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 G-d,
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 on 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 Aubervilliers 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.