The Media and Intellectual Antisemitism in Western Europe

The Media and Intellectual Antisemitism in Western Europe

Robert S. Wistrich

Judeophobia at the beginning of the 21^st century has been undergoing a significant metamorphosis. It is not primarily ethnic, völkisch, or racist in character as it was six decades ago in Europe. In contemporary Western Europe, antisemitism is no longer the exclusive preserve of xenophobic forms of radical populism or the ultra-nationalism that was traditionally linked with it, both before, during and after the Holocaust. This does not mean that the existing movements of the radical Right have ceased to be a matter of concern. They are remarkably stable and in many Western and Central European countries they represent between 10-20% of the electorate. Jews are still targeted but less so than foreign immigrants, guest workers, Arabs, Africans, Gypsies or other outsiders.

On the other hand, though militant Islam is perceived as an enemy by the radical Right, so, too, is the “international Jewish lobby.” Indeed antisemitic “anti-Zionism” has led to a significant rapprochement – particularly in Germany – between the far Right and radical Islamists. Both accuse “the Jews” of exploiting the Holocaust to financially blackmail Germans and gain world-wide support for Zionism. Despite its endemic anti-Arab racism, the far Right often uses the Middle East conflict, anti-Zionist slogans and “solidarity with the Palestinians” as a means to further antisemitic political propaganda.

There have also been broader changes in the political structure, self-perception, dominant ethos and liberal ideology that prevail in the European Union (EU) which have to be taken into account. Unlike Russia and Eastern Europe, the dominant trend in the EU today is post-national, multi-cultural and pluralist: it claims to look beyond outdated 19^th century concepts of the territorial nation-state, the sanctity of national sovereignty or of a homogeneous cultural community.[i][1] This supranatural evolution should logically have suited the Jews of Europe down to the letter. Indeed, until very recently they had never seemed so prosperous, accepted and well-integrated into the economy, culture and politics of their respective countries. Moreover, in the year 2004, the European Union is not experiencing mass employment, a major economic depression, a crisis of the parliamentary system, serious religious conflicts, class warfare, revolutions, the threat of Bolshevism, or cultural upheavals of the kind that would have generated antisemitism in the past.

The differences do not stop there. In the 1930s, antisemitism was centrally directed and organized throughout Europe by Nazi, fascist or authoritarian Catholic regimes. It was endorsed by Church and State, with governments passing antisemitic legislation as well as practicing discrimination in housing, employment and administrative matters. Today, there are statutes that outlaw antisemitism and the churches are committed to Christian-Jewish dialogue. There has been a revival of interest in Jewish culture in Europe expressed in book fairs, film festivals and klezmer music. Not only that, but commemoration of Auschwitz liberation day on 27 January has been institutionalized in many European countries – an unmistakable mark of respect to the Jewish victims of the Shoah. By the same token, jack-booted Nazism is considered beyond the pale. State-sponsored incitement against Jews and Israel is still a reality in the Arab and Muslim world, but not on the European continent. So if things are so good, why are they so bad? Why do Jews in the European Union feel so insecure?

The problem in Europe today comes primarily from civil society - especially from the educated elites and the media, whose barely disguised hostility to Israel has created a new climate of suspicion toward Jews. This atmosphere is in many ways more reminiscent of fin-de-siècle Europe during the Dreyfus Affair than the 1930s. Then, as now, “the Jew” in the collective sense, was stigmatized as a pariah in European society. There were ugly demonstrations, cries of “Death to the Jews” could be heard on the streets and there was much talk of a “Jewish syndicate” seeking to control national policy behind the scenes. The traditional hostility to Jews came to assume new secular forms, creating a wall of suspicion between Gentiles and Jews that challenged the premises of liberal assimilation. It was this invisible “new ghetto” provoked by the antisemitism of the 1890s, which has returned in Europe today, with the focus on discrediting the Jewish State and seeking to isolate it within the international community.

True, there are still those who maintain that antisemitism is no real threat but merely the product of an overheated Jewish or Israeli imagination, a paranoid expression of collective hysteria. Many liberals and left-wing critics go further and claim that the debate over antisemitism is a deliberate ploy to divert attention from Israel’s “war crimes” or to silence criticism of its actions. There are “post-Zionist” Israelis and Diaspora Jewish “dissidents” who also like to pretend that antisemitism is an “invention.”[ii][2] Sometimes they assert that it is designed to encourage “aliyah” to Israel; or to raise money for Jewish organizations; or to strengthen an eroding Jewish identity. The more malevolent among the critics see antisemitism as a fiction of the so-called “Holocaust industry” to intimidate Jews and Gentiles alike. These cynical and false propositions are not new but look decidedly hollow in the light of the statistical and other evidence regarding the dramatic rise in antisemitic acts. Even the President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac – eighteen months ago still in denial (“there is no antisemitism in France”) – has in the past year adopted a much firmer position, committing the Republic to take tough measures against the current wave of antisemitic violence.[iii][3]

The British House of Commons, for its part, conducted a useful debate on the subject in which the issue was publicly acknowledged for the first time. Equally, the European Commission since the beginning of 2004 has also begun to address antisemitism in a more serious way. In late 2003 it still tried to suppress a report (commissioned under its auspices) which confirmed that there was indeed a significant rise in antisemitic violence across Europe. What disturbed its monitoring center in Vienna were the findings that Muslim immigrants seemed to be responsible for the rise in Judeophobic incidents in many countries. At the same time, a tendentious EU survey of December 2003 showed that about 60% of the population in the European Union believed Israel was the greatest single threat to world peace – an unprecedented level of hostility.

Since then there has been an even more problematic EU Commission report, blaming most antisemitic incidents in Europe on young white males – unemployed and right-wing extremists – a conclusion contradicted by much of the empirical evidence.[iv][4] On the other hand, the important conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) held in Berlin at the end of April 2004, while not squarely addressing this sensitive topic of Islamist Judeophobia, did emphasize the need to develop new plans and strategies to prevent a further increase in antisemitism.[v][5] The Berlin conference acknowledged that there were no grounds that could justify attacks on European Jews on the basis of the Middle East conflict. Nevertheless, despite the fanfare, the Berlin Conference preferred not to name the main perpetrators. Nor have any effective institutional means been mounted to carry out a sustained educational campaign across the continent against antisemitism.

There is no compelling evidence to believe that the danger posed by rising antisemitism has diminished. It continues to affect the security and well-being of Europe’s Jews. Moreover, the question of Israel remains a source of tension between America and Europe, along with the war in Iraq, the threat posed by militant Islam and arguments over the best way to confront global terror. Many Americans as well as Israelis, tend to believe that Europe is once again surrendering to the demons of its antisemitic past. True, Jews are not for the moment actually murdered in the streets, expelled from their professional positions or being driven out of countries in which they live. But they do feel a new pressure, a sense of depression and anxiety. There are once more questions about their loyalty. Over half of the population in some EU states believes Jews care more about Israel than the countries in which they live. Even more remarkable is the prevalence of an openly antisemitic discourse about the power of the “Jewish Lobby” and its iron grip in the United States. Recently, this has been the topic of talk shows, op-ed articles and bigoted comments by a number of US Congressmen and former high officials, seeking scapegoats for America’s entanglement in the Iraqi quagmire.[vi][6]

There is a widespread myth that the “neocons” (i.e. East Coast Jewish intellectuals) have been running American foreign policy for the benefit of Israel and that they manipulated Washington a disastrous war. As in the 1930s, Jews are being cast in the role of warmongers. In Britain, a highly respected Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, alluded last year to a “Jewish cabal” around Prime Minister Tony Blair. This sinister “cabal” consisted of two Mischlinge – Foreign Secretary Jack Straw who apparently had a Jewish grandfather and the half-Jewish Peter Mandelson: only Lord Levy, Mr. Blair’s chief fundraiser, was actually a “full-blooded Jew.”[vii][7] The increasing invocation of such a loaded discourse is a symptom of the revived popularity of conspiracy theories concerning Jews – which though somewhat muted in America and Europe, assume especially lurid colors in the Middle East. Much of this Muslim Judeophobia itself derives from European models, including National Socialism. Today, Europe is reabsorbing the virus back into its own mainstream, ignoring the lessons of its own history, as soon as the issue relates to Muslims.[viii][8]

When ideologues of Al-Qaida like Ayman al-Zawahiri denounce what they call the “Judeo-American” alliance to achieve world domination (or the so-called plot of “Crusaders” and Zionists) they, too, are echoing European as much as Islamic motifs; when Malaysia’s last Prime Minister Mohammed Mahathir insisted in 2003 that Jews “run the world run by proxy,” he was reviving fictions contained in that notorious Russian fabrication, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This grotesque document continues to hypnotize millions of Arabs, thanks to television soap operas like the Egyptian Rider Without a Horse.[ix][9] More loathsome, still, was the antisemitic Syrian series Al-Shattat (The Diaspora) shown last Ramadan on the Hizbollah TV channel, Al-Manar in Lebanon and relayed across the Middle East as well as to parts of Europe.[x][10] It showed horrific scenes of Jews committing ritual murder, more graphic than even the worst examples of Nazi antisemitic propaganda. The Palestinian Hamas movement, too, openly embraced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion ever since its official sacred Covenant appeared in 1988. It has also encouraged Holocaust denial and the blood libel.

The ubiquity of such rabid anti-Jewishness in the Middle East has significantly contributed to radicalizing Muslim youth in Europe - especially in France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden and Great Britain. The antisemitic virus was already there in the cultural baggage of many of the Maghrebin immigrants before they arrived in Europe. It is also the case that it has been heightened by the fundamentalist preaching in the mosques, often sponsored and financed by the Wahhabite rulers of “moderate,” “pro-Western” (sic) Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it has been dramatically spread by Islamic websites.[xi][11] But Europe, too, must accept its responsibilities. The Muslim Judeophobia activated on European soil derives in part, at least, from the marginalization of new immigrants by the majority white society.

Vocal opposition to anti-Arab racism has been one factor encouraging a new alliance between the European Left and the Islamists. Even more important in this rapprochement has been a common hatred for the “American- Zionist conspiracy” which supposedly seeks to dominate the world. The hard left and Muslim militants may be far removed on issues like secularism, socialism, the rights of women or homosexuality. But they both despise Western values of capitalism, democracy and individual freedom with equal vehemence and passion; and they categorically reject the use of American military power abroad (especially in the Middle East). This “Red-Green” nexus reviles Israel as an “agent” of American imperialism; yet, simultaneously believes that Jews control the domestic and foreign agenda of the United States, the world of international finance and the global media. Western antiglobalist “progressives” – no less than the Islamists – regularly slander Zionism as a new form of Nazism. The anti-American and anti-Israeli rhetoric of the antiwar movement in Europe –has increasingly reflected this “Islamo-progressive” agenda, which all too often slides into open antisemitism.[xii][12] The demonization of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon and their continual equation with Adolf Hitler has indeed become a standard refrain of “peace” demonstrations on the streets of Europe. The German anti-imperialist Left regularly equates the State of Israel with Nazi Germany and undermines its moral right to exist by branding it as a colonial project pursuing a fascist policy. For German anti-globalists, portraying “Uncle Sam” with a “typical Jewish nose” – as happened in a big anti-Bush demonstration in Berlin on 21 May 2002 – is by no means unusual.

The alliance between the radical left and the hard-line Islamists in Western Europe took on a new lease during the European elections of June 2004, especially in France and Britain. The radical left alliance of Revolutionary Communists and “Workers Struggle” (Lutte Ouvrière) groups turned to Islamic militants to help it secure seats in Parliament. According to Arlette Laguillère, the Trotskyite passionara of the working class, “the struggle for Palestine” is now an integral part of the “global proletarian revolution.” This project naturally includes wiping Israel off the map as well as fighting for the overthrow of the global economic system and American power. The French Communist Party has also been active in unconditionally supporting the Palestinian cause.

In Britain, the Marxist-Islamic coalition was born out of the anti-war coalition created two years ago to prevent the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Over half of its steering committee comes from the hard left and its chairman Andrew Murray was a leader of the British Communist Party and formerly an employee of the Soviet Novosty Agency. Co-chair is Mohammad Aslam Ijaz of the London Council of Mosques. For the Islamists, the hatred of Americans and Jews is clearly the critical element in this alliance. As Abu-Hamza al-Masri, a leading British fundamentalist, puts it, anyone who “wants to throw Jews out of Palestine is welcome.”[xiii][13] In other words, to destroy Israel and Zionism, even alliances with atheists are permissible. This is exactly the line that was adopted by Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri in a message to Al Qaida supporters in Britain in August 2002. It was echoed from the Left by a former disciple of Che Guevara, now converted to Islam - the Venezuelan terrorist leader Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. In his recent book, Revolutionary Islam, Carlos calls for an alliance of Islamists and Marxists to destroy America and its allies.

International revolutionary terrorists like Carlos have moved with the times. So, too, have members of the hard Left in Europe and North America who embrace Muslim militants as the “new proletariat” or underclass that will help them achieve the old dream of destroying world capitalism.[xiv][14] In Britain, this “anti-imperialist” Left includes Communists, Trotskyists, Maoists and ecologists as well as radical offshoots of the Labour Party like the Scottish MP and former Saddam Hussein groupie, George Galloway. Galloway, a flamboyant “anti-Zionist” who received huge subsidies from the fallen Iraqi dictator, now works closely with the Muslim Association of Britain and Palestinian groups financed by Yasser Arafat. His primary aim appears to be the overthrow of British Prime Minister Tony Blair for supporting the American war in Iraq and doing nothing to “free Palestine.”

Anti-American and anti-Jewish stereotypes have become firmly anchored in the prevailing pro-Palestinian discourse in Europe. This Palestinophile enthusiasm has led certain politicians, intellectuals, journalists and artists into using inflammatory language that inverts the horrors of the Holocaust against Jews and Zionism. Israel finds itself placed in the dock as a serial violator of human rights while infinitely worse abuses with far greater loss of life pass without international condemnation – from Chechnya to the Sudan. The terminology of genocide seems almost exclusively reserved for the Jewish State. For example, in an interview in Stern magazine in June 2002, a former Conservative German Minister, Norbert Blum, denounced what he called Israel’s Vernichtungskrieg (war of destruction) against the Palestinians. In using this explicitly Hitlerian term, he presented Sharon’s policy as if it were equivalent to Nazi-like “exterminationism.” Israel’s actions were described as the product of “blind vengefulness,” carried out in total disregard of the international rules of warfare.[xv][15] In the same interview Blum maintained that those who complained about antisemitism were trying to use it as a “moral cudgel” to silence justified German and European outrage against Israel’s human rights abuses. This allegation continues to be heard on the Left and Right – as well as in the mainstream media across the European Union.

Intellectuals, artists, journalists and writers have been especially prominent in defaming and demonizing Israel. This has been done in ways that have fertilized the soil for a new kind of antisemitism whose main objective is to delegitimize the Jewish State. In this respect, modern intellectual and media elites are continuing an ancient tradition in European history. Antisemitism throughout the ages sustained itself through the work of educated people – clergy, academics and intellectuals – no less than through violent mob behavior or the rhetoric of unscrupulous demagogues and plebeian rabble-rousers. One thinks of the diatribes of St. John Chrysostom, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and many leading theologians and preachers over the centuries. It was official “saints” of the Church who created the doctrinal basis of anti-Judaism and the groundwork for the “teaching of contempt.”[xvi][16] The violent anti-Jewish tirades of the leading Protestant reformer Martin Luther raised this Christian demonology to new heights. Even a model European and symbol of “tolerance” like the great humanist Erasmus suffered from a milder form of the same disease.[xvii][17] Judeophobia also pervades the writings of many philosophers and radical thinkers of the Enlightenment like Voltaire, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, or Feuerbach, not to mention Marx, Proudhon and the early French socialists.[xviii][18]

Anti-Jewish stereotypes also figure as a prominent element in the great English literary tradition from Chaucer through Marlowe and Shakespeare to Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope; it is no less evident in the work of such prominent 20^th century authors as Hilaire Belloc, John Buchan, H. G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound or Evelyn Waugh. Modern French and German literature, art and philosophy show an even stronger strand of religious bigotry, racist prejudice and contempt for Jews. For example, intellectuals and journalists like Edouard Drumont, Maurice Barrés and Charles Maurras laid the foundations for the fin-de-siècle French nationalist and racist antisemitism which viciously denigrated the Jews as an “alien, subversive body,” disintegrating and corrupting la grande nation.[xix][19] Equally in 19^th century Germany, one finds major artists like Richard Wagner, renowned academic historians such as Heinrich von Treitschke or leading ecclesiastics (including the Protestant Court preacher Adolf Stoecker) who helped sow the seeds of Nazi race-hatred. Modern antisemitism in Romania, Russia and Poland, like its models in the West, also owed a great debt to indigenous intellectuals who cultivated and developed the “pseudo-scientific” ideology on which it was based.

The same phenomenon has, in recent decades, steadily grown in intensity in the Arab-Muslim world. The current antisemitism of Arab academics, journalists and intellectuals is alarmingly reminiscent of Nazi Germany, representing a major obstacle to “normalization” with Israel. This is as true of societies like Egypt and Jordan (nominally at peace with Israel) as it is in Ba’athist Syria, Wahhabite Saudi Arabia, radical Shi’ite Iran, “liberated” Iraq or the supposedly secular Palestinian Authority. In each of these otherwise distinct Arab or Muslim societies, respected journalists and academics have not hesitated to propagate monstrous falsehoods such as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in order to demonize Jews.[xx][20] Even mainstream publicists and intellectuals in Egypt like Anis Mansour or Mohammed Heikal (who recently asserted that no more than 300,000 Jews died in the Shoah) are part of this cascade of bigotry. Yet, the shocking proliferation of such genocidal antisemitism is scarcely mentioned in the European or Western media. It remains a taboo subject despite its obvious relevance to understanding the Middle East conflict and its significance as a major symptom of the jihadist threat to Western society.

In Western Europe today, it is not so much denial of the Holocaust but its relativization and inversion (in order to “Nazify” Israel) which best expresses the new “teaching of contempt.” The renowned Portuguese writer, Jose Saramago, not long ago compared Ramallah to Auschwitz. The Ulster-born British poet Tom Paulin rants against the “Zionist SS” who are – in his eyes - nothing but vicious “child murderers.” That quintessential English man of letters A.N. Wilson – witty journalist, athlete, biographer and committed Anglican – could write in the London Evening Standard after Jenin, that Israel has forfeited its right to exist.[xxi][21] This is unfortunately only the tip of a rather large iceberg. The paroxysm of falsifications, half-truths and lies in the European press that accompanied the Israeli entry into Rafiah in May 2004, has followed the same pattern of demonization already apparent during the Jenin affair two years earlier.

For contemporary Israel-baiters it is self-evident that the world must be made Judenstaatrein (cleansed of a Jewish State). Israel is certainly not a State like any other, to be judged by impartial or objective criteria. It is a “rogue state”, “criminal” by definition, corrupt in its essence and illegitimate at its very source. Israel is deemed to be unique because it was born with the “original sin” of having supposedly supplanted, displaced, expropriated and deliberately expelled the “indigenous” Palestinian population. Israel is, so to speak, ontologically and metaphysically “racist” and “colonialist.”[xxii][22] This Palestinian Arab narrative – so often parroted in uncritical fashion by Israeli “post-Zionists” and Jewish “anti-Zionists” has overwhelmed the objective historical facts surrounding Israel’s war of independence in 1948. This noxious mythology goes far beyond reasonable criticism, scholarly debunking of myths, double standards or mere bias against Israel. Explicitly or implicitly, it attributes qualities of criminality to the Jewish State which recall the classic stigmatizing techniques of antisemitic indictments.[xxiii][23] The narrative is not just partisan, false or innocently pro-Palestinian. It represents a kind of doctrinal Inquisition. We have here a clear case of dehumanization – the a priori negation of the humanity of Israel.

The consistent demonization of Israel is made easier by the collective amnesia in the non-Jewish world regarding how and why the birth of Israel was nearly aborted in 1948 by Arab aggression; or how Egyptian President Nasser sought its extinction in 1967; or how Yasser Arafat, in 2000, deliberately chose terrorist violence when offered a Palestinian State on a platter by Ehud Barak. The same pattern has continued since then. While constantly recycling the image of a sadistic and unprovoked Israeli aggression, during the present intifada, the West European media mostly ignores Israeli civilians who are victims of Palestinian jihadist terror. The European agenda seems clear: to focus primarily on examples of Palestinian suffering, divorced from their historical or military context; and to magnify Israeli reprisals against horrific acts of terror into “crimes against humanity.”

The tone, when it comes to Israel, is frequently shrill, indignant and pillorying.[xxiv][24] It is as if most liberal Europeans have become a priori unwilling to entertain the possibility that contemporary Jews could ever be genuine victims. After all, if the Jewish state is presumed to be intrinsically “racist,” “imperialist” and “colonialist,” then Jews and Israel become automatically suspect. Unless Diaspora Jews openly proclaim their hatred of Sharon, the settlers or the Israeli army, they are likely to be considered beyond the pale. However, if they do denounce Israel, then all platforms are open. Media outlets in the West – especially in Europe - will lionize such “anti-Zionist” Jews, embracing them with open arms, as if they were Biblical prophets. Indeed, their pronouncements usually pass as “courageous” acts of dissent rather than as a transparent form of intellectual conformism. The political correctness which often characterizes liberal analyses of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is de rigeuer among most anti-Israel Jews. It is certainly not any quality of original thought which accounts for the frequent selection of such contributions for publication in the West. They do, however, serve as a useful alibi against accusations of antisemitism.

The most common response of the anti-Israel media in Europe to charges of Judeophobia is indignant denial. This is sometimes accompanied by even more vehement denunciations of Israeli government policy and complaints about “moral blackmail” whenever the revival of antisemitism is raised as an issue. The mantra of the mainstream media is that they are only opposed to Sharon, not Jews. However, so-called “anti-Sharonist” caricatures also rely for their effect on older or hidden layers of Judeophobia. In January 2004, for example, Dave Brown’s revolting caricature for The Independent (showing Ariel Sharon crunching Palestinian babies) won the Political Cartoon of the year award in Great Britain. Not only did the imagery evoke the medieval blood libel but its ugly depiction of Sharon would not have been out of place in the Nazi antisemitic newspaper, Der Stürmer.[xxv][25] Some time before, the New Statesman in a lurid cover entitled “A Kosher Conspiracy” revived another long-established motif of antisemitic iconography – highlighting a brassy, gleaming gold Star of David impaling a supine Union Jack.[xxvi][26] The secular left-wing Libération in France, went back still further, evoking memories of the deicidal charge to communicate its anti-Israeli message. A Christmas cartoon showed Ariel Sharon nailing a cross for Yasser Arafat while an Israeli tank parks nearby; the caption read: “Pas de Noël pour Arafat” (No Christmas for Arafat) - “but you are welcome for Easter.”[xxvii][27] Such heavily loaded messages coming from the secular liberal–left media in Europe are a reminder of the continuing power of archaic Christian imagery over supposedly secular minds.

Jews today find themselves once more being caricatured as cruel, mean, conspirational, bloodthirsty and evil oppressors – just like they were in medieval Christendom. They are presumed to exercise a sinister, almost occult power. The Judeophobes claim that Zionists, in particular, seek domination over others, through their close alliance with an overbearing, ruthless America – the new Roman Empire of our own age. Their goal as supposedly enunciated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – is to consolidate the age-old dream of universal Jewish power. But the Jews and their American allies are not only plotting to achieve global hegemony. They are regularly depicted as super-fascists – pupils who have surpassed their model and master – Adolf Hitler.

The European media and a sizeable number of intellectuals have been especially active during the past four years in this truly perverse effort to “Nazify” Israel, or, at the very least, to vilify it as an “apartheid” state. The Jewish state has indeed become the apex and culmination of every dark episode in the colonial history of the modern West. It is as if all the crimes committed in the last 150 years against American Indians, Aborigines in Australia, Algerian Muslims, Vietnamese or blacks in South Africa were merely a preamble to the horrors being perpetrated by the Israeli army and settlers in Palestine. Such grotesque lack of proportion barely raises an eyebrow in educated circles today. The prominence of Jews themselves in leading this lynch-like atmosphere against Israel has played no small role in creating this surrealist situation.

The attempt to equate the Israeli Defense Forces and the Wehrmacht or settlements in the disputed territories with murderous German “ethnic cleansing” policies during the Holocaust, did not begin with the Second Intifada. The Warsaw Ghetto was repeatedly evoked by part of the Western media as an analogy to Israel’s siege of Beirut, in 1982. On the radical Left there were deliberate efforts at that time to metamorphose Israelis into the “new Nazis” and to transform Palestinians into the “Jews” of the Middle East.[xxviii][28] However, such myths were predominantly the preserve of Arab and Soviet propaganda which had not yet seriously penetrated mainstream public opinion. Today, this mythology is almost universal. Anti-Zionism has degenerated into an “anti-imperialism of fools.” It is a catch-all credo in which misplaced sympathy for the underdog, highly selective solidarity with Third world causes and abstract compassion for “the wretched of the earth,” nourish an irrational hatred of Israel. No matter how vile the terrorist murders perpetrated by Palestinians against innocent Israeli civilians, they are likely to be ignored or justified in liberal Europe as “acts of despair.” Alternatively “suicide bombings” are elevated into noble acts of resistance to a “Nazi-like” occupation, thereby parroting Palestinian propaganda claims as if they were gospel truth. Whatever Israel does militarily in response to Palestinian terrorism is reflexively condemned as “excessive force.” Such automatic indictments unpleasantly echo the familiar rallying-cry that Der Jud ist Schuld (The Jew is guilty) – which has typified antisemitism throughout the ages. The unwritten anti-Zionist credo of the new millennium states that “Israel is guilty” before the facts are even examined. It is a further confirmation that political antisemitism today has not really changed its spots though it has shifted its focus from the individual Jew to the Jewish State.

The official opposition of European governments to antisemitism is of course an important counterweight to the prejudices rampant in the media. But it remains impotent to transform the situation without a much broader mobilization within civil society. France, for example, recently legislated against the hijab (the “Islamic veil”). Its government has returned to the republican tradition of laicité in the hope that it will contain Islamic fundamentalism. There has also been a flurry of strong government condemnations of antisemitism. Yet the number of attacks on Jews has grown by 60% compared to the first half of 2003. The reasons seem obvious. With six million Muslims and 600,000 Jews, France has the largest Muslim and Jewish populations in Europe.[xxix][29] The Israeli-Palestinian conflict reaches the homes of French Muslims through inflammatory Arab TV stations accessible by satellite or via French media that support the Palestinian cause. Moreover, even if the French state is now acting against domestic antisemitism, its foreign policy is openly pro-Arab. This fact greatly weakens its ability to successfully combat the phenomenon which it deplores and simultaneously helps to nourish through its cynical Realpolitik.

In Germany, the gulf between the position of the state authorities and the grass roots is even more striking. For example, the German political establishment generally acts with firmness against antisemitism by right-wing extremists. But it has been unable to change the fact that one third of all Germans believe Jews have too much influence in the world; that two thirds of the population in Germany think that Israel is the main threat to world peace; or that three quarters of Germans would like to draw a line over the Holocaust.[xxx][30]

The persistence of such attitudes obviously has a great deal to do with the partisan moulding of public opinion against Israel through the electronic and printed media – reinforced by the academy, the churches and the intellectuals. Ironically, it is precisely these educated elites who usually insist that they care deeply about the Holocaust. Yet they seem to have little problem with slandering Israelis as “war criminals” for actively defending themselves against the prospect of a new genocide. Dead Jews, it would seem, can do no wrong. Living Jews, bent on survival, are another matter entirely – unless they follow the political prescriptions of the United Nations, Europe or the Arab world.

In January 2004 an international forum against genocide was held in the Swedish capital, Stockholm. A scandalously provocative artistic exhibit called “Snow White” (the work of an expatriate “anti-Zionist” Israeli artist) was displayed in the Museum of Antiquities as a political protest against Israel. It was a perfect example of the nihilist aesthetics that glorify terror, a kind of mindless hybrid of Communist agit-prop and fascist art. The exhibit left the impression that the Palestinian woman terrorist who had slaughtered Jews and Israel Arabs in a Haifa restaurant was part of a just “struggle for national liberation” against wicked occupiers. Swedish officials seemed far more appalled by the Israeli Ambassador’s militant protest than by the outrageous “artwork” itself.

A few weeks ago, the mask of official Swedish hypocrisy and antisemitism was ripped off when Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds, visiting a class of 16 year-olds in Gothenberg, accused Israel of behaving like the Nazis towards the Palestinians. According to a dumbfounded Jewish pupil who witnessed the scene, the Foreign Minister actually beamed when a Muslim girl explained that Jews had no right to be in Israel and should be expelled since their Messiah had not yet returned. This happened at a school with a high proportion of immigrants, many of them Muslims. In a similar vein, on 11 June 2004 a football match took place in Stockholm between two teams of 15 year-olds in which IK Maccabi (the Jewish team) were taunted throughout with cries of “Death to the Jews,” and “Smash Zionism.”[xxxi][31] They were then punched and kicked by their Somali opponents after the match.

This antisemitic sickness does not happen in a vacuum and it is fed by the one-sided denunciation of Israel in the Swedish media as well as the mixed messages emanating from official sources.[xxxii][32] During a visit to Yad Vashem on 9 June 2004, Laila Freivalds continued this two-faced game indulged in by the Swedish government and some other countries of the European Union. She firmly rejected any attempt to equate “criticism” of Israeli government policies with antisemitism, while ignoring the implications of her own complicity in the phenomenon. She claimed that the legal system firmly prosecutes and punishes antisemitic incitement. What she did not mention is that under Swedish law there have to be no less than ten witnesses for racial incitement to be prosecuted and work its way into the statistics. Nor does the case go to court if the perpetrators are too young. A significant number of youngsters of Arab and Muslim background fall into precisely this category. Thus most antisemitic crimes in Sweden are not even included in what are, in effect, spurious statistics.[xxxiii][33] So much for the assertion that the number of antisemitic incidents in Sweden is declining.

Holocaust education is actively supported by the Swedish (and some other European governments) who constantly lecture and hector Israel from an Olympian vantage-point of rather smug, high-minded moralism. Frequently, such reproaches ignore the existential perils which Israel continuously has to face. They not only sever the Holocaust from threats of destruction directed against the Jewish State but in practice, use it against Israel whenever this seems expedient. Hence, the teaching of the Shoah – while desirable in itself - is hardly a panacea for antisemitism. It often feeds it! For example, when the subject is brought up in schools with a high percentage of Muslim students, the result is the harassment of Jewish teachers and pupils, as well as antisemitic abuse.[xxxiv][34] Not only that, but the classrooms are turned into yet another platform for Israel-bashing in the name of “anti-racism” and human rights!

The graph of anti-Jewish incidents in Europe today closely follows the pattern of Muslim (especially Arab) migration, with France, Belgium, Britain, Germany and Sweden leading the field. Arab/Muslim attacks on Jews have risen sharply in all of these countries in the past few years. In schools and universities, there is widespread hostility against Jews among Arab and Muslim students; sermons in mosques incite hatred against Jews; and Muslim websites spread antisemitic propaganda through Holocaust denial, blood libel and Jewish conspiracy theories. Increasingly, Jews feel compelled to hide their religious identity in public, in order to reduce the danger of being assaulted. Can there be a more striking indicator of the vitality of contemporary antisemitism in Europe?

There can be little doubt that what is happening at street level is being nourished – wittingly or not – by the anti-Israeli extremism of many artists and intellectuals. For example, in early 2004, the Greek composer and cultural icon Mikis Theodorakis (famous for his score of the 1964 film “Zorba the Greek”) publicly declared in the presence of the Greek Culture and Education Ministers: “They [the Jews] are fanatical and get their own way. Today it can be said that this tiny people find themselves at the root of evil, rather than of good.”[xxxv][35] The outburst of Theodorakis was not an isolated or aberrant case in Greece where there has been a barrage of antisemitic articles vilifying Jews and Israel and where the mainstream press has periodically glorified suicide bombings. Such incitement cannot be separated from the desecration of synagogues, cemeteries and Holocaust memorials that has recently disfigured Greece. It is a telling reminder that artists and intellectuals both reflect and shape their own societies; and it is a warning that television, cyberspace and other technologies provide even third-rate intellectuals with a potential audience much larger than in any previous era. The world-wide web has been a godsend for the multiplication of antisemitic images and outlandish conspiracy theories across the globe.

Europe is not, of course, monolithic in its attitudes to Israel. The media and the intellectuals are not anti-Jewish en bloc. There is still an important current of opinion which rejects the attitudes analyzed in this essay. But the stubborn refusal to unequivocally condemn jihadist and Palestinian terror directed against Jews or Israelis is an important symptom of partisan hostility which cannot be explained by ignorance alone. Of course, in the Middle East itself, the enmity is much more visceral and antisemitism has long been a tool for Arab governments to express their antagonism to Israel. No less importantly, hatred of Israel functions most effectively as the opium of the masses. Thus the Saudi leadership recently blamed 95% (sic) of the Al-Qaida terrorist attacks in their own country on “Zionist machinations.” It appears that Osama bin Laden and the “Zionists” must be allies if Saudi Arabia is the target!

Conspiracy theories and antisemitism provide a powerful tranquillizer for popular discontent, diverting attention away from the abysmal failures of Arab societal and human development. The fact that so many educated Arabs have acquiesced in this charade is a grave dereliction of intellectual responsibility. It displays a shocking lack of civic courage. So, too, does the deafening silence of most European elites in face of the demented effusions of genocidal Arab antisemitism – a certificate of moral bankruptcy if ever there was one. The fact that there are some “peace-loving” Israelis who all too eagerly lend their names to this banalization is a sad footnote to the psychopathology of self-hatred that periodically resurfaces in Jewish history.

Institutional, geo-political and naked economic interests have certainly played their part in the current wave of European Judeophobia. Since the early 1970s the so-called Euro-Arab “dialogue” and the systematic support for Palestinian positions against Israel has helped to smooth the path for an increasingly toxic anti-Zionist and anti-American discourse.[xxxvi][36] This “dialogue” has been driven by very concrete strategic, trade and diplomatic considerations on the European side. For the Arab states, the “dialogue” provided equally tangible political benefits. The Euro-Arab framework of cooperation helped to prepare the road for a massive Third World migration into Europe. This has resulted in an uninterrupted flow of new immigrants that has already created a population of 20 million Muslims in the EU today. This constituency is beginning to emerge as a domestic political factor, whose growing influence may very well lead to a further delegitimization of Israel.

Beyond that, there is the broader, long-term impact of Arab oil money on Western diplomacy, commerce, the financing of Middle East academic study and the capacity to sway public opinion in an anti-Zionist direction. Islamist terrorism against European targets has not softened this anti-Israeli atmosphere. Nor did it diminish European opposition to American intervention in Iraq as the Al Qaeda bombings in Madrid and their aftermath have all too clearly demonstrated. True, Europeans remain deeply suspicious of Islam and generally dislike Arabs; but this undercurrent of xenophobia hardly makes them more sympathetic to the Jewish State. Vocal embrace of the Palestinian cause, so it appears, can coexist with a strong tinge of Islamophobia as well as with the old-new antisemitism.

Within the mainstream media, there is, however, little room for the open criticism of Islam. Television stations across the European Union continue to repeat the same sterile mantras about unprovoked Zionist aggression against “defenseless” Palestinians. They relentlessly pillory the “state terrorism” of Israel, Jewish apartheid walls, “ethnic cleansing” and invent myriad anti-Israeli tales of horror. In Britain at the time of the Jenin battle, A. N. Wilson wrote in the Evening Standard: “We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide.” The Guardian pompously claimed that Jenin was a “crime of especial notoriety” and “every bit as repellent” as Al-Qaeda’s Manhattan massacre of 9/11. The Times correspondent asserted that in a decade of reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya and Sierra Leone she had never seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life.”[xxxvii][37] These grossly distorted media accounts had no connection with reality. They made no mention of the tactic of Palestinian terrorists to deliberately place themselves amid civilians in a refugee camp; they ignored Israel’s restraint in not using its massive air power; and the risks to which it subjected its own reservists – who were obliged to engage in costly and dangerous house-to-house combat. Indeed, this was the first “genocide” in history which the final death-count was 52 Palestinians (mostly terrorist fighters) while the Israelis lost 23 of their own soldiers. The only massacre in Jenin was a massacre of the truth.

More recently, the same pattern of falsification has been repeated in some European media reactions to the Israeli operations in Rafiah. The UN, too, which is one of the leading global purveyors of antisemitism today, has provided a particularly damaging form of legitimacy to this systematic blackening of Israel. Ever since the 2001 Durban conference (under its auspices), the UN’s escalated policy of discrimination against the Jewish State and “sanctification” of the Palestinian cause has extended a virginal halo of purity over suicidal terrorism and reinforced a widespread European myth that Israel continuously violates international law.[xxxviii][38]

Contemporary antisemitism in Europe – as in the Middle East, North America or the United Nations - feeds on the constant multiplication and amplification of false rumors, disinformation, media bias, myths, blood libels and systematic slanders which are revived every time Israel acts vigorously in its own self-defense. Especially striking, however, is the constant harping on the Holocaust. Here is José Saramago, that famous man of letters, writing in the leading Spanish newspaper El Pais. The Portuguese Nobel Prize Laureate told his readers that Israelis are motivated by the “monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that they are “chosen by God;” that they are gripped by an “obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism,” which they have rationalized by what they have endured in the Holocaust. While committing other crimes “comparable to Auschwitz,” they “endlessly scratch their own wound” (i.e. the Holocaust) and “they show it to the world as if it were a banner.”[xxxix][39]

Similarly abusive allegations against the Jews as a people have been made in many other European countries, not least in Germany. Nearly 20 years ago, Henryk Broder bitterly remarked: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” When a prominent German parliamentarian, Martin Hohmann, blamed Jews for millions of deaths in the early years after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, many Christian Democrats and other citizens from his constituency were reportedly of the opinion that “he had said the truth.” Today, Jews are seen by an increasing number of ordinary Germans as a “Tätervolk” (a nation of perpetrators) no better than the Nazis themselves.[xl][40] Such an inversion of roles is obviously an easy way to relieve the heavy German burden of guilt. The renowned German author Martin Walser captured this mood in his best-selling novel, Tod eines Kritikers (Death of a Critic) published in June 2002. Taking the German-Jewish literary reviewer Marcel Reich-Ranicki as his prototype, Walser caricatured his main fictional protagonist with the help of every known antisemitic cliché. The book provoked a heated public debate and as a result, Reich-Ranicki himself, received more antisemitic defamatory letters than usual.[xli][41] Walser’s subliminal cultural antisemitism was not new. Already in 1998, in a speech on receipt of the Peace Award of the German Book Trade, Walser called for placing Germany’s antisemitic past in cold storage and protested against its “exploitation” for current purposes. His position was then widely defended by politicians and intellectuals from across the German political spectrum.

Since then, such a discourse has become much more mainstream in Germany, as have statements by German intellectuals comparing Palestinian suicide bombers to the Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, who desperately fought the Nazis during World War II. The former victims of the Holocaust find themselves transmuted by conventional European wisdom into fascist perpetrators themselves. The “Nazification” of Israel is emerging as a popular sport throughout Europe. This is one of the more sinister mutations in the history of the “longest hatred,” turning the Shoah itself into a boomerang with which to strike at the moral foundations of the Jewish state.