Posted on 05/14/2002 10:25:41 AM PDT by liberalism=failure
An Old Hatred's New Day
Does a wave of anti-Jewish attacks around the world mean antisemitism is on the rise?
A specter is haunting the world, but its name is not communism. Its name is antisemitism. A hardy perennial among the world's ideologies, antisemitism did not merely survive the century that relegated fascism and communism to the dustbin of failed "isms." Today, many people fear, the vilification of Jews is taking on new force, fueled and often rationalized by perceptions of Israel's role in the worsening conflict between the 54-year-old nation and Palestinian militants bent on destroying it. It also appears to be acquiring new colorings, some of a decidedly leftist hue. But is antisemitism something to be feared today as it should have been feared in the 1930s? Or is it simply an opportunistic freeloader benefiting momentarily from the turmoil in the Middle East?
Evidence of mounting anti-Jewish sentiment appears most dramatically in the worldwide surge of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions. Such incidents recall, and in some cases even exceed in brutality, the Nazi-led rampages of Kristallnacht in 1938. And they have been on the rise, particularly in Europe and even more particularly in France, ever since the Palestinians launched the second intifada against Israel in the fall of 2000. During the past month alone, following Israel's military incursions into the West Bank in response to a series of brutal suicide bombings, the number of such episodes has skyrocketed. In Tunisia, the detonation of a gas-laden truck killed at least 17 people outside Africa's oldest synagogue. In Russia and Ukraine, vandals attacked synagogues and desecrated cemeteries, with one gang of 50 Kiev youths chanting "Kill the Jews" as they assaulted a rabbi. Arsonists in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, set fire to a Jewish library, destroying valuable religious and historical texts. And thugs, probably neo-Nazis, broke windows and defiled the interior of the Finsbury Park synagogue in north London. "The Finsbury Park episode was the culmination of a bad, bad month in which 51 incidents against Jews were recorded," says Fiona Macauley, public affairs director of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Still, that figure pales in comparison with French numbers. In a nation that is home to some 5 million Muslims and 700,000 Jews, events such as the burning of a Marseille synagogue have become more than daily occurrences. Most are carried out by Muslim youth gangs, but some, it is believed, are the work of more sophisticated Islamist terrorist groups. If French Interior Ministry records are correct, 360 crimes were committed against Jews and Jewish institutions in the first two weeks of April alone.
Getting worse. Whatever the exact numbers, Martine Oiknine, a Moroccan-born Jew who manages a cafe in a Jewish neighborhood of Paris, finds that the situation has grown steadily worse since September 11. "Now we are openly insulted by Muslims," she says, "and I think that's because now that they've been able to attack the United States, no one is safe and they can call us dirty Jews." Far more alarming to other French Jews has been the government's perfunctory response to antisemitic attacks, a tepidness that many say is motivated by fear of losing the large Muslim vote. "What disturbs us is that the French government and institutions aren't reacting," says Joseph Bokobza, a Jewish dentist of Tunisian origins. Such concerns cannot easily be dismissed as alarmist: It was only in January that the French president, Jacques Chirac, declared that antisemitism was not a big problem in France.
Those downplaying the implications and wider significance of antisemitic incidents, including the measured voice of the British Economist magazine, point out that the perpetrators are, by and large, the usual suspects: neo-Nazis, ultranationalists, Muslim fanatics. Inveterate haters of Jews, they say, are simply taking advantage of a climate of opinion that has become more openly–and not necessarily unfairly–critical of Israeli policies under the leadership of the Likud Party's Ariel Sharon. Writing in the Washington Post, Chris Patten, the European Community's commissioner for external relations, forcefully rejected charges by American pundits that European leaders, journalists, and intellectuals are using the Mideast conflict to vent their latent antisemitism. He asserted that it is only "the beginning of wisdom" to recognize that, in the Mideast as in Ireland, there are "two authentic cries of pain and rage." He added, "It is not antisemitic to say that, any more than it is to suggest that we will do our common campaign against terrorism irreparable damage if we allow it to be hijacked by Likud."
Few of even the staunchest defenders of Israel, in America or elsewhere, claim that all criticism of Israeli policies and leadership is covert antisemitism. But when criticism edges toward the view that Israel has no right to exist, says Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, alarms go off.
Equally troubling to some observers are the ways in which journalists and opinion makers seem to push conventional wisdom toward one-sided and simplistic demonizations of the Israelis. That slant has had popular repercussions, with large pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli demonstrations being mounted throughout the world's capitals–demonstrations in which the line between anti-Israeli sentiment and antisemitism is often fully blurred. At such gatherings in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany, kaffiyeh-wearing youths demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinian militants and routinely compare Israelis to Nazis. Amid one such crowd in Berlin, a little girl sitting on her father's shoulders wore mock dynamite sticks strapped around her waist. (A photograph of this perverse romanticism has at least prompted words of concern, and the promise of an investigation, from German officialdom.)
Writing in Panorama last month, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci put the charge most bluntly: "I find it shameful . . . that state-run television stations contribute to the resurgent antisemitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones." Or worse: Take the recent cartoon in the Italian daily La Stampa intended as a comment on the Israeli siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, where Palestinian terrorists have taken refuge. It depicts an Israeli tank with its gun directed at the infant Jesus, who is saying, "Surely they don't want to kill me again?"
Significant, too, is the fact that the tenor of public opinion began to change in Italy and other countries well before Sharon sent troops into the West Bank. Most notorious was a January cover of the leftist British weekly The New Statesman, with a picture of the Star of David piercing the Union Jack over a headline that read, "A kosher conspiracy?" Overt antisemitism, which joins up with and is reinforced by anti-Israel sentiments, appears to be losing much of its stigma in certain of Britain's higher circles. At one recent London dinner party, for instance, the French ambassador described Israel as a "s - - - - y little country" that threatens to draw the world into World War III. When the ambassador's words got out, the French Embassy rejected charges that he was either antisemitic or anti-Israeli.
Intellectuals of the left in America as well as in Europe have long taken positions critical of Israel, justifying them as part of their anti-colonialist agenda. But anti-Israeli criticism reached a new height of virulence when Oxford literature professor and poet Tom Paulin, a frequent commentator on the BBC, last month told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram that American Jewish settlers on the West Bank and Gaza were "Nazis" who should be "shot dead." Paulin has claimed that his words were taken out of context and that he is in any case a philo-Semite. But Lawrence Goldman, a history tutor at Oxford, raised doubts about that plea in his own comments to the Daily Telegraph: "This is the man who described the Israeli Army as the 'Zionist SS,' declared that Israel has no right to exist and left the Labor Party because it was 'Zionist.' " So, Goldman asked, "Which bit of Jewish does he like? The jokes, perhaps? Or is it the food?"
Ned Temko, editor of the Jewish Chronicle in London, voices qualified concern. "I don't think there is a widespread campaign of antisemitism," he says, "but some commentators and presenters at times wander past criticism of Israel in a way that is either incredibly naive or antisemitic." That tendency, he adds, is even worse in other parts of Europe. In France, for instance, the media and leftist intellectuals have so exaggerated the culpability of Israel that previously unthinkable comparisons are almost commonplace. "Even high school kids are now comparing Sharon to Hitler," says cafe manager Oiknine. Pierre-André Taguieff, a philosopher at a prominent French think tank and author of the recent book The New Judeophobia, sees intellectual and official attitudes toward Israelis and Jews as being tied up with feelings of guilt about France's Muslims, the majority of whom live in the poor, violence-ridden suburbs surrounding many French cities. "To be politically correct is to support the victims," says Taguieff, who, though he is not Jewish, receives threats from people who think he is. He argues that a far left that portrays the United States and Israel as the ultimate enemies has linked up with parts of the antiglobalization movement and with radical Islamists to produce a new form of antisemitism that has largely displaced that of the far right. (Largely but not completely, as the recent strong showing of ultranationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, a hater of Muslims as well as Jews, made clear.)
Seeds of shame. If this is the new face of antisemitism in France and other parts of the Western world, antisemitism with a largely left-leaning cast, its connection with another relatively new form of antisemitism should not be ignored. That is Muslim antisemitism–or, more precisely, militant Islamist antisemitism. As Bernard Lewis and other historians of Islam have pointed out, Muslim states have historically tended to be far more tolerant of Jews, their fellow people of the book, than have, for example, most Christian polities. But the seeds of shame and resentment that were planted in the conquered Muslim realms during the colonial period have now blossomed into something hideous. Particularly after the failure of secular Arab nationalism became apparent following the 1967 Six-Day War, hopes for a civilizational revival focused increasingly on a strongly political and fundamentalist version of Islam. And this Islamism, whether Sunni or Shiite, included not just an ideological demonization of the West but also of, specifically, Jews and Israel.
Since the Islamist agenda of creating theocratic states was, above all, a threat to existing Middle Eastern regimes–whether single-party dictatorships, pseudo-parliamentary democracies, or mon-archies–these regimes re- sponded with a mixture of repression and co-optation. "The hatred of Israel is a part of a revolutionary ideology that has set itself against the Arab governments," says Charles Hill, a fellow in the international security studies program at Yale. "In order to protect themselves, the governments had to take on this part of the Islamist program and even to fan its flames." Encouraging their populations to vent their frustrations at Israel–the Saudi and Egyptian offi-cial newspapers routinely publish hateful antisemitic screeds reminiscent of the worst Nazi tracts–these regimes have also directly and indirectly supported the most intransigent Palestinian militants. And it is precisely those militants–whether in Hamas, Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad–whom Yasser Arafat had in mind when he backed down from the peace proposal that President Clinton put before him and Ehud Barak during the summer of 2000.
It is a peculiar irony, then, particularly in the wake of September 11, that the foreign-policy establishments of Western nations, including the United States, say so little, openly or forcefully, about the role of struggling Middle Eastern regimes in exacerbating tensions between the Palestinians and Israelis. In that irony might be seen the deepest causes of a worldwide and resurgent antisemitism.
With Thomas K. Grose in England, Lucian Kim in Germany, and Eduardo Cue and Benjamin Sutherland in France
Present events in Europe, while not the same, nevertheless give us a chance to witness the growth of hate-driven collectivism, right before our very eyes. Fascinating.
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