When Sen. Lieberman appeared as a candidate in 2000, there was of course a rash of anti-semitic statements against him on the internet. These overwhelmingly came from people who are not associated in any way with liberals, “neoleft” etc.
And yet, the knuckle-dragging “right” was not responsible for Lieberman’s “ousting” from his political party.
I don’t know what anti-semites are like in Europe. I do know that some of the more “knuckle-dragging” overt anti-semitic groups in the U.S. are anything but “rightists” in the sense of being true political conservatives. They are much more like “national socialists”, with very statist and redistributionist underpinnings to their rather confused goals. Their membership tends to be composed of the undereducated underclass; people whose economic condition, they believe, can only be improved by looting someone else who, they hold, has acquired wealth without deserving it as much as they see themselves as “deserving” it. Methods, of course, differ.
I don’t know who, exactly, is responsible for any anti-Jewish violence in the places named above. The only “Kristallnacht” I have ever seen personally, occurred when I lived in a racially-changing neighborhood in a large city. The local version of the Black Panthers did go on an organized campaign to drive Jewish merchants out of the neighborhood. And, yes, part of it was throwing bricks through shop windows in the middle of the night, followed by looting. For a time then, Jewish shops all had boarded-up or bricked-up windows or had those “cages” hastily installed. Then the Jewish merchants all left. There was a kind of “residential hotel”, a nice one, in the neighborhood, largely tenanted by elderly Jews. It, too, was harrassed, and they all moved out. Again, it was not about Judaism, per se. It was not even about race, exactly. It was about the perpetrating organization’s drive to replace those Jewish merchants and residents with its own partisans. And they got it done, too. As a non-Jewish white who very obviously owned nothing worth having, I was tolerated. The “perps” were quite open about their goals, and the local liberal media not only didn’t raise cain about it, they “understood”. The perps were anything but members of the “knuckle dragging right” we associate with the neoKKK, Neonazis, etc. That sentiment I saw reflected nationally when a reference to “Hymietown” was not only not resoundly condemned; the utterer remained an honored member of the left wing.
Again, I really don’t think the truly scary kind (because it’s effective) of American antisemitism has anything to do with Judaism as such. It has to do with the goals of particular groups, which can vary. Right now, the elitist left and the “knuckle dragging right” have much in common, though their objectives are not exactly the same. But then, those who see themselves as economically oppressed by someone else are often the agents, witting or unwitting, of statist, totalitarian-minded elites.
“Left” and “Right” are not very good terms for the groups in the U.S. “Neocons” and “Neoleft” are only imprecisely descriptive of conglomerations of individuals whose ideas and goals overlap. The “neonazi” types are neither one, being more like “gangs”, which may well ally themselves with truly political groups from time to time. On the far fringes, there is little difference between the Aryan Brotherhood, for example, and the Black P. Stone Nation or MS-13. There is a racial overlay to all, but racism really isn’t what they’re about.
I don’t believe some of the dispensationalist interpretations can be dismissed out of hand. I know there are some Catholics who say (for example) that there is no Scriptural significance or prophetic fulfillment to the creation of the modern State of Israel in 1948, but frankly, hearing them say that makes me think of discussions with Protestants over the Eucharist: “When Jesus said ‘This is My Body’, He didn’t mean THA-A-T!”
