.1
■
EDITOR'S NOTEBOOE
The Still-Sounding Alarm
T
he demonizing of Israel is cranking up. More and
more, the Jewish state is criticized without con-
text or comparison. It's judged in the court of
world opinion without examining the record of
terrorist regimes in the Middle East. Such demonizing is a
contrived attempt to isolate Israel, expose its rough edges
and break the Jewish grip on land the Arabs want as theirs.
Armed with an insider's perspective on the demonization
of Israel, a respected national staff member of the Anti-
Defamation League stopped by the Detroit Jewish News in
Southfield last week. Ken Jacobson, the ADUs International
Affairs Division director, affirmed that the
anti-Jewish fervor in Europe and the Middle
East is real.
It's something U.S. Jews must wake up to.
Jacobson is right: The ancestral homeland
of Jews has been poked and prodded so
unceasingly that it's no wonder a European
Union (E.U.) opinion poll put Israel at the
top of a list of nations threat-
ROBERT A. ening world peace.
SKLAR
"If there is going to be crit-
Editor
icism of the human rights
records of Israel, that's legiti-
mate," said Jacobson, "as long as you do it in
the context of the far, far worse records of all
the states surrounding it."
He said Israel is not beyond scrutiny, but
over-scrutiny invariably spews Jewish hatred.
So beware.
"When the U.N. passes more than half its
resolutions against Israel, or when Portuguese
writer and Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago
visits Ramallah and calls Israel's policies worse
Ken Jacobson
than Auschwitz," Jacobson said, "we're seeing
the lines of legitimate criticism crossed."
Ditto for when the Italian newspaper La
Stampa prints a cartoon of a tank emblazoned with a Jewish '
star. The target is the baby Jesus, who pleads, "Surely they
don't want to kill me again?"
At a February conference in Brussels on anti-Semitism, the
European Union executive arm's president, Romano Prodi,
insisted that the waves of attacks on Europe's Jews and their
interests are products of Palestinian terror fomented by
Islamic extremists against Israel.
Prodi told JTA: "Let's be clear. We do hear expressions of
anti-Semitic prejudice. We do see vestiges of the historical
anti-Semitism that was once widespread in Europe. We do
see attacks against synagogues, desecration of Jewish ceme-
teries and physical assaults on Jews. "
Prodi insisted that the turbulence isn't the same as state-
sponsored persecution of Jews by fascist regimes in the
1930s and 1940s. He said Jews are not alone today like at
the height of the Third Reich. That's an important distinc-
tion. Says Jacobson: "That the super power in the world is
ready to stand up and do a lot of things for Israel is funda-
mentally different than it was in the 1930s and '40s."
Conference speaker Elie Wiesel, a Nobel laureate and
Shoah survivor, aptly summarized the European left's demo-
nizing of Israel: "Don't say we're paranoid. We're simply real-
istic. If Auschwitz didn't cure the world of anti-Semitism,
what will?"
Jacobson defined demonizing as the left's camouflaging of
something that, at the core, creates an environment in which
anti-Semitism thrives and in which people feel at ease being
anti-Semitic to the point of denying the legitimacy of the
Jewish state.
The day the infamous E.U. poll came out, Prodi was in
New York. So the ADL cornered him. Jacobson recounted,
"We said to him, 'It may reflect anti-Semitism, but at the
very least, it reflects that your governments and your media
present Israel in a demonic fashion."
The Brussels conference was the result.
And it exposed the gulf among speakers. Some felt that
Jew-hating should be tied to the larger battle against racism
and xenophobia. Others felt that it's so pervasive in history,
it demands a targeted response.
The New York Times reported Cobi Benatoff, the
European Jewish Congress president, saying: "Anti-Semitism
and prejudice have returned. The monster is here with us
once again.
Uncontested is the fact that Jew-hating in Europe further
fuels the Arab war on Zionism, a war encouraging European
violence by Muslim immigrants indoctrinated via TV, music
videos and schoolbooks in their homelands to
view Jews as vermin. It's incumbent that we
monitor whether any European government
heeds Prodi's call to legislate against racism
and xenophobia — and brand anti-Semitic
acts and Holocaust denial as crimes.
Time will tell if the conference mattered.
But I hope the words of Britain's Chief
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks echo: "Jews must not be
left to fight anti-Semitism alone. The victim
cannot cure the crime."
While they're stepping up at home,
European nations can complete the change of
their colors by condemning all the terrorism
that has gripped the Arab world — in some
instances, a world only weapons of mass
destruction away from mimicking Hitler's
madness.
Jacobson hit on a central tenet to changing Europe —
extending praise when merited. "If you don't acknowledge
when people do the right thing," he said, "you are creating a
disincentive for them."
For example, he said, "we can't treat all Germans today
like they are Nazis. What we have to do is say Germans
today are not responsible for what their grandparents did,
but they are responsible to teach what happened and make
sure it doesn't happen again."
I like Jacobson's recipe for balance: "It's both accurate to
talk about we are in a different world today and psychologi-
cally sound to do so. To continually talk about how terrible
everything is, and that there's nothing we can do about it, is
really debilitating."
Anti-Semitism usually serves needs that have little to do
with Jews, but which feed on the Jewish stereotype. Jews
often are the scapegoats of conspiracy theories. In Europe,
the hatred goes back 2,000 years — the Vatican's 1965 repu-
diation that the Jews bear a collective guilt for the death of
Jesus notwithstanding.
Anti-Jewish undercurrents lurk throughout Europe and
the Arab world. Take E.U. support of the Palestinian
Authority — $720 million for 2002-2003. It makes E.U.
taxpayers complicit in funding terror against Israelis.
No gift to the Arafat-controlled P.A. remains untainted.
So we as a people need to stay vigilant.
As Jacobson put it, "I think there are clear reasons to be
alarmed. These are very dangerous times." ❑
Monday-Saturda
Thursday I.
Sunday 12-5
IN
3/12
2004
5