A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (57 page)

In 2001, al-Manar was one of the most-watched TV stations in the Middle East. Many traced its popularity with young viewers to the music videos that the station showed between programs. Those videos combined violent images with music that incited hatred toward not only Israel but also Jews as a people.
¹³
In 2006, with help from Saudi Arabia, Hamas launched its own television station modeled after al-Manar. It too used both religion and popular culture to promote hatred of Jews. That message was also featured on its website and reinforced in the sermons heard in many mosques and the lessons taught in many madrassas (religious schools or seminaries).

That propaganda also appealed to many young people around the world—particularly in nations with a significant Muslim population. In 2007, the German Interior Ministry found that young Muslims in Germany were more likely to express “anti-Semitic attitudes” than non-Muslims, whether immigrants or native-born.
¹⁴

About five months after the attacks of September 11, many Jews experienced yet another “awakening to antisemitism.” In January 2002, a
correspondent for the
Wall Street Journal
, Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped in Pakistan. Despite efforts by the governments of the United States and Pakistan to keep the reporter’s Jewish identity a secret, the kidnappers clearly knew that Pearl was a Jew. A group that called itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty recorded his beheading in a video entitled “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.” It showed a carefully staged ritual murder.

On video, the kidnappers forced Pearl to repeat their demands and then state, “My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish American. I come from… a family of Zionists. My father’s Jewish. My mother’s Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel. In the town of B’nei Brak in Israel, there’s a street called Haim Pearl Street, which was named after my grandfather, who was one of the founders.” Moments later, Pearl was beheaded. Journalist Thane Rosenbaum later noted:

It must have been a tremendous coincidence for [his killers] to learn that the Pearls had a street named after them in Israel. Indeed, his murderers had hit the hostage jackpot: a Jewish-American journalist with Zionist roots. But they would have killed him anyway, even if he had never been to Israel, even if he didn’t know what a Zionist was…. His murderers marked him for death because of one central truth in his biographical data: Stripped down to his essence, Daniel Pearl was a Jew.
¹⁵

Pearl’s murder, the UN conference in Durban, and the attacks of September 11 occurred within a six-month period. Each was motivated at least in part by antisemitic propaganda. In the months after September 11, that propaganda struck a chord even in countries that were home to few, if any, Jews. One such nation was Spain. In the early 2000s, Spain had one of Europe’s smallest Jewish communities—approximately 12,000 people out of a total population of 42 million.

In 1492, Spain expelled its entire Jewish population (see
Chapter 6
), and it did not officially overturn that order of expulsion until 1968. In 2005, Pilar Rahola, a journalist and a former Spanish lawmaker, described her country as one that has “never confronted its responsibility with regards to antisemitism—neither in the past, nor present.” She then cited a survey conducted in Spain that same year. It showed that 78 percent of
the public would not accept a Jewish neighbor, 69 percent believed Jews are too powerful, and 55 percent attributed “dark intentions” to them.
¹⁶

That survey suggested that more than 500 years after Jews had been forced out of Spain, antisemitism was still deeply embedded in Spanish culture. The media has helped keep that prejudice alive. A report issued by the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia revealed that coverage of the Middle East conflict in the Spanish media included the same antisemitic slurs that the Nazis had leveled against Jews in the 1930s (including the lies that Jews engage in ritual murder and that they conspire to control the world). The group saw a link between “the tremendous wave of anti-Israel sentiment in Spain” and the “antisemitic content in the news.”
¹⁷

British journalist Howard Jacobson comes from a nation where Jews have long been an integral part of national life. Yet he, too, worries that old slurs are once again becoming part of England’s culture. He explains:

Most English Jews walk safely through their streets, express themselves freely, enjoy the friendship of non-Jews, and feel no less confidently a part of English life than they ever have…
.

And yet, in the tone of the debate, in the spirit of the national conversation about Israel, in the slow seepage of familiar anti-Semitic calumnies into the conversation—there, it seems to me, one can find growing reason for English Jews to be concerned. Mindless acts of vandalism come and go; but what takes root in the intellectual life of a nation is harder to identify and remove…
.

The language of extremism has a malarious dynamic of its own, passing effortlessly from the mischievous to the unwary, and from there into the bloodstream of society. And that’s what one can smell here. Infection.
¹⁸

How does the “language of extremism” enter the “bloodstream of society”? In 2007, the Community Security Trust, the defense agency of Britain’s Jewish community, explained:

Messages that start out as attacks on alleged Israeli policy or behaviour often conclude with abuse of, or threats to, all Jews, the wish that all Jews were dead, claims of Jewish conspiracy, or the accusation that Jews killed Christ. The antisemitism is compounded if the incident
is targeted at a Jewish person or institution—such as a synagogue—that is then held responsible for the alleged actions of the Israeli government. This charge of collective responsibility and collective guilt, whereby every Jew in the world is supposedly answerable for the behaviour of every other Jew, is one of the fundamental building blocks of all racism.
¹⁹

This was the process that left Joëlle Fiss and her colleagues angry, frightened, and frustrated at the Durban conference in 2001; it motivated the September 11 terrorists and inspired the rumors that swirled after the attacks; and it played a critical role in the murder of Daniel Pearl.

In the years since those events, a number of individuals and groups have pressed for better ways of identifying and combating antisemitism nationally and internationally. As a result, more than a dozen countries have passed laws designed to reduce antisemitic violence through education and programs that raise awareness of the problem and improve law enforcement. Although some of these programs have been successful, the “language of extremism” has continued to infect one nation after another. In France, it created an atmosphere that contributed to yet another murder. This time the victim was Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old cell-phone salesman.

On February 13, 2006, more than three weeks after Halimi’s family notified the authorities that he was missing, the Paris police found him half-naked, stabbed, and with cigarette and acid burns covering much of his body. He died on the way to the hospital. The 27 individuals charged with his murder were members of a criminal gang known as the Barbarians. All but two were found guilty; their sentences ranged from six months to life in prison.
²⁰

Why did the gang torture Halimi? That question troubled Judea Pearl, the father of Daniel Pearl. After noting that many politicians and civic leaders attended Halimi’s funeral, he wrote:

They always talk about “them”—the criminals, the Barbarians—rarely about THEMSELVES
.

They do not talk about the silence and tacit encouragement that have created this climate in France where a gang of youngsters would choose to target Jews…. A climate in which torturing a Jew is considered a lesser form of cruelty…. “We tortured him because he was a Jew,” said one of the abductors last week
.

How did this climate of inhumanity infiltrate a country that gave the world liberty, equality and brotherhood?
²¹

The continuing violence against Jews in France in the weeks that followed Halimi’s murder seemed to support Pearl’s argument. Although some in Paris and other cities publicly protested the violence, many others just shrugged and turned away. Those attitudes had consequences.

In 2010, the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism reported a significant rise in antisemitic incidents in the first decade of the twenty-first century—even in years “when there was no significant Middle East trigger.”
²²
(A trigger is the spark that sets off violence but is not necessarily the cause of that violence.) The worst year was 2009 “in terms of both major antisemitic violence and… verbal and visual expressions against Israel and the Jews.”
²³

Experts attributed some of the increase in antisemitism to widespread opposition to an Israeli military action in Gaza during the winter of 2008– 2009.
²⁴
But it was not the only factor. Elisa Massimino, president of the group Human Rights First, explained why:

Contemporary antisemitism is multifaceted and deeply rooted. It cannot be viewed solely as a transitory side-effect of the conflict in the Middle East. Antisemitic incitement and violence predate the Middle East conflict and continue to be based in large part on centuries-old hatred and prejudice. The branding of Jews as scapegoats for both ancient and modern ills remains a powerful underlying factor in the antisemitism hatred and violence that continues to manifest itself today.
²⁵

Massimino also reminded her audience that antisemitism was not the only hate-motivated violence in Europe. Similar attacks were directed “against members of a range of communities because of their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or other similar factors.”
²⁶
And, as in other times in history, when one group is threatened, everyone is at risk. Pilar Rahola explained:

Canaries are brought into coal mines to measure contamination. When they die, the level of contamination is very high. When Jews die because they are Jews, the contamination of democracy has reached a dangerous level. Jews are democracy’s canaries: they live and die to the extent that liberty lives or dies. Thus, whenever the enemies of
democracy have increased in number, Jews have died. Jews first, then everyone else.
²⁷

Some experts have linked part of the rise in antisemitism and xenophobic violence to fears about globalization—the opening of national borders to ideas, people, and investments. Many feel threatened by the enormous increase in international connections and fear the loss of their national identity and their independence. As in other times of rapid change, they sometimes latch onto old myths as they search for easy solutions to tough problems. For example, several Spanish newspapers responded to the economic downturn that began in 2008 with editorial cartoons showing “the Jews” using “their money” to manipulate the world for evil purposes. Extreme nationalist groups in Russia have taken a similar stand by blaming the nation’s economic problems on a “Zionist-influenced commercial-financial mafia.”
²⁸
To many people, those images and slogans evoke memories of Nazi propaganda (see
Chapter 13
). The rise of an extreme nationalist political party in Hungary offers insights into similarities and differences between that time and now.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Gabor Vona, a former history teacher, founded a student movement that quickly became a political force in Hungary. That group, Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom, or Jobbik for short (in English, “the Movement for a Better Hungary”), has repeatedly claimed that it is “not against anything but only
for
Hungary.” The group vehemently denies that it is extremist: “We do not believe in the division between left and right. The true division is between those who want globalization and those who do not. We are a patriotic party.”
²⁹

Despite such remarks, party officials have repeatedly inflamed audiences by warning that “a crumbling country, torn apart by Hungarian-Gypsy civil war, could easily be claimed by rich Jews. That is why we should expect a Hungarian-Gypsy civil war, fomented by Jews as they rub their hands together with pleasure.”
³⁰
By 2007 Jobbik had its own private army, known as the Hungarian Guard. Its leaders claimed that the guard was needed to “maintain public order, preserve Hungarian culture, and defend the nation in extraordinary situations.”

Many Hungarians disagreed. They saw similarities between the Hungarian Guard and the Arrow Cross, a Hungarian pro-Nazi party that helped the Germans ship about 500,000 Jews and between 5,000 and 10,000 Roma to Auschwitz and other camps during World War II. Their
concerns increased in 2010, when Jobbik signed an agreement with the Independent Police Trade Union, a radical group with nearly 5,000 members. As a London newspaper observed, the pact between the two groups meant that thousands of armed police officers were now allied with an extremist political party with its own uniformed guard. The paper noted, “There is a whiff of the Weimar Republic here.”
³¹