The Secret Passion of the New Antisemitism : Azure - Ideas for the Jewish Nation
What distinguishes antisemitic propaganda from legitimate criticism, then, is the stubborn insistence on holding Israel to standards from which other countries are exempt, and the demand that Jews be denied a right to which other peoples are entitled, even obligated, to exercise themselves. Nevertheless, one cannot dismiss the new antisemitism as a modern version of the same old hatred; in some sense, after all, postmodern universalism deeply identifies with what the “Jew” was supposed to stand for. And it is precisely this identification that leads, we will see, to the widespread denunciation of the Jews so common today.
What is there to say other than “plus ça change, plus ça reste la mȇme chose”? Ultimately, the “Jew” has been objectified and stripped of humanity in the varied interests of religion, secular philosophy, modern economic theory and plain old scapegoating. As we know from painful history both modern and ancient, it is easier to hate and destroy an abstract, dehumanized conceptual “Jew” than a co-citizen or neighbour of the Jewish faith.
