Europeans turning against Israel
AS THE Middle East conflict burns on, more Europeans are turning against Israel. A growing number subscribe to the belief that the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians is the wellspring of much of the world's ills today , and that the blame for all this lies squarely with Israel - and by extension, with its staunchest ally, the United States.
Go to a dinner party in Paris, London or any other European capital and watch how things develop. The topic of conversation may be Iraq, it may be George Bush, it may be Islam, terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. However it starts out, you can be sure of where it will inevitably end - with a dissection of the Middle East situation and a condemnation of Israeli actions in the occupied territories. I can't count how many times I've seen it. European sympathy for the Palestinians runs high, while hostility toward Israel is often palpable.
And the anger is reaching new levels: A poll of 3,000 people published last month by Germany's University of Bielefeld showed more than 50 percent of respondents equating Israel's policies toward the Palestinians with Nazi treatment of the Jews.
Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed specifically believed that Israel is waging a war of extermination against the Palestinian people.
Germany is not alone in these sentiments. They have been expressed elsewhere, and often by prominent figures. In 2002, the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago declared,
"What is happening in Palestine is a crime which we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz."
In Israel just last month, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, the Irish winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize, compared the country's suspected nuclear weapons to Auschwitz, calling them "gas chambers perfected".
.... Over dinner in Berlin not long ago, a French-woman told me emphatically that Israel was "America's policeman in the Middle East". Her companion, nodding in furious agreement, insisted that the two countries are partners in a "new imperialism", leading the world inexorably into war. Israel is at once America's servant and the tail that wags the dog - doing America's bidding while forcing it into madcap adventures such as Iraq.
As that sentiment grows, American support for the Jewish state will continue to scratch raw nerves in the Old World. -Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post
Todah to Katy.
As an antidote, one might want to read Melanie Phillips:
British Muslims Cheapen the Holocaust.
Phillips explains how the Shoah is a "unique atrocity ... a crime against the Jewish people without parallel in its nature and scale" -
The Holocaust was principally a crime against the Jews. It was only the Jewish people who were specifically singled out for the extermination of an entire race. Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally handicapped people, and others were murdered too, and we should remember that. But the Nazis did not try to chart every last great-aunt by marriage who might have been a Gypsy, homosexual, or mentally handicapped person in order to remove all those groups from the face of the earth; that terrible fate was reserved for the Jews alone. It was not merely people who were being exterminated, but a people.
And she takes to task the Muslim Council of Britain for boycotting the Auschwitz commemoration in Westminster Hall "because, according to its Secretary-General Iqbal Sacranie, the event excluded 'ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of Palestine.' "
Phillips: "If Sacranie really thinks that Jewish and Palestinian suffering should always be commemorated together, then why doesn’t he mention the victims of the Holocaust every time he protests about the Palestinian conflict?"
I would say Phillips stands alone in the UK, but for Carol Gould.
Writing about the the 50% jump in antisemitic attacks in the UK in an editorial at Jewish Comment, Carol explains the climate in Britain through personal experience, some of which will make your jaw drop if you live in the U.S.
I am being told tonight in a social setting that "there is no anti-Semitism in Britain" by a Jewish friend. "Britain is one of the kindest countries in the world for Jews," say these people.
.... Why is it that for many years now I have seen the British anti-Semite from an entirely different perspective? I am, after all, British myself and in mixed company am not identified as either Jewish or Christian. However, comments made at dinner parties and in work situations in which I have found myself have made me speechless with astonishment. ("Oh, I see it is a Jewish holiday -- another excuse for them to flaunt their fur coats and stuff their faces." etc etc)
What is so alarming about the coverage of Israeli history in the British media is its emphasis on the ‘terror gangs’ that ‘created Israel’ and the ‘genocide’ of 1948. Most young Britons know nothing about the Shoah and the systematic state extermination of European Jewry. The remnant of that great and numerous community who made its way to Palestine is characterised in many British programmes and newspapers as ‘a gang of terrorists.’ I have had this thrown at me countless times in the private homes of otherwise gracious hosts.
Gd help us.