The Oldest Hatred, the West’s Latest Test
Following the October 2nd terrorist attack in Manchester, England, Gerfried Ambrosch examines the ideological convergence between the Western left and Islamist movements—and calls for renewed resolve in confronting anti-Semitism in all of its forms.
In a 2010 address, the late Christopher Hitchens warned:
"Because antisemitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny and fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone but as the common enemy of humanity and civilization and has to be fought against very tenaciously for that reason—most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic jihad."
On Yom Kippur 2025—the holiest day in the Jewish calendar and two years after Hamas’s brutal massacre of some 1,200 men, women, and children in Israel—a Muslim man carried out a terrorist attack on a Manchester synagogue, leaving two dead. “This is the day we hoped we would never see, but which, deep down, we knew would come,” said Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis. “For so long we have witnessed an unrelenting wave of Jew hatred on our streets, on campuses, on social media and elsewhere—this is the tragic result.”
Since October 7th, 2023, anti-Semitism has surged across the West. Many on the political left, in particular, have aligned themselves with Islamists in demonizing and vilifying the world’s only Jewish-majority country—and the only democracy in the Middle East—as a “genocidal apartheid state.” Calls for a “global intifada” at countless mass protests have once again left Jews in Western countries feeling exposed and vulnerable. Self-described progressives have, in effect, made themselves “useful idiots”—to use a phrase often attributed to Lenin—for the world’s Islamofascists, through their embrace of anti-Zionist Palestinianism.
Timeless reading in a fleeting world.
