The Holocaust Continues to Haunt Europe
Il Giornale, March 28, 2018
The latest news is unbearable: in Paris, a Jewish woman Mireille Knoll, 85, who survived the Franco-Nazi deportations of the 1940s, was stabbed to death by a young Muslim whom she had known since he was a child. This anti-Semitic murder echoes that of Ilan Halimi, a Parisian boy who was kidnapped in 2006 by a group of young Muslims who tortured him to death while reading the Koran in an apartment in the banlieues while the police refused to consider its anti-Semitic nature. Even now they hesitated to treat Knoll’s killing as an anti-Semitic attack…
The last anti-Semitic attack occurred only a few days ago, an eight-year-old boy was beaten a month ago in Sarcelles because he was wearing a kippah; a few days before a fifteen-year-old girl wearing a Star of David around her neck was disfigured with a knife; a few days later a boy had his fingers cut off with a saw... Last year a man who shouted Allah hu Akbar threw Sarah Halimi Attal from a window. In recent years there have been a dozen multiple fatal attacks, the Jewish Museum in Brussels, the children killed at a Jewish school in Toulouse, the Hypercacher kosher supermarket ... And this is not only in France. Europe’s Jews, including those in England and Russia are surrounded, they want to leave, even if they see that in the end, after much reluctance, their leaders accept the idea they are anti-Semitic attacks, yet no one wants to face the old monster, which can be found on the left in figures such as James Corbyn, on the right with those like Marine Le Pen and Islamic like many immigrants.
This is much more alarming for the Old
Continent than for the Jews. The persecuted Jews can always find a homeland in
Israel. Instead, Europeans have no place to go. Anti-Semitism will destroy them
as it did in the 1930s and 1940s. Europeans are and will have to directly
confront the causes and consequences of a ruthless cognitive illness, namely the
demented dissonance between that which the society believes to be true and the
sad reality. Without an economic and cultural future, hysteric Europe is losing
sight of its past in which six million innocent people were massacred on its
soil. Can there be a worse fate? An entire society - a continent – that by now produces
all over the place murderous anti-Semitism after experiencing the Holocaust?
Why is this happening?
For example, let’s take a look at Greece: in that country so rich in history and lacking Jews, according to a Pew study, 70 percent of its citizens hold anti-Semitic views. Why is that? It certainly hasn’t anything to do with its local Jews, who are few and tranquil. Public discontent has led a situation in which the European populations are looking for someone to blame; the feeling of humiliation is linked to the economic crisis and institutions... And on this, conjoin, fell the murderous fury of the new anti-Semitism introduced by immigration with its Islamic propaganda. The numbers and episodes of this new anti-Semitism are astonishing: every 83 seconds an anti-Semitic post appears on Twitter (who writes about it is frequently a victim), in 2016 this amounted to 382 thousand anti-Semitic posts in 20 different languages. The episodes are manifold, from desecrated graves to murder: there’s so many to choose from, just Google it.
But the most heated debate revolves around discussions on the origins of "right" or "left" or rather Islamic, anti-Semitism today. Surely ignorance, populism, and the economic nervousness of the general public who feel betrayed by Europe plays a part. However, the old stereotype of the stateless and antinational Jew, selfish and individualistic, which dominated right-wing anti-Semitic thinking doesn’t exist. If anything, for today’s anti-Semites the Jews are too "Western”. Simply put, they’re too closely linked to the ideas of nation, identity and country, and even religion... These concepts single the State of Israel out for censure and here is the central theoretical point of today’s anti-Semitism: nationalism, imperialism, colonialism... the jews are today accused of these sins. Mortal sins in the eyes of the european modern identity, antinational and globalist, no matter what the State of Israel really is and how it democratically and generously copes with its difficult arab minority. On this difference between nation and globalism, has grown the evil islamic graft the sees the Jews as an emanation of the worst human attitudes, embodied by the State of Israel and its natural allies.
For an Islamist, supported by the extreme left, Israel is a den of child murderers, a bilge of apartheid, a gang of imperialists armed to the teeth with the atomic bomb in their pockets. This is why, just like apartheid South Africa, Israel, and its Jewish cohorts in the world, must be eliminated. It’s the banner of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Dieudonné, the popular anti-Semitic French comedian. Moreover, it’s Abu Mazen’s implicit dream – a man who describes Zionism as an ideology with no connection to the legitimate aspiration of the Jewish people return to its home clountrym, but that sought to exercise European colonialism. This is also the implication of the most seemingly decent movements, such as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), which both Corbyn’s Labour party in the UK and the Five Star Movement in Italy like so much.
The encirclement is tight. A brave leader is needed to fight it. At present, there isn’t one in sight.
Translation by Amy Rosenthal