From the OPINION section of today's
Miami Herald, Sunday, January 4, 2004, page 5-L:
Quote:
ANTI-SEMITISM BECOMES GLOBAL PLAGUE
by Arthur N. Teitelbaum
Though counter-intiutive, at times we are too close to events to fully appreciate their dimension and meaning. Such is the case today as we face a dramatic resurgence of global anti-Semitism.
From the vocal to the violent, Jew-hatred of the past confronts us today with new energy, new advocates and, unfortunately, new accepting audiences. It is variously packaged for the masses, minorities and the misfits.
Take the antiglobalism movement. One finds anti-Semitic threads woven into its tapestry of ideas, with global currencies and markets portrayed as oppressive expressions of "international Jewish control."
In a lead article on antiglobalism, the current issue of the Carnegie Endowment's prestigious
Foreign Policy magazine reports a 12-year high in the number of attacks on European Jews, noting that "Not since Kristallnacht, the Nazi-led pogrom against German Jews in 1938, have so many European synagogues and Jewish schools been desecrated."
The problem has finally caught the attention of the countries which make up the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In December, OSCE ministers from 55 member states agreed to hold a conference on anti-semitism in Berlin in April 2004.
Nor is this "new anti-Semitism" exclusively a European phenomenon:
- Mahathir Mohammad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, at the 10th Islamic Summit Conference said: "The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy -- 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews."
He got an enthusiastic ovation from the leaders of more than 50 nations, in response to his call for a holy war against Jews.
- Two synagogues in Istanbul were recently attacked [December 2003] with powerful and lethal terrorist bombs.
- In Florida on December 21, a new Muslim learning center south of Orlando held its inaugural event, with invited speakers including Shaikh Abdur-Rahman Al-Sudais, the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, who was quoted in newspapers in April 2002 as calling Jews "the scum of humanity, the rats of the world, the killers of prophets and the grandsons of monkeys and pigs." After a public outcry, his invitation was withdrawn.
- In Terre Haute, Indiana, a Holocaust Museum dedicated to the children who were experimented on by in the infamous Dr. Mengele was burned to the ground.
- In New York City there has been a serious increase in anti-Semitic incidents involving vandalizing of Jewish property -- 32 cases last month alone.
The history of mankind is replete with examples where words and perverse ideas have moved people to action. Anti-Semitism is a prototypical example. From discriminatory exclusion of Jews through the centuries, to the culminating horror of the Holocaust's industrialization of murder, the Jewish community has learned the lessons of history the hard way.
Anti-Semitism's themes are old, but its delivery technologies are as modern as the Internet and satellite communication. It finds receptive audiences among both the ignorant and the educated. Its purveyors are extremist bigots of both the political right and the political left. Today's engines of anti-Jewish bigotry include both organizations and nation-states, with all of the latter's financial and political muscle.
They say that those who don't know history are destined to repeat it. Perhaps. But there are also those, perversely, who do know history and want to repeat it.
Some 60 years ago, Jews and other minorities were dispatched to camps in Europe and killed by the millions in an environment saturated with anti-Semitism. With the history of the 20th century as a guide, who could have predicted that early in the 21st century the 1 million Jews in who live in Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Denmark would again feel under siege, with attacks on Jewish students, rabbis, Jewish institutions and Jewish owned-property?
Some European leaders blame anti-Israel sentiment among radicalized elements in their rapidly growing Muslim populations. They are partially correct. Also true is that the violence has occurred in an environment where governments and leaders have failed condemn anti-Semitic violence, or have at best been slow or tepid in their response. The message to Europe's burgeoning immigrant population is that there is a certain level of acceptance of such intolerance.
Historians note one way of determining the health of a nation's democracy is by examining the condition of its Jewish community. Doing so today we can see that democracy and the ideal of tolerance, one of its core expressions, are under assault in much of the world. To ignore this situation compounds a dangerous problem.
What does history teach? No matter the perpetrator or the victim, good people must not turn away nor shrink from the fight against bigotry. This is no time for bystanders. Not now, not ever.
_____________________________________
Arthur N. Teitelbaum is Southern Area director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Interesting that attacking of Jews seems to be clearly coming from Muslim immigrants, who seem to be inclined toward the same violence that was common in the countries they immigrated from.
France, as I've said elsewhere, is approximately 20% Muslim. Which makes it a large enough ratio that it is very difficult for the French to resist and stand up to.
It also explains why France has been so resistant to an invasion of Iraq (beyond the 30-year political ties Chirac had to Saddam Hussein).
A warning of what could occur in this country as well, if we allow Muslims to immigrate to the U.S. in large numbers.
As we've seen, Muslims don't assimilate, they stick to their own subculture. Long before September 11th, I read articles for a decade, saying that Muslims retain their religion across many generations, and are more likely to be sleeper cels than other immigrant groups. And that this was a danger we could prevent, simply by not allowing Muslims to immigrate. It was NSA and CIA studies that showed this.
And as this article reflects, American Muslims retain the same bitter anti-semitism as their counterparts in the Muslim world. But are somehow creditewd as being more liberal and enlightened.
But again, look at the Orlando meeting, and what they were willing to endorse and promote there.
I sincerely hope that Islamic immigration to the U.S. has pretty much frozen since 9-11.
But again, there are already 7 million Muslims in the U.S., that already present a considerable threat, to Jews in particular.
As this article makes clear.
If it were attacks on Jews and Jewish businesses in Alabama or Mississippi, I might guess that anti-semitic attacks in the U.S. were the work of the KKK.
But since they are happening in places like Indiana and New York City (areas with a large ratio of Muslim immigrants) I'm more inclined to believe these are Muslim-orchestrated attacks.
