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MOST OF THE 19 KILLED & 50 INJURED WERE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

19 killed, 50 injured in suicide bombing on Jerusalem bus
Ha'aretz
By Jonathan Lis, Anshel Pfeffer and Haim Shadmi, Ha'aretz Correspondents and Ha'aretz Service and Agencies
June 18, 2002

At least 19 people were killed and 50 injured Tuesday morning when a suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus full of passengers, most of them high school students, in southern Jerusalem. Five of the wounded were in serious condition.

The explosion took place around 8 A.M. near the Pat Junction on Egged bus line 32A from the neighborhood of Gilo. The blast ripped through the bus, leaving it a charred, mangled hulk at the side of the road.

The wounded were taken to three Jerusalem hospitals for treatment: Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem; Hadassah University Hospital, Mt. Scopus; and Sha'are Zedek Medical Center.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack in an official statement broadcast on the militant movement's television station. It said that the bomber was Muhammad Haza el-Rol, a 22-year-old student at al-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus, and that he came from the Jenin area.

He had apparently disappeared about three days ago. His father told Reuters from his home in the al-Fara refugee camp, near Nablus, that he was "very happy" to hear that his son was the bomber.

Shalom Sabag was driving in front of the red-and-white Egged commuter bus that had been plying its route through southern Jerusalem to the city's central bus station during the morning rush hour.

"I stopped the car and ran to the bus. I was the first person to get on the bus and take people off," Sabag told Reuters.

"The bodies were piled up near the door of the bus on the right side. He didn't wait to blow up - he blew up straight away. I took off the bodies of a two girls and a man.

Ruth Elmaliach, a teacher at a high school near the scene of the explosion, said she was in her car, waiting for the light to change at the junction, when the explosion went off.

"I'm sure our students were on the bus. I saw how the bus blew up...The bus is always packed at this hour...now we're checking to see if all the students have arrived but I'm afraid some of them have not," Elmaliach told Israel Radio.

Shlomi Calderon, a witness to the bombing, told Army Radio, "the bus left the stop and as soon as it entered traffic there was a very large explosion and all the parts [of the bus] flew everywhere. There was complete shock in the area. It was horrible, horrible. All of the bus' parts flew everywhere in a radius of 150 meters."

BOMBING COMES AS BUSH PREPARES TO MAKE MIDEAST SPEECH

The bombing comes on the eve of President George W. Bush's much-anticipated address on the Mideast, in which he is widely expected to lay out a framework on how to create an independent Palestinian state with a constitution and a unified security force.

Bush's vision, which could include a recommendation for a provisional Palestinian state with temporary borders and limited sovereignty, may be announced as early as Tuesday or Wednesday.

Jerusalem police were still on high alert Tuesday for terror attacks in Jerusalem. Security forces were on high alert throughout the capital the previous night, after receiving a specific warning that a suicide bomber was planning to carry out an attack in the capital.

Police had set up roadblocks in various parts of the city, and a police helicopter had been used in an attempt to locate the bomber.

"There are more warnings," Jerusalem district Police Chief Mickey Levy told reporters at the scene of the bombing. "We are deployed and are still searching for the suspects."

Levy said that before Tuesday's blast, police had received what he called a "hot warning" that a bombing was about to take place in Jerusalem.

"Sometimes we succeed in locating the bomber and sometimes unfortunately we don't succeed in neutralising the bomber...The warning yesterday (Monday) was general. It was not specific," Levy said.

CHEN KEINAN: “CNN INTERVIEW ABOUT MY MURDERED DAUGHTER TURNED INTO A SHOW ABOUT THE TERRORIST’S MOTHER”

Chen Keina: CNN interview about my murdered daughter turned into a show about the terrorist's mother"
By Amalia Argaman-Barnea
Yediot Ahronot
June 3, 2002

The parents of the infant Sinai Keinan, who was murdered last week in the terror attack in Petah Tikva, were interviewed last week on CNN, and tearfully told the story of their loss.

When they later viewed the program, they said they were alarmed to see that instead of their story, only the mother of the terrorist who carried out the terror attack appeared on the program.

Last Friday Chen Keinan and her husband Lior were asked to be interviewed on the CNN program called "International Hour". This is a program that is broadcast in many countries all over the world. They were asked to talk about their feelings following the murder of their 14 month old infant daughter, Sinai, and Chen's mother, Ruti Peled, 56, who was also killed in the terror attack.

Chen, who speaks English well, and her husband Lior, already prepared at the hospital, very carefully, the message they wished to convey to the world, and "especially to the Europeans who give legitimacy to terror." Before the taped interview began, Chen was asked to speak, in a live broadcast, to an American broadcast of the network, and among other things, she said: "We love you. Help us as much as you can".

Afterwards the two went for a special interview. The journalist who interviewed them, asked Chen, among other things: "How do you feel"? And she responded with a question: "Do you have a mother? Do you have children"?

"Close your eyes for a minute and imagine that they were murdered in front of your eyes. Only then will you know in what hell I live". Her husband, Lior, showed the journalist the broken parts of Sinai's baby carriage, and all the members of the broadcast team shed tears.

"That same evening", related Chen painfully, "We sat down to watch the special interview with us, and instead, to our amazement, we got only the interview with the mother of the terrorist who carried out the terror attack in which my daughter and mother were murdered".

The terrorist's mother related during the interview, among other things, that before he left on his mission, she gave him her blessings.

"Only the day after were portions of my interview broadcast, in another program, with my statements having been edited", related Chen last night on the Israeli TV show, Documedia. She said that the special interview with her was not even broadcast. She expressed anger about the "unfair and unprofessional" treatment by CNN. Chen said that she expects that in wake of this, the Israeli Foreign Ministry would remove foreign journalists from Israel, as they serve the Palestinian public relations goals.

CNN had made no comment to make.

Tom Gross adds in December 2002: In the end, Seinfeld never made the visit.

16 DEAD ON A COMMUTER BUS

[Note by Tom Gross]

Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for today's bombing of a crowded rush-hour commuter bus in northern Israel, that killed at least 16 people and wounded scores. The killer came from Jenin, according to an announcement made by Islamic Jihad on Al Manar Television, operated by the Lebanese terror group Hizbullah.

Yet the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, the Arab world's leading television network, is claiming Jews are behind today's massacre. (See news update from Ha'aretz below.)

A rescue worker told Israel radio it was difficult to count the casualties because bodies were blown to pieces and burned. Virtually all of those on board were killed or wounded, according to rescue personnel at the scene. The gas tank of the bus exploded, engulfing the vehicle in flames while many passengers were trapped inside.

CYANIDE IN NETANYA

The headline in today's Ma'ariv newspaper in Israel is "Military Intelligence chief: Terrorists planned to scatter cyanide in Netanya."

Israeli military sources said the Palestinians are trying to use cyanide or nerve gas in suicide bombings. They said the first attempt to use cyanide gas against an Israeli target was in the March 27 suicide bombing in a hotel in Netanya in which 30 Israelis were killed. But the Palestinians were unable to install the cyanide in the belt used by the suicide attacker, the sources said. They said the work with cyanide has been taking place in at least one two laboratories in the West Bank, including An Najah University in Nablus.

The sources said Israeli military intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi, warned a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that Palestinians were seeking to add cyanide to the explosive belts used in suicide attacks. The general said Palestinian insurgents are being aided by Hizbullah, Iran and Syria in their efforts. "We are talking about an intention," Brig. Gen. Ron Kitri, the army spokesman, said.

Here is an article on the same subject by Ehud Yaari, one of Israel's television's leading analysts (and also a subscriber to this email list), followed by various other items.

-- Tom Gross

‘A DOUBLE THREAD’: LONDON, WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE?

‘A Double Thread’: London, what’s not to like?
By Jonathan Wilson
The New York Times
June 2, 2002

The contemporary American memoir, with its unswerving loyalty to addiction, illness and family misery, has become, with a few solid exceptions, a lachrymose and dubious item. The British memoir still tends to exhibit a large measure of restraint, a quality that, if it was once irritating to American readers, can now seem only refreshing. John Gross’s delightful reminiscences encompass his London life until the age of 18, a span that might not seem long enough to provide adequate material for a memoir. But Gross’s song of himself is also a paean to his family, most particularly his mild-mannered father, and to the city – “an extraordinary city, London. A wonderful city” – in which he grew up before, during and after World War II. The result is writing that captivates because it frequently eschews personal inwardness in favor of depicting a broader social world. Ultimately Gross, a subtle and finely tuned observer, a walker in the city, cares more for other people and places than for himself.

The explanatory subtitle to “A Double Thread” (the title perhaps a nod to the tailors and seamstresses of Gross’s predominantly working-class neighborhood, the East End), “Growing Up English and Jewish in London,” is itself striking, if only because a similar declaration would be unthinkable for a New York Jewish writer. As in, So what? But London, although its Jewish East End closely paralleled New York’s Lower East Side throughout the first half of the 20th century, is a city with a tiny Jewish minority (less than 2 percent), and the experience of its Jews is skewed by that fact. Given the relative vulnerability of English Jews, by the numbers anyway, perhaps the most remarkable element in Gross’s book is his take on anti-Semitism, or rather, its absence. In almost every chapter he reminds his readers that throughout his life he has been treated rather well in England, his declared and open Jewishness viewed as neither an impediment nor a provocation. During his childhood and adolescence Gross “never suffered on account of being Jewish.” While he is aware that the unblemished experience of his youth may have been the exception rather than the rule, his own good fortune is a powerful enough persuader to lead him to wonder “whether recent historians have sometimes made out the situation to be worse than it was... The history of non-anti-Semitism remains an unwritten subject.”

Gross can speculate about dicey history partly because his sense of what constitutes anti-Semitism is quite different from that established by current standards. For example, at one point he reports an ugly incident that took place while he was on a stroll with his father in Kensington Gardens: a couple, having “spotted” Gross and his father as Jews, sit beside them on a bench and begin to spew invective: “I think they should all be towed out to sea in a ship and drowned.” But from Gross’s optimistic perspective moments like this are invisible dust on an otherwise clean screen.

As anti-Semitism is happily not the focus, other elements of Gross’s Jewish life have plenty of room to come to the fore, and he does a lovely job of sketching the intriguing personalities in his family and among his friends, in addition to the famous and infamous characters of his neighborhood: politicians, actors, boxers, gangsters. But above all it is his father, a turn-of-the-century immigrant from a small town on the Polish-Ukrainian border, whose life and work color and shade the book. Abraham Gross, a prominent East End doctor, emerges as an appealingly Chekhovian figure, humane, warm, modest, a community man, actively involved in dispensing “guidance and advice as well as medicine” to his predominantly working-class patients.

What separates John Gross’s early life from that of the majority of his contemporaries is the fact that, for redoubtable professional reasons, his family home remained in Mile End, at the heart of London’s East End, long after most of the neighborhood’s Jewish population, including its doctors, had decamped to the leafy suburbs in the north and northwest of the city. Gross thus experiences the paradox of a privileged life on underprivileged streets. Sent away to one elite school after another, sometimes as a boarder, sometimes not, he always returned to a place shunned or feared by most of his classmates. The result is the kind of collision between intellectual fervor and street smarts that we tend to associate with an older, upwardly mobile generation.

Gross, who grew up to become an eminent British man of letters, editor of The Times Literary Supplement and numerous Oxford anthologies and, in the 1980’s, an editor and critic for The New York Times, most certainly did not pass his youth running with the tough kids; he was bookish, careful and unathletic from the start. Nevertheless, scurrilous and charismatic East End figures – the fight promoter Jack Solomons, the “fixer” Sidney Stanley – hover over his life, offering a vital alternative to the lessons contained in the local library or the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Gross relishes, and has an eye for, detail that tells a story of lost Jewish London (“a disused wooden gate just beginning to rot, with the legend ‘Evans and Son-Cowkeepers’ painted on it in both English and Yiddish characters”), but this is also a memoir, entirely unsentimental, of a boy plotting escape from a Jewish world that he frequently found “narrow, provincial and materialistic.” Gross’s way out is through a tried and true method, voluminous reading, and while it is hard to transform a litany of books into inspired text, Gross somehow manages to do so. It’s his enthusiasm that’s catchy.

Kafka once abjured, simply, “Never again psychology!” Gross is of this school, and the one weakness of “A Double Thread” is that too often he decides tastefully to “draw a veil” over this or that incident when full disclosure seems warranted. But the book holds many pleasures, not least a delight in recording the world of comic books and “impossibly polite” radio shows for children “in the days before television.” My brother, a Londoner born in the same year as Gross, once owned a button, purchased in New York City, that read “Dress British Think Yiddish.” I would hazard that this has secretly been the way of British Jews down the generations, and it’s certainly edifying to see Jewish thinking unveiled here so intelligently. John Gross’s memoir is of a lucky, happy childhood and adolescence. What is one to do with such a rare beast except praise it?

(Jonathan Wilson’s new novel, “A Palestine Affair,” will be published next year. He is chairman of the English department at Tufts University.)

ISRAEL AND THE ANTI-SEMITES

Israel and the Anti-Semites
By Gabriel Schoenfeld
Commentary
June 2002

Has a new and potent form of anti-Semitism come to life in the world? If so, what does it portend?

Let us for the moment bracket off the Muslim world. The evidence of anti-Jewish hatred in that immense pocket of humanity has been copiously documented and is simply too overwhelming to warrant extended discussion. The more interesting question concerns Europe – a continent, it was widely assumed, effectively inoculated against a toxin that a mere half-century ago had reduced it to ruin and that, in the decades since World War II, had been confined to obscure recesses of political life.

Events over the past months suggest otherwise. It was only this past February that Hillel Halkin, writing in Commentary about an "accumulating record of actual anti-Semitic incidents" around the world, cautioned that evidence of a substantial resurgence in Europe was so far only "circumstantial." Since then, the continental landscape has begun to shift with astonishing speed.

The immediate occasion for the shift was, of course, Israel's incursion into the West Bank in late March and April. That military operation was precipitated by the daily terror within Israel itself that had been going on for many months and that culminated in the bombing of a hotel ballroom in Netanya in which 29 Israelis perished and more than 140 were injured while sitting at their seder tables on the first night of Passover. To put an end to this relentless campaign of terror, Israel's national-unity government dispatched the army into Palestinian cities and camps to uncover and destroy bomb factories and to apprehend those responsible for the mass killings of Israeli civilians. "In the month of March, we lost the lives of more than 126 persons," explained Israel's dovish foreign minister, Shimon Peres; "we did not have any other alternative."

Though the incursion did not achieve all of the government's stated objectives, one visible result was the near-total cessation of terrorist attacks inside Israel. Another was the seizure of a trove of intelligence information, including documents confirming (to anyone who still doubted it) that Yasir Arafat, Israel's ostensible partner in the Oslo peace process and a man richly subsidized by the European Union, was in possession of arms forbidden to him by the Oslo accords and was personally funding and directing the civilian bombing missions of at least one armed unit, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

That sectors of Europe would be critical of any Israeli military action against Arafat's Palestinian Authority, even one so self-evidently defensive in character, was hardly a surprise; the cause of Palestinian statehood is, after all, a cherished item on the European diplomatic and political agenda. But the scale and the venom of the reaction, on both the elite and the popular level, were something else again. At least we can now see things as they are.

Let us begin at the popular level, where there has been, first of all, a rash of physical attacks on Jewish symbols, Jewish institutions, and Jews themselves. The list of such violent incidents from the first two weeks of April alone is too long to summarize adequately.

In the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, for example, some 50 youths chanting "Kill the Jews" descended on a synagogue on a Saturday evening, broke twenty windows, and beat the rector of the religious school with stones. In Greece, Jewish cemeteries were vandalized in what the press termed "anti-Jewish acts of revenge," and the Holocaust memorial in Salonika, a city whose 50,000 Jews were rounded up and deported to Nazi death camps in 1943, was defaced with Palestinian slogans. In Slovakia, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated in what an official described as the "biggest attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust."

In peaceful, democratic, law-abiding Western Europe – a part of the world that for the past half-century has prided itself on the degree of personal safety it affords its inhabitants – the story was similar. One scene of violent anti-Israel demonstrations was Holland, where protestors hurled rocks and bottles and small roving bands used stones and bicycles to shatter store windows in the heart of Amsterdam. In neighboring Belgium, five firebombs were tossed into a synagogue in a working-class district of Brussels, and a Jewish bookstore was severely damaged by arsonists; a synagogue in Antwerp was firebombed with Molotov cocktails, and in the same city a travel agency specializing in trips to Israel was also set alight.

In Germany, two Orthodox Jews were beaten while strolling on Berlin's chic Kurfuerstendamm, the heart of the city's shopping district. A woman wearing a star-of-David necklace was attacked in the subway. Jewish memorials in Berlin were defaced with swastikas; a synagogue was spray-painted with the words, "Six Million Is Not Enough. PLO." Anti-Israel demonstrators hurled bricks through windows as they marched.

In England, reported the London Express, "race-hate attacks on the Jewish community have soared." In the first ten days of April there were fifteen anti-Semitic incidents, including eight physical assaults. Most of the attacks in England were on Jews walking alone, set upon and beaten by small roving bands. At least two of the victims required hospitalization.

France was the epicenter of aggression. Gangs of hooded men descended on Jewish victims and struck them with iron clubs. Buses carrying Jewish schoolchildren were stoned. Cemeteries were desecrated. Synagogues, Jewish schools, student facilities, and kosher stores were defaced, battered, and firebombed. On April 1, the Or Aviv synagogue in Marseille was burned to the ground, its prayerbooks and Torah scrolls consumed by flames; it was one of five synagogues in France attacked. The first half of the month saw "nearly 360 crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions," according to the French interior ministry – amounting, in the words of the New York Times, to "the worst spate of anti-Jewish violence" in France since World War II.

Some observers have drawn comparisons between this violent crime wave and Kristallnacht – the pogrom unleashed by the Nazis against German Jews on November 9 and 10, 1938. Unlike in the 1930's, however, there was no organized power behind the assaults, let alone a government, and in every European country the police, so far as one knows, did their duty (though the political authorities often stood aside until matters threatened to get out of control). Still, physical violence against Jews has undeniably become a pan-European phenomenon, visible in every country north and south, east and west. Everywhere one turns, moreover, this physical violence has been accompanied, and abetted, by an explosion of verbal violence.

The themes are also the same everywhere. Israel, a country victimized by terrorism, stands accused of perpetrating terrorism; the Jews, having suffered the most determined and thoroughgoing genocide in history, stand accused of perpetrating genocide. The language in which these accusations are leveled is extravagantly hateful, drawn from the vocabulary of World War II and the Holocaust but entirely and grotesquely inverted, with the Jews as Nazis and their Arab tormentors in the role of helpless Jews.

Still sticking to the popular level, events in early April were once again particularly instructive. In the course of two weeks, anti-Israel street demonstrations took place not only in every major European capital but in hundreds of minor cities and towns. In Tuzla, a town in Bosnia, some 1,500 demonstrators carried placards reading "Sharon and Hitler, Two Eyes in the Same Head" and "Israel – the Real Face of Terrorism." In Dublin, Ireland, the banners, several featuring Nazi swastikas superimposed over stars of David, read "Stop the Palestinian Holocaust" and "Jerusalem: Forever Beloved, Forever Palestinian." In Barcelona, Spain, demonstrators carried placards inscribed "Israel Murderer; USA Accomplice," and "No to Genocide." In Paris, the posters read "Hitler Has a Son: Sharon"; in Belgium, "Hitler Had Two Sons: Bush and Sharon." In Salonika, a solidarity concert was staged under the slogan: "Stop the Genocide Now – We Are All Palestinians." In Bilbao, Spain, thousands marched through the streets chanting "No to Zionist terrorism." In Berlin, the placards read "Stop the Genocide in Palestine" and "Sharon is a Child Murderer." In cities and towns across France, "Death to Jews" and "Jews – murderers" were refrains heard at a multitude of rallies.

The catalog is infinitely expandable, for not only is it incomplete in itself but the passage of each day has brought new acts of violence, new demonstrations, and new and more vicious slogans. Who is behind all this street-level activity?

Actual physical violence against Jews has been, for the most part, the work of Muslims. According to the French ministry of the interior, the perpetrators have generally been "Arab youths from North African countries." Arriving from societies where hatred of Jews is fostered by government, government-controlled media, and radical clerics, these immigrants are fed a rich and stimulating diet from the Arab and European Arab-language press, whose brand of anti-Semitism is as hallucinatory as anything ever peddled by Julius Streicher in the Nazi organ Der Sturmer.

Some of this fare stems ultimately from Saudi Arabia, a great and unceasing fount of wild anti-Jewish vitriol. Al-Riyadh, a government-controlled newspaper in that country, has, for example, parlayed a twist on an ancient libel to excite and terrify its readers – the Jewish use of the blood of Gentile adolescents not for Passover matzah but for Purim pastry:

"Let us now examine how the victims' blood is spilled. For this, a needle-studded barrel is used; this is a kind of barrel, about the size of the human body, with extremely sharp needles set in it on all sides. [These needles] pierce the victim's body, from the moment he is placed in the barrel.

These needles do the job, and the victim's blood drips from him very slowly. Thus, the victim suffers dreadful torment – torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure and love that are difficult to comprehend." [1]

And so forth. The lesson that readers are supposed to draw from this ghastly fantasy is likewise inflammatory: a Saudi cleric enjoined his Muslim brothers in a recent government-sponsored sermon "not to have any mercy or compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women? Why don't you wage jihad? Why don't you pillage them?"

The fact that Islamic immigrants are behind most of the physical attacks on European Jews hardly suggests that the problem is easily containable. Thanks to Europe's welcoming immigration policies, and to their own high fertility, Muslims are now a significant demographic factor on the continent. If in 1945 they numbered fewer than a million, today they are more than fifteen million, with some two million in England, more than four-and-a-half million in France, three million in Germany, nearly a million apiece in Italy, Spain, and Holland, and the remainder scattered across more than a dozen other countries. They are, of course, a heterogeneous population, and most of them are no doubt neither in the grip of radical Islam nor susceptible to appeals to violence. But some significant number of them are, and the challenge they pose can only grow.

In any case, if Muslims have taken the lead in perpetrating physical violence, others have enthusiastically joined in or blazed the way when it comes to incitement and verbal abuse. The various demonstrations illustrate this well. Thus, at the event in Dublin, organized by a group known as the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, half the demonstrators were reportedly Irishmen. Similarly, in Brussels, not only Arab students but representatives of Belgian social and political organizations took part, including the Catholic movement Pax Christi, the Belgian Socialist party, and the Belgian Green party. The solidarity concert in Salonika was organized by, among others, two Greek trade-union bodies; the dean of Athens University also lent his support, issuing a statement condemning Israel for its "continuing cruel violation in Palestine of human rights." In Barcelona, where some 10,000 people turned out, unions, political parties, and nongovernmental organizations campaigned against Israeli "genocide" and set fire to a star of David. In France, at the rallies where chants of "death to the Jews" were heard, one could find, according to Agence France Presse, not only the Muslim Students of France and the Committee of Moroccan Workers but also officials of various trade unions and members of the Revolutionary Communist League, the Greens, and the French Communist party, along with officials of the Human Rights League. In the front ranks was Jose Bove, the French Luddite formerly known for vandalizing McDonald's hamburger outlets.

But these events at street level are only the beginning; it is in the world of politics and elite opinion that the nature of the burgeoning movement of European anti-Semitism becomes fully clear. And anti-Semitism is, incidentally, the right and the only word for an anti-Zionism so one-sided, so eager to indict Israel while exculpating Israel's adversaries, so shamefully adroit in the use of moral double standards, so quick to issue false and baseless accusations, and so disposed to invert the language of the Holocaust and to paint Israelis and Jews as evil incarnate.

A mild (in relative terms) expression of this current could be found in a petition being circulated among European academics. Passing over in silence the suicide bombings that were devastating Israeli civilian life, not to mention the eighteen months of unremitting violence that were Arafat's answer to Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer of 97 percent of the territory of the West Bank and the division of Jerusalem, the statement denounced Israel's government as "impervious to moral appeals" and then called for a moratorium on grants by European educational institutions to Israeli scholars and researchers. (The reason, one assumes, was their tacit complicity in genocide.) Among the hundreds of signers of this meretricious document were scholars from institutions of higher learning in virtually every country of the continent, including the famed British Darwinist, Richard Dawkins.

Similarly in Norway, where in 1994 the Nobel committee had awarded its peace prize to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasir Arafat. At that time, one honest member of the committee, Kaare Kristiansen, had resigned in protest, rightly calling Arafat a terrorist unworthy of this award. Now, however, other members, one of them a Lutheran bishop, said they wanted to strip not Arafat but Shimon Peres of the prize; his crime – participating in a government that was violating the "intention and spirit" of the award. Not to be outdone, the leader of the Socialist Left party demanded reparations from Israel for destroying Palestinian infrastructure paid for by Norwegian aid money – never mind that this sort of subsidized "infrastructure" regularly shelters armed Palestinian terrorists and their activities.

In Denmark, a Lutheran bishop delivered a sermon in Copenhagen Cathedral likening Ariel Sharon to the biblical King Herod, who ordered the death of all male children in Bethlehem under the age of two; Denmark's foreign minister, Per Stig Moller, branded Israel's anti-terror incursion a "war against a civilian population." The Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, a Nobel laureate in literature, delivered himself of this delicacy: "We can compare what is happening on the Palestinian territories with Auschwitz."

In Germany, Norbert Bluem, a minister under former chancellor Helmut Kohl, called Israel's offensive in the West Bank a "limitless war of annihilation," while Juergen Moellemann, an official of the Free Democrats, openly defended Palestinian violence against Jews: "I would resist too, and use force to do so... not just in my country but in the aggressor's country as well." Wrote one commentator in the Suddeutsche Zeitung: "It's been a long time since the hatred of Jews – once disguised as anti-Zionism – has been as socially acceptable in Germany as it is today."

In Italy, La Stampa, the liberal daily, resurrected the oldest Christian anti-Semitic canard of all: deicide. A cartoon depicted the infant Jesus looking up from his manger at an Israeli tank and pleading, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again." From voices in the Vatican, utter indifference to the murder of Jews was coupled with the charge that the Jews themselves were committing genocide. "Indescribable barbarity" was the phrase of Franciscan officials in Rome describing Israel's attempt to arrest Palestinian terrorists who had taken shelter in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. In the hallowed "land of Jesus," complained the Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano, Israel was exhibiting an "irritating haughtiness" and engaging in "aggression that turns into extermination."

If France has led Europe in anti-Semitic violence, Great Britain may be where the elite expression of anti-Semitic ideas has been most uninhibited. (In his February Commentary article, Hillel Halkin memorably quoted the columnist Petronella Wyatt: "Since September 11, anti-Semitism and its open expression has become respectable at London dinner tables.") Thus, Claire Rayner, the president of the British Humanist Association, asserted in April that the notion of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people was "a load of crap"; by contrast, the suicide bombings of Israeli restaurants and buses were both understandable and justifiable: "If you treat a group of people the way Palestinians have been treated they will use the only weapon they have, which is their individual lives."

More established figures voiced sentiments fully as bizarre as Claire Rayner's and, if anything, nastier. Last autumn, the highly-regarded British novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson had "reluctantly" announced in the (London) Evening Standard that the state of Israel no longer had a right to exist. More recently, he used his talents to accuse the Israeli army of the "poisoning of water supplies" on the West Bank, thereby availing himself of another time-honored canard, traceable back to the 14th century and repeated on countless occasions since then to justify the mass murder of Jews.

Wilson is a self-described "unbelieving Anglican" who is certainly well aware of the shameful history of Christian religious anti-Semitism to which he was now making his own signal contribution. Tom Paulin is a professor at Oxford, an arts commentator for the British Broadcasting Corporation, and a poet whose recent verse includes a lament for a small Palestinian boy "gunned down by the Zionist SS." "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all," Paulin told the Egyptian al-Ahram Weekly in April, and Jews from Brooklyn who have settled in the West Bank "are Nazis, racists... They should be shot dead."

To al-Ahram, Paulin is that "rare thing in contemporary British culture, 'the writer as conscience.'" Some Europeans apparently agree with this judgment. The Irish Times found him "a rigorous respecter of language" who "does not dilute his words" while remaining free of any trace of personal prejudice. Chiming in, A.N. Wilson called him a "brilliant scholar and literary critic" and noted that "many in this country and throughout the world would echo his views on the tragic events in the Middle East."

On this last point, at least, Wilson may be right. One could devote many more pages to, for example, the malevolent mythmaking of the British and European press in reporting on the "massacre" of Palestinians in Jenin, where the Israelis aimed for "the near-total destruction of the lives and livelihoods of the camp's 15,000 inhabitants," according to the Evening Standard. A "crime of especial notoriety," blared the Guardian about an operation that cost the lives of over two dozen Israeli reservists in an effort, successful but hideously costly, to eliminate terrorists while avoiding civilian Palestinian casualties. Or one could dwell on the reflexive hatred of the Jewish state that now appears to be rife within the Anglican Church: "Whenever I print anything sympathetic to Israel," admits the editor of the church's official newspaper, "I get deluged with complaints that I am Zionist and racist." Or one could quote again from the many examples adduced by Halkin and freely available in the public prints and on the web. But we must once again move on.

The Palestinians who insisted that there was an Israeli massacre in Jenin surely had their reasons for fabricating such a claim. Those reasons are no doubt related to hatred of Jews per se – for such hatred exists, abundantly. But they are also closely related to the tactics of the Palestinian struggle, which has successfully relied on the readiness of many in Europe (and elsewhere) to accept such fabrications at face value, to spread and amplify them while ignoring all contrary evidence, and to pillory Israel on the basis of lies that they themselves have tended and fed.

Where this eager readiness comes from is another question. A considerable literature has been devoted to plumbing the nature of Europe's enduring "Jewish problem," and the current flare-up has already given rise to a fresh round of theorizing about its root causes, old and new. Among the factors regularly adduced, at least by those willing to acknowledge that it is a problem, are the seemingly indelible brand that has been left on European consciousness by centuries of ubiquitous anti-Semitic myths; hatreds rooted in Christian theological concepts; a deep-seated psychological need to lighten the burden of European guilt for the Holocaust by defaming its victims posthumously; a no less pressing need to atone for European colonialism and imperialism by casting Israel as the world's worst colonial power; and on and on. One can spin more theories with ease and find evidence to support each of them, for anti-Semitism is a disease with no single cause.

But one salient fact about the picture I have been painting is this: there is a clear fit between anti-Israel or anti-Jewish hatred and the general ideological predispositions of the contemporary European Left. As historical trends go, this is relatively new. For most of the last century, what predominated in Europe was the racialist and nationalist anti-Semitism of the Right, fused with and colored by Christian theological teachings. Today, though the neo-Nazis and the Holocaust deniers occupy their accustomed place, and though anti-Semites figure among the constituents of Jorg Haider in Austria and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, the anti-Semitism in swiftest motion is the left-wing strain, the strain that loathes the Jews not on explicitly racialist or religious grounds but on "universalist" ones.

This tradition, too, has a long and ignoble history, from the Enlightenment's Voltaire (who regarded the Jews as "the most abominable people in the world") through socialism's Karl Marx (to whom Polish Jews were the "filthiest of all races"), through seven decades of Soviet Communism with its pro-Arab foreign policy and its harshly oppressive attitude toward Soviet Jewish citizens, through the New Left, through the German and Italian terrorism of recent decades and the post-60's alignment of the Left with the cause of Palestinian "liberation." Today, a new chapter is being written. There are, to be sure, neo-Nazis to be found among those burning the star of David and chanting obscene slogans against the Jewish state in the streets of Europe; but the ranks are more heavily composed of environmentalists, pacifists, anarchists, anti-globalists, and socialists. "I have difficulties with the swastika," said a member of Belgium's Flemish-Palestine Committee at an April demonstration, registering by his perturbance the anomaly of that Nazi symbol amid the placards of his ideological comrades.

The pattern continues in the upper reaches of European politics. True, anti-Semitic impulses cannot always be readily disentangled from the many other considerations that govern political behavior – like raw electoral calculations in a continent with many Muslims and (except for France) very few Jews. But surely it is significant that among Europe's governing bodies, it is the political Left that has been leading the charge against Israel. It was Germany's Social Democratic-Green coalition government that this past April, in the midst of Israel's battle for survival, and despite its much vaunted "special relationship" with the Jewish state, opted to halt further exports of spare parts for the Merkava tank. It was France's socialist foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, who in April publicly castigated American Jews for being so "intransigent" as to fail to make "the switch toward peace." When the European Parliament passed a resolution on April 10 calling for trade sanctions against Israel, it was propelled forward by Europe's Liberal Democrat and Green parties, with the Socialists denouncing Israel in the most perfervid tones of all.

If one moves even higher up the rungs of political life, into the multilateral institutions that shape the world polity and in which the Europeans have invested so much of their diplomatic capital, the die is cast from the same mold. (The degree to which the United Nations has turned itself into an anti-Semitic mob warrants an extended essay of its own.) Thus, when the UN Human Rights Commission passed a resolution in April condemning Israel for "war crimes," "acts of mass killing," and an "offense against humanity," while simultaneously backing without reservation the "right of the Palestininas to resist," the European countries voting in favor included the socialist or Left-coalition governments of France, Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal, with centrist Spain and right-wing Austria joining in. Outside of Europe, needless to say, every left-wing dictatorship in the world voted in support of the resolution, including that shining protector of human rights, the People's Republic of China.

It would be unfair to leave the subject of Europe without noting the courageous efforts of those in England, France, Italy, and Germany who have stood up to or spoken back to the anti-Semites. Perhaps foremost among them lately has been the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci, who in a lengthy and impassioned indictment published in the weekly Panorama declared, in part:

"I find it shameful... that state-run television stations [in Italy] contribute to the resurgent anti-Semitism, crying only over Palestinian deaths while playing down Israeli deaths, glossing over them in unwilling tones. I find it shameful that in their debates they host with much deference the scoundrels with turbans or kaffiyehs who yesterday sang hymns to the slaughter in New York and today sing hymns to the slaughters in Jerusalem, in Haifa, in Netanya, in Tel Aviv. I find it shameful that the press does the same, that it is indignant because Israeli tanks surround the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, that it is not indignant because inside that same church 200 Palestinian terrorists well armed with machine guns and munitions and explosives (among them are various leaders of Hamas and al-Aqsa) are not unwelcome guests of the monks (who then accept bottles of mineral water and jars of honey from the soldiers of those tanks)."

But these exceptions are notorious because they are exceptions. Elsewhere, and especially on the cultural and political Left, Europeans have tended to speak in a very different voice.

What about here, in the United States? Mercifully, anti-Semitism on these shores lacks Europe's rich traditionalism. Violent attacks on Jews have been exceedingly rare in our history, and although genuine social movements have at times been built – most famously by Father Charles E. Coughlin in the 1930's – on anti-Jewish hostility, the few attempts to harness this hostility to electoral purposes have all come to naught. The question is, under what circumstances might this change?

One relatively new factor in the American equation, as in the European, is a sizable Muslim influx. Reliable numbers remain hard to come by: a U.S. Department of State fact sheet offers a figure of six million, which is almost certainly much too high, while other estimates range from two to four million. But there is no disagreement that the Muslim population has grown dramatically in recent decades, or that this growth has already affected Jewish security. If physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions once came mostly from right-wing or nativist groups, now they come increasingly from Arab militants. One of the most well-known such attacks was the murder of Ari Halberstam, a hasidic schoolboy, shot in 1994 by Arab gunmen while traversing the Brooklyn Bridge.

The years since 1995 – years in which, according to the Anti-Defamation League's annual survey, anti-Semitism as a whole declined in America – also witnessed an upsurge of violent incidents connected to the Middle East and in most cases perpetrated by Arabs. This was especially pronounced after the beginning of the latest intifada in September 2000. Within months, at least 34 incidents – primarily vandalism and arson but including physical attacks on individuals – were reported in New York State alone.

Heightened security after September 11 seems to have brought about a decrease in violence of this kind, but lately the pace has picked up again. In Berkeley, California, for example, "Jewish residents have been attacked on the streets," the Daily Californian reported in late April. The university's Hillel society building was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, and the city's largest synagogue has received a stream of threats, including one in which a telephone caller said that all Jews should be "annihilated" and "holocausted." The mayor has proposed creating a special police unit to deal with the rash of death threats against Jews and bomb scares at synagogues.

But mention of Berkeley, one of the most advanced academic locales in the country, should remind us that no more than in Europe are anti-Semitic attitudes here limited to Arabs or Muslims, or to the uneducated. Rather, they have found a home in what are presumably the most enlightened precincts of society. "Die Jew. Die, die, die, die, die, die. Stop living, die, die, DIE! Do us all a favor and build yourself [an]... oven," were the words in a student newspaper at Rutgers. "How have Judaism, the Jews, and the international forces all permitted Zionism to become a wild, destructive beast capable of perpetrating atrocities?" are the words of a tenured professor of sociology at Georgetown, a leading American university. In many elite universities, radical professors have joined with Arab students to compel their institutions to divest from the "apartheid" state of Israel. One need only scan the dozens of names of distinguished faculty sponsors of such initiatives to grasp that a significant movement is gathering force. [2]

The political address of this movement is once again on the Left. True, the nefarious reach of "world Zionism" has long been a favorite theme of American white supremacists like David Duke, just as it has been of the British Holocaust-denier David Irving. But even in its more genteel incarnations, as in the now-marginalized Patrick J. Buchanan, this brand of anti-Semitism is in relative eclipse, whereas on the Left it has become the glue of a new coalition. The environmentalists and anarchists who in past years satisfied themselves by hurling rocks through the windows of Starbucks coffee shops have now joined forces with Arab radicals to calumniate the Jewish state. "Hey, hey! Ho, ho! IMF has got to go!" was one slogan at an April rally in Washington, D.C. The other was "Sharon and Hitler are the same. Only difference is the name."

Among the most active elements of the Left-Arab alliance are, sad to say, a number of Jews. For years, figures like Noam Chomsky and his acolyte Norman Finkelstein have traded in extreme denunciations of Israel, to relatively little effect.[3] Of late, they are finding greater traction. The principal activity of a new organization called Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel is organizing rallies in support of the PLO. "There are many American Jews who are flat-out embarrassed by the fact the prime minister of Israel is guilty of war crimes," says its executive director, Josh Ruebner. Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine, and dozens of his associates, including Chomsky and such non-Jewish luminaries as the black activist professor Cornel West, recently placed a full-page ad in the New York Times in which, in classical anti-Semitic form, either Ariel Sharon or one of his "supporters" was presented in a cartoon caricature as a hook-nosed, evil-looking Jew, the state of Israel was characterized as a "Pharaoh," and Israeli soldiers were likened to Nazis blindly "following orders" in "a brutal occupation" that "violates international law, human rights, and the basic ethical standards of humanity."

In the decades before World War II, a mass of anti-Semitic rhetoric, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion through Mein Kampf and beyond, helped prepare the intellectual and cultural groundwork for the catastrophe that followed. Today, the ceaseless denunciations of Israel on the part of the international Left, including some of its most respected and respectable spokesmen, cannot help striking one as possessing the seeds of a macabre replay. What George F. Will has called the "centrality of anti-Semitism" to the current Middle East crisis may yet develop the potential of transforming that crisis into (to quote Will again) "the second – and final? – phase of the struggle for a 'final solution' to the Jewish question."

European leaders would heatedly abjure any such objective; yet in their hands, the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish campaign has generated real momentum. The European states are militarily weak, but they have other levers of power to exercise. They have already played a major role in Israel's political and diplomatic isolation, and they could conceivably attempt to strangle it economically by means of the boycotts and sanctions they have threatened to impose. By virtue of their influence in international organizations, and through the moral cachet they continue, however unaccountably, to deploy in centers of elite opinion elsewhere around the world, they have been instrumental in chipping away at Israel's very legitimacy.

One does not wish to exaggerate. Today's virulent anti-Semitism is, in part, an epiphenomenon of the Israel-Arab conflict – or, more accurately, of Israel's effort to withstand the Arab determination to destroy it. To the degree that Israel succeeds in thwarting or turning aside that determination, the rhetoric may abate, and explicit anti-Semitism may diminish. (By contrast, the perception of Jewish weakness has historically always fed the appetite of anti-Jewish aggression.) But there is also no denying that the new anti-Semitism has taken on a life of its own, gathering strength from long-repressed theological hatreds suddenly given license to emerge, from all sorts of misplaced social resentments that have nothing to do with the Jews, and (to judge from the Left-Arab coalition) from broader ideological agendas in which Israel is a mere stand-in, a conveniently vulnerable target for those not yet willing or able to take on the mighty United States.

One small but very disturbing sign of the headway being made by the new anti-Semitism is the speculation that has suddenly sprung up in the most disparate places about the possibility of a world without Israel – as if it were a perfectly ordinary prospect for a thriving democracy of nearly five million Jews simply to disappear. That a leader of Hamas like Ismail Abu Shanab should contemplate the extinction of Israel is understandable; that he should feel comfortable in talking about it publicly – "There are," he has amiably explained, "a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews" – tells us a good deal about what has come to be considered permissible discourse in the presence of reporters. But then, Tom Paulin and A.N. Wilson have followed close behind—and similar sorts of thoughts, suitably qualified, have even appeared under the bylines of avowed friends of the Jewish state here at home. As one of them, Richard John Neuhaus, has lately written, while personally disclaiming any such sentiment, even to "wish that Israel 'would cease to exist' is... not necessarily a wish to destroy the Jews, since one might at the same time hope that the minority of the world's Jews living in Israel would find a secure home elsewhere, notably in the U.S." Such are the tortuous rationalizations to which the swell of worldwide anti-Semitism has led.

Great shocks, as we know from the last century, can produce political flux beyond all foresight. In the last years the world has been subjected to a series of such shocks, September 11 being the greatest, and more may well be on the way. Where their repercussions will end no one can yet say, but the concomitant and hardly accidental revival of the ancient fear and hatred known as anti-Semitism must make one tremble. The story of 20th-century Europe, wrote the historian Norman Cohn in the concluding words of Warrant for Genocide, his 1966 study of European anti-Semitism in the years before World War II, is a story of how "a grossly delusional view of the world, based on infantile fears and hatreds, was able to find expression in murder and torture beyond all imagining. It is a case-history in collective psychopathology, and its deepest implications reach far beyond anti-Semitism and the fate of the Jews."

Those words remain frighteningly relevant today.

1. Translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, available at www.memri.org.
2. Typical is the initiative at Princeton; see www.princetondivest.org/faculty.htm.
3. In a December 2001 lecture delivered in Beirut, Lebanon, Finkelstein likened Israeli actions to "Nazi practices" during World War II, albeit with some added "novelties to the Nazi experiments."

(Gabriel Schoenfeld is the senior editor of Commentary.)

OLD HABITS DIE HARD

Old habits die hard
By Jack Schwartz
May 2002

The Holocaust ended more than 50 years ago but it began more than 100 years ago in succeeding tremors of anti-Semitism that spread throughout Europe leading to the abyss of the death camps. The rancor against the Jews was prompted, as often happened in the past, by their very success. By the third quarter of the 19th century Jewish emancipation in Western Europe was a fact in not only word but deed. Allowed to break out of their ghettos and shed their dress and habits, Jews became leaders in all aspects of Europe's march to modernity: They excelled in medicine, law, the arts, commerce and the political nostrums of the time that offered the illusion of progress. In doing so, they antagonized the forces of tradition – high and low – that felt themselves threatened by the advance of secular humanism and free enterprise. These included the landed aristocracy, the church, small tradesmen and an array of the disaffected who felt themselves ill-used or left behind by the advance of modernity. Rather than blaming their discomfiture on their own intransigence or failure to adapt to social and economic change, it was easier to blame the Jews. Their solution was to create or reinforce associations that would at once exclude the Jews as well as denigrate them, isolate them and put them back in their place. In effect, the Jews were to be re-ghettoized. (This literally happened in a prologue to later events after the defeat of Napoleon.) The means at hand were culture and faith.

Xenophobic nationalism was the religion of a century that ran from 1850 to 1950, ultimately trumping or suborning its only serious rival, socialism. In virtually all cases, as the myths of the various Folk – German, Slavic and Latin – were reinvented, the Jew was expunged from the corporal body of the nation as a vile foreign organism. The French, instigated by such leaders as Edouard Drumont and his Anti-Semitic League at the end of the 19th century, exploded in a paroxysm of Jew hatred during the Dreyfus trial, followed by subsequent spasms of anti-Semitism in the political movement Action Francais – which in the mid-30's won almost half the French vote; in anti-Jewish legislation that created internment camps in France for "stateless" Jews BEFORE the Nazi conquest; in the Vichy Government - popular until the Allies turned the tide of war and, ultimately, in the enthusiastic roundups by the French police of Jews including children – a Gallic touch that went beyond the German mandate – for deportation to Auschwitz.

In Austria, Karl Lueger, the popular early 20th-century mayor of Vienna became the first European politician to be elected running on an anti-Semitic platform (the sentimental Viennese have still named a street for him); his spirit presided in the interwar years culminating in the anti-Semitic depredations of the Anschluss and the enthusiastic participation of the Austrians in Hitler's S.S., of which they formed a third.

Poland, which had the most serious Jewish problem, had hardly regained its independence after the Great War when, in the late 30's, it introduced a spate of anti-Semitic legislation designed to drive out the Jews – including a ban on kosher meat. The German conquest absolved the Poles of the need to pursue their policies thanks to the Nazis own unique solution to the Jewish problem; to be sure, they were helped by zealous Poles in killing fields both small (Jedwabne) and large (Warsaw). And when the pitiful remnant of Jews returned after the war to claim the property that had been stolen from them, they were met by massacre in places such as Kielce. For good measure, the Polish Communist regime used Israel's growing military success against its Arab foes to persecute the few Jews who had survived and returned after the war, a harbinger of things to come on the part of Europe's Left.

All of the persecution in these three Roman Catholic countries was fiercely stoked by the church which – as David Kreutzer has pointed out in his well-documented book – used all the canards of modern, racial anti-Semitism to inflame its followers. To be sure, anti-Semitism was not limited to Roman Catholic nations. Although some of the worst excesses in the war years occurred in those states – indeed in realms under virtual Vatican sway, such as Fascist Slovakia led by the murderous Monsignor Jozef Tiso and the Ustasha regime of Croatia where many death camps were actually commanded by priests - there was enough blame to go around among other Christian nationalities. The Swiss, for one, who turned away from their borders upwards of 50,000 Jews left to a grim fate at Nazi hands, and who helped in the S.S. despoliation of their victims. And we should not forget the Germans themselves who orchestrated the Holocaust and whose pastors – in the anti-Semitic spirit of Martin Luther – were still offering Hitler heartfelt – although no longer obligatory – well wishes on his birthday as the Allies approached the gates of Berlin. As for the Russians, their long history of pogroms urged on by their Orthodox priests and czars, the depredations of the Black Hundreds and a virulent anti-Semitism that led the one-time seminary student Josef Stalin to plan an annihilation of Russian Jewry thwarted only by his death, was marked by a seminal work of anti-Semitic brilliance - the czarist secret-police forgery known as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." "The Protocols," which purport to be a document that reveals a Jewish plot for world domination, have been used by several generations of Jew haters from the Nazi propagandists in Berlin to their Arab heirs in Cairo. All of this European anti-Semitism, of course, was prefaced by the long rehearsal of 2,000 years of church-instigated Jew-hatred in Christian lands leading to the persecution, slaughter, despoliation and exile of Jews from virtually every European realm.

Old habits die hard and it was naןve to think that the virus of European anti-Semitism was extinguished – along with most of Europe's Jews – in the flames of the Holocaust. Rather, it went underground to re-emerge in a new virulent strain on the very same European soil that soaked up so much Jewish blood over the centuries. Jew-baiting, taboo in a Europe guilt-ridden over its complicity in the Nazi genocide – has now re-emerged in a fresh form suitable to a new era. The Leopard of anti-Semitism always changes its polemical spots – Blasphemy, Christ-killing, Xenophobia – in keeping with the spirit of each age that seeks to morally justify its attack on the people of Israel, but it's goal is always the same: to demonize and delegitimize the Jews. What world Jewry naively mistook as an end to endemic anti-Semitism due to the horror of the Holocaust and the hope of Israel was simply a window that offered a brief respite before the next onslaught. The wrinkle this time is that European anti-Semitism has been appropriated and adapted by the Moslem world – which has its own legacy of denigrating and despoiling the Jews going back to the Prophet – and recycled back to the Continent.

Although – or perhaps, because – Europe has little love for its own recent Moslem immigrants, it has embraced the cause of the enemies of Israel in the Middle East. But what is of relevance here are two phenomena: 1. The re-emergence of anti-Semitic tropes in European newspapers which derive from a medieval template of Jew-baiting and 2. The resurgence, increase and intensity of physical attacks on Jews by a growing Muslim population. Although decried on the one hand by the European community, they are on the other hand, abetted by the European media in their shrill attacks which conflate jeremiads against Israel with anti-Semitic imagery. This wink-and-a-nod brand of Jew bashing has a legacy that goes back to the patrician disdain for, and priestly abhorrence of, Jewish "arrogance" that affected shock when their attitudes took the concrete form of physical violence against Jews. Whether bishops inveighing against the Jewish massacres by Christian mobs in Speier and Worms during the Crusades or burghers holding their noses at the depredations of Kristallnacht, the people whose high-sounding anti-Semitism permitted these atrocities were affronted by, and distanced themselves from, the very anti-Semitic acts that their attitudes had encouraged. This disingenuous and base tradition has returned with a vengeance today. We need only look to the French, for example, who hold their noses at the anti-Jewish hooliganism of France's Moslem thugs while filling Le Monde with anti-Semitic venom that justifies the very attacks they decry.

The French are not alone. The BBC has regularly introduced anti-Semitic slanders bruited by Arab "correspondents" into its news programming. The British newspapers are full of anti-Jewish sneering, not least of which comes from the venerable Guardian, bellweather of the British Left, which has taken to anti-Semitic caricature in its rantings against the Jewish state. It is the kind of journalism that the Guardian would have once decried as worthy of the British Fascist Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts in the 30's. Now, wrapping itself in the flag of Palestinian Rights, it sees fit to indulge in the race-bating of Neo-Mosleyism. Most recently, it decried the Israeli incursion into Jenin, the self-described capital of Palestinian terrorism, as something that "looks," "smells" and "feels" like a crime. (A flourish evocative of Hermann Goering's boast that he could "smell" a Jew at twenty paces.) Leaving aside their editorialist's forensic gifts from afar, what the Guardian was all-but-saying before any fact-finding was begun, was that a massacre had occurred – although reporters on the scene found this not to be the case. One would have to believe from the intemperate tone of this article that the editors would be disappointed if a massacre HADN'T taken place. All this selective dudgeon in an editorial that not once mentioned the hundreds of Jewish dead from the homicide bombers sent out from this terrorist breeding ground.

What makes for such outrage – not on the part of the Arabs, who at least have a stake in this – but from these Men of the Left who come from a tradition of intellectual fair play and social tolerance? I would venture to guess that the rabid tone of the editorial reflects an outline of anti-Semitic assumptions – the Jew as usurper, manipulator, oppressor, and yes, murderer – ingrained in British society, which simply have to be colored with whatever hues are currently in vogue on the palette of Jew hatred. England exiled its Jews in 1290 and was judenrein for almost 300 years, which perhaps explains why it avoided the slaughters of its peers on the Continent during the late Middle Ages, early Renaissance and Reformation. This didn't stop the English popular mind from inventing the Jew of Malta and Shylock (who, let's face it, is a villain who insists on his pound of flesh, loses his daughter and is forced to convert), and later Fagin and T.S. Eliot's insidious Jew as well as the entire panoply of anti-Semitic detritus of the British ruling classes from the Social Darwinism of Houston Stewart Chamberlain whose racial writings inspired Hitler to the ravings of Lytton Strachey and the sneering of his Bloomsbury friends to the Quisling opportunism of Lord Halifax and the Windsors to the pro-Arab, anti-Zionist tilt of the Old Boy network in the Foreign Office. It must have been so hard for them to have swallowed the reality of a Jewish homeland after the politicians had made the mistake of committing themselves to one.

There is an obligation afoot today among their heirs in Whitehall and Fleet Street to compensate for the Original Sin of the Balfour Declaration by at least undoing its worst excesses, if not repealing it altogether. The Jews may have been Clever but the British had Character, something a Jew could never attain. With such a legacy, it is easy to see how the toffs at the BBC and the Guardian are susceptible to believing, and writing, the worst about the Jews and their state, and borrowing from a rich patrimony of anti-Semitism to do so. In a sop to its liberal past, Guardian writers have tried to distinguish between their opposition to the existence of the Jewish state – a political position – and anti-Semitism, a cultural one - as if the destruction of Israel and its concomitant loss of Jewish life and subsequent dislocation and denigration would not be a disaster for the Jewish people and an anti-Semitic event on the scale of a Second Holocaust.

Anti-Semitism has a long history in Europe that won't go away. The only people to deal with it in a serious way were the Germans, given their role in the Holocaust. Interestingly, Germany is the only major country in Western Europe where there is not a heavy majority opposing Israel. Most of the other nations believe that either they defeated the Germans (France) were conquered by the Germans (Austria) or remained neutral (Switzerland). Therefore, their consciences are clear. We hear much chastisement from the Dutch about Israel's policies toward the Palestinians (the overwhelming majority of Holland's Jews went to the Nazi ovens with nary a finger being raised by the Dutch who, alas, failed to show the same courage as the Danes). Ditto for Belgium, which is so eager to try Ariel Sharon of Sabra and Shatila (but not Yassir Arafat of Munich and Ma'a lot) for war crimes. With the exception of the Danes, the same sorry story is true throughout Europe. Nations who collaborated with, benefited from or turned a blind eye to the Nazi extermination of the Jews are now making common cause with the next inimical threat to their existence.

Perhaps the experience of those avatars of Mittel-Europa, the Austrians and the Swiss – each at the heart of the Continent in both history and geography – can help explain the psychology that drives this. After all, Israel is a democracy with the very same commitment to tolerance, humanism and liberal values that these nations celebrate. Arrayed against it is a sea of 300 million Arabs whose spearhead, the Palestinians, are led by a thuggish terrorist and dictator reflective of the other tyrannies ubiquitous in the Arab world, all of whom are implacable enemies of Israel and, with little prodding, the West. Would it not make sense that the Austrians and the Swiss, along with their European compatriots would stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel? Why then, does the European Union support Arafat's corrupt, dictatorial regime? Why do European politicians, intellectuals and their peers in the press consistently side with a faction whose interests are inimical to everything for which they putatively stand?

In the case of the Austrians, they claim to be the first nation "conquered" by the Nazis. The fact that they wildly celebrated the Anschluss and welcomed their native son Adolph Hitler in his triumphal return at the head of the German Army, reveled in the Walpurgisnacht of anti-Semitic persecution that followed and joined ranks with the Fuehrer to conquer Europe, has somehow been erased from Austrian history. And, of course, having committed no crime against the Jews, there is nothing for which to atone. But the Austrians know better. Actually, they won the war – that is Hitler's War Against the Jews. And like all winners (except, of course, the Israelis on the West Bank), they're entitled to the spoils. Who, after all, is living in all those stately houses in Vienna that once belonged to the Jews who populated more than a third of the city? How did they get them? We know the answer. So do the Austrians. There has never been an attempt – except for the barest tokenism – to compensate the heirs of those despoiled – many of them murdered – by the state or by the inheritors of the expropriation. Collective guilt, unacknowledged but nonetheless there, gnaws just beneath the surface of the Austrian conscience. One does not have to be Dr. Freud – one of the Jews driven from Vienna (whose offices have been charitably converted by the Viennese to a museum) – to understand that the Austrians must harbor a great deal of resentment toward a people whom they have wronged and whom they feel has the moral high ground on them. Similarly, the Swiss – who have had to eat crow as their shameful financial shilling for the Nazis and theft of Jewish holdings has come to light in recent years despite their stonewalling – must be seething at what may seem to them as the never-ending blandishments of the Jews and their lawyers.

What better way for the Austrians and the Swiss and the French and all their other European brethren – who were complicit in the Nazi extermination but for reasons of postwar expedience got off the hook – to ease their collective conscience and cut the Jew back down to size, than by showing that the Jews, too, are morally reprehensible? Back to a level playing field! Were the Jews persecuted? They persecute. Were they oppressors? They oppress. Were they the victims of a Nazi genocide? They are Nazis who commit genocide. Just as the Fascist theology of Social Darwinism and neo-Paganism freed Europe from any remaining Christian restraint in dealing with the Jews, so the cause of Palestine has freed today's Europe from any residual guilt about the Holocaust. If the Palestinians didn't exist the Europeans might have had to invent them. One of the unsought benefits of the Palestinian Liberation Movement is that it has liberated Europe from being in moral thrall to the Jews, from being forever in debt to them for the crime against humanity that was the Holocaust. Now, it is Europe who can accuse Israel – and thereby the Jews – of crimes against humanity and, in so doing, wash the slate clean of its own crimes without ever having to fully acknowledge them. What a weight has been lifted from Europe's conscience. The Palestinian cause has finally "normalized" the Jew in a way unforeseen by Israel's founders. It has allowed Europe to make the Jew as "normal" as the Christian in the realm of oppression. The possibility that this may not be true – that Israel is fighting a struggle for survival against an array of intransigent and inimical forces – is something that Europe cannot countenance because that would put the Jews back on their moral pedestal. This explains the impassioned, indeed excessive efforts of the Europeans to make the Palestinian case for crimes against humanity on the part of Israel and, therefore the Jews.

To be sure, there are the more prosaic reasons for Europe's tilt toward the Palestinians:

1. The guilt that European nations feels for their own colonial adventures: France in Algeria where torture and counter-terror – the real thing – was Government policy for years; the British everywhere from India (the Amritsar massacre), Kenya (more torture and counter-terror against the Kikuyu resistance) Northern Ireland (the massacre of marchers at Derry) and, oh, yes, Jenin, (where handcuffed Palestinian prisoners were shot and homes blown up arbitrarily in response to a 1930's Arab insurgency that was far less threatening than the current intifida). And, of course, there are the Belgians in the Congo where more than 10 million blacks were enslaved and slaughtered hardly more than 100 years ago under King Leopold whose legacy continues to this day in the massacre of half a million Tutsi by Hutu murderers with the collusion of, guess who? The French. For Europe to displace its collective guilt for this overwhelming oppression by singling out Israel is politically shameful but psychologically effective. The Palestinians maintain it is unfair that they must pay the price for Israel which they claim was fashioned out of European guilt over the Holocaust. In fact, the Jewish homeland was forged two decades before the Holocaust in the same series of mandates and treaties that created several Arab states including Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. More to the point, it is Israel that is currently paying the price for Europe's predatory colonial past.

2. Expediency rationalized as sophistication. Europe is dependent on Arab oil; it also does considerable business with Arab states – including Iraq (alas, the French again) and so naturally, it does not want morality to get in the way of its business interests.

3. Cravenness. Europe has a burgeoning and increasingly active Muslim population that can vote. They are visible; they are active. There are not many Jews left since the Europeans killed most of them in the Holocaust. (France has Europe's largest remaining Jewish population, 600,000; it has six million Muslims.)

4. Anti-Americanism. To the extent that Israel is seen as America's "client," Europe, in its resentment of American "hegemony," has tilted toward the Arabs.

5. Post-colonialism. Two generations of studies in Relativism, Deconstructionism, Multi-Culturalism and Post-Colonialism has created a culture of European intellectuals, journalists, "humanitarians" and leaders who are in contempt of their own Western values and are willing to embrace any "ism" – up to and including Islamo-fascism and the lies that go with it – as an alternative to Western democracy.

6. Television. A tank in front of a building provides a riveting visceral picture. To explain why the tank got there involves words, which is a cerebral activity that takes time and thought. Once again, Iconography, a traditional tool in Gentile demonography of Jews, trumps the power of the Word. In the hot medium of television, pictures have a natural advantage over words, a reality that gives the terrorists a distinct advantage. No one sees them plotting an attack but people see the Israeli response. Yes, images of Israeli terror victims flash on television but they seem to recede before the constant repetition of pictures of Israeli soldiers in front of wailing Arab women. The delusion that this is a David and Goliath situation, overlooks the array of political, economic and military forces aligned against Israel and forgets that, at the end of the day, David was a Hebrew and Goliath was a Philistine.

There may be those who genuinely object to the policies of the current Israeli Government on the West Bank. This includes many Israelis, many Jews in the Diaspora and many genuine friends of Israel. But this does not explain, nor can it justify the campaign of vilification against Israel in Europe that has spilled over into an open season against Jews. The current drive to isolate Israel is redolent of an ancient anti-Semitic effort to ghettoize the Jew, except this time on an international basis. The UN debates on Israel's policies, like the "human rights" fiasco in Durban last year, are modern equivalents of the "disputations" set up by the church in medieval Spain whose purpose was to prove the superiority of Christianity over the fallen Jewish creed. The verdict is already decided.

It is important to unmask the current European onslaught against the Jewish state – and, by implication, the Jews – for what it is: a recrudescence of anti-Semitism, only by another name. Elie Wiesel said recently that he could not imagine living through another Holocaust in his lifetime. To prevent this, all people of conscience must recognize the motives of those in Europe abetting the Arab agenda for what they are. And we must speak out against the Arab program whose goal is the destruction of the Jewish state – a true second genocide – which, should it succeed, might not even burden the European conscience this time around.