LONDON
LAST week, Twitter shut down
a popular account for posting anti-Semitic messages in France. This
came soon after the firing of blanks at a synagogue near Paris, the
discovery of a network of radical Islamists who had thrown a hand
grenade into a kosher restaurant, and the killing of a teacher and young
pupils at a Jewish school in Toulouse earlier this year. The attacks
were part of an escalating campaign of violence against Jews in France.
Today, a sizable section of the European left has been reluctant to take
a clear stand when anti-Zionism spills over into anti-Semitism.
Beginning in the 1990s, many on the European left began to view the
growing Muslim minorities in their countries as a new proletariat and
the Palestinian cause as a recruiting mechanism.
The issue of Palestine
was particularly seductive for the children of immigrants, marooned
between identities.
Capitalism was depicted as undermining a perfect Islamic society while
cultural imperialism corrupted Islam. The tactic has a distinguished
revolutionary pedigree. Indeed, the cry, “Long live Soviet power, long
live the Shariah,” was heard in Central Asia during the 1920s after
Lenin tried to cultivate Muslim nationalists in the Soviet East once his
attempt to spread revolution to Europe had failed. But the question
remains: why do today’s European socialists identify with Islamists
whose worldview is light-years removed from their own?
In recent years, there has been an increased blurring of the distinction
between Jew, Zionist and Israeli. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the
militant group Hezbollah, famously commented: “If we searched the entire
world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in
psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the
Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.”
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/opinion/sunday/europes-trouble-with-jews.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y
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