He hated his own Hispanic ethnicity. He hated anyone who looked different to him or possessed a different culture. He hated women for showing no interest in him.

His posts also reveal a pro­gres­sion from common prejudice into ever-deepening paranoia and con­spir­acy theories. He began to gravitate more and more toward Nazi icon­o­graphy and ideology.

He tattooed large SS bolts on his arm and a swastika on his chest.

He acquired a “right-wing death squad” patch, began to openly praise Hitler and fell ever deeper into the world of the Nazi killing squads that carried out the genocide of the Jews.

Before long, all of Garcia’s disparate hatreds found a central focus, mani­fest­ing in a demented, time-worn narrative.

Garcia turned to the “Jewish Question,” he assailed Jews for con­trolling the gov­ern­ment and he claimed that Jews had “engin­eered society so that men cannot mate with women.”

This was the final evolution in the thinking that had turned a young man from cruising right-wing sites and finding kitsch in military insignia, to com­mit­ting mass murder.

Its trans­mis­sion through well-honed mythology and con­spir­acies, its char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of Jews as both inferior and malevol­ently superior.

But its capacity to shift from prejudice to an all-consuming quest must be its most distinct feature.

Hitler unleashed the most dev­ast­at­ing war in history in pursuit of erad­ic­at­ing Jews.

Henry Ford, a man who had everything, would rave about Jews con­trolling the world around the campfire.

They con­trolled the banks, real estate, they caused the failures of the navy, they created jazz music, he would tell anyone willing to listen.

Ford used his immense wealth and creative genius to publish antisemitic rants in the newspaper he acquired in 1919, The Dearborn Inde­pend­ent, even­tu­ally packaging his favorite antisemitism screeds into a two-volume work titled “The Inter­na­tion­al Jew.”

Ford delib­er­ately did not copyright the book to enable its swift and easy dis­tri­bu­tion. It became a sensation in Germany. Hitler called Ford “his inspir­a­tion” and kept a portrait of him in his Munich office.

Garcia, pos­sess­ing no such means or high intellect, used what he had, easy access to guns, to kill as many innocent people as he could.

Another aspect of antisemitism that makes it unique is its nostalgia for a purer, bygone age and the belief that the Jew is the agent of its cor­rup­tion. Ford had it. Hitler had it.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.) believes that the creation of the State of Israel in lands directly linked to Jews since before Roman times is a Nakba, an Arabic word denoting “cata­strophe.”

One might consider the cata­strophe to be the exterm­in­a­tion of the European Jews which ended just three years prior to Israel’s inde­pend­ence.

Or the Arab violence and political blackmail that led to the British freezing out millions of Jews from Mandate-era Palestine, directly leading to their deaths.

Tlaib might consider the cata­strophe to be rejection by the Arabs of two-state solutions in 1937 and 1947, which could have spared a lot of blood and tears.

Instead, Tlaib has blamed Holocaust survivors who found refuge in Israel for “wiping out” Palestini­ans. She has tried to purge sup­port­ers of Israel (virtually all Jews) from pro­gress­ive spaces claiming that true pro­gress­ives cannot be pro-Israel, and invoked chilling rhetoric about those ‘behind the curtain’ that ‘make money … to control and express people.” They do it from “Gaza to Detroit,” she said.

Equally dis­turb­ing is that despite his famili­ar­ity with Jewish history, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.) hosted an inflam­mat­ory event in the Senate on May 10 to mark 75 years of “Nakba” after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy cancelled Tlaib’s initial plan to hold it at the Capitol.

In doing so, Sanders effect­ively laundered her con­tem­por­ary antisemitism into respect­able “pro-Palestini­an­ism” or “anti-Zionism.”

Another feature of antisemitism is that while it scars the Jewish people in every gen­er­a­tion, it hurts the per­pet­rat­or more.

From Babylon and Rome to the Nazis them­selves, the anti­semites have dis­ap­peared while the Jews endure.

They outlive their tor­ment­ors not as a quirk of history but because by turning on this numer­ic­ally minuscule nation —  that gave the world its great religions and the ethics derived from them —they turn on a vital part of them­selves and so suffer a mortal wound.

Tlaib and her patrons should remember this.