Brendan O'Neill: Israelis don’t care that we hate them. But they’d like to know why
‘The lesson many in the West took from the Holocaust is that nationalism is bad; the message Jews took from it is that nationalism is necessary.’Italian MEP Raises Tough Questions over Anti-Semitism in the Arab World
This cuts to the heart of today’s fashionable disdain for little Israel. What many Westerners seem to find most nauseating is that Israel is cocky, confident and committed to preserving its national sovereign rights against all-comers. In short, it’s a lot like we used to be before relativism and anti-modernism. I think that Israel reminds us of our older selves, our pre-EU, pre-green days, when we, too, believed in borders, sovereignty, progress, growth.
Now that it’s de rigueur in the right-thinking sections of western society to be post–nationalist and multicultural, to be fashionably uncertain about one’s national identity, the sight of a border-fortifying state offends and outrages us. In the words of George Gilder, author of The Israel Test, Israel is now hated more for its virtues than for its political or militaristic vices. It’s hated for remaining devoted to ‘freedom and capitalism’ when we’re all supposed to be snooty about such things.
If Israel is unofficially being made into a pariah state, it isn’t because of its foreignness, or even necessarily its Jewishness, but rather because it is too western for our liking. We loathe it because we loathe ourselves.
Fiorello Provera, the EU's Vice Chairman on the Committee on Foreign Affairs has written to the European Commission and its High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton, to express his concerns about anti-Semitism in areas of interest to the EU.The hell with peace
Provera wrote yesterday: "In 2012 during the 8th Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean, which was held in Morocco, a demonstrator outside the parliament in Rabat dressed as an orthodox Jew rode a person wearing a donkey’s head. It was supposed to symbolise the subservience of Arab regimes to Jews. Unfortunately there is a widespread belief in many Arab countries that Jews play a role behind the scenes when it comes to politics and economics. In Morocco, for example, the secretary general of the Istiqlal party, Hamid Chabat, claimed that the Arab Spring was the result of a Zionist conspiracy, comparable to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
Mr. Black is currently promoting his latest book Financing The Flames of Hate. While he was speaking, at a breakfast meeting, organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, about the content of his book, here is what went through my mind:
Political narcissism is cancer,
The result of forgetting the word truth, the world is experiencing stannic control,
Anti-Semitism is now in abundance… anti-Semitism means that Jews must not have a state of their own and thus must never have genuine human rights… the anti-Semites of today are all in cahoots to bring the Jews back to the exilic status from which they got freed 66 years ago, LAST,
Western societies are willingly paying to kill Jews and the outcome, the more Jews killed the richer the killer and his family become.
To understand that sickening phenomenon, here is what I heard and share, some in Mr. Black’s own words: (h/t Bob Knot)