...As elites in the West come to grips with the role Islamist extremism plays in fomenting violence in the Middle East, Spain, England, Scotland, the U.S. and India, a small but vocal group of Jews have achieved prominence by walking in Kreisky's footsteps, by offering the same message he did in the 1970s: It's the Jews - and not the people who hate them - who are the problem. Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas aren't really so bad, it's the Jews and their state we need to worry about.

They offer this story as part of an exchange with two categories of people, the first category being those who are predisposed to think badly of Jews. The second category consists of those intent on denying the existence of or appeasing jihadism, a religious-based authoritarian and expansionist mass movement whose leaders have used Israel and the Jewish people as scapegoats to explain the inability of Muslim and Arab countries in the Middle East to adapt to the modern world.

It's hard to tell these two groups apart - there's a lot of overlap - but nevertheless people in these two categories share an abiding interest in hearing Jews assert that it's their fellow Jews and the institutions they run that are the source of the world's problems. Non-Jews intent on hearing this narrative and Jews willing to offer it have, like Kreisky and the Austrian voters who supported him, worked out a mutually beneficial exchange that proceeds as follows:

Disaffected Jews who have little credibility or influence in the Jewish community in the U.S. or Israel are accorded adulation in the non-Jewish world by legitimizing the notion (detailed by Bernard Harrison) that Jews are "a malign and conspiratorial political entity" that must be combated or expelled "lest the host body politic be irretrievably harmed or corrupted or both,"[14]and by portraying Israel as a monstrous nation intent on genocide or ethnic cleansing and the Jewish state as the cause of most, if not all of the problems in the Middle East.[15]

By proffering this narrative, these Jews achieve, thanks to their non-Jewish allies, prominence and influence they were previously denied by their fellow Jews. In order to legitimize this exchange, these disaffected Jews portray their newfound Christian allies as morally, spiritually, and intellectually superior to the retrograde and hard-hearted (i.e., mainstream) Jews they condemn.

In addition to being the recipients of naked flattery as a result of this exchange, non-Jews experience the frisson of hearing and affirming (and the privilege of repeating) anti-Jewish rhetoric that has been rendered acceptable because it has come out of the mouth of a Jew. It also inoculates them against charges of anti-Semitism and gives them leave to ignore threats or hostility to Jews as unimportant...[The rest.]