http://forward.com/articles/147934/?p=all conomic upheaval and strife in Europe have historically begat fierce nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Faced with a serious debt crisis, severe budget cuts, grim austerity, rising unemployment and creeping inflation, the current depression is no exception.
Since the fall of 2008, reported incidents of anti-Semitism have risen across the continent. In Britain, a record number of anti-Jewish crimes was noted in 2009. This year in the Netherlands, the number of Jews who reported being verbally harassed, and even physically attacked, climbed. More recently, a restored Jewish cemetery in the Republic of Kosovo was desecrated with Nazi grafitti.
What is fundamentally different about Europe’s current condition, however, is that anti-Semitism has been largely superseded in the organized far-right by suspicion at best, and hatred at worst, of the continent’s growing Muslim community. As Australian writer Antony Loewenstein puts it: “Yesterday’s anti-Semites have reformed themselves as today’s crusading heroes against an unstoppable Muslim birth rate on a continent that now sees Islam as an intolerant and ghettoized religion.”
Related
Beware the Right’s Rise in Hungary
A Racist Stench Rises Out of Cologne
A Danger Burns From the Ashes of Communism
More curious still is that via this Islamophobia (for lack of a better term), Europe’s extremist parties have entered into a disturbing marriage of convenience with sections of the Israeli right. In December 2010, politicians including Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei and Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang in Flemish Belgium visited Israel and signed the Jerusalem Declaration, “guaranteeing Israel’s right to defend itself against terror.” On a separate occasion, Members of Knesset Aryeh Eldad (National Union) and Ayoob Kara (Likud) met with members of a Russian neo-Nazi delegation that also toured Yad Vashem.
The English Defense League — not a political party but, rather, a thuggish and violent mob made up of the same sort of white working-class males who formed the rank-and-file of Mosley’s Blackshirts — has described the bond between themselves and Israel in the following terms: “In many ways there are parallels to be drawn between the radicalization that has infected the Palestinians and their supporters and the radicalization that continues to breed in British mosques. In this way at least, the people of England and the people of Israel have a great deal in common.”
Don’t be fooled. In the discourse of the European right, “extremism” and “radicalism” with regard to Islam are terms used to couch deeper concerns and prejudices, so as to broaden the movement’s appeal. Overtures to the existential security of Israel as a bulwark in the Middle East are in one respect an extension of this desire for wider acceptance and a detoxification of the far right brand.
But mutual cooperation between the Israeli and European fringes can perhaps best be attributed to a shared obsession with blood, soil and demography, as well as an opposition to multiculturalism and a desire to fashion mono-ethnic and mono-religious states.
The number of Muslims in Europe has grown, from 29.6 million in 1990 to 44.1 million in 2010. Muslims now represent 10% of the overall population in France. The fear, as expressed here by the British National Party (BNP), is that because the Muslim world’s “excess population” is “currently colonizing” the continent, the “indigenous British people will become an ethnic minority in [their] own country well within 60 years — and most likely sooner.”
Rightist factions thus demonize Muslim immigrants as the inculcators of any national maladies. The BNP again blame immigration for “higher crime rates, demand for more housing, longer hospital waiting lists, lower educational standards, and higher unemployment.”
At a time when Jews are diminishing as a total share of Israel’s wider population, Avigdor Lieberman rails against a two-state solution that calls for “a Palestinian territory with no Jewish population and a Jewish state with a minority group comprising over 20% of the general population,” the Arabs. His party, Yisrael Beiteinu, has described Israeli Arabs as a fifth column “likely to serve as terrorist agents on behalf of the Palestinian Authority.”
The religious right in Israel also has courted the European fringe, with MK Nissam Ze’ev (Shas) arguing that, “At the end of the day, what’s important is their attitude, the fact they really love Israel.”
On the one hand, it is tempting to argue that such parties as Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu are flirting with the far right as a facet of their strategy to garner any friends it can, at a time when the policies of Netanyahu’s government are alienating allies across Europe. This would certainly explain the recent photo op of Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, with Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s Front National. Given Le Pen’s father’s propensity for Holocaust minimalization, the grubby axiom “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has rarely been more apt.
Speaking in general terms, this might be a fair assessment, but it also is evident that for certain members of the Knesset, something altogether more sinister is at work. These representatives have entered into a Faustian pact with the dregs of Europe in hopes of eliciting support for a Jewish state cleansed of its Muslim population; and for those on the religious right, for a state grounded in an extreme form of Orthodox Judaism. It is a deal out of which no good can possibly come.
Liam Hoare is a freelance writer and graduate student at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.
Comments (
+7
yeshenite's avatar - Go to profile
yeshenite 49p · 1 week ago
I happen to be a Jew living in Europe, so I'd like to think that I have some insight to offer on this topic.
First, there are basically two streams in the nationalist right re-emerging in Europe. Is one essentially pro-Israel/pro-Jewish and anti-Islamic, the other is pro-Islamic and anti-Jewish/Israel.
The first one is overwhelmingly successful of the two. The other is essentially confined to the fringes of neo-Nazis and draws support from ex-KKK leader David Duke. There are some notable exceptions, such as Hungary's Jobbik party. But that party is not pro-Islamic, rather it's anti-everything, including Romas(or "Gypsies" to use a language some of your older readers might understand better).
Jewish support for these parties is very different depending on the country you're in, but often it is sub-par among the general Jewish population. Among our youth, however, it's much more mixed.
In some countries, like Sweden, Jews and half-Jews have an outsize role in the leadership of the SD party(Sweden Democrats). In other's, they do not have this role but are nontheless warmly welcomes.So, why now and why these mixed feelings? Jewry, and especially American Jewry, is still mentally trapped in many ways in the 1930s. They still see, in the end, white Christians/Europeans as the biggest threat. Sure, muslim radicalism is slowly overtaking that on the foreign scene but domestically, it's people like Walt/Mearsheimer and Buchanan that makes most Jews feel most scared. Farrakhan is mostly seen as an obscene clown.
This narrative is quite old and outmoded. In America, the situation for Jews is much better than it is in Europe. Gutman's speech on 'European' anti-Semitism was actually about muslim anti-Semitism *in Europe*, a fact that got lost initially but was later re-discovered in the subsequent debate.
I am simply not overstating things when I say that in many Western European major cities today many Jews are frankly afraid to publicly identify themselves as Jews.
Many of you might be familliar with the situation in Malmö, where the Jewish community has fallen from 3,000 Jews to 500 or so Jews, many moving to Israel, abroad or in some cases in other parts of Sweden.
The Jewish communities in most of Europe has been in a bind. Like most Europeans, their pre-conceived notions of racism have been upended. After all, we're all taught that minorities cannot be racist, and if they are, it's because they are oppressed by the evil European majority and it's an unfortunate but logical way to deal with that.
Europeans still don't understand how one religious minority, muslims, can be so hostile and violent towards another, Jews. This impotency, this fear of calling a spade a spade, has left many younger Jews bitter. Many move with their families, and others remain and some even join these nationalist parties.
(Continued)
Report
Reply
1 reply · active 1 week ago
+6
yeshenite's avatar - Go to profile
yeshenite 49p · 1 week ago
The response of many Jewish organisations have essentially to appease and create interfaith understanding forums.
The issue with these is that most Jews do not seek trouble but that's not how it is on the other side. Let me give you an example.
A few months ago, one of the local Jewish organisations in my hometown(I live in one of the largest cities in a modern, West European nation) invited a few muslim community leaders who often organise conferences and such.
Many of these were controversial, because they had very suspect leanings and statements. It was not clearcut, but there were reasons to be skeptical. Nontheless, Jews are Jews, so they were invited in good faith.
After the conference, where they mouthed of platitudes about understanding but were very defensive on their role and at times were prickly in their attitude, it was revealed that several of these community leaders had invited a whole host of homophobic and anti-Semitic speakers. Many of these speakers denied the Holocaust, they were peddling the Protocols and many other things.
Not until the media began, very late and very tepidly, ask them questions about this(often in very faint ways, because we mustn't offend them! They might become violent! Remember the Danish cartoons? There is such fear on these issues), they very reluctantly talked about 'misunderstandings'. Almost all of them started screaming 'islamophobia'.
And what did the Jewish community do? Grumble, mumble and look over their shoulders because it's important 'not to spread prejudice against muslims'.
Some of these muslim community leaders are still in the list of 'acceptable muslim contacts' simply because they are the norm, not the exceptions. It's the same if you go look at the imams in many mosques, often funded by the Saudis.
And I haven't even touched upon the occuring violence that many Jews are victim of by muslim gangs. And we're talking citizens, not criminals, who after seeing Jews drop everything they are doing and often spit at, shout and at times run up to and start beating Jews. Time and time again.
In the face of this, what does the Jewish community leadership worry about?
'Not fanning the flames of prejudice'.
It's no wonder that many young Jews are joining or at least sympathising with the nationalist right in Europe.
As for the positions many of these parties take: frankly most of these are quite mild relative to the rhetoric you see coming from the nationalist right in Israel. They're quite soft. It's only that the left in Europe is far stronger than it is in Israel and much less nationalistic. In Israel, Labor is nationalistic. In Europe, being a 'nationalist' is still seen as something almost Nazi-like.
This is quickly changing, and Jews are in some ways helping to drive this.
Where things will end up, I do not know. But the situation isn't sustainable and appeasement should have by now been banished by European Jewry as a tatic of survival. But apparently some never learn.
Report
Reply
+4
Dave's avatar
Dave · 1 week ago
The European right blames ethnic tensions on Muslims.
The Clinton State Dept, via the ambassador to Belgium, blames them in Israel.
And the Forward backs the ambassador to Belgium.
Report
Reply
+1
's avatar - Go to profile
@Dr_Tad · 1 week ago
The Loewenstein quote is from this recently-released e-book on the Norway massacre & the European far Right.
http://www.onutoya.com/Report
Reply
+6
Bill 's avatar
Bill · 1 week ago
So, the left wing hates Israel in Europe. The right wing like Israel. Ergo, Israel should repudiate the right wing. Why is that exactly?
Report
Reply
+4
Ben's avatar
Ben · 6 days ago
Demagogy: anti-Muslim movement is not racist ( Hitler was the Muslims sencere friend). European nazi never attack moslems. Moslems traditions contradict the most liberal in Europe French laws. Majority of anti-Jewish attacks in Euruope make Muslims.
The OBVIOUS example of liberal Jewish DEGRADATION is their Muslim-attraction.
Report
Reply
1 reply · active 5 days ago
0
's avatar - Go to profile
@wraden · 5 days ago
"anti-Muslim movement is not racist" - Woah, you don't say. What did you think of that anti-Jewish movement 80 years ago? That was racist, yes, no?
Report
Reply
+2
ChickenShiite's avatar - Go to profile
ChickenShiite 85p · 5 days ago
This is Islam vs Civilization. To stop Islamic imperialism the entire free-world will have to set aside its differences and pull together - all faiths,
Read more:
http://forward.com/articles/147934/?p=all#ixzz1hUIKTyHY
Topic: Intersting article on Nationalist European groups and some Israelis (Read 313 times)