Op-Ed: Europe’s Most Notorious Jew-Baiter? It’s a Tie

Ben Cohen @ JNS:

Now, if I had to pick someone from that particular field, I’d have to conclude that it’s a tie for first place.

From Hungary: step forward Zsolt Bayer, journalist, fascist apologist, a founder of the ruling Fidesz party, and a confidante of that country’s Putinesque prime minister, Viktor Orban. From Great Britain: step forward Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, darling of Islamists both Shi’a – Hezbollah – and Sunni – the Muslim Brotherhood – and literally obsessed with the claim that the Zionist movement collaborated with Adolf Hitler during the 1930s. (His obsession has lasted so long, one wag on Twitter commented that he’d devised a drinking game where he downed a shot of gin every time Livingstone mentioned Hitler, with the result that he’s now living in a dumpster.)

I get that there are others who could stake a claim to the “most notorious” title. Like French comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. Or the leaders of Greece’s neo-fascist Golden Dawn Party. Or the former British parliamentarian George Galloway. But I choose Bayer and Livingstone because together they neatly encapsulate the thematic fixations of post-war antisemitism: the undue political and economic influence of wealthy, powerful Jews, the insinuation that Jews invariably choose tribal conspiracy over national loyalty and the contention that the Jews themselves actively assisted the Nazi genocide that led to Auschwitz and Treblinka.

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