Antisemitism
in the Arab and Islamic world is a given. It is accepted as if there is little
to be done against it. Even governments in countries that have signed peace
agreements with Israel do little to quell the Jew hatred that infests their
population. In many cases, political and religious officials continue to stoke
the flames, blaming Jews and Israel for all the ills of the world to distract their
people’s attention away from their own failures, or they do it openly to promote
the global aims of Islam, which includes the destruction of the Jewish state.
The denial of Jewish history and religion in Jerusalem, particularly the Temple
and the Temple Mount and the City of David is all part of this political and
religious desire for conquest over the Jews. It is as ancient and as modern as
Islam itself. It is fed into children with their mother milk. It is bred into
them in what they are taught in their schools. It is soaked into their brains
and hearts in their mosques and in their media.
When they migrate to Europe or
to America they bring this baggage with them. When they enter college and
university it is part of who they are as adults. When they graduate and become
influence and opinion making professionals going into the media, politics,
academia, community organizers, trade unionists, leaders of female, social, and
human rights issues their anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is an integral part of
their agenda. As for the losers, those whose lives remain miserable, whether in
the land of their birth, or those who migrate to Europe and hold a grievance,
many stroke out against the society in which they live and find the Jew or the
Jewish state as the target to which they vent their rage. Some find
glorification in it by dressing their violence in the cloak of Islam.
We
do, however, expect much more of the Western world as we see a growth of
antisemitism country by country. More often than not the local Jews are made to
pay for the gathering hate against the Jewish state.
The
Anti-Defamation League produced a report in November 2017 showing that an
already high rate of anti-Semitic incidents in America in 2016 had risen by a
further 67% in 2017. Both vandalism and harassment increased dramatically.
The
ADL report only names one culprit – white supremacists, but it is clear by
digging into the weeds that the main perpetrators leading the organized Jew-hatred
in America, as in Europe and much of the Middle East, are Muslims supported by the
radical left.
Take
the American campus, for example.
The
website of Canary Mission (https://canarymission.org/) is a good place to study
the vehement antisemitism that is behind the anti-Israel boycott movement.
The
BDS Movement goes way beyond calling for a boycott against Israel. The ultimate
aim of the BDS Movement, in all its forms, is the elimination of the Jewish
state.
The
in-depth research compiled by Canary Mission reveals that a huge proportion of
the antisemitism linked to anti-Zionism on US campuses is being actively
propagated and promoted by professors and students originating from Muslim
countries, supported by radical far-left professors who make grossly false
statements against Israel, often wandering into anti-Semitic stereotyping and
rhetoric.
BDS
professors who denigrate Israel in their classrooms are fully aware that the
aim of BDS is not Palestinian human rights but, according to the words of BDS
founder, Omar Barghouti, the elimination of the Jewish state. In his words, “We
oppose a Jewish State.” This is confirmed by other top BDS activists. Ahmed
Mor has said, “BDS does mean the end of the Jewish state.” And Assad Abu
Khalil has said, “The real aim of BDS is to bring down the State of Israel.”
The
Canary Mission website makes for compelling reading as a study into the depth
of anti-Semitism linked to anti-Israel activism on American campuses.
The
international media plays an important role in forcing governments to confront
the growing public displays of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel hate crimes and
violence.
SWEDEN
is a country with a sad record of how permissible anti-Israel activity has led
to an uncontrollable anti-Semitism.
It
took an international media outcry, led by the New York Times, for the Swedish
government to appoint an anti-Semitism commissioner to look into the rising
outbreaks of violent anti-Jewish attacks. This followed the torching of the
Gothenburg synagogue and yet another Malmo anti-Israel demonstration in which
mobs chanted slogans about killing Jews. Malmo which now has a growing Muslim
population of over 20% has a growing anti-Jewish hate crime incidents.
It
remains to be seen if the Swedish anti-Semitism czar is effective, or if it is merely
a fig leaf to cover the embarrassment of international media exposure.
It
took a social media video of a man carrying a Palestinian flag smashing the
windows of a kosher restaurant in AMSTERDAM to cause embarrassment in Holland.
The video showed Dutch policemen standing aside and watching the man commit his
crimes. They only arrested him when he broke into the restaurant and began
threatening the people inside.
To the further embarrassment of the Dutch
government and its legal system this man, a Syrian-Palestinian asylum seeker
was freed from jail after two days to await trial not on anti-Semitism or hate
crimes but on charges of vandalism and theft. Compare this to the case of a
Dutch Jew, Michael Jacobs, who was held by police for a week because he carried
an Israeli flag as he stood near an anti-Israel protest in Dam Square in
Amsterdam.
Holland
needs to change Dutch law and its application when dealing with anti-Semitic
and anti-Israel incidents which are increasingly violent against Jewish and
Jewish property. Frequently, these incidents are perpetrated by individuals and
groups with a radical anti-Israel agenda.
Further
proof that the far left lead the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, violence in Europe
was evident in GREECE last December. It wasn’t the far right Golden Dawn
members that vandalized the Israeli Embassy in Athens over the Christmas
period. It was members of the far left Rubicon anarchist group who latched onto
the Palestinian cause to express their Jew hatred by targeting the symbol of
the collective Jew, Israel, when they daubed red paint on the embassy walls.
FRANCE
is one European crucible where Muslim migrants are using deadly violence
against Jews. The name Halimi is
synonymous with this murderous Muslim anti-Semitic hate.
In
2006, the barbarous and gruesome killing of young French Jew, Ilan Halimi,
shocked France. Halimi was kidnapped and tortured over a thee week period by a
gang of 28 Muslims known as ‘the Barbarians.’ French authorities refused to
look on the Halimi case as a hate crime, despite the at-Semitic rants of the
group’s leader, Yousouf Fofana, at his trial.
Following
the murder of a Jewish teacher and three Jewish children in Toulouse in 2012 by
Mohammad Merah, anti-Semitic crimes in France have greatly increased.
As
an offshoot to the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in 2015, a French Muslim
terrorist took people hostage in a kosher deli in Paris after killing four
Jews. The terrorist was killed in a police shootout.
Three
years later, as Jews assembled at the Hyper Casher in memory of the murdered
Jews, arsonists burned down two Jewish supermarkets in the Paris district of
Creteil where the population in increasingly Muslim and decreasingly Jewish.
In
haunting replay of the Ilan Halimi murder, when a 66-year-old female Jewish
doctor, Sarah Halimi, was brutally murdered in her Paris home by a 27-year-old
Muslim man in April 2017, the police authorities again rejected the claim that
this was a hate crime, despite the neighbors hearing him shout “Allahu Akbar”
and recite Koranic verses as he murdered her.
In
these two brutal murders, eight years apart, against French Jews named Halimi,
the French authorities continued to face the awful reality the Jews are
targeted for being Jews, despite the evidence.
French
Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, told a Jewish audience in December that “In
our country, anti-Semitism is alive. It is not superficial, it is well-rooted
and it is alive. And it hides always behind new masks.”
This new mask is anti-Zionism, a disguise
for Jew-hatred. And yet, the Prime Minister in January approved the
publication of anti-Semitic essays by the author, Louis-Ferdinand Destouches,
known in France as Celine, over the heavy objection of the French Jewish
community leaders.
“You cannot deny
the writer’s central position in French literature,” Philippe said in
defense of the publication by an anti-Semite.
There
was an active boycott campaign to prevent the Israeli Habima theater company
from performing a Hebrew version of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ at the Shakespeare
Festival at the Globe Theater in LONDON in 2012.
Caught up in the anti-Israel
frenzy, Ben White, one of the boycott campaigners, posted a picture of Howard
Jacobson, the English Jewish writer who was to win the Man Booker Prize for
literature, on Twitter with the quotation, “If you need another reason to
support a boycott of Habima, I present a massive picture of Howard Jacobson’s
face.”
How
quickly hatred of Israel degenerates into picking on the local Jew.
Jacobson
responded with a statement that included, “I am aware that I look Jewish.
Massively Jewish. I don’t know. Massively Jewish-looking. I don’t know. But
Jewish, yes. So how does this fact bear on the proposed boycott? How does it
constitute a reason to support it? What does the face betoken that it might
strengthen people in their commitment to boycott an Israeli theater company?
I
have addressed the subject of anti-Semitism in my novels and articles. I have
warned about finding prejudice where there is none: and have often spoken of
how little anti-Semitism I have faced in this country. I don’t go looking for
it. I would rather not find it. But to see my appearance adduced as an argument
to support a boycott of Habima convinced me that, on this occasion,
anti-Semitism has found me.”
In
BRITAIN today, the Jewish population is concerned over a potential Labour
government as their country grapples with Brexit. The reason for their concern
is that anti-Semitism is rampant within the ranks of the Labour Party at all
levels. The headline of an article that appeared in the Jerusalem Post on September
29, 2017, screamed, “Antisemitism engulfs the British Labor Party.”
At
their annual conference, Israel was compared to the Nazis and there was a call
to expel pro-Israel Jewish groups from a party in what was described “as a
thinly veiled call to purge Jews from the Labour Party.”
This
is the party led by Jeremy Corbyn, a leader who called Hamas and Hezbollah his
friends.
Anti-Semitism
within the British Labour Party was described by the Tablet magazine as “a
running sore in Labour politics, in part because of Corbyn’s own past
statements and associations, and in part because he has attracted the fringe
left, banished in the 1980s, back into the party.”
John
Cryer, the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party admitted that he had seen
anti-Semitic tweets from party members “that would make your hair stand on
end.”
At
a side event to the Labour Party annual conference called ‘Free Speech on
Israel,’ speakers called for both the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends
of Israel to be “kicked out” of the party, accusing Israel of committing
“genocide” in Gaza.
One speaker told the audience that Israel and Israelis should
not be treated any differently to the Nazis. Other speakers refused to call
Israel by name, preferring to refer to it as “the Zionist state.”
A prominent Labourite, Tony Greenstein, who
talked about “Zionist scum” was warmly applauded by the audience.
Wes
Streeting, Labour MP for Ilford North, admits to the problem. “People say
there is no anti-Semitism problem, but we have seen it there in black and
white.”
An
internal review into anti-Semitism within the party was considered by many as a
whitewash for which the author, Shami Chakrabarti, was elevated to the House of
Lords.
In
a poll of British Jews conducted in August 2017, 80% said that the Labour Party
was too tolerant of Antisemitism within its ranks. 65% said the British
government did not do enough to protect its Jews.
Outside
of politics, in London, at anti-Israel demonstrations, Hezbollah flags wave in
the cold British air. Hezbollah, or what is neutrally called ‘the military
wing’ of that Lebanese Islamic group, is designated as a terrorist organization
that targets the Jewish state for annihilation, but they are accorded
protection by Jeremy Corbyn who refers to them as his friend.
Outside
the American Embassy in London in December 2017, protesters screamed
anti-Semitic chants as they demonstrated against the American decision to
recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
“Death to America!” and “Death
to Israel!” were heard as was the Arabic chant of “Khaybar. Khaybar, ya
yahud! Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud!” which threatens the slaughter of Jews as
executed by Muhammad against the Jews of Khaybar in the year 628.
This
is permitted in the capital of Britain 1390 years later.
In
SOUTH AFRICA, in November 2017 at a protest outside the Israeli Embassy against
the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration recognizing the
rights of the Jewish people to a national homeland in Palestine, one of the organizers,
Julius Malema said, “We will always carry the flag. We know that what Israel
is doing to the Palestinians is wrong.”
The
protest was organized by one of the leading radical left-wing opposition
parties. But the flag that was flying at
the demonstration was the Hezbollah flag that calls for the destruction of the
Jewish state.
More
than two thousand Christians travelling to this event in support of Israel had
their buses turned away and in some cases impounded on the grounds that the anti-Jewish
state protesters were “very aggressive and militant.”
In
GERMANY, where pictures of Israeli flags being burned in Berlin and Stuttgart
went viral, the President, sensitive to German history, came out to say that
the burning of flags of the Jewish state in German towns “frightens and
shames me.” He went on to say that “the German Federal Republic is only
fully functional when Jews are fully at home in it.”
The
German Justice Minister, Heiko Maas, was forced to say, “who burns Israeli
flags burns our values.”
When
the CDU parliamentary faction announced it was calling for a special commission
to look into antisemitism it was, as Manfred Gerstenfeld wrote in the Jerusalem
Post, “an admission that hate crimes against Jews are a significant problem”
in Germany.
They
have reason to be concerned. In the first half of 2017, 681 anti-Semitic
offenses were recorded. A German federal
survey showed that 40% of Germans hold Israel related anti-Semitic views.
Volker
Beck, a Green Party member of the Bundestag told Die Welt that he
believed this figure “is much higher.”
Updated
statistics are hard to come by, but in 2016 there were 1,468 anti-Semitic
incidents in Germany and 2017 figures are certain to be higher. 62% of German
Jews responded to a survey conducted by Bielefeld University by saying that
they had experienced anti-Semitism in their everyday lives.
On
a positive note, since Angela Merkl’s party passed a resolution in December
2016 calling the BDS Movement “anti-Semitic,” there has been a legal push back
against BDS activism in Germany.
In
August 2017, Frankfurt became the first German city to ban the “deeply
anti-Semitic” BDS, as the deputy mayor, Uwe Becker, called them. Since
then, Berlin and Munich quickly followed Frankfurt’s anti-BDS example.
In
many places, particularly on campus, protests against, and the closing down of,
pro-Israel speakers and events is permitted under free speech laws but, in
VIENNA, we saw the reverse of such free speech activity.
Three
pro-Israel activists were arrested and put on criminal charges for waving
Israeli flags.
They
did so in protest against anti-Semitic slogans being chanted at a demonstration
against the American decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the
Jewish state. The charges against them read that the Israel supporters “showed
an Israeli flag at a rally in an extremely provocative way and manner that was
visible to participants at the rally and thereby produced considerable offense
and provocation among the Palestinians protesters.”
One
of the arrested flag wavers said, “My mother is an Israeli. Her family were
Jewish refugees from Iraq and Libya. An Arab-speaking friend from Israel was
able to translate some of the slogans yelled at the demonstration. For example,
the Arab battle cry to massacre Jews “Jews! Remember Khybar. The army of
Muhammad is returning!” and “Death to Israel!”
This
activist, who gave his name as Matthias, said he heard shouts of “Intifada!”
and “child-murdering Israel!”
Vice
magazine posted a copy of the police notice with the criminal penalties for
waving an Israeli flag which the notice said was “extremely reckless”
and which “disturbed public order.”
Waving
an Israeli flag at a protest in Vienna is considered a criminal offense but
waving Palestinian and Turkish flags at a demonstration were not.
Matthias
and his friends were attacked by the pro-Palestinian demonstrators. They were
arrested but the violent demonstrators were allowed to return to their
anti-Israel rally.
Matthias
was seeking legal aid to appeal the penalties and criminal charges against him
and his friends. It cannot be that Jew-hating chants at a rally are permitted,
but Israeli flag waving protest against anti-Semitic outbursts results in
criminal charges
There
is much need for the establishment of legal groups in individual countries to
fight against the rising tide of anti-Semitism through the application of
existing and introduction of new laws.
Good
work has been done by the Lawfare Project in the United States and others to
set back BDS with the introduction of new laws at state and government level
but much more needs to be done to protect Jewish and Israeli students on
campuses against the hate crimes perpetrated against them that have been
allowed to develop under the banner of “free speech.”
As
South Carolina became the first state to codify the universal definition of
anti-Semitism into law, Governor Henry McMaster said, “Anti-Semitism has no
place in South Carolina, and the passage of this bill will go a long way toward
ensuring that our state and its college campuses provide a welcoming
environment for those from all walks of live.”
The
governor was spot on. Passing such a law enables legal challenge to
discrimination against Israelis and Jews whose speech is too often closed down on
campuses sometime by violent protest. Discrimination and the prevention of free
speech is at play here and the introduction of state anti-Semitism laws open
the way for legal defense for the victims against the perpetrators.
In
Great Britain, the voluntary group, UK Lawyers for Israel, have been amazingly
effective in challenging anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish actions by applying
existing laws against rising problem.
In
SPAIN, after 50 municipalities passed laws endorsing BDS, the brilliant Angel
Mas initiated ACOM and began a campaign to strip back BDS using the application
of law. Over the past year, 24 rulings and injunctions have been brought
against BDS in Spain thanks to litigation by ACOM and BDS motions have been
defeated, repealed or suspended in a dozen Spanish municipalities.
Similar
independent legal bodies are being established in Holland, Sweden, and South
Africa. All these countries have become hotbeds of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic
hate in which the Jewish population live in increasing fear.
The
problem is a simple and obvious one. Anti-Semites who hate Jews can get their
thrills by slamming the Jewish state. By calling themselves anti-Zionist they
are allowed to get away with their anti-Semitism. It’s that simple.
David
Hirsch, in his seminal book ‘Contemporary Left Antisemitism,’ called it this
way. “Anti-Semites always pose as victims of the Jews, or of ‘Zionism,’ or
of ‘the Israel lobby.’ And the claim that Jews try to silence criticism of
Israel by mobilizing a dishonest accusation against them is now recognizable as
one of the defining tropes of contemporary antisemitism.”
A
perfect example of that is Linda Sarsour, as rabid a hater of the Jewish state
as you can get.
When she is recruited to address a Jewish anti-Israel gathering
to protest that she is a defender of Jews you know you have a problem. You have
a problem because, according to Sarsour, you cannot claim to be a feminist and
support Israel at the same time. Being a believer in Israel, to her, makes you
a racist and ipso facto you cannot be a feminist.
And, if you are a Jewish
supporter of Israel you become a Zionist and a racist and, therefore unkosher
and unwelcome in her circle of intersectionality.
Muslims, like Linda Sarsour,
who want to see an end to the Jewish state, who are recruiting useful Jewish
idiots to their cause, always play the victim card portraying Jews as their
executioners. See Hirsch's description of them.
The
Israeli government would be wise to invest money, manpower, and resources in
support of volunteer groups and organizations who are defending Israel and the
Jewish people from such dangerous attacks and harassment.
This report was
compiled for the 2018 GFCA Conference on Anti-Semitism by
Barry Shaw,
Senior Associate
for Public Diplomacy,
Israel Institute
for Strategic Studies.
Author of the
book ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism.’
