Antisemitism on rise across Europe 'in worst times since the Nazis"

[OriZ 3,157]

The New Anti-Semitism.

In the space of just one week last month, according to Crif, the umbrella group for France's Jewish organisations, eight synagogues were attacked. One, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, was firebombed by a 400-strong mob. A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and looted; the crowd's chants and banners included "Death to Jews" and "Slit Jews' throats". That same weekend, in the Barbes neighbourhood of the capital, stone-throwing protesters burned Israeli flags: "Israhell", read one banner.

In Germany last month, molotov cocktails were lobbed into the Bergische synagogue in Wuppertal – previously destroyed on Kristallnacht – and a Berlin imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, called on Allah to "destroy the Zionist Jews … Count them and kill them, to the very last one." Bottles were thrown through the window of an antisemitism campaigner in Frankfurt; an elderly Jewish man was beaten up at a pro-Israel rally in Hamburg; an Orthodox Jewish teenager punched in the face in Berlin. In several cities, chants at pro-Palestinian protests compared Israel's actions to the Holocaust; other notable slogans included: "Jew, coward pig, come out and fight alone," and "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas."

Across Europe, the conflict in Gaza is breathing new life into some very old, and very ugly, demons. This is not unusual; police and Jewish civil rights organisations have long observed a noticeable spike in antisemitic incidents each time the Israeli-Palestinian conflict flares. During the three weeks of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009, France recorded 66 antisemitic incidents, including attacks on Jewish-owned restaurants and synagogues and a sharp increase in anti-Jewish graffiti.But according to academics and Jewish leaders, this time it is different. More than simply a reaction to the conflict, they say, the threats, hate speech and violent attacks feel like the expression of a much deeper and more widespread antisemitism, fuelled by a wide range of factors, that has been growing now for more than a decade.

"These are the worst times since the Nazi era," Dieter Graumann, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, told the Guardian. "On the streets, you hear things like 'the Jews should be gassed', 'the Jews should be burned' – we haven't had that in Germany for decades. Anyone saying those slogans isn't criticising Israeli politics, it's just pure hatred against Jews: nothing else. And it's not just a German phenomenon. It's an outbreak of hatred against Jews so intense that it's very clear indeed."

Roger Cukierman, president of France's Crif, said French Jews were "anguished" about an anti-Jewish backlash that goes far beyond even strongly felt political and humanitarian opposition to the current fighting: "They are not screaming 'Death to the Israelis' on the streets of Paris," Cukierman said last month. "They are screaming 'Death to Jews'." Crif's vice-president Yonathan Arfi said he "utterly rejected" the view that the latest increase in antisemitic incidents was down to events in Gaza. "They have laid bare something far more profound," he said.

Nor is it just Europe's Jewish leaders who are alarmed. Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, has called the recent incidents "an attack on freedom and tolerance and our democratic state". The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, has spoken of "intolerable" and clearly antisemitic acts: "To attack a Jew because he is a Jew is to attack France. To attack a synagogue and a kosher grocery store is quite simply antisemitism and racism".

Police at the site of a shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium, where four people were killed. Photograph: Eric Vidal/REUTERS

France, whose 500,000-strong Jewish community is one of Europe's largest, and Germany, where the post-war exhortation of "Never Again" is part of the fabric of modern society, are not alone. In Austria last month, a pre-season friendly between Maccabi Haifa and German Bundesliga team SC Paderborn had to be rescheduled after the Israeli side's previous match was called off following an attempted assault on its players.

The Netherlands' main antisemitism watchdog, Cidi, had more than 70 calls from alarmed Jewish citizens in one week last month; the average is normally three to five. An Amsterdam rabbi, Binjamin Jacobs, had his front door stoned, and two Jewish women were attacked – one beaten, the other the victim of arson – after they hung Israeli flags from their balconies. In Belgium, a woman was reportedly turned away from a shop with the words: "We don't currently sell to Jews."

In Italy, the Jewish owners of dozens of shops and other businesses in Rome arrived to find swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans daubed on shutters and windows. One slogan read: "Every Palestinian is like a comrade. Same enemy. Same barricade"; another: "Jews, your end is near." Abd al-Barr al-Rawdhi, an imam from the north eastern town of San Donà di Piave, is to be deported after being video-recorded giving a sermon calling for the extermination of the Jews.

There has been no violence in Spain, but the country's small Jewish population of 35,000-40,000 fears the situation is so tense that "if it continues for too long, bad things will happen," the leader of Madrid's Jewish community, David Hatchwell, said. The community is planning action against El Mundo after the daily paper published a column by 83-year-old playwright Antonio Gala questioning Jews' ability to live peacefully with others: "It's not strange they have been so frequently expelled."

Studies suggest antisemitism may indeed be mounting. A 2012 survey by the EU's by the Fundamental Rights agency of some 6,000 Jews in eight European countries – between them, home to 90% of Europe's Jewish population – found 66% of respondents felt antisemitism in Europe was on the rise; 76% said antisemitism had increased in their country over the past five years. In the 12 months after the survey, nearly half said they worried about being verbally insulted or attacked in public because they were Jewish.

Jewish organisations that record antisemitic incidents say the trend is inexorable: France's Society for the Protection of the Jewish Community says annual totals of antisemitic acts in the 2000s are seven times higher than in the 1990s. French Jews are leaving for Israel in greater numbers, too, for reasons they say include antisemitism and the electoral success of the hard-right Front National. The Jewish Agency for Israel said 3,288 French Jews left for Israel in 2013, a 72% rise on the previous year. Between January and May this year, 2,254 left, against 580 in the same period last year.

In a study completed in February, America's Anti-Defamation League surveyed 332,000 Europeans using an index of 11 questions designed to reveal strength of anti-Jewish stereotypes. It found that 24% of Europeans – 37% in France, 27% in Germany, 20% in Italy – harboured some kind of anti-Jewish attitude.

So what is driving the phenomenon? Valls, the French prime minister, has acknowledged a "new", "normalised" antisemitism that he says blends "the Palestinian cause, jihadism, the devastation of Israel, and hatred of France and its values".

Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust, a London-based charity that monitors antisemitism both in Britain and on the continent, also identifies a range of factors. Successive conflicts in the Middle East he said, have served up "a crush of trigger events" that has prevented tempers from cooling: the second intifada in 2000, the Israel-Lebanon war of 2006, and the three Israel–Hamas conflicts in 2009, 2012 and 2014 have "left no time for the situation to return to normal." In such a climate, he added, three brutal antisemitic murders in the past eight years – two in France, one in Belgium, and none coinciding with Israeli military action – have served "not to shock, but to encourage the antisemites", leaving them "seeking more blood and intimidation, not less".

Experts said anti-Jewish attacks were not only down to Israel-Palestinian conflict. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

In 2006, 23-year old Ilan Halimi was kidnapped, tortured and left for dead in Paris by a group calling itself the Barbarians Gang, who subsequently admitted targeting him "because he was a Jew, so his family would have money". Two years ago, in May 2012, Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah shot dead seven people, including three children and a young rabbi outside their Jewish school. And in May this year Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman of Algerian descent thought to have recently returned to France after a year in Syria fighting with radical Islamists, was charged with shooting four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels.

If the French establishment has harboured a deep vein of anti-Jewish sentiment since long before the Dreyfus affair, the influence of radical Islam, many Jewish community leaders say, is plainly a significant contributing factor in the country's present-day antisemitism. But so too, said Gardner, is a straightforward alienation that many young Muslims feel from society. "Often it's more to do with that than with Israel. Many would as soon burn down a police station as a synagogue. Jews are simply identified as part of the establishment."

While he stressed it would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of Muslims, Peter Ulrich, a research fellow at the centre for antisemitism research (ZfA) at Berlin's Technical University, agreed that some of the "antisemitic elements" Germany has seen at recent protests could be "a kind of rebellion of people who are themselves excluded on the basis of racist structures."

Arfi said that in France antisemitism had become "a portmanteau for a lot of angry people: radical Muslims, alienated youths from immigrant families, the far right, the far left". But he also blamed "a process of normalisation, whereby antisemitism is being made somehow acceptable". One culprit, Arfi said, is the controversial comedian Dieudonné: "He has legitimised it. He's made acceptable what was unacceptable."

A similar normalisation may be under way in Germany, according to a 2013 study by the Technical University of Berlin. In 14,000 hate-mail letters, emails and faxes sent over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel found that 60% were written by educated, middle-class Germans, including professors, lawyers, priests and university and secondary school students. Most, too, were unafraid to give their names and addresses – something she felt few Germans would have done 20 or 30 years ago.

Almost every observer pointed to the unparalleled power of unfiltered social media to inflame and to mobilise. A stream of shocking images and Twitter hashtags, including #HitlerWasRight, amount, Arfi said, almost to indoctrination. "The logical conclusion, in fact, is radicalisation: on social media people self-select what they see, and what they see can be pure, unchecked propaganda. They may never be confronted with opinions that are not their own."

Additional reporting by Josie Le Blond in Berlin​, Kim Willsher in Paris, John Hooper in Rome and Ashifa Kassam in Madrid

• This article was amended on Friday 8 August to correct the name of the Madrid Jewish community leader David Hatchwell. This article was further amended to correct the numbers of Jews who left France for Israel in 2013.

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/07/antisemitism-rise-europe-worst-since-nazis/print

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

It's not the new antisemitism, it's the old antisemitism.

That doesn't mean that criticising Israel for its actions in Gaza is antisemitic.

[Póg mo 1,749]

It's not the new antisemitism, it's the old antisemitism.

That doesn't mean that criticising Israel for its actions in Gaza is antisemitic.

According to Israel's apologists somebody being critical of Israel does indeed mean they are antisemitic. This is unfortunate for all the poor Jews who don't support or have nothing to do with Israel. I really wish Israel would do something/anything to make the distinction, rather than cynically use the Holocaust to further its twisted agenda.

[BatmanUSA 105]

in each instance of violence quoted by the OP, it is always the radical terrorist Islamism's committing the crimes. And they don't just attack Jews. Isis, along with other muslim terrorists are also torturing and killing Christians..

[eieio 1,594]

I am no Jew lover.....not really a jew hater either....but I have never understood why Jews are so hated?

For the most part they seem to just want to be left alone. How many times do you read about Jewish terrorist plots?

Now the Muslims.....it would be better for this world if they were all in heaven tomorrow.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Yeah... That's not extremist at all is it.

[eieio 1,594]

72 virgins. Thats rational

[We Keep Receipts 9,238]

I am no Jew lover.....not really a jew hater either....but I have never understood why Jews are so hated?

For the most part they seem to just want to be left alone. How many times do you read about Jewish terrorist plots?

Now the Muslims.....it would be better for this world if they were all in heaven tomorrow.

Sigh...

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

72 virgins. Thats rational

Suggesting that all Muslims should die isn't rational.

[eieio 1,594]

Look what we can give them

I understand why they do things to make people want to kill them.

They must lay awake at night thinking' What can I do to get my hands on those virgins?'

[JohnR! 5,495]

I am no Jew lover.....not really a jew hater either....but I have never understood why Jews are so hated?

For the most part they seem to just want to be left alone. How many times do you read about Jewish terrorist plots?

Now the Muslims.....it would be better for this world if they were all in heaven tomorrow.

Jews are hated for two reasons. (Very abridged version. You can get the full version online. There are texts from a myriad of sources.)

Muslims have a beef with Jews for when Muhammed was spreading the word of Islam he was betrayed by the jewish tribes of Medina, with whom he had a covenant of peace and mutual protection.

Christians have a been with Jews because they claim jews killed their prophet but ultimately because when christianity took over pagan Europe it wanted to competition, so it too persecuted the jews as 'Jesus' killers'.

Muslims have a beef with christians becaue of the carnage perpetrated by the crusaders during their invasion of Jerusalem, one of the sacred cities in Islam.

The hypocrisy is that all this killing and all this carnage we see today is because all three religions, that worship the one and very same god, can't agree on which one follows god's commandments the best. We live in a planet where the exsitence of our species is based on disagreement over how a fairy tale is told and interpreted. We are a sad, sad race.

[SaharaSunset 165]

I am not anti-Jew. I am anti- MANY of Israel's militant actions of late, and the whole "Zionist" movement/ takeover of Palestine in general. I disagree with it - but I don't hate Jews. It's not a myth. And all the propaganda in the world is not going to make me believe that I am really anti-Jew because its not true, and I know it.

My point. People can disagree with the actions of Israel without hating Jews. I know, it much easier to throw out "anti-semitism" because then people who oppose Israel seem like the evil Nazi's of old. But as a human being, I oppose the oppression of other human beings. I abhor what the Nazi's did to the Jews historically, and I abhor what the Israelis are dong to the Palestinians today.

[SaharaSunset 165]

I am no Jew lover.....not really a jew hater either....but I have never understood why Jews are so hated?

For the most part they seem to just want to be left alone. How many times do you read about Jewish terrorist plots?

Now the Muslims.....it would be better for this world if they were all in heaven tomorrow.

Look what we can give them

I understand why they do things to make people want to kill them.

They must lay awake at night thinking' What can I do to get my hands on those virgins?'

Guess what, It might be better if ignorant people who make ignorant comments, and irrational and erroneous generalizations of entire religions, were the ones "in heaven tomorrow." I think the world could use less of those kinds of people.

[OriZ 3,157]

I am not anti-Jew. I am anti- MANY of Israel's militant actions of late, and the whole "Zionist" movement/ takeover of Palestine in general. I disagree with it - but I don't hate Jews. It's not a myth. And all the propaganda in the world is not going to make me believe that I am really anti-Jew because its not true, and I know it.

My point. People can disagree with the actions of Israel without hating Jews. I know, it much easier to throw out "anti-semitism" because then people who oppose Israel seem like the evil Nazi's of old. But as a human being, I oppose the oppression of other human beings. I abhor what the Nazi's did to the Jews historically, and I abhor what the Israelis are dong to the Palestinians today.

The mere comparison says alot...

The point is not that everyone who criticizes Israel is anti semitic. Believe it or not there are many things I, too, criticize Israel for.

The point is there are also many people who jump on the bandwagon and use it as an excuse, hence the new anti semitism. And the people like you, who do it for the right reasons it seems - should denounce those people and not stick their head in the sand and claim it does not exist, because it does, and it is not just a small group doing it.

[SaharaSunset 165]

The hypocrisy is that all this killing and all this carnage we see today is because all three religions, that worship the one and very same god, can't agree on which one follows god's commandments the best. We live in a planet where the exsitence of our species is based on disagreement over how a fairy tale is told and interpreted. We are a sad, sad race.

I disagree. The carnage and killing we see today has very little to with religion. It has to do with the selfish actions of a very small percentage of the world's humans population. Oh yes, people have always used religion to justify their actions. But it is always a distortion of what the religion actually teaches. Not one of the "Big 3" you mentioned really and truly teach people to destroy others. Extremist in all religions have interpreted the various scripture and texts to mean what they want it to mean. But the religions themselves actually teach quite the opposite.

I'm sure it makes one feel quite superior to call God a "fairytale" - but in reality, the notion of "God" has actually been a driving force for more good in the world, than evil. But if you rely in the internet for your info, of course you will get the most salacious and notorious descriptions of human behavior associated with religion. But again, it is a distorted perception of religion.

We are not a sad race. The news paints a sad story, but if you actually leave the wonderful worldwide web and travel in the real world, and see the human race in action, I think you would be shocked at how many people are leaving good and happy peaceful lives. Even though the news tells us otherwise, the reality is, there is much more goodness in the world...and much of it is because of the billions of good people who believe that wacky fairytale about God, and are striving for goodness that religion teaches.

Peace