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The Post-Modern, Anti-Jewish Reconfiguration of the West
(JNS) Melanie Phillips - Last week, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs published a book of essays called Israelophobia and the West: The Hijacking of Civil Discourse on Israel and How to Rescue It. The book provides a thoughtful analysis of the nexus between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, where legitimate criticism of Israel stops and demonization starts. Both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism constitute an irrational belief, akin to a cult. This is understood by French sociology professor Shmuel Trigano. In the most astute essay in the JCPA's book, he correctly says we are "entering a new age of Jew-hatred," which cannot be argued with but must instead be fought. The onslaught against Israel and Zionism, he points out, is part of a broader reconfiguration of the West. Anti-Zionism, he says, is the creature of post-modernism and its satellite orthodoxies: post-colonialism, multiculturalism and gender doctrine, all of which are involved in "deconstructing" Western society. As he writes, criminalizing the identity of the Jews as a people in the State of Israel is part of the European postmodernists' war against their own cultures and nation-states. What is driving this anti-Jewish derangement is the repudiation of the Jewish precepts at the heart of the Christian West. The writer is a columnist for The Times (UK).