Philosemitism, the Current Manifestation of Antisemitism

In the International Edition of The New York Times on Tuesday, November 19, 2024 ’s worlds most famous newspaper informed its readers about one of the biggest war crimes and crimes against humanity that US troops committed after the Second World War. The name of the farmer’s hamlet My Lai became in 1968 synonymous with the horrendous massacre of peasants, women and children the Western World had committed in South East Asia. Indeed, the famous neocon and American academic Samuel P. Huntington was right when he wrote in his bestseller The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) that ‘The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.’ 

This is also the main reason why the West reacted so surprised that finally after so many years of Jewish terror the Palestinian resistance movement broke out their concentration camp Gaza and started slaughtering Jews in Israel. The reaction of the Western elites was most revealing, not the Jewish terror since 1948 shocked the Western Christian and jewish elites, but the fact that these ‘animals’ had the temerity to hit back. ‘How dare these Arabs.’ Even the alleged left-wing mayor of Amsterdam raised immediately in a conditioned reflex the Israeli flag on the roof of the town hall, to lower it the next day after she was told that she had made a fool of herself, being the highest authority in a city consisting of a substantial number of citizens with a Moroccan background. This Mayor, Femke Halsema, is a well-known ambitious exponent of political ‘Philosemitism’ that is overtly or covertly still supporting the genocidal ‘Jewish State.’ The problem with the Dutch philosemites is that most of them want to be ‘plus royalist que le Roy,’ or better, ‘more Jewish than a Nationalist Jew.’ The main reason is that most Dutchmen collaborated actively or indifferently during the Second World War. At the same time, their jewish neighbours or their jewish compatriots were collectively deported to the nazi-extermination camps. 75 per cent of the jewish Dutch did not return.

The civil service apparatus of the ‘tolerant’ city of Amsterdam drew maps with concentrations of their jewish population,  to support the nazi-authorities. Around 2 per cent of the Dutch population joined the resistance, while the same percentage of the Dutch fought against the Waffen-SS in Russia. Ashamed, many pretended after the war they had been courageous by fighting the nazis. This understandable but cowardly attitude is not abnormal for the Dutch and their children and grandchildren. Already a century ago the internationally famous historian Johan Huizinga pointed out that the population in the Netherlands ‘has as its basic trait that it is unheroic.’ Here, the greatness of resistance is unknown, as was evident during the Second World War and is evident again today by for instance supporting the genocidal Jews in Israel. Huizinga: ‘How could it be otherwise? A state, built up from prosperous citizens of moderately large cities and fairly satisfied farming communities, is not a breeding ground for what is called the heroic.’ The Dutch prefer to collaborate with those in power and this also explains the fact that twice as many Jewish citizens were deported from the Netherlands as from Belgium and three times as many as from France. Huizinga: ‘The unity of the Dutch people lies above all in its civil character… Our less military spirit, the predominant commercial spirit, sprang from a civil atmosphere… Hypocrisy and pharisaism beset the individual and the community here! […] it cannot be denied that the Dutch, again in a certain bourgeois conviviality, tolerate a slight degree of bungling or favouritism of friends without protest.’ What the Italians call Mafia practices the Dutch call proudly ‘polder model,’ meaning the way of life whereby corruption is not corruption but a necessary lubricant which makes life in a small country, where everybody knows the other, so much easier. End 2009 the Dutch publicist Max Pam , whose father was a jew concluded in the mainstream newspaper De Volkskrant: 'It even seems to me irrefutable that Christianity created a breeding ground for a virulent anti-Semitism that ultimately led to the Holocaust.’ I want to add to this the fact that this Christian ‘anti-Semitism’ also created after 1945 to a ‘virulent filosemitism.’ The popular Dutch publicist Jan Blokker Jan Blokker wrote a few years before he died in 2010:

'After the Second World War, Judaism was virtually declared sacred in the Christian world and no nation is as far ahead in that procession as the Dutch,’ An important fact in an opportunistic country where, as soon as push comes to shove and one's own skin is at stake, power is blindly obeyed with a frightening ‘cadaver discipline.’ In this connection, Blokker remarked:

'In Dutch history, indifference has generally been the friendliest attitude towards Jews. The Dutch have always known exactly which of their neighbours was a Jew and at any given moment that knowledge could have consequences: betraying Jews for "head money” (blood money. svh) during the German occupation is just one form of that.’

That is the way it is, only a fool denies this. I would like to add the following, not only has Christianity 'laid a breeding ground for virulent anti-Semitism,’ but Christianity has also ‘laid a breeding ground for virulent philo-Semitism.' In the words of the well-known Jewish-Israeli filmmaker and scholar professor Eyal Sivan:

'Modern anti-Semitism in Europe is philosemitism. The Jew has been declared holy. We see a love for Jews, simply and solely because they are Jews. For the philosemite, a Jew remains the other, the outsider, just as for the antisemite. When we talk about Israel, we are in fact talking about Europe, about the European inability to live with the other, about the continuity of European antisemitism that is now directed against the Arabs, encouraged by Zionist propaganda. It is striking that now that the Jews are accepted in Europe, they have largely disappeared from Europe. It is as if the wandering Jew has finally gone home, a thought that you find among both Christians and Zionists. European racism led to the birth of Israel and philosemitism also stems from the European awareness of having failed in history. But what it is all about in fact is not love for the Jew, but love for the victim. That gives the philosemite, not the victim, but the philosemite himself the feeling of being a good person.’

That development from antisemitism to philosemitism was inevitable, because the hatred of the other, the stranger, the deviant, a resentment that had been carefully cultivated and nurtured for 20 centuries, could of course not disappear overnight after 1945. It is now being projected onto the Arabs, the Muslims, as we can also see daily. 

En: De Amerikaanse hoogleraar in de kerkgeschiedenis, dr. Franklin H. Littell, stelt het zo:

‘For the professing Christian, of all the questions that arise out of the study of the Third Reich and the Holocaust the most terrible are these: What were the churches doing? How could such a monstrous crime be committed in the heart of Christendom by baptized Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox who were never rebuked, let alone excommunicated? Where were the Christians?’

Yes, where were the Christians? And where are they now, now that anti-Semitism has turned into the equally suspect philo-Semitism? Max Pam wrote: ‘With his piece "How Europe Lost Its Self-Confidence" Frits Bolkenstein (former leader of the Dutch neoliberal party. svh) has once again joined what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has described as the believers in belief. These are people who do not believe themselves, who often reject the content of faith as untenable or even nonsensical, but who nevertheless find it beneficial that others do believe.’

The reason why Western politicians like Bolkestein display such paradoxical behaviour is simple: they use religion as a stick to beat another religion they hate. They only use it as a club to clobber another religious culture. The same is true of the philosemites who use philosemitism as a politically correct outlet for their antisemitism that is nowadays directed against the Arab population, if you like, the Islamic culture. In this way, they give shape to their petty-bourgeois hatred and fear of the other, the stranger, the outsider. We know where this will ultimately lead. But their hatred and fear are so intense that they can no longer control either of them. They are hysterical people, who repeatedly come to the surface in times of crisis due to the increasing pressure, mostly economic. Once again, William Butler Yeats' poem The Second Coming from 1919 is in effect. A year after the mass slaughter that went down in history as the First World War, he wrote about the pre-war mental state of the masses:

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.’

As stated before: a characteristic of the antisemite/philosemite is that he sees a Jew first and not a human being, an Arab first and not a human brother or sister, who will ‘not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,’ as Martin Luther King once said. This racism which sees ‘the other, the outsider, the stranger, the Jew, the Black made into a cliché, a stereotype who can in this way be dehumanized.’ The other is assigned a certain unchangeable role from which of course there may be no deviation since the cliché must remain a cliché of the antisemite/philosemite. That is why Eyal Sivan is so right when he says: 'In fact, what it is all about is not love for the Jew, but love for the victim. That gives the philosemite — and not first and foremost the victim — but the philosemite himself/herself the feeling of being a righteous person. 'The same applies to racists who discriminate based on colour, they see a Negro first and not a human being. The other, the outsider, the stranger is made into a cliché, a stereotype, who can be dehumanized in this way. The other is assigned a certain unchangeable role from which of course there may be no deviation since the cliché must remain a cliché of the antisemite/philosemite,’ Sivan told me during an interview. 

Filosemites hate jews who refuse to play their assigned role of victim. One of the antisemitic filosemites once wrote:

‘Unfortunately, there was a lady Hedy Epstein, who made a career out of Holocaust survivorship ("Holocaust survivor and speaker") [...] If a Holocaust survivor has to go to Gaza [...] then you don't understand the past, you've experienced it but you haven't understood it. In fact, everything you should have learned has been for nothing [...] They are whores, publicity-hungry whores [...] What drives Hedy Epstein is a complete mystery to me. The Gaza Strip is occupied by the Palestinians, and those same Palestinians and the Arab donor countries have turned Gaza into a very large, eternal concentration camp. Why would Hedy Epstein want to go there? Wasn't being in a concentration camp once enough? Does she want to lick her lips at the fact that there are others in a concentration camp for once?

This hatred is focussed on Hedy Epstein, a then ’85-year-old German Jew who fled the Nazis in 1939, and is now promoting her hunger strike in Egypt' to draw attention to the fate of the Palestinian civilian population locked up in the Gaza Strip. And the philosemite does not allow that. The Jew must play his or her assigned role of victim, and if she refuses to do so, she is a 'publicity-hungry whore.’ Just like his ideological brother, the antisemite, the philosemite is only concerned with himself. The Jew, the Arab, and the other is only a role in his pathetic representation of the world.

The Jewish humanist Hedy Epstein who kept her humanity was  called bij a Dutch Philosemite a 'publicity-hungry whore.’