Antisemitism: Supremacists united against Jews

In the United States of America, the resurgence of antisemitism against North American Jews was noticed since the beginning of the 20th century, in the 1910s, due to defamations against the North American Jewish community, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) was created. In the 1910s, the Jewish community in the United States of America was severely attacked by rampant antisemitism, discrimination was open and explicit. Various informational supports were used to defame Jews, such as mass communication represented by newspapers, through books and even through art with plays portraying Jews with pejorative stereotypes.

Faced with this context of deepening fanaticism and intolerance, Chicago lawyer Sigmund Livingston presented a creative and strategic idea, which was to create an organization with the mission of combating or at least reducing the antisemitic phenomenon and ideology against the people. Jew with a view to ensuring justice and fair treatment for all, the ADL is founded with the clear understanding that the fight against a specific form of prejudice could not be successful without combating all forms of prejudice and persecution. In that context within space and time within American territory at the beginning of the 20th decade, Henry Ford was one of the influential exponents who used his power in the media to promote and disseminate antisemitism through his newspaper, we know that newspapers has the power to shape public opinion.

The ADL found that in the year 2022, cases of antisemitism increased by about 36% compared to the previous year 2021, a significant increase, being the highest percentage since the ADL began tracking acts of antisemitism in the year 1979. Nowadays, after the incident that killed hundreds of Israelis with the Hamas terrorist attack, instead of the international community worrying about the biggest terrorist attack of the millennium with around 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians cowardly killed, a wave of antisemitism against the Jews began, Zionism and the State of Israel, whose bloodthirsty and cowardly attack is second only to the attack on September 11, 2001 in New York in the United States of America, which left almost 3,000 dead in total, around 2,606 in New York alone in the United States of America.

At the start of Hamas’ conflict against Israel, the ADL also recorded a nearly 1,000 percent increase in the daily average of violent messages mentioning Jews and Israel on supremacist channels. After the period from October 7th to December 7th of 2023, the ADL registered a greater increase, jumping to a total of 2,031 antisemitic incidents, against 465 incidents during the same period of 2022, percentage wise the increase represented 337% per hundred year after year. These range from incidents of physical aggression to incidents of vandalism, incidents of verbal or written harassment, demonstrations with antisemitic rhetoric, expressions of support for terrorism against the State of Israel and/or anti-Zionism.

White supremacist movements are already widely known, widely publicized, and exposed, but they are very active, officially represented by the Ku Klux Klan. However, new racist groups have emerged in the North American territory composed of racist and antisemitic blacks, such as Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI) as well as black public figures who deny the historical phenomena of antisemitism, such as the inquisition, progroms, concentration camps and the Holocaust to which Jews, among other minority social segments and marginalized by society under their respective dictatorial totalitarian regimes, including the German Nazi regime in the 20th century. It is worth highlighting black racists such as Whoopi Goldberg and black rapper Kanye West, who disseminated antisemitic messages in communication and media channels, and are public personalities with millions of fans around them. In the world, and that if anything is said against the human rights of any social group, it can have catastrophic effects, especially if they are ethnic-racial and poor minorities.

American actress Whoopi Goldberg insisted that the Holocaust was not a question of race, that it was a simple conflict between human subgroups of the white race of the human species, as if all people with non-black skin belonged to the same group ethno-religious, or as if all indigenous peoples belong to a single ethnicity, religion, culture, etc. in relation to the hegemonic societies to which they are subjected, Whoopi Goldberg disregarded the Jewish issue that has ancestry in its Semitic patriarchs, the Jewish people, whose first patriarch Jewish was Abraham, a people of Semitic origin, a Semitic religion and with an ancestral land from a historical, archaeological, anthropological and religious Jewish point of view, with its own customs, this generated a national Jewish revolt in the United States of America against racist comments by Whoopi Goldberg.

The black American singer Kanye West, a billionaire and successful rapper, who has a fantastic discography and several musical partnerships, was one of the new revelations of racism against Jews. According to the ADL confirming anti-Semitic comments from Kanye West, known as Ye, Kayne West stated that real Jews are not the current official Jews, real Jews are actually black, saying that when he refers to Jews he is referring to the 12 lost tribes of Judah. ​​The belief that black people, and not today’s Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahim Jews, Falasha Jews, Sephardic Jews, among others, are not the true Jews, accused of being impostors by black supremacists, and that black people are the true descendants of the biblical Israelites, is made clear in Kayne West’s speeches, which is a hodgepodge of supremacism against the Jews, and is well within the Black Hebrew Israelite black supremacist ideology, the same thing that followers of the Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI) movement defend . BHI adherents reject Judaism, many follow other non-Jewish beliefs, and are not equal to black Jews or commonly known as Jews of color within the official Jewish community, but refer to themselves as “true Jews”, This shows us that black supremacists themselves individually or in black supremacist groups are acting in an articulated and interactive way with other supremacist ideologies in a similarly anti-Semitic discursive way, however at the same time they say that they are the true Jews, they contradictorily reject real official Judaism. Kanye West stated several other things, that Jews control the media, finances, the market, the music industry, among other absurdities against the Jewish population.

Kanye West’s comments, Ye, were welcomed by several radical anti-Semitic groups. During an Oct. 16 sermon for the Nation of Islam’s annual Holy Day of Atonement celebration, Student Minister Ishmael Muhammad referenced Ye’s recent comments. Extremist sects such as the Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI) also praised Ye, Kayne West is suspected of having links to all these extremist groups due to his public positions and slogans and lobbies that he publicized and that helped spread his teachings to more people. The extent of influence over extremist groups was clear, and perhaps these black anti-Semitic groups and personalities also influenced him in a symbiotic way, however what we noticed are groups that support him, including White Lives Matter and the Goyim Defense League, which They took advantage of Ye’s comments to advance their own agendas and inspire new smear propaganda campaigns against Jews. The speeches of these anti-Semitic black artists are the voices of these extremist groups, as well as other social groups with anti-Semitic tendencies, but in a veiled way, such as on university campuses, in the media and political movements and parties.

Within this black racist supremacist conception, they deny the Jewish identity of Jews of all existing ethnicities, from Jews with lighter complexions to Jews with darker complexions among other Jewish ethnic variants, who therefore must disregard what the Jewish people suffered. , such as the inquisition, the progromms, the holocaust and post-holocaust anti-Semitism with an added element to persecute the Jews, Jewish Zionism and Israel. In line with ADL (2022), Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI), also called “Black Hebrews” or “Hebrew Israelites,” believe that Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are descendants of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

It should be noted that not all BHI adherents include Native American populations in the Twelve Tribes, but all agree that conventionally accepted whites or Jews are not members of the tribes. This is a departure from the dominant understanding of the Twelve Tribes as referring to the twelve sons of Jacob, each representing a different genealogical line of the Jewish population. Given the above, we come to the conclusion that these are extremist, radical and anti-Semitic movements and groups, which discriminate against those Jewish peoples from Europe, the Middle East and even Asia, even ignoring the existence of black Jews, known as Jews of color and Ethiopian Jews, Falasha Jews. The strictly racially based, categorically racist guidelines that they consider the “true Jews” espoused by the Black Hebrew Israelites (BHI), these divided the tribes of Israel in their ideological manner as follows: Judah = American blacks; Benjamin = West Indian Blacks; Levi = Haitians; Ephraim = Puerto Ricans; Menasseh = Cubans; Simeon = Dominicans; Zebulon = Guatemala to Panama Mayans; Gad = Native American Indians; Reuben = Seminole Indians; Asher = Columbia to Uruguay Incas; Issachar = Mexican Aztecs; Naphtali = Argentina / Chile.

Black Hebrew Israelites are not Jews and Black Jews are not the same as Black Hebrew Israelites. Black Jews and Jews of color are genuine members of the Jewish faith. Black Hebrew Israelites specifically identify with Biblical Israelites and consider Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to be false religions. Many BHI professors claim that Jews and other whites forced blacks to join other religions. Extremist factions believe that white Jews are perpetuating identity theft.

We cannot say that in all countries right-wing parties have anti-Semitic subgroups, but there are in different parts of the world and in academic institutions such as university campuses, they are permeated by anti-Semites, in the cases of countries like Brazil much of the anti-Semitism is expressed by radical party branches of the “anachronistically” neoliberal capitalist socialist left, also composed of unions, teachers indoctrinating anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist ideologies, these groups dominate various means of communication to influence the working class that Jews are to blame for the ills of capitalism, and that Jews oppress the oppressed classes and other peoples around the planet.

The most illustrious cases of anti-Semitism by the current Brazilian government with a neoliberal left leaning, whose political positions are occupied by members of the PT Workers’ Party, after the terrorist attack that Hamas committed against Israel on October 7, 2023, the speech of professor and politician José Genoíno Neto, a PT politician, said that there should be a boycott of Jewish companies and a boycott of Israeli companies, Brazilian journalist Breno Altman, who called Jews rats among other barbarities against the Jewish people and the State of Israel, defended following José Genoino Neto’s speeches, several ministers from President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s government declared support for José Genoino Neto, as the Minister of Labor and Employment, Luiz Marinho, stated in his speech that he would like to pay “tribute and solidarity” to Genoino and Breno Altman, as well as the minister of agrarian development and agriculture, Paulo Teixeira, who also expressed solidarity with the speeches of José Genoino Neto and Breno Altman, concomitantly with lawyer and politician Gleisi Hoffmann from the same party as the president of Brazil , President Lula, expressed solidarity with Breno Altman’s pejorative speeches regarding Jews and Israel.

All these incidents in the political scene are being reflected and disseminated on Brazilian university campuses, which are strongly or totally dominated by the employee unions of the universities to which they are linked, and by the social movements in which the unions, radical left-wing political parties that are openly anti-Zionist, who despise the suffering that Israelis and Jews around the world suffer in this exhausting moment of the Hamas-Israel war, in which many Jewish and Israeli lives are being wasted, just as Palestinian lives are taken by Islamic fundamentalist groups and regional terrorists who target the defamation and destruction of the Jews and the State of Israel. Current racism in Brazil, as we have observed, is selective, almost “exclusively” against Jews. The Brazilian Israeli Confederation (CONIB) reacted, taking legal action to combat hate speech against the Jewish people, and created for the first time in the history of Brazil a platform to combat hate speech against Jews, called COMBATE AO ANTISSEMITISMO: https://combateaoantissemitismo.org.br/

The past of the Iberian Peninsula, between the period 1492 and 1496, and the developments during the centuries that imposed legislation for the conversion of Jews to Christianity, if they did not do so they would be expelled from Portugal and Spain, but in addition to the expulsion of a portion of the Jewish community Sephardic who maintained Judaism, there was also an emigration of Jews who converted to Christianity, but most of whom kept Judaism secret, the so-called bnei anusim or crypto-Jews to the great Iberian colonial empire where the Catholic church was present and institutionalized the inquisition throughout the territory of the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America and the lands and islands that it dominated. The history of the Jewish people was recorded in different regions of the world, including in the archives of the Inquisition, which are a small sample of what was officially documented historically of the multitude of Jews forcibly converted to Christianity, the history of the Jewish people was marked by turbulence, oscillating through peaceful periods, as well as constant persecutions, massacres and expulsions, which is why there are so many Jews scattered around the world after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Roman Empire.

We cannot ignore the fact that in the diaspora Jews could only openly and officially profess Judaism, and only survived at times when the nations to which they were subjected were tolerant, multicultural, pluralistic and fully democratic, unlike partially democratic societies. democratic, or selectively democratic, it is worth remembering that not every society with these characteristics ceases to be selective at all, as we see historically there are moments and peaks of authoritarianism, dictatorships, extremism, radicalism and racial supremacism, whether white or black, to attack the community Jewish, a large part of these supremacist social groups dominate the media, schools, ideologies, public and social spaces, permeate university campuses and academia, political movements and spaces, militant social movements of other minorities, artistic and cultural spaces as the most effective means to generate, propagate and disseminate hatred against Jews in a repetitive way, reaching its climax or apex, from veiled and camouflaged discrimination to an organized and structured form of hate speeches constructed and ready to be channeled throughout public and private social institutions against true national minorities.

The Jews recently suffered a surprise, aggressive, massacring and violent attack that claimed the lives of around 1,200 Israeli lives, the Jews still suffer from anti-Semitism and any attack that the State of Israel suffers, and defends itself from aggressions by enemy terrorist groups, the international community largely blames Israel for its military actions in favor of the dismantling of terrorist groups that operate in Israel to maintain the State of Israel and the Jewish people existing in this territory, not only Hamas commits atrocities against Israel, as well as Hezbollah and other fundamentalist, extremist and supremacist organizations against Jews and Israel. According to Michell Bard (2023) it was shown on the Jewish website (The Jewish Virtual Library) that between the years 2012 and 2020, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted 180 related resolutions against Israel, compared to 45 for the rest of the world. Israel’s Ambassador to the UN noted in October 2021 that since its creation 15 years earlier, the council had condemned Israel 95 times, compared to 142 resolutions against all other countries in the world combined.

The disproportionality against Israel reveals a composition of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist national leaders, something that needs to be resolved, this is the great challenge, how to dilute the hatred of Israel and the Jewish people in addition to repairing moral, material and existential damages; but above all, how to solve, through resolutions and legal regulations, scientifically based measures that combat the disproportionality of repetitive convictions and abuses that act as a threat to a people and a country, which was created because its people were the target of millennia-old persecution whose peak was the inquisition and finally the holocaust, whose population is small and which generally represent around 0.01% to 3% of the population in each diaspora nation.

Jews within the modern and contemporary era, especially Jews from the Reform Jewish movements, pluralist Jews, humanist Jews, renewal Jews, transdenominational Jews, secular Jews, liberal Jews, Reconstructionist Jews and unaffiliated Jews, have never promoted and even less supported the gender inequality, racial inequality, religious intolerance, religious fundamentalism, imposition of belief or disbelief, imposition of conservative ideologies that may deprive individual freedoms with a view to social inclusion, but also the inclusion of minorities and socially discriminated and stigmatized groups in their own religion, in accordance with democratic, enlightenment, progressive, multiculturalist and pluralist principles, especially in countries with more solid and longer-standing democracies.

Jews cannot be attacked to be forced to abdicate their authentic Jewish faith because of defamers and lying extremists, who spread fake news against Jews, the ancestors of Jews were Jews, descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the branch of 12 tribes of Israel from which the Jews are descendants and keep Judaism alive, regardless of the denomination or Jewish movement, all Jews have a Jewish background from ancient Judaism or more traditionalist ancestors, who inhabited Eretz Israel.