April 12, 2024

In Brief: Swastikas Are Progressive Now

Vandalizing synagogues with swastikas is good, leftists argue.

Democrats and the Left have a growing problem with Israel, and it’s beginning to look a little bit like the old leftists in Nazi Germany.

Journalist Daniel Greenfield has the goods:

After Hamas supporters vandalized a synagogue with a swastika, leftist cheered this prototypical Nazi act as a progressive commitment to human rights.

“A swastika clearly has a deep and painful history for the people in our community, it’s a symbol of hatred and death,” Rabbi Ethan Witkovsky of Temple Beth El said.

However Malcolm Harris, a former Occupy Wall Street activist and author of ‘Palo Alto’ and other books published through Hachette, explained that swastikas were progressive now.

“Israel’s genocide has literally reversed the meaning of a swastika on a synagogue from a Nazi threat to a condemnation of genocide,” Harris, who also writes for The Nation and Wired, argued.

Harris claims that he viewed vandalizing a synagogue with a swastika as “an anti-zionist condemnation of Israeli genocide.” And if vandalizing synagogues with swastikas, the ultimate symbol of Nazi behavior is only “anti-Zionist”, not antisemitic, then there really is no difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and between leftist anti-Zionists and Nazi antisemites.

He points to other examples from America, the UK, and Belgium, where swastikas were used and excused.

Islamist and leftist movements who defend Hamas and its mass murder of Jews on Oct 7 could hardly object to the swastika which is a mere symbol. What’s worse, burning entire families alive, raping women and holding them hostage, or drawing a few lines on a wall?

Once the Left had accepted the legitimacy of Hamas atrocities as “resistance”, all that was left was redefining the swastika as a righteous repudiation of Jews and Israel.

The “reversal” of the National Socialist swastika from a symbol of the worst kind of evil to a progressive symbol is itself a symbol of the mainstreaming of antisemitism on the Left.

Greenfield adds a warning:

Jews tend to be the canaries in the coal mine. Fanatics and totalitarian movements may start with the Jews, but they never end there. The Jews are just a convenient inciting incident.

He concludes:

The progressive swastika is a symbol of death for Jews and for everyone else.

Read the whole thing here.

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