Posted on 04/30/2002 9:38:43 AM PDT by BenF
The rocks have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are slithering free.
In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him "a dirty Jew." Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapons fire.
In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack. Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza "should be shot dead." A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus. Antisemitism, wrote a columnist in The Spectator, "has become respectable . . . at London dinner tables." She quoted one member of the House of Lords: "The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."
In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, "Surely they don't want to kill me again?" In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulchre. The caption: "Non resurrexit."
In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town of Herford: "Six million were not enough."
In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of Kiev's main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.
In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Ioannina and vandals hurled paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica. In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of "Sieg Heil" and "Jews into the sea." In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.
But nowhere have the flames of antisemitism burned more furiously than in France.
In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseille; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words "Dirty Jew" were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months. According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter.
Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming "Jews to the gas chambers" and "Death to the Jews." The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve "family honor." The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked -- and did not apologize -- when it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that the world's troubles were the fault of "that shitty little country, Israel."
"At the start of the 21st century," writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a well-known social scientist, in a new book, "we are discovering that Jews are once again select targets of violence. . . . Hatred of the Jews has returned to France."
But of course, it never left. Not France; not Europe. Antisemitism, the oldest bigotry known to man, has been a part of European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, open Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to type.
To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of Jew-hatred all over their continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency. "Stop saying that there is antisemitism in France," President Jacques Chirac scolded a Jewish editor in January. "There is no antisemitism in France." The European media have been vicious in condemning Israel's self-defense against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have been far less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard.
They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians.
A timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews. Militant Islamist extremists were attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed Americans on Sept. 11. The Nazis first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was ablaze.
Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. When they become the objects of savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned and an explosion is soon to come. If Europeans don't rise up and turn against the Jew-haters, it is only a matter of time until the Jew-haters rise up and turn against them. -- ## --
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. To receive his columns by e-mail, send a note with your name and e-mail address to columns@earthlink.net ).
It exists in Free Republic, too.
Oh please...this is getting silly. Europe is moving right, Jews are on the left and the Muslims which liberals, many of them Jews, allowed into Europe are beating up on Jews.
Calling people names is only designed to cover up why what is occurring is occurring. "Antisemitism" is a dodge. As meaningless as "racism", "xenophobia" and "homophobia".
It is what people do, not what they are, which nearly always accounts for problems.
It exists in Free Republic, too.
I respectfully disagree. I have been here a long time, and have not seen any evidence of anti-semitism (except maybe from the occasional pro-Palestinian left-wing America hater).
The indigenous Europeans are, at minimum, standing by and letting it happen. Incidents are being whitewashed by European authorities and underreported by the European press. The specific actions aimed at Jews in Europe are being carried out by Muslims, but they are facilitated and quietly applauded by plenty of people in the European population. A lot of the motive is craven fear of their immigrant Muslim populations by the Europeans (fear that their OWN pizza parlors and shopping districts will soon be bombed on a random basis) but not all. Frankly, I am horrified by the European/British attitude toward these new pogroms and very sad and concerned for my Jewish friends.
I did not know that that Moslems own all of those European publications!
In this country the Jews have brought in some mistaken ideas about danger to them coming from Christians. Thus in that area their interests as they perceive them have meshed with those of the Left, i.e., the deChristianizing of America.Jews have also believed that they had to induce in this society a true respect for diversity in the hope that they would be thereby protected. They seem to have thoroughly misunderstood what it is about this country that made it so inviting to them in the first place?
This statement makes as much sense as saying Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventists and Buddhists "are such fervent advocates of massive immigration". The truth is that Democrats want voters and corporations want cheap labor and consumers. Both use PC and it's chilling effect on free speech to serve their ends. Spouting off such a statement apparently serves to nourish your passion.
While I agree with the posters who said that the Moslems in Europe were to blame for the actual incidents, the rest of Europe has generally stood by and done nothing. Also, the magazines, etc. are not Moslem-controlled. See posts 11 and 14.
The events of the last few months will, IMHO, accelerate this change.
Jeff Jacoby is the Globe's token conservative writer that helps them convince themselves that they're really balanced.
Anti semitism precedes the facts that are supposed to call it forth; it seeks such facts out to nourish itself upon them; it must even interpret them in a special way so that they become truly offensive.
Your statemnt, Oh please...this is getting silly. Europe is moving right, Jews are on the left and the Muslims which liberals, many of them Jews, allowed into Europe are beating up on Jews, is no different than the mindset which brought forth this statement in the article:
She quoted one member of the House of Lords: "The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."
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