The new anti-Semitism?

By Jonathan Cook
April 8, 2005

http://www.iviews.com/Articles/articles.asp?ref=IV0504-2670

Anti-Semitism, like some plague-inducing virus, is "evolving" — or so warns
Holocaust scholar Daniel J. Goldhagen in the American Jewish weekly The Forward . According to the author, the lessons of the Holocaust are slowly being
forgotten and a "free-floating" globalized hatred of Jews is being spread via the
Internet and television.

Goldhagen’s piece, "The Globalisation of anti-Semitism," is one of the latest
contributions to a growing body of reports by American and Israeli
journalists and research centers purporting to show that a powerful new strain of racism
is sweeping the globe. None of the authors is as disinterested as he
claims:
each hopes to silence criticism of both Israel and the muscular Zionist lobby
groups within Washington that support Israel.

Goldhagen’s trick is to turn traditional Christian anti-Semitism on its head.
Where once the anti-Semites accused the Jews of being the contagion carriers
— harming their neighbors by spreading their uniquely "diseased" financial,
professional and moral ideas — now it is the non-Jew who must be quarantined.
We are all anti-Semites unless we can prove otherwise. 

"Globalized anti-Semitism has become part of the substructure of prejudice in
the world," Goldhagen writes. "It is relentlessly international in its focus
on Israel at the center of the most conflict-ridden region today, and on the
United States as the world’s omnipresent power."

The rise of Arab anti-Semitism, which has no obvious connection to historic
European hatred of Jews, is explained away: "Essentially, Europe has exported
its classical racist and Nazi anti-Semitism to Arab countries, which they then
applied to Israel and Jews in general."

The process, however, has not stopped there, according to Goldhagen. "Then
the Arab countries re-exported the new hybrid demonology back to Europe and,
using the United Nations and other international institutions, to other countries
around the world. In Germany, France, Great Britain and elsewhere, today’s
intensive anti-Semitic expression and agitation uses old tropes once applied to
local Jews — charges of sowing disorder, wanting to subjugate others — with
new content overwhelmingly directed at Jews outside their countries."

The only way to prove one is not infected, Goldhagen implies, is by
abstaining from any criticism of Israel and Zionist influences — Christian as well as
Jewish — currently dominating Washington’s policy-making circles.

Goldhagen makes a solitary concession: that "fair" criticism can be made of
Israeli policies, although who is to be the arbiter is left unclear. Even were
genuine peace in the Middle East to be achieved, he believes "anti-Semitism’s
deep roots in the ever more globalizing consciousness, and its tenacity and
plasticity, make its dissipation unlikely."

There is little basis for any of Goldhagen’s conclusions. Research
consistently shows that for many years the most insidious form of anti-Semitism has been
directed not against Jews but Muslims. In the wake of September 11, that is
truer than ever, with unthinking stereotypes of "the Arab" promoted in the
mainstream media, Hollywood films and much of the language used by the White House.

A report published in 2003 by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
(ADC) found a disturbing rise in hate crimes against American Arabs since
9/11. The first such report produced on this scale, the ADC document notes 700
violent attacks against Americans perceived to be Arabs or Muslims in the the
first nine weeks after September 11, including several murders. It also records
at least 80 cases of officials illegally removing passengers from planes and
more than 800 cases of employment discrimination against Arabs.

A chapter of the report also identifies regular anti-Muslim and anti-Arab
incitement in the American media and among senior politicians. Just imagine, for
example, the outcry at the media headline "Why is Islam a threat to America
and the West?" had it been applied to Judaism.

The success of Zionist academics and journalists in winning a
disproportionate share of world attention for the plight of the Jewish Diaspora, thus
eclipsing the concerns of the Arab Diaspora, is proof in itself that global Jewry
today enjoys a far more protected status than its inferior Semitic cousin.

Nonetheless, it is accepted without question by scholars like Goldhagen and
by policymakers in the US capital that eternal vigilance is needed in the
battle to defeat anti-Semitism. Such an assumption recently led to the Orwellian
double-think of senior Republican senator Rick Santorum. He announced in April
that he would be introducing "ideological diversity" legislation to empower
officials to cut funding to any college that allows its staff or students to
criticise Israel openly.

The urgent need for legislation to protect Jews on campuses across America
was justified by the Zionist pressure group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),
which reported a 24 per cent rise in anti-Semitic "incidents" at US colleges
last year. Even allowing for the fact that the ADL is vague about what
constitutes an "anti-Semitic incident", mixing "assaults" with "harassment", this
percentile rise represents a mere 21 additional incidents on college campuses in all
of the United States in 2002. 

One need only look at the list of Washington’s most powerful lobby groups —
from the ADL and American Israel Public Action Committee (AIPAC) to the
Zionist Organization of America and the American Jewish Committee — to understand
that the Jewish community and Israel have a forceful voice on Capitol Hill
safeguarding their interests.

There are no equally influential Arab lobbying groups, which may explain why
attacks on Muslims and the increasingly draconian administrative measures
being taken against Arabs and Muslims in the US and Europe go largely unreported
and thus unprotested.

What does get reported — repeatedly — is a supposed huge surge in
anti-Semitic attacks around the world. Conferences and think-tanks endlessly draw our
attention to the rise in the number of incidents. Few of these authorities
agree on numbers, however. For instance, a meeting organized by the United Nations
and Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris this month said 1,300 anti-Semitic
"acts" had been identified in France alone since 2001, while Israeli researchers
backed by the ADL identified 311 "serious incidents" globally last year.

Such glaring disparities stem from the inherent difficulty of defining an
"anti-Semitic act." The Wiesenthal Centre apparently includes almost anything —
from a knife attack, to a journalist’s vitriol against Ariel Sharon, to the
mere title of the Electronic Intifada website, which the Wiesenthal Centre cited
as evidence — along with the blathering of American neo-Nazi organizations
and existence of some tasteless but low budget video games apparently produced
by teenagers in the Arab world — in a report on anti-Semitism’s spread
through the Internet. 

Israeli researchers from Tel Aviv University tightened the definition a
little, admitting that there had been only 56 incidents involving a weapon around
the world last year — six more attacks than that of the previous year.

Professor Dina Porat of Tel Aviv University’s Project for the Study of Anti-S emitism did at least admit there was a methodological problem in calculating
anti-Semitism in quantitative terms. "I cannot say with total confidence that
every incident reported in these figures was motivated by anti-Semitism,"
adding that a report of a monument damaged in the Netherlands "turned out to be
nothing more than a homeless person looking for shelter for the night."

Unfortunately, however, whatever the definitions used, the same hyperbolic
conclusions are drawn. Prof. Porat observed that most of those responsible for
anti-Semitic attacks were Muslims, inadvertently suggesting that the motive was
not the "age-old hatred" of Jews supposedly characteristic of Europeans, but
rather, a more modern phenomenon: Muslims retaliating against fellow Jewish
citizens for Israel’s military strategies against the Palestinians.

Disturbing though this trend may be, it clearly is not evidence of the return
of traditional European anti-Semitism — whatever Goldhagen and the other
prophets of the new anti-Semitism claim. It suggests, rather, that in the "new
Europe" extreme passions are being unleashed among Arab immigrant populations by
the increasingly violent and brutal policies of Ariel Sharon in the occupied
territories. Jews are a symbolic and easy target for such attacks.

In other words, a microcosmic re-enactment of the Middle East conflict is
being played out by a few Arabs — remember, just 56 armed attacks last year,
according to the Israeli study — in cities like London and Paris. These Muslims,
however deluded, believe they are restoring an honor to an Arab or Islamic
nation that they feel has been humiliated by Israel’s violence and cruelty
towards the Palestinians. They feel they represent the weak striking out at a group
perceived as strong. The success of Zionist lobby groups in America and the
international community’s failure to compel Israel to respect and obey
international law only reinforce the perception of Jewish strength in the face of Arab
impotence.

Nevertheless, Prof. Porat’s colleague Dr. Avi Becker of the World Jewish

Congress sees such incidents in more apocalyptic terms. "I don’t think it would be
right to speak in terms of a new Holocaust at this stage, but there is no
doubt that Jewish communities are at war."

Dr. Becker was also keen to mix criticism of Israel into his pot. Apparently
forgetting the toll of six million Jews in Nazi death camps, he said: "The
rise of anti-Semitism in Western Europe comes in the disguise of freedom of
expression. As far as I am concerned, this is the worst type of anti-Semitism."

In equally deceiving style, the Wiesenthal Centre at its conference tried to
link the attacks by Muslims with the Jew hatred of 1930s Europe. The center’s
Rabbi Marvin Hier said: "These are critical times. Never since the end of the
Second World War have we witnessed such a proliferation of anti-Semitism."

To underline his point he added: "There is nothing new about the oldest
hatred. Some will hide behind what Israel is doing ... but those are just excuses,
that’s a ruse."

The diagnosis from Goldhagen and others is that we, the non-Jews, are doomed
to our age-old racism. It’s in our genes: we are born in thrall to our
prejudice.

Where does such a thesis lead? In another time and place, it may — like

other philosophies of uniqueness and disease that preceded it — take us along a
route that leads to the horrible gas chambers of a warped imagination.