liberty of rambling on about the infamous "Jewish lobby" that controls "the world and the banks" – a classic trope of Hitlerian propaganda and of anyone who has ideologically given credence to a notorious historical forgery of pre-Soviet Russian origin such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". A disconcerting association which, however, has provoked nothing but half-hearted and reluctant protests from the left, which in theory ought to be at the forefront of denouncing the crimes of anti-Semitism. But by now, unfortunately, this is only in theory. Not a single word of strong condemnation of the pro-Pal fanatics of the ‘failed soap bars’, nor of solidarity with those who were prevented from presenting unorthodox books. Never a word, as if it were normal. Perhaps because it has, in fact, become normal.

As the Bulgarian case demonstrates, it cannot be said with certainty that Italy holds an unchallenged monopoly on the venomous anti-Semitic rhetoric prevalent amongst the so-called ‘good’ people, so-called ‘good’ people such as the flotilla participants who, without the slightest shame, shed tears and tore their clothes during the funeral of the Iranian dictator Khamenei, just a few weeks after the horrific massacre of dissidents in Tehran: here too, the alliance with the puppet-masters of Hamas has been definitively sealed. Recently, the singer Boy George, guilty of having performed a song, "We Will Dance Again", dedicated to the young Israelis who died in the carnage at the Nova Festival on 7 October 2023, was savaged by anti-Semitic comments appearing on social media, so violent as to prompt the cowering platform that publishes his work to delete, under the weight of online lynching, the account of one of its artists, leaving him at the mercy of the mob that cannot tolerate the memory of the Jews murdered during the greatest pogrom since the Holocaust. In France, as Giulio Meotti has recounted in these pages, a publisher decided not to publish a book on the Holocaust by the historian Rafael Medoff because the author had refused to include a statement taking a stand against Israel, as had been imperiously demanded of him. And again in France, in Grenoble, a frenzied crowd interrupted a concert a few weeks ago with shouts and bottles thrown onto the stage to drive out DJ Barbara Butch, a lesbian activist and queen of the queer world, the star of one of the most controversial tableaux – an LGBTQ+ parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper – in which, during the opening ceremony of the 2024 French Olympics, she appeared wearing a crown, surrounded by drag queens. She is a much-loved figure in France’s progressive circles, but when certain quarters – particularly those associated with Mélenchon-style anti-Semitic extremism – discovered that she was Jewish and had no intention of toeing the pro-Palestinian line, she was branded a pariah. Now, every public stage is and will remain off-limits to her. Meanwhile, Mélenchon is preparing to stand as a candidate in the upcoming presidential elections after receiving a standing ovation from his supporters because, at a rally, he chose to pronounce the name ‘Epstein’ – not the correct ‘Epstin’ – but the shouted ‘Epstain’ (with an ‘a’) in front of a frenzied crowd, to emphasise the Jewish identity of a scoundrel who died in prison under very mysterious circumstances. It should not be forgotten that these same supporters drove the Jewish socialist Raphaël Glucksmann out of a united left-wing demonstration, with Mélenchon’s thugs chasing him whilst shouting vile insults against the ‘horrible Zionist’. In France, as in Italy, the reactions have been very mild and conventional. The normalisation of anti-Semitism knows no bounds.

After all, the climate of appalling cultural regression that now places left-wing anti-Zionism and classic anti-Semitism on the same level of moral indignity has even normalised the demonisation and dehumanisation of Jews and their state, already targeted by accusations of ‘genocide’ adopted by a left that is now utterly devoid of historical memory. In a newspaper that is supposed to be a symbol of authority, the New York Times, the lie about dogs allegedly trained by the Israeli armed forces to rape Palestinian detainees was published as if it were true. A ‘left-wing’ writer in Italy is spreading the tall tale that the Israelis allowed dogs to devour the tiny bodies of children killed in Gaza. An influencer rants to her followers about Israeli human organ factories supplied by Palestinians killed in acts of genocide. It’s normal. All of it is frighteningly normal.