Essay 1152

Just in time for Yom Kippur, this editorial appeared in newspapers nationwide…

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The new anti-Semitism

Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University: Tribune Media Services

Hating Jews, on racial as well as religious grounds, is as old as the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Later in Europe, pogroms and the Holocaust were the natural devolution of that venom.

Anti-Semitism after World War II often avoided the burning crosses and Nazi ranting. It often appeared as a more subtle animosity, fueled by envy of successful Jews in the West. “The good people, the nice people” often were the culprits, according to a character in the 1947 film “Gentleman’s Agreement,” which dealt with the American aristocracy’s social shunning of Jews.

A recent third type of anti-Jewish odium is something different. It is a strange mixture of violent hatred by radical Islamists and the more or less indifference to it by Westerners.

Those who randomly shoot Jews for being Jews--whether at a Jewish center in Seattle or at synagogues in Istanbul--are for the large part Muslim zealots. Most in the West explain away the violence. They chalk it up to anger over the endless tit-for-tat in the Middle East. Yet privately they know that we do not see violent Jews shooting Muslims in the United States or Europe.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promises to wipe Israel “off the map.” He seems eager for the requisite nuclear weapons to finish off what an Iranian mullah has called a “one-bomb state”--meaning Israel’s destruction would only require one nuclear weapon. Iran’s theocracy intends to turn the idea of a Jewish state on its head. Instead of Israel being a safe haven for Jews in their historical birthplace, the Iranians apparently find that concentration only too convenient for their own final nuclear solution.

In response, here at home the Council on Foreign Relations rewards the Iranian president with an invitation to speak to its membership. At the podium of that hallowed chamber, Ahmadinejad, who questions whether the Holocaust ever took place, basically dismissed a firsthand witness of Dachau by asking whether he really could be that old.

The state-run, and thus government-authorized, newspapers of the Middle East slander Jews in barbaric fashion. “Mein Kampf” (translated, of course, as “Jihadi”) sells briskly in the region. Hamas and Hezbollah militias on parade emulate the style of brownshirts. In response, much of the Western public snoozes. In the last two decades, Islamic terrorists have bombed and murdered thousands inside Europe and the United States. Their state supporters in the Middle East have raked in billions in petro-windfall profits from energy-hungry Western economies. For many in Europe and the U.S., supporting Israel--the Middle East’s only stable democracy--or even its allies in the West has become viewed as dangerous and costly.

In addition, Israel is no longer weak but proud and ready to defend itself. So when its terrorist enemies like Hezbollah and Hamas brilliantly married their own fascist creed with popular left-wing multiculturalism in the West, there was an eerie union: yet another supposed Third World victim of a Western oppressor thinking it could earn a pass for its murderous agenda.

We’re accustomed to associating hatred of Jews with the ridiculed Neanderthal right of those in sheets and jackboots. But this new venom, at least in its Western form, is mostly a left-wing, and often an academic, enterprise. It’s also far more insidious, given the left’s moral pretensions and its influence in the prestigious media and universities. The renewed hatred of Jews in the Middle East--and the indifference to it in the West--is a sort of “post anti-Semitism.” Islamic zealots supply the old venomous hatred, while affluent and timid Westerners provide the new necessary indifference--if punctuated by the occasional off-the-cuff “Amen” in the manner of a Louis Farrakhan or Mel Gibson outburst.

The dangers of this post anti-Semitism is not just that Jews are shot in Europe and America--or that a drunken celebrity or demagogue mouths off. Instead, ever so insidiously, radical Islam’s hatred of Jews is becoming normalized.

The result is that the world’s politicians and media are talking seriously with those who not merely want back the West Bank, but rather want an end to Israel altogether and everyone inside it.