Jewish Chronicle, February 28 2003

Many in the Jewish community are aghast at what they believe to be an upsurge in anti-Jewish feeling in Britain. Media coverage of Israel appears to be driven by obsessive spite and malice, representing self-defence as aggression and perpetrating distortions, double standards and lies. They feel the only explanation must be antisemitism, a view reinforced by regular articles in mainstream publications about the malign influence of the Jewish lobby.

But there are others in the community who don’t see it that way at all. These people, who are mainly on the political left, think the claim of antisemitism is a device to mask the crimes of Ariel Sharon. They believe Israel is guilty of appalling acts against the Palestinians, and that Sharon is a thug who stands in the way of a peace settlement. Those who level the charge of antisemitism are denounced as hysterical, paranoid and – worst offence of all – right-wing.

A conference in Jerusalem last week on antisemitism and the media provided chilling and authoritative evidence that the Jewish left has donned blinkers, ear mufflers and a thick bag over its head which it has then buried up to its shoulders in the sand. The conference, organised by the Hebrew University’s Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Antisemitism, was by no means a rally of Sharon supporters. The renowned Holocaust expert Professor Yehuda Bauer said: ‘There’s no doubt that Israel is committing human rights violations on the West Bank’, and Jews had a duty to criticise Israel’s misdeeds. Yet he was also in no doubt that the Jews are facing a new kind of virulent antisemitism: a genocidal threat to the Jewish people from fanatical Islamist totalitarianism, camouflaged by the lies and distortions about Israel in the western media.

The recurring conference theme was a nexus of anti-Jewish hatred between fanatical Islamists on the one hand and the British and European media on the other. The connection revolved around the Nazification, dehumanisation and delegitimisation of Israel, with both Islamists and western media using anti-Zionism as a cloak for prejudices rooted in both medieval Christian and Nazi demonology.

The volume and nature of Arab and Muslim propaganda about the Jews exposes as simply asinine the claim that the Middle East conflict is about the West Bank or Israel’s behaviour. In newspapers, TV programmes and mosques throughout the Arab world, Jews in general are dehumanised and demonised, a prelude to their destruction. They are represented as apes and pigs engaged in a conspiracy against the world, with claims that 9/11 and even the Columbia space shuttle disaster were Jewish plots. There is repeated use of the blood libel, and a 41-part series on Egyptian TV promoting as authentic the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Some Arab intellectuals have spoken out against such fabrications, but these are a minority.

The Islamists’ repeated equation between Zionism and Nazism has now constructed a strategic alliance with Europe. This species of Holocaust denial absolves Europe of guilt towards the Jews, and replaces it by European guilt towards Arabs said to be displaced as a result of the Holocaust. Europe has waited for 50 years for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of addressing genocidal Muslim antisemitism, the Europeans have seized upon a narrative which paints the Jews as Nazis and the Palestinians as the new Jews.

Accordingly, the conference heard about German claims that Israel was using Nazi methods and (repeating a claim by Hamas) that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Jewish conspiracy against Bill Clinton. It heard of repeated charges in Sweden that the media was controlled by Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel. It heard that the reconstruction of French identity around large-scale Muslim immigration is being done at the expense of Jews, who are being excluded from public debate if they challenge the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding) -- now playing to packed houses in Paris -- about the malevolence towards Israel shown by the French media. And it was told about the way the British media describes Israel’s ‘death squads’, ‘killing fields’ and ‘executioners’ while sanitising Palestinian human bombs as ‘gentle’, ‘religious’ and ‘kind’.

What was notable was that journalists and academics from the Israeli left waved all this aside. It was unimportant, even on occasion a joke. What really mattered was Israel’s bad behaviour. One finds the same attitude on the Jewish left in Britain. A left-wing Polish journalist, Konstanty Gebert, explained this phenomenon. The left was unable to accept the overwhelming evidence of the new antisemitism, because to do so would not only mean accepting it had grossly misconstrued the Middle East crisis but that its whole world view was wrong. This is the belief that reason can reconcile all differences; and so all that’s needed in Israel is an enlightened government, and reason will prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason destroys that world view. It also might (horrors!) give credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonisation is absolutely vital to the left as a protective against the implosion of its whole ideological position.

The result is an Orwellian mutation of the oldest hatred: a global, lethal anti-Jewishness which is marching in Britain and Europe under the banner of anti-racism and human rights. As Yehuda Bauer remarked, although there are important differences between now and the 1930s, the refusal of the Jews to grasp the threat they now face is tragically all too familiar.

Posted by admin at February 28, 2003