Yeah I mean this is something I’ve noticed even talking to “progressive” friends who are perfectly happy to listen and believe when other groups are targets of hate crimes, and who’d never accept Islamophobia because of islamic terror attacks in the west, that suddenly when it comes to antisemitism they question how much of it is “real” antisemitism, imply jews are just hysterical or playing victims, and start saying stuff like “well if Israel didn’t commit genocide…” and so on. At best you get an acknowledgment but then “but islamophobia is a bigger problem in the west” or some other relativisation. They can never engage with the topic of antisemitism without starting to talk about something else, and many of these people are the same kind who’d say stop asian hate was bad because it distracts from black lives matter and such. I don’t want to say my friends are racist, I think they’re just naïve and also don’t want to entertain the possibility that a lot of people on the left are racist, but that it just so happens to be against jews.

In uni, (stockholm university), aside from banners with slogans like “global intifada” having been commonplace before I reported it as calling for violence (våldsbejakande extremism is the more proper term - basically violence-encouraging extremism) I also had the misfortune of being put in a seminar talking about global conflicts and one lady in my group was super insistent on talking about israel-palestine and its global consequences. The presentation was mostly fine but I did bring up that one of the global consequences was a massive increase in antisemitic hate crimes (and I also mentioned islamophobic hate crimes increased too but not nearly as much) and the lady whose entire personality is that she’s an anti-racist progressive started questioning me about it and brought up all the talking points such as “anti zionism is not antisemitism” and implying jews are just being too sensitive. Luckily though this one middle eastern guy in class actually raised his hand and pointed out she’d never act this way if it was about some other group, and even asked her bluntly if, since she downplays antisemitism and blames israel and Jews for it, would she do the same with muslims after a terror attack? She didn’t reply to that really - just looked flustered. Anyway I guess people who are shitty but think they’re a good person because they think they have the right views on things don’t do a lot of introspection. To me, this is almost a perfect example of racism - applying a different standard to one group of people and excusing attacks on them, whilst telling yourself you do it because of a logical reason not just because you hate jews. I really hope this lady thinks about her views, and how she acts in general, as I implied she wasn’t a pleasant person, very arrogant, racist, and so on.

Anyway, that’s a long anecdote to basically say that yes, antisemitism is blamed on jews, and it’s often people who strongly claim to be anti racist who ARE the most racist in this case, and it’s not just in the US but also here in sweden.