The radical Left's rise to power in Chile shows just how things have changed when it comes to hatred of Israel on the world stage. It should serve as a warning sign for North America as well. The winner in the recent presidential election in Chile is the leader of the radical Left, Gabriel Boric, whereas the loser is José Antonio Kast, a conservative right-winger who is the son of a former SS officer. At first glance, they are total opposites. But if you take a closer look, when it comes to this far away South American country, the two share quite a few commonalities. What is Nazism today? It's important to once and for all realize that German Nazism has transformed over the years, and it is no longer just part of the Right. The fact that the Palestinian issue has become so central in the newly elected Chilean president's platform should be of great concern. It's not just pro-Palestinianism, it's mainly anti-Israelism.
Boric believes Israel is perpetrating genocide. Just like the Holocaust deniers in Tehran, who want to replicate the liquidation of the Jewish people, his statements on a so-called genocide Israel is carrying out are a reflection of the ideological desire to destroy Israel. The conventional wisdom is that this stance is a product of the massive presence of Arabs and Palestinians in Chile (in the hundreds of thousands). This may have been a factor, but it is not the source of Boric's anti-Israeliness.
The anti-Israeli sentiment in the South American Left – which spread from Argentina to other Latin American countries – comes from the unique fusion of Marxism and Nazism. The linchpin is the Tacuara Nationalist Movement – a fascist movement formed in the 1950s. The South American old Left, which produced figures such as Salvador Allende – the President of Chile who was toppled by Augusto Pinochet – traced its ideology to the communists and the Spanish Civil War. The radical Left from our era may have given up the terror campaign of the 1960s and later decades, but it links its ideological stance to those fascist movements in the 1950s, which later split in the 1960s and became part of the radical Left.
Both the communists and the neo-Nazis had a keen desire to destroy the capitalist system in Argentina and dismantle its democratic institutions in order to obtain power, a report issued by the US Congress said in 1962. The report was written following a spate of violent attacks against Jews in Argentina after the hanging of Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann – a prominent Tacuara figure – in Israel
A journalist who met two of the movement's leaders heard that they are not antisemites but rather oppose having Argentinians act on behalf of a foreign country. "They believe that most of the Jews living here are Zionists and hence have dual loyalties. They said that Eichmann … carried out his duties as a German soldier and he was executed for crimes that he was not guilty of."
They also said, "We are the enemies of Judaism. In Argentina, the Jews are the servants of the Israeli imperialism who violated our sovereignty when they abducted Eichmann." This was many years before the anti-Israeli sentiment became part of the radical Left's agenda.
In the early 1960s, Tacuara created a link between its radical worldview to Third-Worldism. In particular, they connected Peronism to the Arab world and shouted slogans like fans at a soccer match: "Nasser, Peron, and the Third Position." In 1962, the founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization Ahmad Shukeiri, who served as the Saudi ambassador to the UN, declared in the UN General Assembly that he was saluting the movement. He even submitted a draft resolution that would endorse it. A year earlier, having seen the potential in the propaganda front, he was the first to accuse Israel of imposing an apartheid system on Israeli Arabs. This is a special nexus of Nazism, left-wing revolutionary ideology, and Third Worldism, particularly in Egypt, Algeria, and the Palestinians.
The important part is that the movement was the one that introduced the concept of urban guerilla warfare as early as the 1950s. The use of terrorism and the radical ideology influenced – through Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and other channels – the radical left-wing revolutionaries in the United States. The radical Right and radical Left found a common ground through anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and anti-Israeliness. Just like Boric and the newly elected president of Peru, Pedro Castillo, the US could see a radical left-wing president take power.
Who gave the headline?
The New Yorker may still run stories on orchids, but it has been rapidly going down the path of anti-Israeliness.
The declining journalistic standards have been plaguing many media outlets due to the radicalization of the Left in America, including high-quality newspapers and journals. The New York Times and The New Yorker are the biggest names. The New Yorker led the charge against Donald Trump's alleged ties with Russia and was at the forefront in the attempt to besmirch Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated to be an associated justice and was accused of sexual misconduct.
Now the magazine has a story on Trump's supposed antisemitism, using quotes from an interview he gave Barak Ravid. In Israel, the Pavlovian reaction to the interview focused on his badmouthing of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but in the US the media tried to take some of Trump's comments on US Jews to create a story on antisemitism. "Is Donald Trump an Anti-Semite?," The New Yorker's headline asked.
Those who reinforce Trump's supposed view are those who regularly get quoted in the magazine: Avishai Margalit, Moshe Halbertal, and others. Trump is quoted as saying that "people in this country that are Jewish no longer love Israel…I'll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country."
For New Yorker Editor David Remnick and heads of Jewish organizations such statements smack of antisemitism. It would be more interesting to look at the magazine's coverage of antisemitism, which can be described as selective blindness. You could expect Israeli intellectuals who know the US world of academia and the Left to say something about the antisemitic wave in the US.
Many Jewish students have turned their gaze down on campus and won't identify themselves as Jewish, especially when it comes to organizing Jewish (or God forbid pro-Israeli) events. There are countless reports on this trend, but I also heard about it firsthand from Pitzer College President Melvin Oliver. Two years ago. Oliver told me that there will be some point at which Jews would feel threatened.
The violence that erupted against Jews during Operation Guardian of the Walls has been extensively covered. A Reut Institute report highlighted a new phenomenon of deleting Jewish presence. Jews are categorized as white. This is very much in line with the contemporary trends in the US. There is a radical, pro-Islamic, and antisemitic faction that is taking over the Democratic Party. There are many instances in which Jews feel they have to run for the hills, including the deadly violence against Jews in Brooklyn and New York City. In certain areas near Los Angeles and New York, Jewish property was vandalized by leftwing activists.
These incidents are not the product of right-wing antisemitism but left-wing wokeness that has attacked Israel incessantly to create hate groups in which antisemitism is their byproduct. The BDS is a successful production line in this industry. But in places where the New Yorker is read, including among liberal Jews, Israel is no longer being described positively.
The New Yorker encapsulates just how Israel has become a toxic subject. In this sense, Trump is right. Although you cannot paint all US Jews with a broad brush, the so-called "Jewry of the New York Times" doesn't like Israel. They like the Israeli intellectuals that the New Yorker occasionally interviews, in a bad context. And worse than that – the readers know what to expect. If he or she actually does like Israel they will not go on and read Remnick's latest columns.
Those who love cinema can now watch a movie that is a love letter to the New Yorker. The movie is called "The French Dispatch" and it shows the magazine for what it used to be. This is an esoteric work of art but it gives us a good glimpse into the level of professionalism and accuracy that the magazine upheld, and the topics that it typically covered. One edition was practically all about orchids. The magazine still has special features that are a notch above everyone else when it comes to original content and accuracy. For example, the recent article about pedophilia in Germany's adoption system. But such high-quality journalism is not that common anymore. As the recent coverage of Trump's statement suggests, the once-prestigious magazine had become anything but that.
Canceling Rowling
The most Orwellian episode on the Left is the way it has tried to cancel JK Rowling in the very world of fiction she has created. The latest exhibit: Quidditch associations are going to distance themselves from the author of Harry Potter and they plan to change the name of the game as well.
Why do they want to cancel her? Because she made comments that were perceived to be transphobic. It's not just the game; they want to delete her name from the entire Harry Potter franchise. Even the Harry Potter actors who started their career as children and owe their success to her works have started to distance themselves from Rowling and have stopped mentioning her.
Rowling has come out in defense of a woman who had been fired for criticizing transgenders. Firing someone for one statement is scary; the attempts to cancel her are just as scary. The author later said transgenders who called themselves women and raped women should not be called women in police records. She wants to protect women, this is what it is all about.
In the new Stalinist food chain, transgenders are considered to be more miserable than women, so women are not allowed to protect themselves from the denial of their rights when transgender people and LGBTQ members come out against them. George Orwell could not have described the Rowling row in better terms. As a billionaire author, it's going to be hard to cancel her entirely. But the attitude toward her is creating an environment of terror.
