Resurgent Anti-Semitism

The Obama Administration has absorbed and surrounded itself with competently-political Jewish insiders within the Democratic party, giving it a legitimization of the need required to demonstrate to America that there is nothing racist in the attitude of President Obama; he is a great emancipator. Willing to open shut doors, and make diplomatic overtures to regimes that oppress their own people while threatening the security of the international community.

It is toward Israel that the world increasingly has turned, to reform itself of its unacceptable tendencies to self-protection. A protection of state and population that has been found wildly wanting to the world at large. For the world sees that protection as predicated on the subjugation and oppression of another population, one that shares the territory within which Israel exists, and has done so since UN-declared partition in 1948. Israel must free itself of the need to dominate others.

Israel's new government is icily informed by America's new government that it must cease and desist from all initiatives, new and ongoing, to absorb land through settlements, outside the original green line of its inception as a nation. That the country is that of a nation is overlooked in the complaints that it is an apartheid state, even while a quarter of its citizens is non-Jewish with full citizenship. That it is often from within that 'other-national' citizenship that Israel finds itself embattled is also handily overlooked.

That the government and the independent judiciary agreed to permit illegal Arab squatters to be removed from Jewish-owned land that had been in Jewish hands for the last 80 years is a matter for indignant denunciation from the United States and Arab states. Yet belligerent anti-Israel Gulf State Arabs have been permitted to purchase privately-owned land within Israel, and there is no word of concern other than from Jews. Incipient destabilization only Israel worries about.

A decade and a half ago Jews were jubilant at the news that everywhere one looked, the incidence of anti-Semitism was in the decline. It was uncivil to make publicly known one's anti-Jewish feelings, and people generally kept those racist proclivities private. Much can happen in the space of several years; as emigration from Muslim countries increased and Europe and North America became increasingly populated with Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitism has resurfaced.

Now, because Muslim-generated propaganda against Jews and the State of Israel has been generally accepted, and even embraced by Western intelligentsia, unions, academic institutions and churches, (even the World Archaeological Congress; who must hold with the PA that the Jewish heritage-value Dead Sea Scrolls properly belong to the Palestinians) suddenly it is no longer socially ignorant to profess one's criticism of a state created by and for Jews whom the world has traditionally obsessed over, victimized and abandoned to fate.

A new obsession has emerged, one obsessing social and civil and church groups again, and while none of these groups would ever admit to harbouring the collective blight of expressive racism, and declare themselves emphatically non-anti-Semitic, they see nothing amiss in passionately slandering Israel. Sufficient unto the day is the subterfuge of a universal anti-Israel blight shielding avid practitioners from the charge of anti-Semitism.

Israel is held to a standard not demanded of any other country on the face of the Earth. Other countries may defend themselves, may declare themselves to be uni-religious, uni-ethnic, uni-social-heritage devoted, but not Israel. Not even when the country has absorbed well over a million people of other faiths than Judaism, other ethnic backgrounds and given them equality.

The Palestinian Authority under Fatah, formerly the PLO, is considered the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, languishing in its self-imposed refugee status for want of a peace agreement with Israel. Yet immediately following the Fatah General Conference the armed wing of Fatah attacked Jewish Israelis, riddling their vehicles with bullets, injuring the occupants.

Emboldened and stimulated, no doubt, by Fatah's re-endorsement of the Al Aksa Martyr's Brigade during the General Conference. Is it likely that any humanitarian or social justice group, any country's diplomat, any academic institution outside Israel, any trade union representatives will stand up and publicly admonish the Palestinian Authority for insisting "The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades are the jewel in Fatah's crown. We must strengthen their status ... maintain them in a state of alert."

Whereas puckish cartoons lampooning Islam and its Prophet on the basis of reality in today's world sees a delicately sensitive handling of the issue from the West in the wake of a ferocious and bloody backlash from outraged Muslims the world over, vicious fascist posters depicting Nazi-era caricatures of Jews are considered perfectly fine for academia's student mobs of Arabs and their sympathizers.

All are animated by the specificity of Jew-hatred. Israel-bashing has become an accepted device by which those whose sympathies are easily led and those whose deep-seated hatred for Jews can be construed as legitimate criticism of a Democratic state. Deeply satisfying as a device for those who finally feel free to express their detestation of all things Jewish.