From the antisemitism thread
What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Anti-Semitism | The New Yorker
Islamophobia is thus, to use the phrase that Edward Said applied to Orientalism, “a strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism.” This hidden alignment was particularly discernible in the ease with which the Cold War, with its ubiquitous, if subliminal, anti-Semitism, morphed into the clash of civilizations, with jihadists replacing Reds as figments of the American nightmare. Trump no doubt regards himself as an American original, but he is only the latest ringmaster of this binary circus. In fact, our temperamental President is bigotry’s cliché. Even the cult of white supremacy on which his movement depends has its origins, too, in the positive-negative structure of the Western imagination, a structure erected in the first place to keep Jews in their place. It may offend Donald Trump to be linked to an ancient current, but while his arrival, with all its mayhem, is an unprecedented crime against democratic values, it is also evidence of the deeper disorder from which our culture has yet to recover.
The problem with linking anti-semitism to broader societal trends, though is that it may blunt the point that in many cases, some people irrationally maintain a very nasty, very specific, and very real animosity towards Jews.
