The Dangerous Link Between Antisemitism and National Decline
The UK, Canada, and Australia were once the world's most tolerant multicultural societies. Now they are hotbeds of antisemitism. It spells major decline for these nations, not just for their Jews.
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This is a guest essay written by Nachum Kaplan of the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Antisemitism is a sign of a sick society and it usually portends a steep decline in prosperity and influence.
This bodes poorly for the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, where antisemitism has reached plague levels.
All three of these English-speaking Commonwealth democracies have Left-wing governments. Their prime ministers — the UK’s Keir Starmer, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, and Australia’s Anthony Albanese — do not seem aware that throughout history, bad things follow periods of peak Jew-hatred.
In 1492, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I issued the Alhambra Decree expelling Jews in Spain who would not renounce their faith. About 300,000 Jews fled to the Ottoman Empire, various Italian city states, France, and elsewhere.
As Jews were prominent in trade, finance, medicine, textiles, and other industries, the Spanish economy took an immediate hit and voids in these sectors led to prolonged economic stagnation.
By contrast, the Ottoman Empire boomed with the influx of well-connected Jewish merchants and highly-skilled artisans and professionals, who even introduced the first printing to the empire. Cities such as Istanbul, Thessaloniki, and Smyrna became bustling trade centers, while Jews became advisors, physicians, and diplomats in the Ottoman court.
The Kingdom of Naples likewise benefited greatly from Spain’s Jews arriving. The influx helped stabilize the population after decades of war and plague. Jewish artisans, merchants, and financiers revitalized the kingdom and made outsized contributions to medicine and agriculture.
From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany systematically killed six million Jews in the Holocaust. German intellectual life has never recovered. The Mark of Cain is seared into the German psyche.
Allied armies had reduced German cities to rubble by the end of the war, causing immense misery, occupation, and the country to be split into West Germany and East Germany, with the latter under oppressive Soviet rule. It would take 45 years before the country was unified again.
In 1948, the Arab state dispossessed and expelled its 800,000 Jews, many of whom walked perilous kilometers across the desert to the newly recreated State of Israel.
Today, Israel is a prosperous, democratic state with a $500 billion economy and 11 to 14 times wealthier than its Arab neighbors, which mostly languished.
It is hard to miss the pattern. Countries that make Jews unwelcome stagnate and decline. It would be arrogant beyond hubris for the UK, Canada, and Australia to think they are somehow immune.
They might not be expelling Jews, but they have allowed such a hostile environment to foment that many Jews will leave. I could not find reliable data, but the Israeli embassies in London, Ottawa, and Canberra confirmed to me that they are dealing with sharp increases in citizenship applications.
Dark times and decline always follow periods of extreme antisemitism.
To the religiously minded, it is clear evidence that those who expel the “Chosen People” whither, while those who love His people thrive. Economically speaking, it is unsurprising that expelling large numbers of your best-educated, most prominent, and most mercantile citizens would have a huge negative economic and cultural impact.
While I do not discount the first explanation or deny the second, I suspect it is because antisemitism — while being an illness itself — is symptomatic of a deeper cultural sickness that makes decline inevitable.
It is the nation-state equivalent of low self-worth.
The scapegoating of Jews — a favorite pastime among Jew haters — speaks to low confidence and a low sense of agency. It is easier to blame the Jews than to summon the bravery and energy needed to make the difficult-but-necessary policy decisions and reforms required to prosper.
In the modern context of the UK, Canada, and Australia, surging antisemitism is also symptomatic of other problems. These countries boast of their multicultural success, but have done miserably at assimilating large numbers of migrants from Muslim countries. They are now pandering to this demographic and its extremist elements, and surrendering their Western values and heritage in pursuit of votes.
It is a civilizational garage sale.
Their leaders also refuse to admit this, which is why violent, jihadist, antisemitic, and anti-Western bile can be heard spewing from Imams’ mouths at any number of mosques in each place. Many (secular) university faculties are only marginally better.
A failure to crack down on these Islamists and their supporters — and the way they have been allowed to protest violently, call for genocide openly, and target Jews — shows a breakdown in law and order. Operatively, there are now exemptions for all sorts of actions and expressions of hatred as long as they are done in the name of “Palestine” and targeted at “Zionists.”
Any state that loses control of law and order and has a two-tiered policing system based on race or religion has fundamental problems of a kind that cannot be quickly or easily remedied.
There should be no doubt or denial about this. The UK, Canada, and Australia have all the ingredients for an Amsterdam-style pogrom to happen there.
When anti-Jewish protests began after the Hamas-led October 7th attack on Israel, the police should have stopped them early and used force if necessary. It has long been known that stopping antisemitism before it spreads is a key tool in combating it.
I thought mounted police would be a good approach because jihadist rabble will not look so brave when troopers on 17-hand horses are galloping through them. If only one of these countries had a famous mounted police force. Oh, that is right. There is the renowned Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
These days, the Mounties do not always get their man, plus they barely even look for him if all he has done is attacked Jews, ransacked Jewish businesses, and set synagogues ablaze.
Antisemitism in Canada has reached horrific levels. Montreal’s streets have become a dystopian hellscape, while Toronto police have even arrested a Jewish journalist covering a pro-Hamas rally.
The World Zionist Organization said there had been a 670-percent increase in antisemitic attacks in 2024. More than 80 percent of Canadian Jews say they feel less safe than before the October 7th attacks.1
Bomb threats to synagogues and other Jewish institutions number in the hundreds and have become routine, while there have been arson attacks against Jewish schools, businesses, and synagogues.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has issued the usual banal condemnations of antisemitism, yet he has cynically stoked it for political gain. He has criticized Israel harshly and unfairly, legitimized blood libel tropes, imposed an arms embargo, and said that Canada would enforce the International Criminal Court’s disgraceful and politically motivated arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It has been a truly repugnant and dishonorable display.
The United Kingdom is likewise a dumpster fire of antisemitism. Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, has said that London is the world’s most antisemitic city.
Antisemitic incidents have tripled over the past year, with more than 5,500 incidents recorded between October 7th, 2023, and September 30th, 2024, according to the Community Security Trust, a think tank that advises the Jewish community on security matters. More than 300 of them were physical assaults, so almost one a day.
Jewish schools have been vandalized, Jews have been assaulted coming out of synagogues, cemeteries have been desecrated, antisemitic chants and protests are commonplace, and Jews are scared to go out in the UK’s major cities.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose Labor party remains tainted with antisemitism despite efforts to clean it up, has cynically made it worse. He has consistently repeated Palestinian distortions and lies about the war and events in Gaza, voted in favor of United Nations resolutions for a ceasefire that would help Hamas and not free the 101 Israeli hostages that the Islamist terror group still holds, and placed an embargo on some military equipment to Israel.
Starmer has also said the UK would honor the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu, proving definitively he does not know right from wrong. It is how a government that wanted Hamas to win would behave.
This gives oxygen and currency to the blood libels that Israel is willfully killing Palestinian civilians, fueling antisemitism, and feeding a sense of righteousness in hating Jews. It has been a cowardly, disgusting, toad-like exhibition.
In Australia, antisemitism has exploded. Reports of antisemitism soared 700 percent immediately after the October 7th attacks and are still up more than 500 percent from a year ago.2
Cars in Jewish areas have been graffitied with antisemitic slogans, and vehicles torched. Jewish businesses have been vandalized and boycotted, Jewish artists excluded from events, Jewish parliamentary offices ransacked, an internet “Jew list” was circulated (prompting new anti-doxxing legislation), and pro-Palestinian activists even abducted and assaulted a non-Jewish man for having a Jewish boss.
Again, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has played a shameful role in fueling and exploiting this. He has been critical of Israel, continually called for a ceasefire in Gaza that would help Hamas, and legitimized the lies that Israel is recklessly killing civilians. The country recently changed its position and voted to recognize Palestinian sovereignty in Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank) in a shocking betrayal of its ally Israel, thus raising eyebrows globally.
It has been a truly stomach-churning performance.
All three countries’ leaders have condemned antisemitism — but done nothing about it. Police have looked like armies in retreat against pro-Hamas demonstrators. There have been no mass arrests to match the massive spike in attacks.
Rather than arresting Islamists, each of these countries has appointed a so-called antisemitism czar, a special envoy whose job it is to liaise with Jewish communities, report on antisemitism, and make policy recommendations to the government. It is the kind of thing governments do when they have no idea what to do, but want to be seen to be doing something.
Frankly, it has been a gutless and feeble response.
A society has to be very sick for antisemitism to have reached these levels of malignancy. The tumor has been allowed to metastasize.
We must hope it is not terminal.
Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs
Executive Council of Australian Jewry
 | A guest post by
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I'm British and thoroughly ashamed of the antisemitism displayed around the U.K. No arrests yet disgusting rants from the marchers. British people get locked up for perceived non crime hate speech yet what these anti semites shout is definitely hate speech and encourages violence.
Great article. Spot on. If nothing is done those countries will see a decline of civilization. I foresee the death of the Ivy league schools here in the US.
We will always continue and prosper wherever we go.
On a smaller scale, in the 1920s, Jews were not allowed to buy a home in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles. So the Jews started Beverly Hills.