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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow bad is anti-semitism in Europe?
This is a very, very long and complex piece. And disturbing.
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France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish. Sale Juif—“dirty Jew”—rang in the streets, as did “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.”
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An argument made with increasing frequency—motivated, perhaps, by some perverse impulse toward psychological displacement—calls Israel the spiritual and political heir of the Third Reich, rendering the Jews as Nazis. (Some in Europe and the Middle East take this line of thought to an even more extreme conclusion: “Those who condemn Hitler day and night have surpassed Hitler in barbarism,” the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said last year of Israel.)
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On the morning of March 19, 2012, a man named Mohamed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian descent, parked his motorbike in front of the entrance of a Jewish school in Toulouse called Ozar Hatorah, which is in a placid residential neighborhood not far from the city center. Merah, who had been radicalized in a French prison and trained in an al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan, dismounted and almost immediately began firing a 9 mm pistol at students and the parents who were dropping them off. He killed a 30-year-old rabbi and his two sons, who were 3 and 6 years old. Merah then walked into the schoolyard, shooting at students. He chased down an 8-year-old girl named Myriam Monsonego, catching her by the hair. Merah held her down and placed his 9 mm to her head, but the weapon jammed. He switched to another handgun, pressed it against her head, and fired. The sound of shooting had brought the school’s principal to the school yard. Yaacov Monsonego arrived to see Merah execute his daughter.
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Each of the 10 students had a story to tell about brutality. “I was in a public school in Créteil but I had to leave. People would yell at me in the halls: ‘Dirty Jew.’ ‘Fucking Jew.’ ‘I want to kill all of you,’?” a student named Paola said. “Two years ago they attacked my brother. They would always scream, ‘Go back to your country.’ They meant Israel.”
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Anne Frank has become an obsession of modern anti-Semites. Her story—universally known, and deeply affecting—is a threat to the mission of the Holocaust-denial movement, and her youth and innocence challenge those who argue that Jews are innately perfidious. In Rome last summer, the slogan “Anne Frank is a liar” was spray-painted on walls in the former Jewish ghetto. In Lebanon, Hezbollah, the radical Shia group, has fought to keep her diary out of schools. In 2006, the Arab European League posted on its Web site a cartoon—this occurred during an earlier round of Europe’s endless, debilitating blasphemy wars—that featured a shirtless, postcoital Hitler in bed with a frightened dark-haired girl. “Write this one in your diary, Anne,” Hitler says.
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I spent one afternoon interviewing people in the main shopping mall of the Rosengård district, which is predominantly home to immigrants. Several of the Muslims I interviewed expressed benign feelings toward Jews. They knew of Malmö’s reputation for anti-Semitism, and regretted it. A couple of others expressed objections to Israel’s existence, but absolved “the Jews” of collective responsibility. But more common was conflation, and exaggeration. I asked several people to tell me where they find information about Jews and Israel. Television stations such as Al Jazeera and the Hezbollah station, Al‑Manar, were cited, as was the preaching of Scandinavian imams. One Danish imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, became famous last year for urging worshippers in a Berlin mosque to kill Jews: “Count them and kill them to the very last one. Don’t spare a single one of them.” He later explained to a Copenhagen newspaper that he “never meant all Jews.”
One man, an Iraqi refugee, told me, “The Jews have too much power everywhere.” Another man, of Sudanese background, explained that the Koran itself warns Muslims to fear double-crossing by Jews. “They killed the prophets and tried to poison the Prophet Muhammad,” he said. I did not hear critiques of Israel’s occupation policies. I heard, instead, complaints about the Jews’ baleful influence on the world.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/03/is-it-time-for-the-jews-to-leave-europe/386279/
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Nuclear Unicorn
(19,497 posts)are they little more than herd animals?
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)it doesn't paint the Muslims in Europe in a very good light.
Thanks for posting. I'm going to be thinking of this for a while.
K&R
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)Most of these attacks are not committed by the native population but by Muslim immigrants or their descendants. Nobody here seems to want to accept that fact.
Dr. Strange
(25,925 posts)
madville
(7,412 posts)The Muslim population will continue to increase in Europe and with no jobs and impoverished living, some of their population will continue to be susceptible to the "hate the Jews" rhetoric.
I think we will see a second holocaust against European Jews in the next 50 years, it depends how quickly radical Islam takes hold in the European countries that are seeing their Muslim populations increasing exponentially.
Israel's survival will be dependent on the continued support of the US (or another large interest donating defense funding/equipment and support). The scary part there is when they eventually get cornered they will unleash their nuclear arsenal and throw that entire half of the world into complete chaos (way more than normal).
Just look at what ISIS is currently doing to Christians in Syria and Iraq, those radical factions believe it is their duty to rid the world of Christians and Jews.
I don't blame the religions though. The modern root of all this is poverty, over population, and modern technology eliminating the need for human labor. THose voids have to be filled with something and many times it is hate.
karynnj
(59,504 posts)given. Jews are less than 1% of the population, but 51% of those targeted by racist attacks. However, if a French Catholic was attacked -- it would not be listed as a "racist" attack. One would suspect that "racist" attacks in France would be those against the Moslems, Jews and blacks.Given the list of despicable crimes, why are there no statistics with regards to them. What I don't know - and can't get from this article is what were the absolute number of these attacks against Jews, broken down by the crime. Only that lets you see the real risk.
The paragraph then goes on to say similar statistics exist in Great Britain. I have a good friend, who we travel with who is a British Jew from about an hour outside London. My husband and I, also Jews, have traveled to various areas in France and Italy (in addition to trips to the UK) with her - always visiting the synagogues as well as the churches. My daughter got her masters (in world religions) at the University of London. Over her time there, she attended services at many synagogues. There is no denying that there have been incidents of anti-antisemitism in Great Britain, but there are incidents in New York/New Jersey! (Frankly, I worried more during the year the same daughter spent on the South side of Chicago working for a Catholic Worker program!)
Most of the rest of the article is a very well written, emotional defense of the need for Zionism -- even if it does not speak of that. Jeffery Goldberg is a liberal Zionist. This is in line with the Netanyahu speech after the Paris attacks where he invited French Jews to make aliyah. This is a case of win/win from his point of view. He is likely 100% sincere in his belief that the world's Jews should be in Israel. It reinforces his view that Israel is the savior of all Jews. But it also would (like the huge immigration of Russian Jews, many now settlers with far different values than the Tel Aviv intelligengia) change the demographics of Israel. Not to mention, what more could Israel want than large numbers of very educated, skilled European Jews "returning" to Israel.
cali
(114,904 posts)and Goldberg has been a very strong and harsh critic of Netanyahu. And he has never written or insinuated that Israel is the savior of the Jews. To the contrary he has refuted that.
karynnj
(59,504 posts)Goldberg - in the Jewish media - essentially identifies as a liberal Zionist. http://forward.com/articles/204844/so-you-really-think-liberal-zionism-is-dead/
cali
(114,904 posts)safe haven for Jews. You claimed he's in line with Netanyahu- and more.
karynnj
(59,504 posts)- and the safe haven reference was to what Netanyahu said - and he said it in that speech.
That does not mean he agrees with Netanyahu on everything.
geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)Nearly 30 years ago, I moved to Israel, in part because I wanted to participate in the drama of Jewish national self-determination, but also because I believed that life in the Diaspora, including the American Diaspora, wasn’t particularly safe for Jews, or Judaism. Several years in Israel, and some sober thinking about the American Jewish condition, cured me of that particular belief.
I suspect that quite a few American Jews believe, as Biden does, that Jews can find greater safety in Israel than in America—but I imagine that they are mainly of Biden’s generation, or older.
A large majority of American Jews feels affection for Israel, and is concerned for its safety, and understands the role it plays as a home of last resort for endangered brethren around the world. But very few American Jews, in my experience, believe they will ever need to make use of the Israeli lifeboat. The American Jewish community faces enormous challenges, but these mainly have to do with assimilation, and with maintaining cultural identity and religious commitment. To be sure, anti-Semitism exists in the United States—and in my experience, some European Jewish leaders are quite ready to furnish examples to anyone suggesting that European Jews might be better off in America. According to the latest FBI statistics, from 2013, Jews are by far the most-frequent victims of religiously motivated hate crimes in America. But this is still anti-Semitism on the margins. A recent Pew poll found that Jews are also the most warmly regarded religious group in America.
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Yet Israel’s future as a Jewish haven is an open question. Alain Finkielkraut, the French philosopher who is a harsh critic of his country’s management of the jihadist threat, is also a strong critic of current Israeli policy. “It is an irony of history that people who move to Israel as Jews might be moving to a state that in the next decades becomes a binational state with a Jewish minority, because of the occupation of the West Bank and the settlements,” he told me when we talked in Paris in January. “Moving from France to escape the attacks of Arabs to a country that will not be Jewish does not make a lot of sense.”
steve2470
(37,457 posts)
zappaman
(20,606 posts)VERY Disturbing.
Incredibly disturbing and horrifying.
Behind the Aegis
(53,994 posts)Some else posted this. It took a bit of time to read it because it is long. It is a real issue which needs to be addressed in a way which seeks justice and freedom from fear and bigotry. Anti-Semitism never left Europe or really went away in a great, significant way, it simply took a nap. There are those who want to dismiss it, usually pontificating on "others" and saying how "anti-Semitism is bad, but..." (usually something about Israel or another minority group or Israelis/Jews are moving to Germany). On the flip side, there are those claiming, fearing we are seeing Europe gearing up for the next Holocaust. Both sides are completely off base, usually for very different reasons.
Personally, I believe it will get worse. How bad? I don't know. There may be a lull here and there, but eventually we will likely see something big, which people will be unable to deny, except for the CT'ists who will claim it is a "false flag" by Israel or Jews. The history of anti-Semitism is too entrenched to ignore or 'poo-poo' away. It would be similar to someone saying racism in our country has "it's moments" but really things "just aren't that bad". It completely ignores the reality of facts on the ground, as well as the well-established history here.
