Posted on 05/18/22
| News Source: NBC News
The Tops shooting was clearly an act of anti-Blackness. But it’s notable that antisemitism often acts as the ideological center of white nationalist rhetoric, the force that turns racist rage into a semi-organized global theory. In the fevered imaginations of these racist fascists, Jews run the world as a secret, cabalistic elite, and they are using nonwhite people as a weapon to destroy the gentile white population. In these theories of white domination, racial hierarchies and modern “degeneracy,” Jews are a vital piece of the apocalyptic conspiracy puzzle. Because as writers like Eric Ward have illustrated, the neo-Nazi belief that whites are being destroyed requires an allegedly intelligent and powerful puppet master.
While Jews made up a sizable portion of the document, they were not the target of the shooter’s violence, just as they weren’t targeted during the Christchurch massacre or the shooting in 2019 in El Paso, Texas. Even when Jews are not the target of violence, antisemitism can help motivate white nationalist violence against communities of color and immigrants.
As University of Washington Bothell professor Dan Berger explained around Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, antisemitism has played a central role in the growing American far right, except Jews are not its primary victims. Conspiracy theories about people like George Soros, shadowy elites and cabals of satanic pedophiles (as found in the QAnon theory) follow the ideological legacy of earlier antisemitic theories like blood libel and the antisemitic forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”