 Sometimes when I talk about Jewish identity or express an opinion on Israel Palestine or on a Jewish public figure I get accused of secretly shilling for Mossad or for global Jewish finance or being part of a reptilian uber cult secretly controlling world politics which would be great obviously because it would imply that I'm much more organized than I actually am but seeing as it's not it makes me question why anti-Semitism sometimes takes the form of conspiracy theories. What role does anti-Semitism play in a broader political landscape and of course am I actually part of a swarm of Jewish lizards gunning for world domination? If you've been keeping up with the news in the past couple of years you've been forgiven for thinking that anti-Semitism was either a curse solely endemic to the Labour Party or a non-issue cooked up by the Tories in order to smear the Labour Party. In short it's been used as a political football to allow different people to score points against one another particularly by the conservatives who rightly feel like they're losing the argument on a lot of social and economic issues and so are trying to distract people with a culture war. It also happens a lot in the debate of Israel Palestine and a lot of people dismiss all criticism of Israel as necessarily anti-Semitic which is of course not true and on the other side people think that any implication that they might be anti-Semitic is automatically a way to sign in support for Palestine so let's get this out of the way to begin with. Not all Jews are Israeli not all Israelis are Jewish a lot of Jewish people are critical of Israel and a lot of people who support Israel can themselves be pretty damn anti-Semitic. Donald Trump has been ramping up support for Israel and he was buoyed to office by actual Nazis and Klan members. The Israeli state should be held up to the same standards as any other states aka when our governments fund and support the theft of land, mass dispossession, war crimes and apartheid to support their own geopolitical ends we should be allowed to criticize that. Cool? Okay so that aside these debates around who can and can't be anti-Semitic tend to muddy the waters a bit means all talk about anti-Semitism becomes a proxy debate about Israel or about the labor party and that's pretty worrying because and I can't stress this enough there are actual fascists and Nazis on the streets and in our political institutions. The far right is on the rise throughout the world and especially in European and Anglo-Saxon nations this comes flavored with a particularly dangerous brand of old-school anti-Semitism. Sometimes anti-Semitism is pretty obvious sometimes it looks like people marching on the streets with swastika flags and putting bricks through synagogue windows and sometimes it comes in a much more subtle dog whistle form using cultural signifiers to associate Jewishness with a nefarious dangerous influence on society and a lot of the time this takes the form of conspiracy theories. These paint Jewishness as a corrupt political influence which is disruptive to UK society. This is a less direct but no less dangerous form of discrimination because it builds the case the exclusion of Jewish people from public life and sometimes from life altogether. There's a huge wealth of conspiracy theories featuring cabals of Jewish people secretly controlling the world or which accuse Jewish finance of having a corrupting influence on politics this kind of racism is as old as the hills. It was claimed that the Rothschilds had made their money on the back of Wellington's victory at the Battle of Waterloo essentially profiting from the bodies of dead English soldiers and in the early 20th century a pamphlet called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was circulated and this purported to reveal the secret Jewish plot for world domination. Of course this was a total forgery but that didn't stop many thousands of copies of this propaganda being circulated often to school children throughout the next couple of decades despite the fact that it was exposed as a fraud publicly in 1921. Actually famous industrialist Henry Ford paid for the printing of 50,000 copies. This has pretty much been the story throughout the century and the one before that. Jewish groups have been blamed for orchestrating all kinds of public disasters from the Boston bombing to Sandy Hook to 9-11. Yes there is a theory that Mossad did 9-11 and a so called Jewish banking has been blamed for the economic crash of 2008. Also a lot of Holocaust denial is premised on the idea that the Holocaust is a myth concocted by Jewish people in order to justify their perceived political influence and this isn't just limited to the scruyer outposts of the internet it's actually everywhere in UK political life. Recently the Telegraph published an article accusing famous Jewish billionaire George Soros of secretly financing a campaign against Brexit and this theory is directly borrowed from the propaganda of the Hungarian and Polish governments which recently passed legislation whitewashing their own role in the Holocaust and where they've seen mass far-right street movements burning effigies of Jewish people in the street and this has been repeated pretty uncritically by the mainstream press in an effort to catalyze support for Brexit by painting its opponents as clandestine saboteurs you know foreigners and Jews. It should be said here that George Soros has a history of campaigning on liberal issues he's made no secret of this and he's not even the biggest donor to the pro-remain campaign and obviously whilst I don't have any particular loyalty to one of the world's richest financiers the man is a Holocaust survivor so yes stay classy Telegraph. A few months ago Kevin Meyers at the Times suggested that top BBC presenters like Vanessa Feltz were paid more than other women because of their Jewish ancestry which made them like better negotiators or greedier the actual link is unclear but anyway this is on the same spectrum as when fascist gammon Nigel Farage talks about the malign influence of Jewish lobbies. Theresa May infamously used the phrase citizens of nowhere to slur her political opponents and this language is a barely veiled uptake of the insult ruthless cosmopolitan used to smear Jewish people by you guessed it the Nazi party. Incidentally that speech was itself written by Nick Timothy who was one of the authors of the article on George Soros. So we need to look at why this figure of the wandering Jew is so useful for right-wing demagogues. We know that politicians and pundits often use racial bogeymen to stoke up fears that they can play off for political gain and to distract from their own failed economics and disastrous political decisions and to paper over the cracks in an increasingly divided nation but why Jewish people and why code it like a conspiracy theory. The figure of the wandering Jew is displaced without any perceived ties to any particular nation so they're easily smeared as traitors or double agents for an outside influence so when something goes wrong you've got someone to blame. When Brexit turns out to be an omnishambles it's not because this government is craven corrupt and incompetent it's because of Jewish bankers trying to secretly sabotage the will of the British people and let's not forget that Jewish former Labour leader Ed Miliband was smeared in the press as the son of a man who hated Britain. Displaced mobile people are also useful when politicians are ramping up nationalist rhetoric. Nationalism and its bloodthirsty cousin nativism are ways of summoning up some sense of unity at a time of deepening inequality and political polarization. It says that sure you might be living in a cardboard box whilst I own half of Mayfair but we ultimately have the same interest in common because we're both British. It distracts from the real source of people's misery and leaves the wealth and power of the upper classes intact and you need a pretty powerful enemy who can unite people who don't really have that much in common materially speaking so enter the racialized other figure of the Jew who has no link and no loyalty to the nation or the land. It's not a coincidence that rhetoric around migrants looks a lot like Nazi rhetoric around Jews both a fluid and stateless and a threat to the survival of the coherent land-bound nation-state and it's no coincidence that the far-right demonstrators at Charlottesville were chanting the slogan blood and soil. And remember Donald Trump made his first entrance on the modern political scene by championing the Bertha movement claiming that Barack Obama wasn't really born in the United States he was just a foreign influence trying to ruin the country. The association between Jewish people and the corrupt influence of bankers is also a Philip to the far right. Popular suspicion of the power of the Rothschilds or Jewish finance or whoever comes from the correct observation that global financial systems are ruining our country and our planet driving them into disaster and that could be a basis for a radical transformative demand for the democratization of our economy but instead it's twisted into racial hatred. It blames economic collapse and corruption on a particular racial group claiming that the fault is not with capitalism for instance it's not the fault of high finance the fault lies with the particular racialized other category of people and you actually see this popping up sometimes in left-wing organizing circles who think that structural critique is the same as lazy dog whistle racism. So yes this conspiracy-style anti-semitism is usually the domain of the right but people on the left also have a responsibility to route out conspiracy thinking in our own ranks as well. These theories have a particularly ugly history because they provide the justification for mass violence against Jewish people. The story goes that if Jewish people are responsible for the failure of a nation you need to eradicate Jews to restore that nation to glory by any means necessary that means pogroms that means ghettoization that means genocide. We live in a world in which capital disperses power across borders and national governments claim they have no power to hold the market in check. Sometimes it feels like the buck stops nowhere so I get it. I see how it's easy to try and reach for easy solutions and try and pin the blame on a single group of people it's comforting to think that there are people secretly controlling the world. It's easier to swallow than to face up to the messy reality that power is used and abused right before our eyes that we're all implicated in that system and that overturning that power is a lot more complicated than just getting rid of the bad guys. I hate to break it to you but there actually isn't a secret gang of Jewish billionaires carefully orchestrating the rollout of whatever kind of political settlement you happen to dislike. The world is just more complicated than that. If there is a worldwide Jewish conspiracy and I just haven't been invited I'm gonna be so annoyed.