. Another is Wistrich’s insistence, carefully documented, that anti-Semitism is not, as is conventionally believed, the sole preserve of the European nationalist Right. Actually, anti-Semitism is politically and theologically promiscuous, at home among Christians and Muslims as well as socialists, royalists, anarchists and fascists. In that regard, one of the book’s most compelling chapters concerns the anti-Semitism that prevailed in the Soviet Union, involving the domestic persecution of the Jewish community alongside a global campaign, at the UN and other forums, against what was euphemistically called “international Zionism.”"} 63:{"position":8,"content":"Many of today’s leftists would doubtless shrink away from the kinds of guttural anti-Jewish barbs so patiently documented in this book: Bakunin’s “bloodsuckers,” Marx’s “loan-mongers,” the “dirty Judases” of the Russian Narodnya Volya (People’s Will) movement, and so forth. Contemporary leftists would insist that their opposition to Zionism and Israel is based instead on anti-racism. But Wistrich debunks these semantic games. Whether they like it or not, what the advocates of an Israel boycott share with Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the belief that Israel is singularly, as Wistrich puts it, “an organic obstacle to peace and progress.”"} 64:{"position":9,"content":"Given its emphasis on the current climate, A Lethal Obsession is organized along thematic and geographical, rather than chronological, lines. There are chapters on Britain and France, on the dovetailing of anti-Semitism with anti-Americanism, and on the implications for European Jews of their continent’s various troubled models of multiculturalism. The dramatis personae of anti-Semitism’s history all make an appearance, from Wilhelm Marr in Germany (who coined the term as a positive means of political identification) to Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran."} 65:{"position

The oldest hatred in modern times

Why anti-Semitism cannot be regarded as just one more lazy, ill-thought-out bigotry.