Deborah Lipstadt: European Antisemitism ... Ominous Signs and Silence from the Left
In my attention to the Bishop Williamson matter I have really been negligent about addressing another more important topic: the rise of antisemitism in Europe.
There has been a survey by ADL which finds that a significant portion of Europeans blame the financial mess on Jews. I have no idea who conducted the survey and how the questions were structured [this would impact the outcome] or if one can draw a conclusion about an entire Continent from surveying 3,500 people.
But it is still disturbing. I hope others use this finding to do more research.
On this issue, I strongly recommendJonathan Freedland's article in the Guardian.
In it Freedland notes that after 9/11 and 7/7 [the date of the London bombings] the British liberal left massed and strongly protested any hostility to Muslims. They were saying to European Muslims and particularly those in the UK: you do not stand alone. They called upon their fellow Britons to be" careful in their language, not to generalise from a few individuals to an entire community, to make clear to Britain's Muslims that they were a welcome part of the national life."
Freedland believes this was the right reaction. Yet he notes that, in the wake of the Gaza operation [which he opposed from the outset], liberals have remained eerily silent even as"British Jews have indeed come under attack."
In the four weeks after the Gaza operation began there was an eightfold increase in antisemitic incidents in Britain compared with the same period a year earlier."
There were"attacks on synagogues, including arson, and physical assaults on Jews. One man was set upon in Golders Green, north London, by two men who shouted, 'This is for Gaza', as they punched and kicked him to the ground."
There has been"Blood-curding graffiti" including slogans such as"Slay the Jewish pigs", and"Kill the Jews", to"Jewish bastardz."
Jewish schools are on high alert.
In the face of this real threat the British left has been virtual silent.
But, Freedland goes on, this is more than a sin of omission.
Take last month's demonstrations against Israel. Riazat Butt, the Guardian's religious affairs correspondent, describes in a joint edition of the Guardian's Islamophonic and Sounds Jewish podcasts how at one demo she heard the cry not only of"Down with Israel" but"Kill Jews". An anti-war protest in Amsterdam witnessed chants of:"Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas."
At the London events, there were multiple placards deploying what has now become a commonplace image: the Jewish Star of David equated with the swastika. From the podium George Galloway declared:"Today, the Palestinian people in Gaza are the new Warsaw ghetto, and those who are murdering them are the equivalent of those who murdered the Jews in Warsaw in 1943."
Now what, do you imagine, is the effect of repeating, again and again, that Israel is a Nazi state? Even those with the scantest historical knowledge know that the Nazis are the embodiment of evil to which the only appropriate response is hate. How surprising is it if a young man, already appalled by events in Gaza, walks home from a demo and glimpses the Star of David - which he now sees as a latter-day swastika - outside a synagogue and decides to torch the building, or at least desecrate it? Yet Galloway, along with Livingstone, who was so careful in July 2005, did not hesitate to make the comparison (joined by a clutch of Jewish anti-Israel activists who should know better).
For liberals those Jews who dissociate themselves from Israel are acceptable. Those who don't are"fair game for abuse and attack until they publicly recant."
But they don't ask Muslims to explain jihadism or renounce Islamic extremism. Asking them to do so is seen as unenlightened.
Bishop Williamson is a gnat -- if not lower than that -- compared to this.