The new anti-Semitism

Want to make yourself really, really unpopular if you’re a Jew? Try saying that the world is witnessing a terrifying firestorm of hatred directed at Israel and the Jewish people, in which the British and Europeans are deeply implicated.

Since it is now a given in many circles that Israel is a threat to the world equal to North Korea, and that Ariel Sharon is a cross between Martin Bormann and Hendrik Verwoerd, you will find yourself accused of using the Holocaust to avoid any criticism of Israel’s behaviour. Because, well, you know, you Jews always stick together and are mighty quick to deal that persecution card.

Anyone who holds that view may as well skip what follows. More objective and fair-minded souls, however, might be deeply alarmed to learn of the evidence provided at a recent conference on anti-Semitism and the media at the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem.

This was scarcely a gathering of the Ariel Sharon fan club. Among academics and journalists from Israel, Europe, Britain and America were several left-wingers and liberals who were deeply hostile to Israel’s Likud government, believed that the settlements should be dismantled, and were troubled by the behaviour of some of Israel’s military. ‘There’s no doubt that Israel is committing human-rights violations on the West Bank,’ said Professor Yehuda Bauer, the distinguished Holocaust expert.

But there was equally no doubt, from what he and others said, that anti-Zionism is now being used to cloak a terrifying nexus between genocidal Arab and Islamist hatred of the Jews and deep-seated European prejudices.

Anti-Semitism is protean, mutating over the centuries into new forms. Now it has changed again, into a shape which requires a new way of thinking and a new vocabulary. The new anti-Semitism does not discriminate against Jews as individuals on account of their race. Instead, it is centred on Israel, and the denial to the Jewish people alone of the right of self-determination.

This is nothing to do with the settlements or the West Bank. Indeed, the language being used exposes as a cruel delusion the common belief that the Middle East crisis would be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state.

The key motif is a kind of Holocaust inversion, with the Israelis being demonised as Nazis and the Palestinians being regarded as the new Jews. Israel and the Jews are being systematically delegitimised and dehumanised — a necessary prelude to their destruction — with both Islamists and the Western media using anti-Zionism as a fig-leaf for prejudices rooted in both mediaeval Christian and Nazi demonology.

This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now marches behind the Left’s banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving rise not merely to distortions, fabrications and slander about Israel in the media but also to mainstream articles discussing the malign power of the Jews over American and world policy.

The Jerusalem conference heard chilling presentations about a phenomenon barely discussed in Britain: the virulent Arab and Muslim hatred of the Jews. This goes far beyond even the desire to finish off Israel as a Jewish state. Anti-Jewish hatred plays a crucial role in the fanatical jihadism that now threatens all of us in the West, pouring out in television programmes, newspapers and religious sermons throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and amounting to a new warrant for genocide.

The dominant message is that Jewish power amounts to a conspiracy to destroy Islam and take over the whole world. Truly mad theories circulate on Islamist Internet sites which have now convinced untold numbers of Arabs and Muslims that the Jews were behind both 9/11 and the Columbia space-shuttle disaster. Egyptian television transmitted a 41-part series which presented the notorious Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — which purported to be a Jewish plot to control the world — as the truth. (This has prompted some Arab intellectuals to condemn such propaganda as both untrue and a tactical error, but these dissidents remain a small minority.) Meanwhile, Saudi media and religious sermons incite the murder of Jews.

According to the Arabic scholar Professor Menachem Milsom, this Arab and Islamist propaganda persistently dehumanised Jews by representing them as apes and pigs. A preacher at the totemic Haram mosque in Mecca said the Jews were ‘evil offspring’, the ‘destroyers of God’s word’, ‘priest murderers’ and the ‘scum of the human race’. The mediaeval Christian blood libel — the claim that the Jews kill children and drink their blood — has surfaced time and again in prestigious Arab newspapers.

And Zionism was equated with Nazism; just as the Nazis believed in the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race, so Zionists (sic) believed they were the chosen people, which justified their own military expansion. This equation was not confined to a marginal few. Abu Mazen, said Milsom, the Palestinian Authority intellectual who is being talked about as Yasser Arafat’s prime minister in a ‘reformed’ administration, wrote as much in his doctoral thesis — in which he also said that the Zionists gave the Nazis permission to treat the Jews as they wished so long as this guaranteed their immigration to Palestine.

These sick outpourings are not so much religious or even fundamentalist doctrines as rooted in a fanatical totalitarian ideology. As Professor Bauer observed, the driving aim is the Islamic dictatorship of the world. Realisation of this utopia necessitates the destruction of the foundation creeds of Western culture, Judaism and Christianity — and especially Israel, the supposed personification of Western global power-lust, which was planted as an incubus on Arab soil as a result of the Holocaust.

Holocaust denial is therefore central to Arab anti-Semitism, the prejudice which such historical falsehood has helped to forge a strategic alliance with Europe. For it absolves Europe of its guilt over the Jews, and replaces it with European guilt towards Arabs displaced as a result of the Holocaust.

Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, Europeans have eagerly embraced the Nazification of the Jews, a process which really got under way with Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This marked the beginning of the media’s systematic inversion of Israeli self-defence as aggression, along with double-standards and malicious fabrications, which have nothing to do with legitimate (and necessary) criticism of Israel and everything to do with delegitimising the Jewish state altogether in readiness for its dismantling.

So the conference heard about German accusations 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 the Nazification of Israel in Sweden, where there were charges that the Israelis were exterminating the Palestinians, that the media were controlled by Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel, and that influential Jewish lobby groups were ‘spraying journalists with poison’.

It heard that in France Jews were vilified and excluded from public debate if they challenged the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding) — which has been playing to packed houses in Paris — about the obsessive malevolence towards Israel displayed by the French media. It was told about the way the British media described Israel’s ‘death squads’, ‘killing fields’ and ‘executioners’ while sanitising Palestinian human bombs as ‘gentle’, ‘religious’ and ‘kind’. It heard about the cartoon in the Italian newspaper La Stampa during the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, depicting an Israeli tank pointing a gun at the baby Jesus who is saying, ‘Surely they are not going to kill me again.’

And of course there was Jenin, the so-called ‘massacre’ or ‘genocide’ reported as such by virtually the entire media, where in fact 52 Palestinians died, of whom more than half were terrorists, while Israel sustained (for it) the huge loss of 45 of its soldiers. This astonishing media distortion was conceded at the conference by the (extraordinarily brave) Palestinian politics professor Mohammad Dajani, who also observed that a distraught Palestinian public was — on this and other occasions — whipped up by biased and emotional Palestinian reporting which showed little concern for the truth. But the big lie of the Jenin massacre is now believed as fact, contributing to the belief that Israel is a criminal state.

Europeans have thus made themselves accomplices to an explicitly genocidal programme. But an even more striking feature is that, while the old anti-Semitism still festers away among neo-Nazis, the new anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of their sworn enemies on the political Left. So, as the Canadian law professor Irwin Cotler observed, we now have the mind-twisting situation where anti-Jewish hatred is harnessed to the cause of anti-racism and human rights, with Israel being compared to both Nazism and apartheid by those who define themselves against these ideologies. Such a travesty of the facts involves, of course, the implicit denial of the truth of those terrible regimes, quite apart from the prelude to annihilation created by such a lethal defamation of Israel. And even more counterintuitively, many Jews and Israelis on the Left also subscribe to this analysis — and even to the demonology of Israeli Nazism and apartheid — handing an effective weapon to those who dismiss the claim of a new anti-Semitism as Jewish paranoia or Islamophobia.

So what is the explanation for the Left’s position? Partly, it’s the old anti-imperialist and anti-West prejudice. Partly, it’s the view that only the powerless can be victims; so Third World people can never be murderers, and any self-defence by Western societies such as Israel must instead be aggression. Partly, it’s the post-modern destruction of objectivity and truth, which has ushered in the hegemony of lies. And partly, as the Left takes an axe to morality and self-restraint, it’s a golden opportunity to pulverise the very people who invented the damn rules in the first place.

A left-wing Polish journalist at the conference, Konstanty Gebert, got the real point. The Left, he said, could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy. This was founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view. It would also give credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonisation is absolutely vital to the Left as a protection against the implosion of its whole ideological position.

So the evidence is being denied, and truth is being stood on its head. The result is the defamation of a people, the greater prospect of its destruction, and the disastrous failure of the populations of Britain and Europe to understand properly the threat that all free peoples now face.

Many of my favorite posters hang out at LF. They follow the stories I like to follow and are able to post sources there that are not allowed here anymore.
Well now, that sort of says it all.

Not really. But I've no doubt that your and Dennisw's constant harping on the place (as if you yourselves spend a great deal of time there) only piques the curiosity of folks. For those interested in the sorts of "Pursuit of Liberty" symposium threads that used to take place here or the gamut of research-provoking disinfo once picked apart here in a quest for the truth of events as well as the desires of those shaping events, it can be an interesting read.

The sites are not so very different in substance and style where your primary subject of interest is concerned:

Hey Askel5: Israel isn't perfect.
Kill all the Jews! Happy now?

Go fuck thyself!!

This is exactly the sort of garbage which does take the shine off LF as well as Free Republic. It's just less one-sided over there, that's all.

And while I do not "filter" posts out of principle there, it's true that one has the option of being subjected to such mindless tripe thanks to the post rating system which -- though a subject of controversey itself -- alleviates both the waste of time that is repeated banning of disruptors and helps to keep the single identities of posters a constant. The fact that posters from both sides of the argument end up "below ground" suggests that there is some parity to the system.

Each place has its own good and bad qualities. I think you do this place a disservice, actually, by constantly inviting comparison to other sites and speaking as if a poster's participation elsewhere is somehow grounds to impugn their posts here.

Of late, I've spent most of my time at LF criticizing masturbation, asking atheists whether or not human nature is permanent, learning more about Japan's attempts to surrender in WWII and wondering why we did bomb Nagasaki and Dresden absent any particular strategic necessity. Additionally, I'm keeping tabs on the Balkans, Baku-Ceyhan, the "journalists as terrorists" Richard Perle saga and the actions of other possibly comprimised Interested Parties as well as Blood Trail stuff and the continuing use of sexual perversion as means of control by globalists.

I fail to see how any of that has any bearing on this thread and your "guilt by association" thoughtpolice tactics seem awfully idiotic and downright paranoid as a result.

I realize you may wish it did -- and in many respects, it does, does it not? -- but the world doesn't really revolve around Israel.

It's exactly in the dumbing down of Christianity to include all manner of objectively non-Christian belief and practices that we have become something other than a Christian nation.

Really thought-provoking post, bvw. I'm going to give your "Jewish place" a little more consideration. Jerusalem's certainly a nexus, no doubt, recognized first by the Jews to whom God did give that and many other places as they annihilated their enemies and took the spoils, "killing all that breathed" ... all with the confidence that is knowing these acts were ordained by God.

Meta-Christian ... still bugs me somewhat given the fact that we are denying absolutely the peculiarly Christian discernment by which respect for life (particularly the weak), the institution of holy matrimony (which actually liberated women and children thanks to patriarchy) and the ability to objectively distinguish among other cultures (as good or bad) without losing respect for the individuals a part of that culture (each of whom was deserving of the genuine liberation that was the Word).

I think we've become an meta Anti-Christian nation in many respects. Our deconstruction of it in the name of "tolerance" and such being the far more deadly attack on it than the overt targeting of Christianity by the courts.

Personally, I think the State of Israel accomplishes this defamation more often than not when defending itself --and its more heinous actions -- as a "Jewish" state.

Once again, Israel is subjected to the criticisms of "true conservatives" while Rhodesia and South Africa were considered beyond reproach for doing the very same things (indeed, anyone who criticized them was a "commie").

You have obviously never read your Bible (at least the front part of it). Do you want to know what a truly Jewish state would do? I'll tell you.

It would expel the entire non-Jewish population and allow non-Jews to live there only if they were practicing Noachides and even then only during periods when the yovel ("jubilee") year was in effect.

It would destroy all non-Jewish places of worship just as they were to have destroyed the high places of pagan "gxds" in the Biblical era.

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the Biblically-mandated wars of annihilation against the Canaanites and `Amaleq, in which every man, woman, child, and even animal was to be put to the sword? Perhaps you are unaware that in the case of an `ir niddachat (a Jewish city that had strayed after idolatry) not only was it to be treated the same way but destroyed and never again rebuilt?

It is amazing how ignorant so many chr*stians are of "their own" Bible. Doubtless you find all this quite crude and horrific by chr*stianity's more liberal standards, but unless you are a religious liberal who believes the Bible is the work of men you're stuck with all this (even if you believe the rules changed two thousand years ago, which is hardly a conservative position).

Very true but I don't often get get the chance since she doesn't post here as much as she used to.

It's no longer my job to "look busy" at some sinecure.

I've been taking care of family for a few months and do not have the time I used to.

I'm around, it's just that my posts reflect the same proportion of interest in all things Zionist as they always did and so have dropped off to nearly zero, as a result.

Perhaps this is one reason I've yet to be "recruited" by Stormfront at LF.

You never did answer my question ... have you any religious affiliation yourself?

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the Biblically-mandated wars of annihilation against the Canaanites and `Amaleq, in which every man, woman, child, and even animal was to be put to the sword? Perhaps you are unaware that in the case of an `ir niddachat (a Jewish city that had strayed after idolatry) not only was it to be treated the same way but destroyed and never again rebuilt?

Well, actually no. If you keep reading, you'll find I get to that eventually.

Thank you for your insights on the fact that Israel is not a strictly "Jewish" state. How would you describe it instead? "Democratized", or what?

Assuming the same realities where God's will is concerned yet apply to the Jews, I guess I don't understand what has changed.

I agree with you, actually, that we should employ more consistency in both our criticism and support of other nations. I never understood why -- despite the bodies floating down bloody rivers like logs -- Rwanda was dismissed as some "internal conflict into which we cannot intervene" while the alleged genocide in Serbia mandated military intervention.

If it's any consolation, perhaps Israel receive more than its share of scrutiny and criticism in direct proportion to its receiving more than its share of aid and diplomatic concessions. One must admit there is no real parity on that score either, regardless whether or not one supports our special relationship with the State of Israel.

One would never know that looking at LF, where Israel and Jews are all that is "debated". So what do you like best about that sinkhole? The Jewhating, the America hating, the bashing of FR, or the Holocaust denial?

Good grief, Veronica. Try not to tip your hand in the process of trying to smear LF only to reveal yourself as the wholly subjective, single-issue and purposed agit-prop artist you are.
Anyone with the least objectivity who canvases the site (starting with the Editor's Choice column, the increasingly wide network of partnerships confected with other libertarian endeavors as well as the Owner's own posts with regard to the mission and purpose of the place and the criteria with which he intends Moderators and Raters deploy the FAME system) understands perfectly well that the wholly distasteful and substanceless work of the more strident provocateurs on the Israel/Jew threads is but a wad of fetid gum stuck to the Free Speech shoe at LF.
Even a cursory look at the posting habits of the Usual Suspects reveals them to be single-issue sorts like yourself whose sole mission in life is to perpetuate the rancor and spam latest posts with bs posts in the hopes IT WILL APPEAR that the Israel thing indeed overshadows the actual purpose of the site.
All one need do is set their threshold to "1" in order to dispel the utterly ludicrous notion that LF is a "hate site" centered on or even unduly preoccupied with questions about Israel or the Jews sufficient to characterize it as some Stormfront hate site.
It's to be expected from any political discussion board that the subject of our international relations with Israel or internal relations with Jewish organizations bent on curtailing the free speech or exercise of religion by others come up. After all, our relations with Israel are a CRITICAL aspect of our foreign policy and certainly a crippling factor in our relations with Arab nations and any religious organization -- the Catholic Church, for example -- which seeks to influence our rule of law or the spin our courts and President put on notions of "Free Speech" or "Respect for Life" is subject to criticism.
Broadbrushing any and all critical discussion of those relationships as "anti-semitic" is not only disingenuous but reeks of the deceipt essential for instilling suspicions, cutting out tongues and prosecuting Thought Crimes.
Bottom line ... I still fail to see how it is that your opinions of some other website are pertinent to the discussion at hand. If you wish to continue in this vein, why not open a thread on Liberty Forum in the backroom where you could perhaps evidence your more subjective impressions.

The right to criticize any country is a given, but 95% of the criticism the "world community" hurls at Israel is based on anti-semitism, and there is a double-standard employed by and buckets of hypocrisy among, Israel's "critics."

95%, eh?

On what factual basis do you come up with that number?

Just once I'd like to see you spend more of your time addressing the substance of honest criticisms and questions rather than seeking to shut down all debate with your bogus and strictly dramatic smears and subjective personal opinions.

As a Catholic familiar with the "more Catholic than the Pope concept" ... sometimes I wonder that the State of Israel doesn't consider itself somehow "more Jewish than the Practicing Jews".

Askel's attempt at a sleight of hand.

According to Askel, a practicing member of the Catholic Church questioning the orthodoxy of the head of the Catholic Church, is as outrageous as the head of the State of Israel questioning the orthodoxy of a member of the State of Israel! While at the same time granting that it's theoretically possible for the head of the State of Israel to be an enemy to Practicing Jews!!!!

Askel, I can certainly understand you being quite busy with life's responsibilities. Therefore I will plead that you answer the following question with one word.

In keeping with the strictest Catholic theology, is it theoretically possible for a member of the Catholic Church to be more Catholic than the Pope?

Yes or No?

I recognize there are people in the world that hate Jews, particularly in the Middle East, and possibly that percentage can be applied to criticism coming from that quarter. But it seems to me that Jews expect a badmouth from that source, having heard it for centuries and consider that it goes without saying.

Criticism from other places doesn't enjoy the historical hatred traded with middle eastern venues, and much of it can be said to be sincere criticism for actions, choices, and behavior, especially from America who belies this presumed entrenched and ubiquitous "anti-semetic" character by financially supporting Israel with billions of dollars a year.

The "95%" is a little high there, don't you think, considering that the Americans who do the criticising are aware of the recipient of those billions?

...the post rating system which -- though a subject of controversey itself -- alleviates both the waste of time that is repeated banning of disruptors and helps to keep the single identities of posters a constant. The fact that posters from both sides of the argument end up "below ground" suggests that there is some parity to the system.

I don't think that the post rating system at Liberty Forum has any merit whatsoever. I've seen pro-Israel posts downrated to a -1, while anti-Israel posts are uprated to a 2. Even non-comments or pings get rated as a 2. Something is seriously wrong over there. I prefer Liberty Post.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.