The Mystification of Anti-Semitism

Updated November 19:

Commenter Lafayette Sennacherib notes that when he commented on a blog recently, laying out the various complaints that Nazis had against Jews (that the Jewish elite were aligned with international capital, while the rest contained a hotbed of seething Communism) his comment was deleted as anti-Semitic.

Let us protest this sort of thing.

What the Nazis did was really evil and fucked up, but they did have their reasons!

The Jewish line is that all anti-Semitism is "mysterious." This is what I call "the mystification of anti-Semitism." Many Jewish writings on anti-Semitism take this line, to the point where this is now our dominant "analysis" of anti-Semitism.

The Jewish line goes something like this: Anti-Semitism is crazy! It cannot be explained by any rational mechanism. There simply is no rational reason for it whatsoever. Basically, it's a form of insanity.

This analysis has the advantage for sure of letting the Jews of the hook and putting it all on the anti-Semites, but sadly enough, in life, things do have reasons. Even victimizers victimize people for various reasons.

This is of course not to defend victimizers or engage in blame the victim crap, but this analysis is useful in life.

Now suppose in life I am getting victimized a lot. I move around to different towns, and I keep on getting victimized, often for the exact same false "reasons." My victimizers are a bunch of pricks for sure, but it's incumbent on me as a rational actor to discover what it is that I am doing that is setting these idiots off (unfortunately, this been the case at various times in my life).

A proper analysis, with the assistance of a psychotherapist, helped me to understand what was driving some of the idiots who did some really fucked-up stuff to me at various times in my life. Turns out that they were not psychotic nuts, but were operating from some logical, but sick, psychological impulses. I now try to live my life so as not to provide fuel for bullies.

I feel this Jewish-led project to mystify anti-Semitism has not been helpful in terms of getting to the bottom of the phenomenon. As anti-Semitism does a lot of harm to Jews, it is important to get to the bottom of it.

Further, if there are any reasonable complaints against Jews that further anti-Semitism, it is helpful to discover these so that Jews may modify their behavior in the future in order to lessen anti-Semitic bile directed at them.

One of the projects of this blog is an empirical analysis of anti-Semitism.

That is, we will take all of the arguments, from the Philosemites to the anti-Semites, as "possibly true" and then analyze them to see if there is anything there or not. I'm not prepared to just reject all anti-Semitic accusations as nonsense, but they do need to prove their case. Likewise with the Jews and their defenders! May the best theory win.