[...] The problem – as it was in the 1930s – is discursive as well as physical.
A "day of rage" march in Paris in January 2014 saw far-right Catholics marching alongside young Muslim north African men from the banlieues. They were united with the chant: “Juif, la France n’est pas à toi" (Jews: France is not for you).
Meanwhile, in Berlin last week, I saw a man of Middle Eastern-appearance walking up and down near the Tiergartenstrasse wearing a sign and holding up a placard. It read, helpfully, in both English and German: ‘The Zionist hides Behind the Secret Agency and terrorizes the Whole World’.
We can't solve Europe's problems but we can clean up our own by first recognising their seriousness, whether in the institutional culture of the Labour party or on the streets, where offline abuse often take place.read more
According to Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitic incidents, attacks on Jews in the UK often come with "Nazi invective", including "Heil Hitler", a slogan favoured by both white and non-white attackers. It all gets especially vicious when Israel is at war. In 2014, during the six weeks of the Israel-Gaza war, the CST recorded an unprecedented 1,174 number of anti-Semitic incidents, while the hashtag #hitlerwasright trended.
Too often, in the face of all this, Jews are assumed to be simply making a fuss, to be hogging the limelight as usual. But as long as there are Jews there will be anti-Semitism, and as long as there are Jewish women there will be a particularly vile sexualised variant of it. Until the nature and reach of such sentiment is acknowledged, things will only get uglier.
Worth reading: France: The beginning of the end for French Jews (David Horovitz)
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