What is Europe’s anti-Semitism problem about?

In SlateEurope Has a Serious Anti-Semitism Problem, and It’s Not All About Israel:

recent Anti-Defamation League survey found that 24 percent of the French population and 21 percent of the German population harbor some anti-Semitic attitudes. A recent study of anti-Semitic letters received by Germany’s main Jewish organization found that 60 percent of the hate mail came from well-educated Germans. So this isn’t just a problem with young, disaffected Muslim men.

After all, the two worst recent incidents of violence against Jews in Europe—the killing of three children and a teacher in a 2012 attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse and the shooting of three people at a Jewish museum in Brussels in May—took place during times when there wasn’t much news coming out of Israel. Continentwide statistics on anti-Semitic incidents leading up to the most recent uptick don’t show much of an overall trendin Britain, anti-Semitic violence is becoming less common while online abuse is becoming more frequent—or a correlation with events in Israel and Palestine.

antisemitismThe perpetrators of the two incidents in question? 29 year old Mehdi Nemmouche and 24 year old Mohammed Merah. That’s what I call chutzpah. Or, the author of the piece is flying under the radar of the implicit red-lines of what is permissible in Slate by inserting those links which actually support the idea that anti-Semitism is a problem of disaffected young Muslim men. Mind you, I grant that anti-Semitism has broad, but shallow, roots across much of Europe. The key is whether mild antipathy flips into politicized violence. Because of the Arab-Israeli conflict people of a Muslim background often have casually anti-Semitic views above and beyond what you might expect. Some individuals take the political dimensions very seriously, and the drum beat of vociferous coverage of the actions of the Israeli state bleeds into perceptions about Jews as a whole.*

Though the American media seems to be taking an antiseptic attidue toward the demographic composition of anti-Israeli rallies which have become anti-Semitic in a cartoonish sense, they haven’t censored the photographs. It’s rather obvious that young men of Middle Eastern heritage are prominent at these rallies. They aren’t a representative slice of the populations of France and Germany, to name two countries.

* To be even-handed, some Jews elide and erase the distinction between being Jewish and being Israeli.

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7 Responses to What is Europe’s anti-Semitism problem about?

  1. Maju says:

    The Tolouse massacre was performed by a single man (the scooter assassin) who had previously attacked some of his military colleagues and, if I recall correctly, was arrested soon after never to be heard about again (some South French reported that it was all very odd and likely to have some sort of military or spy mistery behind, maybe just personal revenge). Whatever the case weeks later the police execution of a self-proclaimed “Al Qaida” robber with hostages in the same city made all forget about the previous incident.

    Why are your only sources Zionist sites like Haaretz, the BBC or the Defamation League itself? Why not a single word about what is happening in Gaza right now, tonight? Why that horrible hypocrisy?!

    Why are you bringing out that isolate, strange and suspicious case of loner chain-killer soldier (so they said, I don’t remember a trial nor investigation) precisely now that the most Antisemitic state on Earth, Israel, is massacring Semites (Arabs) by the thousands in the Gaza Ghetto with all impunity with full support of the USA and of course that of the Defamation League (Israel’s Goebbels).

    My question is why North Americans think that it’s oh-so-great to murder hundreds of children and thousands of civilians in the most horrible open air prison in this part of the World? A

  2. @ why North Americans think” etc. etc.

    I doubt most of us think that the deaths in Gaza are “oh-so-great.” People do not want their peace of mind disturbed by those images broadcast into their homes. Their empathy is tempered,however, by their understanding that Hamas provoked the conflict. The fact that the Israelis kill more Arabs than vice versa does not make the cause of Hamas a just one. During WWII, Americans killed many more German civilians than vice verse. That fact, however, never led to any confusion about whose cause was righteous and whose was evil.

  3. Narr says:

    Non-Jewish Semites appear to be massacring other non-Jewish Semites in larger numbers than Israel is, but then Syrians and Iraqis (to use the imagined identities imposed on them by Western imperialists) have the disadvantage of not being massacred by Jews.

    And to answer for myself alone (other North Americans can speak for themselves) I don’t think it’s “oh-so-great.” It just is.

  4. Jane Austen says:

    How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!

  5. I think North American media is taking the cue from European media in whitewashing who, exactly are committing those acts. If the European media will just refer to “French youths” than so will the North American media.

    Of course it’s loaded to describe just who is yelling “Heil Hitler” in Pro Palestinian rallies. Hint: It’s not Aryan Neo-Nazi’s. I think the MSM just doesn’t want to open that can of worms.

  6. Narr says:

    I like Jane Austen’s comment and plan to steal it 😉

    Narr

  7. Granite26 says:

    My first reaction to reading the clip was wondering how they defined ‘some Anti-Semitic attitudes’. Specifically whether the ‘attitudes’ would compare with any group the espouser wasn’t a member of, say, red-heads, foreigners, golf players, or those dagburned kids what won’t get off my lawn.

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