Craig Clifford

Embed from Getty Images The accusation of racism and genocide against the Israelis has been around for decades, but until fairly recently it was largely confined to the Soviet Union, PLO, and other terrorist groups. Sadly, it also has its roots in certain quarters of the Western intellectual world. This accusation—coming from politicians, journalists and professors in Western democracies—is so prevalent now that we have a term for it: Holocaust inversion.

Not to excuse Italian Fascism, but my experience in Italy and my knowledge of Italian history certainly make me even more despondent about the current anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment in Italy. Having spent ten years taking college honors students on a month-long study abroad in Urbino, Italy, and falling in love with Urbino, I’ve been especially disturbed by the huge anti-Israel marches in Italy and the blatant misapplication of the term “genocide” to Israel by many Italians.

Once I got to college, my study of philosophy intensified my history with the Jews in a number of ways—and, as I’ll discuss, the fact that so many of the scholars I encountered were Jewish may not have been an accident. First of all, my interest in Plato and ancient Greek philosophy, which started in a sophomore honors philosophy course with John Silber and his teaching assistant James Devlin, led me to a whole cadre of Jewish Plato scholars, many of whom had come to America to escape the Nazis.