Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Spike in Antisemitism in the UK in January

I am currently in London at a international Parliamentary conference on antisemitism. More on that later.

But this BBC report on what is happening here in the UK is relevant.
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3 comments:

Abba-Dad said...

It's not just the UK, but most of Europe. France is a prime example where anti-semitic incidents happen on a daily basis and are never reported.

I never liked Europe to begin with. I don't understand how they can turn a blind eye to what is going on in their midst.

February 18, 2009 3:51 PM
hockey hound said...

The Banality of Evil
by Mark Silverberg

A resurgence of the oldest of ancient hatreds.


Anti-Semitism never really died after the Holocaust, it simply went underground for a while. In the wake of the
According to British police, Jews are four times more likely to be attacked because of their religion than are Muslims.
Gaza War, a disturbing series of events are occurring in Britain - events that should give us all cause for concern. Zionism has not only become a dirty word; it has become a cover for a resurgence of the oldest of ancient hatreds.

According to the Observer, there is an average of seven anti-Semitic attacks every single day in the United Kingdom - attacks that have come in the form of graffiti, vandalism, arson, violent assaults on Jews in the streets, and hate e-mails. Jewish schools have been granted extra protection and the Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Jewish racism in British society, issues frequent advice and warnings. According to British police, Jews are four times more likely to be attacked because of their religion than are Muslims. Every synagogue service and virtually every Jewish communal event now requires guards on the lookout for violence from both neo-Nazis and Muslim extremists. Orthodox Jews have become particular targets; some have begun wearing baseball caps instead of skullcaps and concealing their Star of David jewelry for fear of being physically assaulted.

The war in Gaza has revealed a darker side to British society, as demonstrated by the extent to which the British media, intelligentsia and political class have simply buckled in the face of the global Islamic jihad. Melanie Phillips, writing in the Wall Street Journal (Europe) put it this way: "Years of demonizing Israel and appeasing Islamist extremism within Britain have now coalesced, as a result of the media misrepresentation of the Gaza War as an atrocity against civilians, in an unprecedented wave of hatred against Israel, and a sharp rise in attacks on British Jews" - and the authorities have done little or nothing to stop such incitement to hatred. In one case, the police even told pro-Israel demonstrators to put away their Israel flags because they were "inflammatory," yet they allowed anti-Israel demonstrators to scream support for Hamas, and even to dress up as hook-nosed Jews "drinking" the blood of Palestinian babies.




These events are part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Britain is slowly succumbing to Islamic "dhimmitude" - whether out of fear, ignorance or Arab financial interests in Britain. As in the French banlieues (inner city ghettos), Britain also has self-governing "no-go areas" where Muslims dominate certain locales to the exclusion of non-Muslims. The result is that there are increasing reports of Muslim attacks on Jews in Britain, and it is becoming clearer with each passing day that Londonistan (the title of Melanie Phillips' book) is not a safe place for Jews. This is true for many places on the continent, as detailed in Bat Ye'or's book Eurabia.





In a recent comment in The Spectator, one reader opined: "I for one resent the fact that I can no longer congregate outside my synagogue. I resent the fact that my children attend Jewish school protected by security fences, concrete blocks and guard posts. I resent the fact that my eldest daughter... should feel intimidated on campus and questioned in a hostile, finger pointing manner how she feels as a Jewess on the question of Gaza, and if she supports the Israeli actions." Worse, a Birmingham school is investigating reports that twenty children chased a 12-year-old girl (its only Jewish pupil) chanting "Kill all Jews" and "Death to Jews"; and in another incident a Jewish schoolgirl reported being bullied at a non-Jewish school because of the Gaza conflict.





One would think that it was the Jews who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, rioted across Europe and burned down Danish embassies two years ago over the Mohammed cartoon caricatures, planned and executed the suicide attacks on the London tube and Madrid railway stations, decapitated Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg and other "infidels", trained their children to become "martyrs", strapped twenty pounds of explosives to their bodies and detonated themselves in restaurants, subways, pizza parlors, buses, shopping malls, coffee shops, marketplaces, tourist resorts and Passover Seders in France, London, Bali, Kenya, Algeria, Istanbul, Dar es Salaam, Mumbai and Israel, and are waging a global religious war against "non-believers."




I suspect that if the British students who attended the seventeen sit-ins and demonstrations held at British universities to protest Israeli "massacres" in Gaza had chanted "Death to all Muslims", as they screamed "Death to all Jews" during the Gaza War, the British Left and civil rights organizations would have been all over them demanding staff resignations, academic boycotts of their schools and colleges, the arrest of the demonstrators, and compensation to British Muslim victims. But it appears that the more socially acceptable and fashionable it becomes to "blame the Jews", the more the Jew-haters seem to come out of the woodwork.





And in terms of "the Israeli massacre (that never was) of Palestinians in Gaza" (and Melanie Phillips points this out in a recent editorial), neither the British media nor British society seem to care that the government of Sri Lanka is attempting to eradicate terrorism by a military campaign in which, according to the United Nations, "many civilians are being killed", thousands made homeless, hundreds of thousands trapped, and to which, as food shortages grow, the government refuses to allow access to journalists. Despite all this, there are no sit-ins on British campuses against the Sri Lankans, no violent protests outside its High Commission, and no calls to boycott Orange Pekoe tea. In fact, there have been no protests of any kind attacking Hamas for firing missiles for years at Israeli cities, towns and villages, not to mention terrorizing over 250,000 men, women and children whose idea of a restful night was and is one spent in a bomb shelter.





Somehow, the deaths of 1,300 Gazans (more than half of whom were Islamic terrorists being sheltered by
There are no sit-ins on British campuses against the Sri Lankans, no violent protests.
civilians) have evoked more outrage than the estimated two million dead in Congo, the tens of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered by Sunni and Shia terrorists in Iraq, or the massacres of civilians killed by their own governments in Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Burundi, Chad, Afghanistan, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Guinea, Rwanda, West Bengal and, most notably, by Hamas in Gaza. The point is, if you are willing to acquiesce in terrorist attacks on Jews in southern Israel, where a tiny democracy seeks to protect its people against terrorism, why wouldn't it be okay to beat them up in the streets of London or Birmingham?





Jews are the barometers of the societies in which they live. Any student of history understands that as it goes with the Jews, so it will go with democracy; and as it goes with democracy, so it will go with the Jews. It was, after all, the Jewish people who first gave the world the moral and ethical codes that underpin Western civilization; the tragedy is that today, it is these very values that are under attack. If the events surrounding the recent Gaza War foreshadow the future of British Jewry (as do similar events in France and Venezuela), then thank G-d there's an Israel - for there is nothing that proves the need for a Jewish State more than the persecution of Jews outside of it.

Shevat 24, 5769 / 18 February 09

February 18, 2009 7:30 PM
DANIELBLOOM said...

important to talk about here is that antisemitic play in London now by Caryl Churchill called "Seven Jewish Children" or something. Now THAT is something worth talking about here.

February 19, 2009 11:29 PM

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