Zionism generates backlash against Jews in Europe
economist.com
AMERICANS are becoming increasingly alarmed at a revival of Europe’s extreme right and disturbed by a spate of attacks on Jewish targets, such as the desecration of Jewish graves in the Russian city of St Petersburg last weekend (pictured above). Some have even become convinced that Europe is witnessing a resurgence of anti-Semitism to levels not seen since the rise of Hitler. America’s ambassador to the European Union (EU), Rockwell Schnabel, said earlier this month that anti-Semitism across the continent was “getting to a point where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s”. American Jews are reading, horrified, a rash of new books with titles such as “The Return of Anti-Semitism”.
The extent of the resurgence in European anti-Semitism is, at times, being overstated: in the 1930s, German Jews were excluded by law from state jobs and forbidden to marry non-Jews. Nothing like this is happening in Europe now. However, while such state-sanctioned persecution is thankfully absent, there has clearly been a rise in violence and hate directed at Jews in recent years. Last November, car bombs outside two synagogues in Istanbul killed at least 25 people (though most victims were, in fact, Muslims). On the same day, a Jewish school in Paris was torched. More recently, neo-Nazi groups have reportedly attacked the homes of prominent figures with Jewish origins in Britain’s governing Labour Party.
It is against this background that Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, held a seminar on anti-Semitism in Brussels, on Thursday February 19th. The meeting nearly did not take place: Mr Prodi threatened to cancel it after the president and European head of the World Jewish Congress accused the commission itself of anti-Semitism. The criticism followed the EU’s publication of a poll last November in which 59% of respondents said Israel was a threat to world peace—more than for any other country. Around the same time, there were press reports that the European Commission had stifled a study on anti-Semitism which blamed members of Muslim minorities in Europe for many attacks. The EU’s European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), which conducted the study, insists it will be published shortly.
At Thursday's seminar, Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp and Nobel laureate, said European Jews now “live in fear” and that some were even talking of leaving. Mr Prodi rejected suggestions that things were as bad as the 1930s and 1940s, but he proposed strengthening the EU's anti-racism laws, to make both anti-Semitism and denial of the Holocaust criminal offences across the Union.
The problem of resurgent bigotry against Jews has been most acute in France, home to Europe’s largest communities of both Jews and Muslims (at 600,000 and around 5m respectively). Government statistics give some cause for hope that a recent crackdown on anti-Semitic behaviour in French schools has begun to show results. The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said this month that the number of violent anti-Semitic attacks in France had fallen by 37% in 2003. But Jewish groups say many incidents go unrecorded.
Anti-Semitism in Europe goes back centuries—it has been called “the longest hatred”—and has its roots in the idea that the Jews bore a collective guilt for the death of Jesus. It took until 1965 for the Catholic church to issue a formal statement repudiating this notion. Polls suggest that residual anti-Jewish sentiment is disturbingly durable. One, conducted in 2002 for the American-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), found that 30% of people polled in ten EU countries agreed with the statement that “Jews have too much power in the business world”.
Such attitudes are not restricted to Europe. A poll by the ADL, also in 2002, found that 24% of Americans agreed with the same statement—despite America’s official support for Israel and American evangelical Christians’ generally positive view of God’s “chosen people”. Anti-Semitism has been whipped up among black Americans by the likes of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, who once called Judaism the “synagogue of Satan”. Recently, a row has been building in America over “The Passion of the Christ”, a soon-to-be-released film made by Mel Gibson. Abraham Foxman, director of the ADL, says the film portrays Jews as bloodthirsty and vengeful.
Of course, anti-Semitism is far worse in some Muslim countries, where it may be officially sanctioned or even encouraged. Some Arab media routinely spew out vile calumnies against Jews. A Lebanese satellite-television channel, run by the Hizbullah militia, recently ran a serial purporting to document the Jews’ rise to global power, including an episode depicting a rabbi slitting the throat of a Christian boy. Last October, Malaysia’s then prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, declared: “The Europeans killed 6m Jews out of 12m, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.” In the resulting storm of protest, Dr Mahathir claimed, unconvincingly, that his comments had been taken out of context.
Muslims faced with accusations of anti-Semitism might well ask: what about the rampant Islamophobia in Europe, America and elsewhere? Is not France’s recent decision to ban Islamic headscarves a tacit official endorsement of such prejudices? How about an EU seminar on anti-Muslim hatred too? Indeed, the same polls that illustrate European anti-Semitism show even deeper levels of prejudice against Muslims. A recent poll in France suggested that while 10% of the population admitted disliking Jews, 23% expressed prejudice against North Africans. The EUMC reports that attacks on Muslims have risen in Europe since the September 11th terrorist attacks in America. It is worth noting that the leader of France’s extreme-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, now hurls most of his abuse at Muslims, not Jews.
Nevertheless, Jewish groups and the Israeli government complain that the Western media give Israel a particularly hard time. Broadcasters’ and newspapers’ criticisms of Israel’s security policies, they say, are intemperate and reflect an underlying anti-Semitism. Fierce Israeli criticism of the BBC’s reporting recently prompted the broadcaster to appoint a senior journalist to monitor its Middle East coverage and handle complaints. However, some Jewish leaders worry that over-zealous monitoring of supposed bias may be counter-productive.
In many cases where Israel and its supporters sense anti-Jewish bias—and likewise those where the Palestinians and their friends detect Islamophobia—any apparent errors or omissions may simply be the result of genuine misunderstanding, carelessness or the difficulty of reporting highly complex conflicts in a balanced manner, rather than prejudice. The available evidence suggests that those Europeans harbouring hatred against the Jews are a small minority—though not too small for their bigotry simply to be ignored. |
