The frightening rebirth of anti-Semitism
Noted and quoted
Following are some provocative observations from Robert Wistrich’s “A Lethal Obsession”:
“[T]he fact that Arabs outnumbered Jews by 40 to one in population and more than 600 to one in territory was plainly irrelevant to those who turn apoplectic about the ‘expansionist’ Israeli-Jewish reich – approximately the size of tiny Wales or the state of New Jersey!”
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“At the top of the anti-Semitic league table … are three predominantly Catholic countries – Hungary, Spain, and Poland – where the belief in Jewish economic power appears to be especially tenacious…. The least anti-Semitic countries in 2005 were in Protestant northern Europe, particularly the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Germany.”
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“Among the Latin countries, Spain is strikingly more hostile to Jews than Italy; Austria is notably more anti-Jewish than Germany, particularly on issues related to Israel and Holocaust memory. Traditional Christian anti-Semitism – above all the deicidal myth claiming that the Jews killed Christ – remains strongest in Poland (39%), followed by Hungary (26%); it is weakest in France (14%) and Germany (13%).”
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Wistrich quotes Jean-Paul Sartre on the historically inoffensive nature of individual Jews: “It’s fun to be an anti-Semite. One can beat and torture Jews without fear.”
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Wistrich notes that Stalin said, “Jews make poor soldiers.” Yet during World War II, Wistrich writes, “[t]hough the Jews numbered only about three million inhabitants within the mighty USSR, they were in fourth place among the multitude of Soviet nationalities in the absolute number of medals awarded for bravery at the front.”
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“Probably no other single text in the annals of anti-Semitism would have such a deadly effect as the Protocols in preparing the Holocaust or in inspiring hatred of the Jewish state after 1948…. The Protocols were widely disseminated in America in the 1920s by the famous automotive manufacturer Henry Ford.”
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“‘Allah commands the Muslims to fight the friends of Satan wherever they may be found. And among Satan’s friends – indeed, his best friends in our age – are the Jews.’ Such statements are not marginal or unusual in the Arab-Muslim world, they are mainstream.”
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“Especially common are the insidious tales that have filled the Egyptian and Arab media for years, recounting how Israel sells hormonally altered fruit to kill Arab men’s sperm and supplies aphrodisiac chewing gum to women in order to stimulate lust and destroy Muslim morality.”
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“The same radical Left that foams at the mouth at the very mention of Israel/Palestine has had little difficulty in closing its eyes to the religious and gender apartheid in Islam, the murderous crimes of such Communist leaders as Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot, not to mention the mass murders in Africa from Idi Amin’s Uganda in the 1970s to Rwanda over a decade ago, and Sudan today.”
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“Since the early 1980s, to quote … Samuel Huntington, Muslims have been ‘far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization.'”
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“Throughout their age-old sojourn in the diaspora, Jews have long served as a reliable barometer for the sickness or health of various host societies. All too often the non-Jewish majority and their rulers have succumbed to the temptation of scapegoating a vulnerable minority that had no physical means of self-defense.”
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