To be clear, when I said it isn't "entirely organic", I meant more the direction it's taking rather than the depth of the antisemitism. The way Qatar, Iran, Russian, and Hamas backed agitators and influencers have been shaping the narrative would not be possible if they weren't drawing on a deep well of antisemitism present in Western leftist circles.
The thing about antisemitism is that it is a chameleon bigotry. Whatever you ideologically hate and fear about your own society, this is what you project onto Jews, and claim Jews are conspiring to implement. So the form your antisemitism takes says a lot about what you believe outside of that. And as such, there are certain types of leftist antisemitism.
To give an example from one of the things I mentioned being relitigated, leftists, early on during the Dreyfus affair, didn't take Dreyfus's side. That came later, and mostly from the center left. The people who considered themselves leftists at the time tended not to go along with the whole: "Dreyfus is guilty, look at this evil Jew betraying his country for suspicious Jewish interests," thing the right was spewing. They tended to go with, "Well, we don't care if he's innocent or guilty. He's a rich capitalist Jew who is in the military using it for rich capitalist Jewish ends."
And the relitigating I keep seeing in the cases specifically of Leo Frank and Alfred Dreyfus are often in a very right wing mold, which is where it becomes important to understand that Qatar, Iran, Russia, Hamas, etc. are not left wing organizations. They have decided to make common cause with and use Western leftists under the cloak of "anti-colonialism", but they are all regimes that are somewhere on the spectrum of the far right. And this means that while a lot of the antisemitic narratives that they are feeding to the global left are leftist ones, including and especially one's straight out of old Soviet propaganda, quite a few are actually typically right wing ones, partly because those are narratives that feel natural to operatives from right wing regimes, and partly because of the way this illiberal, antidemocratic and viciously antisemitic movement, fostered by far right regimes, has been easily infiltrated by neo-nazis.
They are also regimes that have as a cucial part of their makeup, a deep resentment with regards to how the post-WWII, post-Cold War, post-9/11 global power structure has shaken out. These regimes are all, in their own conception of themselves, the losers. This unites them with post-German unification post-Franco-Prussian war France, and the post-Civil War white supremacist groups like the KKK. And for that matter, post-WWI Germany. And just like them, the way to deal with being on the losing side, is to turn it in their minds into a great injustice, which they are the victims of. And when you are a regime full of people who are avowedly antisemitic, you are going to construct ways to blame this great injustice on the Jews.
In their own ways the lynching of Leo Frank and the persecution of Dreyfus were attempts to address "great injustices" and relitigate them. The South is being held down by Jewish money, manipulating black people into not accepting their proper place, and turning the white northerners against us, and also those Jews are violating the flower of pure white Southern Christian girlhood, and manipulating black men to do the same. France didn't lose AlsaceâLorraine because a united Germany was a powerhouse, Napoleon III was an idiot, and they were up against Bismarck; they lost because dirty Jewish spies were selling French military secrets for 30 pieces of silver.
And then these attempts to relitigate failed, and now you have new generations of antisemites relitigating the failed relitigation.
These relitigations of the great injustice are in service of making the people who make up these losing sides feel better about themselves, but they are also attempts to begin the process of turning the tables on the winners, which makes it unsurprising that this relitigation and historical revisionism are so central to the propaganda coming out of Russia, Iran, Qatar, Hamas, etc. They want the world to see and agree with their view of these supposed great injustices so that the imbalance can be redressed.
It's a great injustice that Jews were not completely destroyed in the Holocaust, and instead have prospered. it's a great injustice that the Jews hey kicked out of their own countries didn't have to go groveling to whoever would take them and take whatever subservient role they were given, but instead that most went to Israel and stood against them. It's a great injustice that when so many Arab countries invaded Israel, Israel survived and beat them. It's a great injustice that the US survived the Cold War and the Soviet empire was broken, clearly a Jewish capitalist plot. It's a great injustice that the US and its economic system survived 9/11 relatively unscathed, and is still around to be allied to Saudi Arabia and Israel, limiting Qatar and Iran's power in the region, so the Jews must have done 9/11, and also Osama bin Laden was a noble truth teller.
So this all this relitigation and historical revisionism makes it much less suprising that the relitigation of the Dreyfus Affair and the lynching of Leo Frank would get swept up into the propaganda machine, but it's only relatively unsurprising, if we acknowledge that there is a propaganda machine that exists outside of the Western left itself, because these are not narratives, they would naturally reach for. All of this is important for understanding the sudden outbreak in antisemitic rhetoric, intimidation, and violence that the Western left is on the forefront of, but none of this absolves the Western left. The Western left has been duped and manipulated, but the reason they were so vulnerable to being duped and manipulated is because they were already antisemitic as fuck.
