I hope everyone enjoyed the extended Labor Day weekend. It was a pleasure to just relax and not exert to do much of anything, especially with oppressive Arizona dragging on through September! So now, continuing with the rise of anti-Jewish sentiments in 2025, I have additional comments from my ASU course studies during the early 2010s on this persistent prejudice during the World War Two era. They are also based on the Robert Wistrich book I have been referring to in previous posts during the past month. Here is what I wrote for the class discussion board then:
While the extreme antisemitism of the Nazis is well known — resulting in tragedy of horrific proportions and the Islamo-Fascists of our own era preach poisonous ideologies to rival the Nazi era of decades past, I was not aware of how propaganda of the Soviet period was much the same. Apparently it was spreading the same hatreds and conspiracy theories of international Jewry dominating the financial systems of the West (if not the world). Wistrich had also detailed this at the start of A Lethal Obsession. It was new information to me that the Soviet propaganda machine was prattling on about how the “Zionists” were determined to oversee the liquidation of national-liberation movements in the Third World as Wistrich tells it.
I was also unaware that Soviet hate ideology had gone to the length of branding the Hebrew portion of the Bible “as a book of hatred, preaching genocide; it was they who reinvented Judaism as a teaching of racial exclusion designed to justify an expanded Israeli lebensraum (living space) as Wistrich also points out. According to him, this particular brand of hate-mongering is more extreme than some of the teachings of the Arabs or Nazis.
Wistrich also stated that the predominantly Catholic countries of Spain, Hungary, and Poland rank at the top of the list of European countries still retaining the most antisemitic beliefs and stereotypes. In the cases of Hungary and Poland this would scarcely be surprising as I’ve read a great deal about many people collaborating with the occupying Nazi forces during World War Two to help round up Jews and deport them to Auschwitz, Chelmno, Treblinka, and other death camps.
Where Spain is concerned, it is likely that some of the more virulent strains of antisemitism and persistent theories of Jews having too much power in business were inflamed and expanded during the hard-core fascist regime of dictators Francisco Franco. He ruled the country with an iron fist from 1939-1975. Franco was an admirer of Adolf Hitler but did not ally himself militarily with the German Nazi regime. Spain remained technically neutral throughout the conflict. Now, looking to more recent times there is the disturbing flare-up of virulent anti-Jewish sentiment throughout the Islamic realm which was largely dormant during the Second World War.
This hatred of Jews by Muslims is used according to Wistrich’s introduction as a “guise of conspiracy theories serves the Islamists as the cement for their all-out assault on Western liberalism, capitalism, modernity, secularism, and the very idea of female emancipation.” Although it seems that Wistrich is lumping many things together, without doubt — there are a great number of Muslims who are true believers or there would not necessarily be such radical, reactionary political regimes that are so oppressive in Iran, or the persistent efforts of the Taliban to dominate Afghanistan.
Within the next couple weeks I’ll have a couple more posts to wrap up this subject, but I’ve enjoyed revisiting the subject after so long.
