BENJAMIN KERSTEIN: Rise of the ‘anti-Nazi’ Nazis.
The progressive left believes that it owns anti-Nazism. Literally owns it. Anti-Nazism is progressivism’s personal property, and no one else has any right to it. As such, progressivism can wield anti-Nazism as a weapon against anyone and anything it finds distasteful with total impunity.
Today, with campus antisemites stating at every possible opportunity that their goal is a second genocide of the Jews and engaging in the racist hate crimes necessary to prove it, we are faced with an irony that is world-historical in scope: Progressives use anti-Nazism to defend people who are very much like Nazis. Progressives then go even further and claim that these people are victims of Nazism.
* * * * * * * *
The reason is that, whatever their pretensions otherwise, progressives do not own anti-Nazism. In fact, they have no claim to anti-Nazism whatsoever. Genuine anti-Nazism can only lie with those who oppose genocidal antisemitism, because if Nazism is not genocidally antisemitic, then it is not Nazism. You cannot be anti-Nazi while defending genocidal antisemites. It is impossible.
Moreover, by claiming that antisemites are somehow victims of Nazism, progressives are engaging in an act of monstrous blasphemy. They are defaming the millions of Jews who died at antisemitism’s hands and appropriating the generational trauma of those who survived.
Historically, this is par for the course. Antisemites have always been happy to appropriate whatever they wish from the Jews and then spit in our faces. But it is no less disgraceful for its great age.
This is offensive enough, but progressives dig the hole even deeper: They claim that the Jews are Nazis. This blood libel is a staple of progressive rhetoric and wildly popular among the campus antisemites. In many ways, it has become part of “legitimate” discourse in academia. Nonetheless, it is difficult to fully convey the depth of the sadism and cruelty inherent in it.
Related: The World After Gaza: turning the Holocaust against Israel.