THE CANARY IN EUROPE'S MINE
By
Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe April 28, 2002
The rocks have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are
slithering free.
In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and calling
him "a dirty Jew." Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a
third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapons fire.
In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a
large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack. Oxford professor Tom Paulin, a
noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West
Bank and Gaza "should be shot dead." A Jewish yeshiva student reading
the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus.
Antisemitism, wrote a columnist in The Spectator, "has become Respectable
at London dinner tables." She quoted one member of the House of Lords:
"The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we
think at last."
In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank
emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads,
"Surely they don't want to kill me again?" In Corriere Della Sera,
another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel
Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulchre. The caption: "Non
resurrexit."
In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade
was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching
near a synagogue on the Jewish sabbath. Graffiti appeared in a synagogue in the
western town of Herford: "Six million were not enough."
In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of
Kiev's main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.
In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Ioannina and vandals hurled paint at
the Holocaust memorial in Salonica. In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration
featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of "Sieg Heil" and
"Jews into the sea." In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice
was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed. But nowhere have the flames of
antisemitism burned more furiously than in France.
In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the
Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and
Marseille; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse
was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus
in Paris, the words "Dirty Jew" were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up
members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes
Jewish children to school in Aubervillie rs has been attacked three times in the
last 14 months.
According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish
incidents per day since Easter.
Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming
"Jews to the gas chambers" and "Death to the Jews." The
weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said
Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them
to preserve "family honor." The French ambassador to Great Britain was
not sacked -- and did not apologize -- when it was learned that he had told
guests at a London dinner that the world's troubles were the fault of "that
shitty little country, Israel."
"At the start of the 21st century," writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a
well-known social scientist, in a new book, "we are discovering that Jews
are once again select targets of violence. Hatred of the Jews has returned
to France." But of course, it never left. Not France; not
Europe. Antisemitism, the oldest bigotry known to man, has been a part of
European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, open
Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to
type.
To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of Jew-hatred all
over their continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency.
"Stop saying that there is antisemitism in France," President Jacques
Chirac scolded a Jewish editor in January. "There is no antisemitism in
France." The European media have been vicious in condemning Israel's
self-defense against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have
been far less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard.
They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are
aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians. A
timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews.
Militant Islamist extremists were attacking and killing Jews long before they
attacked and killed Americans on Sept. 11. The Nazis first set out to incinerate
the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was ablaze. Jews, it is often said, are the
canary in the coal mine of civilization. When they become the objects of
savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned and an explosion is soon
to come. If Europeans don't rise up and turn against the Jew-haters, it is only
a matter of time until the Jew-haters rise up and turn against them.
Hakham Meir Y. Rekhavi
Tenu'a Mikraith 'Olamith
World Karaite Movement (R.A)