By Benjamin Weinthal

While Europe commemorated International Holocaust Day last month, the
European Union is experiencing an explosion of modern anti-Semitism. Have
the lessons of murderous Nazi racial anti-Semitism been inculcated into
mainstream European opinion and action?

The results of the Jewish Agency’s report released in January showing global
anti-Semitism spiraling out of control – and of a German Bielefeld
University study in December documenting mushrooming hatred of Israel –
recall the memorable line in the film “Casablanca,” in which police Captain
Renault announces that Rick’s Cafe must be closed because of illegal
activity. “I’m shocked, shocked to discover that gambling is going on
here!’” says Renault, while being handed the proceeds of his gambling wins.

While some observers of Jew-hatred in Western Europe are not shocked by the
largest wave of anti-Semitism since the Hitler movement, many European
governments, policy makers and academics tend to feign shock like Renault or
simply cannot fathom that hatred of Israel is the most ubiquitous form of
contemporary anti-Semitism.

The Bielefeld study found that 41 percent of Europeans agreed with the
statement that Jews are exploiting the Holocaust to advance their own
interests, and 46 percent supported the contention that Israel in general
“is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”

The shift from the largely obsolete version of Nazi-based biological
anti-Semitism to the prevailing form of contemporary anti-Semitism was best
captured by the Swedish Social Democratic mayor of Malmo, Ilmar Reepalu. “We
accept neither Zionism nor anti-Semitism,” Reepalu said on International
Holocaust Remembrance Day, blasting the city’s small Jewish community for
not “distancing” itself from Israel during the country’s efforts to repel
Hamas rocket attacks during last year’s Operation Cast Lead war. Meanwhile,
the mayor has solidified an alliance with radical Islamic strands among the
Muslim population, which makes up 15 percent of Malmo’s 250,000 people.

The Jewish Agency report revealed that more acts of anti-Semitism took place
during the first three months of 2009 than in the entire year of 2008; in
France, 631 incidents were recorded during the first six months of 2009,
compared to 474 in all of 2008.

The report appears to reflect what many commentators in Europe have observed
over the years: a marriage between leftists and Islamic organizations that
aims to turn the Jewish state into an international punching bag.

European leftists frequently declare the empty slogan of “never again
fascism,” while championing anti-Semitic despotic groups and regimes such
as Hamas, Hezbullah and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Witness the example of
the vice president of the German Left Party, Sahra Wagenknecht, and her
fellow party members of the parliament.

When Israeli President Shimon Peres indirectly referenced the Iranian threat
and the need to stop the Islamic Republic’s drive to go nuclear during his
speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day to the German Parliament, Wagenknecht
and fellow German Left Party members Christine Buchholz, Heike Hänsel and
Sevim Dagdelen refused to participate in a standing ovation. They justified
their protest because Peres warned about the dangers of the Iranian regime
and because he participated in Israel’s self-defense wars.

Buchholz lead a hardcore faction within the Left Party that supported
Palestinian suicide attacks against Israel as a legitimate form of
“resistance.” Wagenknecht is an admirer of the ex-German Democratic
Republic’s Stalinist system, which refused – as part of its foreign policy
doctrine – to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

All of the Left Party members, of course, cynically cherish the notion of
memorializing murdered Jews. Wagenknecht issued a statement in early
February defending her snub of Peres: “My behavior does not mean in any way
that I withhold respect for the occasion of the speech, the commemoration of
the crimes of the Holocaust committed by the Germans. I bow in deep humility
to the victims of the Shoah.”

Yet what disturbs the Left Party – and it is not merely limited to members
of the German Left who participated in pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbullah rallies
–is the notion of Jews flexing their muscles to defend their national
security. With bitter irony, Eike Geisel, an undogmatic leftist author
(1945-1997), neatly summed up the problem: “The Jews, if they’re not dead,
should please suffer, admonish and warn, but not fight back.”

The lesson that many Germans fail to grasp within the context of the endless
series of Shoah remembrance events is “Pray for the dead, and fight like
hell for the living,” to invoke the American trade unionist Mother Jones.
Where are the Mother Joneses of Europe when it comes to stopping Iranian
anti-Semitism, the regime’s violence toward its civilian population and its
nuclear weapons threat?

All of this helps to explain why Germany’s only institute devoted to
researching anti-Semitism is slavishly devoted to dead Jews instead of
fighting to prevent harm to living Jews in Europe. Wolfgang Benz, the
scandal-plagued director of the Berlin Center for Research on Anti-Semitism,
spends his time documenting desecrated Jewish cemeteries in East Germany and
dangerously lumping murderous anti-Semitism together with bias against
Muslims. Benz argues, “The fury of the new enemies of Islam parallels the
older rage of anti-Semites against the Jews.”

Harvard-trained political scientist Daniel J. Goldhagen previously told me,
“Anti-Semites the world over have tried to stir further hatred of Jews by
equating Israelis and Jews with Nazis. Now the Berlin center, supposedly
devoted to the study of anti-Semitism, has abetted them by delegitimizing
telling the truth about the people with the most Nazi-like views of Jews:
the political Islamists.” One of the key manifestations of modern
anti-Semitism is equating the Jewish state with Nazi Germany. Just as the
Nazi regime was defeated and dissolved, the Nazi Germany-equals-Israel
parallel encourages the abolition of Israel.

The Berlin Center advises the German government on combating anti-Semitism.
Its decision to ignore the deadly cocktail of Islamic anti-Semitism and
left-wing anti-Semitism (read: modern anti-Semitism) does not bode well for
the security of Germany’s Jews or the so-called German-Israeli special
relationship. Benz’s reputation took a beating last month when he was
unrepentant about revelations that he had repeatedly honored his doctoral
supervisor Karl Bosl, who early in his career had been a hard-core Nazi
ideologue.

Absent an assertive, confrontational posture toward turning Israel and
Diaspora Jewry into a whipping boy, Europe will experience a flight of Jews
seeking refuge in Israel and the United States. But, unlike Captain Renault
in Casablanca, Europeans cannot claim they are “shocked, shocked” because
the anti-Semitic writing is clearly on the wall.

http://www.thejewishadvocate.com/current/Editorials

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