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Moving to action on anti-Semitism
By Abraham H. Foxman
National Director of the Anti-Defamation League
This op-ed originally appeared in the December 21, 2003 edition of the Jerusalem Post.
Posted: December 22, 2003
Acknowledging a problem, without exaggerating it, is the first and necessary step to solving it. Regarding the explosion of anti-Semitism around the world, we still haven't definitively taken the first step.
It was encouraging several weeks ago, following the terrorist attacks on two synagogues in Istanbul and the fire-bombing of a Jewish school outside Paris, that French President Jacques Chirac finally said that the problem of anti-Semitism in France is real and needs attention.
The result was the potentially important step of setting up a ministerial committee, chaired by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to evaluate on a monthly basis the government's efforts to combat the scourge. While Chirac's acknowledgement of the problem was very late, it showed how taking that step almost inevitably leads to action. Hence, the importance of looking at and analyzing the various rationalizations that are used to avoid such acknowledgement.
First is the denial that "my country" is anti-Semitic. France and Greece are among the examples of this approach. When issues are raised about the surge of anti-Semitic incidents and the failure of governments to speak to the problem, a posture of "How dare you accuse France or Greece of being an anti-Semitic country?" surfaces.
They insist, "We treat our Jews like any other citizen and we abhor anti-Semitism." This, of course, is an evasion. The issue was not whether these countries were anti-Semitic but whether leaders were doing anything to combat the anti-Semitic incidents in their country and whether they were helping to create a climate in their country, through one-sided criticism of Israel, that allowed anti-Semitism to flourish.
Second is the theme that attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions are not really anti-Semitism but the passions of the Middle East conflict coming to the streets of Europe.
The shallowness of this evasion lies in two areas. Whatever the connection to Middle Eastern issues, the Jews who are personally attacked or whose institutions are vandalized because of their Jewish identity feel threatened and in danger because of who they are. This is anti-Semitism. Also, if the incidents were simply political emotions resulting from the conflict, why were there no Jewish attacks on Muslims on the streets of Paris?
Third is the idea that the threat to Jews is not so serious because extreme anti-Semitism, comparable in some ways to the ideology of hatred of the Nazis, comes from the Islamic world and there are almost no Jews living in those countries. This, too, is a dangerous evasion. While it is important not to make glib comparisons of today's dangers to the unique horrors of the Holocaust, the threat to Jews everywhere resulting from extremist Islam is immense, at least in its potential.
Murderous Nazism in the '30s and '40s was a product of an ideological wish to exterminate Jews combined with military power to implement the ideology, together with complicity by other governments and societies. Today, the ideology of hatred is there in the Islamic world - just note the widespread acceptance of conspiracy theories about 9/11, the applause that Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia received for saying that Jews "rule the world by proxy," the blood libel and other charges against Jews in the media and by the growth of Holocaust denial beliefs. Together with this is the potential for mass murder, not through Panzer units as in Nazi Germany, but through the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction which would undoubtedly target Jews once acquired.
It is a dangerous illusion to think that because Jews don't reside in the places where the greatest hatred grows, the danger is not great.
Fourth is the idea propounded even by some prominent Jews, that what we are witnessing is not really a recrudescence of classical anti-Semitism, but a reaction to the bad policies of the Sharon government. Whatever one's views on Israeli policies, and clearly there is a lively conversation going on in Israel in this regard, it is a misreading to see what is going on in those terms.
This is not to say that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not have impact on anti-Semitism around the world. I think it would. But this approach is faulty because the true linkage of anti-Semitism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the opposite: it is the hatred reflected in anti-Semitism that has made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even harder to solve. Anti-Semitism, far from being a product of the conflict, is increasingly a cause of it.
All of these evasions have practical impact. They stand in the way of what is needed to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
We are seeing some recognition of the seriousness of the problem. More must be done, starting with world Jewry.
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