Every day I read about several, sometimes a dozen or so such incidents. A burnt or vandalized synagogue, attacks in the subway, attempts to push people under a train, a noisy demonstration in front of an oncological hospital, attacks on shops. We can see the tip of the iceberg. There are many more of these cases, and information about them is usually limited to the Jewish media. Only the most drastic ones make it to the pages of mainstream newspapers.

The antisemites found out that now it is allowed, that they are practically safe, so the need for sadism is coming out, although it is wearing a cloak of compassion. It likes to adorn itself with a keffiyah, more and more often called the hipsters' swastika.

A Polish antisemite from Canada writes to me asking me to remove the text of his letter published with his permission seven years ago. The proud antisemite has not changed his views; he claims that the quotes he gave have lost their validity.

In his letter, the author asked "about anti-Semitism in the context of truth and justice, narrowing down to its Polish specificity" (he argued that David Duke's statements were not antisemitic). In my answer, I tried to clarify this question about the "Polish specificity":

"You are asking about the specificity of Poland, about what has to happen for young Poles in a park in the capital to pour kerosene on a pram with a Jewish baby and set it on fire? (A specific case of arson of a pram with a Jewish infant in Warsaw's Saski Park in the spring of 1919.) What has to happen for a group of young men to burst into a neighbor's house and smash the heads of men, women, children and the elderly with poles? (Dozens of documented cases from the Second World War.) What has to happen for people to come up with the idea of wiring shut doors and windows and setting fire to the house? What has to happen for a lawyer, a city councilman, who upon learning of the murder of a random Jew who was hit on the head with a crowbar, to be upset that only one Jew died? (A case from Łódź a few years before the Second World War.)"

How to define this anti-Judaism/Judenhass, antisemitism, anti-Zionism in the shortest possible way? It is a hatred of people of Jewish origin, cultivated by religion, culture and national/ideological propaganda, justifying inflicting any harm on people of Jewish faith or origin, including murder, as well as honoring and often rewarding murderers.

How does this relate to justice?

Those who cherish the world heritage of anti-Judaism believe that it is fair to burst into any house inhabited by Jews and slaughter its inhabitants in the name of what is said about Jews. A peculiar concept of justice.

The letter asking for removal of the old article was polite, I acceded to the request, assuming at first that perhaps the man had changed his views and was embarrassed by what he had written a few years earlier. (I was wrong, which he emphasized in his next letter, thanking me for taking the text off, but I did not find out the real motives of this request).

This case was right-wing, and right-wing antisemitism is never far from justifying or even praising Nazism. Leftist antisemitism is supported by romanticism, but few notice the strange tendency of these romantics to form alliances with tyrants, with theocracy, with pure Nazism.

It is difficult to say where to classify John Oakes, an author, publisher and columnist, often appearing in the Guardian. He has just written a scholarly article in which he states that Israel is using hunger as a weapon against the civilian population in Gaza. A colleague of the author, the Egyptian columnist of the government newspaper Al-Ahram, Ibrahim Al-Baha, states that the heroic fighters in Gaza are winning, does not mention the famine, and writes about his admiration for the fighters:

"I congratulate the resistance for its wisdom and the Zionists for their stupidity, which has turned the Israeli army into the laughingstock of the entire world and into an object of rage and invective due to its inability to achieve its goals. All it has managed to do in nearly nine months [of war] is kill civilians, women and children."

The Guardian’s author chose a different approach. He writes that it is no secret that Israel "uses hunger as a weapon against civilians," adding that Israel denies this, but there is overwhelming evidence provided by Human Rights Watch and Oxfam. He also quotes the words of the European Union's political commissar, Josep Borrell, who said that "the people of the Gaza Strip are facing a 'man-made catastrophe'." The UN World Food Programme agrees: there is a "full-blown famine" in the northern Gaza Strip, and the International Court of Justice is considering an arrest warrant for Israeli politicians — for the war crime of starving civilians.

After presenting this "irrefutable evidence", the author "informs" readers that this year the inhabitants of Gaza broke the fast of Ramadan by eating leftovers from garbage cans and grass. From there, he had only one step to starvation and hunger in the Warsaw ghetto.

In the editorial office of the Guardian no one asked this author if he had seen an army feeding the enemy society to the extent that Israel does, nor was he asked if he had seen statistics on the supply of food, medicine, water and fuel delivered to Gaza through the border with Israel; no one asked stupid questions about where the information about eating grass came from. John Oakes even notes that this comparison with the Warsaw ghetto may seem grotesque. This, however, clearly does not bother him and he takes up the challenge, building an image of terrible Jews who in his head behave like their persecutors, both those who killed Jews by starvation in the Warsaw ghetto and those from distant antiquity, who are commemorated by religious fasts.

Oakes would not be a genuine antisemite if he did not accuse Jews of abusing Palestinian children in particular, so he concludes his essay on hunger, fasting, religion, and the Warsaw Ghetto by stating that hunger does not distinguish between Hamas fighters and toddlers, adding that starvation is non-Jewish.

This antisemite is wrong. Not only does he want to believe all the lies about famine in Gaza, but he firmly rejects the idea that Hamas fighters can have more food than civilians, that food goes first into the hands of Hamas, then to those who are related to Hamas in one way or another, then to the market of speculators, and finally to those most in need. And yet, the predicted cases of starvation deaths were not recorded, and the photos supposed to show the horror of hunger show neither emaciated children nor emaciated adults. There is no hunger here, such as we observe in many places in Africa, or such as was observed in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus, besieged by Assad, or such as in Yemen or in refugee camps in Sudan. There is no abundance of humanitarian aid trucks waiting in line in any of these places.

However, this "humanitarian" is not alone; there are legions of people like him; they come from the left and the right, and their wonderful essays are in constant demand in editorial offices.

A few days ago, a friend posted on his Facebook a Red Cross document from November 22, 1944 stating: "We have found no trace of the facilities for the extermination of civilian prisoners in Auschwitz."

The same Red Cross reported in 2024: "We have not found any evidence of weapons or hostages being held in hospitals in Gaza."

Many found hunger in Gaza like in the Warsaw ghetto. We may wonder why today we see more people hungry for lies about Jews on the left side of the political spectrum than on the right. An American journalist, Daniel Greenfield, tries to explain it in an article under the significant title: “Every Leftist Cause Begins as Humanitarianism and Ends as Terrorism”. The first assumption seems correct: every left-wing cause is based on empathy. Greenfield quotes Dickens's phrase from A Tale of Two Cities: “Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!” If the French Revolution is considered the source of leftist issues, then our opponent has painted himself into a corner. I am a bit disturbed by whispered teachings from my youth, combining leftism rebelling against communism with cooperatives, trade unions, the slogan: “Let's get rich together, not one at the expense of the other”. But, yes, it is true, I heard the opinion early on that the greatest enemy of honest leftism was the vanguard (at that time it was the "vanguard of the proletariat"). Greenfield says:

"The ideological fashions may change but the story is always told the same way.

Somewhere there is an oppressed group to be liberated. And he, she or they is the one to fight for their liberation. Along the way that exquisite sensitivity which may lead an upper class Ivy Leaguer to learn all about the customs and suffering of black transgender men in Detroit or Hamas terrorists in Gaza congeals into an equal insensitivity for the suffering of his targets.


And then people die. Sometimes it’s those he considers the oppressed or the oppressors. Usually both. The humanitarians become terrorists and their revolutions lead to tyranny."

When you feel a great compassion, you are ready to kill. Compassion is the crowning argument for every murderous leftist cause. "Today," Greenfield writes, "it is constantly invoked in favor of Hamas." (The compassionates must know something, because they prefer to talk about the people of Gaza and call those fighting against Hamas "infanticiders" while avoiding the word “Hamas”. Thus, the Jews use starvation as a weapon, killing children and women.)

This empathy, dripping with falsehood, forces us to hide the true face of the alleged victim. Empathy based on gossip and hearsay, on conspiracy theories and propaganda, often turns humanism into an alliance with criminals.

The vanguard organizing movements for big leftist causes invariably recruits its fighters by appealing to their sensitivity, to good intentions, to romanticism and aversion to boring fact-checking. What is important is the feeling of one's own moral superiority and the willingness to force others to accept one’s vision of reality. Oceans will flood mountains, little white bears will fall from melting ice floes and drown, science-produced plants will kill humanity, men who choose to become women are persecuted and denied competition with women in sports and presence in places reserved exclusively for women.

At times, this attack of a very right-wing journalist on the left can be irritating, and yet it contains a grain of truth about those who want to change the world and do not notice how much they despise those they supposedly feel compassion for, do not notice when they agree (demand) to achieve their goals by any means, do not notice when their empathy leads them into the arms of crime.

"The upper class leftist revolutionary, unable to accomplish anything of worth or become anyone of note, sets out to subjugate the world. His empathy for people whom he has never met instantly makes him a wiser and deeper person. And before you know it, he’s cheering Hamas."

We have a flood of illustrations of this peculiar leftism in the media, sentimental stories of the victims. Sometimes it will be the director of a hospital in Gaza, sometimes it will be a conversation with a persecuted Palestinian under a palm tree. Asking these people about the Palestinians who are not supporters of Hamas and who perceive the tragedy of this war differently does not make much sense, because they have never heard of them.

An Internet user writes: "Nothing and no one will fill this void! And the great of this world look at infanticide with a smile." This deeply moving sentence is illustrated by a painting by an artist signing himself "Banksy", in which we see empty swings against the background of the ruins of the city. It's a mural from Gaza. I wrote in another article that there is no longer a five-star hotel where Hamas hosted the artist, and there is no Hitler 2 store, and the Hamasjugend no longer organizes its summer camps. In the discussion, someone wrote that the interjection about the Nazis, Hitler and the Hamasjugend was unnecessary. Well, that has to be a starting point, although it may be difficult for people fed lies by the media which are full of leftist empathy. Hamas is part of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was formed in close symbiosis with German Nazism. The father of the Palestinian people, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, was not only an Islamic fanatic, but a devotee of Nazism who spent the war in Berlin, broadcasting Nazi propaganda from Germany. Then there is the long history of influence on Arab rule by escapees from Nazi Germany after WWII. Let's jump to the present day. Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps openly use the Nazi salute at their celebrations. Hamas and the PLO do this less frequently, and an overt reference to Nazi ideology is now considered inappropriate because of its left-wing Western allies. However, it is not only social media that show the popularity of Nazi ideology. Its traces are clearly visible in the Hamas charter. Hamasjugend – yes, in exactly the same way as the Hitlerjugend was trained, Palestinian children are trained in schools and at summer camps. When we have no knowledge of the Nazi ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, the entire Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains completely incomprehensible.

When children in a class refuse to celebrate the birthday of a Jewish friend, it means that their parents have believed in a certain image of the world, from which, with their tacit consent (although usually without their knowledge), information about those they sympathize with, and whose actions (and fate) are the end result of faith, has been removed.

The global warming of feelings towards Nazism is hidden, it’s deceitful, it adorns itself with an keffiyah and admires works of art created by empathetic artists.

Translation: Małgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson