Davis Blogger Asks: How Many of the Occupiers are Anti-Semites?

A local blogger recently compared the Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement in a blog titled, Occupy Wall Street: "How many of these protesters are anti-Semites?" 

"Both [movements] are full of extremists who tend to have poor educations and an unsophisticated understanding of the economy and our political system." 

Rich Rifkin is a self-described centrist who keeps a blog called Lexicon Daily and sometimes writes a column for the Davis Enterprise. In his blog, he continued his comparison by explaining that both movements hate the Federal Reserve, WTO and free trade. But he suggested one major difference.

“The Occupy Wall Street movement has an explicitly anti-Semitic element setting the tone.”

Rifkin makes it very clear that he does not believe all on the far left are anti-Semites, noting that many of them are actually Jews themselves. But he says the hatred for bankers and bond traders within the movement is consistent with centuries of anti-Semitism.

We ran a story last week about at Occupy Oakland last week. One of them, it turned out, had been arrested in the past for a hate crime, which turned up a note that said, “Death to Israel. Long live the infitatda.”

Those charges were dropped, which we later clarified in the article, but the subject of Israel ended up dominating of the story.

Read Rifkin’s whole blog here and share your thoughts about his comparison below.

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