Greetings, Brethren:

Two articles on the spread of anti-Semitism in Europe towards the Jews...add it to the Arab world and that is a lot of hate.

www.washingtonpost.com
Europe and 'Those People'  Anti-Semitism arises again.
By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, April 26, 2002; Page A29
France can hardly contain its contempt for that muscle-bound naif, the American hyperpower, stomping around the world in search of "evildoers." The French roll their eyes at such primitive moralism, so devoid of Gallic nuance.
How inconvenient, then, that the same French have just put on the presidential ballot Jean-Marie Le Pen, the modern incarnation of European fascism. Le Pen defeated the Socialist prime minister for second place, making him a runoff candidate for president of the Fifth Republic.
No matter. This will not restrain French intellectuals and foreign ministers from lecturing Americans on their simplisme -- their preference for morality over realpolitik, their reliance on military power, their fantasies about an "axis of evil" and, perhaps most unbearable, their principled support for Israel.
Israel -- that "sh---- little country," as the French ambassador to Britain recently said at a London dinner party. "Why should we be in danger of World War III because of those people?" This contemptuous sneer at "those people" occasioned a minor scandal. No, the scandal was not the ambassador's statement but the hostess's indiscretion in revealing it -- and then adding how utterly commonplace the ambassador's sentiment had become in London's better circles.
And not just among the cocktail set. The European "street" has lately been expressing itself on the subject of Jews as well. In France, synagogues have been burned to the ground and Jewish youths savagely attacked. In Belgium, two synagogues were firebombed, a third sprayed with bullets. A Berlin police official advised Jews, for reasons of safety, not to wear outward symbols of their religion.
In Europe, it is not very safe to be a Jew. How could this be?
The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release -- with Israel as the trigger -- of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history. What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today but its relative absence during the past half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.
This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque. What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state.
What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well . . . since the '30s. The liberal Italian daily La Stampa ran a cartoon of the baby Jesus, besieged by Israeli tanks, saying, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again."
Again. And this time the Christ-killers come in tanks. Just when Europe had reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew -- the Holocaust survivor who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize -- along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling to apologize for its own existence.
The French were the vanguard of this modern anti-Semitism that can tolerate the Jew as victim but not as historical actor. It was 35 years ago at the outbreak of the Six Day War that Charles de Gaulle cut off French support for Israel, denouncing its audacity in fighting for its life over his objections. But he did not stop there. He later went on to famously denounce the Jews as "an elite people, sure of itself and domineering."
The rejection of docility -- "sure of itself" -- was Israel's real crime 35 years ago. It remains Israel's crime today. Israel's recent three-week Operation Defensive Shield, the boldest and most justified Israeli military offensive since the Six Day War, provokes precisely the same reaction, though not always expressed with de Gaulle's candor.
Three people have been chosen by the United Nations to judge Israel's actions in Jenin. Two are sons of Europe, and one of those is Cornelio Sommaruga. As former head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Sommaruga spent 12 years ensuring that the only nation on earth to be refused admission to the International Red Cross is Israel. The problem, he said, was its symbol: "If we're going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?"
This man will sit in judgment of the Jews. Marx was wrong when he said that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. The second time is tragedy too.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company

  A wave of Jew-bashing in Europe
By Jeff Jacoby, 4/28/2002

THE ROCKS have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are slithering free.

In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling him ''a dirty Jew.'' Two synagogues in Brussels   were firebombed; a third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapons fire.

In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack. Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza ''should be shot dead.'' A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus.  Anti-Semitism, wrote a columnist in The Spectator, ''has become respectable ... at London dinner tables.'' She quoted one member of the House of Lords: ''The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.''

In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, ''Surely they don't want to kill me again?'' In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulchre.

In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town of Herford: ''Six million were not enough.''

In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of Kiev's main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.

In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Ioannina and vandals hurled paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica. In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of ''Sieg Heil'' and ''Jews into the sea.'' In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.

But nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France.

In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseille; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words ''Dirty Jew'' were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months. According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter.

Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming ''Jews to the gas chambers'' and ''Death to the Jews.'' The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve ''family honor.'' The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked - and did not apologize - when it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that the world's troubles were the fault of ''that shitty little country, Israel.''

''At the start of the 21st century,'' writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a well-known social scientist, in a new book, ''we are discovering that Jews are once again select targets of violence.... Hatred of the Jews has returned to France.''

But of course, it never left. Not France; not Europe. Anti-Semitism, the oldest bigotry known to man, has been a part of European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, open Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to type.

To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of Jew-hatred all over their continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency. ''Stop saying that there is anti-Semitism in France,'' President Jacques Chirac told a Jewish editor in January. ''There is no anti-Semitism in France.'' The European media have been vicious in condemning Israel's self-defense against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have been far less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard.

They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians.

A timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews. Militant Islamist extremists were attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed Americans on Sept. 11. The Nazis' first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was burned in the fire.

Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. When they become the objects of savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned and an explosion is soon to come. If Europeans don't rise up and turn against the Jew-haters, the Jew-haters will rise up and turn against them.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.

This story ran on page E7 of the Boston Globe on 4/28/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.