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Rochelle Wilner |
Frank Dimant |
Prof. Stephen Scheinberg |
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Rochelle Wilner |
Frank Dimant |
Prof. Stephen Scheinberg |
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by Professor Stephen Scheinberg
National Chair, League for Human Rights
Professor of History, Concordia University, Montreal
“The State of Israel is a central component of Jewish identity. When Israel is attacked in inflammatory terms, no one should kid themselves who the real target is.” (35)
Rabbi Michael Melchior
Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel
“Arab governments have transformed Israel into an outpost of malevolent world Jewry, viewing Israelis and Jews as interchangeable emblems of cosmic evil.” (36)
Jonathan Rosen
New York Times Magazine
“I am a Jew. My father is a Jew.” (37)
Journalist Daniel Pearl
murdered by antisemitic
and anti-American Muslim extremists
Several researchers involved in the study of the pathology of hatred had thought that antisemitism was a declining phenomenon. Various forms of evidence seemed to point in this direction. Public opinion surveys indicated that antisemitic views that before World War II were widespread, and were perhaps held by the majority of western populations, were now harboured by far less significant minorities. Tabulations of antisemitic incidents revealed slight ups and downs over the years but did not provoke fears of an antisemitic upsurge. Right wing extremist groups were still operating but seemed to be in marked decline. All this led Leonard Dinnerstein, the leading historian of American antisemitism, to conclude in his 1994 study that it had “declined in potency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.” (38) Likewise, in his recently published study of the Canadian Jewish community, sociologist Morton Weinfeld confidently declares that while “antisemitism is not gone,” it is “increasingly irrelevant to the daily lives and opportunities of Canadian Jews.” (39) Finally, Israeli scholar Barry Rubin contended in 1995 that “never before, at least since the time Christianity seized power over the Roman Empire, has anti-Semitism been less significant than at present.” (40) I must admit to sharing these views until very recently, but the events of the past year and a half have forced me and many of my colleagues to take account of what has been labelled “the new antisemitism”.
Certainly, researchers have employed the term to describe a new wave of antisemitic violence by members of the Arab diaspora directed against members and institutions of the Jewish community in Europe. Some have noted this phenomenon surfacing in the political discourse used increasingly in the international arena. Other commentators, largely in the United Kingdom, have described a purported upsurge in the, not so polite, antisemitism of British salons. I believe that these elements are interrelated and that a better understanding of the new antisemitism demands a comprehensive definition of its constituent factors.
I understand the new antisemitism as having four major complementary elements. The first is the rise of antisemitism in the Arab world along with a burgeoning propaganda campaign that has brought it successfully to the Arab, and to some, presently unknown, extent to the Muslim masses. A second directly related element is a growing Arab diaspora with many of its members already infected by the pernicious virus of antisemitism and others made more vulnerable to the disease by discriminatory conditions in their host countries. This has led to a rise of Arab hate crimes directed against Jews. The third component is the persistent campaign to delegitimate Israel in the family of nations. Within, and through the United Nations, Israel and the Jewish people have been subjected to unparalleled discriminatory treatment. From all of these factors there has emerged a fifth element, the unleashing of latent antisemitism in circles which, since the Holocaust, had regarded such expressions as a taboo which had no place in an enlightened society.
In order to understand the contemporary manifestations of antisemitism that emanate from the Middle East and have already reached Canadian shores, it is instructive to examine the growth of prejudice against Jews in Arab lands. Historic Islam did not develop the well-articulated antisemitic doctrines of western Christianity. To be sure, Jews living in Muslim societies did not escape the insecurities of their European brethren, but the distinguished scholar Bernard Lewis puts it fairly and succinctly, stating that “they were better off under Muslim than under Christian rule in most significant respects.” (41) An eighth century Islamic legal classic set out both the discriminatory burdens and the safeguards for Jews and Christians: “place a poll tax upon them and do not enslave them and do not let the Muslims oppose them or harm them or devour their property except as permitted.” (42) In practice, both sides of this injunction might be ignored at particular moments, depending on local conditions. Thus the full picture of Jewish life under Islamic rule encompasses not only the massacres of hundreds of Jews in Fez (1033), Cordoba (1010 and 1013), Granada (1066), and Marrakesh (1232), but also the golden age of Spanish Jewry when its poetry, philosophy, and business enterprises flourished from roughly the end of the ninth century to the death of the pre-eminent Jewish scholar Maimonides in 1204.
Western antisemitism made only small inroads, largely through Christian communities in the Middle East, but the upsurge in the Zionist enterprise after World War I did spark an antisemitic response in some Islamic nationalist groups and encouraged pogrom-like actions against Jews in various parts of the region. Nazi efforts to cultivate Arab sympathies met with some success during the 1930s with the most noted collaboration of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who organized Muslim SS troops from Bosnia, and actively sought an alliance with Hitler on the basis of “their mutual enemies: the British, the Jews and the communists”. (43)
Yet it was undoubtedly the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, along with the defeat of Arab armies, that marked the decisive turning point for the development of Arab antisemitism. At the very moment when Arab hopes for development were encouraged by the fall of colonial empires in the aftermath of World War II, Arab armies were decisively defeated by a previously scorned or ignored Jewish minority. Moreover, the longed-for economic development of the Arab lands did not take place. The French and British were gone, colonialism could no longer be blamed for economic and political failures, but the interchangeable symbols of Israel, Zionism, and the Jew would serve as the new scapegoat for the failures of Arab states.
Fortunately, for the Arab elites, European society had provided a rich legacy of antisemitic works that could be turned to the use of their cause. Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford’s International Jew and other such works found their way into Arabic editions, as well as Arab-published editions in various languages to be disseminated through the world. King Feisal of Saudi Arabia distributed free copies of The Protocols to his guests and President Nasser of Egypt recommended it to some of his visitors. They understood, along with the Arab propagandists of today, that the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy provided a better scapegoat than tiny Israel. In case the masses do not bother to read The Protocols, it has been made into a thirty-part dramatic series by Arab Radio and Television. (44) There has always been a corpus of western-produced slanders against the Jews which met the needs of Arab elites for readily accessible propaganda to unleash on their own people, as well as Muslim populations around the world.
Of course, for some Arab intellectuals, especially those with Western ties, such antisemitism could be embarrassing and they therefore introduced the tenuous distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, a distinction which had no place in their homelands. However, for half a century now the Arab world has steadily propagandized its own population, and much of the rest of the world, not only with the classics of antisemitism but also with its own additions and refinements. Much of this propaganda moves beyond the traditional canon of antisemitism to single out Israel as a criminal Zionist enterprise engaging in acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing that rivals the Nazis’ atrocities. Somehow, the real acts of genocide or ethnic cleansing in our own time seem to escape the notice of these publicists. Thus, there can be seen even in the cities of Canada, the vile graffiti equating the Star of David with the Nazi swastika. This is not merely propagandistic overkill or hyperbole in the service of Arab emotion, but part of a broad movement to delegitimate the only state of the Jewish people. The repercussions that this type of propaganda will have on the wider Canadian public in terms of injecting antisemitic stereotypes into the national consciousness has yet to be assessed. Clearly, such prejudiced material is an anathema to the multicultural values of Canadian society and on these grounds alone should be viewed with extreme caution.
Space does not permit more than a few examples of the most recent products of Arab antisemitism but hardly a day goes by without another example of these vile productions. “It’s not my fault Hitler hated the Jews,” says the present Grand Mufti. “Anyway they hate them just about everywhere.” (45) In the same vein a journalist writing in Cairo’s Al-Akhbar gives “our thanks to the late Hitler who wrought in advance, the vengeance of the Palestinians against the most despicable villains on the face of the earth. However, we rebuke Hitler for the fact that the vengeance was insufficient.” (46)
Such statements go beyond the now usual Holocaust denial to acknowledge the reality of the tragedy and revel in it, but denial is a more persistent theme. It was not always so because in the early years of Israel’s statehood, the far more sophisticated Arab response to the Holocaust was: “Why should the Palestinian people have to carry the burden of Hitler’s crimes?” The denial theme has predominated of late, beginning with a questioning of the number of victims by the Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas in the eighties and progressing to the PLO-affiliated Red Crescent which in a 1990 article referred to “the lie concerning the gas chambers”. Deniers wanted for prosecution by western governments have found havens in Arab countries and the well known French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy has been honoured in the region. Denial obviously serves the purpose of those who would invalidate Israel’s claim to have rescued the survivors of the European tragedy, and it also aids in bolstering the contention of a Jewish world “conspiracy” which supposedly created the Holocaust “myth”. (47)
Yet another weapon borrowed from the arsenal of European antisemitism is the blood libel which has a long and tragic history in Europe, but this horrendous slander has been taken up with enthusiasm in the Arab world and has found its way into the annals of United Nations debate. In its traditional form, the blood libel focussed on the disappearance of a Christian child and associated it with a supposed religious injunction to use the child’s blood in the production of Passover matzoh. In 1983 the Syrian Defence Minister wrote The Matzah of Zion, a book which revived the blood libel in the Arab world. This work is reportedly to be made into a film. An article in the Oct. 28, 2001 edition of Al-Ahram, the New York Times of Egypt summarizes the book. Its concluding paragraph states:
“The bestial drive to knead Passover matzahs with the blood of non-Jews is [confirmed] in the records of the Palestinian police where are many recorded cases of the bodies of Arab children who had disappeared being found, torn to pieces without a single drop of blood. The most reasonable explanation is that the blood was taken to be kneaded into the dough of extremist Jews to be used in matzahs to be devoured during Passover.” (48)
These astounding calumnies against the Jewish people rarely rate a mention from the Western media, which has, however, been somewhat more alert in its coverage of the latest form of Arab antisemitism.
After September 11, it became fashionable in the Arab world to deny its own citizens’ involvement in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon by, of course, blaming the Jews. The vile story that 4000 Jews stayed home from work at the World Trade Centre on September 11 was widely circulated in the Arab and Muslim world. 61% of Muslims, in a recent Gallup poll, appear to have accepted this lie when they denied Arab responsibility for the tragedy. (49) There was even the accompanying bit of slander that rabbis had advised their congregants to withdraw their funds from the stock market before the tragic day. While many media outlets reported these stories and their impact on “the Arab street”, the focus of the stories seemed to be more on Arab denial of responsibility rather than on both the implicit and explicit antisemitism involved.
Acts of terrorism by Islamic fundamentalists have also been, too often, separated from antisemitism by some in the western media… The recent killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is a case in point in which the “American” aspect has been given undue priority. The organization "Journalists Without Borders" focuses solely on the killing of a journalist in its condemnation of the murder. Pearl was kidnapped and killed because he was both an American and a Jew, twin requirements for the assassins’ ideal victim The fact that his parents came from Israel was probably not known to his murderers who appear to have forced him to say on video tape: “I am a Jew. My father is a Jew.” According to one account, of some one who has seen the tape, one of Pearl’s captors warns that “other Americans and Jews should be ready to face a fate like Daniel Pearl.” (50)
In the case of Osama Bin Laden, some have argued that he grafted on his antisemitic and anti-Zionist message to his anti-American agenda, after the fact of 9/11, but his hatred of both Jewish and Christian infidels has never been in doubt. The targeting of the World Trade Center and New York City, I believe, was more than anti-Americanism; it was also a stereotypical symbol of Jewish power. The terrorist curriculum certainly starts with Anti-Westernism 101, but it is taken concurrently with Anti-Zionism/Antisemitism 202.
Too many have forgotten that long before 9/11, similar — if less dramatic — tragedies took place on this side of the Atlantic when Hezbollah agents bombed the Embassy of Israel in Buenos Aires in 1992, followed by an attack on the city’s AMIA Jewish Community Centre two years later. A total of 115 lives were lost in these bombings, with over 550 injured, with the majority of victims and casualties occurring in the AMIA attack. As far away as Buenos Aires, Jews were singled out even then as apparently “legitimate” targets interchangeable with the “Zionist enemy”. At that time, Jewish institutions around the world increased their security in response to the threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. Following 9/11, this pattern has been repeated. In Canada itself, synagogues and schools have been forced to assume the financial burden involved in additional security measures and personnel, which speaks to the prevailing insecurity of the Jewish community which no Audit alone can capture.
In his recent New York Times Magazine article “The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism,” writer Jonathan Rosen offers the important observation that “by grafting ancient Christian calumnies onto modern political grievances, Arab governments have transformed Israel into an outpost of malevolent world Jewry; viewing Israelis and Jews as interchangeable emblems of cosmic evil.” (51) His point is important to understand since Arab propaganda has transformed a regional conflict between Israel and its neighbours into a global war against the Jews.
The western media rarely carries the news of Arab antisemitism even as their public seeks to know more about the Arab world. Several explanations may be suggested. First, the media could be repeating their sins of the 1930s when they often ignored or minimized Nazi antisemitism. Second, the journalists may view Arab antisemitism as only a bit of hyperbole limited to their conflict with Israel. Third, the same media which generally reacted negatively to the rhetorical excesses of the French extremist Jean Marie LePen, may have a racist double standard in which North Americans and Europeans are held to a higher standard than the Arab peoples. Fourth, they may consider expressions of Arab antisemitism as too common to be newsworthy.
The explanation may lie in a combination of the above factors but, in any case, ignoring or downplaying Arab antisemitism is not only dangerous for the Jews of the world but also limits our understanding of Islamic fundamentalism. If we are to comprehend its ideological basis, then the antisemitism fostered even within the so-called “moderate” Arab nations is a basic building block of the Islamic fundamentalist ideological structure. It has also become an important component in the intellectual and emotional makeup of the Arab diaspora.
I had a surprising telephone call, early last October 2001, from a friend who asked me if I had heard anything about a September incident in Paris in which, reportedly, Jewish young people had been assaulted by Arab youths on the Champs Elysées. It seemed unlikely to me because I had received no reports from the usual antisemitism monitoring services and even the Jewish press had not covered it, but I did promise my friend that I would keep my eyes open for any confirmation of the event. Only a few weeks later did I learn that up to 200 Arabs had come in from the suburbs and, shouting slogans like “Death to the Jews” and “Destroy Israel”, had struck and harassed young Jews who use the locale as a Sunday rendezvous. Police arrived, after an hour, and while they stopped the action, they made no arrests. There was almost no press attention, although one newspaper, Le Parisien reported fighting among youths, who were not further identified. This media strategy fits in well with the disposition of the French government, which seems to go to some lengths not to identify “Arab” perpetrators of attacks against Jews. By the same token, there were important elements in the Jewish communities who were, at least at first, reluctant to make much of the event, and this explains the initial lack of information. In recent weeks, however, the leaders of French Jewry have become more vocal and have begun to voice their concerns as they face the largest Arab diaspora community in Europe, with a strong Islamic fundamentalist element within it.
The Arab diaspora in France numbers three to four million or from 5% to 6.6% of the population and, with a high fertility rate, it is growing five times faster than the general population. There is no denying that while many of this population are successfully integrated, the majority has been ill-treated, with many — especially the youth — suffering from chronic unemployment, and they have been victims of racism and discrimination. Jean Marie LePen and his extremist National Front constitute a major force in French political life and he has inspired center-right politicians, and even socialists, to vie for his potential voters with their own anti-immigrant programs. Many among the disaffected Arab youth have identified with the Palestinian cause as perhaps a means of self-assertion. However, the Middle East media is widely available to them not only in print form, but through television satellite dishes which bring in the worst of Arab propaganda and, in all probability, its antisemitism. (52)
French Jews have generally been in the forefront of those opposing LePen and other extremist elements hostile to the Arabs. They have also joined in support of Muslim halal slaughtering practices, although in this instance it must be acknowledged that Jewish self-interest in protecting kosher slaughter of animals, which shares characteristics with halal, was an important motivation. There is no obvious conflict between the two communities in France that might serve as a useful explanation for Arab attacks on Jewish persons and institutions. In other words, the Arab war against the Jews has come to France.
In early January 2002, rocks and firebombs were thrown at the synagogue in the Paris suburb of Goussainville, A few days earlier, in the suburb of Creteil, firebombs caused extensive damage to the Otzar Hatorah school, and a Jewish elementary school in Marseilles was similarly attacked two months earlier, with a “Death to the Jews” graffiti left behind. On January 31, in the suburb of Montreuil, 40 youths, many with their faces covered with Palestinian headscarves, sprayed mace in the faces of Jewish youngsters. In a nearby suburb, only a week earlier, a Jewish school bus carrying children was stoned when it passed a housing project. (53) These are just some of the more recent serious incidents and many more could be cited, but one should not conclude from this that the French Jewish community is in immediate peril and that there will be a massive emigration to Israel, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon recently proclaimed. Israel’s ambassador to France, Eli Barnavi, was more restrained, saying that “it is exaggerated to say that French Jewry is in danger.” On his recent visit to Paris, Shimon Peres, once again at odds with Sharon, declared that “I am certain that France is not anti-Semitic, neither historically nor currently.” (54) His amnesia regarding the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy France is inexplicable, but his view of the present situation is shared by the Jewish leadership in France. The Jews of France are well integrated in the economic, political and cultural life of their country. They have felt secure even as they lived since World War II among Vichy collaborators, even amidst the rise of right wing extremism, and even while French foreign policy was extremely hostile to Israel, that their personal safety was never in question. It is therefore not surprising that the initial response of the French Jewish leadership was to downplay the incidents and declare their faith in French tolerance.
Both Premier Jospin and President Chirac assured the community of their friendship and support but that goodwill did not extend to urging the police to make arrests or denunciations of Arab perpetrators. One factor may be that the political leaders feel somewhat guilty about the wretched status of the Arab minority and hesitate to alienate them further. There are also signs that with a rapidly approaching presidential election this spring, the two major leaders are not inclined towards vigorous action. The Arab vote is growing larger and they outnumber the Jews in France by ten to one. Pascal Boniface a foreign policy expert and leading socialist, recently urged his party to consider a stronger pro-Arab position in the Middle East as a means of attracting more support. (55) These signs make the leadership of the Jewish community more restive, and with due reason.
A series of Jewish community rallies has been held. In one of them at Creteil, Moise Cohen, the President of the Paris Consistoire, put the matter in stark terms: “If Jews attacked Muslims and their schools there would be a public outrage, a political and media outrage. So why is it that when Jews are the victims of aggression, our politicians and our media remain silent?” (56) On February 1 Roger Cukierman, the President of CRIF, the umbrella organization of French Jewry delivered his own strong and far-reaching statement in Le Monde. He contended that even an attack on a synagogue became only “an act of violence,” with no seeming reference to its Jewish target. Increasing the heat of his message he argued: “The media like to give the widest exposure to voices critical of Israel and Jews, all the more so when these voices are Jewish. This way, media can’t be charged with anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism.” He charged the French judicial system with laxness in its failure to mete out meaningful sentences to those convicted of anti-Jewish violence and explained this failure in powerful words:
Holding out the hand of cooperation, Cukierman called for a real dialogue with moderate Moslems, those who were prepared to denounce violence. But in unmistakable words he declared that while the Jews were once again being made the scapegoat — “it’s a part that we no longer are prepared to play.” (57)
Some have seen in France the realization in microcosm of Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” and one writer, Michel Gurfinkiel, follows this approach by asking whether the French way of life is in danger and answering his question by raising the spectre of Islam overwhelming the nation. (58) It seems more likely that a growing Arab diaspora minority will play an ever more important role in French life and, given the growth of Arab communities elsewhere in Europe and North America, the French response to antisemitic violence, taking into account increasing Arab political strength, will be a very important model. Enlightened multicultural policies must be accompanied by the firmest response to acts of violence. Yet the main lesson these events in France offer to us here in Canada, is that anti-Zionism is the favoured expression of antisemitism in the world today, that its ramifications can be felt well beyond the Middle East and that it can take varied forms in distinctive national settings.
As in France, the Jewish community of the United Kingdom has been victimized by local Arab attacks on persons and institutions, with a similar response by the authorities. In October 2000, just after the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifadah, leaflets (probably prepared by the Islamist extremist group Al Muhajiroun) were distributed in Stamford Hill, North London, citing a commentary on the Koran that “the hour will not come until the Muslims kill the Jews”. Five perpetrators were apprehended, the police wanted to proceed with the case, but there was no prosecution. This led Neville Nagler, the director general of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to question why “under existing laws an overt appeal to kill members of a racial minority can be carried out with impunity.” (59) In the same month, and in the same neighbourhood. David Myers was the target of an attempted murder attempt by an Algerian asylum seeker. After a 2001 in which unease increased in the Jewish community, a Muslim cleric was charged in February 2002 with “soliciting for murder” after distributing videos calling on his co-religionists to “kill the Jews”.
There seems to be little media interest in these disturbing events. When the community hall of a North London synagogue burnt down and the police concluded the arsonists were racially motivated, this was hardly mentioned in the press. Mike Whine, the director of defence for the Board is disturbed. “There is an acute growing sense of being under threat … the level of physical attacks against us has increased substantially and this is a marked international trend.” Jo Wagerman, the first woman president of the Board, puts it succinctly that “one is very aware that recently, Britain isn’t the same.” (60) Yet while the level of antisemitic incidents in the U.K. has been intense since the beginning of the intifadah, one does not see there the kinds of Arab gang activities witnessed in Paris and its suburbs.
A more sophisticated antisemitic assault emanated from the Islamic Society in combination with the Socialist Worker movement at the University of Manchester. They launched a campaign to drive all supporters of Zionism off campus, under the guise of defending Palestinian human rights. The motion, which failed to gain the required two-thirds of the vote after a successful mobilization of Jewish students, would, in the words of Neville Nagler, have denied “to Jewish students their civil rights, religious identity and equal treatment”. (61)
Britain’s large, two million strong, Muslim population is primarily of South Asian origin and this makes a difference. While a great deal of Arab-produced antisemitic material has been directed towards the Muslims of South Asia, we have little sense of its impact even though we know we must treat the issue very seriously after the murder of Daniel Pearl. One might recall that only a few years ago Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad blamed his nation’s financial problems on the Jews. There has, however, been little evidence to date, that many Muslim youth of South Asian origin will take on the Palestinian headscarf or antisemitism as badges of identity, as will their Algerian cousins in France.
The antisemitism debate in the United Kingdom has taken on other forms, away from the street and into the salons, the press, and even the churches. London’s antisemitism in the salons controversy seems to have first been ignited by Petronella Wyatt who wrote in The Spectator that “since September 11 anti-Semitism and its open expression has become respectable at London dinner tables”. She was echoed by Barbara Amiel, wife of Lord Conrad Black who reported on the loose tongue of the French ambassador who, while under her own roof, blamed the present world crisis on “that shitty little country Israel.” (62) Perhaps more telling was the experience of Stephen Pollard, a writer and broadcaster who joined some of his Gentile friends at dinner. These were friends of long standing who Pollard “would have… sworn… did not have a racist bone in their bodies”. But the subject changed to the Middle East and one of his friends announced her personal boycott of Israeli goods. Pollard’s friend was not referring to Israeli swimsuits or oranges, it turned out, but to “Jewish goods”. She would personally boycott a British electronics firm because it was owned by a prominent Zionist and she made herself very clear:
‘You all stick together — always going on about the Holocaust. Stephen, you’re the same as the rest of them. You only defend Israel because you’re Jewish.’ The others all took her side. ‘Why don’t you leave her alone. She’s only saying what we think.’ I felt nauseated and shocked. I had been living in a dream world. (63)
It is difficult to say how far this new dispensation for antisemitism has penetrated British society or even the West End of London. Anecdotal evidence may be the stuff of journalism, but it is not very satisfactory evidence for social scientists. Still, the number of such sightings must give us pause to reflect on how events in the Middle East may be influencing thinking and behaviour in Europe, the United States and right here in Canada. Has the conflict given permission for latent antisemitism to surface and, if so, how widespread is it? Even future opinion surveys may not give us firm answers to these questions but, in the meantime, the warnings implicit in the anecdotes cannot be ignored. Moreover, the anecdotes seem to be confirmed by a major incident in the British press.
British friends and supporters of Israel have long been disappointed by the Middle Eastern coverage of three left-liberal publications, The Guardian, The Independent and The New Statesman, but the leadership of the Jewish community did not confuse this political stance, which they deplored, with antisemitism. Nothing, however, prepared the UK Jewish community for the January 14, 2001 issue of The New Statesman and especially its cover. The cover artist showed a Union Jack and over it was a golden Magen David (Jewish Star) almost piercing into the centre of the flag. Beneath this was the theme of the issue — “A kosher conspiracy”. The two lead articles by Dennis Sewell and John Pilger have been deemed inaccurate and even offensive, but certainly no more so than the usual fare offered up by the magazine.
It was the packaging authorized by New Statesman editor Peter Wilby that was truly offensive. He apologized after receiving a barrage of criticism, admitting that the cover gave “unwittingly the impression that The New Statesman was following an anti-Semitic tradition that sees the Jews as a conspiracy piercing the heart of the nation.” (64) There is not the slightest sign in his published apology that Wilby gave any reflection to why he had, at this moment in history, sanctioned such a cover. Even the General Secretary of the Labour Party, David Triesman, who is a Jew, condemned his fellow leftists of the magazine who offered up images of a Jewish conspiracy “redolent of the extreme right”. He had, said Triesman, subscribed to the journal for 40 years and “never though I would come to regard it as anti-Semitic. But I do today.” (65)
Loose salon or dining room table talk is one thing, but the editor of a leading British magazine has time to think about his product. Many of us who have been engaged in Jewish advocacy have encountered the response from editors that we must understand the pressures of getting out a daily newspaper and that their “mistakes” on Middle East coverage should be understood as a consequence of the pressures of time. No such excuse can be entertained for a weekly. Wilby and his colleagues had the time to reject the cover, if not the theme. If he will not reflect on his “unwitting” behaviour, then we must.
Elsewhere in UK society, a more conscious rejection of the Jews is taking place. Melanie Phillips, writing for The Spectator, identifies a new strain of antisemitism within the Church of England and other Christian churches. Ms. Phillips has argued that a doctrine called “replacement theology” is widely embraced within the Church and has a devastating antisemitic component. Briefly she states that the doctrine maintains “that the Jews have been replaced by the Christians in God’s favour, and so all God’s promises to the Jews, including the land of Israel, have been inherited by Christianity”. She finds that two of the doctrine’s leading proponents are the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Rish Abu El-Assal and an adherent to liberation theology, Father Naim Ateek. Of course, for these Arab clerics replacement theology serves the Palestinian cause, delegitimizing the Jewish claim to Arab land. Andrew White, canon of Coventry Cathedral, blames the Arab clerics for reviving a doctrine which was “key in fanning the flames of the Holocaust”. Through their cultivation within the Church of images of Palestinian oppression they have managed to link their cause to a theologically suspect belief. White also holds that while the Vatican buried the “replacement theology” doctrine after the Holocaust, today it nevertheless enjoys widespread influence in both the Anglican and Catholic churches.
Phillips substantiates her case with references to key adherents of the doctrine such as the Bishop of Guildford who is an admirer of both Riah and Ateek and no friend of Israel. “Ultimately,” he states, “one shared land is the vision one would want to pursue,” which is, one supposes, a vision much like that of Palestinians who advocate a democratic secular state over the whole of the land. Several of the clerics Phillips interviewed, who opposed the replacement doctrine, acknowledged that they had seen many followers crossing the line from criticism of Israel to anti-Jewish hatred. Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, regularly lectures on Islam before Christian groups. He avers that he has found in his audiences a “deeply rooted anti-Semitism latent in Britain”. Since September 11 he has discovered many who are prepared to blame Israel for everything and are unwilling to understand “that for Islam the very existence of Israel is a problem… Israel may be behaving illegally in a number of areas, but she is under attack. But white liberal Christians find it deeply offensive not to blame Israel for injustice.” (66) It would be interesting to have some statistical evidence on the support for both replacement theology and antisemitism within the churches, but Phillips does give us cause for concern.
Many UK Jews now feel less secure today, less certain of their gentile friends, and more sceptical about their place in British society. The writer Dan Jacobson cautions that we do not know “how deep or how prevalent this purported growth of British antisemitism really is.” (67) Finally, Professor Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, has taken these signs of antisemitic resurgence so seriously that in an address to peers and MPs he declared it his duty “to sound a warning,” before verbal abuse descended into “violence and bloodshed”. (68) Attacks on Israel, he contends, have crossed the line of legitimate criticism, and “what we are seeing goes way beyond that to become an attack on Jews, not just on the State of Israel.”
Both the British and French cases, each in their own way, show new forms of antisemitism, but flowing from the same source. Anti-Zionism and antisemitism have become inextricably linked. Even replacement theology, its origins lying in the older Christian and European antisemitism, has been resurrected and fortified by anti-Zionism and is therefore included as part of the new antisemitism. I hope that my recurring insistence on the linkage of antisemitism to anti-Zionism is not taken to mean that criticism of Israel is off-limits. I am and have been critical of many aspects of Israeli policy, but anti-Zionism moves beyond vigorous criticism of certain policies of the Jewish state to either subject Israel, its leaders and supporters to discriminatory standards of judgment and treatment or, at the extreme, to deny her right to exist.
A brilliant defence of Israel has recently appeared that speaks to elements of “the new antisemitism”. McGill law professor and member of parliament Irwin Cotler has offered his analysis, with characteristic brilliance, in numerous fora. I use the term “new antisemitism” in a broader sense, but seek to incorporate some of what Cotler offers in my own analysis.
Professor Cotler understands the old antisemitism as discrimination against Jews, denying them their full rights of citizens or indeed involving active persecution of them. This older form, he believes, has now been largely overshadowed by a new antisemitism that denies Jewish national rights or their peoplehood. In this sense, discrimination against Israel in the international sphere and attacks on Israel’s very existence deny to the Jewish people an equality of treatment, that is, their entitlement to equal national rights. “In a word,” says Cotler, “Israel is the only state in the world today — and the Jews the only people in the world today — that are the object of a standing set of threats from governmental, religious and terrorist bodies seeking their destruction.” (69)
Much of Cotler’s well-founded case focuses on the United Nations and its agencies in which, for example, Israel has been denied due process, being denied until just recently any form of membership in any of the regional UN groupings and still being denied entry into the Middle East regional body. Israel is thus denied equality before the law. She is singled out as a human rights violator more than any nation, including genocide perpetrators such as Yugoslavia or Indonesia, and certainly more than such “champions of liberty” as Syria, Iraq or Iran which routinely escape scrutiny and condemnation. The Fourth Geneva Convention dealing with the treatment of civilian populations in times of war had not been convened once since its drafting in 1949, even though countless human tragedies had taken place in the interim, but in 1999 and again in 2001 it met solely to condemn Israel. Beyond the UN, but often with its complicity, Israel has been demonized, being made, in Cotler’s words, into the “poisoner of the international well”, the object of a campaign to undermine its very right to exist with the ignominious “Zionism is racism” resolution. Cotler, one of the world’s leading human rights experts, elaborates the above case but it all adds up to the singling out and denial of the Jewish people “to live as equal members of the family of nations”.
Cotler’s analysis raises two important questions. The first and most basic question is whether Cotler is merely trying to shield Israel from its critics by fastening on them the still powerful label of antisemitism. It is evident that he understands this objection, for not only does he proclaim his own openness to legitimate criticism of Israel’s actions (and his record is very clear on this), but in early January he founded a new “International Commission to Combat Anti-Semitism” with Per Ahlmark, a former deputy prime minister of Sweden, serving as interim co-chair. Thus Cotler recognizes, not only that the impartiality of a purely Jewish institution fighting this brand of international antisemitism might be challenged, but also that it is vital that non-Jews recognize and engage in the battle against this newer form of antisemitism.
I believe, however, that Cotler is too narrow in his analysis of the new antisemitism. Placing his analysis in the broader framework that I have offered above would only strengthen his argument. The Arab attack on Israel in the United Nations and in the international arena is certainly recognized by Professor Cotler as the basis for this “new anti-Jewishness.” Yet, it was beyond his purpose to explore how this feature of the Arab offensive was related to Arab antisemitic ideology and propaganda, or to its penetration into Europe and even North America. I hold that all these elements are parts of a well-conceived Arab assault and that no one of these elements is well understood without the others. That is, the new antisemitism, unlike the old, has had since 1948 a Jewish state to focus on, adding a new dimension, but the new antisemitism exhibits continuity with the old, promoting many of the same old slanders in singling out Jewish persons, institutions, and the state of Israel for attack.
Fortunately, we have seen little evidence in Canada, as yet, of the striking new forms that antisemitism has taken in Europe. We do have smaller Arab and Muslim populations here than in France or the UK, and among the Arabs here are a large proportion of Copts from Egypt and Christian Lebanese, peoples that may not share the sentiments of their former neighbours in the Middle East. (70) Nevertheless, there have been signs of Arab antisemitism, by which I most emphatically do not mean legal protests on behalf of the Palestinians, whatever the merits of the case.
In the fall of 2000, shortly after the intifadah began, there was a disturbing rash of incidents in Montreal, including four assaults on identifiable Jewish students by perpetrators identified as young Arab males. There was also a small pro-Palestinian demonstration by 25 persons outside a synagogue on Yom Kippur. This association of Jewish religious worship with Zionism and Israel was a clear sign that antisemitism had made its way into some elements of the Arab-Canadian community of the city. In Toronto that fall the familiar antisemitic graffiti equating the Magen David (Star of David) with the Nazi swastika appeared on synagogues as well as other Jewish institutions. Perhaps some of the more serious Canadian incidents, in the immediate wake of the intifadah, were in Ottawa where a Jewish memorial chapel was attacked by arsonists and where a synagogue was vandalized, its windows broken, and its doors smeared with a graffiti greeting from the perpetrators — “Islam 4 ever”.
Montreal’s Concordia University is the home of an activist, Arab contingent, part of a much larger Arab student population. A radical-led Student Union (CSU) played ethnic politics and in March 2001 won an election with several of the pro-Palestinian activists taking on key roles in the new government. Again, one must not confuse all of the pro-Palestinian activities taken on by the CSU with antisemitism, but whereas the McGill Student Union, for example, helped to organize a peace vigil for Arabs, Jews and others, the CSU preferred a one-sided, divisive, blame-Israel approach. The most distasteful act of the CSU was the publication last fall of a student agenda entitled “Uprising” i.e., intifadah. Along with calls for students to steal, take drugs and join the revolutionary movement (whatever that may mean), there was also implicit antisemitism in the article, for example, by Laith Marouf, a vice-president of CSU, who charged that “Zionists monopolize North American media”, (71) a variant of a well-known antisemitic canard.
This same individual was later barred from campus for acts including allegedly painting graffiti on university property. “Stop Jewish Supremacy” and “Stop Jewish Apartheid” were two such slogans, clearly targeting Jews rather than Israel. Marouf was active in the SPHR (Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights), functioning not only at Concordia, but at all the other Montreal universities and a few in Ontario. This group has passed out literature bearing the insignia of the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review, charging Israel with developing an “ethnic bomb” that will only target Muslims and not Jews. This outrageous allegation has been disseminated on at least one additional occasion in a different format by the SPHR, even though it had reportedly entered into an agreement with the university administration not to disseminate such blatantly antisemitic material on campus.
One of the most common, yet one of the most horrendous, post-9/11 acts has been the perpetuation of the myth that 4000 Jews did not come to work at the WTC that day. A visiting professor at McGill University used the University’s e-Mail facilities to spread this garbage around the world. His copy of the scurrilous material seems to have originated from the PLO office in Turkey. It is impossible to know how far this infection spread from the professor in question and others like him to Canadians and others around the world. This dangerous myth has also been heard on open-line radio talk shows across Canada, along with the allegation that September 11 was “all the Jewish people’s fault”.
There has as yet been no systematic examination of the Canadian Arab or Muslim media to see if antisemitism is a regular feature, but one Ottawa-based English language Islamic publication entitled Fadak, recently crossed the line into blatant antisemitism. Its October 2001 edition included a forged document alleging to be an antisemitic statement of Benjamin Franklin to the Constitutional Convention in which he is said to have proclaimed that “the Jews are a danger to this land,” and should be excluded or “our children will be working in the fields to feed the Jews, while they remain in the counting house, gleefully rubbing their hands”. This scurrilous invention comes from a 1935 Nazi publication, “A Handbook on the Jewish Question,” and it has been making its way around the Arab world for some time, for example, in an Egyptian government weekly, Akher Sa’a. (72) The infection of antisemitism appears therefore to have reached the Arab diaspora in Canada, but there is no way of telling yet whether it is an epidemic.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Canada have also had antisemitic features. The “Zionism equals Racism” canard re-appeared on the streets of Canada, particularly after the widespread dissemination of such propaganda at the UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa last summer. Signs were also seen in Ottawa alleging that the “Jewish State is a Racist State.” Along with these signs, Jewish observers at both street and campus demonstrations have heard shouts of “Death to the Jews” and “Death to Israel”. These are expressions not of youthful enthusiasm or Palestinian rage, but of the depth of the antisemitic infection that has reached Canadian shores.
It is clear that the Canadian government and non-governmental organizations must remain vigilant in the face of this “new antisemitism”, a phenomenon that potentially poses an even greater danger than the historic, well-researched variety. And it is not solely the Jewish community that is at risk. Citizens of all ethnic and religious background will feel the repercussions if racist doctrine is allowed to capture the hearts and minds of ordinary Canadians in complete contravention of our multicultural traditions of tolerance and respect for diversity.