Throwing In The Towel; Signed "Term Limit Petition" And Made Modest Contribution to Joe Collins. Beware The Rise in anti-Semitism.
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Something you can do about " A Limited Term Amendment." (See 1 below.)
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Is Joe typical? If not he should be
I am going to send him a modest contribution. (See 2 below.)
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Being Jewish, I make no claim to being an expert on anti-Semitism. However, I am vitally interested in the subject. Particularly when I see it's recurrence. Anti-Semitism is always associated with periods when a troubled world is looking for a scapegoat and it generally has the ability to go viral.
I believe Obama knew what he was doing when he allowed large numbers of Somali Muslims to migrate to our country because it would further more radical Muslim influence in our society and so it has.
Trump, more out of unfamiliarity and a poor choice of words, gave cover to anti-Semitism by his unwise response to the racial incidence in Charlottesville.
The two articles I have posted are worth a read because whenever anti-Semitism is on the rise bad things eventually follow because "something is rotten in Denmark."
When an entire political party is allowed to ignore it's occurrence within its ranks that is beyond disgraceful and that is the posture the Democrats have chosen to take and it will haunt them or should.
As I noted earlier, Trump is the only president, in my memory, to discuss and condemn anti-Semitism in a SOTU and for this I give him credit. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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1) In order to pass our Term Limits Convention bill in 34 states and slap term limits on the U.S. House and Senate, we figure we need one million supporters nationwide.
And since there are about 42,000 individual zip codes in the entire U.S., we need to find just over 28 allies in each zip code.
So, as supporter of term limits, will you please forward this email to five friends or family members who hate what the professional politicians are doing to this great country?
Or, even better, will you please forward the link to the national petition to them.
This is a grassroots campaign to fix Washington. We need at least 28 allies in each and every zip code in America to sign this petition. No matter where your friends and family live in the U.S., we need their help.
I'm Joe Collins, a Black Conservative, Navy Veteran, and Republican from South Central Los Angeles. I'm running for Congress to defeat radical leftist Maxine Waters.
I'm sure you've heard of Maxine Waters.
You probably remember this viral video from the 2018 campaign, when Maxine Waters incited harassment and violence against supporters of President Trump...
This toxic and radical behavior is typical of Maxine Waters. She's been plaguing my community and the rest of our country with it for two and half decades.
It's time for Maxine Waters to go!
Being from South Central LA, I can defeat Maxine Waters! But, I need your help to replace her as a representative who supports President Trump, holds conservative American values, and will fight to protect our nation from Waters and the rest of the pro-socialist Democrats.
Maxine Waters has never had a candidate like me run against her. A Black, Conservative, Veteran that was born and raised in the 43rd district.
Together, we can help President Trump Keep America Great and Make California Great Again!
I was born and grew up in South Central LA. When I was a freshman in High School, I was prime age for gang involvement. My mom moved me to Texas for a chance at a better life; Escaping gang violence and poverty. After High School, I made the decision to serve my Country and joined the U.S. Navy, where I was active for 13 years, including time serving during the successful "Operation Iraqi Freedom".
I have now returned home to the South Central LA neighborhood where I grew up, only to find it even worse than when I left – all under Maxine Waters' failed leadership.
Maxine Waters' policies have not only increased poverty and gang violence here, but for all Americans they have eliminated our freedoms, our values, and our security.
And now Maxine Waters has incited violence against those who would oppose her!
With Maxine Waters in Congress, our freedoms, our safety and our economic prosperity are all in danger.
Please send your support now to help me defeat Maxine Waters.
Sincerely,
Joe Collins Republican for Congress
P.S. I am a Walk-Away from the Democrat Party. As a black man, you are told you have to be a democrat. After joining the Military, I walked away because their party does not represent my values, my ethics, and my morals.
I am a proud supporter of President Trump 100% and I need your help to take out anti-Trump liberal Maxine Waters.
I was born in Somalia and grew up amid pervasive Muslim anti-Semitism. Hate is hard to unlearn without coming to terms with how you learned it.
By
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I once opened a speech by confessing to a crowd of Jews that I used to hate them. It was 2006 and I was a young native of Somalia who’d been elected to the Dutch Parliament. The American Jewish Committee was giving me its Moral Courage Award. I felt honored and humbled, but a little dishonest if I didn’t own up to my anti-Semitic past. So I told them how I’d learned to blame the Jews for everything.
Fast-forward to 2019. A freshman congresswoman from Minnesota has been infuriating the Jewish community and discomfiting the Democratic leadership with her expressions of anti-Semitism. Like me, Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia and exposed at an early age to Muslim anti-Semitism.
Some of the members of my 2006 AJC audience have asked me to explain and respond to Ms. Omar’s comments, including her equivocal apologies. Their main question is whether it is possible for Ms. Omar to unlearn her evident hatred of Jews—and if so, how to help.
In my experience it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to unlearn hate without coming to terms with how you learned to hate. Most Americans are familiar with the classic Western flavors of anti-Semitism: the Christian, European, white-supremacist and Communist types. But little attention has been paid to the special case of Muslim anti-Semitism. That is a pity because today it is anti-Semitism’s most zealous, most potent and most underestimated form.
I never heard the term “anti-Semitism” until I moved to the Netherlands in my 20s. But I had firsthand familiarity with its Muslim variety. As a child in Somalia, I was a passive consumer of anti-Semitism. Things would break, conflicts would arise, shortages would occur—and adults would blame it all on the Jews.
When I was a little girl, my mom often lost her temper with my brother, with the grocer or with a neighbor. She would scream or curse under her breath “Yahud!” followed by a description of the hostility, ignominy or despicable behavior of the subject of her wrath. It wasn’t just my mother; grown-ups around me exclaimed “Yahud!” the way Americans use the F-word. I was made to understand that Jews—Yahud—were all bad. No one took any trouble to build a rational framework around the idea—hardly necessary, since there were no Jews around. But it set the necessary foundation for the next phase of my development.
At 15 I became an Islamist by joining the Muslim Brotherhood. I began attending religious and civil-society events, where I received an education in the depth and breadth of Jewish villainy. This was done in two ways.
The first was theological. We were taught that the Jews betrayed our prophet Muhammad. Through Quranic verses (such as 7:166, 2:65 and 5:60), we learned that Allah had eternally condemned them, that they were not human but descendants of pigs and monkeys, that we should aspire to kill them wherever we found them. We were taught to pray: “Dear God, please destroy the Jews, the Zionists, the state of Israel. Amen.”
We were taught that the Jews occupied the Holy Land of Palestine. We were shown pictures of mutilated bodies, dead children, wailing widows and weeping orphans. Standing over them in military uniform were Israeli soldiers with large guns. We were told their killing of Palestinians was wanton, unprovoked and an expression of their hatred for Muslims.
The theological and the political stories were woven together, as in the Hamas charter: “The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The Stones and trees will say, “O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill me.” ’ . . . There is no solution for the Palestine question except through Jihad.”
That combination of narratives is the essence of Muslim anti-Semitism. Mohammed Morsi, the longtime Muslim Brotherhood leader who died June 17 but was president of Egypt for a year beginning in 2012, urged in 2010: “We must never forget, brothers, to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews”—two categories that tend to merge along with allegations of world domination.
European anti-Semitism is also a mixture. Medieval Christian antipathy toward “Christ killers” blended with radical critiques of capitalism in the 19th century and racial pseudoscience in the 20th. But before the Depression, anti-Semitic parties were not mass parties. Nor have they been since World War II. Muslim anti-Semitism has a broader base, and its propagators have had the time and resources to spread it widely.
To see how, begin at the top. Most men (and the odd woman) in power in Muslim-majority countries are autocrats. Even where there are elections, corrupt rulers play an intricate game to stay in power. Their signature move is the promise to “free” the Holy Land—that is, to eliminate the Jewish state. The rulers of Iran are explicit about this goal. Other Muslim leaders may pay lip service to the peace process and the two-state solution, but government anti-Semitism is frequently on display at the United Nations, where Israel is repeatedly compared to apartheid South Africa, accused of genocide and demonized as racist.
Media also play their part. There is very little freedom of expression in Muslim-majority countries, and state-owned media churn out anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda daily—as do even media groups that style themselves as critical of Muslim autocracies, such as Al Jazeera and Al-Manar.
Then there are the mosques, madrassas and other religious institutions. Schools in general, especially college campuses, have been an Islamist stronghold for generations in Muslim-majority countries. That matters because graduates go on to leadership positions in the professions, media, government and other institutions.
Refugee camps are another zone of indoctrination. They are full of vulnerable people, and Islamists prey on them. They come offering food, tents and first aid, followed by education. They establish madrassas in the camps, then indoctrinate the kids with a message that consists in large part of hatred for Jews and rejection of Israel.
Perhaps—I do not know—this is what happened to Ms. Omar in the four years she spent in a refugee camp in Kenya as a child. Or perhaps she became acquainted with Islamist anti-Semitism in Minnesota, where her family settled when she was 12. In any case, her preoccupation with the Jews and Israel would otherwise be hard to explain.
Spreading anti-Semitism through all these channels is no trivial matter—and this brings us to the question of resources. “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” Ms. Omar tweeted in February, implying that American politicians support Israel only because of Jewish financial contributions. The irony is that the resources available to propagate Islamist ideologies, with their attendant anti-Semitism, vastly exceed what pro-Israel groups spend in the U.S. Since the early 1970s the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has spent vast sums to spread Wahhabi Islam abroad. Much of this funding is opaque, but estimates of the cumulative sum run as high as $100 billion.
Thousands of schools in Pakistan, funded with Saudi money, “teach a version of Islam that leads [to] anti-Western militancy,” according to Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy—and, one might add, to an anti-Semitic militancy.
In recent years the Saudi leadership has tried to turn away from supporting this type of religious radicalism. But increasingly Qatar seems to be taking over the Saudi role. In the U.S. alone, the Qatar Foundation has given $30.6 million over the past eight years to public schools, ostensibly for teaching Arabic and promoting cultural exchange.
For years, Qatar has hosted influential radical clerics such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and provided them with a global microphone, and the country’s school textbooks have been criticized for anti-Semitism. They present Jews as treacherous and crafty but also weak, wretched and cowardly; Islam is described as inherently superior. “The Grade 11 text discusses at length the issue of how non-Muslims should be treated,” the Middle East Media Research Institute reports. “It warns students not to form relationships with unbelievers, and emphasizes the principle of loyalty to Muslims and disavowal of unbelievers.”
The allegation that Jewish or Zionist money controls Congress is nonsensical. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that the Israeli government has spent $34 million on lobbying in Washington since 2017. The Saudis and Qataris spent a combined $51 million during the same period. If we include foreign nongovernmental organizations, the pro-Israel lobbying figure rises to $63 million—less than the $68 billion spent lobbying for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
In 2018 domestic American pro-Israeli lobbying—including but not limited to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac—totaled $5.1 million. No comparable figures are available for domestic pro-Islamist lobbying efforts. But as journalist Armin Rosen observes, Aipac’s 2018 total, at $3.5 million, was less than either the American Association of Airport Executives or the Association of American Railroads spent on lobbying. Aipac’s influence has more to do with the power of its arguments than the size of its wallet.
Now consider the demographics. Jews were a minority in Europe in the 1930s, but a substantial one, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Today Jews are at a much greater disadvantage. For each Jew world-wide, there are 100 Muslims. In many European countries—including France, Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K.—the Muslim population far exceeds the Jewish population, and the gap is widening. American Jews still outnumber Muslims but won’t by 2050.
The problem of Muslim anti-Semitism is much bigger than Ilhan Omar. Condemning her, expelling her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, or defeating her in 2020 won’t make the problem go away.
Islamists have understood well how to couple Muslim anti-Semitism with the American left’s vague notion of “social justice.” They have succeeded in couching their agenda in the progressive framework of the oppressed versus the oppressor. Identity politics and victimhood culture also provide Islamists with the vocabulary to deflect their critics with accusations of “Islamophobia,” “white privilege” and “insensitivity.” A perfect illustration was the way Ms. Omar and her allies were able to turn a House resolution condemning her anti-Semitism into a garbled “intersectional” rant in which Muslims emerged as the most vulnerable minority in the league table of victimhood.
As for me, I eventually unlearned my hatred of Jews, Zionists and Israel. As an asylum seeker turned student turned politician in Holland, I was exposed to a complex set of circumstances that led me to question my own prejudices. Perhaps I didn’t stay in the Islamist fold long enough for the indoctrination to stick. Perhaps my falling out with my parents and extended family after I left home led me to a wider reappraisal of my youthful beliefs. Perhaps it was my loss of religious faith.
In any event, I am living proof that one can be born a Somali, raised as an anti-Semite, indoctrinated as an anti-Zionist—and still overcome all this to appreciate the unique culture of Judaism and the extraordinary achievement of the state of Israel. If I can make that leap, so perhaps can Ms. Omar. Yet that is not really the issue at stake. For she and I are only two individuals. The real question is what, if anything, can be done to check the advance of the mass movement that is Muslim anti-Semitism. Absent a world-wide Muslim reformation, followed by an Islamic enlightenment, I am not sure I know.
3a) The New Anti-Semitism
In Europe and the U.S., rising political forces on both the right and the left have revived old patterns that scapegoat Jews for society’s ills
By
Yaroslav Trofimov
When France’s Yellow Vests began to protest weekly last November, it was about President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise fuel taxes. Within a few months, it also started to be about the Jews.
Signs that labeled Mr. Macron as a “whore of the Jews” and a slave of the Rothschilds, a reference to the president’s past employment with the investment bank, became a fixture of the demonstrations. In February, several Yellow Vest protesters—since disavowed by the movement—assaulted the Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut on the doorstep of his Paris home, yelling, “You will die,” “Zionist turd” and “France is for us.”
“When there is a world-wide economic and social malaise, people look for scapegoats—and the Jews have always served as scapegoats,” said Francis Kalifat, the president of CRIF, the council uniting France’s Jewish institutions. “Anti-Semitism creates bridges between the far right and the far left: They have such a hatred in common that they come together.”
French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut arrives at a Paris courthouse on May 22 for the trial of a Yellow Vest protester accused of jeering at him and calling him a ‘dirty Zionist’ last March. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
In France and other Western societies, the proliferation of new political forces that challenge the established liberal order—from both the right and the left—has revived old patterns of vilifying the Jews as the embodiment of the corrupt elites supposedly responsible for society’s ills.
Meanwhile, unfiltered social media has pushed these anti-Semitic tropes, long confined to the fringes, into the mainstream of public debate. On any given issue—from economic inequality to the financial crisis to immigration and terrorism—old and new conspiracy theories blaming the Jews have gained new traction, abetted by the political polarization and general crisis of confidence permeating Western democracies.
“Latent anti-Semitism is being activated,” said David Feldman, director of the Pears Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Birkbeck, University of London. “Populist politics is not inherently anti-Semitic, conspiracy theories are not inherently anti-Semitic, but both very easily lend themselves to an anti-Semitic turn and easily become anti-Semitic.”
This change comes after an unusual, postwar golden age that Jewish communities enjoyed across Western Europe and the U.S. over the past several decades. After the horrors of the Holocaust, a commitment to minority rights, religious freedom, an inclusive vision of nationhood and a human-rights-based liberalism seemed to be the bedrock of political life in Western democracies. While anti-Semitic prejudice persisted in some areas, overt anti-Semitism seemed taboo.
‘The trend away from liberal democracies is bad for the Jewish people, period.’
—Jonathan Greenblatt, Anti-Defamation League
“Liberal democracies have been good for the Jewish people. Civil rights have been critical to our success in societies which, in the absence of these rights, over centuries and millennia systematically discriminated against and marginalized Jewish people,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the director of the Anti-Defamation League in New York. “The trend away from liberal democracies is bad for the Jewish people, period.”
As anti-Semitic discourse again becomes normalized in the West, the number of incidents targeting Jews has surged in the U.S. and Europe.
French police work outside the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery store where a gunman’s rampage left four Jews dead, Paris, Jan. 9, 2015. PHOTO: ERIC FEFERBERG/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Until the past few years, the biggest threat came from Islamists and disaffected Muslim youths, particularly in the troubled banlieues at the edges of French cities. France, home to Europe’s biggest Jewish community, has suffered a string of killings of Jews, including the deadly 2015 assault on a Paris kosher supermarket claimed by Islamic State. Anti-Jewish harassment remains commonplace in distressed neighborhoods where working-class Muslims and Jews live side by side.
“The Jews who lived in the banlieue have been leaving. Daily life has become impossible there,” said French Sen. Esther Benbassa, who represents many suburbs of Paris.
The West’s new wave of anti-Semitism, however, is increasingly coming from new quarters: from the nativist far right, with its fear of “the other” and dreams of racial purity, and from the extreme left, which often identifies Jews with the capitalist elites it seeks to destroy and glorifies Palestinian militants.
Sen. Benbassa, who supported the Yellow Vests’ economic demands, said that skinhead far-right activists twice assailed her with anti-Semitic insults during the recent demonstrations; other Yellow Vests—who, like many in the movement, can’t abide anti-Semitic prejudice—came to her rescue.
People pay their respects at a makeshift memorial for the 11 worshipers killed during Oct. 27, 2018, services at the Tree of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh, Nov. 1, 2018. The massacre was the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. PHOTO: GENE J. PUSKAR/ASSOCIATED PRESS
When another far-right extremist shouting anti-Semitic slurs and seething over immigration gunned down 11 worshipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last October, he claimed more lives in one swoop than an entire decade of Islamist violence against Jews in France. Including that shooting—the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history—the total number of reported physical assaults on Jews in the U.S. more than doubled last year to 39, according to the Anti-Defamation League. In April, another far-right extremist opened fire in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., killing a 60-year-old woman.
Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, right, is hugged after an anti-Semitic gunman killed a 60-year-old woman at the Chabad of Poway synagogue, April 28, Poway, Calif. PHOTO: DENIS POROY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
In the U.K., the number of anti-Semitic incidents has been rising for each of the past four years, reaching 1,652 in 2018, compared with 960 in 2015, according to the Community Security Trust, which monitors threats to British Jews. (Most of the identified perpetrators were white and non-Muslim.) And in France, the number of reported anti-Jewish incidents rose 74% to 541 last year, according to the country’s interior ministry. That may be just the tip of an iceberg: Last year, a European Union survey of European Jews found that 79% of those who experienced anti-Semitic harassment didn’t report it to authorities.
A critical difference between today’s anti-Semitism and its pre-World War II iterations is the existence of Israel—a prosperous democracy and an undeclared nuclear power that is nearing the historic threshold of being home to the majority of the world’s Jews. On one level, Israel represents a guarantee of security should things get dramatically worse—a “life insurance policy” for diaspora Jews, as Mr. Kalifat of CRIF puts it. Already, tens of thousands of French Jews have invested in property in Israel or acquired Israeli passports.
But on another level, Jews in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere are regularly blamed for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—a minority within one country being held accountable for the policy decisions of the government of another. Sometimes this dynamic can take on softer forms, such as when Jewish students on American college campuses—where the movement to boycott Israel is strong—face pressure to repudiate any connection to the Jewish state. Sometimes, it can become violent. During the 2014 Gaza war, some pro-Palestinian protesters in France—unable to attack Israeli interests—burned down several Jewish-owned businesses instead. “When you diabolize the state of Israel, you end up diabolizing the Jews,” Mr. Kalifat said.
A rally against Israel’s Gaza offensive descended into violence in which an angry pro-Palestinian crowd damaged local Jewish businesses, Sarcelles, France, July 21, 2014. PHOTO: MIGUEL MEDINA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
The diabolization of Israel certainly lies at the heart of the crisis in Britain’s Labour Party—a movement that used to attract the bulk of the U.K. Jewish vote and that 85.6% of British Jews now see as harboring significant anti-Semitism, according to an August-September 2018 poll for the Jewish Chronicle, a London-based Jewish newspaper.
In nearly four years of being led by Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of Israel and Zionism, Labour has experienced so many anti-Semitic incidents within its ranks that in May, the party found itself under formal investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, an antiracism watchdog created by a previous Labour government. Mr. Corbyn has described leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends” and was recorded saying that “Zionists” don’t “understand English irony” despite spending their entire lives in the country. He vigorously denies that he or his party are anti-Semitic.
“Jews in this country are held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government in the way we wouldn’t demand for, say, British Pakistanis. It’s the way that is not applied to any other minority,” said Luciana Berger, a member of Parliament who had to be protected by police at last year’s Labour conference and quit the party in February.
Demonstrators stage a protest against anti-Semitism in Britain's Labour Party, accusing its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, of doing too little to rid the party of anti-Jewish prejudice within its ranks, London, April 8, 2018. PHOTO: DAVID CLIFF/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET/GETTY IMAGES
Several people—from both the far right and the left—have been arrested and sentenced for making anti-Semitic threats against Ms. Berger, a former parliamentary chair of the Jewish Labour Movement. Ms. Berger said that she is often asked whether Jewish life in Britain could continue under a Corbyn government. “It comes up all the time: Do we have to leave the country?” she said. “It’s terrifying.”
In the U.S. Democratic Party—which attracted 72% of the American Jewish vote in last year’s midterms—rising criticism of Israel’s policies has also sometimes spilled into anti-Semitic language. In February, Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” suggesting that money from a pro-Israel group helps dictate U.S. foreign policy; she apologized after condemnation by her fellow Democrats in Congress.
Though President Donald Trump has expressed hope that such incidents would prompt a “Jexodus” toward him and his party, so far, there is little evidence of it happening: Some 71% of American Jews hold an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Trump, according to a surveycarried out in April-May for the American Jewish Committee, or AJC—a figure unchanged from the year before.
Several American Jewish organizations have repeatedly criticized Mr. Trump’s own remarks, such as saying in 2017 that the anti-Jewish protesters in Charlottesville included “very fine people” and, in October 2016, that Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks” to enrich “global financial powers.”
Hundreds of white supremacists and neo-Nazis gather in Charlottesville, Va., Aug. 12, 2017. White nationalists chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ and other anti-Semitic slogans.PHOTO: MARK PETERSON/REDUX PICTURES
Mr. Trump strongly denies any anti-Semitism and points to his staunch support of Israel. Indeed, unlike among traditionally liberal American Jews, Mr. Trump has become widely popular in Israel, where 79% of Jews approve of his handling of the relationship with their country, according to a poll conducted for the AJC in April. Building strong bonds with Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mr. Trump has pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, where a planned new town has been named Ramat Trump in his honor.
In addition to cultivating Mr. Trump and the Republican Party, Mr. Netanyahu has wooed nationalist and populist governments in Hungary, Austria, Brazil and elsewhere that have defended Israel in international forums. As with Mr. Trump, that has made Israel even more of an issue in many countries’ domestic politics—and created unusual strains in the ties between the Jewish state and those countries’ overwhelmingly liberal Jews.
“It’s something new for us: We have never been in a situation of big tension between the governments of very friendly countries and their Jewish communities,” said the veteran Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, who until last year headed the Jewish Agency, a body responsible for Jewish immigration and ties with the diaspora.
Some of the West’s new nationalist and populist forces have embraced Mr. Netanyahu’s Israel because of political calculations, including the need to mask anti-Semitism in their own ranks. Many others, however, admire the Jewish state’s successes and values, from growing its economy and building up its military to elevating tradition, culture and faith.
Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has made protecting Europe from a “Muslim invasion” the cornerstone of his policies, is a case in point. “In the world today, there are basically two types of leaders: There are the globalists and the patriots,” Mr. Orban, a frequent visitor to Jerusalem, said in 2017. “And it is beyond question that the current prime minister of the state of Israel is a member of the club of patriots.”
Yet Mr. Orban has also sought to rewrite Hungary’s history, portraying his country as an innocent victim of Nazi Germany and playing down its participation in the Holocaust. That has opened up a rift between the leaders of Hungary’s Jewish community and Mr. Orban’s government. “They want a proud Hungarian nation without black spots,” said Andras Heisler, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary, whose mother was deported to Auschwitz by Hungarian police.
An anti-migrant billboard campaign by the Hungarian government shows an image of the billionaire George Soros, Budapest, July 5, 2017. The poster reads, ‘Don’t let Soros have the last laugh!’ The words ‘Stinking Jew’ have been scrawled on the Hungarian-born Mr. Soros’s forehead. PHOTO: AKOS STILLER
Mr. Heisler, who has frequently criticized Mr. Orban’s rhetoric targeting Muslims and his attacks on the Jewish billionaire George Soros, acknowledged a paradox: Despite their apprehension about Hungary’s political course, Jews walking through Budapest in religious garb are much safer today than those in the liberal democracies of Germany or France. “In Hungary, there is anti-Semitism, but there are no physical attacks,” Mr. Heisler said. “We can go with a kippah in the street.”
Contrast that with Germany, where the government’s commissioner on anti-Semitism warned Jews in May not to wear kippahs for their own safety—advice that sparked an uproar and was withdrawn.
In Sarcelles, a town north of Paris with a large Jewish community and a much larger population of Arab and African Muslim origin, Rene Banon’s pharmacy in the Flanades shopping center was burned down during anti-Jewish riots sparked by the Gaza war in 2014. These days, he frets about local Jewish youths wearing prayer shawls and yarmulkes as they walk to the local synagogue on Sabbath. “This could be seen as a provocation,” Mr. Banon said in his rebuilt pharmacy on a recent afternoon. “They shouldn’t be doing it in such a difficult period.”
Such fears—and experiences—of daily harassment, often perpetrated by Muslim youths, have pushed a fraction of French, German or Austrian Jews to support far-right, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim parties, disregarding these movements’ anti-Semitic overtones. That is a dangerous mistake, warned Mr. Kalifat, the head of France’s CRIF.
“The best bulwark against Islamists is not the far right. It is democracy,” Mr. Kalifat said, pointing to the torrent of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial that has poured from far-right activists within the Yellow Vest movement in recent months. “If the extreme right wants to fight Islamists, that doesn’t make it our friend—because I know that it will be Islamism and Muslims at first, but then it will be the Jews.”
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