I wrote a blog earlier this year suggesting that anti-Semitism is a disease that destroys the brain of the anti-Semite or the culture of anti-Semitic peoples. As I’ve churned this idea around in my head I now find it more appropriate to think of anti-Semitism as a poison. When people accept anti-Semitism they are drinking a poison that leaves their brains dysfunctional.
For Arabs and Hitler era Germans, blaming the Jews for all their problems and accepting no responsibility for anything creates a dysfunctional society. You can hardly consider yourself a true Arab if you don’t blame the Mossad and the CIA for all your problems.
I’ve seen it happen to one of my old friends, Fran Peavey, who became increasingly anti-Semitic as her lefty pacifism became more anti-Israel. The rest of her work became confused and ineffective in parallel.
Of course, some anti-Semitism is to be expected with a pacifist. The Holocaust is the towering granite mountain of evidence that pacifism is nonsense. The Jews surviving in Israel, in the middle of 100 million hate filled Arabs, by building a great military, is a second Himalayan mountain of evidence against pacifism. The Jews are living and dead proof that pacifism is fantasy. Ipso: pacificists readily become anti-Semities.