DAPHNE ANSON: EURABIAN PLIGHTS….THE RECRUDESCENCE OF ANTI-SEMITISM
Eurabia and the Recrudescence of Antisemitism
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| Eurabian Plights: A Scene in Brussels |
‘It is now a commonplace in Europe to regard antisemitism and the more recent phenomenon, “Islamophobia”, as much of a muchness. Yet there are important historical distinctions between the hatred of Jews and anti-Muslim prejudice. While European Muslims are without question subject to discrimination and violence, no reasonable observer could claim that they face the prospect of a Final Solution-style extermination plan….
Last month, Richard Herzinger, of the German daily Die Welt, neatly captured the wrongheadedness of Europe’s new political conviction when he stated that “it is not ‘Islamophobia’ that is the antisemitism of the 21st century, but antisemitism.”
Writing in Libération last November, the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner noted that the idea of Islamophobia originated in revolutionary Iran. In Bruckner’s view, allegations of Islamophobia allow Islamic radicals to blunt criticism of extremist Islam and rationalise the rejection of secular Western values. In short, “Islamophobia” is a gagging order. But … Bruckner and the few journalists and academics who question the rhetoric of Islamophobia are a minority.
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| Eurabian Plights: A Message from Copenhagen |
The fact is, European societies have gone to great lengths to stifle any expression of anti-Islamic sentiment – even, some might say, at the expense of freedom of speech.
In 2008, for instance, the right-wing extremist Pro Cologne political party organised an anti-Islam conference. Thousands of demonstrators from all walks life took to the streets in protest against this “Stop Islam” event, prompting the city of Cologne to pull the plug on it.
By contrast, when four years earlier Walter Hermann set up his so-called ‘Cologne Wailing Wall’ exhibit – which includes a cartoon of a man wearing a Star-of-David bib and an American flag while devouring a Palestinian boy and holding a knife that bears the word “Gaza”, alongside him a glass filled with blood – in Cathedral Square, the bustling pedestrian zone in the middle of the city, it was allowed to stand without protest.
Eurabian Plights: In Old London Town …. Writing in the weekly Freitag, journalist Sabine Pamperrien recently described critics of the equating of Islamophobia with antisemitism as Winkeladvokaten – loosely translatable as “shyster lawyers”, a term that the Nazis used to degrade Jewish lawyers during the Third Reich.
The same description was applied to the German left-wing politician, Gregor Gysi, by an Austrian neo-fascist and convert to Islam, Robert Schwarzbauer, who specifically branded Gysi a “shyster lawyer of Zionism” for his efforts to combat his party’s anti-Israeli platform.
A significant contrast between antisemitism and Islamophobia – which the merging of them dangerously ignores – is that the former manages to bring together such uneasy bedfellows as radical leftists, fanatical Muslims and right-wing extremists.
…. German-Jewish philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that the crimes of the Holocaust created such profound guilt among some Germans that they tend to ignore antisemitism, blame the Jews for the Holocaust, and hold Israel to moral standards they apply to no other country.
A University of Bielefeld survey last year found that 57 per cent of Germans questioned agreed with the statement that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians”.
Conflating antisemitism with anti-Muslim thinking may serve as a release for German guilt. But it has dangerous consequences for European Jews and undermines the legitimate fight against radical Islamic terrorists who threaten Europeans of all faiths and backgrounds.’
I can think of other reasons why conflating antisemitism and “Islamophobia” is invalid. Jews, who have have been part of European society for over a millennia, have always abided by the tenet that “The Law of the Land is the Law,” have never allowed their religious beliefs and observances to encroach upon the public domain, do not proselytise, and needless to say there is no equivalent of Jihad in Judaism. The “new antisemitism” of the nineteenth century – the rise of political antisemitic movements culminating in the obscenity of Nazism – was predicated on the perception of Jews as agents of modernity, whereas “Islamophobia” is predicated on the perception of Muslims as agents of pre-modernity. And of terror.
It’s a cardinal principle of democratic societies that all citizens – no matter what their religion or ethnicity – must be subject to a single corpus of law: the same law must govern all. When Jews, who established a surreptitious communal presence in England during Tudor times, broke cover during the Cromwellian Protectorate and successfully requested toleration, which they did also following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, there was no question that they would be exempt from the legal system of England and Wales. To be sure, there are religious courts – batei din – that determine certain issues in accordance with Jewish law (Halakhah) but these function within the framework of religion – and in no way impinge upon the public sphere or rival the law of the United Kingdom.
In Britain and in other pluralistic democracies, religion is a matter of private conscience; it does not equate with citizenship, nor with nationality. The Church of England may still be the Established Church, but apart from the requirement that monarchs and their spouses, must belong to it, the days when members of other faiths were impeded by their non-Anglicanism from participating equally in public life, have long gone. Nonconformists and Roman Catholics were emancipated in the 1820s, and Jews finally won the right to sit in Parliament in 1858. Jews could already serve as municipal office-holders and as commissioned officers in the armed services, and all impediments to their civic equality had gone by 1891.
The situation on the Continent was different. There, Jews faced specific discriminatory and disabling legislation that had not existed across the Channel since the reign of Edward the First (who of course expelled all Jews from his realm in 1290). On the Continent, Jews had to win freedom from compulsory ghettos and from draconian debarring laws in order to take their places as citizens.
Before Napoleon would grant citizenship to the Jews of France, their leaders had to satisfy him that they deserved it – they had to demonstrate that their beliefs and practices were commensurate with modernity. For example, he required – and obtained – their assurances that they did not practice polygamy and animal sacrifices, and that they felt an overwhelming loyality to France. (What would he make of this video, I wonder!)
On Sunday, in handing over the reins of the Front National to his daughter Marine, that crude old racist, Jean-Marie Le Pen, could not resist an antisemitic jibe about a Jewish reporter who’d complained about being ejected from the party’s gala dinner, beaten, and racially abused. Racism, as in that case, from the French Right, has a long tradition extending back to the ultramontain anti-Dreyfusards and to Charles Maurras and Action Française.
Not that the French Left have been any better – witness their constant baiting in the National Assembly and in their press (with insults such as “dirty tolerated alien”) of the haute bourgeois René Mayer (1895-1972; pictured), a pro-American industrialist and banker related by marriage to the Rothschilds, who was Prime Minister of France in 1953, a director of Air France, a champion of the colons of Algeria, and – though very much an assimilated, patriotic Frenchman – loyal to Judaism (his grandfather was Grand Rabbin of Paris) and involved in Jewish communal affairs.
Now, of course, French Jews, like Jews elsewhere in Europe, are so intimidated by Islamic hate-mongers that they’re leaving the country in droves.
http://challahhuakbar.blogspot.com/2011/01/jews-are-leaving-europe-why.html
In an article in a recent issue of the London Daily Mail, that fearless – I could almost add “peerless” – journalist Melanie Phillips, author of that alarming window on the growth of militant Islam in present-day London, Londonistan, reiterates yet again the alarming degree of islamisation that is taking place in Britain with the apparent connivance of a supine government (driven, as I blogged this week, by anti-Israel weaklings within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office).
“Because our political and security establishment has defined extremism as involving violence, it is blind to the steady process of Islamisation that is taking place”, she writes. “Astonishingly, it is tolerating – and even encouraging – the relentless incursion of Islamic religious law. Yet this is inimical to British values – and not just because it denies the human rights of women, homosexuals or anyone who wants to renounce Islam.”
For, she continues, Islam
“does not recognise the superior authority of the law of the land, against which it therefore asserts itself.
…. [B]lind eyes are being turned to Sharia courts meting out not just family law judgments that oppress women, but even criminal sanctions, too…. [T]here has been … an enormous growth of Islamic banking – despite the fact this serves as an umbrella for the financing of Islamic terrorism and is a vehicle for putting yet more pressure on British Muslims to subject themselves to Sharia law.
Almost every week, more examples surface of the way in which British culture is giving way to Islamic practices. As a recent BBC Panorama programme demonstrated, some Muslim schools are teaching their pupils to hate ‘unbelievers’ – all under the nose of Ofsted.
And a growing number of education authorities serve halal meat to all pupils – without even informing the public of this minority faith practice [Incidentally, halal meat was also served to an unsuspecting House of Commons!]. London hosts three Muslim TV channels — all with ties to fanatical Islamic organisations or regimes.
In short, Britain is being steadily Islamised – and the establishment appears paralysed like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
Four years ago in my book, I delivered a warning. A country that can’t even bring itself to name the nature of the enemy it faces will be defeated by that enemy.
The Stockholm bomber is but the latest export from Londonistan – and unless the Government gets up off its knees and changes its disastrous strategy, I very much fear he will not be the last.’
But there’s an added problem. For as J. R. Dunn observed in American Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/03/prospects_of_terror_an_inquiry_1.html
‘Europe is vulnerable. It abuts directly against ancient Muslim homelands at several points, has a substantial and unintegrated Muslim population, has offered active Jihadis sanctuary within its borders, has pursued reckless immigration and security policies, and has supped with the Devil through its open support of Saddam Hussein (paid for with Iraqi oil funds) and Muslim terror organizations such as Al Fatah and Hamas.
Many observers believe it’s already too late, that Europe is one with Sumeria and Byzantium, that all that remains is the funeral procession. They point to the numbers of native births – below replacement level of 2.1 children per couple in almost every country—compared to those of Muslim immigrants, which are two to three times higher, and echo Bernard Lewis’s now-famous prediction, “Europe will be Muslim by the end of the century.”
Europe in also unfortunate in that its overall government, the European Union, has established itself, in defiance of the experience of the past century, as the kind of managerial superstate proven unfeasible just about everywhere else on earth.’
Ironic, isn’t it? Napoleon had to be certain that Jews did not pursue polygamy or other practices at odds with modernity – yet in Europe today, such practices by Muslims are allowed.
In Britain, any non-Muslim married to more than one wife would be charged with bigamy if found out – but, so long as he contracts polygamous unions in countries in which polygamy is lawful, a Muslim may bring his multi-wives to the UK. And they’ll receive state benefits into the bargain! Moreover, the tolerance of “arranged marriages” – something that the dhimmitudinous, Londonistan-loving British Ambassador Frances Guy enthused about in her speech last year at the Beirut Arab University, to which I referred in my penultimate post – has resulted in the immigration to Britain of many Muslims from conservative, reactionary societies, and the consequent negation in the raising of their offspring of the influence of their British marriage partners of more “anglicised” mores.
These are the perilous realities of Europe’s unrestrained “multiculturalism”, driven by the EU elites but not by the populace.
And Jews and Israel are prominent among the losers.
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