World leaders slam Ahmadinejad over Holocaust denial, but why the silence over inversion of Nazi past against Israel at home?
The obscene rantings of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad last week in which he described the Holocaust as “a false pretext to create Israel” have drawn fire from across the world. Russia joined a list of countries, including Britain and the United States, over the weekend in issuing a strongly worded statement of outrage.
This is all well and good. Indeed, it is the least we should expect. But Holocaust denial merely forms part of a wider pattern of related anti-Semitic discourse in which the crimes of the Nazis are either denied or, more commonly, are inverted so as to function as a rhetorical weapon of deligitimisation against Israel. And it is not just a problem in Iran and the wider Muslim world.
It is also a problem in Europe where smearing the Jewish state by alleging or inferring that its behaviour is analogous to Nazi Germany has taken root inside mainstream political and cultural discourse. Instances of this sort of behaviour in the European mainstream have been written about in previous entries on this website and I have included an entire section on it in my recently published book — A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel.
But since it is not obvious that denying the Holocaust in order to denigrate Israel is morally worse than alleging that Israel is analogous to the Nazi regime which perpetrated the Holocaust an important question arises:
Why are European leaders so vocal in condemning anti-Semitic bigotry when it comes out of Iran, but so quiet when it comes from newspapers, cultural figures and indeed politicians in Europe itself?
Now, the question, of course, is not rhetorical. It could certainly be argued that the thinking of the leader of an aggressive dictatorship which has genocidal intent towards Israel and the Jews and which aims to acquire nuclear weapons constitutes a more urgent matter than resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe.
But even if most of us would agree that the former is of greater relative concern than the latter, this does not mean that the latter is unimportant. For the increasing legitimisation of extreme anti-Zionist discourse is degrading Europe’s political culture while simultaneously acting as a catalyst for the rising incidence of anti-Semitic incidents against Jews across western Europe.
In a 2004 poll by the University of Bielefeld of 3,000 German citizens 51 percent of respondents said that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians was analogous to Nazi treatment of the Jews.
The disease must be rooted out. While commending European leaders for standing up for decency against Iran, we must remind them that they have problems at home. They need to take a lead, and we should not hesitate to demand it from them.
Tags: Israel
September 20th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
“The disease must be rooted out.”
A few hundred more people like your good self in Europe and perhaps it would be possible. As things stand, as they have stood for many centuries, I don’t believe there is a snowball’s chance in hell. As long ago as 1895, Herzl recognised that “anti-Semitism could not be defeated or cured, only avoided, and that the only way to avoid it was the establishment of a Jewish state.” In Der Judenstaat, Herzl writes as follows:
“The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.”
Source: Wikipedia article on Theodor Herzl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl
Naturally, Israel has her own set of problems and the survival of the Jewish people is far from certain even there. But surely it is far better to die amongst one’s own people, struggling for freedom and for life, than as a despised shtetl Jew in the Diaspora.