Jews as and homeless people who threaten European nations “parasitic,” “alien,” and their autochthonous populations—ideologies from which one allegedly seeks distance. The equation of the democratic Jewish State of Israel with Nazism’s terror regime is another marker of such peculiar secondary antisemitism. It demonizes Israelis as it simultaneously downplays the horrors committed against Jews in the past, whereby Israel serves as a "collective Jew" onto which classical antisemitic stereotypes are frequently projected. Commonly invoked Nazi references and inversions vis-a-vis Jews as a collective entity are displayed in phrases like Palestinians are the "victims of the victims," or "Muslims are the Jews of today" (implying that Muslims are persecuted on the same level today in Western societies as Jews were in Nazi Germany). Such inversions may also point, following Critical Theory, to the deep wish to turn the persecuted victims of European history into These constructs collectively today’s perpetrators. denigrate Jews and turn them into a morally reprehensible, guilty party by demonizing Israel as a unified, evil entity that represents Jews. These tropes relativize the genocide and the still unmastered legacy of the Holocaust as well as the historical guilt associated with it on the European continent. The Frankfurt analysis of collective defense mechanisms, school’s Holocaust relativization, and tenacious old and new resentments exposes how anti-democratic attitudes and social hatred have lingered on—indeed have even been reinforced by new motives—in the institutionally democratized context of post-Holocaust Germany. Part and parcel of this observed social trend that
Jews as “parasitic,” “alien,” and homeless people who threaten European nations and their autochthonous populations—ideologies from which one allegedly seeks distance. The equation of the democratic Jewish State of Israel with Nazism’s terror regime is another marker of such peculiar secondary antisemitism. It demonizes Israelis as it simultaneously downplays the horrors committed against Jews in the past, whereby Israel serves as a "collective Jew" onto which classical antisemitic stereotypes are frequently projected. Commonly invoked Nazi references and inversions vis-a-vis Jews as a collective entity are displayed in phrases like Palestinians are the "victims of the victims," or "Muslims are the Jews of today" (implying that Muslims are persecuted on the same level today in Western societies as Jews were in Nazi Germany). Such inversions may also point, following Critical Theory, to the deep wish to turn the persecuted victims of European history into today’s perpetrators. These constructs collectively denigrate Jews and turn them into a morally reprehensible, guilty party by demonizing Israel as a unified, evil entity that represents Jews. These tropes relativize the genocide and the still unmastered legacy of the Holocaust as well as the historical guilt associated with it on the European continent. The Frankfurt school’s analysis of collective defense mechanisms, Holocaust relativization, and tenacious old and new resentments exposes how anti-democratic attitudes and social hatred have lingered on—indeed have even been reinforced by new motives—in the institutionally democratized context of post-Holocaust Germany. Part and parcel of this observed social trend that