Andrew Roberts, Napoleon

Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life Paperback.

Jeremy Popkin, A New World Begins

At Amazon, Jeremy Popkin, A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution.

'There is a fight to be waged against an intellectual matrix coming from American universities and intersectional theses that want to essentialize communities and identities, at the antipodes of the Republican model, which postulates the equality between human beings, independently of their characteristics of origin, sex, religion. It is the breeding ground for a fragmentation of societies that converges with the Islamic model...'

One hundred French intellectuals have signed a letter backing the recent comments from French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer.  

See the Unz Review, "France: Prominent Academics and Macron Administration Attack American Anti-Racist Ideology as "Anti-White":

100 prominent French academics signed a letter affirming Blanquer’s statement, and calling for the French people to defeat an “American” ideology that preaches hatred of “whites” (a word that, unlike Trump, they explicitly used) and the indigenous Gallo-Romans of France. While the academics and Blanquer primarily blame Saudi-funded Islamist preachers for the death of Samuel Paty, they also believe US influence on their intellectuals has made it socially acceptable to murder white people.  

In an interview with a French journal, Blanquer reiterated this sentiment...

RTWT.

BONUS: Speaking of France and French intellectuals, the Assistant Village Idiot has an explainer: "Critical Race Theory [and Michel Foucault]."

Woke Trust Fund Millennials 'Work' to Destroy Capitalism

They don't work. They're as privileged as you can be, benefiting from an economic system that's made them (well, their families, really) among the most fortunate people in the world. Remember that. Remember these are the young idle rich. These are the same kinds of young people whom the Bolsheviks murdered in the revolution's obscene orgy of indiscriminate retributory violence ("Anastasia screamed in vain..."). These idiots, rather than be grateful... Rather than work to help those less well-off... Rather than just, say, work for charity and human emancipation through global poverty reduction (and through free markets)... Or, frankly, rather just work --- toil! --- and make their own damn money and mind their own damned business... They're guilt-ridden and mad. 

Remember, it's always the affluent intellectuals who form the "vanguard" of radical movements, waving the red flag at the head of the worldwide proletarian revolution. Che Guevara was trained as a physician. Ho Chi Minh was the son of Confucian scholar and teacher, and after literally traveling the world, he received his political education in Paris, that destitute human hellscape of haute couture, Impressionism, the Guide Michelin, and world-foundational enlightenment philosophy. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Comrade Lenin) actually enjoyed a comfortable petite middle-class status and studied physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University, one of the top technical institutes in Russia at the time. He was expelled for "revolutionary activities." Stalin was the son of Besarion Jughashvili, a shoemaker and successful small-business owner who ultimately cracked under pressure and descended into a long drunken vodka vacation. Son Joseph (Joseph Besarionis dzе Jughashvili a.k.a Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin) was a very promising student who attended the Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia, on a generous scholarship. He'd been mentored by Father Christopher Charkviani into the Orthodox priest-pipeline, a promising career path to economic stability (if not wealth and prosperity). Mao Zedong, as a child, was raised in a wealthy family in Hunan Province. He attended the First Normal School of Changsha, one of the best educational institutions in regions --- and he then quickly absorbed himself in all kinds of anti-imperialist revolutionary agitprop, naturally. Béla Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, received an education at the "upper class" Silvania Főgimnázium (the Silvania National College), a prestigious bilingual high school in Zalău, Romania. It was Béla Kun who, in 1919, led the fight against counterrevolutionary troop units, crushing the incipient counter-rebellion, which resulted in 1,000s of dead and tortured over a two-year period (1919–1921) known as Hungary's "White Terror."

These people are not the product of the capitalist "lumpenproletariat," that most despised and downtrodden class in all of Marxist-Leninist theory.

And so it goes: For America's sheltered Millennial youth of today, as entitled as they are --- because of racism, sexism, microaggressions, homophobia, transphobia, settler colonialism, genocide of indigenous peoples, the "environment," and (of course) Israel --- the solution is the burn it all down in an apocalyptic ideological war against phantom "oppressors." 

Gird your loins, people. They're coming after you. Sooner or later, they'll have your name and number (listed in the new regime's social media social credit system database, built in collaboration with the recently nationalized ideological-purity industry firms of Silicon Valley, now elevated under the new Biden politburo as the Big Tech Komsomol Thought Crimes Sanitary Correction Unit). Get ready for Kamala's "Truth and Reconciliation Committee." Wealthy Ivy League and elite private college students will be the party's Red Guards in America's 2020 "Cultural Revolution." 

At the Walter Duranty Times, "The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism":

Lately, Sam Jacobs has been having a lot of conversations with his family’s lawyers. He’s trying to gain access to more of his $30 million trust fund. At 25, he’s hit the age when many heirs can blow their money on harebrained businesses or a stable of sports cars. He doesn’t want to do that, but by wealth management standards, his plan is just as bad. He wants to give it all away.

“I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” he said.

A socialist since college, Mr. Jacobs sees his family’s “extreme, plutocratic wealth” as both a moral and economic failure. He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.

Millennials will be the recipients of the largest generational shift of assets in American history — the Great Wealth Transfer, as finance types call it. Tens of trillions of dollars are expected to pass between generations in just the next decade.

And that money, like all wealth in the United States, is extremely concentrated in the upper brackets. Mr. Jacobs, whose grandfather was a founder of Qualcomm, expects to receive up to $100 million over the course of his lifetime.

Most of his fellow millennials, however, are receiving a rotten inheritance — debt, dim job prospects and a figment of a social safety net. The youngest of them were 15 in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the have-a-lots and everyone else; the oldest, if they were lucky, were working in a post-recession economy even before the current recession. Class and inequality have been part of the political conversation for most of their adult lives.

In their time, the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor has pushed left-wing politics back into the American political mainstream. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. trailed Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist candidate, by 20 points among millennial voters in this year’s Democratic presidential primary. And over the last six years, millennials have taken the Democratic Socialists of America from a fringe organization with an average member age of 60 to a national force with chapters in every state and a membership of nearly 100,000, most of them under 35.

Mr. Jacobs, as both a trust-fund kid and an anticapitalist, is in a rare position among leftists fighting against economic inequality. But he isn’t alone in trying to figure out, as he put it, “what it means to be with the 99 percent, when you’re the 1 percent.”

Challenging the System

“I was always taught that this is just the way the world is, that my family has wealth while others don’t, and that because of that, I need to give some of it away, but not necessarily question why it was there,” said Rachel Gelman, a 30-year-old in Oakland, Calif., who describes her politics as “anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and abolitionist.”

Her family always gave generously to liberal causes and civil society groups. Ms. Gelman supports groups devoted to ending inequality, including the Movement for Black Lives, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and Critical Resistance, a leading prison abolition group.

“My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” Ms. Gelman said. “Once I realized that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my wealth besides redistribute it to these communities.”

According to the consulting firm Accenture, the Silent Generation and baby boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030, and up to $75 trillion by 2060. These fortunes began to amass decades ago — in some cases centuries. But the concentration of wealth became stratospheric starting in the 1970s, when neoliberalism became the financial sector’s guiding economic philosophy and companies began to obsessively pursue higher returns for shareholders.

“The wealth millennials are inheriting came from a mammoth redistribution away from the working masses, creating a super-rich tiny minority at the expense of a fleeting American dream that is now out of reach to most people,” said Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist and an emeritus economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has published 12 books about class and inequality.

He said he has been professionally arguing against capitalism’s selling points since his teaching career began, in 1967, but that his millennial students “are more open to hearing that message than their parents ever were.”

Heirs whose wealth has come from a specific source sometimes use that history to guide their giving. Pierce Delahunt, a 32-year-old “socialist, anarchist, Marxist, communist or all of the above,” has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather’s outlet mall empire. (Mx. Delahunt takes nongendered pronouns.)

“When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression,” Mx. Delahunt said. There’s the originally Indigenous land each mall was built on, plus the low wages paid to retail and food service workers, who are disproportionately people of color, and the carbon emissions of manufacturing and transporting the goods. With that on their mind, Mx. Delahunt gives away $10,000 a month, divided between 50 small organizations, most of which have an anticapitalist mission and in some way tackle the externalities of discount shopping.

If money is power, then true wealth redistribution also means redistributing authority. Margi Dashevsky, who is 33 and lives in Alaska, gets guidance on her charitable giving from an advisory team of three women activists from Indigenous and Black power movements. “The happenstance of me being born into this wealth doesn’t mean I’m somehow omniscient about how it should be used,” she said. “It actually gives me a lot of blind spots.”

She also donates to social justice funds like Third Wave Fund, where grant-making is guided by the communities receiving funding, instead of being decided by a board of wealthy individuals. The latter sort of nonprofit, Ms. Dashevsky said, “comes from a place of assuming incompetence, putting up all these hurdles for activists and wasting their time on things like impact reporting. I want to flip that on its head by stepping back, trusting and listening.”

Of course, an individual act of wealth redistribution does not, on its own, change a system. But these heirs see themselves as part of a bigger shift, and are dedicated to funding its momentum.

 Still more.

President Trump's Comments at 75th Anniversary of D-Day Landing at Normandy (VIDEO)

At USA Today, "'He can be a statesman': Trump's Normandy speech well-received by critics, Scarborough says, 'I hope he means it'."

(Fuck Joe Scarborough.)

Marine Le Pen's National Rally Tops Vote in EU Elections (VIDEO)

At the Guardian U.K., "EU vote confirms French far right as Macron's main opposition."

Rebuilding Notre Dame (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Notre Dame may take decades to fix. The first concerns are water and soot":

Two holes gape where Notre Dame’s vaulted stone ceiling has collapsed. The cathedral’s 19th century timber spire is gone, as is most of its roof. Portions of the interior walls were blackened by the intense heat of Paris’ most consequential fire in centuries.

As the world absorbs the magnitude of devastation wrought by Notre Dame’s inferno, architects and engineers anticipate a decades-long restoration process replete with unprecedented challenges. Designers will need to navigate complicated structural issues and delicate preservation debates to satisfy an array of stakeholders.

They will all be asking the same question: How do you revive an 850-year-old icon?

"The whole world is watching, and everybody has something to say about it,” said Marc Walton, director of Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts at Northwestern University. “It has to be built for the next 1,000 years. It’s going to be a different structure as a result, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

The first order of business is to dry the cathedral out, said John Fidler, who served as conservation director of English Heritage, a government agency that maintains England’s national monuments.

“There are millions of gallons of water poured into the structure that will seep down to the crypt, the basement,” Fidler said. Pumping out that water could take months, and years may pass before the entire building is completely dry.

“It’s easy to make the surface dry because there are large pores on the surface, but deeper in the stone, the pores grow narrower and it’s more difficult to suck that water out,” he said. “When the walls remain damp, you get mildew and mold and fungus and salt crystallization, which can rupture the pores in stone and cause it to deteriorate on the surface.”

Soot is also a particular concern because it’s so oily, said Rosa Lowinger, a conservator of buildings and sculpture based in Los Angeles.

“People’s first instinct is they want to wash it, but that’s the last thing you should do,” she said. The building’s limestone is porous, so soap and water would drive the soot into its pores. Instead, soot must be removed while dry. “The earliest decisions here — the protocols taken — will define how successful a project like this is.”

While conservators tackle those problems, other teams will get started on the greatest engineering challenge of the entire project: the assessment of the cathedral’s structural condition.

Most analysis methods are tailored toward modern buildings, not stone structures, so engineers may struggle to determine the stability of the damaged cathedral, said Matthew DeJong, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley who has worked on historic buildings in Europe.

But Notre Dame is surely damaged, said Frank Escher, an architect and preservationist with Escher GuneWardena Architecture in Los Angeles.

“A fire of this nature can weaken a stone structure. It’s too early to say whether it’s safe or not,” said Escher, who is currently restoring the century-old Church of the Epiphany, the oldest Episcopal church in L.A...

More.

Yellow Vest Update

Clarie Berlinski rattled off a long thread last night on the violence of the yellow vest protesters.

They're anarcho-nihilists, basically, and Berlinski's mad because she thinks Macron's a pussy, he's caving to the street scum, and his political cowardice will strengthen the "far right." So, she calls for more authoritarian responses to the protests as a way to prevent "real" right-wing authoritarians from coming to power.

@threadreaderapp , would you please unroll this? Thank you very much for being a good bot.

— Claire Berlinski (@ClaireBerlinski) January 8, 2019

Hello you can read it here: Thread by @ClaireBerlinski: "I agree completely with @NTenzer when he says that violence is consubstantial with this movement. It's not the word I wo […]" https://t.co/zwj2JwOKf9
Share this if you think it's interesting. 🤖

— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) January 8, 2019

And some of the things that have been happening this last weekend, although given Ms. Claire's animated exasperation, I doubt media reports can replace being on the ground in Paris and watching local media coverage in real time:

At the Local (France), "VIDEO: Protesters attack French ministry with forklift truck."

More:

Yellow vests: France to crack down on unsanctioned protests https://t.co/ACOI7GLrUz

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) January 7, 2019

7 January 2019

Christophe Dettinger: Boxer surrenders after clash with riot police in Paris

PHOTO: A former professional boxer who was filmed at the weekend punching a police officer on a bridge in Paris during a "yellow vest"... https://t.co/yKwxeUvfhC

— Maria Battles (@maria_battles) January 8, 2019

Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History

Hmm, this looks worth a look.

At Amazon, Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History.

Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind

Following up, "How to Write About the Right."

At Amazon, Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction.

How to Write About the Right

Leftists will always characterize and attack the new populist-nationalist right as racist and xenophobic. That's a given. It's political correctness on steroids and the left's given assumption is one of the very fault-lines of the new politics of identity across the world.

For me, when someone calls me racist I blow it off and throw it back in their faces. Play by the left's rules. They hate that and it confounds and flusters them.

In any case, Professor Mark Lilla had a nice piece at the New York Review in December, "Two Roads for the New French Right." It elicited the typical Pavlovian attacks from the left. See, "How to Write About the Right: An Exchange."

Two Roads for the New French Right | by Mark Lilla | The New York Review of Books https://t.co/fIXJZ1mL1x

— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) December 20, 2018

Mark Lilla: the Left is always accusing the Right, and their defenders (including me), of being nativist, and they are totally wrong. Now let me tell you about The Great Replacement that is going on in Europe. https://t.co/sbgn6Djaee

— Cas Mudde 📢 (@CasMudde) January 4, 2019

And Lilla's response:

Writing about the political right has never been harder. Different kinds of right-wing ideologies and political formations are proliferating and shaking liberal governments around the world, as Greil Marcus points out. This makes it difficult to keep track of all the developments, distinguish them, and establish the connections between them. At the same time, liberal and left forces that want to resist these developments are increasingly hostile to learning anything that does not conform to their settled ideas about the right. A misplaced wokeness works like Ambien, dulling our curiosity and willingness to engage, and thrusting us into an intellectual twilight where the only thing we see is the familiar specter of white supremacy...

Keep reading.

Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71.

Emmanuel Macron's Nightmare

The worst riots in France in a couple of generations. Folks are being reminded of 1968.

At the Economist, "Emmanuel Macron’s problems are more with presentation than policy."

Emmanuel Macron’s problems are more with presentation than policy
So not a nightmare just a bump pic.twitter.com/m3pN2tZdBy

— Sunchartist (@Sunchartist) December 7, 2018

Paris Riots

These are called the "yellow jacket" riots, because French citizens are required to keep reflectorized vests in their vehicles, and the jackets are universally available, apparently.

At the Guardian U.K., "Paris riots: PM to meet protest groups after worst unrest in decade: Shops and cars set alight after peaceful gilets jaunes protest turns violent":

Macron to hold emergency meeting after worst unrest in a decade in central Paris https://t.co/qxHxmA97gt

— Angelique Chrisafis (@achrisafis) December 2, 2018

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has instructed his prime minister to hold talks with protest groups after anti-government demonstrations led to the worst violence in central Paris in a decade, with more than 100 people injured as cars and buildings were set alight.

Macron is facing his biggest crisis since taking office 18 months ago after the violence erupted on Saturday following weeks of street protests that began against fuel taxes and have turned into an anti-government movement.

The Élysée and key ministers appeared to rule out imposing any kind of state of emergency after thousands of masked protesters from the gilets jaunes – named for their fluorescent yellow jackets – fought running battles with riot police, torched cars, set fire to banks and houses and burned makeshift barricades.

Macron, who had said he would “never accept violence”, instructed the prime minister, Édouard Philippe, to meet what he has called legitimate protest groups and opposition politicians this week in an effort to calm tensions and stop “professional” rioters from infiltrating street demonstrations.

The Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz said 378 people were in custody, including 33 under the age of 18. He said many of those arrested in battles with police were men aged between 30 and 40, often from regions far from Paris, who had “come to fight police while claiming to be part of the gilets jaunes movement”.

The interior minister, Christophe Castaner, and his head of staff will be questioned by a senate committee on Tuesday over how thousands of protesters were able to play cat and mouse with police through central Paris for hours.

Macron flew back from the G20 summit in Argentina on Sunday and went straight to inspect damage at the Arc de Triomphe. Graffiti all over the base of the 19-century monument read: “We’ve chopped off heads for less than this” and: “Topple the Bourgeoisie.” Scores of used teargas canisters filled the gutters.

Near the Champs Élysées there were splashes of paint on buildings after protesters had paint-bombed police. Used bottles of eye-drops on the ground indicated that some protesters – many of whom wore ski-masks and breathing equipment – stood their ground despite the teargas fired from rows of police behind shields.

Along the Avenue Kléber near the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday morning, passersby peered at scorched pavements where the burnt-out carcasses of cars had been towed away, and where a private residence had been set alight. Graffiti read: “Babylon is burning.”

The far-right leader Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of the leftwing party La France Insoumise, both called on Macron to dissolve parliament and hold elections.

The violence started on Saturday in broad daylight on the edges of a peaceful demonstration by the gilets jaunes movement, which began two weeks ago in protest at rising fuel prices and a new green fuel tax.

After three successive Saturday citizens’ marches in Paris organised on social media, the security forces seemed at a loss to stop the rioting, with groups of masked men spilling into nearby streets, ripping up benches and traffic lights and hurling bits of paving stones from roadworks...

Warnings of latest crisis facing Macron were in plain sight https://t.co/dHeRWQsE1i

— Angelique Chrisafis (@achrisafis) December 2, 2018

Alternative for Germany (AfD) Surges in Popularity

Hey, Merkel's almost single-handedly bringing the new "hard-right" to power in Germany.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Germany: Anti-Immigration Party Surges in Popularity."

President Trump Throws NATO Into Crisis (VIDEO)

Well, maybe NATO was already in crisis. Trump is just lifting the lid off.

At LAT, "Trump throws NATO summit into crisis mode with demands, before switching and claiming victory":

President Trump threw the annual NATO summit into crisis Thursday — forcing an emergency session and suggesting the United States could leave the nearly 70-year-old alliance — before switching positions and claiming victory.

As the summit closed, the president held an unexpected news conference, taking credit for having secured firmer commitments from all 28 other member nations to increase their spending on defense.

Other leaders, however, denied that NATO members had made any significantly new commitments to spending beyond what they’d agreed to in 2014, under some pressure from President Obama.

French President Emmanuel Macron, in his own closing news conference, said NATO members had made no new commitments. He also said that Trump "never at any moment, either in public or in private, threatened to withdraw from NATO."

From Brussels, Trump headed next to Britain on a diplomatic tour that will end Monday in Helsinki, Finland, with his first official meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Before departing for London, however, he sent some undiplomatic advance signals in his news conference — calling Britain a “hotspot,” noting the resignations that have threatened Prime Minister Theresa May’s government and questioning whether her “Brexit” plan for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union is what British voters want.

Trump at NATO’s close cast himself as a savior in a crisis of his own making. Yet in declaring victory and agreeing to sign a closing declaration — emphasizing joint defense against Russia — Trump avoided the debacle that he made of last month’s summit of the Group of 7 industrialized powers in Canada. There, as he flew off, he tweeted his withdrawal from the summit’s final statement and hurled insults at host Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, for his perceived slights.

In Brussels, Trump said that the NATO members committed to meet the already agreed-to goal of allocating an amount equal to 2% of each nation's gross domestic product toward defense spending, and that he would like to see the benchmark raised to 4% eventually.

"Yesterday, I let them know I was extremely unhappy with what was happening. And now we're very happy. We have a very powerful, very strong NATO — much stronger than it was two days ago,” Trump said at the 35-minute news conference here...

More.

NATO in the News

It's time to realign NATO to reflect American interests. Donald Trump is doing that, and I'm all for it.

Most importantly, make NATO partners pay more. They can pay more for their own security. They can quit free-riding off the American hegemon.

Following-up from yesterday, "Allies Brace for Trump at NATO Summit (VIDEO)."

At Foreign Affairs, the American Interest, and the National Interest:

Since 2014, NATO has seen three consecutive years of growth in defense expenditure across European member states and Canada. https://t.co/Up5noxPWWs

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) July 10, 2018

The question of equitable burden-sharing will not go away. ⁦@TomaszSiemoniak⁩ ⁦@IgorJanke⁩ ⁦@RadioFreeTom⁩ ⁦@irishspy⁩ https://t.co/fvxpZcVzOT

— Andrew A. Michta (@andrewmichta) July 10, 2018

A Strategic Reset for NATO > Donald Trump's criticism that the alliance isn't fit for form is valid. NATO needs an overhaul. < https://t.co/b5qOPSQQiQ

— Panzer Leader (@ArmorCavSpin) July 10, 2018

Allies Brace for Trump at NATO Summit (VIDEO)

At NYT, "Trump Poised to Enter NATO Meeting as Wild Card Among Allies."

And video from President Trump's comments upon landing in Belgium:

Anti-Semitism and the Threat of Identity Politics

From Gideon Rachman, at FT:

Gideon Rachman: For the past 50 years, anti-Semitism has not been a political issue in the west. But that appears to be changing.https://t.co/E0ECLVO6xy

— Financial Times (@FinancialTimes) April 2, 2018

For the past 50 years, I have had the pleasure of living in a period when anti-Semitism was not a political issue in the west. But that appears to be changing.

Last week thousands of people marched in Paris to demonstrate against anti-Semitism after the murder of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who, according to President Emmanuel Macron, was “murdered because she was Jewish”. That same week a smaller demonstration took place in London, to protest against anti-Semitism in the Labour party. This Sunday is likely to see the re-election of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, who uses barely coded anti-Semitic rhetoric. Even the US is not immune. Last August saw the far-right marching in Charlottesville, amid chants of “Jews will not replace us”.

So are we reliving the 1930s? Not really. Contemporary anti-Semitism contains some loud echoes of the past — for example, the resurgence of the idea of Jews as a shadowy international network. But the new element is the way that anti-Semitism is now mixed in with bigger fights about Islam and Israel.

For the far-left, a key enemy is often Israel, which is seen as an embodiment of western racism. For the far-right, the main enemy is Islam, which it identifies with terrorism and mass immigration. Both far-left and far-right often claim to be immune from anti-Semitism — either because they are anti-racists (the left) or because they are pro-Israel (the right).

These complexities are embodied by Mr Orban. At a recent rally, the Hungarian prime minister used language laden with anti-Semitic imagery: “We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty . . . not national, but international, [and who] does not believe in working but speculating with money.”

The bogeyman of the Orban campaign is George Soros, a Hungarian-Jewish financier. But the main accusation hurled at Mr Soros by Mr Orban is that he is planning to flood Hungary with Muslim refugees. The Hungarian prime minister’s decision to build a wall to block the flow of migrants has made him a hero of the far-right in the US and Europe.

Mr Orban’s hostility to Mr Soros and suspicion of the “Islamisation” of Europe is also shared by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who paid a cordial visit to Hungary last July. There are many on the far-right who are fans of both Mr Orban and of Israel. Their common enemy, “radical Islam”, is, they argue, the real threat to Jews in modern Europe.

Many of Europe’s Jews are, however, appropriately wary of “support” from the far-right. When Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front, tried to join the march in memory of Mireille Knoll, she was kept at arm’s length by the main French Jewish organisation.

A similar ambiguity surrounds Donald Trump. Some Americans point to his links to the alt-right and reluctance to condemn the Charlottesville march. On the other hand, Mr Trump’s beloved daughter, Ivanka, has converted to Orthodox Judaism, which is not a decision normally associated with anti-Semitism. And there is no doubt that the government of Israel is much more comfortable with President Trump than with his predecessor, Barack Obama.

The far-left in Europe could use the Trump-Israel link to argue that their rage is aimed at nationalism, not Jews. But there is an obsessive quality to their hatred of Israel that is telling. Killings in Gaza are met with outrage, while deaths in Syria or Yemen barely register. Some of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that circulate in the Middle East have also leaked into leftwing politics. One of the people whom Jeremy Corbyn, the UK Labour leader, was happy to entertain at the House of Commons was Raed Salah, an Islamist leader who peddles the idea that Jews were warned to leave the Twin Towers in New York before 9/11...

More.

This is a little too equivalent a take. I don't see Orban or European nationalists particularly anti-Semitic. In fact, the nationalist right seems to be the only faction aggressively defending Israel and the Jews. It's not the 1930s, at all. As we've seen time and again, attacks and murder of Jews is nearly a complete leftist phenomenon. Jews are leaving France because of Islamic jihad, not the National Front.

Jews Are Being Murdered in Paris

From Bari Weiss, at NYT:

THIS—>Jews Are Being Murdered in Paris. Again. https://t.co/2gTRwJAk8l

— Christina Sommers (@CHSommers) March 30, 2018