Coming of age in the early 70s and to the present I never comprehended why Jews in particular were targeted for hate over the centuries. I can kind of see in medieval Europe, for example, that Jewish traditions and customs were alien to the feudal culture and its inherent fear of the poorly understood. This difference was useful for the ruling classes in making Jews a common enemy to control the ignorant populous. Since then we experienced the Enlightenment, and in theory we came to realize thunder and lightening were not the actions of angry gods. Nevertheless, there is always a significant number of humans who are weak and cowardly and need to have an easy explanation for their misapprehensions and failures, and "It's the Jews" can be pretty handy.

Hatred of Jews has been a feature of what is called the extreme right: there really was a guy named Hitler, but the right wing white supremacist mentality hasn't aged well and the aphorism- the demand for white supremacists far outweighs the supply- is correct. For the most part today's right wing extremists, where they exist, are loser internet dwellers. I queried AI about the number of “active participant/adherent” people in actual white supremacist groups- the KKK, American Nazis, and others- with the rough estimate being under 10,000. but the specter of them has served the left well over the decades for both fundraising and vote getting. We might recall the Biden administration repeatedly informed us that white supremacy “is the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland.” For many of the weak and cowardly..and gullible...that was sufficient motivation to demonstrate their moral goodness by proxy: slogan chanting, donations to progressive groups, and voting Democrat. The odious, and currently under indictment, Southern Poverty Law Center, raised over $200 million in 2024, largely based on its claim to counter "white supremacists." There is an irony here, because it's likely they used $3 million to fund groups like the KKK. Their "endowment" is around $800 million (with millions held in foreign banks), so $3 million isn't much: an investment to keep white supremacy alive, therefore maintaining the inflow of cash.

The narrative was comforting: It's the Jews! was said to be the exclusive purview of right wing extremists. But the the dynamic changed as globalist elites, especially in the EU and the UK, got in to kind of a competition to prove how diverse and inclusive they were. The means for this was to open their borders and wave in whoever showed up; geographically this included lots of people from Northern Africa and the Middle East, numbering in the millions in the past 15-20 years. Predictably this included huge numbers of Muslims, and of them huge numbers were young adult males. The reality is, while many Muslims are happy to live their faiths and respect the beliefs of others, Islamic scripture, law, and doctrine is not Jew friendly. Historically and to the present grudging tolerance of Jews was often the best to be hoped for (today Jews account for about 0% of the population of the 10 largest Muslim countries).

Perhaps the EU and UK elite held a fantasy that their millions of Muslim "asylum seekers" would enthusiastically embrace the values of their adopted countries, but this hasn't come to realization, to say the least. For example, "Free Palestine" and anti-Israel protests have attracted hundreds of thousands of Muslims. Jews have been admonished to hide their identities, sometimes being blamed for inciting others to attack them. While assaults on Jews by Muslims are given lip-service as a bad thing by authorities, in general they have doubled-down on their policies. Opposition to unfettered immigration is said to come from the usual bogeymen- right wing extremists- and is met with mockery, derision, and curtailment of speech. In the UK, 1,000s have been arrested for saying things that displeased the government, what in the US would be protected by the 1st Amendment. In the UK simply flying the traditional national flags have been deemed "tools of hate" by the government in its "social cohesion strategy." Wherever privileged progressives are in charge there is an abundance of weakness and cowardice. It really doesn't matter if many or even most Muslims are live and let live types, those who obtain power are overwhelmingly hate-filled bigots, and have cowed the Western establishment elites into subservience. They are willing to subvert centuries of tradition and the hard-earned ideals of justice, equality, and even decency to appease the interlopers (euphemistically, "asylum seekers") at the expense of their citizen constituencies. Of many untoward consequences, one is that immigrants who do want to assimilate are viewed with suspicion.

We tend to look a "right" and "left" as a line, with the greater the extreme the greater the separation, but this is glaringly inaccurate. Rather it's a circular function, where at the greatest extreme they converge, along with their ignorance, hatred, bigotry, and perniciousness. A faddish neologism of the left is “intersectionality,” where all the oppressed masses of the world find commonality at the boot of Western culture. The true intersectionality is where “antifa” merges with fascism, socialism-communism with national socialism (Nazism) and, of course, they all exclaim “It’s the Jews!:”a bizarre incarnation of the “Coexist” slogan.

One things people at either extreme seek out is mobs; these provide a comforting anonymity and release from the inhibitions of humaneness. We've witnessed lots of mobs in recent years, on the streets of London, Paris, and college campuses in the US, for example. But you’ve got to feel sorry for the extreme right in a way: the left can quickly mobilize protesters in the 1,000s, and even hundreds of thousands, whereas the infamous Unite the Right rally in 2017 (“the largest public gathering of white supremacists in a generation”), mustered a paltry 500, and the counter protesters had four times more.