Op-Ed: Why my antisemitism antenna keeps twitching

Ivor Gaber @ TheJC:

Let me begin with a declaration of interest so that readers know, as they say, where I am coming from.

I am Jewish by birth and an atheist by belief. I was one of the original signatories to the declaration of Jews for Justice for the Palestinians and Independent Jewish Voices, so I can hardly be described as a friend of the current Israeli Government or any of its immediate predecessors.

But why, at every Labour conference I have attended as a journalist and observer, does my trusty antisemitism antenna almost always start twitching?

I am no Jewish snowflake. I have sat in meeting after meeting where platform speakers have made legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government - both this one and Labour's before, and have offered, in the main, thoughtful insights into the origins of the state of Israel and of the whole Zionist mission.

But then, as soon as the discussion is opened to the audience, my discomfort begins.

Take Jeremy Corbyn's closing conference speech at this year’s conference for example. In the section on foreign affairs he spoke about the Saudi onslaught on Yemen, the oppression of the Rohingyas and the death toll in the Congo. Each reference received polite applause. Then he mentioned Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and the polite applause exploded into yelps of agreement and a standing ovation.

Why?

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UK: At Oxford, Education Proves No Barrier to Bigotry and anti-Semitism

Ilan Manor @ Haaretz:

I felt a similar sentiment last week when confronted with anti-Semitism at Oxford for the first time. I moved to the UK more than a year ago to begin my PhD studies. Although I had heard many times that anti-Semitism was rampant in Europe, and that anti-Israel activists were flourishing in UK universities, I encountered neither. Over the past year there have been no anti-Israel protests at Oxford and no calls to boycott Israeli products. Additionally, the BDS activists so often depicted as titans in the news in Israel were nowhere to be seen.

(...)

But then it happened.

A close friend and fellow PhD student invited me to have drinks with his father. His father in question immediately asked if I was a Zionist. While this is a difficult question under any circumstances, it is even more complicated in the UK, given that it is a code word for "Israeli zealot". If you wear a Super-Jew t-shirt and dream of Naftali Bennett you are what the Brits consider a Zionist. I answered that I was a Zionist, and that Zionism as a movement originally recognized the religious and national rights of the Palestinians.

On hearing this my friend’s father embarked on a tirade. Like the hot-tempered Sonny Corleone he angrily remonstrated: “You went too far! You tried to buy the U.S. elections and the people wouldn’t have it”. When I asked who he was referring to, he explained, “the Zionists of course.”

Apparently, we Zionists had not only backed Hillary Clinton in the elections, but also used our financial leverage to ensure that she would go to war with Russia to increase the price of oil. “Your money also ensured that Russia would lose through your sanctions on Putin. But you lost!” he said, smiling.

By the end of the evening the extent of the Zionist plot against America became apparent. Anglo-Saxons, a code word for white people, had decided to back Donald Trump and avoid Hillary’s war. “But you were not content”, explained the father. According to his theory, this is why the leader of the plot, George Soros, orchestrated protests throughout the world against Trump. “Like most Zionists, Soros is a sore loser,” said the father.

I was not sure how to contend with these comments coming from a successful businessman who was himself a university graduate.

(...)

Walking home I was baffled by my friend's reaction. Not only did he fail to counter his father's arguments, but he was actually inquisitive, asking how Soros made his money, how one could manipulate oil prices and why the Zionists had favored Clinton.

The following morning my friend came to apologize, stating that his father often drinks too much. “I’m really sorry," he said, "that my father forgot to pay for the drinks. But I could tell he really liked you. ”

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Hungary’s Ugly State-Sponsored Holocaust Revisionism

Via Tablet (h/t glykosymoritis):

Does it matter if a country consciously lies about its past? An excerpt from the new book, ‘The End of Europe' By James Kirchick

Why does it matter if a country consciously lies about its past? Inculcating in future generations a litany of myths about national innocence, perpetual victimhood, and lost honor grants license to irresponsible and dangerous behavior. Today’s fight over memory politics in Hungary echoes the mid-1980s German Historikerstreit, or historians’ controversy. That dispute centered on whether the crimes of Nazi Germany were singular evils or comparable to other mass atrocities, in particular, those of Stalinism. The intellectual combatants of the Historikerstreit brought no new facts to bear but only argued over how to interpret what was already widely known. In the words of the German essayist Peter Schneider, so heated was the argumentation, so deeply did it impinge on Germany’s understanding of itself, that the fusillade of polemics in the feuilletons attracted “a level of curiosity among the general public normally aroused by photos of the British royal family in swimsuits.”

(...)

After much back and forth, Nolte and his confrères were soundly refuted in the court of German public opinion. Among Germans today, it is a consensus view that the Holocaust was a singular event and that Germany has a duty to preserve the memory of the Holocaust and impart it to future generations. Germans have so thoroughly imbibed the awful lessons of their history that their country is one of the more immune in Europe to far-right populism.

Hungary, by contrast, has undertaken no such reckoning. In the same way that Ernst Nolte wanted ordinary Germans to feel a straightforward patriotism, uncomplicated by guilt over the Nazi past, Viktor Orbán and Mária Schmidt wish to muddy the distinctions between victim and perpetrator in order to present a simplistic view of Hungarian history. Nolte’s complaint that preoccupation with the Holocaust served “the interests of the persecuted and their descendants in a permanent, privileged status” sounds indistinguishable from Schmidt’s allegation that the progeny of the victims of Hungarian fascism “would like to consider their ancestors’ tragic fate an inheritable and advantageous privilege.” It is inconceivable that a German chancellor today would express a desire to “preserve Germany for the Germans.” Yet this is precisely the sort of language, redolent of the 1930s, that Viktor Orbán uses today about Hungary. Convinced that Hungarians are perennial victims of global machinations—abetted by his “evil” domestic opponents—and unencumbered by comprehension of, or a sense of humility about, where heedless nationalism has taken his country in the past, Orbán feels emboldened to advance a chauvinist political agenda.

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UK: The hateful whispers that make me want to move from London to Tel Aviv

Simon Wilder @ The Spectator:

The referendum result didn’t make me decide to leave, but it was a penny on the scales. This no longer feels like home. I may spend too much time on Twitter, but the things people say about Jews and Israel there make me tremble. They feel safe in their hatred, and, scarier still, probably are.

There’s a train of thought among right-thinking people in London at the moment that Israel is culpable; that it is responsible for all the ills of the Palestinians, all the woes of the Middle East. If it weren’t for Israel, they say, the world would be a better place. If you go to a dinner party you can hear things that wouldn’t have sounded unfamiliar in 1930s Germany. They say they’re just ‘anti-Zionist’ but to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic. No one is anti- any other country. No one questions, say, Iran’s right to exist.

I’ve voted Labour in the past, but these days people in the Labour party all too often say things about Jews having big noses, or controlling the media, or somehow engineering the attack on the World Trade Center. Israel is behind Isis, they say. At demonstrations people hold up placards that say Hitler was right. Those words, exactly. Much of Labour barely raises an eyebrow.

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Op-Ed: Europe’s Most Notorious Jew-Baiter? It’s a Tie

Ben Cohen @ JNS:

Now, if I had to pick someone from that particular field, I’d have to conclude that it’s a tie for first place.

From Hungary: step forward Zsolt Bayer, journalist, fascist apologist, a founder of the ruling Fidesz party, and a confidante of that country’s Putinesque prime minister, Viktor Orban. From Great Britain: step forward Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, darling of Islamists both Shi’a – Hezbollah – and Sunni – the Muslim Brotherhood – and literally obsessed with the claim that the Zionist movement collaborated with Adolf Hitler during the 1930s. (His obsession has lasted so long, one wag on Twitter commented that he’d devised a drinking game where he downed a shot of gin every time Livingstone mentioned Hitler, with the result that he’s now living in a dumpster.)

I get that there are others who could stake a claim to the “most notorious” title. Like French comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. Or the leaders of Greece’s neo-fascist Golden Dawn Party. Or the former British parliamentarian George Galloway. But I choose Bayer and Livingstone because together they neatly encapsulate the thematic fixations of post-war antisemitism: the undue political and economic influence of wealthy, powerful Jews, the insinuation that Jews invariably choose tribal conspiracy over national loyalty and the contention that the Jews themselves actively assisted the Nazi genocide that led to Auschwitz and Treblinka.

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Antisemitism Expert: Nazi Relics Sold at German Auction Highlight Growing Far-Right Obsession With Holocaust Revival

Via Algemeiner:

The popularity of a recent controversial auction in Germany, which sold relics belonging to high-level Nazi officials, highlights a growing obsession on the part of the far-Right to revive its connection with the perpetrators of the Holocaust, a leading antisemitism expert told The Algemeiner on Monday.

Kenneth Marcus — president and general counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and author of The Definition of Anti-Semitism — was speaking in response to reports by German media that a mysterious Argentinian bidder spent approximately 600,000 euros ($679,000) on Friday to purchase Nazi memorabilia at a Munich auction titled: “Hitler and the Nazi grandees — a look into the abyss of evil.”

According to a report Monday in Germany’s The Local citing Bild daily, the buyer — dressed in dark clothing and a baseball hat — spent 275,000 euros ($311,000) alone on a uniform jacket belonging to Adolf Hitler. Silk underwear belonging to Gestapo founder and Nazi Air Force Commander-in-Chief Hermann Goering fetched 3,000 euros ($3,395). He also purchased the brass container that contained hydrogen cyanide, which Goering used to commit suicide hours before his scheduled execution in 1946 in Nuremberg.

In total, the mystery buyer — who refused to give his name to the Bild, but said he was “from Argentina” and bought the items “for a museum” — purchased more than 50 Nazi relics. Other attendees included “young couples, elderly men and muscular guys with shaved heads and tribal tattoos.”

What is even more intriguing about the mysterious buyer — and what Marcus said is “unlikely coincidental” — is that he identified himself at auction using the number “888,” which has ties to the neo-Nazi code “88.” According to the report, “88” marks the letter “H” in the alphabet and stands for the Nazi “Heil Hitler” salute.

“We are seeing an increasing fascination towards the Nazis in Europe at the same time that antisemitism is flaring up. Nazi memorabilia is increasingly fetishized and prized within the fetid corners of the world in which far-Right bigotry is reviving,” Marcus said. The auction itself, he contended, “is symptomatic of the broader resurgence of antisemitism and neo-Nazi ideology in Europe.”

“This is not just ‘neo’ Nazism. It is Nazism, pure and simple. In a sense, Nazism never entirely disappeared,” he told The Algemeiner. “Within much of the Western world, it simply went underground after World War II. Increasingly, however, it is resurfacing today as memories of the Second World War recede.” 

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Europe: How anti-Semitism became respectable again

David P. Goldman @ Pajamas Media:

Heinrich Heine

[...]  For half a century the horror of a million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis stopped the mouths of the anti-Semites, but that memory has worn off. [...]

Ich, ich dulde dass du rasest, Du, Du duldest dass ich atme, wrote Heinrich Heine of the relationship between Gentiles and Jews in 19th century Europe: I tolerate your rage, and you tolerate my breathing. Things have changed. The crime of the Jews today is to breathe, and especially to breathe the air of their own country. As the body count rises, enlightened opinion once again will blame the Jews for breathing. Muslims will continue to engineer humanitarian disasters (as in the last Gaza War) to solicit Western sympathy, and European governments will attempt to placate their growing Muslim populations by blaming Israel.

The difference between today and the 1930s, to be sure, is that Jews are armed rather than defenseless. I am weary of excusing myself for breathing. Let them hate us as long as they fear us.

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In Europe, Jew-hatred trumps national security

Judith Bergman editorial @ Algemeiner

It has been less than two months since Islamic terrorists successfully targeted the Brussels airport and the Maelbeek metro station, killing 32 people and wounding many more. And it has been only half a year since the Paris attacks, in which Islamic terrorists killed 130 people and wounded nearly 400. These were groundbreaking, shocking events in the history of Islamic terrorism on European soil, so one would naturally assume that Israel and Jews in general, who make up such a marginal demographic group, constituting less than half a percent of the population of the EU, would be the last thing on European politicians’ minds. Another enormous immigration crisis looms, as 800,000 migrants, according to French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, are currently in Libyan territory waiting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. This means that Europe will most likely be facing even more chaos than it did last summer.

However, European politicians, instead of busying themselves with protecting their citizens from future terrorist attacks — as well as preventing another chaotic summer of migration chaos — incredibly find time to get mired in sordid squabbles about insane ideas of transferring Israeli Jews to the United States and claiming Hitler was a Zionist, as we saw in the UK, or composing elaborate peace conference initiatives to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as we saw in France. If I were a European citizen, I would wonder why my government was occupying itself with these issues, which have no vital meaning to any Europeans, at a time when Europe is facing unprecedented security threats.

As I mentioned in a past column, one example of this preposterous mindset was France’s rejection of Israeli terrorism tracking technology, which might have possibly prevented the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels — a clear example of Jew hatred trumping national security concerns, especially at a time when national security should be the top priority of every single European government.  [...]

In other parts of the UK, Jews are not faring any better. Almost 20 percent of Jews in Scotland have said that they have been victims of hate crimes. In Glasgow, home to the majority of Scottish Jews, more Jews are leaving or fearing to identify as Jews in a city, which has become increasingly hostile, something that culminated in 2014, when the Glasgow City Council decided to fly the Palestinian flag in what it said was a show of solidarity with the people of Gaza.

Just as elsewhere in Europe, these developments are more likely than not to result in an even greater exodus of Jews from the European continent. Israel will be the richer for that and Europe the poorer. This leaves the Europeans with nowhere to escape from their irresponsible politicians. But they should ask why Israel and the Jews continue to be an almost clinical obsession to the point where Jew-hatred trumps national security. It would be very interesting to hear the answer.

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Why is Ireland so hostile to Israel? Why do the Irish support BDS? What Is It about Israel that upsets them?

Alex Grobman, Ph.D., writes @ The Jewish Voice and Opinion

During her formative years, Israel received significant support in Ireland. Having experienced religious persecution themselves, the Irish identified with Jews. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case, according to Professor James Bowen of the National University of Ireland at Cork.

Bowen, who serves as national chairman of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC), says the initial sympathy expressed towards Israel disappeared when the Irish learned how the Arabs were “dispossessed” of their land in 1948 and then experienced the “horrors of the post-1967 occupation.”  Founded on November 29, 2001, the IPSC has no policy regarding the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, according to Bowen, it believes the decision to turn the area into two states, a federated state, or a single state should be made by the Palestinians and Israelis, who, the group says, have a legitimate interest in the outcome.

Promoting BDS

However, IPSC does not see itself as merely an interested party trying to support both sides. The group and its national chairman have taken a prominent role in promoting the Boycott-Divestment-and-Sanction (BDS) movement in Ireland against Israel. In fact, Irish academics have been particularly adamant in their efforts to have Israeli academic institutions boycotted.

In a letter to the Irish Times dated September 16, 2006, 61 Irish professors signed a petition urging academic institutions throughout the world to adopt a policy of boycotting Israeli institutions of higher education.

The date was no coincidence. The Irish professors, calling themselves Academics for Justice, published their letter on the anniversary of the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon. In that incident, thousands of Arab civilians, mostly Lebanese Shiites and Palestinians, were killed by a militia controlled by the Philange, a predominantly Christian-Lebanese party. The Philange claimed the attack on Sabra and Shatila was retaliation for the assassination of then-newly elected Lebanese-Christian president Bachir Gemayel. Although Israeli soldiers did not participate in the massacre, the IDF, which was already in the area, did nothing to stop it.

Academics for Justice have proclaimed September 16 as Ireland’s “Boycott Israel” day. [...]

More Irish Demonizing of Israel
But teachers are not the only segment of society promoting BDS against Israel in Ireland, where a de facto cultural boycott of the Jewish state has been in effect for years. A classified Israeli Foreign Ministry report revealed in December 2011 that, for more than a decade, no Israel dance or theatrical company, musician, or filmmaker had been invited to Ireland. Thirty-four Irish artists—one-fifth of all Irish performers receiving public funds—signed a petition calling for a cultural boycott against Israel. Irish artists and performers interested in maintaining relations with Israel are subjected to verbal and written attacks.

The Irish press regularly demonizes Israel and tirades against the Jewish state’s leaders are published in the name of “human rights.”

Trócaire, the overseas development agency of the Catholic Church of Ireland, which is funded by the Irish government through Irish Aid, is also anti-Israel. Although Irish Aid’s mandate is to “promote coherence across the full range of Irish government policies on issues such as agriculture, trade, the environment, and fiscal matters,” Trócaire has assumed a major role in fostering the demonization of Israel. In January 2013, for example, Trócaire produced a series of biased “educational resource guides” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that drew strong criticism from Israelis and some Irish commentators.

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Belgium: "I often go out of my way to avoid mentioning that I am Jewish"

Haaretz decided to headline this op-ed: "As Jews in Brussels, we're trapped between the Jihadists and the far right", but the writer is not talking about extremists, but rather about regular Belgians.


Via Haaretz (h/t glykosymoritis):

I do not feel more threatened because I am Jewish. When people comment that, “Oh, now this has finally hit home,” as opposed to it happening in Paris or elsewhere, I reminded them that terrorism already came to Belgium — when four people were murdered at the Jewish Museum in May 2014. Yes, they say, but the threats then and since were directed at the Jewish community.

They might continue — but the warnings against Jewish targets were isolated, "exclusive" threats, and those threats are somehow "tolerable" because, well, that is what happens to Jews. We Jews here in Europe get threatened. The police and soldiers in front of our synagogues, community centers and schools are somehow "our" normal and to be expected, because, well, we are Jews. That perspective should have been shattered by the latest attacks.

We Jews should have been seen as the canary in the coalmine. We may be some of the first who get hit, but we are not the last. After the attack on the Brussels Jewish museum, the official reaction expressed solidarity. But most people saw it as an attack against Jews, and not as an attack on a pluralistic society in which different sorts of people live together.

 After the terrorist attacks on Paris this past November, journalists remarked that the victims at the Bataclan and in the restaurants were attacked for being "normal" people doing "normal" things, the first such attack on "normal" people. But that was also not the case; the victims of the January 2015 attack on the kosher supermarket were also "normal" people doing something as "normal" as shopping for food. Yet somehow because those shoppers were Jews, they were seen as something apart, as somehow different. Their deaths were somehow less cruelly random.

Europe has a long history of treating Jews badly. I have had many experiences of anti-Semitism from non-Muslim Europeans. My French colleagues are not asked if they support the National Front in job interviews, but I was questioned about my political allegiances, prompted by my resume, that notes I speak Hebrew and did an internship in Israel (I have since taken Hebrew off my CV). I often go out of my way to avoid mentioning that I am Jewish, never sure when it will mark the end of a conversation or provoke snide remarks.

I am not equating social slights with murderous attacks, but they are related. Yes, currently the reason we have soldiers outside our synagogues is due to a heightened threat from jihadists. But I see this threat as aggravated by the lack of full acceptance of Jews (and Muslims) on the part of so many non-Jewish and non-Muslim Europeans. I emphasize non-Jewish and non-Muslim because, contrary to the racist rhetoric of the rising far-right politicians, Europe’s non-Jewish and non-Muslim populations are by far the majority and hold most positions of power in European society.

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Op-Ed: "The basic idea behind most modern anti-Semitism is that Jews must be up to something"

Via UK Media Watch:

A lot has been written in the British media about antisemitism in the UK Labour Party, but an op-ed written by Dave Rich of the CST masterfully cuts down the core of what the debate is about – the belief by a worrying number of Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters and “friends” that “Jews must be up to something”.

The basic idea behind most modern anti-Semitism is that Jews must be up to something. Whatever Jews say and do can’t be taken at face value: they must have some ulterior motive or hidden agenda that needs to be uncovered.

So when Jewish donors give money to political parties, it can’t simply mean that they support that party’s policies, as any non-Jewish donor would; they must be trying to buy support for Israel. Or when Israel sends rescue teams to countries that have suffered from natural disasters, it can’t simply be to offer humanitarian aid; it must be to steal human organs from the victims of those disasters.

Later in the op-ed, Rich addresses those who reflexively dismiss antisemitic rhetoric as “merely” anti-Israel.

Nowhere is this more apparent than when Jews complain about anti-Semitism in left-wing or pro-Palestinian circles. It has become a reflexive response for any such complaints to be dismissed as fake, a manufactured outrage designed to cynically deflect criticism of Israel’s policies.

 due to years of treating Jewish concerns about anti-Semitism as a cynical Zionist smokescreen…Anti-Semitism is simply not recognized as such if it comes in an anti-Israel context

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UK: "Polite racism turns the Jews, once again, into demons with the supernatural power to manipulate and destroy nations"

Nick Cohen @ The Guardian:

As one of the finest liberal ambitions is to find the sympathy to imagine the lives of others, you should become a Jew too. Declare that you have converted to Judaism or rediscovered your Jewish “heritage” and see the reaction. It’s not just that, if you are middle class and fortunate, you might experience racism for the first time, which in itself would be a “learning experience” worth having. You might also learn the essential lesson that antisemitism is not about Jews. Like rape, it’s about power.

Whether the antisemitic conspiracy theory is deployed by German Nazis or Arab dictators, French anti-Dreyfusards or Saudi clerics, the argument is always the same. Democracy, an independent judiciary, equal human rights, freedom of speech and publication – all these “supposed” freedoms – are nothing but swindles that hide the machinations of the secret Jewish rulers of the world.

Describe the fantasy the Tsarist and Nazi empires developed that bluntly and it is impossible to understand how the Labour party is in danger of becoming as tainted as Ukip by the racists it attracts.

But consider how many leftwing activists, institutions or academics would agree with a politer version.

Western governments are the main source of the ills of the world. The “Israel lobby” controls western foreign policy. Israel itself is the “root cause” of all the terrors of the Middle East, from the Iraq war to Islamic State. Polite racism turns the Jews, once again, into demons with the supernatural power to manipulate and destroy nations. Or as the Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallström, who sees herself as a feminist rather than a racial conspiracist, explained recently, Islamist attacks in Paris were the fault of Israeli occupiers in the West Bank.

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Op-Ed: "Jews, it seems, are the sole historical victim whose claim is dubious"

What Cohen and Johnson ignore is that anti-Zionism is by definition a movement to abolish the Jewish state.  If the latter antisemitism, then the former is antisemitism as well.  According to every definition of the word, denying Israel's right to exist is antisemitism.

The only 'anti-Zionists' who are not antisemitic, are not really anti-Zionists, they're Zionists who are critical of Israel. 


Roger Cohen @ New York Times:

The zeitgeist on campuses these days, on both sides of the Atlantic, is one of identity and liberation politics. Jews, of course, are a minority, but through a fashionable cultural prism they are seen as the minority that isn’t — that is to say white, privileged and identified with an “imperialist-colonialist” state, Israel. They are the anti-victims in a prevalent culture of victimhood; Jews, it seems, are the sole historical victim whose claim is dubious.

(...)

What is striking about the anti-Zionism derangement syndrome that spills over into anti-Semitism is its ahistorical nature. It denies the long Jewish presence in, and bond with, the Holy Land. It disregards the fundamental link between murderous European anti-Semitism and the decision of surviving Jews to embrace Zionism in the conviction that only a Jewish homeland could keep them safe. It dismisses the legal basis for the modern Jewish state in United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947. This was not “colonialism” but the post-Holocaust will of the world: Arab armies went to war against it and lost.

As Simon Schama, the historian, put it last month in the Financial Times, the Israel of 1948 came into being as a result of the “centuries-long dehumanization of the Jews.”

The Jewish state was needed. History had demonstrated that. That is why I am a Zionist — now a dirty word in Europe.

Today, it is Palestinians in the West Bank who are dehumanized through Israeli dominion, settlement expansion and violence. The West Bank is the tomb of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Palestinians, in turn, incite against Jews and resort to violence, including random stabbings.

The oppression of Palestinians should trouble every Jewish conscience. But nothing can justify the odious “anti-Semitic anti-Zionism” (Johnson’s term) that caused Chalmers to quit and is seeping into British and American campuses.

I talked to Aaron Simons, an Oxford student who was president of the university’s Jewish society. “There’s an odd mental noise,” he said. “In tone and attitude the way you are talked to as a Jew in these left political circles reeks of hostility. These people have an astonishingly high bar for what constitutes anti-Semitism.”

Johnson, writing in Fathom Journal, outlined three components to left-wing anti-Semitic anti-Zionism. First, “the abolition of the Jewish homeland; not Palestine alongside Israel, but Palestine instead of Israel.” Second, “a demonizing intellectual discourse” that holds that “Zionism is racism” and pursues the “systematic Nazification of Israel.” Third, a global social movement to “exclude one state — and only one state — from the economic, cultural and educational life of humanity.”

Criticism of Israel is one thing; it’s needed in vigorous form. Demonization of Israel is another, a familiar scourge refashioned by the very politics — of identity and liberation — that should comprehend the millennial Jewish struggle against persecution.

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Europe: Ferociously anti-Israel mini-movements became the norm in W. Europe

Oxfam, Belgium

The great strength of the BDS movement in Europe is that they are extremely well organised, determined, professional, they are full of hate for Israel, well funded and transcend frontiers - anti-Israel miliants can be found in every European country and in every city.  And of course they use the Internet to spread their hatred of Israel.  There no such movement to counter their actions, not even at national level let alone at the European level.  As Benjamin Weinthal writes it was given international exposure at the 2001 UN Durban "anti-racism" conference - fifteen years later the European Jewish community has not put in place a single concerted initiative to counter this.

Benjamin Weinthal,  fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, @ Jerusalem Post:

A lack of US-style resistance to the growing BDS movement in Europe has ignited a worrisome trend across the continent. It is now up to pro-Israel groups to extinguish the flames.

To fathom the potency (or lack thereof) of the BDS movement targeting Israel, the diverging and converging paths of its activity in the US and EU can be quite telling.

First, the divergences: Buoyed by the infamous 2001 UN Durban “anti-racism” conference in South Africa, ferociously anti-Israel mini-movements became the norm in Western Europe. Nearly 15 years after the conference, large sectors of European Muslims and hard-leftists, bolstered by an indifferent mainstream society, have turned BDS into an assault on Israel’s legitimacy.

The economic damage done to Israel by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is rather insignificant thus far. Rather, BDS is about lethal force. In short, the extremist core of the movement seeks to dismantle Israel. The British poet W.H. Auden understood where movements animated by a fundamentally irrational ideology lead: “When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.”

x

As the late Dr. Robert Wistrich, the former head of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University, explained to this writer, there are still “countervailing forces” in the US to blunt efforts, especially on the grassroots level, to turn Israel into an abnormal state.

But the lack of civil society resistance to the ad nauseam attacks on Israel within Western European countries is disquieting. The challenge for anti-BDS activists will be to sway the vast number of undecided, largely apolitical constituencies in Europe.

As the Jerusalem-based watchdog NGO Monitor has documented, European governments have pumped tens of millions of euros into NGOs that support various forms of BDS. The mushrooming industry of BDS-animated NGOs in Europe is not matched in the United States.   [...]

The 800-pound gorilla in the room that separates Europe from the US is the Holocaust.

The Shoah still informs large segments of Europe’s psychology – and frequently in a pathological way. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play The Garbage, the City and Death, written in 1975, neatly captures an aspect of Europe’s preoccupation with Jews: “And it’s the Jew’s fault, because he makes us feel guilty because he exists. If he’d stayed where he came from, or if they’d gassed him, I would sleep better,” said one of the characters.

The transformation from “It’s the Jew’s fault” to “It’s Israel’s fault” is part and parcel of the BDS movement in European discourse.  [...]

By contrast, the French government has a robust anti-discrimination law that covers full-blown boycotts targeting Israel. The French, however, are in a kind of split-personality mood. President François Hollande’s government energetically supports labeling of Israeli products and other unilateral penalties against Israel. Put simply, the French posture could help accelerate the slippery slope of anti-Israel activity into more BDS actions.

BDS can spread in Europe like wildfire. Consequently, one barely puts a BDS defeat in the rearview mirror before a new BDS action appears on the scene. Legislative and political measures will certainly help stem the flow of BDS. In the final analysis, however, if pro-Israel groups and local Jewish communities can bring about a radical attitudinal change within large swathes of the indifferent masses to stop the BDS program in Europe, there might be a sea change in public opinion.

If the unrealized potential of broad-based European pro-Israel views could be set in motion, it would create an additional convergence with American society.

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UK/Europe: Jews know that a boycott is just the beginning

Jonathan Newmann, a director of Jewish Human Rights Watch, writes @ The Daily Telegraph:

The anti-Semitic campaign to shun Israeli goods embodies the radicalism that threatens everyone

[...]  BDS claims it protests against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, and models itself on the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa.

But polls show that the Jewish community believes it to constitute anti-Semitism. Why?

First, BDS aims to eradicate Israel completely – its founder, Omar Barghouti, openly declared that “we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine”.

Second, the boycotters target the Jewish state alone. BDS does not go after any other liberal democracy or British ally, let alone any dictatorship; only Israel, the Jew among nations. 

Third, wherever BDS surfaces, it is accompanied by harassment of Jews – whether it’s Jewish students who retreat from campus life for fear of intimidation, or kosher food being forcibly removed from supermarket shelves, or Jewish trade union members who see their unions become vehicles for anti-Jewish hate, or a Jewish-American reggae performer being booted from a music festival.

Fourth, anyone remotely sensitive to Jewish history will know that boycotts have been the instrument of Jewish persecution for a millennium. The last century taught the Jews full well that what begins with a boycott by a few thugs or unknown academics does not end there. If “never again” is to mean anything, it is that BDS cannot be tolerated in a decent and civilised society.

Consequently, the Government’s announcement has generally been welcomed. But it has provoked a backlash from some, who claim it will limit councils’ freedom to make “ethical investments”, and that it is an “attack on local democracy”. Neither of these claims can withstand scrutiny.

If boycotting a liberal democracy like Israel in support of the brutal dictatorships of Hamas in Gaza and the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the West Bank – neither of which have held anything resembling an election in years and routinely execute political opponents, in line with the rest of the Arab world – constitutes an ethical investment, then something in the moral compass is suspiciously askew.  [...]

But BDS is not just about Jews or foreign policy. It’s about the radicalism that threatens us all. Jihadi John hated Jews before becoming the face of the Islamic State (Isil); Alexe Kotey participated in a pro-Hamas flotilla before becoming an Isil executioner; and the Bataclan Theatre in Paris was for years a target of BDS protests and abortive terrorist attacks before Isil slaughtered 89 innocents there last November. 

BDS and anti-Semitism may come for the Jews first, but the radicalism behind them has us all in its sights.

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Op-Ed: Why does the Labour Party seem to find it so difficult to weed out antisemitism from within its ranks?

Jeremy Newmark, Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement @ The Telegraph:

It is partly about refusal to engage with contemporary antisemitism as it is understood by most Jewish people today. My party must reflect upon this carefully if our stated opposition to all forms of racism is to be taken seriously by the victims of antisemitism.

We need to get over the denial. If "Holocaust Denial" is a central motif of antisemitism on the political Right, "Antisemitism Denial" is fast becoming a parallel on the Left. In Oxford, the refrain was that "most accusations of antisemitism are just the Zionists crying wolf". At JLM we don’t use the term antisemitism lightly. We encourage robust criticism of Israel’s government and its policies. We do not take the “Israel right or wrong approach”. We advocate a Palestinian state as an expression of self-determination of the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, even we are dismissed as the “Zionists crying wolf”. Despite European antisemitism being measured at a historic high against any index, it is almost impossible to discuss it in Labour circles without encountering this form of denial.

Sometimes, people refuse to engage in another way. They act as if serious antisemitism ended some time ago. At a leadership hustings event, one of the strongest responses to a question on antisemitism came from Jeremy Corbyn. It was robust, passionate and empathetic. Jeremy described his family’s involvement in fighting the Fascists during the 1936 "Battle of Cable Street". It was an almost brilliant response. The problem was, it ended there. The answer stopped at Cable Street. It left the question hanging – did Jeremy understand that antisemitism is a constantly mutating virus? Does Corbyn understand that today antisemitism takes a very different form? I think he, like most in the Labour Party, does. But unless this is demonstrated from the top, incidents like Oxford will continue to taint us.

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Op-Ed: "You cannot sow anti-Semitism with your policies and then feign surprise when you end up ‎reaping anti-Semitism"

Judith Bergman @ Israel Hayom:

In Denmark, it has been decided that an information center is needed to educate and inform the general population about the ‎Jewish minority living there. The purpose of this center, which will be run by the Danish Jewish community and funded by the Copenhagen municipality, is to combat anti-Semitism. This is rather ironic, ‎considering that Jews have lived in Denmark for over 350 years and that Denmark became world famous ‎for saving most of the Danish Jews during World War II. It seems a little late in the day for education and ‎information. Then again, the majority of the "new" anti-Semitism against Jews in Denmark -- although far ‎from all of it -- comes from a new demographic, Muslims, who have only lived in Denmark for the past ‎four decades.

Several days ago, ‎ Copenhagen Mayor of Employment and Integration Anna Mee Allerslev told Danish television that "Danish Jews, Jews in Copenhagen, have experienced discrimination. This is of course not the general ‎impression in Copenhagen, but we have too many instances of anti-Semitism or Jew-hatred and we want ‎to help break down prejudices and spread information and in that way eliminate discrimination and hate ‎crimes."

The center will be educating teachers who, in turn, will visit schools, educational institutions ‎and youth clubs in order to spread information about the Jewish minority in Denmark.‎

Allerslev happens to be the same person who in 2012 told Danish Jews ‎participating in a festival celebrating the multiculturalism of ethnic and cultural minorities in Copenhagen ‎that they would not be allowed to display the Israeli flag at the festival. No such message was given to any ‎other minority participating in the festival. "The Israeli flag can seem provocative to some and for security ‎reasons we do not wish the Israeli flag to be displayed," Allerslev said. Only four years later, the mayor has ‎seemingly realized that discriminating against Jews is a bad thing.‎

(...)


You cannot sow anti-Semitism with your policies and then feign surprise when you end up ‎reaping anti-Semitism. Everything is connected.

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Sweden: Ongoing anti-Israel campaign has made it very difficult for Jews to live in the country

Dow Marmur @ The Star (h/t Honestly Concerned):

Take Sweden as an example. By all accounts it has no reason to be hostile to Israel, yet recent pronouncements by its government, particularly its foreign minister, that single out the Jewish state for condemnation because it defends itself against deadly terrorist attacks while seemingly tolerating similar actions by other states, have made it very difficult for Jews to live in Sweden.
Its anti-Israel campaign seems to have less to do with what’s happening in the Middle East and more with what’s happening in Sweden itself. Its government is said to want to make sure that its growing Muslim population, including the new immigrants, will support the party in power. A pathetic but apparently effective way to woo them is to express hostility to Israel. This, therefore, may be the real reason why what looks like Sweden’s foreign policy is really no more than local scheming that uses local Jews as scapegoats.

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Europe: Because Jews' tormentors don’t look like the people in history books it won’t trigger any alarm bells

The Holocaust has been instrumentalised for political purposes for a long time, espcially to fight the Far right and conservatives.   It has become a powerful tool. It is often used to bash Israel, thus trivialising the Holocaust.  Two examples.  The first Belgian poet laureate Charles Ducal compared Jews in Israel to Nazis. Portugal’s Nobel Prize–winning novelist, José Saramago "drew a parallel between the plight of the Palestinians and Auschwitz, an Israeli journalist countered by asking him whether there were gas chambers in Gaza. Saramago replied, “I hope this is not the case. There are so many things being done that have nothing to do with Nazism, but what is happening is more or less the same.”"

Ed West writes @ The Spectator:

This is not happening in Europe.

[...] Monday’s controversy over asylum seekers being made to wear red wristbands in order to receive free meals, because being asked to wear ID to qualify for things is exactly like being a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. A chilling echo, as many people commented. I imagine the reason for this policy is that it’s more convenient than asking someone with a not especially good grasp of English to walk around with a form for his entire family; either that, or it was part of a concerted effort by the Conservative government to pave the way for the mass extermination of refugees.  [...]

On the same day as this story broke Amnesty International put out an advert in the New York Times calling on European leaders to take in more refugees. The picture showed families behind barbed wire with the phrase ‘Leaders of Europe, it’s not the polls you should worry about. It’s the history books.’

https://twitter.com/adhofstra/status/691665680450637824

Chilling, once again. Except for the fact that Germany’s policy right now is as far from Nazism as it is possible to get –  pathological altruism rather than pathological nationalism – and yet the minute a refugee is photographed near barbed wire we’re immediately back to Auschwitz.

Next door to Germany sits tiny Denmark, which has historically been one of the most ethical countries on earth (at least since the time of Canute the Great). It has now been compared to the Nazis after it told refugees that they must sell their assets to pay for their upkeep before the Danes support them. I agree they should have exempted special items like wedding rings, but how tenuous is that Nazi comparison? As James Lewishon wrote for The Spectator:

‘The Nazis took the Jews’ valuables as part of an industrialised process of genocide which ended with them stripped naked and murdered in the showers of Auschwitz. The Danes meanwhile organised the most successful rescue of Jews anywhere – 92 per cent of Danish Jews survived the war, including my entire family. It is true that today the Danes are proposing to take some refugees’ valuables as part of the asylum process. But the showers at the other end are safe and contain hot water paid for by Denmark’s extensive welfare state.’

The problem with history is that the most dominant subjects tend to crowd out all others, just as in any artistic sphere the most celebrated musician, writer or artist tends to become remembered at the expense of contemporaries. This has happened with Nazi Germany in our culture, which has become ubiquitous just as knowledge of large areas of the past has become confined to a few enthusiasts.  [...]

One of the reasons for Nazism’s ubiquity is that this era of the past has become a weapon in the culture war, a stick with which to beat conservatism. [...]

Many people will argue that the whole point of teaching so much of Nazi Germany is to avoid a repeat of it. Yet the history books are full of warnings and lessons, so focusing on one area does not give us a well-rounded idea of the human experience, nor especially guide us away from future tragedy.

Last year 8,000 Jews fled France for Israel, and I can’t imagine it will be long before the Jewish population in Germany starts to decline once more. But because their tormentors don’t look like the people in our GCSE history books it won’t trigger any alarm bells. Amnesty is right: our leaders should worry about Europe’s history books, but maybe they should be more concerned about Edward Gibbon [the fall of Rome] than William Shirer.

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"Many Western journalists covering the Middle East do not feel the need to conceal their hatred for Israel and for Jews"

Khaled Abu Toameh @ Gatestone Institute:

But when it comes to covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ignorance apparently is bliss. Misconceptions about what goes on here plague the international media. The binary good guy/bad guy designation tops the list. Someone has to be the good guy (the Palestinians are assigned that job) and someone has to be the bad guy (the Israelis get that one). And everything gets refracted through that prism.

Yet the problem is deeper still. Many Western journalists covering the Middle East do not feel the need to conceal their hatred for Israel and for Jews. But when it comes to the Palestinians, these journalists see no evil. Foreign journalists based in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv have for years refused to report on the financial corruption and human rights violations that are rife under the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas regimes. They possibly fear being considered "Zionist agents" or "propagandists" for Israel.

Finally, there are the local journalists hired by Western reporters and media outlets to help the cover the conflict. These journalists may refuse to cooperate on any story that is deemed "anti-Palestinian." Palestinian "suffering" and the "evil" of the Israeli "occupation" are the only admissible topics. Western journalists, for their part, are keen not to anger their Palestinian colleagues: they do not wish to be denied access to Palestinian sources.

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