Thursday, February 18, 2016

Anti-Semitism On the Decline?

That's what a Frenchman, writing in City Journal, contends. However, I contend that his reasoning is more than a soupcon muddled:
It is true that, especially in France, in places where the Jewish community is mostly of North African origin, Jews are victims of violent criminal acts. But these remain quite rare, committed by young Arabs who reenact the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in their sections of Paris or Marseille. And anti-Zionism shouldn’t be confused with anti-Semitism.  
Anti-Zionism is based on a real situation: the Palestinians are not a mythical people, nor are their demands mythical, however difficult they may be to satisfy. Anti-Semitism, on the other hand, is entirely mythical: the Jew was not a real person but a mystical and political construction.
Wrong. Anti-Zionism--or as I call it, Zionhass--is the latest incarnation of "the oldest hatred."  Zionhass incorporates, and is often fueled by, the hatred of Israel, the world's one and only Jewish state.

As for Jews being "mythical" and Palestinians being "real"--that one is wrong on both counts. Jewry is real (even if fantasies/derangements about it have nothing to do with how real Jews think and behave) . Palestinians, on the other hand, are Arabs who took on peoplehood in the 1960s, and then only as a weapon with which to dislodge Jewry from the Jewish national home.

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