Being a Jew in Europe
Simon Sebag Montefiore writes an article in the New Statesman about the rising anti-Semitism in Europe.
Even in Britain it is noticable how the old-sinister conspiracy
theories about the all-ruling Jewish cabal is becoming mainstream
as more and more of its rhetoric is accepted and repeated by the
European left.
Yet something has changed about the European attitude to Jewishness.
One feels it everywhere: we have moved, as it were, from the world of
Howard Jacobson back to Franz Kafka. This is connected to Israel,
America, 9/11 and Iraq. For more than a decade now, Israel has been the
fashionable bete noire of the chattering classes. The response to Israel in the European media, particularly the BBC and the Guardian, has long been prejudiced, disproportionate, vicious often fictitious.
A typical case of the media's mendacity on Israel was the invented
coverage of the Jenin "massacre" (not) by British news organisations,
which were so anti-Israel that they popularised an event that they
could not have witnessed, because it had not happened. They never
apologised - because any Israeli "atrocity" is seen to illustrate a
greater truth. Another example was the Israeli assassination of the man
whom the BBC called Hamas's "spiritual leader": Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was
actually a terrorist boss, about as "spiritual" as Osama Bin Laden.
Yet, in the British media, every Israeli sin is amplified, while those
of the Arab world are ignored. The million dead of the Iran-Iraq war,
Saddam Hussein's 300,000 victims, thousands more massacred in Chechnya,
the Arab militias killing black Sudanese, the torturing Middle Eastern
tyrannies are ignored - but in Britain, every Palestinian death is
reported like a sacred rite. Our media conceal the venom directed at
Israel by Arab clerics, television and the internet, presenting Israeli
complaints as propaganda. The Middle East commentator Tom Gross
revealed in the National Review
that when the "moderate" Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais
visited Britain this month, the BBC hailed him as a brave worker for
"community cohesion". Yet his Friday sermons call for Jews - "scum of
the human race, rats of the world" - to be "annihilated". It is not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel. Many of its policies are
clumsy, self-defeating, wrong. I am against most of the settlements,
against the razing of Palestinian houses. Israel will lose its soul if
it uses citizen-soldiers to skirmish through Rafah or Hebron for much
longer. I want a Palestinian state; I care deeply about the humiliation
and deaths of Palestinians. If criticisms against Israel were based
purely on its political faults, no one could complain. Yet, since the
first intifada, Israel's critics use hysteria and unreality, holding
Israel to standards to which Britain, for one, could never aspire.
Link via Volokh.
1:50:17 PM 
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