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.

Read more.

Does Germany need another Islamist, anti-Israel and antisemitic Infusion by John L. Esposito?

BICSA (The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism) report by Clemens Heni:

75 year old John L. Esposito, Georgetown University’s Director of the Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding and professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., will be the keynote speaker of a big conference in Germany, Jan 14–16, 2016, about „anti-Muslim racism and hostility towards Islam in Germany and Europe.“

The conference will take place at the University of Osnabrück in the North-West of Germany, over forty speakers are invited to speak. The event is organized by the “Center for Islamic Theology,” and supported by the German Federal Government and its Ministry of Education and Research, Lower Saxony’s Ministry for Research and Culture, and the Post Graduate Program Islamic Theology. 

This Center for Islamic Theology is headed by Bülent Ucar, who is the main organizer of the event alongside with his co-worker, Nina Mühe, an anthropologist and Islamic studies scholar known for her attack on Berlin’s Anti-Hijab Law in classroom. Mühe is a former fellow at a German branch of George Soros’ Open Society Institute.  [...]

In his book “Who Speaks for Islam?” (2007, together with Dalia Mogahed), Esposito used the equivalence of anti-Semitism and “Islamophobia.” In his distorted view, Jews aren’t but a “religion” and just one of two “religions with Semitic origins.” In fact, hatred of Jews is a worldwide ideology, while “Islamophobia” is rather an invention by some specific circles, namely Iran and Islamist organizations and their followers.  [...]

This “optimism” (a nice word for the spread of Islamism, no?) can also be seen in the work of leading Sunni cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, another protagonist of Esposito. In his book “The Future of Islam” (2010), the Saudi (Prince Alwaleed) funded scholar says, al-Qaradawi “claims that everything is acceptable (halal) unless proven forbidden (haram).” This makes him a moderate according to Esposito and his German colleagues Gudrun Krämer and Bettina Gräf. Gräf co-edited a book, “The Global Mufti,” with pieces by another Georgetown academic, Barbara Freyer-Stowasser (1935–2012), about “gender equality” in a fatwa about female suiciding bombing against Israel by al-Qaradawi.  [...]

Mustafa Ceric, former Grand Mufti of Sarajevo, is another Islamist portrayed as kosher, by Esposito. Ceric once went to the Auschwitz Memorial site, not to remember the Shoah but rather to invoke the Muslims-are-the-new-Jews-analogy. Ceric has also been criticized for his ties to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, among other Islamist aspects of his approach.  [...]

August 5, 2014, during the latest Gaza War, John L. Esposito tweeted the following: “Elie Wiesel plays the Holocaust trump card in Gaza” and links to an antisemitic homepage – “Mondoweiss.” Wiesel had said, that Jews stopped using children as sacrifices some 3500 years ago, Hamas should stop it now, too. Truly a correct statement, taken the fact that Hamas is verifiably known for abusing children and others as human shields. For Esposito this was just another reason to defame Israel and make fun of the Shoah and a Holocaust survivor.

Esposito compares Israel to Nazis, uses even more antisemitic language, promotes Islamists as possible allies and defames German officials, who headed federal offices in the fight against Jihad and Islamism.

Are these enough reasons for the Jewish Museum Berlin’s Yasemin Shooman, the mainstream weekly “Die Zeit” and its author Yassin Musharbash, the left-green-wing daily “taz” and its Daniel Bax, scholars like Andreas Zick from Bielefeld University, who even sits on Board of the US based “Journal for the Study of Antisemitism” (JSA), or historian Wolfgang Benz, former head of the “Center for Research on Antisemitism” at Technical University Berlin, dozens of other scholars, activists and authors, the Government of Lower Saxony and the German Federal Government to support and join such an event?

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France: Blaming anti-Semitic and jihadist violence on Israel

Shmuel Trigano writes @ New English Review: Paris - January 11: A Disturbing Event

Coulibali, a "child of the République"
and Jew-killer 

[...] Contrary to what pundits chose to see and celebrate, the universal compassion manifested at the rally had nothing to do with an ethical sublimation of feelings of vengeance. It was an expression of resignation, of the silent willingness to be exposed as martyrs to blows (in the future). The fact is that a “war” (to cite Valls) without clearly identified enemies has no chance of being won.

The least you can do when you’re attacked, if only for your mental health, is to identify your attacker. The problem is that, for 15 years now, France has been unable to do so. From an analytical strategic standpoint, refraining from identifying and understanding the aggressor’s motivation and logic is a failure that could have fatal consequences. Repeatedly, we have heard politicians and journalists acknowledging their lack of understanding (“How could Amedy Coulibali, a child of the République, have done this?" was the title of a January 14 broadcast on FR2). This failure directly impacts the capacity to fight against the danger and prevent an act of aggression from taking place. Instead, again and again we hear pathetic attempts to regard attacks, from Boston to Canberra, as crimes committed by mentally unstable individuals. Fifteen years went by between the start of the wave of acts of aggressions in France in 2000 and the moment after the recent attack that François Holland spoke of an “anti-Semitic act.” 

For fifteen years then, the French governing classes denied that there was a problem, preferring instead to perpetuate the myths of “inter-community tensions” and an “imported conflict” and to incessantly offer up sociologizing explanations. The same reasoning is still informing the government’s attitude. On the very morning of the rally, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, speaking on the French radio station RTL, blamed the anti-Semitic attacks on the conflict in the Middle East – a code word for Israel. Against this unrelenting mantra, recent attacks have demonstrated the real wellspring of anti-Semitism. It proceeds not only from Islamic and Quranic sources against non-Muslims – and this is clearly stated by the terrorists – but also from the silence of “moderate” Muslims, who have never (with rare exceptions) clearly and massively taken a stand or fought against anti-Semitism. It also feeds on the incapacity of the French state to integrate Islam by reforming it (as Judaism and Christianity were in the 19^th century in order to become part of the French nation-state) and to protect French Jews. To hide all this, at the very height of recent events, members of the French government could still be heard implicitly pointing an accusing finger at Israel (which they do systematically in their policies), seeing it as responsible for everything that’s happening.

“Je suis Charlie, je suis un flic, je suis juif”
The slogan that was repeatedly chanted at the rally, “Je suis Charlie, je suis un flic, je suis juif,” speaks volumes of another form of resignation, internal this time. If “I” am all these things at once – Charlie, policeman, and Jew – then I am no one in particular. This means that I cannot be identified, that I choose not to own who I am, and thus be able to face my attacker in order to win the fight. But when it comes to neutralizing the identity of the victims, the Jews pose a problem: to conform to the resigned frame of mind, Jews must not leave the role they play as silent consenting victims, and this is precisely what they would be doing were they to decide to leave the country. The movement of aliya was thus presented on many French TV stations as a betrayal, a blow to “national unity.” On January 15, for example, a report on the evening news on FR2 went out of its way to demonstrate that the Jews do not want to move to Israel, that they want to remain French. This attitude is of course intimately bound up with the media portrayal of Israel over the past 15 years, as the country that symbolizes military force and “occupation.” It is more convenient to celebrate Jews in the role of victims, as sacred symbols of the Republic (“An attack on a Jew is an attack on the République,” was the way former president Jacques Chirac put it). This is extremely worrisome because of the proximity between the sacred and the terrifying taboo, which sustain one another and can easily switch places. 


The “pas d’amalgame” syndrome
Once again, as following all recent attacks in the West, the “pas d’amalgame” syndrome was immediately reactivated. “Pas d’amalgame” can be translated as “let’s not blur distinction” or “let’s not conflate” or “lump together,” it being understood, though not expressly stated, that the object of this confusion is between terrorists and Muslims. [...]  Tarek Oubrou, Imam of Bordeaux and an adherent of the Muslim Brotherhood, invited to comment on the departure of Jews, declared that Muslims too were leaving France, in a very typical attitude that can be described as a form of symbolic ping-pong. Then there were calls to bestow the legion of Honor on “the Muslim [expressis verbis] Malian hero of the kosher supermarket.” Six days after the attack, the president himself stated that, “Muslims are the first victim of fanaticism, fundamentalism, and intolerance.” And, in response to the threats against Jews coming from fundamentalist mosques, the government extended security measures to mosques. The “pas d’amalgame” syndrome thus serves to position Muslims in the category of victims and collaterally stamp out any consideration of a specifically Islamic form of anti-Semitism.

The fact is that the blurring of distinctions is widespread amongst political leaders on the highest level (Cameron, Hollande, Obama, and others). After every attack they repeat the selfsame profession of faith, asserting urbi et orbi that the publicly stated reason for the attacks – namely, Islam – is being falsely cited by the assailants whose acts are actually “unrelated to Islam.” It is obvious to everyone, however, that Islam is the unique motivation of the attackers, a fact that is corroborated by the rapidity with which some new converts to Islam commit terrorist acts for which they had no grounds prior to their conversion. The blurring of distinctions is thus surreptitiously reproduced whenever political leaders speak of Islam as an absolute or of the betrayal by these Islamists of Muslims as a whole. Their very need to defend Muslims as a whole, when there is no reason why they should ALL be held accountable for the fundamentalists among them (even if the latter claim to be motivated by Islam), is a sign that at bottom they believe there’s a reason for suspicion.  More.

The “pas d’amalgame” syndrome thus dialectically comprises a collateral “confusion,” unacknowledged to be sure, that involves blaming anti-Semitic and jihadist violence on Israel, in this case in the person of Netanyahu. Journalists outdid one another in the excessive language they used to define the Israeli ministerial delegation at the rally, described alternately as far right wing, ultra-nationalist, etc. while they presented the Palestinians, of course, as innocent angels. This is one of the specific characteristics of the new anti-Semitism, one that has been amply documented, and in which the French media have been playing a very serious role. The accusation against Israel and Zionism in the new anti-Semitism was clearly stated already in 2001 by Hubert Védrine, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, when he declared that he “understood” the anti-Jewish acts of violence in the banlieues in light of “what Israel was doing to the Palestinians.” He reiterated the thought on January 11 on the French news network BFM, as did Laurent Fabius, as we have seen, the very same day. Indeed, this is standard discourse at the Quai d'Orsay, an expression of France’s “Arab policy,” and it has a direct structural impact on anti-Semitism in the country.  More.

Europe: EU rights conference to give equal billing to anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred

Jerusalem Post (via Elder of Ziyon):

Two victimes of the massacre at the
Jewish museum in Brussels perpetrated
by Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche

Jewish organizations worldwide expressed shock and dismay over the weekend following the announcement that the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency is planning on holding a conference that implies an equivalence between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

The first annual colloquium on fundamental rights in the EU, held by the racism watchdog organization and titled “Tolerance and respect: Preventing and combating anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim hatred in Europe,” is scheduled to be held in Brussels in early October.

It will focus on the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment and violence across the continent and the “growing evidence in many European countries, especially in the past two years, of very high rates of anti-Muslim incidents, including acts of verbal and physical violence,” according to the organizers.

Jewish community leaders in Europe and elsewhere told The Jerusalem Post that despite being largely supportive of the FRA’s work, they believed it inappropriate for it to juxtapose hate directed against Muslims with anti-Semitism as if both were one and the same.

“The challenge of combating anti-Semitism would be better served by a stand-alone colloquium fully focused on the problem,” said Eric Fusfield, the legislative affairs director of the B’nai B’rith International Center for Human Rights and Public Policy. [...]

According to Michael Whine, CST director of government and international affairs, many European countries seek to “equate anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hatred in the same breath and they are not the same. Muslims are suffering in Europe, and that is being monitored, but it’s certainly not coming from the Jews, whereas many of the attacks against Jews are coming from the Muslims.”

“The growing problem of anti-Semitism in Europe comes from Muslims and the Left and anti-Israel agitators,” he added. More.