The old hatred is back

Pamela Bone on anti-Semitism, a voice of solidarity:

Something good, at least: a friend, in Paris a few weeks ago, was handed a pamphlet in the street. Reading it as she walked on, she saw it was an advertisement for a march against anti-Semitism: Contre l'antisemitisme je marche!. She went back to the young woman who had given it to her, and said in French: "Thank you. I am Jewish." The woman answered: "I am Muslim."

France has the highest population of both Jews and Muslims in Europe. They have a shared interest in fighting racism, because both groups have suffered an increase of it... But while according to a European Union report most of the anti-Semitism in France - the burning of Jewish schools, defacing of graves and attacks on individuals - is coming from young Muslim immigrants, the anti-Muslim feeling is not coming from France's Jewish community, which is old and established and has better things to do than deface mosques.

In the Arab world hatred of Jews pours out of television, newspapers and mosques: Israel is to blame for every wrong that besets Arab countries; the Holocaust is either a lie or didn't go far enough; the ancient Christian "blood libel", that Jews kill children and use their blood to make Passover bread, is repeated in mainstream newspapers. It's common wisdom that Jews were behind the September 11 attacks, and that Jews persuaded the Americans to invade Iraq (this last is fairly widely accepted in some Western circles, too).

And in the West, suddenly a new anti-Semitism has become widespread, acceptable, even politically correct, it is argued in a new book of essays (Those Who Forget the Past, edited by Ron Rosenbaum). Anti-Israel violence erupts on American campuses, there are calls by academics in the US, Britain and Australia to boycott Israeli academics, in letters pages of respectable newspapers there are comparisons between Israelis and Nazis. See, the Jews do what was done to them.
.....
There are many people who would never discriminate against individuals because they are Jewish, who nevertheless feel entitled to hate the Jewish state. Israel can be criticised, as any state can be. But when the world's only Jewish state - the collective Jew - is criticised disproportionately and unreasonably, Jews cannot be blamed for fearing the old hatred is back; or that it never really went away.

(Hat tip: Jim Nolan.)