More Anti-Semitism in
Europe – May 7, 2002
When I read of the incidents
of anti-Semitism happening in Europe, I think I am all too ready to stick my
head in the sand and say “it’s an isolated incident, anti-Semitism there isn’t
really so bad.” This article from the
Boston Globe, by bringing together in one place a number of the different
incidents, makes it somewhat harder to keep one’s head in the sand. It’s distressing that after all the world
has been through, barely a generation after the Holocaust, blatant, public
anti-Semitism can make such a return in the supposedly civilized world.
When will we ever
learn? …we in the broad sense, not just
Jews, but we, the world, that senseless hatred, of anyone, is a bad thing that
should not be tolerated.
Reb Barry
By Jeff Jacoby - The Boston Globe
April 28, 2002
The rocks have been
lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are slithering free.
In Belgium, thugs beat up
the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him "a dirty
Jew." Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third, in Charleroi,
was sprayed with automatic weapons fire.
In Britain, the cover of
the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David
stabbing the Union Jack. Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an
Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza
"should be shot dead." A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms
was stabbed 27 times on a London bus. Antisemitism, wrote a columnist in The
Spectator, "has become respectable . . . at London dinner tables." She
quoted one member of the House of Lords: "The Jews have been asking for it
and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."
In Italy, the daily paper
La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star
points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, "Surely they don't want to
kill me again?" In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus
trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand,
is sitting on the sepulchre. The caption: "Non resurrexit."
In Germany, a rabbinical
student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade was thrown into a Jewish
cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the
Jewish sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town of
Herford: "Six million were not enough."
In Ukraine, skinheads
attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of Kiev's main synagogue.
Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.
In Greece, Jewish graves
were desecrated in Ioannina and vandals hurled paint at the Holocaust memorial
in Salonica. In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas,
photos of Hitler, and chants of "Sieg Heil" and "Jews into the
sea." In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135
tombstones destroyed.
But nowhere have the
flames of antisemitism burned more furiously than in France.
In Lyon, a car was rammed
into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was
firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseille; so was a Jewish
school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov
cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words "Dirty
Jew" were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football
team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school
in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months. According
to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per
day since Easter.
Walls in Jewish
neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming "Jews to the gas
chambers" and "Death to the Jews." The weekly journal Le Nouvel
Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape
Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve
"family honor." The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked
-- and did not apologize -- when it was learned that he had told guests at a
London dinner that the world's troubles were the fault of "that shitty
little country, Israel."
"At the start of the
21st century," writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a well-known social
scientist, in a new book, "we are discovering that Jews are once again
select targets of violence. . . . Hatred of the Jews has returned to
France."
But of course, it never
left. Not France; not Europe. Antisemitism, the oldest bigotry known to man,
has been a part of European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of
the Holocaust, open Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change, and
Europe is reverting to type.
To be sure, some
Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of Jew-hatred all over their
continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency. "Stop saying
that there is antisemitism in France," President Jacques Chirac scolded a
Jewish editor in January. "There is no antisemitism in France." The
European media have been vicious in condemning Israel's self-defense against
Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have been far less agitated about
anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard.
They are making a
grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are aimed at the Jews,
tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians.
A timeless lesson of history
is that it rarely ends with the Jews. Militant Islamist extremists were
attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed Americans on
Sept. 11. The Nazis first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of
Europe was ablaze.
Jews, it is often said,
are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. When they become the objects
of savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned and an explosion is
soon to come. If Europeans don't rise up and turn against the Jew-haters, it is
only a matter of time until the Jew-haters rise up and turn against them.