It has been a week of ordinary anti-Semitism in Europe.
Germany’s Sparkasse Savings Bank allowed opponents of the existence of Israel, who have mendaciously likened the Jewish State to the Third Reich, to deliver a talk in its office.
In Amsterdam, Holocaust survivors were severely beaten and called “dirty Jews” and a Dutch publisher inserted in a history textbook for high schools containing the theory that cash-strapped Britain’s support for Zionism owed its existence to the desire to woo rich Jewish bankers.
In Oslo, an anti-Semitic cartoon (a Goebbels-style and unflattering image of a Jew), was printed on a credit card from Norwegian bank.
In London, 110,000 ordinary citizens signed an appeal to arrest Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Jewish boys were badly beaten in Manchester.
In Italy, a movie titled “Israel – The Cancer” has been screened in a dozen municipalities and cities. When the Israeli embassy contacted the mayor of one of these cities to ask him to explain why he allowed it, the first citizen replied by defending “freedom of expression”. So could I ask a public hall to screen a pro IS movie? No. But I can host a documentary inciting people to euthanize the State of Israel.
In Scotland, MP Paul Monaghan accused the “proud Jewish race” of “persecuting the people of Gaza”.
Jews have been chosen again as a convenient scapegoat for Europe’s own decline.
This horrible list could go on indefinitely, but I think it already gives a clear idea of what is happening, again, on Europe’s soil these days.
Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, the former chief rabbi of Milan’s Jewish Community and one of the most respected personalities among Italy’s Jewry, just delivered a shocking message to his fellows Jews:
“European culture is suffering from many ills. Emotionalism, goodism, pacifism, third-worldism, hedonism, individualism, egotism, relativism and ignorance are aggressive and insidious viral agents (…) Political Islam is a sort of nemesis of European culture. The medical metaphor that sees in Israel and the Jews a ‘cancer’ and a ‘contagion’ are new versions of old anti-Semitic rethorics. Political Islam, unfortunately, has used these as a Trojan horse in the already sick or weak conscience of Europeans.”
Rabbi Laras summarized perfectly what is happening today to Europe’s conscience, destroyed again by anti-Semitism and where Jews have been chosen again as a convenient scapegoat for Europe’s own decline.
In Europe’s streets, front pages, televisions and parliaments there is the identification of Israel with evil. The symbol of good has been assigned to “Palestine”.
It seems that Israel, as it is seen in Europe, has liberated the European conscience from culpability for the Holocaust and that Europe rolled back again to the atmosphere of suspicion of the ‘30s.
What future do Jews have in Europe? None, I fear. But the next in line, I think, will be the crazy Europeans who allowed all of this.