Hungary, Where Europe’s Faultlines Meet
As the World Jewish Congress prepares to convene in Budapest, Paul Berger covers the increasingly hostile conditions under which Hungarian Jews — one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe with an estimated population of around 85,000 recorded in 2012 — are forced to reside.
Primarily, the problem in Hungary is a political problem. With an unemployment rate of over 11 percent and low economic growth, the electoral success of the fascistic Jobbik movement, and an annual rise in recorded hate crimes last year, the European faultlines of economic malaise, political extremism, and the persecution of immigrants and minorities are meeting in Hungary with troubling consequences.
Other provisions restricted the liberty of the individual to work, travel, and marry. Students whose college education is subsidised by the state are required to work in Hungary for a certain period of time after graduation, while others who elect to move abroad now have to pay back the value of that subsidy. The law now also gives preference to traditional family relationships, in other words those between one man and one woman with children. At the behest of the European Union, a provision allowing only public media to broadcast political advertising before general and European elections was amended.
Maggie and the Jews
Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” of British politics, who pulled her country back from 35 years of socialism, led it to victory in the Falklands war and helped guide the United States and the Soviet Union through the cold war’s difficult last years, died Monday. She was 87. (The New York Times)
Margaret Thatcher on the Jewish people:
I have enormous admiration for the Jewish people, inside or outside Israel. There have always been Jewish members of my staff and indeed my Cabinet. In fact I just wanted a Cabinet of clever, energetic people — and frequently that turned out to be the same thing.
Margaret Thatcher on Israel:
The political and economic construction of Israel against huge odds and bitter adversaries is one of the heroic sagas of our age. They really made the desert bloom. I only wished that Israeli emphasis on the human rights of the Russian refuseniks was matched by proper appreciation of the plight of landless and stateless Palestinians.
Margaret Thatcher on the Holocaust:
I attended the Yad Vashem Memorial to the Holocaust: as on every occasion, I came out numb with shock that human beings could sink to such depravity.
For Denmark's Jews, Hate Beneath the Surface
In contrast to life across the sound in Malmö — where the mayor once famously stated, “We accept neither antisemitism nor Zionism”, and the Jewish community centre was bombed last September — Copenhagen’s Jews have traditionally felt few threats. “A Jew in Denmark can live a life without problems or fear of being a Jew,” says Chief Rabbi Bent Lexner.
Indeed, this year’s commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Rescue only serves to highlight the place of Jews within wider Danish society: in the presence of the Queen, the community will recall the escape to Sweden of 7,000 Jews in 1943, assisted by the resistance and ordinary Danes.
And yet, something is amiss in the state of Denmark. In the past 12 months, there has been a spike in recorded hate crimes against Jews.
In May, a male was assaulted in Fælledparken Park by a gang who shouted “dirty Jew” and “death to Israel”, leaving him with a concussion and black eye. Then, in September, a representative of Magen David Adom, who was wearing a kippah, was attacked outside Central Station by three men. The same month, Copenhagen’s Mayor for Employment and Integration, Anna Mee Allerslev, suggested that Israeli flags should not be displayed at a multicultural event in the city’s park, before rescinding her statement upon realising her insensitivity.
Read more: http://www.thejc.com/news/world-news/102485/great-caf%C3%A9-life-hate-stirs-under-surface-copenhagen
David Ward, with foot still very much in mouth
As if accusing “the Jews” of perpetuating “atrocities” against the Palestinians on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day wasn’t enough for David Ward, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East has given an interview to The Guardian in which he reaches once more for his shovel, making use of some old tropes as he digs.
When the interviewer, Aida Edemariam, asked if he was surprised about the storm which followed his initial comments, Ward replied:
There is a huge operation out there, a machine almost, which is designed to protect the state of Israel from criticism. And that comes into play very, very quickly and focuses intensely on anyone who’s seen to criticise the state of Israel. And so I end up looking at what happened to me, whether I should use this word, whether I should use that word – and that is winning, for them. Because what I want to talk about is the fundamental question of how can they do this, and how can they be allowed to do this.
Such remarks are not only in keeping with the intolerance and unintelligence of his first statement – which, among other things, accused Jews of failing to “learn the lessons of the Holocaust” – but his disbelief that he has said or done anything unacceptable, at all. In Ward’s world, it is not that his comments were rude or disgraceful, but that a hidden elite – them – was simply waiting for Ward to say anything about Israel and Palestine. “We would have been having this same conversation if I’d not used those words”, he added. Ward, then, was merely picked on for saying, well, what must be said.
All eyes on François Hollande
Following the killing of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and numerous other hate attacks in France this year, all eyes will be on how President François Hollande deals with Muslim extremism in 2013.
Malmo in Sweden remains a hotbed of antisemitic violence and, this month, Israeli tourists were advised not to wear kippot in Denmark after a string of attacks in the Copenhagen district of Nørrebro. In both cases, certain sections of the countries’ Muslim communities were to blame.
In Hungary, the ultra-nationalist Jobbik party continues to spout Jew-hate, and an Italian version of the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn is seeking political legitimacy in Italy. This year will be another challenging one for Europe’s Jews.
A Secret Jew in Jordan
by Joe Freeman, Tablet, December 20, 2012
As my second year in the Corps began, I was teaching an eighth-grade English class. Strolling through the rows during an exercise, I stopped next to a student carving a swastika into his desk with a pen. He looked up guiltily as if he had been caught drawing cartoons. I took a piece of chalk and drew a large white swastika on the board, pointing at it repeatedly amid a scattered historical lecture about the Holocaust, World War II, and Hitler’s mustache. I left the room early and believed I had made my point. The next day, I bounded up the stairs to my classroom to find two words scrawled on the door in thick, red marker: Ghurfat Hitler: Hitler’s room. I pushed the door open slowly, and my eyes drifted to the blackboard, which several students had peppered with small white swastikas. I scanned the silent room for perpetrators. Everyone was grinning. I wiped the board clean, shrugged off what appeared to be a prank, and began teaching the lesson as if nothing happened. But when I went home that day, I called our Jordanian security officer and asked for guidance. He told me that to many people in Jordan, Hitler is considered a hero. I said it was wrongheaded history but avoided telling him that the swastikas had bothered me so much because I was Jewish.
I withdrew from social interactions, and the quality of my service in the Peace Corps rapidly deteriorated. I started taking sick days from school. I isolated myself on the weekends and avoided villagers who knocked on my door. I started to turn down invitations. Then the invitations stopped coming.
Situated in the hills, my village afforded sweeping westward views of the Jordan Valley, flat and hot as the bottom of an iron. At night I could see the headlights of cars across the border, winding around roads in Israel. It was around this dreary period of my service that I decided to take a trip there. I wasn’t seeking solace among the company of Jews in particular; I just wanted a break from Jordan, and taking a taxi to the border was the quickest way out of the country. But instead of vacationing, I spent the entire time fretting about what to do once I got back. The Peace Corps requires that volunteers check in upon returning. I sent an email saying I was back in Jordan when I wasn’t yet. Having told so many lies in the past year, did one more untruth matter? In this case, it did. I returned a day after the appointed time and was summoned to the office. Apparently, our security officer contacted officials at the border. I was busted. It was a fitting note to make an exit on. A trip to “Indiana” ended my failed experiment as a secret Jew in Jordan.
Can we call Mondoweiss anti-Semitic yet?
Earlier this year, a minor tiff broke out in the pages of The Atlantic (a fine publication to which I occasionally contribute), after Armin Rosen published an article which asserted that Mondoweiss“often gives the appearance of an anti-Semitic enterprise”. Robert Wright found Rosen’s piece “McCarthyite” in character, deeming Mondoweiss to be merely “an edgy website that is highly critical of both Israel and Zionism”.
Wright took umbrage with the idea of guilt by association: the notion that, if someone deems a publication or institution to be anti-Semitic, all those connected to it must be anti-Semitic as well. In Rosen’s article, Alex Kane – then a staff writer, now an assistant editor – was chided for not publically challenging Mondoweiss’ “lunacy”, while acknowledging that he is not responsible for the work of other writers. The latter point here is worth stressing: Kane holds political views that verge on the repugnant, including the idea that Zionism “helped drive 9/11”, but in general he appears to be a perfectly acceptable individual.
The question apposite to the one Wright raises and challenges is the far more interesting and important one, however. It is also one which underscores Rosen’s piece, namely if a publication or institution chooses to lend its imprimatur to an article or series of articles that can be deemed anti-Semitic – and Rosen cites numerous examples of questionable work – can said organisation be characterised as anti-Semitic as a whole?
Rosen and Wright’s particular quarrel is dead, and since I have no desire to reanimate it, I shall refrain from picking a side. Thus, I shall place my loaded gun upon the mantelpiece, and merely note that when all was said and done, Andrew Sullivan came down on the side of Wright and Mondoweiss.
1.
For those not familiar with Mondoweiss, it is (in its own words) a “news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective,” which seeks to publish “a diversity of voices to promote dialogue on these important issues”. Herein lays the first canard, for claims of plurality are negated by its other commitment to “offer alternatives to pro-Zionist ideology as a basis for American Jewish identity”. Whatever diversity there is on Mondoweiss is akin to an argument between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea, for I have yet to read one article on said site that has been favourable to Israel.
Then again, this is understandable. The site’s founders, Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, are anti-Zionists. It is a political position which influences the way in which Mondoweiss addresses the important questions pertaining to the future of Israel and Palestine. Anti-Zionism informs the articles they select for publication and the commentators they choose to hire. It colours their coverage of the news coming out of the region, suppressing Israel’s achievements or pleasant news regarding the two-state solution, while augmenting the most awful effects of the occupation, and promoting developments which indicate things might be moving in the direction of Isratine and the death of the Jewish state.
Anti-Zionism – or, to put it other way, the belief it was a mistake to have created Israel in the first place; that Israel is not and can never be the answer or even an answer to the Jewish question – is, it goes without saying, a very problematic ideology. It constantly requires one to walk the thin line between disbelief in a Jewish state, and anti-Semitism, since anti-Zionists must constantly be forced to answer the question of why it is that Jews – and only Jews – are the only national group not entitled to a state of their own. One’s answer to that question says a good deal about a person’s character, for good or for ill.
Martin Amis discussed the mild anti-Semitism of his own father, and gave his thoughts on Israel. He read from Saul Bellow’s book on Israel, and suggests that there is a great deal of anxiety among Jews about the future of Israel.
Christopher Hitchens, who only discovered he was Jewish in 1989, talked about the place of Judaism in history: about Voltaire, suspicion, Israel, and the Jewish diaspora.
Martin Amis then discussed the Jewish concept of manhood, before going on to contemplate the effect of 9/11 on the Jewish community.
Hitchens then touched on some moments that betray a prejudice against Jews that still lingers even after the Holocaust, including the claims made in America in 1989 that Jewish doctors were deliberately injecting black babies with Aids. He suggest that prejudice against Jews is different from other kinds, because it takes a pseudo-intellectual, as opposed to superficial and ignorant form.
Amis then sought to define the actual concept of anti-Semitism, before Hitchens considered the perception of Jews as masters of finance.
(Source: youtube.com)
The European Left and Its Trouble With Jews
by Colin Shindler, The New York Times, October 27, 2012
Such Israelophobia, enunciated by sections of the European left, dovetailed neatly with the rise of Islamism among Palestinians and throughout the Arab world. The Islamist obfuscation of “the Jew” mirrored the blindness of many a European Marxist. Despite the well-intentioned efforts of many Jews and Muslims to put aside their differing perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the offensive imagery of “the Jew” has persisted in many immigrant communities in Western Europe. Islamists were willing to share platforms with socialists and atheists, but not with Zionists.
The New Left’s profound opposition to American power, and the convergence of reactionary Islamists and unquestioning leftists was reflected in the million-strong London protest against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was organized by the Muslim Association of Britain, the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and the Stalinist Communist Party of Britain. When some Muslims voiced apprehension about participating in the protest with non-Muslims, the M.A.B. leadership decreed that it was religiously permissible if halal food was provided and men and women were given separate areas. Such displays of “reactionary clericalism,” as the early Bolsheviks would have called it, were happily glossed over.
