After the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket that left ten dead and three others injured, much attention has been paid to the perpetrator’s repugnant ideas about race and immigration. But, although the shooter deliberately sought to murder African Americans, his manifesto makes clear that he sees Jews as the sinister force behind the world’s evils. The commentator known by the pseudonym Elder of Ziyon, examining the 180-page document, notes the ways that it combines anti-Semitic ideas from both far-right and far-left sources—and that often it’s difficult to tell the difference:
His chapter on Jews in the first section . . . copies both text and graphics from far-right websites. However, there is a bit of cross-pollination between the far-left and the far-right in how they regard Jews. One can see that his sources [on the right] take materials from the far-left anti-Semites and that leftist anti-Semites take materials from the same far-right materials that he quotes. His document includes talking points taken directly from the “anti-Zionist” left. . . . He also takes talking points from the Nation of Islam.
Indeed, Elder to Ziyon points to a graphic, pasted into the manifesto, that contains all the standard accusations of “apartheid,” “illegal occupation,” and the like, next to a picture of Israel with a Jewish star on top of it.
Like the anti-Semitic left, [the shooter] argues that he doesn’t hate all Jews: “When referring to ‘the Jews’ I don’t mean all ethnic or religious Jews. Some can be actually decent, and make significant progress [sic] to humanity. However many of them are not.” Is there any difference between what he says and the anti-Semitic left saying that its obsessive hate of Israel has nothing to do with hating Jews, since they think there are “good Jews” as well?
The far left and the far right might say they hate Jews for different reasons, but neither of them have a problem with using the arguments and methods of the other side.
Read more on Elder of Ziyon: https://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2022/05/buffalo-shooters-manifesto-shows-cross.html