As usual, the use of the term "Nazi" or "Holocaust" signifies the end of rational debate. "Nazi" has no cognitive meaning; it is just profanity, uttered by anyone who wants to play a moral trump card in any argument. But when it is used as a label for Jews and Jewish national identity, there is a more sinister consequence. The suggestion that Israel is no better than Nazi Germany resonates at a sub-conscious level with many Europeans who dislike the collective guilt of post-Holocaust reckoning and are happy with the idea that Jews are actually little different, in moral terms, from their Nazi murderers. An opinion poll in June 2002 found that a quarter of Germans agreed with the statement that Israel's actions "are in principle no different from what the Nazis did to the Jews in the Third Reich."
In the Muslim World, denial that the Holocaust took place at all is a relatively common idea, and even those who do not deny the Holocaust still see it as a Zionist propaganda tool which must be countered.
In the three years that Britain has had a Holocaust Memorial Day, mainstream bodies in the Muslim community have consistently refused to attend the annual memorial ceremony as it does not commemorate the "genocide" of Palestinians alongside the Holocaust of the Jews.
This attempt by the left to strip the Jews of the accolade of victimhood is also apparent in the left's attitude towards the current high level of antisemitism in Western Europe. The two and a half years since the start of the second intifada have seen a sharp rise in attacks on Jewish people and property in Britain, France and Belgium. Several synagogues in France were attacked after Israel was accused of committing a massacre in Jenin in April 2002. In the UK, synagogue desecrations rose by 400% in the two years following the start of the intifada, while antisemitic assaults rose by 75%. There is strong evidence that these attacks are, on the whole, perpetrated by Muslim and Arab youth who attack Jews as a way of expressing their hatred for Israel. Yet some on the left claim that Jews encourage antisemitism by their behaviour, and therefore only have themselves to blame: as Paul Foot of the SWP put it in The Guardian, "Especially pathetic on the part of our apologists for Israeli oppression is their bleating about antisemitism. For the sort of oppression they favour is the seed from which all racialism, including antisemitism, grows."
Contemporary antisemitism is, in Western Europe at least, largely a red-green phenomenon. Though some on the left seek to link the rise in antisemitism to the success of far right parties in some European elections, compelled to defend their worldview in which antisemitism (and racism generally) only comes from the right, the left has failed to offer any cogent analysis, let alone rejection, of its own or Islamist antisemitism. Even more conspicuous by its absence is any acknowledgement that the left itself could, even in theory, be capable of demonizing, stereotyping or prejudging Jews. The left's blindness to antisemitism is of a piece with its marriage of convenience to Islamists. The left maintains a rigid dichotomy - West/bad, non-West/good - and Israel and Jews, being white and European (or, as the left see Israel, a European creation), sit firmly on the West/bad side of this argument. Unfortunately, this dichotomy leaves no room for an understanding of the dangers of radical Islamism for leftists, Jews, Muslims, women, and others. The red-green marriage of convenience has blinded the left not only to threats to its core values, but to how those values have already been undermined.
Hating the French for the right reasons.
March, 2003
Consuming September 11
September, 2002
America's shallow globalization strategy
July, 2002
It's a lonely world when you're both an anti-globalization leftist and a
Zionist.
May, 2002
Channel your rage at the people responsible for September 11 -- and I
don't mean the cavemen in Afghanistan.
December, 2001
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