JEWISH PEOPLE, BEWARE!
THE CANARY IN EUROPE’S MINE ~ Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe
(OTHER PAGES TO READ ON THIS SUBJECT…)
Jewish People, Beware (1) ~ Another Holocaust …
Jewish People, Beware (3) ~ Germany & the EU – anti-Semitism
Jewish People, Beware (4) ~ Document on anti-Semitism : Unlearning Intolerance
(Speech by Secretary-General Kofi Annan)
Jewish People, Beware (5) ~ The Final Solution : A Discourse
The rocks have been lifted all over Europe, and the snakes of Jew-hatred are slithering free.
In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and called him a “dirty Jew”. Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third in Charleri, was sprayed with automatic weapons fire.
In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine, depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack. Oxford Professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza, “should be shot dead.” A Jewish yeshiva student reading the Psalms was stabbed 27 times on a London bus. “Anti-Semitism”, wrote a columnist in The Spectator, “has become respectable… at London dinner tables.” She quoted one member of the House of Lords: “The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.”
In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a page 1 cartoon: A tank emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who pleads, “Surely they don’t want to kill me again?” In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in His tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulchre. The caption: “Non resurrexit.”
In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a rally, marching near a synagogue on the Sabbath. Graffiti appeared on a synagogue in the western town Herford: “Six million were not enough.”
In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the windows of Kiev’s main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the attack was anti-Jewish.
In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Ioannina and vandals hurled paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica.
In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of Hitler and chants of “Sieg Heil” and “Jews into the sea”.
In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was invaded and 135 tombstones destroyed. Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France. In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire.
In Montpellier, the Jewish religious centre was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseille; so was a Jewish school in Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with a Molotov cocktail, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words “Dirty Jew” were painted.
In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars.
The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months. According to police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming, “Jews to the gas chambers” and “Death to the Jews”. The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel: It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian woman, so that their relatives will kill them to preserve “family honor.”
The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked and did not apologize when it was learned that he had told guests at a London dinner that the world’s troubles were the fault of “that ***One little country, Israel.” “At the start of the 21st century, “writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a well-known social scientist, in a new book, “we are discovering that Jews are once again select targets of violence… Hatred of the Jew has returned to France.” But of course, it never left. Not France; nor Europe.
Anti-Semitism, the oldest bigotry known to man, has been part of the European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of the holocaust, open Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change, and Europe is reverting to type. To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of Jew-hatred all over their continent. But the more common reaction has been complacency. “Stop saying that there is anti-Semitism in France,” President Jacques Chirac scolded a Jewish editor in January. “There is no anti-Semitism in France.” The European media have been vicious in condemning Israel’s self-defence against Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank; they have been far less agitated about anti-Jewish terror in their own backyard. They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and vitriol are aimed at the Jews, tomorrow they will be aimed at Christians. A timeless lesson of history is that it rarely ends with the Jews. Militant Islamic extremist were attacking and killing Jews long before they attacked and killed Americans on Sept 11. The Nazi’s first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of Europe was ablaze.
Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coal mine of civilization. When they become the objects of savagery and hate, it means the air has been poisoned and an explosion is soon to come. If Europeans don’t rise up and turn against the Jew-haters, it is only a matter of time until the Jew-haters rise up and turn against them.
“The Canary in Europe’s Mine” By Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe
April 28, 2002
N.B.January 2003: Broadcast on our South African national radio station, SAFM, “A number (40?) of Jewish graves were desecrated in and around the Cape Town area (South Africa) today. Police are investigating.”
CONTINUED … GERMANY & THE EU
