Antisemitism Today

The term antisemitism denotes racial discrimination and all forms of hostility and violence against Jews as such, and as a minority throughout history. It categorizes attitudes that have evolved since the early centuries of the current era towards the Jews and Judaism as a religious faith and people or race. A contemporary definition, adapted to more recent developments and circumstances, is to be found in Webster's third new international dictionary: "hostility towards the Jews as a religious or racial minority group, often accompanied by social, economic and political discrimination. Opposition to Zionism."

Hostility to the Jews is an age-old phenomenon, originating in the basic differences between a monotheistic minority faith and its environment, and in the tensions between Judaism, early Christianity and Islam. Hatred of the Jews, intensified by the early church fathers, left an indelible mark on European culture and the European mind, while early Islam displayed parallel hostility towards the two "protected peoples" and their faiths and imposed its formal status of inferiority upon both ("dhimmis"). Anti-Jewish outbursts, persecution and pogroms were a regular feature of European societies, and were far from unknown in Muslim lands (as early as the Khaibar massacre of 628 AD).

Modern antisemitism draws upon these historic and religious mainsprings, adding its own contemporary and racist dimensions and ideologies. Its notorious literary expression in recent times has been the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", generally attributed to the Russian secret police at the end of the nineteenth century and subsequently the gospel for antisemitic movements world-wide. Its widest circulation today appears to be in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt and Syria. The racist image of the Jew in these traditions, a particularly lurid and warped example of which is the "blood libel", according to which Judaism requires non-Jewish infants' blood for religious practices and for the ceremonial unleavened bread (as in the 1840 Damascus blood libel), does not even necessitate the actual existence of Jewish neighbors for its propagation and has spread to countries which have no Jewish minority.

In many parts of the world today, antisemitism is part and parcel of the xenophobic racism of right-wing fringe groups, parties and religious sects, which draw upon their local cultures and traditions in the expression they give to social, economic and religious protest, particularly against the minorities in their midst. Scores of antisemitic outbursts are recorded each month by monitoring groups, ranging from armed and other attacks on individuals and property to the desecration of cemeteries and Holocaust memorials and the daubing of antisemitic slogans on buildings, often those housing Jewish communal offices and synagogues.

The UN human rights commission formally condemned antisemitism in a 1994 resolution (in the face of some bitter opposition, led by Syria), formally charging its special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism with the responsibility of examining and reporting on antisemitic incidents worldwide.

The Holocaust was a unique culmination in the annals of racism. The Holocaust denial movement today unites the earlier-mentioned racist, right-wing and xenophobic fringe groups with various Middle East groupings, media and even governments in their public campaigns against the Jewish people and Israel. Its aim is to present the holocaust as a lie, which only the "perverted Jewish mind" could invent, thereby shifting the blame, calumny and shame from perpetrator to victim. In contemporary Middle East media and propaganda, the Jews are labeled as Nazis, and Zionism is equated with Nazism. With tragic premonition, Primo Levi recorded in the final work on his death camp experience, prior to his suicide, how SS storm troopers taunted the inmates: "However this war may end, we have won the war against you: none of you will be left to bear witness...because we will destroy the evidence together with you."

Despite the efforts of those continuing to seek to "destroy the evidence" in the public mind, the Holocaust is overwhelmingly documented and recorded in contemporary history, and its deniers are held in general contempt and abhorrence, as illustrated in the verdict of the London crown court against holocaust denier, David Irving, last year.

The Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust united European government leaders in a call to their countries to include in the curriculum of their schools study of the Holocaust in all its dimensions.

With the overwhelming public and international rejection of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, some Middle Eastern governments, media and publics have joined forces with the racist right-wing fringes elsewhere in the world in promoting and championing both these racist causes. The proliferation of antisemitic propaganda in the Arab world in recent years has raised grave questions of the significance of the threat it could pose on a regional and worldwide scale.

The blood libel, accusing Jews of using non-Jewish infants' blood in their rites, to which Syrian Defense Minister Field Marshal Mustafa Tlas devoted his 1983 book "The Matza of Zion", and of utilizing and sucking the blood of Arabs has been aired repeatedly in the Arab media (e.g. Palestine Liberation Army Mufti Sheikh Colonel Nadir al-Tamimi on al-Jazira T.V. Channel 24/10/2000: columnist Adil Hammuda's "A Jewish Matza made from Arab Blood" in Egyptian daily al-Ahram). The Egyptian weekly "October" has regaled its readers with "the loathsome qualities of the Jewish race throughout its long history". Holocaust denial is a frequent theme in the Arab media, with the Palestine Times writing of "God's lying people" who are "the Holocaust worshippers"(no.114, December, 2000), and the Palestine TV channel's "no Chelmo, no Dachau, no Auschwitz, only disinfecting sites...the lie of extermination". The mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Sabri Ikrama, questions the Holocaust, stating: "It is not my fault that Hitler hated the Jews. Anyway, they hate them just about everywhere"(AP 25/3/2000, NYT 26/3/2000). These are random examples of antisemitic racist expressions that abound in the Middle East media. Other Muslim clerics call upon the worshippers in the mosques, in similar language, to "have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country...wherever you meet them, kill them"(Ahmad Abu Halabiya, Friday sermon in Gaza mosque broadcast live on Palestine TV channel).

In this atmosphere of regional racist provocation to violence, many hundreds of Muslim antisemitic attacks on Jews and Jewish sites worldwide have been reported in the past year alone. Demonstrators chant the age-old Arab battle cry "Idbah al-Yahud" ("slaughter the Jews") in the streets of European cities; synagogues have been the targets of arson, as have Jewish schools, and their pupils. An M16 automatic rifle was fired at the Paris great synagogue during last year's Day of Atonement prayers. In Essen, the old synagogue, today a museum and Holocaust memorial, was attacked by a mob of Arabic-chanting demonstrators.

Arab attacks on Jewish targets worldwide raise questions of their spontaneity or organized antisemitic activities, directed from sources of provocation in the Middle East. Do their publics condone such acts, and do they mirror a deeper antisemitism within these communities?

In view of the above, it is hard to credit the Arab claim that they have nothing against Judaism or Jews as a faith, race or people, but only against Zionism and Israel. In October 2000, with the withdrawal of Israel from Joseph's tomb in Nablus, a local mob stormed the site and destroyed it, burning thousands of Jewish prayer books. A few days later, the 1000-year-old synagogue near Jericho, entrusted to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo agreement, was set on fire. Other synagogues and cemeteries have been targeted in the area, with far more vociferous public blessing than censure on the part of the Arab leadership. Sadly, the phenomenon of Arab antisemitism and the portrayal of the caricatured Jew in Middle Eastern literature and the media combine imported motifs with old Islamic anti-Jewish tracts.

Arab antisemitism has served both to exacerbate and exploit hatred of Israel. Abuse of Israel has become indistinguishable from abuse of the Jewish people, a people which, in the words of the Egyptian government daily al-Akhbar, "should not be trusted, because they are a nation of vagabonds filled with hatred towards the entire world". The fact that such racist defamation can appear, with acceptance and impunity, in so respected an official organ of a Middle East government at peace with Israel illustrates how deeply engrained antisemitic bigotry has become in the region. It appears to be public policy in much of the Arab Middle East today, at times in the thinnest of anti-Zionist disguises. Furthermore, it is a source of rabid racism spreading from the region, out to a wider international community and society.