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The New Anti-Semitism
(Wall Street Journal) Yaroslav Trofimov - When France's Yellow Vests began to protest weekly last November, it was about President Macron's decision to raise fuel taxes. Within a few months, it also started to be about the Jews. In France and other Western societies, the proliferation of new political forces that challenge the established liberal order has revived old patterns of vilifying the Jews as the embodiment of the corrupt elites supposedly responsible for society's ills. Meanwhile, unfiltered social media has pushed anti-Semitic tropes, long confined to the fringes, into the mainstream of public debate. On any given issue, conspiracy theories blaming the Jews have gained new traction. "Populist politics is not inherently anti-Semitic, conspiracy theories are not inherently anti-Semitic, but both very easily lend themselves to an anti-Semitic turn and easily become anti-Semitic," said David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Birkbeck, University of London. As anti-Semitic discourse again becomes normalized in the West, the number of incidents targeting Jews has surged in the U.S. and Europe. Until the past few years, the biggest threat came from Islamists and disaffected Muslim youths. However, the West's new wave of anti-Semitism is increasingly coming from the nativist far right, with its dreams of racial purity, and from the extreme left, which often identifies Jews with the capitalist elites it seeks to destroy and glorifies Palestinian militants.