Jews Archives

The Second Time Around

February 21, 2007 08:22 AM

Updated 2/24/07 below

Meant to post this a little while ago. It's from an interview with Hungarian Nobelist Imre Kertesz, in which the author and Auschwitz survivor reflects on the persistence of European anti-semitism. There's no happy ending.

Am I right then, that you think of anti-Semitism as something persistent? That you do not keep the hope that this problem will disappear after some time...

As long as it is considered a problem, it will neither cease nor disappear. In any case, the Nazi death camps established for the extermination of European Jews, combined with the creation of Israel constitute a new development – a new problem, if you like – not only in the history of Jews but also in that of anti-Semitism. For instance, there is no fitting anti-Semitic response to Auschwitz – if not the denial of the very facts of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. At first this denial seemed to be an act verging on the ridiculous. Today, however, it counts as "serious academic pursuit" and if anti-Semitism is ever elevated to the level of the state, if it is considered a state programme, then the officially supported, institutional falsification of history will become possible once again, as we saw in single-party dictatorships.

In democratic states, criticism of Israel provides a new and effective avenue for anti-Semitism – particularly when Israel does something that prompts criticism, which by the way other states do, too, whether or not they have to fight for their existence. A language has developed that I would like to call Euro-anti-Semitism. For a Euro-anti-Semite, it is no contradiction to recall the victims of the Holocaust in mournful tones, and in the next breath, under the guise of criticism of Israel, to utter anti-Semitic statements. Such things have been repeated so often that they are almost cliches. Remembrance of the Holocaust is important to stop such things from happening again. But, in fact, nothing has happened since Auschwitz that would prevent another Auschwitz from happening. On the contrary. Before Auschwitz, the extermination camp was unimaginable. Today, it can be imagined. Because Auschwitz really happened, it has permeated our imagination, become a permanent part of us. What we are able to imagine – because it really happened – can happen again. [My emphasis]

I have not seen this perspective anywhere else, since discussion among those who foresee a "Second Holocaust" - see, for instance, Ron Rosenbaum - tends to take European moral revulsion at the "first" for granted. In this view, modern Europeans either don't recognize or fail to give due consideration to the signs that history is repeating itself - particularly in the demonization and gradual dehumanization of the Jews and, in the modern version, "Zionists." This view assumes that if Europeans really knew "what was coming" they would move to prevent it. But what if Europeans do see the direction things are headed and simply aren't troubled by the consequences that may await the Jews? What if Auschwitz numbed Europeans to the horror of genocide? Worse, what if it actually whetted the appetite, by revealing that such a completely insane goal - the entire elimination of this rootless, problematic clan - was achievable? These are the implications of what Kertesz' observes in modern Europe.

MORE: Read this piece by Anne Bayefsky and despair at our own government's financial contribution to the furtherance of Jew-hatred.

Link · Europe | Israel | Jews | Modern Judaism

Jews Archives

Ukraine Backfill

December 18, 2006 04:36 AM

Yes, posting has been light here recently. So let's briefly catch up with just a few of the major developments.

Jack Palance died at 87. He was from Ukraine - "Believe it or Not."**

Viktor Yanukovich visited Washington for meetings with senior U.S. officials. He told American audiences "There can never be too much democracy, just as there can never be too much freedom." Then he fell over on his side and began pounding the floor as he convulsed with laughter.

Back home, Ukrainians are still not sure who is in charge of the government. Yanukovich-appointed government ministers barred Ukraine's pro-Western foreign minister, Borys Tarasyuk, from a cabinet meeting, explaining (according to Tarasyuk) that his name wasn't "on the list."

The Rada passed a bill to recognize the 1932-33 famine as a deliberate act of genocide, undertaken by Stalin's regime, in which millions of Ukrainians perished. In a nationally televised broadcast, Viktor Yushchenko said, "Those who deny the man-made famine hate Ukraine deeply and convincingly, hate us, our spirit and our future." This group presumably includes virtually the entire majority coalition in the Rada, since its deputies sat out the vote so as not to offend the Putin government in Russia.

David Duke was awarded a doctorate in History by a prominent university in Kyiv that has traditionally fixated on the "Jewish question." (The State Department says the school gets some of its funding from Middle Eastern governments. Go figure.) It was his second visit.

**TV show he hosted with his wife in the 1980s.

Link · Jews | Russia | Ukraine

Jews Archives

CAIR-bears

August 29, 2006 10:33 AM

Milbank at his best, reporting Monday's CAIR-sponsored press event, where "Israel" critics Mearsheimer and Walt obligingly went that extra mile for their hosts.

When the two professors finished, they were besieged by autograph- and photo-seekers and Arab television correspondents. Walt could be heard telling one that if an American criticizes Israel, "it might have some economic consequences for your business." [My emphasis]

You might suddenly thrive! I think that's what he means....

[Hat tip: Glenn]

Link · American Politics | Islam | Israel | Jews | News Media

Jews Archives

Heavy Weighs the Crown (of Thorns)

August 19, 2006 09:47 AM

In an otherwise almost perfectly unhelpful review of European hostility toward Israel, the Economist magazine did include one detail that caught my attention:

It is also often the right in Europe, linked with anti-Semitism in the past, that is most supportive of Israel today. Britain's Conservative Party, for instance, not always known for its admiration of Jews or Israel, is now the most pro-Israel party. In Italy, which invented fascism, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and Gianfranco Fini's formerly neo-fascist National Alliance, are more pro-Israel than the government. In Spain, the centre-right opposition was highly critical of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, when he donned an Arab headscarf to show solidarity during the Lebanon war. [My emphases]

Is this guy for real? Sheesh.

And I don't know what to make exactly of this next bit.

Emanuele Ottolenghi, an expert on Israel and Europe at Oxford University, argues that “Europeans see Israel as the embodiment of the demons of their own past.” The European Union is supposed to have traded in war, nationalism and conflict for love, peace and federalism. But Israel now reminds Europeans of darker forces and darker days.

Ottolenghi is a well-regarded and widely published scholar. I doubt the quote is meant - or that the author intended - to suggest that, in the image of Israel, the European elites see a reflection of their vulgar past and are repulsed by it.

Rather, I think it's meant to suggest that, in today's "progressive" Europe, Israel is a pesky reminder of their culpability in genocide, and Europeans resent that.

So how does that account for the hostility toward Israel? Why can't the Europeans just feel guilty for their betrayals and resolve never again - well, from here on out, at least - to allow genocide in their midst?

Because the oversized moral vanity of today's European progressives cannot allow it. The acceptance is too painful. The Europeans therefore seek to rationalize their culpability by reference to the putative culpability of Israel - Jews, that is - in comparable crimes.

This is not precisely - or rather, exclusively - a matter of antisemitism. It is not a conscious or unconscious wish that someone will "finish the job" that Europe started. The impulse can best be expressed as: If only the Jews would stop provoking, people wouldn't see the need to slaughter them every so often. In this view, people who seek explicitly to kill Jews - let's say, Hamas or Hezbollah - are cast as the original victims, as people who can't be held responsible for their actions because they've been driven to extremes by Jewish aggression.

European antisemitism is a factor, without a doubt. The Economist suggests that attitudes toward Israel have shifted across Europe as Israel has transformed, becoming more powerful and more aggressive. Maybe so. But Israel has nothing on Iran, or North Korea, or China, or even Russia, when it comes to extraterritorial threat - and yet a solid majority (60 percent) of Europeans consider little Israel to be the greatest threat to world peace? Guilt alone cannot account for an outlook that ridiculous.

I'm reminded of a conversation I had with a Polish acquaintance recently. She was lecturing me on the need to understand why someone would strap explosives to himself, walk into a pizza parlor, and blow up a bunch of strangers. I told her that there is no way to understand this - that nothing could be "understood" to induce someone to do something so depraved. It is the act of someone too sick with purposeful hatred to act otherwise. Yet I couldn't budge her. She steadfastly maintained that one shouldn't be too quick to reach judgments - this failure to "understand" is what starts wars etc. At least this appeared to be her attitude... until she told me (in order to reveal her ecumenism) about a visit she had made at some point to a women's social event at a synagogue. All was fine there until one woman evidently felt moved to suggest that Jews were the "chosen" people of God. Yeah, I know. It's not like that's explicitly stated in the Torah or anything, right? Still, this was evidently the first time she (a Catholic) had encountered this perspective. And it was traumatizing. According to her, she suddenly felt physically ill, disgusted, disoriented to the point she had to flee the premises lest she make a scene. Now, if you're asking me whether I believed her story, my answer is no. Maybe she was at a synagogue; maybe this business about the Chosen People arose; but beyond that I'm skeptical. (For that matter, I don't think I've ever heard a Jew utter the words "Chosen People" without the accompaniment of an ironic smirk. History demands irony in such instances.) Nevertheless, I couldn't help being struck by the contrast in attitude. Here she was, almost perfectly ambivalent about suicide bombing - but undone by what she took to be the suggestion that Jews were somehow superior in the eyes of God. (She better not read the Koran!) I wondered whether this dichotomy might have something to do with the fact that Poland contributed the greatest share of Jews to the gas chambers. They were The Chosen, alright.

Link · Europe | History | Jews | Middle East

Jews Archives

lindbergh et al

April 12, 2006 09:01 AM

Yesterday, James Taranto of Opinion Journal noted [first item] that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had published a defense, by former ambassador Edward Peck, of the much-disparaged Mearsheimer-Walt "working paper." That document, as you will recall, argues that insidious Jews and the Israel Lobby control the U.S. government and have steered policymaking away from American interests in order to serve Israel's. So it should come as no surprise that a "Holocaust revisionist" named Mark Weber, the author of an anti-Semitic flyer posted recently on Harvard's campus [second Taranto item], says its content "makes some of the same points as are made in the 81 page paper by [Kennedy School Academic Dean M. Stephen] Walt and [University of Chicago professor John J.] Mearsheimer."

All of which leads me to ask: Is there anything to the fact that all these gentlemen have Germanic surnames?

Link · American Politics | Europe | Israel | Jews | Middle East · TrackBack (5)

Jews Archives

'Our Home Turf'

February 24, 2006 08:43 PM

One more reason it's fun being Jewish:

Israeli starts ‘anti-Semitic cartoon contest’

JERUSALEM: An Israeli cartoonist has launched an “anti-Semitic cartoon contest” to poke fun at fellow Jews in response to furore among Muslims over the publication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH).

Cartoonist Amitai Sandy said he was inspired by violent Muslim protests and the launching of a Holocaust cartoon competition by an Iranian daily that said it wanted to test the boundaries of free speech espoused by Western countries....[snip]

“We will show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published,” Sandy wrote on his website.

“No Iranian will beat us on our home turf,” he added in reference to the cartoon competition being held by Iran’s best selling newspaper to lampoon the annihilation of six million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust during World War Two.

Link · Israel | Jews | Middle East | Modern Islam | News Media · Comments (0) · TrackBack (26)