Every so often, you find an article or a statement which blends the standard themes of modern antisemitism, like Jewish power and financial influence, with anti-Zionist bluster about “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and so forth.

Perhaps the most famous recent example involves the French satirist Siné, who generated a storm of still-continuing controversy after he published an article in the magazine Charlie Hebdo in which he opined that Jean Sarkozy, son of the French President, would “go far in this life” by converting to Judaism in order to marry his girlfriend, the Jewish heiress Jessica Sebaoun (the younger Sarkozy has, for the record, denied that he is converting.) Widely charged with antisemitism because of this particularly inane conflation of Jewish wealth and Jewish influence, Siné retorted that he was not the author of “Mein Kampf” and stressed his pro-Palestinian credentials.

There are two aspects to this which stand out. Firstly, the attempted diversion of the debate towards Palestinian rights, so that antisemitism becomes a Machiavellian ploy to evade discussion of Israel’s origins and policies; what my friend David Hirsh, in a nod to the former Mayor of London, calls the “Livingstone Formulation.” Secondly, the implication that for an argument to be properly considered antisemitic, its author has to be a declared Jew-hater, belong to the far-right, dress up in a sinister uniform and perform the goose-step on a regular basis.

The problem with these barriers to entry is that they excuse a multitude of sins. And so when publications which would be generally deemed progressive - like the awful Counterpunch, for example, or the Palestine Chronicle, from which the example below is taken - run these Siné-like canards, they can act the victim by accusing their critics of playing the antisemitism card.

But what other way is there to classify an article which is headlined “Celebrating the Nakba and Making Money At It?” How else are we to interpret a piece which, upon reading it, actually cements the impression left by the headline, as it levels the accusation that wealthy Jews in Michigan are leveraging their extraordinary power to financially profit from branding the State Fair as a celebration of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, off the backs of Detroit’s poor, largely black, neighbourhoods?

I don’t know much about the author of the article, one Michelle J. Kinnucan, but I suspect that she would not publish these ravings in a far-right publication. And no doubt she would stand by her excited description of a “sweetheart deal” for Detroit’s Jewish Federation (at this juncture, I have to point out that no serious newspaper could publish an article like hers and then expect its reputation to remain intact. Kinnucan has not…let me see…interviewed anyone. Her extrapolation of Detroit’s Jewish demographics into profit margins for the Jewish Federation is just bizarre. She talks about the economic profile of the “general US population” in contrast to the Jewish one without citing examples of other relatively affluent ethnic groups. I could go on.)

Still, why let the basics of proper investigative journalism get in the way when you can reach a conclusion like this one:

“Thus, a celebration of the violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 has been turned into a state-subsidized fund raising event for an already wealthy community…Just how wealthy the expected Nakba celebrants are can be seen by contrasting them with the general US population and the State Fair neighborhood, one of Detroit’s more diverse, but still majority Black, neighborhoods. According to the ‘Detroit Area Jewish Population Study, 2005,’ sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detriot, the median income of Detroit area Jewish households was $85,000 and median housing value was $300,000. The national figures for the general US population are: Median Household Income - $45,000, Median Housing Value - $156,000. The comparable figures for the people living in the State Fair neighborhood are even more striking: Median Household Income - $24,016, Median Home Sale Value - $73,000.”

And then there’s this:

“The economic disparities described above are also strongly related to power disparities. These disparities result in billions of dollars of direct US federal aid to Israel–more than $3.1 billion every year to Israel, on average $6.8 million per day–while Detroit languishes…This, of course, doesn’t include any of the hundreds of billions of dollars malignly misappropriated for invading and occupying Iraq just since 2003. This is a war that even conservatives/centrists such as Colin Powell, Scott Ritter, John J. Mearsheimer, and Stephen M. Walt suggest was, at least partly, a war for Israel.”

Here, then, is the classic formula with a “progressive” twist: The Jews are rich - richer, indeed, than everybody else. They use their wealth locally, nationally and globally to advance their own selfish interests in the form of support for Israel. And the masses, particularly those in black neighborhoods, suffer because of it.

More than a century ago, the German socialist leader August Bebel dismissed this kind of bigoted reasoning as the “socialism of fools.” Plus ça change, eh?