A town on the outskirts of Paris, Bondy, led by the Socialist mayor Sylvine Thomassin, approved the boycott of Israeli goods from Judea and Samaria. It is not the first time. Leicester, the tenth largest city in the UK, has also banned the “products made in Israel” and the Irish town of Kinvara informed the shops, restaurants and even pharmacies that these can no longer sell Israeli products.
A few hours after this French town voted the boycott of Israel, two Israeli Jews, two “settlers”, were killed by the Palestinian Arabs.
The extinction of European Judaism took place amid the complete failure of European culture.
It is a scam. It is a scandal without end. It is title of a book by André Glucksmann: “Silence, on tue”. Silence, it kills! Even while the threat of a new extermination of the Jews is today a reality and a promise, the custodians of memory in the West continue to distinguish between anti-Semitism, which is piously condemned in homage to the Holocaust, and anti-Zionism, a hatred for Israel that is eagerly accepted and propagated.
European culture maintains that the Israelis killed today because they are Jews have nothing to do with their parents killed in the gas chambers; that the anti-Semitism behind the Holocaust is a singular evil of the past.
The extinction of European Judaism took place amid the complete failure of European culture. Today in the West there is a conscience indifferent to the daily demonization and pain inflicted on Jews by the Palestinian Arabs.
40 years ago this week, terrorists hijacked a plane full of Israelis in Entebbe, in 1976, they selected hostages by making them state their names, and they detained the 105 Jews aboard. Some of them were concentration camp survivors who had experienced that same kind of selection more than thirty years earlier. One of them, Pasco Cohen, was killed in front of his daughter.
We saw the same scene in Hevron but also in Dacca, Bangladesh, where 9 Italians were butchered by ISIS.
For a large sector of the world and of the Islamic world, Israel is merely a piece of real estate that must be restored to Islam. But as it goes with Israel, it will go for the rest of the free world.
Last week, Abu Mazen, the “moderate” face of the Palestinian Authority, was in Brussels to collect a standing ovation after saying that a group of Israeli rabbis advised "settlers" to poison the water to kill the largest number Palestinian Arabs as possible. A bald lie. But hate speech works. It works as it vibrates from the heart of old Europe as well as when it is promoted by Ramallah.
In twenty-four hours, two Israeli civilians were killed in cold blood. The killing of Jews had gotten a standing ovation from EU.
And then there is that British passion for hating Jews.
Jeremy Corbyn was talking about the report on anti-Semitism in his Labour Party just a few days ago: “Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for Israel’s actions than our Muslim friends to the self-style Islamic State”.
Yes, we heard right: Israel as ISIS and Prime Minister Netanyahu as Caliph Baghdadi.
Since he was elected secretary of Labour, Corbyn fell in one anti-Semitic scandal after another. The fatal and despicable comparison between Israel and the ISIS is shared by many Labour MPs and councilors suspended in recent months (including former London mayor Livingstone).
British culture is full of these examples of primitive anti-Semitism.But it is not surprising for another reason.
What Corbyn said is shared by most of the humanitarian British élite. The UN was smart to appoint as envoy to the Palestinian territories the professor of law at Queen Mary University of London, Penny Green, who also compared Israel to the Islamic State.
It is an obscene and unacceptable paradox: that the victim becomes the victimizer, that the Jew turns into the new Nazi. During the last war in Gaza in the summer of 2014, The Independent, the leftist British newspaper, wrote that Israel is a “child killers’ community”.
The British intellighentsia justified for years a blood bath of the Israeli people. The poet Tom Paulin wished death to “Jewish settlers”, the playright Caryl Churchill wrote an openly anti-Semitic play, the novelist Iain Banks announced that his books would never be translated into Hebrew, a New Statesman’s weekly cover denounced the “Kasher Conspiracy”, the British professor Mona Baker fired two Israeli colleagues from an academic magazine and the Nobel laureate Harold Pinter declared Israel “the central factor in world unrest”.
British culture is full of these examples of primitive anti-Semitism.
I fear that the dark, irrational, appeal to the oppression of the Jews has once again prevailed in our society, against all logic, against all progress. A few hours after Mr. Corbyn compared Israel to ISIS, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed to death an Israeli girl while she was sleeping in her bed near Hevron.
They would never admit it, but for most of these British hypocrites and for many of their European counterparts, Hallel-Yaffa Ariel and Rabbi Michael Mark deserved it.