The Delirium of Anti-Zionism
In 1975, when the UN infamously declared that Zionism is a form of racism, Daniel Patrick Moynihan defiantly stood before the General Assembly and informed the delegates that the UN had just granted “symbolic amnesty” to the murderers of the six million Jews. The increasingly common accusation that Israel is in some way replicating the crimes of Nazi Germany is certainly in part an effort to give that same amnesty, as well as to belittle the Nazi crime itself. This effort by anti-Israel activists to hijack Holocaust commemorations with an anti-Zionist message is of course a vicious–albeit clumsy–attempt to invalidate Israel’s very right to exist. These people inhabit a historically illiterate narrative in which they wrongly believe that the world powers simply handed the Jews someone else’s country as an afterthought following the Holocaust. By distracting from Nazi atrocities against Jews while accusing Jews of equal crimes against Palestinians, they seem to believe that they are nullifying the Jewish claim to statehood.Jeffrey Goldberg: Hamas Warns: Give Us Money Or We'll Become Terrorists
It is a similar ignorance about the history of anti-Semitism that allows everyone else not to see how this is nothing less than the latest manifestation of an ever-mutating Jew hatred. This malady has an unending appeal because of the way it always promises to liberate mankind, in one way or another, by “solving” the Jews. It was with great optimism that a former minister of the Dutch government recently expressed the opinion that transferring all the Jews from Israel to the United States would herald a new era of world peace. Of course, by the same logic it is the selfish Jews clinging to their state who bear ultimate responsibility for entrapping mankind in the ongoing horrors of war.
Anti-Semitism always expresses itself through the prevailing value system of the time. In Nazi Germany it was pseudo race-science, and in the Soviet Union Marxist doctrines, that were employed against the Jews. In the Middle Ages it was the teachings of the Church that fulfilled this role. Today, as human rights and international law are being hijacked to demonize the Jewish state, the UN is assuming a similar role to the one that the medieval papacy once had. It was encouraging then to hear Bernard Henri-Levy denouncing the delirium of anti-Zionism from the General Assembly chamber, voicing a truth that is all too rarely expressed. (h/t NormanF)
Buried in an Agence France Presse article about the failure of international donors to pay the $5.4 billion they've pledged to help rebuild Gaza is an absolute gem of a quote:NPR: Journalist Documents Anti-Semitism In A Swedish City
A Hamas official warned recently that the territory could become a breeding ground for extremism unless promised reconstruction is accelerated.
"Our message to the world, which is scared of terrorism and extremism, is that the delay in rebuilding Gaza and the continuing blockade against it will make it a ripe environment for the spread of extremism and terrorism," Khalil al-Haya told a Gaza City meeting of the movement's representatives in the Palestinian parliament.
I'm struck more by the credulity of the reporting in this article than by the actual statement from Mr. al-Haya. Of course it is in the nature of Hamas to believe itself to be non-extremist, and of course it is in its nature to threaten violence if it doesn't get paid. (To understand Hamas and its extremist views, read its charter, and to survey a catalogue of its violence against civilians over the years, simply Google "Hamas bus bombings.")
Journalist Petter Ljunggren wore a Jewish skullcap and Star of David pendant to covertly film the anti-Semitism he experienced in the Swedish city of Malmo. NPR's Robert Siegel speaks with Ljunggren.
Over the past few years, the Swedish city of Malmo has earned a reputation for anti-Semitism. Members of Malmo's small Jewish population say that walking in some of the city's Muslim neighborhoods wearing a skull cap, a kepah, is to risk verbal abuse and possibly worse. Well, that risk has now been documented by Swedish television journalist Petter Ljunggren. Ljunggren wore a cap and also a Jewish star pendant in Malmo while secretly filming. One scene captures him fleeing a group of increasingly agitated young men as eggs are thrown at him from nearby windows. Later, a young man from that neighborhood describes how on that night, he'd gotten a text telling him to egg the Jews.