Call it the new “intersectionality,” as illiberal regimes sow antisemitism among liberal democracies.
I’m old enough to remember when Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989. There was great excitement at the potential of promoting justice by identifying and working across differences to overcome interlocking systems — ones that operate in tandem, even if independently — that affect marginalized groups.
Unfortunately, over the intervening years, intersectionality morphed into an elaborate grievance system that detects menacing forces of oppression lurking everywhere, especially regarding Zionist “racist colonizers” who turned Israel into a “genocidal” “apartheid state.”
That kind of intersectionality relies on fantasy, but I’d like to propose a new, reality-based intersectionality — one that, ironically, also involves Jews.
While “intersectionality” once was intended to advance the foundational principles of life and liberty, it can now be applied to a contemporary target: authoritarian and illiberal regimes’ efforts to tear apart those very foundations. The declared intention is destroying liberal democracies.
These regimes — mainly China, Russia, North Korea and Iran — systematically target the international rules-based order that has been a blessing to countless millions since the end of World War II. Connecting these dots is essential because the many dangerous developments in the world are not discretely bad. I will leave it to others to outline how these regimes attack critical infrastructure with cyberwarfare, threaten energy supplies, provide military aid to enemies of the West, interfere with elections and otherwise wage their war on liberal democratic values.
My focus is antisemitism, an ever-mutating hatred that unites the radical right’s “Jews will not replace us,” the radical left’s “globalize the intifada” and radical Islam’s declared intent to annihilate Israel and murder Jews.
Russia is, of course, a past master of deploying antisemitism’s conspiracy myths to further its aims. Last year, the State Department issued a report on this long history, noting in particular the “Kremlin’s use of antisemitic disinformation in the context of its war against Ukraine” and “how Russia’s leaders and propagandists spread anti-Jewish conspiracy theories to shift blame and distort world events.”
But the Kremlin’s antisemitic disinformation efforts extend well beyond Ukraine and accusations that, for example, its Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is a Nazi. “Russian Federation officials and state media promulgate antisemitic conspiracy theories to distract and mislead international audiences,” the report said. A Russian “disinformation and propaganda ecosystem” targets “prominent Jewish figures” and portrays them “as puppeteers behind secret cabals that seek to dominate the world’s politics” and economies.
China cannot rival Russia as a historical purveyor of antisemitism, but it has become a fervent promoter of Jew-hatred. The Post’s Josh Rogin noted last year that since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel, “the quantity and virulence of antisemitic content on China’s tightly controlled internet — especially on its social media — have skyrocketed.”
The Chinese government has long-standing ties to Palestinian groups, and the Associated Press found that Hamas has been fighting Israel with military hardware provided by Beijing — and by those other members of the intersectionalist quartet, Russia, North Korea and Iran. China, Rogin, wrote, “sees the Palestinian issue in the context of its overall anti-Western, anti-imperialist worldview” and, identifying the opportunity, is ramping up its antisemitic messaging as never before.
Last fall, Voice of America reported on China-connected social media operations attempting to stoke antisemitism ahead of the U.S. presidential election, including with a cartoon depicting Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, “their tongues tangled together and wrapped around an Israeli flagpole,” and the message, “No matter who of them comes to power, they will not change their stance on Judaism.”
North Korea has a long antisemitic, anti-Israel history. The regime’s celebrations of Kim Jong Un’s birthday in 2013 reportedly included distributing copies of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” to senior officials. As for Pyongyang’s reach into the West: In 2022, the Jewish News Syndicate reported that regime-linked groups in the United States promote “virulent Jew-hatred” in mostly Korean-language media targeting a Korean American audience (a sampling: “American politics serves to exclusively benefit Jews and capitalists” and “Western imperialism is Jewish imperialism”). The last and most critical link in this campaign: Iran.
Unabashed in its hostility to every value of liberal democracy, Tehran so fervently attacks Jews, denies the Holocaust and promotes Jew-hatred at home and abroad that further explication is scarcely needed. Yet it is important to note that Iran’s supreme leader, employing the word Zionist as a stand-in for all Jews, posts online messages such as “The Zionists suck the blood of a country for their own benefit when they gain a foothold” and regularly implores Iran’s proxies — including Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Houthis — to work toward the Jewish state’s destruction. There are many ties that bind Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Oil, arms and food bring them together; stoking global antisemitism is a useful tool in a divide-and-conquer strategy. These regimes pursue their agendas in ways that may outwardly vary, but they share a common goal: the West’s downfall. They all recognize that the liberal principles of democracies and the international rules-based order can be exploited to sow fear, despair and distrust.
Understanding how illiberal regimes stoke antisemitism in the West has taken on a fresh urgency with the pace of dangerous or deadly antisemitic incidents in the United States picking up. This spring alone, we have seen the murder of a young couple outside a Jewish museum in Washington; the arson of the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion because the suspect, according to police, was angered that Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), who is Jewish, supports Israel; and the firebomb attack in Boulder, Colorado, on a Jewish gathering intended to draw attention to the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. The suspect, according to police, said he wanted to “kill all Zionist people.”
As Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, who died in 2020, noted, “Antisemitism is the world’s most reliable early-warning sign of a major threat to freedom, humanity and the dignity of difference.”
Michal Cotler-Wunsh is Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism and a former Israeli legislator.
