Judeofascists' Thought Police exposed --straight from the horse's mouth:
thenation.com
Excerpt:
The fact that conditions are worse for Europe's Muslims--particularly in those countries where they have not been allowed to become citizens--does not, of course, mean that Jews should remain silent when we are attacked or even offended, just that we should retain a sense of proportion. The British Crime Survey, for instance, counts well over 100,000 racist incidents in each of the past three years. The number of racial incidents actually reported to the police, a much lower figure, has risen from 23,049 in 1999 to 53,842 in 2001. During this same period the number of anti-Semitic incidents reported--a category that includes anti-Semitic leafleting and verbal harassment as well as violence against persons or property--went from 270 in 1999 to 405 in 2000 to 310 in 2001. As of May 22 the total for this year was only 126--hardly indicative of Cossacks riding through Hampstead.
Yet one of the most striking things about the panic supposedly stalking Europe's Jews is how much that panic seems to be centered in Britain--a country where Jews are a very small (about 250,000 out of a population of 59 million) and very well-established minority. "What has been challenged is our comfort of having a foot in both worlds," Jo Wagerman, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told the Israeli paper Ha'aretz. The 240-year-old board is probably the oldest Jewish lobby in the world; Wagerman, whose own family came to Britain under Oliver Cromwell, is the group's first woman president. In the years after World War II, she said, British Jews enjoyed "a kind of golden age...[but] recently, Britain isn't the same." Melanie Phillips, a columnist for the right-wing Daily Mail, who was heckled by a BBC studio audience for claiming that Israel was a democracy, wrote that "the visceral hostility toward Israel and Jews displayed...by the audience is representative now of much mainstream British opinion."
The connections between events in the Middle East and in Europe are complex, fraught with the potential for misunderstanding and manipulation. Only the statistics are straightforward. In London, says Metropolitan Police spokeswoman Miriam Rich, anti-Semitic incidents went "up in April because of what happened in Jenin, and are down again in May. Each month is a direct reflection of what is happening in the Middle East." If you plot the national figures on a graph, says Michael Whine of the Community Security Trust, "and superimpose them with another of incidents in the Middle East, you see one following the other." The same correlation can be seen in France, where, unlike Britain, a growing proportion of the attackers come from that country's disaffected and marginalized Arab minority.
To Jews, such incidents may feed a sense that the whole world is against us. The tendency--understandable if not justifiable--to let any act of violence against Jews on European soil conjure up images of the Holocaust also inhibits clear thinking. Anthony Julius, the lawyer who acted for Deborah Lipstadt against David Irving, and a scholar of British and European anti-Semitism, ridicules the "diaspora narcissism" that leads British Jews to exaggerate their difficulties. And while Julius is careful to distinguish between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel, not all of Israel's friends are so scrupulous.
Indeed, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that many of those shouting loudest about the danger in Europe care more about retaining occupied Palestinian land than about the welfare of diaspora Jews. The BBC, the Guardian and the Independent--all news organizations with a clear editorial commitment to Israel's right to exist--are continually fending off accusations of anti-Semitism for simply reporting the day-to-day dehumanization inflicted on Palestinians. Whether the French ambassador's remark was a crime or a blunder, by making it at the home of Barbara Amiel, wife of Daily Telegraph (and Jerusalem Post) owner Conrad Black, and herself a staunch defender of Ariel Sharon, he put a weapon in the hands of those who argue, with Amiel, that "super-liberalism led to suicide bombers and intifadas in Israel."
Sometimes anti-Zionism really is a cover for anti-Semitism, and we on the left need to be clearer about that. Jews who view Israel's existence as the necessary fulfillment of their national (as opposed to civil) rights have grounds to be suspicious of those who grant Palestinian national aspirations a legitimacy they withhold from Jews. Most of the time, though, the line is pretty clear, and Jews of all people should be wary of using a double standard as a bludgeon. Or conjuring up specters in the cause of ethnic unity. If it is racist to suggest, as the New Statesman did recently, that "a Kosher conspiracy" inhibits criticism of Israel, then what are we to make of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's claim (in the New York Review of Books, reprinted here in the Guardian) that Palestinians "are products of a culture in which...truth is seen as an irrelevant category"? The non-Zionist world has every reason to resent it when the moral odium of anti-Semitism is used to discredit those who object to the brutality of Israeli occupation, or when the tattered mantle of Jewish victimization is draped over policies of collective punishment and murderous reprisal that, as the Israeli press was quick to point out, are modeled on the tactics used to crush Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. If more Jews expressed outrage at these policies, and at the way our tragic history is demeaned by being used as a gag, we would be in a stronger position to demand not sympathy but solidarity.
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