by Jonathan Rosen at The Free Press: Twenty-three years ago, not long after the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent Americans on September 11, The New York Times Magazine asked me if I would write about antisemitism. They had noticed the explosion of Jew hatred that seemed to have ridden in on the contrails of the airplanes that jihadists had turned into weapons of mass destruction and aimed at the heart of American civilization. The editors wanted to know what I made of it.
At the time, I was grieving a national wound. The gaping pit where the Twin Towers had stood 110 stories high was still smoldering, and when the wind shifted the smoke reached me uptown. This was the worst attack on American soil since the founding of the country; I wasn’t eager to examine it with the binocular vision of double consciousness, but I’m grateful I was asked to write what I was seeing.
The piece I produced in reluctant haste is reprinted here as it appeared in the Times on November 4, 2001. There are things I would express differently now, but it captures something of the mood of that moment, along with my own astonishment at finding so much conspiratorial hatred of Jews and Israel braided into hatred of the United States, and the thinking of those who allowed themselves to believe that the United States had been punished for something Jews had done.
As the German sociologist Matthias Küntzel observed in 2002: “The legend, invented and circulated by the Hezbollah television station Al-Manar, that, following warnings from the Israeli secret service agency, the Mossad, four thousand Jews had not gone to work at the World Trade Center on September 11, reached untold millions around the world with lightning speed.” Indeed, it was a lie I encountered often writing my essay just weeks after the event.
Despite its inadequate, archaic name, antisemitism remains a useful tool for summoning aggrieved groups with disparate conspiracy theories, ideologies, and hatreds, including self-hatred, and binding them together. True, those who put it on and wield it willingly, like the Ring of Power, tend to be destroyed in the end. But the end can take a long and catastrophic time. More than 50 million people died in the Second World War.
What has renewed its potency and warped utility, and to what ends? Since September 11, the answers have become a little clearer.
There is, alas, no nutshell version, though it would only help to read “Killing in the Name,” an essay by the historian Jeffrey Herf about radical Islamism, which “seeks to benefit from the pathos of Third Worldist rhetoric,” as Herf explains, though “its ideological themes have more in common with fascism and Nazism than with Marxism-Leninism.” Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has also written with great subtlety about the interplay of Marxism, nationalism, Islamism, and antisemitism in the Arab world.
There is also Küntzel’s short book, published in 2002, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11. It was revised in 2007 with an introduction by Herf, whose own Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World is one of several indispensable books, and which has become even more relevant since October 7. The two appeared together earlier this year, along with Israeli historian Benny Morris, as part of a superb webinar “The Origins and Ideology of Hamas,” which is also a good place to start.
More here.
