[IMC-Editorial] "The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it." --Joseph Goebbels

[Pierre Kogan]

>THE CANARY IN EUROPE'S MINE
>By Jeff Jacoby
>The Boston Globe
>
>April 28, 2002
>
>  The rocks have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred 
> are slithering free.
>
>  In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and 
> calling him "a dirty Jew." Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a 
> third, in Charleroi, was sprayed with automatic weapons fire.
>
>  In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, 
> depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack. Oxford professor 
> Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews 
> who move to the West Bank and Gaza "should be shot dead." A Jewish 
> yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus. 
> Antisemitism, wrote a columnist in The Spectator, "has become respectable 
> . . . at London dinner tables." She quoted one member of the House of 
> Lords: "The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say 
> what we think at last."
>
>  In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank 
> emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who 
> pleads, "Surely they don't want to kill me again?" In Corriere Della 
> Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, 
> because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulchre. 
> The caption: "Non resurrexit."
>
>  In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a 
> grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a 
> rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish sabbath. Graffiti appeared 
> on a synagogue in the western town of Herford: "Six million were not enough."
>
>  In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the 
> windows of Kiev's main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack 
> was anti-Jewish.
>
>  In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Ioannina and vandals hurled 
> paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica. In Holland, an anti-Israel 
> demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler, and chants of "Sieg 
> Heil" and "Jews into the sea." In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice 
> was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed.
>
>  But nowhere have the flames of antisemitism burned more furiously than 
> in France.
>
>  In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In 
> Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were 
> synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseille; so was a Jewish school in 
> Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov 
> cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words "Dirty 
> Jew" were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football 
> team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to 
> school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 
> months. According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 
> anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter.
>
>  Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming 
> "Jews to the gas chambers" and "Death to the Jews." The weekly journal Le 
> Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers 
> rape Palestinian women, so that their relatives will kill them to 
> preserve "family honor." The French ambassador to Great Britain was not 
> sacked -- and did not apologize -- when it was learned that he had told 
> guests at a London dinner that the world's troubles were the fault of 
> "that shitty little country, Israel."
>
>  "At the start of the 21st century," writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a 
> well-known social scientist, in a new book, "we are discovering that Jews 
> are once again select targets of violence. . .. Hatred of the Jews has 
> returned to France."
>
>  But of course, it never left. Not France; not Europe. Antisemitism, the 
> oldest bigotry known to man, has been a part of European society since 
> time immemorial. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, open Jew-hatred 
> became unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to type.
>
>  To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of Jew-hatred 
> all over their continent. But the more common reaction has been 
> complacency. "Stop saying that there is antisemitism in France," 
> President Jacques Chiracscolded a Jewish editor in January. "There is no 
> antisemitism in France." The European media have been vicious in 
> condemning Israel's self-defense against Palestinian terrorism in the 
> West Bank; they have been far less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in 
> their own backyard.
>
>  They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and 
> vitriol are aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at the Christians.
>
>  A timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews. 
> Militant Islamist extremists were attacking and killing Jews long before 
> they attacked and killed Americans on Sept. 11. The Nazis first set out 
> to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe wasablaze.
>
>  Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. 
> When they become the objects of savagery and hate, it means the air has 
> been poisoned and an explosion is soon to come. If Europeans don't rise 
> up and turn against the Jew-haters, it is only a matter of time until the 
> Jew-hatersrise up and turn against them.
>                 -- ## --
>
>
>(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. To receive his columns 
>by e-mail, send a note with your name and e-mail address to 
>columns at earthlink.net ).


-----------------------------------------
Pierre Kogan
kogan at wanadoo.fr
Strasbourg, FRANCE