By Jeff Jacoby, April 28, 2002
The rocks have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are
slithering free.
In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him
“a dirty Jew.” Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third, in
Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapons fire.
In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a
large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack. Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a
noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the
West Bank and Gaza “should be shot dead.”
A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a
London bus.
Antisemitism, wrote a columnist in The Spectator, “has become
respectable . . at London dinner tables.” She quoted one member of the House
of Lords: “The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say
what we think at last.”
In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank
emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads,
“Surely they don’t want to kill me again?”
In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his
tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the
sepulchre. The caption: “Non resurrexit.”
In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a
grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a
rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a
synagogue in the western town of Herford: “Six million were not enough.”
In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows
of Kiev’s main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was
anti-Jewish.
In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Ioannina and vandals hurled paint
at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica.
In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of
Hitler, and chants of “Sieg Heil” and “Jews into the sea.” In Slovakia, the
Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.
But nowhere have the flames of antisemitism burned more furiously than in
France.
In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the
Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and
Marseille; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse
was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in
Paris, the words “Dirty Jew” were painted.
In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with
sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in
Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months. According to
the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day
since Easter.
Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming
“Jews to the gas chambers” and “Death to the Jews.”
The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It
said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them
to preserve “family honor.”
The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked – and did not
apologize – when it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that
the world’s troubles were the fault of “that shitty little country, Israel.”
“At the start of the 21st century,” writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a well-known
social scientist, in a new book, “we are discovering that Jews are once again
select targets of violence. . . . Hatred of the Jews has returned to France.”
But of course, it never left. Not France; not Europe. Antisemitism, the oldest
bigotry known to man, has been a part of European society since time
immemorial. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, open Jew-hatred became
unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to type.
To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of Jew-hatred all
over their continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency.
“Stop saying that there is antisemitism in France,” President Jacques
Chirac scolded a Jewish editor in January. “There is no antisemitism in France.”
The European media have been vicious in condemning Israel’s
self-defense against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have been far
less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard.
They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are
aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians.
A timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews. Militant Islamist
extremists were attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed
Americans on Sept. 11. The Nazis first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the
end, all of Europe was ablaze.
Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. When they
become the objects of savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned
and an explosion is soon to come. If Europeans don’t rise up and turn against
the Jew-haters, it is only a matter of time until the Jew-haters rise up and turn
against them.
