What Causes Someone to Be an Antisemite?

After a decade of researching and writing on the phenomenon of hating Jewish people, I offer a simple explanation of a very complex phenomenon.

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

In response to my blog post yesterday on the rise of antisemitism on the far right today — as symbolized by Donald Trump’s despicable dinner with the antisemitic media figures Kanye West, Nicholas Fuentes, and the especially obnoxious British hatemonger Milo Yiannopoulos — one of my newer Facebook friends, the very kind new girlfriend of a cherished old work colleague who I now count as a friend, asked:

I want to know the mental health and social factors that would cause someone to be an antisemite.

Since 2009 I’ve worked as an editor at six Zionist publications (FrontpageMag, NewsReal Blog, PJ Media, Liberty Island, and now the Algemeiner and our little God of the Desert Books), and as a writer-activist-researcher at three Zionist non-profit activist organizations (the Middle East Forum, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, and the Israel Group), the latter as Director of Research. I state my credentials and experience first not to impart any particular authority for my analysis on the subject, but just to make clear that I’ve had to think about and analyze this stuff a bit too much over the last decade. I simply know too much, and am thus a bit more radical and vehement on this subject than most non-Jews. I am not at all “unbiased” - whatever the heck that means nowadays. And here’s what I think I’ve figured out, just so everyone can understand a bit better why I’ve become so zealous and even dedicated the overall mission of this publishing company to Zionism (a word which to me simply means the abolition of all antisemitic movements, organizations, and governments at an international scale.)

To understand antisemitism, one must look at the phenomenon in a broad way: both deep into history, as well as to how it manifests on a global scale today. When one does that, clear patterns emerge, and it’s not too difficult to understand what’s going on here. A particularly good book unpacking many of these patterns is Dennis Prager’s and Joseph Telushkin’s Why the Jews: the Reason for Antisemitism, which lays out many of the varieties of antisemitism throughout history as the phenomenon has evolved and changed.

Historically, as in going back thousands of years to even before Christ, empires and their warrior conquerors dealt with the conquered peoples and their strange cultures and religions in two ways: either by tolerating their weirdness or by violently opposing it, forcing conversions to the beliefs of the state by the sword. Thus, in global cultures historically, some empires have been fairly tolerant of the Jewish people and their peculiar monotheistic, text-centric creed. Unfortunately, others have not - slaughtering Jewish people in pogroms and, in the 20th century, murdering them at industrial scale in the Holocaust. This historical fact makes clear that not all cultures are created equally. Some cultures can tolerate diverse beliefs, lifestyles, and faith traditions. They see differences as a source of strength and beauty. Other cultures demand conformity from all their members, and will exterminate or oppress those who stand out by refusing to worship the dominant idols in the community.

So where does antisemitism come from? It’s simple: it comes from the culture the antisemite belongs to. And secondarily, it comes from the value that culture places on educating its children. Cultures which value education tend to be less antisemtic. How can we see this? Let’s bring out the statistics.

First, let’s examine the phenomena in the micro-sense and then we’ll look at it globally. The Jewish Virtual Library highlights an ADL report from 1998 revealing where antisemitism is to be found in America’s black communities:

The overall level of anti-Semitism among African-Americans (34%) compares to 37% in 1992. This very slight decline in acceptance of anti-Jewish stereotypes has been significantly slower among blacks than among whites, expanding the racial gap in attitudes toward Jews in 1998.

The current survey reaffirms the strong correlation between education level and acceptance of anti-Jewish stereotypes among African-Americans.

Among those blacks without any college education, 43% fall into the most anti-Semitic group. This number drops to 27% among African-Americans with some college experience, and stands at 18% among blacks with a four-year college degree.

America’s black community is not a monolith - it is filled with multiple cultures, histories, and traditions. Some black people embrace the ideas of Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas. Others follow Kanye West and Louis Farrakhan. The latter are much more likely to fall into the 43% without any college education. And it’s not that attending college itself is what makes the difference - rather, it’s that the black Americans who attend college are more likely to come from cultures which value education than those who don’t.

Now let’s zoom out and look at the planet as a whole to see how this cultural principle applies at global scale. A site that has influenced my understanding of antisemitism tremendously is the Anti-Defamation League’s Global 100. This site collects and presents the organization’s studies in antisemitism by country, so you can see in stark terms how antisemitism is a moderate problem in countries like the United States, the UK, Canada and Australia, while it constitutes a massive, jaw-dropping problem in places like Saudi Arabia, Bulgaria, Greece, Indonesia, Guatemala, and a host of other locales.

Let’s consider it by the numbers and see if there are any noticeable patterns.

North America:

USA: 9% antisemitic

Canada: 14%

Mexico: 24%

Photo by Samuel Charron on Unsplash

Latin America:

Guatemala: 36%

Costa Rica: 32%

Nicaragua: 34%

Panama: 52%

South America

Argentina: 24%

Bolivia: 30%

Paraguay: 30%

Peru: 38%

Columbia: 41%

Uruguay: 33%

Photo by Hans Reniers on Unsplash

Western Europe

Austria: 28%

Greece: 69%

Germany: 27%

United Kingdom: 8%

Ireland: 20%

France: 37%

Sweden: 4%

Spain: 29%

Eastern Europe

Belarus: 38%

Romania: 35%

Hungary: 42%

Ukraine: 38%

Russia: 30%

Czech Republic: 13%

Poland: 45%

Photo by Catherine Avak on Unsplash

Sub-Saharan Africa

Nigeria: 16%

South Africa: 38%

Uganda: 16%

Senegal: 53%

Photo by Saad Khonaifer 🇸🇦 on Unsplash

The Middle East

Saudi Arabia: 74%

Qatar: 80%

West Bank and Gaza: 93%

UAE: 80%

Iran: 56%

Turkey: 69%

Photo by Julian Yu on Unsplash

Asia

India: 20%

Vietnam: 6%

Indonesia: 48%

China: 20%

South Korea: 53%

Japan: 23%

Thailand: 13%

Malaysia: 61%

Have the numbers made my point for me? Do I even need to spell it out? I suppose I should: some countries’ cultures are very tolerant of Jewish people, even more so than here in America, like in Vietnam and Sweden. And in others - especially countries in the Middle East that are Islamic theocracies and authoritarian monarchies governed by Sharia law - the levels of antisemitism are so obscenely high that they should cause your eyes to bulge out of your head like an old-fashioned cartoon character.

It’s totally normal in countries all over the globe for the number of antisemites to be three or four times as high as here in the United States. Some cultures in this world of ours are just that poisoned with lies and hatred. A corollary number to keep in mind here too:

28 UN member states do not recognize Israel: 15 members of the Arab League (Algeria, Comoros, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen); ten non-Arab members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Niger, and Pakistan); and Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela.

So, simply put: antisemitism is caused by someone choosing to embrace the values and mores of a primitive, tribalist, conformist culture - and lacking the education to question this terrible status quo.

Is “mental health” a dominant or meaningful factor? By and large, not really, in my view. Mental health problems like bipolar or schizophrenia may act as an accelerant to antisemitic ideology, as they accelerate all kinds of ideas. But an underlying culture of antisemitism is generally necessary if this particular delusion is going to be what someone with mental health problems chooses to obsess over.

Does this make sense to everyone as an explanation of antisemitism? Anyone disagree? Because I can elaborate more in further pieces. Understanding cultures’ interplay at global scale is one of the key objectives at God of the Desert Books, so future content will explore in further depth many of these antisemitic cultures.