Anti-Semitism is Not the Real Danger to Jews Today
Mark Mazower
Is anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe? Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, this
week gave warning of the re-emergence of "an anti-Semitism that has always existed".
Attacks on Jewish targets in France and the bombing of the two synagogues in Turkey
look like straws in the wind. And when a German MP assigns the Jews responsibility for
the crimes of Bolshevism and the commander of the German special forces publicly
agrees, then it is worthwhile addressing the question.
German MP, Martin Hohmann, was recently expelled from the his party, after absurdly
claiming that Jews were a 'Taetervolk' - a 'race of perpetrators' of rights abuses.
No historian would want to deny the extent of European anti-Semitism in the early 20th
century. However, the Holocaust led to a profound transformation of attitudes in
Europe. After the war the commonly-held belief in scientific racism fell into
disrepute and UNESCO issued its famous declaration that race was a social myth. The
basic law of Konrad Adenauer's West Germany explicitly outlawed racial prejudice.
The Holocaust itself has become the single most-studied episode of the war, if not of
the 20th century, and today there are Holocaust monuments, memorial days and museums -
even in countries where it did not take place - and laws which criminalise Holocaust
denial. So, contrary to what Sharon has indicated, only a few oddballs regard
expressions of anti-Semitism as politically or culturally acceptable.
Over the past 40 years there has been a huge generational shift in attitudes, and even
the genteel prejudices of an earlier generation grate on the ears of the young. If a
few echoes linger farther east, these too are dying away with the transformation of
post-communist societies.
But if the Holocaust eradicated anti-Semitism as a political force in Europe, it had
another far-reaching consequence as well: it gave birth to Israel, thereby linking
Europe, the Jews and the Arabs in a new way. If Israel looms large in the European
political consciousness, it is not because Europeans are anti-Semites but because
Europe itself is in many ways the architect of the present imbroglio.
At a time when most Jewish emigrants were heading to the United States, Argentina and
Western Europe, the British - for their own reasons - gave the green light for the
creation of a Jewish national home in an Arab province of the Ottoman Empire. The
British, the French, who successfully fought to prevent a Hashemite Greater Syria
emerging in 1920, and the Nazis, who drove huge numbers of Jews into Palestine,
between them turned out to be indispensable for the success of Jewish nationalism.
Zionism, which brought "the people without land to the land without people", in fact
implied the dispossession of Palestine's Arabs. Previously, anti-Semitism had been a
negligible factor among the Arabs; there was little trace of it in the Ottoman world,
where Jews and Muslims coexisted harmoniously.
But even as European anti-Semitism dwindled, so it seemed to grow in the Middle East,
fed by racial and religious myths imported from the defeated European Right.
What has emerged is not at heart a racial antagonism but a political one - an
anti-Zionism which takes Israeli rhetoric at face value by conflating Israelis and
Jews. This is very different from the old inter-war European variety. The Nazis were
not much bothered about Jews' political opinions; what counted was race.
The overwhelming majority of Muslim and non-Muslim critics of Israel say that it is
not Judaism or Jews that they hate, but the racist ideology of Zionism and the
excesses of Zionists
If anything, Zionists were the one kind of Jew that right-wing Europeans were prepared
to deal with, since both sides desired the same thing - the departure of the Jews from
Europe. Precisely the opposite is true for Arab opinion: conspiracy theories flourish,
and so does Holocaust denial, but the real target is Zionism as a political doctrine.
Israeli spokesmen, however, are now focusing not on sentiment in the Arab world but on
signs of old hatreds in Europe. By doing so, they badly distort what is happening.
When a German MP is forced to resign after comparing the Nazis with Jewish Bolsheviks,
we are learning more about German frustrations over how the world deals with the
Holocaust than about the dangers facing German Jews.
Recently there has been a remarkable increase in the number of Israelis settling in
Germany: so much for anti-Semitism there. Neo-Nazi and far-right groups continue to
target synagogues and cemeteries. But this has been going on for years and has not
pushed them into the mainstream - quite the contrary.
What is new in the present equation is the violence mostly in France by young Arab
youths against Jewish targets, a spill-over into Europe of the kind of anti-Zionism
already described.
Before we turn to the old catch-all labels of the past, we need to take a good look at
the singer as well as the song. "The best solution to anti-Semitism," Sharon said in
Rome last week, "is immigration to Israel."
As Jewish migration from the former Soviet Union dwindles, the spectre of depopulation
looms large among Israeli officials who fear Jews may before long be outnumbered by
the fecund Arabs in their midst. Sharon is the man, after all, who entered office
vowing to bring a million new settlers to the country in order to reverse its alarming
demographic deficit.
There has always been a debate among Jews about the importance of anti-Semitism in
Europe, and Zionists for obvious reasons have tended to emphasise the threat it poses.
But today Israel itself looks more like a source of danger for Jews worldwide than a
refuge, and even Israelis - though the emigration statistics remain a closely guarded
official secret - are voting with their feet.
If Sharon is seriously concerned about anti-Semitism, there is no one better placed
than he to do something about it by changing his Government's policies towards the
Palestinians.
Saturday, November 29th, 2003 - 11:31pm GMT
The author is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, London.
Article courtesy of The Times
Email This Article...
Readers' Comments
The Holocaust Story is B--- S---. A lie, told by liars.
Comment posted by: Anonymous on Wednesday, 3rd December, 2003 - 06:41pm GMT
A great majority of American Jewish folks support Zionism, both directly and by
ensuring that Israel's interests are kept paramount in American politics. It is their
replacement for the other well-known [false] "God That Failed", communism.
The Bolshevik leadership under Lenin was 90% Jewish. See "The Black Book of
Communism", Harvard University Press.
Palestinians and Sephardim are Semitic; European Jews, descended from the Khazars, are
not. In general, European and American Zionists are the most rabid anti-semites on
earth.
"Christian" Zionism, in the main a concoction of "Premillenial Dispensationalism" (a
creation of John Nelson Darby and Henry Scofield) has no roots in early Christian
dogma, and as Darby himself said, "leads directly back to Judaism".
The Talmud is a brilliant (but racist) work, and the "foremost guide to daily life"
(as Justice Ginsburg put it) for many Jews; and the most Jews consider the Torah to be
little more than a fable. There is precious little in common between Judaism and
Christianity, (Talmud vs. New Testament) and there is less difference between Zionism
and mainstream Judaism, than many would care to openly admit.
Comment posted by: Anonymous on Wednesday, 3rd December, 2003 - 07:37pm GMT
Whether the comment on German MP Martin Hohmann in the article was made by Prof.
Mazower or by some editor of his article, it is anyhow incorrect and abusive to say
that he (Mr. Hohmann) claimed that the Jews were a Tätervolk (a race of perpetrators).
Actually, he said the opposite. His point was that it is unfair to denigrate an entire
people because of crimes that a minority of them had committed, even if that minority
was in power; therefore as unfair to call the Germans a Tätervolk vis-ā-vis Jews as
calling Jews a Tätervolk vis-ā-vis the Christian majority peoples of Russia, merely
because Jews were the dominant ethnic group of the Bolshevik leadership. So what
Hohmann did was to repudiate the idea of collective guilt, which in fact has been in
force since after WWII and still is regarding the German people, since they must still
pay Wiedergutmachungsgeld (money of redress) to Israel for the so-called Holocaust,
whereas there is hardly any German taxpayer alive today who held any responsible
position in 1933-45, and so nobody of those paying it off today to Israel can be held
responsible.
The "sin" that Hohmann committed was that he touched one "untouchable", that is the
dominant role of Jews in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In the prevalent moral and
intellectual climate, only two attitudes to Jews are permissible: admiration or pity.
The unwritten law says: Thou shalt not connect Jews with anything unsavoury, however
true that connection be.
Comment posted by: Lars Adelskogh on Wednesday, 3rd December, 2003 - 08:28pm GMT
Interesting argument....part of which I agree with. But I feel that the argument is a
trite one which glibly examines the political surface. For instance...the proposition
that antisemitism will rapidly diminish now that the Iron Curtain is gone is totally
and demonstably false....a brief examination of popular sentiment in the old Eastern
Bloc states shows that antsemitism is as prevalentr as ever. The argument of the
equivalence of German Jewish guilt....which goes......German Nazis performed the
Holocaust.....Jewish Bolshevics....perpertated at least as horrific acts...therefor
Germans and Jews are equaly guilty...has been showen to be a bogus argument and the
space here does not facilitate me rehashing it. Suffice to say that the equation of
Jews equals Bolshevics is false to begin with and was central to Hitlers own belief.
Finaly the author fails to examine the relationship between guilt and antisemitism,
nor the many other psychological ramifications produced, by two thousand years of
antisemitism, within the collective souls of both victim and perpetrator....thus his
glib assertions that antisemitism is dead in Europe, and that there is a clear and
fundemental difference between anti zionism and antisemitism are unsupported except in
the most superficial of ways. Israeli and Jewish distrust of European intention is the
result of two thousand years of deciet. It is well based.
Comment posted by: Anonymous on Wednesday, 3rd December, 2003 - 08:57pm GMT
I'd like to set something straight - the exclusion of german MP Hohmann from the
parlamentary fraction of his party (he's not yet been expelled from the party)
originated from an irrational fear of even touching the subject of the singularity of
the holocaust, an instilled fear quite pervasive in Germany.
I doubt very much many people have really understood or even read the actual discourse
which led to the scandal. In it, Mr. Hohmann explicitly rejects calling the the jews a
"people of perpetrators", arguing that even if many key actors of communism were
jewish, it still doesn't allow for such a generalization. In the same way, he argues,
germans shouldn't be considered "perpetrators" as a nation, but rather that the
ungodly on whichever side had been the great perpetrators of the violent past century.
This discourse was held by Mr. Hohmann on October the 3rd, Germany's national day, in
his electoral district. It's a view many people hold in Germany nowadays.
For this "extremist" view he was ousted from his fraction (in spite of having been
elected by one of the most solid margins nationwide) by hysterical party leaders,
always eager to please the spirit of our time, shortdsighted and unaware that there's
nothing which passes more quickly than unprincipled political fashions.
Except for the last half of the last paragraph, which is my opinion, these are the
hard facts, just so that no false truths besome used as arguments for or against
anything.
Comment posted by: RSC on Wednesday, 3rd December, 2003 - 09:15pm GMT
It would be to awake one day and find that no one had died as the results of
terrorism.
It would be good to find that no Palestianians or Jews or muslims lost their lives due
to
hatred. That will never happen as long as Zionist have a thirst for world domination.
I was
a young man when the movie was made on Leon Uris' novel. Paul Neumann made me feel
that the jews were the underdog of the world. Now that I have matured and the
threat posed by zionism is becomming more commonly known I see that movie as what
it was, zionist propaganda. Now I sort back through my mind to try and see what
other attempts were made by the Hollywood Zionist to make me believe a lie.It takes
constant
awareness to fight off the effects of the media blitz that triesto show the Zionist
side of the
picture. It is frightning. The beginnings of the mass of propaganda began subtle and
invaded
our minds so slowly that now it is almost impossible to speak against the threat
without incurring
cries of anti-semetism and as of lately in America unpatriotic.
Comment posted by: Anonymous on Wednesday, 3rd December, 2003 - 09:39pm GMT
Almost all of the comments are interesting. The possible connections between Judaism
and Zionism, whether there is a Zionist conspiracy to control non-Jewish societies,
are debates that don't get airtime on mainstream media, for the obvious reason that
the strong Zionist lobby too readily accuses its critics of anti-Semitism. It is the
aim of the World Crisis Web to help redress this balance, without relying on wild and
unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
It is indeed an irony that many of those claiming to be victims of anti-Semitism are
not Semites, but Europeans. This should not prevent them from defending their brothers
and sisters in Judaism, or of holding to their Zionist ideologies, but it is another
indication of the power of the Jewish lobby, that it has successfully associated in
the 'public imagination' the term, Semites, with Jews, whilst disassociating it from
Arabs.
Regarding the Hohmann 'scandal', he has recently been at pains to disclaim comments,
such as that which I made about him under his image in the above article. He says that
he was rhetorically referring to the argument that Jews continue to bear
responsibility for previous generations' war activities, as an analogy for his real
intention, which was to refute the argument that Germans today bear responsibility for
earlier crimes against Jews - that, in fact, Jews today are not responsible for the
crimes of Jewish Bolsheviks almost a century ago, and that by this measure neither are
today's Germans responsible for those of the Nazi Party.
I am not a German speaker. It is difficult for me to track down reliable and
comprehensive accounts of his speech. He was, however, quoted at one point as saying
that "one could describe Jews with some justification as a Taetervolk" (BBC
translation), whilst Hohmann himself has recently said that the central "statement" in
his speech was that "neither the Germans nor the Jews are a race of perpetrators".
If Hohmann has been unfairly hounded by the world's media, this would not surprise me
in the least. The best way to solve the issue would be for someone to supply a fairly
translated copy of the full text of his speech, but this may be a problem, since the
original German copy was taken off the internet at an early stage. Is there a German
speaker, who could supply me with an English translation (with a reference to the
translator), so that I can perhaps publish it for the world to see?
Comment posted by: Danny Dayus on Thursday, 4th December, 2003 - 12:27am GMT
VICTIMS Victimise--this is the truth about unregenerate human being. The most
exquisite horror of having been victimised is that the victim(s) MUST somehow summon
the courage to rejoin the human race on a common footing, in the quest for
reconciliation. There can be NO 'special privileges' for anyone, nor for any group.
We are in this together, QED. Persons who extort special treatment because bad things
happened to a grandparent are adventitious, merely, AND THEY GUARANTEE ONLY THAT
TIT-FOR-NIPPLE HORRORS WILL CONTINUE. Here, in Mankato, MN, a remarkable work of
reconciliation has been afoot since 1958, between Mdewakanton Dakota Indian people and
the now-dominant non-Indian population, after the terror and brutality of the l862
Dakota conflict. I have available an interview conducted recently on my monthly local
history-programme, about this vital work and its larger implications for our human
(and, post-human!) future. Please contact me for details, and the CD will be supplied
in return for cost ($1.00 US) and postage. Sincerely, Emmett R Smith <[EMAIL
PROTECTED]>
Comment posted by: Emmett R Smith on Thursday, 4th December, 2003 - 12:45am GMT
The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy"
Groupe de communication Mulindwas
"avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie"
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Buy Ink Cartridges or Refill Kits for your HP, Epson, Canon or Lexmark
Printer at MyInks.com. Free s/h on orders $50 or more to the US & Canada.
http://www.c1tracking.com/l.asp?cid=5511
http://us.click.yahoo.com/mOAaAA/3exGAA/qnsNAA/TTwplB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
**********Keep Hope Alive!!!*************
Win upto =N=150,000.00 ... Essay Competition 'HOPE PROJECT" ...see the ===>>>
http://www.iseehope.org
Nigeria arise to rebuild Hope
++++++++++++++
Nigerians for Nigeria, rebuilding a Country where No man is oppressed.
- ---
Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
**********Keep Hope Alive!!!*************
Try a faster browser for
FREE....https://secure.bmtmicro.com/opera/buy-opera.html?AID=659398
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
--------------------------------------------
This service is hosted on the Infocom network
http://www.infocom.co.ug
