[American Thinker] One of the constants with leftism is anti-Semitism. Before Israel's existence, the anti-Semites associated Jews with using capitalism to secretly control the world. After Israel came into being, the socialists added a new sin: Israel was a colonial occupying power. It should therefore come as no surprise that activist groups associated with the increasingly socialist Democrat party are anti-Semitic Israel-haters. A few years ago, the Women's March become openly anti-Semitic now, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement is doing the same.Hatred for the Jews is nothing new. In pagan times, they were hated for refusing to bow down to the pagan gods. During pre-Enlightenment Christianity, they were hated for their role in convicting Christ, for refusing to recognize His divinity, and for the fact that a handful of them were moneylenders. This last was because Catholic Church officials selectively criminalized the sin of usury among Christians while tolerating it among Jews, leading to jealousy among the Christian faithful when Jews accumulated wealth in ways forbidden to Christians.
With socialism, a new hatred for Jews developed. Christianity had gone by the wayside. However, the Marxist obsession with capital meant that the Jews' age-old association with capital made them a target for leftist hatred. Additionally, Karl Marx, a self-loathing Jew (his father converted to Christianity for business reasons when Marx was a child), spouted anti-Semitic venom that would have made Hitler proud.
Speaking of Hitler, it's important to remember that his hatred for Jews was also a byproduct of his socialism. After all, he was the leader of the National Socialist Party. It was leftist hatred for Jews that justified slaughtering six million Jews, most of them desperately poor, merely poor, working-class, or middle-class.
With Israel's emergence, the left got a new reason to hate Jews: now they're accused of being colonial occupiers, stealing land from the indigenous Arabs. This version of events is a historic lie. Jews are the region's indigenous people with the Arabs coming in as recent interlopers. Truth, however, has never stopped leftists.