They all have a similar structure. The problem is introduced: A pro-Nazi salute has become fashionable among soccer players; an anti-Semitic comedian is a sensation in France; protestors in European capitals chant “Death to Jews.” Explanations are offered: Muslim immigrants to Europe carry Jew-hatred in their luggage; Arab, Turkish, and African minorities, poor and alienated from mainstream European society, direct their anger not at French or German or British elites but at the Jewish people; and, inevitably, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is held responsible for the incitement of European publics.
Israel. Always Israel. Its self-defense inspires fury, terror, and resentment in a way that Muslim violence—global terrorism, the Syrian civil war, the Islamic State’s slaughter of heretics and apostates, Iran’s financing of sectarian bloodshed—does not. Israel is the totem, the representation of the Jewish people toward which inchoate rage is articulated and directed. Denunciation of Israel, of its government, of its policies, of its stubborn existence, acts as a sort of gateway drug. It is neither condoned nor castigated. On the contrary: Such ugliness is tacitly accepted, even encouraged, as an outlet for destructive energies.
But Israel’s most devoted critics have a habit of going beyond mere policy disputes. What starts as holding Israel to a standard that one would not think of applying to any other country (except possibly the United States) turns into a “rethinking” of the Zionist project, of Israel’s right to exist on its own terms, of the loyalties of diaspora Jews, of the historical reality of the Holocaust, of the role that the Jewish people, two-tenths of 1 percent of the world population, have played in whatever is going badly in one’s life today.
Zionism is not racism. But anti-Zionism is a precursor to, and a form of, anti-Semitism...In fact, Zionhass--an irrational, obsessive hatred of Israel that that spills over onto Jewry--is the Jew-hate of our time, and possibly the most pernicious and virulent form of the hatred to date.
Update: A manifestation of Zionhass in France--according to a new survey, 16% of the French (it's unclear how many of that number are Muslim) believe in the verity of that world-wide Jewish/Zionist conspiracy bunkum.
As I am wont to say: there is a religiously-based "struggle" underway to commandeer the globe, but it isn't secret and it certainly isn't Jewish.
Update: 74% of Muslims in France are antisemitic
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