Road to anti-semitism

SIR – In his analysis of America’s Antifa phenomenon (“The black bloc lay siege to the land of the free”, September 23), Rob Crilly omits one important aspect.

Anti-fascists in today’s America have become enslaved to the fashionable “intersectionality” that perceives a link between all manifestations of oppression, however diverse. Female victims of sexual inequality are related to black victims of racial inequality and to victims of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender inequality.

Palestinians, Left-wing opinion has decreed, are quintessential victims. Their villainous oppressors are Israel, which it accuses of every sort of monstrous criminality. The logical outcome is that if one opposes racism, homophobia and sexism, then one must oppose Israel, and by extension all those who support Israel, and by a further extension all Israelis, most of whom just so happen to be Jews. The fact that half of all Israelis oppose the policies of their government is immaterial.

This is why the Charlottesville violence differed from the Battle of Cable Street, that seminal moment in the history of anti-fascist action. The Cable Street anti-fascists were Jews supported by non-jewish friends, neighbours and fellow workers, who hated the anti-semitism of Oswald Mosley and his bully-boys, and were determined to make a stand against them. Antifa, on the other hand, contains within itself an anti-semitism as hateful as that mouthed by the fascists it opposes. Neville Teller

Beit Shemesh, Israel