Who hates the Jews now?

Spectator, The, Nov 29, 2003 by Strauss, Mark

The new anti-Semitism is being spread by both the Right and the Left, says Mark Strauss, and it is at its most virulent among globophobes

They're at it again: the Jewish conspiracy to take over the world is back in session. The former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad's recent claim that the modern-day Elders of Zion 'now rule the world by proxy' not only garnered loud applause at the summit of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), but most likely earned silent nods of approval worldwide. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the oldest hatred has been making a global comeback, culminating in 2002 with the highest number of anti-Semitic attacks in 12 years. According to public opinion polls conducted that same year, 28 per cent of people in Austria think that Jews are more willing than others to use 'shady practices' to get what they want, while in the United Kingdom 21 per cent believe that Jews have too much power in the business world.

Why now? Rising hostility toward Israel is certainly a significant factor. And when the United States attacked Iraq, anti-Semitism climbed on the bandwagon of the anti-war movement and rising anti-Americanism. How else to explain a war against a country that had never attacked the United States, it was argued, if not for a cabal of Jewish neocon advisers who had hood-winked the US President into conquering Iraq to safeguard Israel? It is no coincidence that last month's Eurobarometer poll ranked the United States just behind Israel as the greatest threat to world peace.

But another clement of the new anti-Semitism, which has little to do with Middle East politics, is often overlooked: the backlash against globalisation. The timeframe for this resurgence of Judaeophobia corresponds with the intensification of international links that has been taking place since the 1990s. As public anxiety has grown over lost jobs, shaky economies, and political and social upheaval, Third World leaders, right-wing demagogues and left-wing activists are seeking solace in conspiracy theories. And in their search for the hidden hand that guides the new world order, modern anxieties are merging with old hatreds and the myths on which they rest.

Throughout the Middle East, where economic growth remains stagnant everywhere but Israel, Islamists and secular nationalists alike portray globalisation as the latest in a series of US-Zionist plots to subjugate the Arab world to Western economic control and erase its cultural borders. Elsewhere in the developing world where, as the 1997 Asian crisis revealed, damaging financial contagion can sweep through nations in a matter of weeks, resentment against the perceived power of international financial institutions has created familiar scapegoats. The 19th century had its Rothschilds; the current era has had Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin at the US Treasury Department, James Wolfensohn at the World Bank and Stanley Fischer at the International Monetary Fund. The spokesman for the Jamaat-i-Islami political party in Pakistan complained, 'Most anything bad that happens, prices going up, whatever, this can usually be attributed to the IMF and the World Bank, which are synonymous with the United States. And who controls the United States? The Jews do.'

Echoes of that view are heard in the West, where anxiety over globalisation provides opportunities for far-Right political parties to exploit the fears of those who see their way of life threatened by migrants from the developing world, and who believe their sovereignty is besieged by regional trade pacts and monetary union. In Russia and Eastern Europe, ultra-nationalists and communist stalwarts have formed an ideological alliance against foreign investors and multinational corporations, identifying Jews as the capitalist carpetbaggers sacking their national heritage.

In their war against globalisation, the far Right has also found common cause with the new Left. Matt Hale, the leader of the US white supremacist World Church of the Creator, praised the 1999 anti-globalisation protesters in Seattle for shutting down 'talks of the Jew World Order'. A bizarre ideological turf war has broken out, as antiglobalisation activists find themselves fighting a two-front battle, simultaneously protesting against the WTO, IMF and World Bank, while organising impromptu counter-protests against far-Right extremists who gate-crash their rallies.

Although the anti-globalisation movement isn't inherently anti-Semitic, it shouldn't be surprised that it attracts the likes of Matt Hale. The movement enables anti-Semitism by peddling conspiracy theories. In its eyes, globalisation is less a process than a plot hatched behind closed doors by a handful of unaccountable bureaucrats and corporations. Underlying the movement's humanistic goals of universal social justice is a current of fcar-mongering - the IMF, the WTO, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment are portrayed not just as exploiters of the developing world, but as supranational instruments to undermine our sovereignty.