How the Left and Right Converge to Form a Horseshoe of Antisemitism

“One of the things that antisemitism does is, it creates coalitions,” Rabbi David Wolpe recently observed.

How ironic that he made this comment on the show of Theo Von, a right-wing podcaster who interviewed Trump during the 2024 election campaign. Some months later, upon his return from a trip to Qatar, Von suddenly felt the need to talk about the alleged “genocide” in Gaza, only to be quoted favorably in the hard-left music magazine Rolling Stone.

The far-right and the far-left have been coming together over antisemitism at least since 1961, when 10 members of the American Nazi Party attended a Nation of Islam (NOI) rally. Members of the NOI escorted the Nazis to front-row seats for a speech by Malcolm X, who was filling in for the originally scheduled speaker, Elijah Muhammad.

More recently, in 2019, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke called Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) “the most important member of the US Congress” for her “Defiance to Z.O.G. [Zionist Occupied Government].”

That same year, the shooter at the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, left behind a manifesto that both embraced white supremacist ideology and incorporated tropes promoted by the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan and the anti-Israel BDS movement, such as the false claims that Jews had a “large role in every slave trade for the past two thousand years” or that Jews persecute “Christians of modern day Syria and Palestine.” In 2021, left-wing academics adopted the language of David Duke and of the Nazis when they accused Israel of “Jewish supremacy.”

So it shouldn’t really have been a huge surprise to see this marriage of convenience beginning to make its way into today’s free-for-all media landscape. Rolling Stone, whose political slant generally is hard left and whose coverage of Israel, as CAMERA has documented at length, is egregiously biased, gushed over Von:

On Tuesday [May 19], comedian and podcaster Theo Von — who promoted the president during his 2024 campaign and accompanied him on a trip to Qatar last week — said the U.S. was “complicit” in creating the horrors that were taking place in Gaza.

“It feels to me like it’s a genocide that’s happening while we’re alive here … in front of our lives. And I feel like I should say something,” Von said on this week’s episode of the This Past Weekend podcast….

Pope Leo and Von couldn’t be more different, but frustration with the lack of progress toward a sustained cease-fire in Gaza, and the looming threat of more devastation to the region, reflect sentiments both in the U.S. and abroad.

There was a similar love-fest between Dave Smith, the conservative libertarian comedian best known for spouting nonsense on The Joe Rogan Experience, and Krystal Ball, the hard-left host of the online political news show Breaking Point, on Monday. Once again, Dave Smith let loose a dizzying blitz of false information, including making the claim that Iran was in compliance with non-proliferation agreements.

Smith said, “we’re left in the position where you’re supposed to sit here and justify a sneak aggressive, preemptive attack, like somehow you’re supposed to feel like you’re the good guys in an absolute war of choice, against a country that does not have nuclear weapons … Iran is a member of the non-proliferation treaty….”

But despite Iran’s (partial) ratification of the NPT, there have long been concerns about its enrichment capabilities, its building of new nuclear facilities, and its lack of cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, leading up to the June 12 declaration by the IAEA that Iran was out of compliance with its NPT obligations, just a day before Israel’s attack. After that report, Iran threatened to leave the NPT altogether (although it’s clear it was not complying with the treaty).

And yet, instead of pointing any of this out, Ball responded, “and they’re [Israel] a rogue nation attacking like six of their neighbors as we speak and are not part of the non-proliferation [treaty] and we’re supposed to be cool with that” — while Smith nodded in agreement. Later in the show, in what may have been the only accurate claim made on that program, Ball remarked, “that’s the Israel horseshoe, between you and me, Dave.”

The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel functioned as a siren call to antisemites everywhere: “It’s open season on the Jews.” Not only has this signal been heeded by certain individuals from both the far-left and the far-right, but a media environment that has no guardrails provides ample opportunities for these two nefarious groups to come together over their ignorance-fueled bigotry.

Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director in the Media Response Team at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, and frequently writes about antisemitism in the media.

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