Reflections on the New Anti-Semitism

David Solway On August 29, 2009
PajamasMedia

The Hebrew Scripture is replete with passages of unforgettable beauty, and many of the most beautiful are to be found in the Book of Psalms. Psalm 119, the longest in the book, is studded with such pearls, in particular verses 103-05, which read (in the King James translation):
How sweet are thy words unto my taste! Yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Through thy precepts I get understanding: therefore I hate every false way. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
These words resonate ironically today, when the words one hears and reads everywhere around us about Jews, about Zionists, and about the state of Israel are not “sweet” but sharp and bitter. The “precepts” we receive in the various media, print and electronic, do not promote “understanding” but seem instead to justify “every false way.” The biblical “lamp” seems to have been extinguished and the “path” is shrouded in darkness The most recent case in point comes from the left-leaning Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet, which reported [1] in a double-truck spread on August 18, 2009, that Israeli soldiers regularly abduct Palestinians to harvest their innards for the international organ trade. (This is the same daily that, on Easter 2003, referred [2] to “the crucifixion of Arafat.”) The source for this ludicrous fable consists of a number of Palestinians whose depositions are accepted as gospel. How Swede are their words! The story now comes full circle back to its Palestinian source to be confirmed by the Palestinian news agency Ma’an (which is, incidentally, financed by Denmark and Holland). The feature [3] cites a certain “expert” whose evidence for the claim consists of a rather peculiar factoid, namely, that Israel returns the bodies of Hezbollah fighters minus their organs! The obvious question remains unasked: why would Israel send back these scavenged bodies if it wished to avoid detection and avert a scandal? The absurdity is palpable, but logic and common sense are clearly beyond the cognitive abilities of anti-Semites. And then, as we know, there is the inconvenient medical fact [4] that the organs of people who do not expire under clinical conditions, when organs can be removed immediately, are not viable for transplant.
Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the Palestinian propaganda machine and the robust anti-Semitism of the Swedish media and officialdom (not to mention Norway, Spain, the UK, and several other European countries) might consult another verse from Psalm 119: “The wicked have laid a snare for me.” And indeed they have. The most popular Dutch newspaper [5], De Telegraaf, cleared the way for its Swedish counterpart to launch its newest calumny, publishing an article on August 8, 2009, accusing Jews of creating swine flu as part of a pharmaceutical conspiracy to profit from the sale of antidotes.
The despicable lies perpetrated by Aftonbladet and De Telegraaf are only the latest in what seems like an endless chain of defamatory utterances and slanderous fictions about the Jewish people and the Jewish state. We recall the notorious Mohammed al-Durah hoax [6], in which the Palestinian 12-year-old was ostensibly shot by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) at the Netzarim junction in Gaza on September 30, 2000, propagated by the France TV 2 network and picked up by every major news outlet on the planet. We now know that the episode was rehearsed, directed, and staged with the collusion of Palestinian stringers and cameramen. It constitutes perhaps the most conspicuous contemporary chapter in the never-ending and constantly mutating hate-campaign against the Jewish people.
Then we had the so-called Jenin massacre [7], which turned out to be anything but, except for the 22 young Israeli soldiers who died trying to avoid civilian casualties when an American-style air strike would have done the job of scrubbing out the terrorist nest. Next, the blame for the 2006 Lebanon war [8] was laid at Israel’s doorstep although the conflict was triggered by the Hezbollah incursion into Israeli territory, resulting in the kidnapping and killing of several Israeli soldiers. Britain’s Independent went so far as to accuse Israel [9] of using uranium-tipped weapons, a claim so manifestly outrageous it defies both reason and belief — and should rightly have defied publication.
An investigation [10] is now proceeding under the auspices of the United Nations Human Rights Council into Israel’s conduct during Operation Cast Lead [11] in Gaza. There is not so much as a mention in its mandate of Hamas’ seven-year rocket barrage against civilian communities in southern Israel which provoked the long-deferred Israeli response. Note well. It is not Hamas [12] — a terrorist organization whose charter promises the annihilation of the Jewish state, which has deliberately violated international law by using its own civilians as human shields, firing missiles from its own population centers, storing ammunition in hospitals and mosques, and commandeering ambulances as troop carriers, and that continues to hold a kidnapped Israeli soldier [13] in illegal detention — which is being investigated. It is Israel that is being singled out for condemnation, the country of which British military expert Richard Kemp, in a BBC interview [14] in January 2009, said: “I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today in Gaza.”
The world is once again thirsting for Jewish blood, an ironic reversal of the old blood libel canard. We see this vampiric appetite expre ssed in a multitude of different ways: in the international media, as we have observed; in the theater (My Name Is Rachel Corrie [15], Seven Jewish Children [16]); in film (Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ [17]); in opera (the antiphrastic staging of Camille Saint-Saen’s Samson et Dalila [18] in Antwerp in May 2008, with the Philistines cast in the role of the Israelites and the Israelites as the oppressors of the Philistines); in the tarnished and largely one-sided reports of NGOs like Amnesty International [19] and Human Rights Watch [20] (the latter soliciting funds from Saudi Arabia [21]); in int ernational conferences on racism (Durban I and II [22], which turn into flagrant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hatefests); in the General Assembly of the United Nations (whose current president, Miguel d’Escoto Brockman [23], is an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state); on university campuses where Israel Apartheid Week [24] is one of the hottest shows around; in Barack Obama’s defaulting on the commitment of the previous American administration regarding the natural growth of Israeli settlements [25] and construction in East Jerusalem; and so on, ad vomitatum.
And there seems no way at present of evading the growing pandemic of anti-Jewish feeling and anti-Israeli denunciation that is infecting the contemporary world. “What is new about the new anti-Semitism,” writes Phyllis Chesler in The New Anti-Semitism [26], is “that it is worldwide. … Jews are being verbally and vis ually attacked everywhere.” The Jew is someone for whom there is no elsewhere. This is my definition, but there have, of course, been many definitions of the Jew over the millennia, most of them pejorative. I need not rehearse them once again, for the Dictionary of Received Opinion is open to all and readily available. It is, in effect, the one dictionary that need not be purchased, lodged in the inner life of the West like a demonic version of the Gideon Bible in hotel room drawers.
There is no disputing this. What the great English Renaissance author Sir Thomas Browne [27] called the Pseudodoxia Epidemica (or Dictionary of Received Opinion) is especially rich and hospitable when it comes to the vilification of the Jew. In his master work of that title, Browne set out to dispel common prejudices of every kind, a Herculean effort which, fraught with “discouragment of contradiction, unbelief, and difficulty,” he described as the “disswasion from radicated beliefs.” Concerning the Jews, he is in no doubt about the ubiquitous and diabolical error of such “radicated beliefs.” “In the conceit of the evil order of the Jews,” he writes, “Christians without a farther res earch into the verity of the thing, or enquiry into the cause, draw up a judgment upon them.” It is only the “more ocular discerners” who know otherwise.
Today, it is not only Christians (or Muslims) who “draw up a judgment upon them” but, as Chesler indicates, a vast, secular, politically correct, mainly liberal-left constituency busily adding a sheaf of extra pages to the common Pseudodoxia, comprising a thick appendix of stigmatic designations. Obviously, this has mainly to do with Israel, conceived as the new Jew on the block and the national incarnation of the “longest hatred” as it manifests among us. Anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli sentiment has become so pervasive that it reminds me of the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa [28]’s definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. But in our demented age the definition applies not to love but to hatred, not to the worship of the Lord but to the derogation of the “satanic” Jew.
The fact must be faced. Although there are writers of integrity, talent, and impressive scholarship, truly “ocular discerners,” who have taken up the d efense of Jews and of Israel, it seems increasingly like a fruitless struggle. The words of Israel’s defenders in the infosphere are simply unable to fill the ever-expanding circle of hostility, deprecation, and vengefulness in which Jews and the Jewish state now find themselves. It is, rather, the words of their adversaries that proliferate and block out the horizon of discourse — the invidious message of those who should never be taken at their word.
Thankfully, there is a countervailing fact as well, which has to do with the long history of courage against all the odds and the unprecedented resilience of the Jewish people — and, of course, with those honorable and gracious advocates for truth and decency who come to the defense of Israel. As hapless as the battle may seem at times, there can be no reneging. “Nor have we let fall our penne,” wrote Browne, even though we “are oft-times fain to wander in the America and untravelled parts of truth.” Browne was a devout man who would have based his practice on a passage like that of verse 130 of the above-quoted psalm: “The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding to the simple.” I would add only the hopeful rider: and to the sophisticates as well.
But for those of us who are not religiously observant, the imperative to speak, write, and act remains in force. In the interests of the survival of Israel and the integrity of the West, and despite all the impediments raised against the simple truth, we need to get the word out.

Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com
URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/reflections-on-the-new-anti-semitism/
URLs in this post:
[1] which reported: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/stephaniegutmann/100007097/jewish-soldiers-harvesting-palestinian-organs-reporter-has-no-clue-if-the-claims-are-true/
[2] referred: http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2004/sweden.htm
[3] feature: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1249418671248&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
[4] the inconvenient medical fact: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1194419829128&pagename=JPost%2FPage%2FVideoPlayer&videoId=1251145111642
[5] Dutch newspaper: http://www.totallyjewish.com/news/wo rld/c-12250/jews-to-blame-for-swine-flu/
[6] Mohammed al-Durah hoax: http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/354621/the-al-durah-blood-libel.thtml
[7] so-called Jenin massacre: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/218vnicq.asp
[8] 2006 Lebanon war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War
[9] accuse Israel: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1161811220659
[10] investigation: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=31768&Cr=palestin&Cr1=
[11] Operation Cast Lead: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/operation-cast-lead.htm
[12] Hamas: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6204
[13] Israeli soldier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Shalit
[14] BBC interview: http://zionism-israel.com/issues/Israel_human_rights_kemp_gaza.htm
[15] My Name Is Rachel Corrie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Rachel_Corrie
[16] Seven Jewish Children: http://pajamasmedia.com../../../../../blog/seven-jewish-children-an-anti-semitic-play-debuts-in-london/
[17] The Passion of the Christ: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335345/
[18] Samson et Dalila: http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Samson_and_Delilah_%28opera%29
[19] Amnesty International: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6185
[20] Human Rights Watch: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6258
[21] funds from Saudi Arabia: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528343805525561.html
[22] Durban I and II: http://www.un.org/durbanreview2009/
[23] Miguel d’Escoto Brockman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_d%27Escoto_Brockmann
[24] Israel Apartheid Week: http://apartheidweek.org/
[25] Israeli settlements: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060403811.html
[26] The New Anti-Semitism: http://www.amazon.com/New-Anti-Semitism-Current-Crisis-About/dp/0787978035/
[27] Sir Thomas Browne: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Browne
[28] Nicholas of Cusa: http://www.amazon.com/Vision-God-Nicholas-Cusa/dp/1602063265/