The World's Oldest Hate Metastasizes

[Wehrwolfen]

By Richard Baehr
9/17/13


A review of Demonizing Israel and the Jews by Manfred Gerstenfeld, RVP Press, New York, 2013

In the six years 1939-1945, two thirds of Europe's 9 million Jews were executed by gunfire, starved to death, or incinerated in gas chambers during the Holocaust. While Nazi Germany was, of course the principal actor in this mass human slaughter, the Germans found many willing collaborators among the legions of Jew haters in countries they conquered, occupied, and recruited from for the slave labor and death camps. For a few decades after the end of the war, in part due to guilt for their complicity or stance as bystanders to the carnage, many Western European nations were supportive of the new state of Israel, and made the public expression of anti-Semitism verboten. Eastern European nations, in the orbit of the Soviet bloc, adopted the USSR's position on Israel, which turned sharply negative soon after Israeli independence.

As Manfred Gerstenfeld, a scholar of Jewish communities in Europe and anti-Semitism vividly portrays in this collection of 57 interviews with academics, politicians, and writers in Europe and a few other places as well, the brief time-out on thousands of years of anti-Semitism among Europeans has ended. The end of any tilt towards Israel occurred even earlier, dating to the end of the 1967 war, when Israel was transformed in the eyes of the leftist elites from besieged victim to colonial occupier. Some Europeans pay lip service to hating Israel, but also oppose anti-Semitism. But when you treat the one majority-Jewish state in the world differently than you treat all others and use the most vicious language at your disposal to condemn Israel, then you are singling it out not for its behavior, but for the makeup of its population.

Gerstenfeld's interviews include citizens of France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Egypt, and Libya.

[Excerpt]

Read more:
Articles: The World's Oldest Hate Metastasizes


Hmm..., Whatever happened to the policy consistent with Progressive social policies and worshiping at the altar of multiculturalism, tolerance for the other, and diversity?

 

[Gardener]

What I have found common is how many people play the game of indulging in all the traditional antisemitic canards in terms of Jewish manipulation, working behind the scenes, loyalty only to their own, etc, but apply it to Israel as a whole instead of Jews in the singular. They, then try to claim they are not antisemitic, but were "only criticizing Israel policy", which, of course, they weren't.

 

[Ray410]

It would be helpful to me if someone who is historically and immediately knowledgeable of the subject would provide a treatise or point to some links which clearly set out the reasons for the historical, and present day, disaffection toward Jews, to the extent that it even exists.

I've attempted to research this and the availability of research on the subject seems to be very sparse or simply overly biased in one direction or the other. I really don't have much interest in Muslim hatred of Jews, but the dislike in the Western World seems strange to me, not well explained. It seems like smoke or fog, not substantial.

 

[Gardener]

It would be helpful to me if someone who is historically and immediately knowledgeable of the subject would provide a treatise or point to some links which clearly set out the reasons for the historical, and present day, disaffection toward Jews, to the extent that it even exists.

I've attempted to research this and the availability of research on the subject seems to be very sparse or simply overly biased in one direction or the other. I really don't have much interest in Muslim hatred of Jews, but the dislike in the Western World seems strange to me, not well explained. It seems like smoke or fog, not substantial.

Much of the antisemitism is simply the result of the Diaspora. When small communities of Jews were scattered to the four winds, they were always a small minority enclave living within a larger, host society. Just the sense of "my group" vs "alien group" explains much of it.

There is always the "Jews killed Jesus" stuff as well as the envy over Jewish success, but it is really just a matter of basic social psychology more than anything else.

It's always easier to blame somebody else, and when that somebody else exists in tiny numbers, all the easier.