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ARAFAT AND THE “NEW ANTI-SEMITISM”

Arafat and the 'new anti-Semitism'
By Sean Gannon
Israel Insider
November 20, 2003

Scarcely a month now seems to go by without the resurrection or repackaging somewhere in the world of one classic anti-Semitic libel or another. First Mel Gibson dusted off of the ancient charge of deicide for presentation in his forthcoming film on the final hours of Christ. Then came Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Meridiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with his crackpot claims about the 'Jewish-controlled' mass media and its Israeli-inspired "persecution" of the Catholic Church. This was followed in October by Mohammed Mahathir's notorious revival of the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination while, meanwhile in Germany, Martin Hohmann MP, gave a speech in which he dredged up that most overworked of twentieth century anti-Semitic canards – Jewish responsibility for Bolshevism and its crimes.

Then last week Chairman Arafat staked his claim for inclusion in this year's list of anti-Semites of international standing by giving another public outing to his favorite anti-Semitic libel, that of the 'poisoner-Jew.' Drawing on Black Death-era beliefs about Jews and disease, he told the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah on November 12th that the IDF was deliberately using depleted uranium and "gaseous bombs" in the territories, causing a precipitous rise in cancer and sterility rates amongst the Palestinian population. Just three days before his speech to the PLA, he had privately told a visiting French delegation that depleted uranium (DU) was responsible for a Palestinian cancer rate equivalent to that caused by the Hiroshima bomb.

This was not the first time that Arafat leveled this charge at Israel. In January 2001, he told the World Economic Forum at Davos that the IDF was poisoning the Palestinians with depleted uranium, noxious gases and weaponized toxic waste, an allegation he repeated at the Arab Summit in Beirut two months later. His mouthpiece, al-Hayat al-Jadidah, even suggested that DU was responsible for congenital deformities in dozens of babies at Shafaa hospital in Gaza. One year later and just two weeks after a British report on the substance warned of the possible ill-effects of contaminated water and soil on the health of local populations, Arafat told al-Jazeera that Israel's use of DU against the Palestinians had been confirmed by the United States.

Of course, Chairman Arafat is not alone in his use of the 'poisoner-Jew' libel to vilify Israel; indeed, it has been a mainstay of the Palestinian Authority's propaganda war against the Jewish state in recent years. In June 1997, for instance, the Palestinian Authority accused the IDF of "an organized plan and conspiracy ... to poison and harm the Palestinian population" by distributing poisoned food while, one month later, it alleged that Israel was flooding the West Bank with hundreds of tons of toxic chewing gum which "completely destroyed the genetic systems" of young boys and drove girls crazy with sexual desire, thus compromising their honor as Moslems.

Then, in December, the director of the PA Committee for Consumer Protection claimed that Israel was knowingly importing chocolate infected with Mad Cow Disease into Palestinian cities. Two years later, Arafat's wife, Suha, told an audience which included Hillary Clinton, of the "intensive daily use of poison gas by Israeli forces" and their poisoning of 80% of Arab water with carcinogenic "chemical materials." And, in May 2001, the official PA news agency, WAFA, reported that Israel had "started a new genocide against the Palestinian people by poisoning them, using poisoned candy bags dropped down from airplanes." Routinely reported also are the 'facts' that Israel deliberately infects Arab children with AIDS and sends HIV-positive prostitutes into Egypt to spread the disease there.

The sheer outlandishness of such accusations has not prevented their being taken seriously outside of the virulently anti-Semitic Arab and wider Islamic worlds. In the most notorious example, the Western world weighed in on the side of the Palestinians in March 1983 when they condemned what transpired to be an outbreak of mass hysteria amongst hundreds of schoolgirls on the West Bank as an Israeli attempt to sterilize them through mass poisoning. Not only was Israel denounced by the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, but the Western media, particularly in Europe, reported that there existed evidence to support the charge. Israel was actually criticized for its supposed actions in the United Nations with even the U.S. delegate, Jean Kirkpatrick, inveighing against it in the Security Council.

Twenty years later, it is clear that the myth of the 'poisoner-Jew' still resonates in some supposedly more enlightened Western societies. For despite Israel's dismissal of them as "false and contemptible," Arafat's continuing claims about the use of poisons against the Palestinians, particularly those about depleted uranium and gas, are being given creeping credence abroad. They have been often uncritically reported in the media, presented as proven facts in online forums and been investigated by anti-Israel organizations such as the U.S.-based International Action Center.

Chairman Arafat is doing his best to capitalize on the world's willingness to believe. All foreign visitors to his Mukata compound are treated to a lecture on Israel's poisoning of his people and are presented with a dossier of 'proof' that the IDF is using DU against "the sons of our people."

Today, with most of his 'guests' hailing from a Europe disposed to believe any calumny directed against the government in Jerusalem, Arafat's 'poison' propaganda must be exposed for what it is – a calculated repackaging of a centuries-old slander, a modern anti-Zionist adaptation of a mediaeval anti-Semitic myth which seeks to delegitimize the Jewish state by demonizing the Jewish people.

In short, a naked example of the 'new anti-Semitism.'

Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.

Sean Gannon graduated in history from University College Dublin. He works as a freelance writer and researcher on Irish and Middle Eastern Affairs and is currently preparing books on Ireland's relationship with Israel since 1948 and Europe and UNSC Resolution 242.

 

WHAT’S NEW IN ANTI-SEMITISM?

What's new In anti-Semitism?
By Azmi Bishara
Dar Al-Hayat
November 20, 2003

Anti-Semitism was not born with Israel and its propaganda; it is much older. This origin of the concept of anti-Semitismus dates back to the 1870s in Germany, when it was first used to describe the ideological hostility toward Jews in Europe. Some historians even attribute it specifically to a writer who founded a league to limit the impact of Jews in 1871, as he considered that they infiltrated society to corrupt and undermine it by sowing the seeds of its deterioration. Basically, the concept of "anti-Semitism" occurred in a specific context hostile to Jews.

It is meaningless to ignore the idiom's context and say that racism against Arabs is a form of anti-Semitism because they are Semitic people. For racism against Arabs does not need to be a form of anti-Semitism for it to be refused. Anti-Semitism is not the only recognized kind of racism. Anti-Semitism was attributed to the European hostility for religious, racial, national and social reasons.

Anti-Semitism is a historical social phenomenon that cannot be denied. It was the most dangerous and horrible form of racism in Europe. The civilization Bush and his supporters like to claim they belong to, i.e. the Judeo-Christian tradition, considered to be the mother of liberal democracy, is also the origin of anti-Semitism and the holocaust place.

Certain Zionist historians try to attribute anti-Semitism to the Middle Ages in Greece and Rome; they consider that any reticence to a foreign culture or religion, including Judaism, is a form of anti-Semitism. Hostility toward Jews was not due to the fact that they are Jews but because they are strangers representing a strange culture. The Judaism religious culture itself includes alibis mentioned in the Torah to exterminate "infidel" peoples.

Anti-Semitism is a specific kind of hostility toward the other that is different proper to the relation between the Christian Europe and its Jewish citizens. Some historians claim that it goes back to the beginning of the Crusades, and the discrimination against them prevailed during the Middle Ages in the form of ostracism and exclusion.

A historian might insist that the religious hostility toward Jews was the introduction to anti-Semitism that became racial, national or social, all the more that the social anti-Semitism exploited the social demagogy that impoverish the middle classes in the interests of the value of the bourgeoisie.

Although anti-Semitism is a modern phenomenon different from eth religious hostility, yet, one cannot separate the non-religious aspects of the anti-Semitism from the religious theological tradition in the Middle Ages. In this culture, Jews are those who refuse the fact that the New Testament completes the Old one. Jewish religious trends considered Christianity a false messianic, a direct denial and an absolute opposition to Judaism for it came to end the historical Jewish mission.

It is necessary to note that France, which is currently accused of anti-Semitism, was the first country to grant Jews legal equality in 1791. However, the Jewish enlightenment itself created the modern anti-Semitism because it called for the deterioration of the prevailing values, traditions and social hierarchy. No doubt that the modern anti-Semitism brought the most horrible forms of racism, with the Jews' mass extermination and the Nazi holocaust.

Neither the Islamic culture nor the other Eastern cultures bore hatred toward the Jews as much as anti-Semitism did. Although Eastern cultures are not innocent of the many massacres their history witnessed, they did not create the anti-Semitism. Israel's attempt to encompass the Islamic culture as part of anti-Semitism is a political effort aimed at playing the role of the victim in the actual conflict with the Arabs.

But we should also mention that the modern Arab policies were affected with the European political thought and hence, with some anti-Semitism ideas albeit they did not adopt them. When Zionism used the holocaust to justify the Naqba, some people thought that the retaliation should be to ignore or minimize it. In the 1967 defeat, there was a need to justify it so they aid that the opponent was a real international devil.

Mixing the Jews with the Zionists is what Israel wants in order to justify why it is not differentiating between criticizing Zionism and anti-Semitism. Criticizing oneself is not contradictory to these truths: 1- anti-Semitism is a European phenomenon that led to the Nazi holocaust. 2- The widest spread form of racism in the Western countries is the hostility to Arabs and Muslims and not anti-Semitism. 3- Not all who are anti-Semitic are anti-Israel for some of them deal with it and consider it as a model of a militarily cultured nation. 4- The Western political and ideological traditions that opposed anti-Semitism and called for equality are today criticizing Israel and its occupation. The Israeli propaganda is hostile to many trends that refuse the anti-Semitism.

Hence, Israel chooses the people it wants to punish for anti-Semitism according to its interests, and it accuses others of anti-Semitism while it has no proof at all they are.

Many organizations in the world were established to account those who are anti-Semitic. Ever since the majority of the organized Jewish Diasporas in the world were united in solidarity with Israel, there is a trend to transform every criticism against Israel into a form of anti-Semitism.

This is one of the reasons why the Palestinian issue is complicated. Israel complains about the international concern with the Palestinian issue. The truth is that the international concern with the Palestinian issue should be seized by Palestinians through a liberation and democratic speech even though anti-Semitism. In fact, any solidarity step toward the Palestinians should be accompanied with compensation to Israel or else, it would be accused of anti-Semitism.

The Palestinian issue was born from the international concern ever since the Balfour promise. Without it, there wouldn't be a Palestinian cause or it would have been settled a long time ago just like any other colonial cause. However, the Palestinian cause was born specifically when other people took their independence and was even more aggravated when other issues wee settled. Hence, the Palestinian people are not to be envied for the international concern.

It is no longer possible to separate these two issues and set away the international concern. We only hope we can. The pivotal question is how to deal with it in a way that refuses anti-Semitism as a source to prove the justice of the Palestinian cause and refuses as well Israel's attempt to use anti-Semitism to silence any voice raised against Israel and its practices and refuses to liberate it from racism.