Are Jews Safe in Europe?
There are three lessons from the explosion of European anti-Semitism.Caroline Glick: The answer to French anti-Semitism
First, hatred of Israel can no longer be separated from loathing of Jews. Anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are one and the same. The hard-core anti-Israel protests that engulfed Europe showed that the demonstrators aimed to dismantle the Jewish state because of its Jewishness. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called contemporary anti-Semitism "pretend criticism of Israel," an "expression of Jew-hatred at pro-Palestinian demonstrations."
The second lesson is that mere opprobrium from European leaders is insufficient. To their credit, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Italy last summer condemned "the anti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility toward Jews [and] attacks on people of the Jewish faith and synagogues." But rhetoric is not enough.
So the third lesson is the need for a zero-tolerance policy toward violent anti-Semitic rallies. And Europe should immediately adopt the U.S. State Department's definition of modern anti-Semitism, which includes anti-Zionism/Israelism. Finally, terrorist entities like Hezbollah and other jihadi networks should be banned. In sharp contrast to the United States, Europe allows Hezbollah's so-called political wing to operate and recruit within the 28-member European Union. Worse, with Europe striking Hamas from its terrorist list, there has been an active attempt to legitimize Islamist groups.
Change must ultimately start at the grassroots, turning anti-Semites and their political and religious movements into pariahs.
Absent this change, the safety of Jews, as well as European democracy, will continue to be jeopardized.
January 16 is the nine-year anniversary of the beginning of the Ilan Halimi disaster.Sarah Honig: 'Charlie' makes them laugh
On January 16, 2006, Sorour Arbabzadeh, the seductress from the Muslim anti-Jewish kidnapping gang led by Youssouf Fofana, entered the cellphone store where Halimi worked and set the honey trap.
Four days later, Halimi met Arbabzadeh for a drink at a working class bar and agreed to walk her home. She walked him straight into an ambush. Her comrades beat him, bound him and threw him into the trunk of their car.
They brought Halimi to a slum apartment and tortured him for 24 days and 24 nights before dumping him, handcuffed, naked, stabbed and suffering from third degree burns over two-thirds of his body, at a railway siding in Paris.
He died a few hours later in the hospital.
In an impassioned address to the French parliament on Tuesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls gave a stirring denunciation of anti-Semitism, and demanded that his people stop treating it as someone else’s problem.
In his words, “Since Ilan Halimi in 2006... anti-Semitic acts in France have grown to an intolerable degree. The words, the insults, the gestures, the shameful attacks... did not produce the national outrage that our Jewish compatriots expected.”
Valls insisted that France needs to protect its Jewish community, lest France itself be destroyed.
Valls words were uplifting. But it is hard to see how they change the basic reality that the Jews of France face.
When all is said and done, it is their necks on the line while humanity’s conscience is merely troubled.
The inclination, subliminally or otherwise, to isolate Jews in a separate classification is pervasive.Ambassador Prosor in UNSC: The Situation in the Middle East
The assumption that the bad guys aren’t primarily after non-Jews even offers a sense of semi-safety to the presumably uninvolved onlookers.
The segregation of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel terror into a different category is abetted by the two-faced denunciation of the Paris bloodshed by Mahmoud Abbas and his on-and-off Hamas partners in Gaza. They enable terror on a grand scale, but then deny culpability.
They pro forma condemn carnage but endorse, glorify and bankroll the perpetrators.
Sanctimonious pen-warriors don’t take Abbas or Hamas to task for their wrongdoing and blatant deception. Europe’s media further adds insult to injury by helping disseminate the false analogy between the demonized and dehumanized Jews of Hitler’s Germany to Europe’s Muslims who claim to be equally as collectively demonized.
Disagreeable as it surely is to tar any group collectively, there’s too much cynical PR profit in drawing this parallel for it to be taken at face value. Comparing Holocaust- era Judeophobia to Islamophobia is not only spurious but colossally galling.
For one thing, Jews never engaged in terror against Germans.
If anything, they regarded themselves as German patriots.
Then comes the minor matter of Arabs having been among the most vociferous promoters of Judeophobia in Nazi times. They still are to this day.
But Europe’s self-acclaimed pen-warriors are loath to take note, expose the chutzpah and sincerely fight against mega-hypocrisy. With rare exceptions, they are nothing like the gallant guardians of their own conceited portrayals. Their syrupy catchphrases in the end give succor to the implacable enemies of us all. “Je suis Charlie” makes the jihadists laugh.