Anti-Jewish bigotry and violence is on the rise in Europe, and the old elites are having trouble mustering the moral and political fortitude to combat it. Interesting, and often depressing, to ponder how little attitudes have changed in the last century. If the blood on their hands for six million victims of the Holocaust can't produce lasting change, no wonder that European sympathy for America's casualties on September 11 hasn't persisted.
Across much of Europe, Jews see old prejudices mixing with new threats from militants among the continent's 17 million Muslims spread rapidly by mosques, the Internet and Arab satellite TV. In a clear reflection of Israeli-Palestinian tensions and the war in Iraq, many Jews also say they sense growing hostility among European intellectuals they see as demonizing Israel.Surveys say anti-Jewish assaults and incidents in much of Europe are at their most frequent since Hitler's defeat.
Henryk Broder, a Berliner with Der Spiegel magazine who made waves across Germany with a 1986 book called The Eternal Anti-Semite... believes the phenomenon of new anti-Semitism is real and growing. He sees a generalized antipathy toward Jews, whatever individuals may feel about the Jewish state or its prime minister, Ariel Sharon. "This is the globalization of anti-Semitism," he said. "What used to be directed at 'the Jew' is now directed at 'Israel.' "
Broder concluded, "People call me paranoid, but I have a feeling that many Europeans secretly hope that the Arabs might finish the business that Germany started with the Jews in 1938."
via the Houston Chronicle
The European Union commissioned a recent report on anti-Semitic violence and then promptly tried to suppress its politically inconvenient results. The combination of ancient European prejudice and the bitter resentments of newly-settled Arab immigrants in European slums is potent and dangerous. NPR correspondent Sylvia Poggioli had a good dispatch last week when the EU report was leaked.
There's a bitter dispute over the European Union's alleged suppression of a report blaming a new wave of anti-Semitism on Muslim youth and on anti-globalization activists. An EU poll found that nearly 60 percent of its citizens believe Israel is the greatest threat to world peace.Over the last three years, across Europe, Jewish cemeteries and synagogues have been attacked and Jewish students beaten. The violence has been blamed on young Muslim males whose anger is fueled by what they see as Israeli oppression of Palestinian Arabs.
CRIF site with EU-commissioned report
The United Nations, a haven of intolerance and antagonism thoroughly dominated by corrupt despots and their double-talking diplomats, is showing its moral hollowness, as noted by Anne Bayefsky.
Last week, the U.N. once again proved itself incapable of rising to the moral challenges embraced in its founding Charter: "tolerance," "the dignity and worth of the human person" and "equal rights." A draft resolution on anti-Semitism--which would have been a first in the U.N.'s 58-year history--was withdrawn in the face of Arab and Muslim opposition.Posted by Alan at December 8, 2003 06:18 AMDaily incidents of anti-Semitic violence around the globe are reported in the media. Yet while leaders of the Free World condemn synagogue bombings in Turkey, firebombings of Jewish schools in France, and the hate speech of Malaysia's president who now heads the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the U.N. moves in the opposite direction, encouraging the proliferation of this centuries-old hatred.
The U.N. is an organization founded on the ashes of the Jewish people, and whose core human rights principles were drafted from the lessons of the Holocaust. The inability of the organization to address seriously one of the very evils it was intended to prevent is a scandal of global proportions. In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared, "disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind." Fifty-five years later the outrage is gone, the silence of the U.N. when it comes to anti-Semitism is deafening, and the only ones benefiting are those planning future barbarous acts against Jews everywhere.
via the WSJ's OpinionJournal