"The new anti-Semitis

The new anti-Semitism

Melanie Phillips says that hostility to Jews is strongest
among those on the Left who claim to be fighting racism

Want to make yourself really, really unpopular if you’re a Jew? Try saying
that the world is witnessing a terrifying firestorm of hatred directed at
Israel and the Jewish people, in which the British and Europeans are deeply
implicated.

Since it is now a given in many circles that Israel is a threat to the world
equal to North Korea, and that Ariel Sharon is a cross between Martin
Bormann and Hendrik Verwoerd, you will find yourself accused of using
the Holocaust to avoid any criticism of Israel’s behaviour. Because, well,
you know, you Jews always stick together and are mighty quick to deal
that persecution card.

Anyone who holds that view may as well skip what follows. More objective
and fair-minded souls, however, might be deeply alarmed to learn of the
evidence provided at a recent conference on anti-Semitism and the media at
the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem.

This was scarcely a gathering of the Ariel Sharon fan club. Among
academics and journalists from Israel, Europe, Britain and America were
several left-wingers and liberals who were deeply hostile to Israel’s Likud
government, believed that the settlements should be dismantled, and were
troubled by the behaviour of some of Israel’s military. ‘There’s no doubt
that Israel is committing human-rights violations on the West Bank,’ said
Professor Yehuda Bauer, the distinguished Holocaust expert.

But there was equally no doubt, from what he and others said, that
anti-Zionism is now being used to cloak a terrifying nexus between
genocidal Arab and Islamist hatred of the Jews and deep-seated European
prejudices.

Anti-Semitism is protean, mutating over the centuries into new forms. Now
it has changed again, into a shape which requires a new way of thinking
and a new vocabulary. The new anti-Semitism does not discriminate against
Jews as individuals on account of their race. Instead, it is centred on Israel,
and the denial to the Jewish people alone of the right of self-determination.

This is nothing to do with the settlements or the West Bank. Indeed, the
language being used exposes as a cruel delusion the common belief that the
Middle East crisis would be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state.

The key motif is a kind of Holocaust inversion, with the Israelis being
demonised as Nazis and the Palestinians being regarded as the new Jews.
Israel and the Jews are being systematically delegitimised and dehumanised
— a necessary prelude to their destruction — with both Islamists and the
Western media using anti-Zionism as a fig-leaf for prejudices rooted in both
mediaeval Christian and Nazi demonology.

This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now
marches behind the Left’s banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving
rise not merely to distortions, fabrications and slander about Israel in the
media but also to mainstream articles discussing the malign power of the
Jews over American and world policy.

The Jerusalem conference heard chilling presentations about a phenomenon
barely discussed in Britain: the virulent Arab and Muslim hatred of the
Jews. This goes far beyond even the desire to finish off Israel as a Jewish
state. Anti-Jewish hatred plays a crucial role in the fanatical jihadism that
now threatens all of us in the West, pouring out in television programmes,
newspapers and religious sermons throughout the Arab and Muslim world,
and amounting to a new warrant for genocide.

The dominant message is that Jewish power amounts to a conspiracy to
destroy Islam and take over the whole world. Truly mad theories circulate
on Islamist Internet sites which have now convinced untold numbers of
Arabs and Muslims that the Jews were behind both 9/11 and the Columbia
space-shuttle disaster. Egyptian television transmitted a 41-part series
which presented the notorious Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders
of Zion — which purported to be a Jewish plot to control the world — as
the truth. (This has prompted some Arab intellectuals to condemn such
propaganda as both untrue and a tactical error, but these dissidents remain a
small minority.) Meanwhile, Saudi media and religious sermons incite the
murder of Jews.

According to the Arabic scholar Professor Menachem Milsom, this Arab
and Islamist propaganda persistently dehumanised Jews by representing
them as apes and pigs. A preacher at the totemic Haram mosque in Mecca
said the Jews were ‘evil offspring’, the ‘destroyers of God’s word’, ‘priest
murderers’ and the ‘scum of the human race’. The mediaeval Christian
blood libel — the claim that the Jews kill children and drink their blood —
has surfaced time and again in prestigious Arab newspapers.

Click to expand...

And Zionism was equated with Nazism; just as the Nazis believed in the
superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race, so Zionists (sic) believed they were the
chosen people, which justified their own military expansion. This equation
was not confined to a marginal few. Abu Mazen, said Milsom, the
Palestinian Authority intellectual who is being talked about as Yasser
Arafat’s prime minister in a ‘reformed’ administration, wrote as much in
his doctoral thesis — in which he also said that the Zionists gave the Nazis
permission to treat the Jews as they wished so long as this guaranteed their
immigration to Palestine.

These sick outpourings are not so much religious or even fundamentalist
doctrines as rooted in a fanatical totalitarian ideology. As Professor Bauer
observed, the driving aim is the Islamic dictatorship of the world.
Realisation of this utopia necessitates the destruction of the foundation
creeds of Western culture, Judaism and Christianity — and especially
Israel, the supposed personification of Western global power-lust, which
was planted as an incubus on Arab soil as a result of the Holocaust.

Holocaust denial is therefore central to Arab anti-Semitism, the prejudice
which such historical falsehood has helped to forge a strategic alliance with
Europe. For it absolves Europe of its guilt over the Jews, and replaces it
with European guilt towards Arabs displaced as a result of the Holocaust.

Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the
Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over
genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, Europeans have eagerly embraced the
Nazification of the Jews, a process which really got under way with
Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This marked the beginning
of the media’s systematic inversion of Israeli self-defence as aggression,
along with double-standards and malicious fabrications, which have nothing
to do with legitimate (and necessary) criticism of Israel and everything to
do with delegitimising the Jewish state altogether in readiness for its
dismantling.

So the conference heard about German accusations that Israel was using
Nazi methods and (repeating a claim by Hamas) that the Monica Lewinsky
scandal was a Jewish conspiracy against Bill Clinton. It heard of the
Nazification of Israel in Sweden, where there were charges that the Israelis
were exterminating the Palestinians, that the media were controlled by
Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel, and that influential Jewish
lobby groups were ‘spraying journalists with poison’.

It heard that in France Jews were vilified and excluded from public debate
if they challenged the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a
devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding) — which has been playing
to packed houses in Paris — about the obsessive malevolence towards
Israel displayed by the French media. It was told about the way the British
media described Israel’s ‘death squads’, ‘killing fields’ and ‘executioners’
while sanitising Palestinian human bombs as ‘gentle’, ‘religious’ and ‘kind’.
It heard about the cartoon in the Italian newspaper La Stampa during the
siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, depicting an Israeli tank
pointing a gun at the baby Jesus who is saying, ‘Surely they are not going
to kill me again.’

And of course there was Jenin, the so-called ‘massacre’ or ‘genocide’
reported as such by virtually the entire media, where in fact 52 Palestinians
died, of whom more than half were terrorists, while Israel sustained (for it)
the huge loss of 45 of its soldiers. This astonishing media distortion was
conceded at the conference by the (extraordinarily brave) Palestinian
politics professor Mohammad Dajani, who also observed that a distraught
Palestinian public was — on this and other occasions — whipped up by
biased and emotional Palestinian reporting which showed little concern for
the truth. But the big lie of the Jenin massacre is now believed as fact,
contributing to the belief that Israel is a criminal state.

Europeans have thus made themselves accomplices to an explicitly
genocidal programme. But an even more striking feature is that, while the
old anti-Semitism still festers away among neo-Nazis, the new
anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of their sworn enemies on the political Left.
So, as the Canadian law professor Irwin Cotler observed, we now have the
mind-twisting situation where anti-Jewish hatred is harnessed to the cause
of anti-racism and human rights, with Israel being compared to both
Nazism and apartheid by those who define themselves against these
ideologies. Such a travesty of the facts involves, of course, the implicit
denial of the truth of those terrible regimes, quite apart from the prelude to
annihilation created by such a lethal defamation of Israel. And even more
counterintuitively, many Jews and Israelis on the Left also subscribe to this
analysis — and even to the demonology of Israeli Nazism and apartheid —
handing an effective weapon to those who dismiss the claim of a new
anti-Semitism as Jewish paranoia or Islamophobia.

So what is the explanation for the Left’s position? Partly, it’s the old
anti-imperialist and anti-West prejudice. Partly, it’s the view that only the
powerless can be victims; so Third World people can never be murderers,
and any self-defence by Western societies such as Israel must instead be
aggression. Partly, it’s the post-modern destruction of objectivity and truth,
which has ushered in the hegemony of lies. And partly, as the Left takes an
axe to morality and self-restraint, it’s a golden opportunity to pulverise the
very people who invented the **** rules in the first place.

A left-wing Polish journalist at the conference, Konstanty Gebert, got the
real point. The Left, he said, could not face the fact that they had totally
misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole
philosophy. This was founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all
differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for
reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is
not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view. It would also give
credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonisation is absolutely vital to the
Left as a protection against the implosion of its whole ideological position.

So the evidence is being denied, and truth is being stood on its head. The
result is the defamation of a people, the greater prospect of its destruction,
and the disastrous failure of the populations of Britain and Europe to
understand properly the threat that all free peoples now face.

Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist.

Click to expand...