Lethal Antisemitism

Why White Supremacists Are Cheerleaders for Hamas

Since the atrocities committed by Hamas, followed by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, there has been a sharp uptick of anti-Semitic speech and incidents across the United States and Europe. Consumers of this news are likely to assume that this surge of overt Jew-hatred and the associated celebration of Hamas’ blood-soaked incursion is limited to radical Muslims and their far-left supporters.

Although it might seem odd to those unacquainted with the landscape of present-day exterminationist anti-Semitism, White supremacists have also been enthusiastic cheerleaders for Hamas. This isn’t because they have an affection for Palestinians, or because they are opposed to settler colonialism. Rather, it’s because they adhere to the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

White supremacist meme illustrating solidarity with Hamas

Present-day White supremacists support Hamas because they regard Jews as their main enemy. They believe Jewish people pose an existential threat to the White race (in their eyes, Jewish people are not White). They hold that Jews are architects of the Great Replacement—the plot to replace White people with people of color—and that are responsible for critical race theory, Mexican immigration, the covid pandemic, vaccines against covid (a plot to chemically sterilize White people), socialism, and everything else that they fear and despise.

White supremacist meme illustrating the purported Jewish plot to clandestinely sterilize White people using the covid vaccine

Recently, the Anti-Defamation League published a selection of pro-Hamas quotes from prominent White supremacists. These demonstrate that many of these people see themselves as allies of the Hamas killers. Mike Penovich, Chairman of the neo-Nazi National Justice Party posted “Hats off to the Palestinians for taking bold and courageous action in their own cause and showing us that the Zionist regime is not invincible.” Nathan Domigo, the founder of the former White nationalist group Identity Evropa chipped in with “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free!” Not to be outdone, Jon Minadeo, the leader of the Goyim Defense League was unstinting in his praise of Hamas’ brutality, proclaiming “PALESTINIANS ARE KILLING THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN. God bless these brave men of Palestine.” Given their political stance, these people can only be delighted by pro-Palestinian protesters in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, chanting “Gas the Jews.”

Both Muslim and White supremacist versions of exterminationist anti-Semitism have deep historical roots. The Muslim version is well documented in Andrew G. Bostom’s encyclopedic The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History. The White Supremacist version is rooted in medieval European Jew-hatred, which revolved around the the idea that Jews are sworn enemies of God, the murderers of Christ, and the progeny of the devil to be hated above all others. As Joshua Trachtenberg wrote in The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism, “The most vivid impression to be gained from medieval allusions to the Jew is of a hatred so vast and abysmal, so intense, that it leaves one gasping for comprehension.”

Minadeo’s use of the phrase “synagogue of Satan” quoted above—a phrase from the Christian Book of Revelations—harks back to these religious roots. But it would be mistake to thing of Medieval attitudes towards Jews as purely religious and discontinuous with the kind of anti-Semitism espoused by today’s White supremacists. Many historians make a distinction between pre-modern (religious) anti-Judaism and modern (racial) anti-Semitism. I reject this distinction as alien to the Medieval Christian mindset. And it runs counter to easily ascertainable facts about Christian attitudes towards Jewish people. As Geraldine Heng writes in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages:

“Scientific, medical, and theological treatises…argued that the bodies of Jews differed in nature from the bodies of Western Europeans who were Christian: Jewish bodies gave off a special fetid stench (the infamous foetor judaicus), and Jewish men bled uncontrollably from their nether parts, either annually, during Holy Week, or monthly, like menstruating women. Some authors held that Jewish bodies also came with horns and a tail, and for centuries popular belief circulated through the Latin West that Jews constitutionally needed to imbibe the blood of Christians, especially children, whom they periodically mutilated and tortured to death, especially little boys.”

And the argument that Medieval people allowed that Jews could convert to Christianity, and therefore that Jewishness was not considered to be inherent, misses the basic point that Jewish bodies could be miraculously transmuted into Christian ones through divine intervention. Just as God could transform wafers and wine into the blood and flesh of Jesus, he had the power to turn demonic Jews into godly Christians.

Conversely, the sharp distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism ignores the extent to which religious content infuses racialized Jew-hatred. In recent decades this aspect is overt in the Christian Identity movement, which has it that Jewish people are literally the offspring of Satan. It was even present in the ideology of the Third Reich. Randal L. Bwyterk notes in Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Sturmer:

“The airship Hindenburg exploded in New Jersey in 1937. In the classic photograph of the disaster a Stürmer reader thought he saw the outline of a Jewish face in the smoke, and the Stürmer agreed: ‘Nature has here shown clearly and with absolute correctness the Devil in human form.’ Another lead article was headlined ‘Light Against Darkness: The German Struggle for Freedom Against the World Devil.’ The world Devil was of course the Jew.”

Recent White supremacist flier drawing on the image of the horned, satanic Jew.

The founding of Israel and the Nakba that befell so many Palestinians did not create the deadly anti-Semitism exemplified by Hamas any more than the rise of National Socialism created the White supremacist project of destroying the Jewish people. Present-day exterminationist anti-Semitism, and the strange—or perhaps not-so-strange—relationship between neo-Nazis and the radical Islamists is unintelligible unless seen against the background of this deep history.