Hatred's Latest Model

...Militant Islam has gained a voice on the Continent and radicalized segments of the large Muslim communities in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Sweden, and other countries...

...Schoenfeld's book contributes positively to this urgent task...

...You kill the Jews...

...Such accusations are not sanctioned within mainstream European societies and usually cannot be voiced in public without raising eyebrows or drawing criticism...

...Frustrated by their relatively poor living conditions, and whipped up by the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic messages they receive from within their own culture as well as the broader culture, some feel free to express their grievances by attacking Jews and Jewish property at will...

...Scores of synagogues and Jewish schools have been vandalized and set ablaze...

...Today they are a fact of life in places as diverse as Sweden, Belgium, Great Britain, and Greece...

...Israel, in short, is rapidly becoming a pariah state, and the Jews of Europe, identified as surrogate Israelis, increasingly have become the targets of intense physical and verbal attack...

...No one can predict what lies ahead with any certainty, but the past tells us that, if allowed to go unchecked, this particular pathology has the potential to do serious harm—and not only to Jews...

...The latest to take up the subject is Gabriel Schoenfeld's The Return of Anti-Semitism...

...The situation has reached the point where France's Chief Rabbi recently called on Jews living there to forgo wearing skull caps and jewelry with Jewish stars in public to avoid being attacked...

...In his fullest and most valuable chapter, Schoenfeld traces the Islamic strain of Judeophobia through Malaysia, Pakistan and the Arab world...

...Such public displays of anti-Jewish aggression would have been unthinkable a few years ago...

...Those images from the popular media overlie others drawn from the traditional repertoire of anti-Semitic stereotypes and reinforce the notion that the Jews are a clever, conniving people who conspire behindthe scenes to dominate the world...

...There is, however, one identifiable point of nexus: a shared animus toward Jews and, especially, the Jewish state...

...These attacks have been accompanied by verbal abuse of an openly threatening kind, with cries of "Death to the Jews," a now familiar refrain at antiwar rallies in many European cities...

...Anti-Semitic ideas have a way of infecting societies at large, and overt hostility to Jews is often the opening phase of more comprehensive and destructive acts of aggression...

...director, Institute for Jewish Culture and the Arts, Indiana University Over the last three years Jews and Jewish institutions across Europe have been the targets of violence on a scale rarely seen since the end of World War II...

...Within the Muslim world, however, they are commonplace...

...It is not uncommon to find Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, referred to as a "war criminal" on a par with Slobodan Milosevic or even Adolf Hitler...

...If there is anything truly "new"' about the "new anti-Semitism," it is this intensely hostile focus on Israel and the accompanying demonization of the Jewish state and those who supposedly support it so aggressively around the globe...

...Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust memorial sites have been repeatedly desecrated...

...After a period of official denial, the "new anti-Semitism," as some call it, is beginning to evoke serious attention from government authorities and media commentators...

...Televised images of the Arab-Israeli conflict also prompt many of Europe's Muslims to identify with the Palestinians and incite some of them to strike out at Jews living in their midst...

...That the notion is nonsense matters little...

...European media commentary on Israel is often harsh, to the point of portraying the country as brutal and implacably belligerent...

...The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, Phyllis Chesler's The New AntiSemitism, and Kenneth Timmerman's Preachers of Hate...

...The Jews, he said, are "the root of evil," a fanatical and forceful people characterized by "too much self-importance and too much stubbornness...

...Its sources are predominantly the far Right, the extreme Left, and radical Islamic circles...

...Given the ubiquity of those sentiments, it is not surprising that the Jews of Europe feel more vulnerable today than they have for years...

...They nervously wonder what the future may hold for them...

...In the name of Zionism, according to that line of thinking, the Jews have illegitimately taken possession of Muslim lands in the Middle East and are carrying out a Nazi-style genocide against the rightful inhabitants, the Palestinians...

...This is not the environment of Europe and the United States, yet as Schoenfeld demonstrates in two other chapters, a renascent anti-Semitism is making itself felt in the Western world too...

...In the words of Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal, who preaches a version of militant Islam across Great Britain, faithful Muslims "have no choice but to hate [the Jews...

...In October, for example, outgoing Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed of Malaysia, told a world gathering of Muslim leaders that the Jews "now rule the world by proxy.' The view is so widespread among Muslims that it is taken as a truism and serves as a rationale for their anti-Semitism...

...In post-war Europe, FrenchPresident Charles de Gaulle set the tone for anti-Jewish rhetoric when, following Israel's victory in the SixDay War of June 1967, he called the Jews "an elite people, selfconfident, and domineering" and suggested they were responsible for "provoking ill will in certain countries at certain times...

...European officials have been reluctant to say so, but it is no secret that much of the street-level violence directed at Jews in Europe is being carried out by angry Muslim immigrants who are not faring well and are themselves sometimes the targets of local racists...

...For in societies that nurture a worldview of victimology and rage, "hatred of Jews and demonization of Israel serve as a pressure release valve from a disordered and futureless environment...

...He argues convincingly that its virulence is unlikely to soon abate...

...The worst country for this sort of hostility by far has been France, with almost 1,500 incidents of anti-Semitic violence recorded since October 2000...

...Politically, culturally, sociologically, and ideologically, these are very divergent groupings, and their adherents normally would have nothing whatsoever in common...

...It is also the most thoroughly researched and reliable study...

...A recently published European Union poll, in fact, showed that a majority of Europeans regard Israel as the single greatest threat to world peace— ahead of such truly dangerous countries as North Korea and Iran...

...Although it is more of a descriptive survey than an in-depth analysis, it usefully documents the range and character of contemporary animosity toward Jews and the Jewish state...

...Several recently published books explore the troublesome phenomenon, including Abraham Foxman's Never Again...

...The most salutary response to anti-Semitism in our own day is to expose it for what it is and thereby help to make its return as brief and bloodless as possible...

...As in this instance, criticism of Israel often carries well beyond a reasonable assessment of the country's policies and actions and sometimes equates the Jewish state with South Africa under apartheid or Germany in its Nazi phase...

...How do you fight the Jews...

...Therefore the Jews must be opposed by all means, including suicide bombings against the "Zionist enemy" in Israel proper and violent action against their "agents" in Europe...

...Last fall, the famed Greek composer Mikos Theodorakis both echoed de Gaulle's words and improved upon them...

...and individual Jews have been shot at, harassed, and beaten in their shops or on the streets...

...it has a long lineage and retains appeal even after the mass slaughters of the Nazi Holocaust have shown where it can lead...

...Caught by this fever some Muslims ask, What are opponents of the satanic force to do...