Hello,

Welcome to the "Jew in Yellow." No, you don't have to be Jewish to come here. Everyone is welcome--unless you you do not like Jews. In that case, you had best go where you are more appreciated.

PURPOSE

Expose Anti-Semitism--Jew-hatred--wherever it rears its scabrous head. Assure that Jews will never serve as scapegoats for the world's ills again. We mince no words, we give no quarter to Jew-haters whether Nazi, Moslem, or whatever.

WHY IN YELLOW?

It was the most common color of the badges and clothes Jews were forced to wear in Europe and under Islam.

After repeated expulsions and permission to re-enter into various countries (for economic reasons not for "love" of Jews) during the Middle Ages. European anti-semitism continued. The yellow clothes and badges were designed to make the Jew an outcast,and marked him for ready identification for persecution. The yellow was only a garment, it did not reach into the Jewish soul. Jews were beaten, imprisoned, and killed with impunity. There was only one answer to this persecution and hounding from country to country: to return to the land promised to them: ISRAEL

Israel as a land were Jews should never be persecuted for being Jews by their fellow citizens came about by in large part by Jews who were not reticent to take action. Prominent amongst these were the fighters of the LEHI (Stern Group) who did much to sour the desire of the pro-Arab British not to have a Jewish country.

“What we dream of is—Jews strong enough and honest enough to hate their killers …”
--Ben Hecht

"Finally and long overdue, your people, oppressed and disgraced by hatred and maliciousness, have achieved justice: now you enjoy full citizen's rights, but you'll remain Jews nonetheless." --Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Austrian playwright.
Picture from: http://www.judaica.org.il/dept.asp?dept%5Fid=102
Check out http://groups.msn.com/JewsagainstJihadists and http://groups.msn.com/NotSoMellowJewinYellow our allied sites







Lehi (IPA: ['lɛxi], Hebrew acronym for Lohamei Herut Israel, "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel", לח"י - לוחמי חירות ישראל), also known as the Stern Gang, was an armed underground Zionist faction in Mandatory Palestine that had as its goal the eviction of the British authorities from Palestine to allow unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state. Although the name of the group became "Lehi" only after the death of its founder, Avraham Stern, this article follows the common practice of referring to it by that name throughout its history.

"Lehi", its Hebrew acronym: Lohamei Herut Israel, "Fighters for the Freedom of Israel", לח"י—לוחמי חירות ישראל) was an armed underground Zionist faction in the Palestine Mandate that had as its goal the eviction of the British from Palestine to allow unrestricted immigration of Jews and the formation of a Jewish state.
The name of the group became "Lehi" only after the death of its founder, Avraham Stern.
http://ngthinker.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/sixty_five_year.html

Lehi was described as a terrorist organisation[1] by the British authorities, the mainstream Yishuv, and by the United Nations mediator Ralph Bunche.[2] Lehi was responsible for the assassination of Lord Moyne and other attacks on the British authorities. Jews were sometimes killed in these attacks, and occasionally targeted for assassination. Israel has honored the group by instituting the military decoration of the Lehi ribbon, which may be worn by the organization's former members


The first anti-Semitic laws that Adolph Hitler put forth upon his accession to power were the Nuremberg laws, also known as the “laws to defend the purity of the Aryan blood”. These included a prohibition against Jews flying German flags or blessing Germany in their places of worship, so that Jews should comprehend that they are in fact not Germans. While destroying idols and challenging debauchery may often invite confrontation, attempting to appease immorality by sacrificing Israel’s essence only magnetizes hate and invites catastrophe. So the decision between smashing idols or not is never the choice between war and peace, but rather the choice between war and Holocaust. I
www.magshimey-herut.org/articles/stern.html


CHECK OUT Islamic Danger FU that's FOR YOU



NOTE: Yes, I know that what follows has pieces repeated, often more than once. It needs editing. I will do that as soon as I get to it. It's always a tradeoff between what has to be put out there and what can be cleaned up when there's less pressure to keep up the fight. Leslie White

Articles : Anti-semitism Che and a nazi, in the mirror
Two protagonists at the extremes: Ché Guevara and David Duke. Since the former appears even on designer g-strings, he needs no introduction. The latter has just landed in Spain, with his dreadful Klu Klux Klan backpack, to introduce a book of anti-semitic hate. It’s all legal in this Spain that puts democratic humorists on trial and, on the other hand, welcomes violent shit-for-brains racists. His sponsor? -- an extreme rightwing party to whom an advertising spot was granted on La Noria, of Channel Five. Gasp! Be that as it may, and as one could have guessed in this Spain that does not consider it a crime to deny the planned murder of six million Jews, we’re going to be visited by all the undesirable Nazis that infest the territory of evil. And meanwhile, a sixteen year-old boy loses his life at the hands of this same violence. To be tolerant with intolerance is an act of violence. Haven’t we learned yet? More rage. I feel a deep revulsion.On the other side of the mirror, the protagonist has a different outline and ideological form, the opposite extreme of the American racist. Nevertheless, his elevation bothers me as well. I know -- every lefty was raised on the myth of Ché Guevara , and his heroic halo has transfixed generations of the young who wish to change the world. My teen years, like those of so many, is a landscape with a Che poster. All the same, the fact that the Badalona Municipal Authority is spending 18,700 euros to put up a statue of Ché in the same neighborhood where for years it has been skimping on efforts that would eliminate the recurrent flooding on Australia Street is a loud embarrassment, an embarrassment that follows from a previous one -- the municipal decision to grant a subsidy to the Casal de Amigos de Cuba. Wonderful! So the democratic administration gives public money to those who defend a left wing dictatorship, and on top of that they set up a monument to a guy who felt that killing people was a legitimate form of struggle. Would they do the same with a right wing dictatorship? I don’t know, but there are some days when it’s better not to get out of bed.Tra. Joe DiFrances.
Pilar Rahola : El Periódico.

Articles : Anti-semitism
Che and a nazi, in the mirror


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Two protagonists at the extremes: Ché Guevara and David Duke. Since the former appears even on designer g-strings, he needs no introduction. The latter has just landed in Spain, with his dreadful Klu Klux Klan backpack, to introduce a book of anti-semitic hate.

It’s all legal in this Spain that puts democratic humorists on trial and, on the other hand, welcomes violent shit-for-brains racists. His sponsor? -- an extreme rightwing party to whom an advertising spot was granted on La Noria, of Channel Five. Gasp! Be that as it may, and as

one could have guessed in this Spain that does not consider it a crime to deny the planned murder of six million Jews, we’re going to be visited by all the undesirable Nazis that infest the territory of evil.

And meanwhile, a sixteen year-old boy loses his life at the hands of this same violence. To be tolerant with intolerance is an act of violence. Haven’t we learned yet? More rage. I feel a deep revulsion.



On the other side of the mirror, the protagonist has a different outline and ideological form, the opposite extreme of the American racist. Nevertheless, his elevation bothers me as well. I know -- every lefty was raised on the myth of Ché Guevara , and his heroic halo has transfixed generations of the young who wish to change the world. My teen years, like those of so many, is a landscape with a Che poster.

All the same, the fact that the Badalona Municipal Authority is spending 18,700 euros to put up a statue of Ché in the same neighborhood where for years it has been skimping on efforts that would eliminate the recurrent flooding on Australia Street is a loud embarrassment, an embarrassment that follows from a previous one -- the municipal decision to grant a subsidy to the Casal de Amigos de Cuba. Wonderful! So the democratic administration gives public money to those who defend a left wing dictatorship, and on top of that they set

up a monument to a guy who felt that killing people was a legitimate form of struggle. Would they do the same with a right wing dictatorship? I don’t know, but there are some days when it’s better not to get out of bed.



Tra. Joe DiFrances.
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Pilar Rahola : El Periódico.


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Articles : Anti-semitism
Moral relativism and Holocaust


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Two deeds, related in spirit and time, have returned the Holocaust to the fore: on the one hand, the philo-nazi rantings of the President of Iran, obsessed by his Jew hatred; on the other, the three year jail term for the great theoretician of Holocaust denial, the so-called historian David Irving. And smack dab in the middle, in a muddling of values, Javier Solana's petition to equate the crime of anti-Semitism, which is on the books in many countries, with islamophobia. And in the air, in this moral relativism that impregnates politically correct European thought, the conviction that the penal code protects the Jewish religion above others. That is how, not long ago, the president of France's Islamic Council expressed it, and many journalists analyze it the same way. Seen from this perspective, the shameful Iranian Holocaust caricature competition would be the equivalent of the Danish cartoon scandal.

Why is this not the case? And stated in more combative language, why is Javier Solana's petition an authentic immoral banality? First off, because the crime of anti-Semitism doesn't protect a religion nor does it shield it from the bumps inherent in free expression, but rather attacks the age-old hatred that led to the effort to exterminate an entire people. The codification of the crime of anti-Semitism does not protect the Jewish God, but rather the memory of six million victims, murdered for who they were, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Let us recall that at Auschwitz the Jews died whether they were believers or atheists; old, young or children; revolutionaries or conservatives; Greek-born or fled from Russian pogroms. It didn’t matter. They were Jews and that was the fault that condemned them to death. Unique and incomparable to any other thing, Jew hatred stands for the only extermination industry that humankind has ever known. When Ahmadinejad mocks the Holocaust and declares his denial of same, he's not attacking a religious creed. He is glorifying a brutal and premeditated slaughter. The slaughter of two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. That is: he glorifies the horror. And that is why anti-Semitism is a crime in those countries that honor the memory with a modicum of decency. And by the same token, that is why dictatorships champion forgetting it [the memory], mocking it or denying it.

So when Javier Solana, on a trip to a theocratic dictatorship, which Saudi Arabia is, asks that islamophobia, a form of racism, have equal status with anti-Semitism, a deadly and immensely efficacious weapon, he shows just how far we’ve gone in scrambling our values. And it also shows how, under the violent pressure of Islamic fundamentalism, we are willing to make moral concessions. Solana would do well to speak about human rights in Saudi Arabia. Far from doing so, he makes fundamentalism the spokesman, falls under the blackmail that fundamentalism sets up for us and, by reducing the Holocaust to mere intolerance, he trivializes the horror. He is, consequently, quite within the bounds of political correctness. As such, he is one more example of the moral defeat of free societies. Pure, pitiful and dangerous moral relativism.

Trad. Joe DiFrances.
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Pilar Rahola : Revista El Temps. Barcelona.

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Articulos : Antisemitismo La estela de Simon Wiesenthal
Estoy en Paris mientras escribo este artículo. He sido invitada por la UNESCO para dar una conferencia sobre un tema que empieza a preocupar mucho en Europa: un persistente y grave rebrote del antisemitismo. Fuera de nuestro país, donde a veces parece que Europa queda muy lejos, en la mayor parte del arco occidental europeo, eltema preocupa, y preocupa a los sectores más sensibles. No en vano estamos hablando de la corriente de odio más trágica de la historia de la humanidad y la única que llevó a la locura de crear toda una industria del exterminio.La conferencia auspiciada por la Simon Wiesenthal, agrupa gente de diferentes lugares del mundo y concentra más de mil personas interesadas por la cuestión Paris, este Paris que hoy trata de colgar un trocito de sol en el decorado de un cielo brumoso - que espléndida vista desde la UNESCO – no es una ciudad escogida al azar. En Paris se han producido los brotes de antisemitismo más violentos de toda Europa y es en Paris, donde el fenómeno paralelo de antiamericanismo, presenta su cara más agresiva. Quizá el ejemplo más sonoro y desgraciado de este nuevo brote de odio, es la agresión física que tuvieron que soportar ciudadanos franceses de "Paz Ahora" - la organización pacifista creada en Israel por Amos Oz - cuando se manifestaban en contra de la guerra de Irak. Estaban en una manifestación en favor de la paz! – que palabra tan pervertida a veces! - y eran ellos mismos activistas con una larga biografía pacifista en el Oriente Próximo, y así y todo, fueron violentamente golpeados.Único motivo?. Su condición de judíos. Era igual que fueran ciudadanos con ideas y posiciones comprometidas, seguramente, más comprometidas que las de muchos de los demás manifestantes. Su condición de judíos los convertía automáticamente, en sospechosos de culpas atávicas e inapelables. El odio antisemita tiene raíces profundas.La Sra. Beate Winkler, directora del Observatorio sobre el Racismo y la Xenofobia de la Unión Europea, nos daba estos datos: solamente en Alemania, se han producido, en un mes, trescientos actos antisemitas de diferentes intensidades, El 62% de todos los actos de xenofobia perpetrados en la UE han sido antisemitas. El crecimiento es imparable, aparte de Francia, en los Países Bajos, Inglaterra y Ay! en Polonia. En Polonia, la herida más profunda de la Soah, donde se concentraron todos los campos de exterminio de la "solución final" y donde cualquier judío del mundo ha perdido familiares, vidas y esperanzas, se ha puesto de moda este graffiti en las calles: "El único judío bueno; el judío muerto".El análisis que me hacía Winkler no era especialmente tranquilizador: la fusión entre la extrema derecha y los sectores integristas islámicos, se había producido con naturalidad. Por ahora, podemos hablar de estrecha colaboración.Para rematarlo, Abraham Cooper, estudioso del uso de Internet por parte degrupos extremistas - 4000 webs violentas analizadas el último mes - explica este caso bien elocuente:David Duka, ex-presidente del Ku Klux Klan y condenado por prácticas de racismo violento en Estados Unidos, había hecho recientemente un periplo glorioso por diferentes países del Golfo Pérsico, donde había ido a explicar la teoría de la conspiración judía del mundo, base ideológica de los Protocolos de los sabios de Sion , que justificaron los progroms rusos y más tarde el mismo Mein Kampf de Hitler. Seis millones de muertos despues, y con Europa prácticamente sin judíos, todavía oigo hablar del "peligro del lobby judío"....En la vieja Sepharad de momento, el antisemitismo no presenta su cara de extrema derecha. Al fin y al cabo, nosotros ya practicamos la solución final por la vía de la expulsión hace algunos siglos y fuimos más o menos ajenos al Holocausto. Ajenos a la parada terminal de Auschwitz, aunque debemos recordar que el odio judeofobio se había puesto en marcha en la Inquisición Española.Pero si no practicamos todavía el antisemitismo clásico, sufrimos en todo su esplendor, la nueva formulación retórica del antisemitismo, perfectamente verbalizado por el pensamiento teóricamente progresista. El nuevo antisemitismo no se reconoce como tal, es fundamentalmente de izquierdas y se camufla bajo el paraguas plácido del antisionismo.Martin Luther King, en su Carta a un amigo antisionista de 1967, decía lo siguiente: El tiempo ha convertido en impopular las manifestaciones abiertas de odio a los judíos. El antisemita, pues, busca nuevas formas yforum para canalizar su veneno. Ahora se esconde detrás de una nuevamáscara Ahora no odia a los judíos, solo es antisionista"37 años despues, conocemos el resultado: criminalización constante de Israel, sin parangón con ningún otro país del mundo. No se criminaliza al Estado asesino del Sudán, la dictadura feroz de Siria, el fascismoteocrático de Arabia, Pero Israel ha de pedir perdón diariamente por existir, cuando, despues del Holocausto, la suya es una base moral incuestionable.En paralelo, minimización del terrorismo palestino, desprecio por las víctimas judías, inhibición ante la ingerencia de poderosos países árabes que financian el terrorismo y sobre todo, silencio ante un hecho clave: la mayoría de sus enemigos no quieren la paz, sino la desaparición de Israel. Todo junto, es el resultado de la crítica a un gobierno?.La obsesión de la izquierda por Israel no es una cuestiónideológica. Es una cuestión estomacal. Ergo, antisionista. Ergo, antisemita.De aquí a las imbecilidades de IU ( Izquierda Unida) de negarse a asistir al memorial en recuerdo de las víctimas del Holocausto, hay un paso entre el camuflaje retórico y el puro desacomplejamiento. El menosprecio por la Soah es una traición a la memoria y una traición a la democracia.Vuelvo de Paris. Por la calle oigo a un joven que grita a una pareja de abuelos que hablan americano "Fucking USA" . Los abuelos miran avergonzados. Me disculpo en nombre de Europa. Me dicen " si este joven supiera que además somos judíos..."Traducción del catalán. Rosa María Marés.
Pilar Rahola : Diari Avui

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Articulos : Antisemitismo
La estela de Simon Wiesenthal


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Estoy en Paris mientras escribo este artículo. He sido invitada por la UNESCO para dar una conferencia sobre un tema que empieza a preocupar mucho en Europa: un persistente y grave rebrote del antisemitismo. Fuera de nuestro país, donde a veces parece que Europa queda muy lejos, en la mayor parte del arco occidental europeo, el
tema preocupa, y preocupa a los sectores más sensibles.

No en vano estamos hablando de la corriente de odio más trágica de la historia de la humanidad y la única que llevó a la locura de crear toda una industria del exterminio.

La conferencia auspiciada por la Simon Wiesenthal, agrupa gente de diferentes lugares del mundo y concentra más de mil personas interesadas por la cuestión Paris, este Paris que hoy trata de colgar un trocito de sol en el decorado de un cielo brumoso - que espléndida vista desde la UNESCO – no es una ciudad escogida al azar.

En Paris se han producido los brotes de antisemitismo más violentos de toda Europa y es en Paris, donde el fenómeno paralelo de antiamericanismo, presenta su cara más agresiva.

Quizá el ejemplo más sonoro y desgraciado de este nuevo brote de odio, es la agresión física que tuvieron que soportar ciudadanos franceses de "Paz Ahora" - la organización pacifista creada en Israel por Amos Oz - cuando se manifestaban en contra de la guerra de Irak.

Estaban en una manifestación en favor de la paz! – que palabra tan pervertida a veces! - y eran ellos mismos activistas con una larga biografía pacifista en el Oriente Próximo, y así y todo, fueron violentamente golpeados.
Único motivo?. Su condición de judíos. Era igual que fueran ciudadanos con ideas y posiciones comprometidas, seguramente, más comprometidas que las de muchos de los demás manifestantes. Su condición de judíos los convertía automáticamente, en sospechosos de culpas atávicas e inapelables.

El odio antisemita tiene raíces profundas.

La Sra. Beate Winkler, directora del Observatorio sobre el Racismo y la Xenofobia de la Unión Europea, nos daba estos datos: solamente en Alemania, se han producido, en un mes, trescientos actos antisemitas de diferentes intensidades, El 62% de todos los actos de xenofobia perpetrados en la UE han sido antisemitas.

El crecimiento es imparable, aparte de Francia, en los Países Bajos, Inglaterra y Ay! en Polonia. En Polonia, la herida más profunda de la Soah, donde se concentraron todos los campos de exterminio de la "solución final" y donde cualquier judío del mundo ha perdido familiares, vidas y esperanzas, se ha puesto de moda este graffiti en las calles:

"El único judío bueno; el judío muerto".

El análisis que me hacía Winkler no era especialmente tranquilizador: la fusión entre la extrema derecha y los sectores integristas islámicos, se había producido con naturalidad. Por ahora, podemos hablar de estrecha colaboración.

Para rematarlo, Abraham Cooper, estudioso del uso de Internet por parte de
grupos extremistas - 4000 webs violentas analizadas el último mes - explica este caso bien elocuente:
David Duka, ex-presidente del Ku Klux Klan y condenado por prácticas de racismo violento en Estados Unidos, había hecho recientemente un periplo glorioso por diferentes países del Golfo Pérsico, donde había ido a explicar la teoría de la conspiración judía del mundo, base ideológica de los Protocolos de los sabios de Sion , que justificaron los progroms rusos y más tarde el mismo Mein Kampf de Hitler.

Seis millones de muertos despues, y con Europa prácticamente sin judíos, todavía oigo hablar del "peligro del lobby judío"....

En la vieja Sepharad de momento, el antisemitismo no presenta su cara de extrema derecha. Al fin y al cabo, nosotros ya practicamos la solución final por la vía de la expulsión hace algunos siglos y fuimos más o menos ajenos al Holocausto. Ajenos a la parada terminal de Auschwitz, aunque debemos recordar que el odio judeofobio se había puesto en marcha en la Inquisición Española.

Pero si no practicamos todavía el antisemitismo clásico, sufrimos en todo su esplendor, la nueva formulación retórica del antisemitismo, perfectamente verbalizado por el pensamiento teóricamente progresista.

El nuevo antisemitismo no se reconoce como tal, es fundamentalmente de izquierdas y se camufla bajo el paraguas plácido del antisionismo.

Martin Luther King, en su Carta a un amigo antisionista de 1967, decía lo siguiente: El tiempo ha convertido en impopular las manifestaciones abiertas de odio a los judíos. El antisemita, pues, busca nuevas formas y
forum para canalizar su veneno. Ahora se esconde detrás de una nuevamáscara Ahora no odia a los judíos, solo es antisionista"

37 años despues, conocemos el resultado: criminalización constante de Israel, sin parangón con ningún otro país del mundo. No se criminaliza al Estado asesino del Sudán, la dictadura feroz de Siria, el fascismo
teocrático de Arabia, Pero Israel ha de pedir perdón diariamente por existir, cuando, despues del Holocausto, la suya es una base moral incuestionable.

En paralelo, minimización del terrorismo palestino, desprecio por las víctimas judías, inhibición ante la ingerencia de poderosos países árabes que financian el terrorismo y sobre todo, silencio ante un hecho clave: la mayoría de sus enemigos no quieren la paz, sino la desaparición de Israel.

Todo junto, es el resultado de la crítica a un gobierno?.

La obsesión de la izquierda por Israel no es una cuestiónideológica. Es una cuestión estomacal. Ergo, antisionista. Ergo, antisemita.

De aquí a las imbecilidades de IU ( Izquierda Unida) de negarse a asistir al memorial en recuerdo de las víctimas del Holocausto, hay un paso entre el camuflaje retórico y el puro desacomplejamiento. El menosprecio por la Soah es una traición a la memoria y una traición a la democracia.

Vuelvo de Paris. Por la calle oigo a un joven que grita a una pareja de abuelos que hablan americano "Fucking USA" . Los abuelos miran avergonzados. Me disculpo en nombre de Europa. Me dicen " si este joven supiera que además somos judíos..."

Traducción del catalán. Rosa María Marés.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Articles : Anti-semitism To Mina Weilt, Who Survived
The TV screen blinks a bit. In between bumps I read the evocative name on the map: Antofagasta. A circle above it reveals an unknown place to me, Hurnauaca. There are names that are a world in themselves, like tiny blinking stars, suggesting mysteries and yearnings. How much condensed history there must be in this name! Tragic history, without a doubt... From up here where I am, at 10,700 meters, squeezed into a “Magnificent Iberia” tourist seat, after twelve hours and fifteen minutes of struggling with my thumb to find a new position every five minutes, after scratching my right elbow, left shoulder, that numb muscle and my stiff neck, and engaged in a fight to the death with the immense man seated in front of me, a man who has resolved to defy the law of gravity with his seat and who practically forces me to eat from his bald head, after everything, this name comes as a liberation. It ransoms my battered imagination, it awakens it on the spot and sets it galloping, like a dashing wild horseman. I am flying to Chile where they’re honoring me with a prize. Holocaust Commemoration Day: Various organizations of the Jewish community of Chile award a prize to a person who has fought against anti-Semitism and in favor of the remembrance of the Shoah. Last year they gave it to President Lagos. Without a doubt they’re doing me an excessive honor. The prize is called Chaver Olam . which, like so many Hebrew names, has more than one meaning--friend of the world and eternal friend. Could there be a more beautiful distinction? They tell me that the act is very solemn, candles are lit, the tragic memory is evoked and, without applause, the person who receives the prize closes the ceremony. I feel a strange emotion, an emotion that goes beyond the flattery of a prize, an emotion that has to do with shared emotions, shared pain, as if I were one of them without being so ... The memory of the Holocaust! I have always stated--and it must be more than 20 years that I’ve been doing so--that every European has two moral obligations to history: One, to recall that the horror is born within the prejudices, wretchedness, ghosts and evils of Europe itself. We invented the hatred of a people; we recreated it through two thousand years of exclusive and barbarous gods; we invented the Inquisition, the pogroms, the evil myths, the hatred of the other. It was us who took the long walk of intolerance, a road that necessarily had to arrive at the final station of Auschwitz. The Holocaust is not a German question, not even an exclusively Nazi one, despite that nazism may have been its most ferocious demon. The Holocaust is a European question. the first duty of Europe is, thus, that of assuming its own guilt. The second duty, vigilance in memory. As we Catalans well know, memory is not just a moral duty: it is also a guaranty of a future. To be familiar with our shameful parts, to know where the serpent’s eggs are incubating, to teach new generations where we have died and killed, is obligatory. Not only as an homage to the victims of the Holocaust and especially toward the intent to destroy an entire people, but also as a foundation for reconstruction. Reconstruction? I maintain that Europe did not only murder millions of people in ovens. It also incinerated itself. After the Shoah, we are nothing more than the fragments of a shipwreck, stripped of the Jewish skin that had given us the best of the sciences and the arts; we are destroyed in one of our deepest souls, orphaned of the culture, without which we cannot explain who we are. When I see the efforts of ultra-Catholic sectors--now dementedly drooling over the orgy of blood, violence and hatred in Gibson’s "Passion"--,the efforts, I was saying, to have Europe's constitution point out the Christian roots of Europe, I recall the worst Christianity, the despotic calling, the exclusion. How could one explain Europe without the Jews? How could one explain twentieth century thought, the great utopian ideologies, the battle for human rights? What is Europe without Jewish Europe? And all the same, neither can one explain Europe without the hatred of the Jews that it has always felt. Is it necessary to recall the Holocaust now? Is it necessary write an article? Here are two reasons born of my conviction: One, that Europe has not done its duties nor has it accepted its guilt, nor has it served the cause of memory. Quite the contrary, it has chosen to have a magnificently robust bad memory. Our children, for example, are they educated in the Holocaust, in its causes? The second reason is the appearance of a new and serious anti-Semitism that is even beginning to worry that sleeping mammoth, the European Parliament. Europe is again becoming anti-Semitic in spite of not having Jews. It is so in its Muslim base, furiously anti-Semitic. And it is becoming so again in its Christian base. The warning signs are loud and clear and they tell us that we must learn from history: Every time that the Jewish question has been prosecuted, we have prosecuted and destroyed freedom. Anti-Semitism is a thermometer--it indicates the temperature of our democratic health. And these days, we are beginning to contract a fever. Trad. Joe DiFrances.
Pilar Rahola : Diari Avui. Barcelona.
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Articles : Anti-semitism
To Mina Weilt, Who Survived


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The TV screen blinks a bit. In between bumps I read the evocative name on the map: Antofagasta. A circle above it reveals an unknown place to me, Hurnauaca. There are names that are a world in themselves, like tiny blinking stars, suggesting mysteries and yearnings. How much condensed history there must be in this name! Tragic history, without a doubt... From up here where I am, at 10,700 meters, squeezed into a “Magnificent Iberia” tourist seat, after twelve hours and fifteen minutes of struggling with my thumb to find a new position every five minutes, after scratching my right elbow, left shoulder, that numb muscle and my stiff neck, and engaged in a fight to the death with the immense man seated in front of me, a man who has resolved to defy the law of gravity with his seat and who practically forces me to eat from his bald head, after everything, this name comes as a liberation. It ransoms my battered imagination, it awakens it on the spot and sets it galloping, like a dashing wild horseman.

I am flying to Chile where they’re honoring me with a prize. Holocaust Commemoration Day: Various organizations of the Jewish community of Chile award a prize to a person who has fought against anti-Semitism and in favor of the remembrance of the Shoah. Last year they gave it to President Lagos. Without a doubt they’re doing me an excessive honor. The prize is called Chaver Olam . which, like so many Hebrew names, has more than one meaning--friend of the world and eternal friend. Could there be a more beautiful distinction? They tell me that the act is very solemn, candles are lit, the tragic memory is evoked and, without applause, the person who receives the prize closes the ceremony.

I feel a strange emotion, an emotion that goes beyond the flattery of a prize, an emotion that has to do with shared emotions, shared pain, as if I were one of them without being so ...

The memory of the Holocaust! I have always stated--and it must be more than 20 years that I’ve been doing so--that every European has two moral obligations to history: One, to recall that the horror is born within the prejudices, wretchedness, ghosts and evils of Europe itself. We invented the hatred of a people; we recreated it through two thousand years of exclusive and barbarous gods; we invented the Inquisition, the pogroms, the evil myths, the hatred of the other. It was us who took the long walk of intolerance, a road that necessarily had to arrive at the final station of Auschwitz. The Holocaust is not a German question, not even an exclusively Nazi one, despite that nazism may have been its most ferocious demon. The Holocaust is a European question. the first duty of Europe is, thus, that of assuming its own guilt.

The second duty, vigilance in memory. As we Catalans well know, memory is not just a moral duty: it is also a guaranty of a future. To be familiar with our shameful parts, to know where the serpent’s eggs are incubating, to teach new generations where we have died and killed, is obligatory. Not only as an homage to the victims of the Holocaust and especially toward the intent to destroy an entire people, but also as a foundation for reconstruction. Reconstruction? I maintain that Europe did not only murder millions of people in ovens. It also incinerated itself. After the Shoah, we are nothing more than the fragments of a shipwreck, stripped of the Jewish skin that had given us the best of the sciences and the arts; we are destroyed in one of our deepest souls, orphaned of the culture, without which we cannot explain who we are. When I see the efforts of ultra-Catholic sectors--now dementedly drooling over the orgy of blood, violence and hatred in Gibson’s "Passion"--,the efforts, I was saying, to have Europe's constitution point out the Christian roots of Europe, I recall the worst Christianity, the despotic calling, the exclusion.

How could one explain Europe without the Jews? How could one explain twentieth century thought, the great utopian ideologies, the battle for human rights? What is Europe without Jewish Europe? And all the same, neither can one explain Europe without the hatred of the Jews that it has always felt.

Is it necessary to recall the Holocaust now? Is it necessary write an article? Here are two reasons born of my conviction: One, that Europe has not done its duties nor has it accepted its guilt, nor has it served the cause of memory. Quite the contrary, it has chosen to have a magnificently robust bad memory. Our children, for example, are they educated in the Holocaust, in its causes? The second reason is the appearance of a new and serious anti-Semitism that is even beginning to worry that sleeping mammoth, the European Parliament.

Europe is again becoming anti-Semitic in spite of not having Jews. It is so in its Muslim base, furiously anti-Semitic. And it is becoming so again in its Christian base. The warning signs are loud and clear and they tell us that we must learn from history: Every time that the Jewish question has been prosecuted, we have prosecuted and destroyed freedom. Anti-Semitism is a thermometer--it indicates the temperature of our democratic health. And these days, we are beginning to contract a fever.

Trad. Joe DiFrances.
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Pilar Rahola : Diari Avui. Barcelona.

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Articles : Anti-semitism Spanish anti-Semitism is alive in the Left
Spain has never fulfilled its responsibility with regards to anti-Semitism - neither in the past, nor in the present . As a result, the powerful accusation by Pat Cox, president of the European Parliament, made in the March 2004 report, is hardly surprising: Spain is considered, today, the main source of incitation against Jews in Europe. The report of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, speaking about media coverage of the Middle East conflict, states: "since the stereotypes found in that coverage are the same waived against the Jews during the 1930s (killing children, controlling the world, related to money, dark intentions…), it is impossible to affirm that the anti-Israeli wave that crosses Spain is independent of an anti-Semitic content in the news". These affirmations are supported by the results Gallup has presented to the Anti-defamation League, in a recent survey: 72% of Spanish people would deport the Jews from Israel; only 12% would accept having Jewish neighbours; 69% believes Jews are too powerful and 55% attribute "dark intentions" to them that cannot be summarized. To my sadness, the study states that Cataluña and the Basque Country both show the highest levels of Jewphobia. These are recent data published by well-respected institutions. Yet, have they worried anyone? More to the point, have they been believed, read, or were they assumed? Not only have they become wet paper but global Spain maintains stereotypes that have caused alarm in Strasbourg. Convinced of the truth of these data, the accusation I make is the following: today, Spain, is anti-Semitic once again. But this time we are a nation that is Anti-Semitic Polish style, that is to say, in Paul Landvai's words, "anti-Semites without Jews". And I say anti-Semite knowing that most of my colleagues (especially from the Left) not only don't accept the term, but find it offensive, as if anti-Semitism was the extreme right's and fanatical Catholicism’s exclusive patrimony. We know, since Martin Luther King denounced it in his "Letter to my anti-Semitic friend", that many are the camouflages of anti-Semitism, and that anti-zionism and anti-Israelism are much more bearable for some sensitive skins. But they are fed by the same source of intolerance. Of course it is alright to be a critic of Israel, and it is true that every critic cannot be accused of anti-Semitism, but there are so many warning notes that we must analyze them if we do not want to destroy our society. The first alarm: the systematic and heartless banalization of the tragedy of the Holocaust – a banalization which does not only take place in aberrant Nazi pamphlets of late, but also in articles and declarations written mainly by progressives and prestigious intellectuals. Still echoing are , for the shame of the millions who died, Saramago's scorn of the memory of the Shoa. Not only has the venerable Nobel trivialised the only industry of extermination in human history, but his attitude begins to reflect a collective grammar. Graphic humour with Israeli leaders depicted as Nazis, accusations of genocide and Hitler-like practices when reporting any Israeli action, simple comparisons between the Holocaust and any present violent contingency… Without going further, Lopez Agudín, in this very same newspaper, raised an aberrant parallelism between Auschwitz and the prisons in Iraq. That is to say, his rightful criticism of the tortures of Iraqi prisoners, became an excuse to reduce one incomparable monstrosity -"the death of the human soul", as Claude Lanzmann defined it in his Shoa - with a deplorable chapter on torture. To banalize the Holocaust is a double moral shame: shameful to the tragic memory of Europe, and to our historic responsibility. But nothing arises from nothing. We can banalize the Holocaust today only because educating our society about the Holocaust’s tragic meaning never worried us, to the point that we localised it to a simple German question. Auschwitz was the final stop of tens of centuries of persecution against European Jews, and Spain (Isabel la Católica in hand) was the motor of the anti-Semitic hatred that has always existed in Europe. All the good, in the fields of law, literature, science, medicine, all the good that has happened to us has to do with Jewish Europe. All the bad that has happened to us has to do with anti-Jewish Europe. Nevertheless, we neither learn, nor do we assume the moral responsibility that the tragic memory would demand. From forgetfulness, banalization and oblivion are born. From forgetfulness prejudice is reborn. And through prejudice, intolerance returns. In perfect synergy with the banalization of the Holocaust, most of our Intelligentsia practices a furious anti-Israelism that goes beyond logical criticism of Israeli actions. Along the way, not only reality is manipulated, and turned into a match between good and bad, but Jewish fault is magnified and Palestinian fault is reduced, to the point of disappearing. The trivialization of Palestinian terrorism, the fundamental enemy to their very own Palestinian cause, is the most outrageous exercise of irresponsibility of Spanish leftist thought. It is as outrageous as the selective solidarity that only cries for Palestinian victims and ignores, to the deepest scorn, Jewish ones. This happens in every aspect of this complex conflict, and propaganda is the result. In this context of misinformation, distortion, the banalization of the Shoa takes place. If the Holocaust is made comparable to any violent action, Europe rids itself of any blame. From there it is a small step to accuse the Prime Minister of Israel of "genocide" or "Nazism", and each day the accusations go a little further. This is in spite of it being especially immoral to add to the shipwreck of genocide, the accusation of Nazism. But it is an immorality that is used, comfortably, in the fine halls of politically correct leftist thought. Intellectuals, leftist leaders, opinion makers, I ask you – do we not have a moral responsibility that we are harming? Do we not have the responsibility to teach tolerance, and not feed old demons? Let's remember that anti-Semitism is the original school of intolerance. Do we not have the responsibility to not betray Europe’s tragic memory? We must not forget the extreme evil of the Holocaust and its unique place of horror in its murder of millions. Whenever an intellectual plays frivolously with the memory of the Shoa, no matter how good his intentions are, he is killing the victims again. It is a subtle double death, the physical death, and the forgetting of death. The trivialisation of the Holocaust not only desprives the victims of their place in history, but sends an aberrant message to society that it is not necessary to be act to prevent the long journey of hatred that made the Holocaust possible. And, finally, we abuse the responsibility of analyzing reality in truthful and non emotional terms, giving elements that serve to objectify the problem, and not turning them into doctrinarian excuses. With regard to Israel, we have replaced ideas with slogans, debates with the placards, and thought with propaganda. The result is an irrational hatred of Israel, an absolute indifference to the implication of terrorism, and exoneration, via martyrdom, of the horrors that Palestinian terrorism perpetrates. The result is not useful even to the Palestinians themselves. I conclude sharing Pat Cox's alarm: we are creating a new anti-Semitic doctrinarian body. Is it parallel to the classic one? No. The new anti-Semitism is leftist, it is an anti-Semitism of the elite and it is unconscious. But it exists.
Pilar Rahola : Diario El Mundo. Madrid.
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© 2004 Pilar Rahola Disseny ADES STUDIOhttp://www.pilarrahola.com/

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Articles : Anti-semitism
Spanish anti-Semitism is alive in the Left


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Spain has never fulfilled its responsibility with regards to anti-Semitism - neither in the past, nor in the present . As a result, the powerful accusation by Pat Cox, president of the European Parliament, made in the March 2004 report, is hardly surprising: Spain is considered, today, the main source of incitation against Jews in Europe. The report of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, speaking about media coverage of the Middle East conflict, states: "since the stereotypes found in that coverage are the same waived against the Jews during the 1930s (killing children, controlling the world, related to money, dark intentions…), it is impossible to affirm that the anti-Israeli wave that crosses Spain is independent of an anti-Semitic content in the news". These affirmations are supported by the results Gallup has presented to the Anti-defamation League, in a recent survey: 72% of Spanish people would deport the Jews from Israel; only 12% would accept having Jewish neighbours; 69% believes Jews are too powerful and 55% attribute "dark intentions" to them that cannot be summarized. To my sadness, the study states that Cataluña and the Basque Country both show the highest levels of Jewphobia.
These are recent data published by well-respected institutions. Yet, have they worried anyone? More to the point, have they been believed, read, or were they assumed? Not only have they become wet paper but global Spain maintains stereotypes that have caused alarm in Strasbourg. Convinced of the truth of these data, the accusation I make is the following: today, Spain, is anti-Semitic once again. But this time we are a nation that is Anti-Semitic Polish style, that is to say, in Paul Landvai's words, "anti-Semites without Jews". And I say anti-Semite knowing that most of my colleagues (especially from the Left) not only don't accept the term, but find it offensive, as if anti-Semitism was the extreme right's and fanatical Catholicism’s exclusive patrimony. We know, since Martin Luther King denounced it in his "Letter to my anti-Semitic friend", that many are the camouflages of anti-Semitism, and that anti-zionism and anti-Israelism are much more bearable for some sensitive skins. But they are fed by the same source of intolerance. Of course it is alright to be a critic of Israel, and it is true that every critic cannot be accused of anti-Semitism, but there are so many warning notes that we must analyze them if we do not want to destroy our society.


The first alarm: the systematic and heartless banalization of the tragedy of the Holocaust – a banalization which does not only take place in aberrant Nazi pamphlets of late, but also in articles and declarations written mainly by progressives and prestigious intellectuals. Still echoing are , for the shame of the millions who died, Saramago's scorn of the memory of the Shoa. Not only has the venerable Nobel trivialised the only industry of extermination in human history, but his attitude begins to reflect a collective grammar. Graphic humour with Israeli leaders depicted as Nazis, accusations of genocide and Hitler-like practices when reporting any Israeli action, simple comparisons between the Holocaust and any present violent contingency… Without going further, Lopez Agudín, in this very same newspaper, raised an aberrant parallelism between Auschwitz and the prisons in Iraq. That is to say, his rightful criticism of the tortures of Iraqi prisoners, became an excuse to reduce one incomparable monstrosity -"the death of the human soul", as Claude Lanzmann defined it in his Shoa - with a deplorable chapter on torture. To banalize the Holocaust is a double moral shame: shameful to the tragic memory of Europe, and to our historic responsibility. But nothing arises from nothing. We can banalize the Holocaust today only because educating our society about the Holocaust’s tragic meaning never worried us, to the point that we localised it to a simple German question. Auschwitz was the final stop of tens of centuries of persecution against European Jews, and Spain (Isabel la Católica in hand) was the motor of the anti-Semitic hatred that has always existed in Europe. All the good, in the fields of law, literature, science, medicine, all the good that has happened to us has to do with Jewish Europe. All the bad that has happened to us has to do with anti-Jewish Europe. Nevertheless, we neither learn, nor do we assume the moral responsibility that the tragic memory would demand. From forgetfulness, banalization and oblivion are born. From forgetfulness prejudice is reborn. And through prejudice, intolerance returns.

In perfect synergy with the banalization of the Holocaust, most of our Intelligentsia practices a furious anti-Israelism that goes beyond logical criticism of Israeli actions. Along the way, not only reality is manipulated, and turned into a match between good and bad, but Jewish fault is magnified and Palestinian fault is reduced, to the point of disappearing. The trivialization of Palestinian terrorism, the fundamental enemy to their very own Palestinian cause, is the most outrageous exercise of irresponsibility of Spanish leftist thought. It is as outrageous as the selective solidarity that only cries for Palestinian victims and ignores, to the deepest scorn, Jewish ones. This happens in every aspect of this complex conflict, and propaganda is the result.
In this context of misinformation, distortion, the banalization of the Shoa takes place. If the Holocaust is made comparable to any violent action, Europe rids itself of any blame. From there it is a small step to accuse the Prime Minister of Israel of "genocide" or "Nazism", and each day the accusations go a little further. This is in spite of it being especially immoral to add to the shipwreck of genocide, the accusation of Nazism. But it is an immorality that is used, comfortably, in the fine halls of politically correct leftist thought.
Intellectuals, leftist leaders, opinion makers, I ask you – do we not have a moral responsibility that we are harming? Do we not have the responsibility to teach tolerance, and not feed old demons? Let's remember that anti-Semitism is the original school of intolerance. Do we not have the responsibility to not betray Europe’s tragic memory? We must not forget the extreme evil of the Holocaust and its unique place of horror in its murder of millions. Whenever an intellectual plays frivolously with the memory of the Shoa, no matter how good his intentions are, he is killing the victims again. It is a subtle double death, the physical death, and the forgetting of death. The trivialisation of the Holocaust not only desprives the victims of their place in history, but sends an aberrant message to society that it is not necessary to be act to prevent the long journey of hatred that made the Holocaust possible. And, finally, we abuse the responsibility of analyzing reality in truthful and non emotional terms, giving elements that serve to objectify the problem, and not turning them into doctrinarian excuses. With regard to Israel, we have replaced ideas with slogans, debates with the placards, and thought with propaganda.

The result is an irrational hatred of Israel, an absolute indifference to the implication of terrorism, and exoneration, via martyrdom, of the horrors that Palestinian terrorism perpetrates. The result is not useful even to the Palestinians themselves.
I conclude sharing Pat Cox's alarm: we are creating a new anti-Semitic doctrinarian body. Is it parallel to the classic one? No. The new anti-Semitism is leftist, it is an anti-Semitism of the elite and it is unconscious. But it exists.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pilar Rahola : Diario El Mundo. Madrid.

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© 2004 Pilar Rahola Disseny ADES STUDIO
http://www.pilarrahola.com


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Articles : Anti-semitism
Dreyfus Rides through France


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I admire the rhetorical intelligence of Chirac, so skilled in the subtle game of deceptions. Only a true puppeteer of the word can obtain these extraordinary effects that hide, distort or, directly, transform certain realities into others. President of a warmongering country and directly tied to many open conflicts, he has convinced the world that he leads the forces of peace. I am aware that he had in his favor the notorious stupidity of some pacifist leaders who are so conditioned to the pavlovian syndrome that they have only to sniff the slightest anti-American stirring to begin to drool. But, in spite of it, and with the heavy weight of his baggage from Algeria (the Premier has lived many lives), the transformation has been a complete miracle. On the same voyage he was the world’s chief accuser of Yankee perfidy in the “war for oil,” and, with Houdini-like art, caused the French monopoly on Iraqi oil, which for years had brought joy to the République’s coffers, to disappear. And obviously, no one asked themselves if Iraqi petroleum favors had any old thing to do with the sweet military aid that the renowned democracy of Saddam had received from his French friend ... a version of the tale that was never considered the authoritative version of “war for oil,” that like an unloosed scream, coursed through the deep throats of placard-carrying Europe.

In one of his latest conjurings, he has even gotten an ingenuous Zapatero to believe that the “good Europe” is that one which is lead by France, protective father and godfather of a wayward Spain. As if France has ever done favors for its neighbor to the south! And now comes the latest special effect: France is a sensitive country in general and to anti-Semitism in particular. Hence, in the face of Sharon’s call to French Jews to emigrate, Chirac has reacted with the harshness that the provocation deserves. “France, judeophobic? Have you ever heard such nonsense?” And so, with the strength that winning the battles of appearance confers, Chirac gets by as a pacifist, a brother in solidarity, pro Spanish and even pro Jewish, and the many wrongs of the République melt into the magma of a perfectly practiced and disseminated image. How did that saying about Caesar’s wife go, that she might be a whore, but she couldn’t appear as one?

If you ask me about Sharon’s call, I’ll tell you that he could have saved it, especially because it might seem more an act of provocation than of concern. But the old Israeli wolf, who is more wily than hunger itself--and if Europe weren’t so amused criminalizing him, they would have already learned that--has hit the bull’s eye, and the effects may be complicated for diplomacy, but rather useful for politics. With a single sentence, Sharon has managed to place the nucleus of the problem on the map: There exists a new anti-Semitism, growing and violent; France (well accompanied by Spain and Belgium) is the central nest where the serpent’s egg lies patiently; and the permanent demonization of Israel is not unrelated to the phenomenon. Quite the opposite, journalistic distortion on the MIddle East (the substitution of propaganda for information is the principle sport of European journalism), the blaming of Israel, the inordinate paeans to a corrupt and violent leader called Arafat, and the minimization of Palestinian terror are the foundation of the new anti-Semitism. An anti-Semitism that, no matter how much France may deny it, has accounted for hundreds of violent acts on its soil.

I understand that Chirac may be offended, especially because, whenever these accusations are made, he must feel that he is being compared to Vichy France. Well fine: He hasn’t understood or he doesn’t want to understand anything. Without a doubt France carries some heavy historical baggage, in spite of its efforts to make the world forget that there was French collaboration and that thousands of French Jews were sent to their death. Just like cute little Austria, that has got people to think that the whole country was the Trapp family, France also has sold us the line that it was all “résistence”: --an example of its perfectly fine bad memory ... Not at all unusual for the most anti-American country in Europe, in spite of the fact that it has more than 65,000 Americans buried there who died to save it. But Sharon’s accusation and that of the American ADL, concerned with the anti-Semitic wave in Europe, and that of the very European Parliament as contained in its report presented in Strasbourg, and the accusation of many of us who for some time have been warning of the threat, is not aimed at a fascist Europe or France, but rather at a liberal but anti-Semitic Europe, which is not the same thing. It’s more akin to the proper and high minded France that condemned Dreyfus, than to Vichy France. In an insightful article in the Jerusalem Post, Emanuelle Ottolenghi said the following: “The Church’s anti-Semitism offered the Jews an out--conversion. Liberal anti-Semitism offered the Jews an out--assimilation. And the present day anti-Semitic offensive related to Israel also offers an out--anti-Zionism.” That is to say, the duality of Jewish people/State of Israel is not only not considered a necessary symbiosis, precise and historically unchallengeable, but it is demonized by the intelligentsia, smeared with every sort of crushing accusation and turned into an example of Jewish culpability.

France’s problem is this: the Dreyfus climate that marches through university classrooms, in so many esteemed gatherings, in so many editors’ offices, and, to be sure, nourished by the undercurrent of judeophobic hatred that runs through the Arab neighborhoods, but is enunciated in the heart of correctly thinking, enlightened and distinguished society, . It is a drawing room anti-Semitism, progressive, politically correct and utterly without inhibitions and, which even acts against fascist anti-Semitism, but feeds another kind, even unconsciously. No matter how much Chirac takes offense, France’s responsibility in the demonization of Israel is as crushing as was one of the notorious shameful acts of its history. Do you remember the 50 Mirage fighter jets that were prepaid by Israel and which France then denied them and handed over to Libya, right in the middle of the 1967 war? Some pasts contain the monsters of today...

The spirit of Vichy is buried and no longer courses through Europe. But the spirit that condemned Dreyfus is not only in effect, but reinforced. And at the same time, unfortunately, among French intellectuals Emil Zola’s spirit scarcely beats. So, Mr. Chirac, don’t feign being offended, we are not all fooled ...

Transl. Joe DiFrances.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pilar Rahola : Diari Avui. Barcelona.

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© 2004 Pilar Rahola Disseny ADES STUDIO
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Articles : Anti-semitism Dreyfus Rides through France
I admire the rhetorical intelligence of Chirac, so skilled in the subtle game of deceptions. Only a true puppeteer of the word can obtain these extraordinary effects that hide, distort or, directly, transform certain realities into others. President of a warmongering country and directly tied to many open conflicts, he has convinced the world that he leads the forces of peace. I am aware that he had in his favor the notorious stupidity of some pacifist leaders who are so conditioned to the pavlovian syndrome that they have only to sniff the slightest anti-American stirring to begin to drool. But, in spite of it, and with the heavy weight of his baggage from Algeria (the Premier has lived many lives), the transformation has been a complete miracle. On the same voyage he was the world’s chief accuser of Yankee perfidy in the “war for oil,” and, with Houdini-like art, caused the French monopoly on Iraqi oil, which for years had brought joy to the République’s coffers, to disappear. And obviously, no one asked themselves if Iraqi petroleum favors had any old thing to do with the sweet military aid that the renowned democracy of Saddam had received from his French friend ... a version of the tale that was never considered the authoritative version of “war for oil,” that like an unloosed scream, coursed through the deep throats of placard-carrying Europe. In one of his latest conjurings, he has even gotten an ingenuous Zapatero to believe that the “good Europe” is that one which is lead by France, protective father and godfather of a wayward Spain. As if France has ever done favors for its neighbor to the south! And now comes the latest special effect: France is a sensitive country in general and to anti-Semitism in particular. Hence, in the face of Sharon’s call to French Jews to emigrate, Chirac has reacted with the harshness that the provocation deserves. “France, judeophobic? Have you ever heard such nonsense?” And so, with the strength that winning the battles of appearance confers, Chirac gets by as a pacifist, a brother in solidarity, pro Spanish and even pro Jewish, and the many wrongs of the République melt into the magma of a perfectly practiced and disseminated image. How did that saying about Caesar’s wife go, that she might be a whore, but she couldn’t appear as one? If you ask me about Sharon’s call, I’ll tell you that he could have saved it, especially because it might seem more an act of provocation than of concern. But the old Israeli wolf, who is more wily than hunger itself--and if Europe weren’t so amused criminalizing him, they would have already learned that--has hit the bull’s eye, and the effects may be complicated for diplomacy, but rather useful for politics. With a single sentence, Sharon has managed to place the nucleus of the problem on the map: There exists a new anti-Semitism, growing and violent; France (well accompanied by Spain and Belgium) is the central nest where the serpent’s egg lies patiently; and the permanent demonization of Israel is not unrelated to the phenomenon. Quite the opposite, journalistic distortion on the MIddle East (the substitution of propaganda for information is the principle sport of European journalism), the blaming of Israel, the inordinate paeans to a corrupt and violent leader called Arafat, and the minimization of Palestinian terror are the foundation of the new anti-Semitism. An anti-Semitism that, no matter how much France may deny it, has accounted for hundreds of violent acts on its soil. I understand that Chirac may be offended, especially because, whenever these accusations are made, he must feel that he is being compared to Vichy France. Well fine: He hasn’t understood or he doesn’t want to understand anything. Without a doubt France carries some heavy historical baggage, in spite of its efforts to make the world forget that there was French collaboration and that thousands of French Jews were sent to their death. Just like cute little Austria, that has got people to think that the whole country was the Trapp family, France also has sold us the line that it was all “résistence”: --an example of its perfectly fine bad memory ... Not at all unusual for the most anti-American country in Europe, in spite of the fact that it has more than 65,000 Americans buried there who died to save it. But Sharon’s accusation and that of the American ADL, concerned with the anti-Semitic wave in Europe, and that of the very European Parliament as contained in its report presented in Strasbourg, and the accusation of many of us who for some time have been warning of the threat, is not aimed at a fascist Europe or France, but rather at a liberal but anti-Semitic Europe, which is not the same thing. It’s more akin to the proper and high minded France that condemned Dreyfus, than to Vichy France. In an insightful article in the Jerusalem Post, Emanuelle Ottolenghi said the following: “The Church’s anti-Semitism offered the Jews an out--conversion. Liberal anti-Semitism offered the Jews an out--assimilation. And the present day anti-Semitic offensive related to Israel also offers an out--anti-Zionism.” That is to say, the duality of Jewish people/State of Israel is not only not considered a necessary symbiosis, precise and historically unchallengeable, but it is demonized by the intelligentsia, smeared with every sort of crushing accusation and turned into an example of Jewish culpability. France’s problem is this: the Dreyfus climate that marches through university classrooms, in so many esteemed gatherings, in so many editors’ offices, and, to be sure, nourished by the undercurrent of judeophobic hatred that runs through the Arab neighborhoods, but is enunciated in the heart of correctly thinking, enlightened and distinguished society, . It is a drawing room anti-Semitism, progressive, politically correct and utterly without inhibitions and, which even acts against fascist anti-Semitism, but feeds another kind, even unconsciously. No matter how much Chirac takes offense, France’s responsibility in the demonization of Israel is as crushing as was one of the notorious shameful acts of its history. Do you remember the 50 Mirage fighter jets that were prepaid by Israel and which France then denied them and handed over to Libya, right in the middle of the 1967 war? Some pasts contain the monsters of today... The spirit of Vichy is buried and no longer courses through Europe. But the spirit that condemned Dreyfus is not only in effect, but reinforced. And at the same time, unfortunately, among French intellectuals Emil Zola’s spirit scarcely beats. So, Mr. Chirac, don’t feign being offended, we are not all fooled ... Transl. Joe DiFrances.
Pilar Rahola : Diari Avui. Barcelona.
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Articles : Anti-semitism I, Rachel, that die in Auschwitz
“I died when I was four years old. I remember that one day my mother embraced me at the time that knocking at the door and the entire home trembled like a leave. Our town was small, very cold in winter, like most of the towns in our beloved Hungary. Our house was the home of the grandparents and mother give to birth me there, between those walls a little bit sad and poor that have seeing birth to Avi and Shmuel too, my eldest brother. Father was a fiddler, but he doesn’t earn so much money and our poverty was so extreme like that suffered most of the neighbors with whom we join in the Synagogue during Shabbat. The Rabbi always used parched clothes and I used to looking for the patches. Shabbat! It was so beautiful to hear my father’s voice when he blessed the table and distributed the braided bread! And afterwards all the brothers stayed together in the dining room, and we make so much noise, that mother scolded us: “Children, keep quiet!” The best food that she has, she takes away for Saturday, in spite that it isn’t so much to pick out from the pantry.That day she embraced me. Not like always, but much stronger than ever, like she feared that something wicked have to happen. Later we were so much time in the street, in the file, with dozens of our neighbors, with the some cold than us, but nobody moved on. Stealthily I could see my friend Sara, with her plaits a little bit wrongly make, but I don’t dare to call her. Mother has said that I don’t have to move, and in spite the cold that I has, I don’t move. I cry a little bit, but lazy, for nobody hears it. Later some men tacked father, Avi, and Shmuel and take them away. They were separating man and women and put them in the other file. They shouted so much, those men, and one of them gives a hard stroke to Mr. Berlatzky, because he don’t want to let alone his little daughter. Mr. Berlatzky only has to his daughter because his wife has died some month ago, and he was very sad. He fells to the ground like a sack, and mother tightened my hand without words: “Don’t say anything Rachel”, and I tightened my teeth and don’t say anything. I remember that I want to cry out when Mr. Berlatzky fells and the snow burst like a pie. But I cry out for my innermost being and so nobody hear to me. As soon as the time past, more I tightened my mother’s leg with my body, in this way, very strongly, because I was hungry and I has cold, and my foots hurts me. I was wearing my party shoes, but my foot hurt me and I wanted to cry, but I don’t cried. When you tighten to mother, is lesser the desire to cry. How much time past? One of those men saw the father’s fiddle sheath and ask to him if he knows how to play. He laughed when father answers. Father looked to the ground, and it was strange, he always looked forward. The man laughed, and it was a laugh that isn’t laugh, it was like a laugh to make cry out, and then I noted it. I noted fear. For the first time I noted fear that never let me until my dead. When we arrived to the train, after we were pushed to climb in trucks like Mr. Pataki’s sheep when they take them away, again they put us in line and they call us for our names, one to one, and one to one we climb to the train. The man that laughed said to my father that he play the fiddle, and so I climb to the train that takes me to the inhospitable and far away place where I will received the last mother’s embrace. With fathers fiddle sad sound.Sometimes I feel suffocate. But mother does a kina of hole, despite that we were fixed, standing, one facing the other in this wagon without windows. When mother does the hole, I could breathe better. Somebody said that Mrs. Berdichevsky was dead, maybe suffocate, or hunger, or cold, and the people said that everybody will die. I don’t knew what mean all this, but I understood that it was very bad, and so I think in father and Shmuel, that was strong and always protected me, and in Avi, that always make me anger, but gives to me kisses. They don’t let that something happened to me. And so slipped the hours, between cries and weeps, and somebody that inform about another dead, and another, and mother that does for me little air corners that I could breathe, and the hunger, the hunger that holes in my belly like a knife. Suddenly Simy, with that sweat voice like that of a little bird, start to sing, and for a moment I think that I fell asleep, but it was a sleep that if it wasn’t. Right there, hungry, scared, caressed only by Simy’s sweetness, and mothers legs… When we were arrived to the place filled with strange men that shouted us and make to us to go in line and past through a narrow path, enclosed between wires, mother looked at the chimneys that fumed. They expelled a dense smoke and the air’s smell was bad. She doesn’t say anything, but I know that mother was scared, she was so much scared, and mother never was scared. “We only have to be feared of those thinks that we do wrong”, she said to me. But she hasn’t do nothing wrong, she was good and always sing to us sweet songs, and in spite that there wasn’t food she does wonderful Shabbats, and she said to me that I will be very beautiful when I will be oldest, a princess and I know that she was the best mother in the world. But now she was scaredI don’t see again to my father. At the some time that we arrived, they put us in a line for take a shower bath. Mother always said that we have to clean ourselves before to eat, but I was hungry and I don’t want to take a shower. I don’t know that before us, many other parents and many other girls have tacked a shower. Maybe they arrived many months before and they have survived to all, but the shower has arrived. No, I don’t know. I don know that I have arrived to the accurate place of the fairy’s tales where live the true evil, the pure evil and this evil takes form and devours everything that he finds and don’t lives nothing alive. I don’t know that there was tales like this. Where was God? Father always talks about God, Adonai…, and the Rabbi found him inside the Tora and he make to us that we know Him, His beautiful words face. But seems me that in that place God don’t was. He don’t was in mother’s fear, nor in my brothers that I don’t see them again, nor in those men faces that pushed us to the room’s entrance. God wasn’t there.Never I have seen so many naked people. We have cold and tightened ourselves. Mother said “Embrace me, my little princess”, and suddenly comes out smoke. Later I was ashes.PD: To the Rachel, and to all the Rachel that died in the dead camps. A million and half of Jewish children killed in the Holocaust. We never forget them.Tra. Isidoro Winicki
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Articles : Anti-semitism
I, Rachel, that die in Auschwitz


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“I died when I was four years old. I remember that one day my mother embraced me at the time that knocking at the door and the entire home trembled like a leave. Our town was small, very cold in winter, like most of the towns in our beloved Hungary. Our house was the home of the grandparents and mother give to birth me there, between those walls a little bit sad and poor that have seeing birth to Avi and Shmuel too, my eldest brother. Father was a fiddler, but he doesn’t earn so much money and our poverty was so extreme like that suffered most of the neighbors with whom we join in the Synagogue during Shabbat. The Rabbi always used parched clothes and I used to looking for the patches. Shabbat! It was so beautiful to hear my father’s voice when he blessed the table and distributed the braided bread! And afterwards all the brothers stayed together in the dining room, and we make so much noise, that mother scolded us: “Children, keep quiet!” The best food that she has, she takes away for Saturday, in spite that it isn’t so much to pick out from the pantry.

That day she embraced me. Not like always, but much stronger than ever, like she feared that something wicked have to happen. Later we were so much time in the street, in the file, with dozens of our neighbors, with the some cold than us, but nobody moved on. Stealthily I could see my friend Sara, with her plaits a little bit wrongly make, but I don’t dare to call her. Mother has said that I don’t have to move, and in spite the cold that I has, I don’t move. I cry a little bit, but lazy, for nobody hears it. Later some men tacked father, Avi, and Shmuel and take them away. They were separating man and women and put them in the other file. They shouted so much, those men, and one of them gives a hard stroke to Mr. Berlatzky, because he don’t want to let alone his little daughter. Mr. Berlatzky only has to his daughter because his wife has died some month ago, and he was very sad. He fells to the ground like a sack, and mother tightened my hand without words: “Don’t say anything Rachel”, and I tightened my teeth and don’t say anything. I remember that I want to cry out when Mr. Berlatzky fells and the snow burst like a pie. But I cry out for my innermost being and so nobody hear to me. As soon as the time past, more I tightened my mother’s leg with my body, in this way, very strongly, because I was hungry and I has cold, and my foots hurts me. I was wearing my party shoes, but my foot hurt me and I wanted to cry, but I don’t cried. When you tighten to mother, is lesser the desire to cry. How much time past? One of those men saw the father’s fiddle sheath and ask to him if he knows how to play. He laughed when father answers. Father looked to the ground, and it was strange, he always looked forward. The man laughed, and it was a laugh that isn’t laugh, it was like a laugh to make cry out, and then I noted it. I noted fear. For the first time I noted fear that never let me until my dead. When we arrived to the train, after we were pushed to climb in trucks like Mr. Pataki’s sheep when they take them away, again they put us in line and they call us for our names, one to one, and one to one we climb to the train. The man that laughed said to my father that he play the fiddle, and so I climb to the train that takes me to the inhospitable and far away place where I will received the last mother’s embrace. With fathers fiddle sad sound.

Sometimes I feel suffocate. But mother does a kina of hole, despite that we were fixed, standing, one facing the other in this wagon without windows. When mother does the hole, I could breathe better. Somebody said that Mrs. Berdichevsky was dead, maybe suffocate, or hunger, or cold, and the people said that everybody will die. I don’t knew what mean all this, but I understood that it was very bad, and so I think in father and Shmuel, that was strong and always protected me, and in Avi, that always make me anger, but gives to me kisses. They don’t let that something happened to me. And so slipped the hours, between cries and weeps, and somebody that inform about another dead, and another, and mother that does for me little air corners that I could breathe, and the hunger, the hunger that holes in my belly like a knife. Suddenly Simy, with that sweat voice like that of a little bird, start to sing, and for a moment I think that I fell asleep, but it was a sleep that if it wasn’t. Right there, hungry, scared, caressed only by Simy’s sweetness, and mothers legs… When we were arrived to the place filled with strange men that shouted us and make to us to go in line and past through a narrow path, enclosed between wires, mother looked at the chimneys that fumed. They expelled a dense smoke and the air’s smell was bad. She doesn’t say anything, but I know that mother was scared, she was so much scared, and mother never was scared. “We only have to be feared of those thinks that we do wrong”, she said to me. But she hasn’t do nothing wrong, she was good and always sing to us sweet songs, and in spite that there wasn’t food she does wonderful Shabbats, and she said to me that I will be very beautiful when I will be oldest, a princess and I know that she was the best mother in the world. But now she was scared

I don’t see again to my father. At the some time that we arrived, they put us in a line for take a shower bath. Mother always said that we have to clean ourselves before to eat, but I was hungry and I don’t want to take a shower. I don’t know that before us, many other parents and many other girls have tacked a shower. Maybe they arrived many months before and they have survived to all, but the shower has arrived. No, I don’t know. I don know that I have arrived to the accurate place of the fairy’s tales where live the true evil, the pure evil and this evil takes form and devours everything that he finds and don’t lives nothing alive. I don’t know that there was tales like this. Where was God? Father always talks about God, Adonai…, and the Rabbi found him inside the Tora and he make to us that we know Him, His beautiful words face. But seems me that in that place God don’t was. He don’t was in mother’s fear, nor in my brothers that I don’t see them again, nor in those men faces that pushed us to the room’s entrance. God wasn’t there.

Never I have seen so many naked people. We have cold and tightened ourselves. Mother said “Embrace me, my little princess”, and suddenly comes out smoke. Later I was ashes.

PD: To the Rachel, and to all the Rachel that died in the dead camps. A million and half of Jewish children killed in the Holocaust. We never forget them.

Tra. Isidoro Winicki



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Articles : Anti-semitism
Yom Ha Shoá


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Slowly, like it was a mammoth awakening of its millennial dream, Europe repeats the annual ritual, and, for a single day, remembers. I don’t know if it’s me that with the age I turn more tender, but I have the impression that this year were more interviews, more ceremonies, more commemorations, maybe a little bit of meditation. I avoid the commentaries that I hear in some news programs that mixed the Holocaust with the Palestine question or minimize the importance of the horror like it be one more of the human horrors, like that there was a lot of Holocaust in the human history. In this sense tireless I will repeat: The history is plenty of barbarism and madness, but there isn’t an episode of the history comparable to the only extermination industry created by the human being. To minimize the wickedness is like to begin to understand it. And if it was something alike to the wickedness in pure state —-“evil exists”, remember to us the great Nobel Price Elie Wiesel, it was the Shoa, the Holocaust. The Shoa means pull up thousands of families, with their children, their grandparents, their fathers and mothers, pull up of entire villages, with its teachers, its doctors, its musicians, its tailors and its poets, pull up entire geographies, with its songs, its languages, its party photos, its weddings and its burials, its memory and its future, pull up all and destroy it in crematory ovens. A million children that were born Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, German, Greek, Italian, French, transferred in dead wagons, and finally killed because they were Jews. And Beyond the children, millions of people, some killed because they were marked with a stigma, homosexuals, Gypsies, revolutionaries, pariahs, another because they belonged to the eternally persecute people. In Auschwitz we burnt the Europe face, we destroyed the human geographies that enrich us and explain to us, and it was in Auschwitz were we broke the history sense. It isn’t another horror. Is our own horror, reflected in a big mirror of wickedness, were the Old Continent’s soul turn out to be the Dorian Gray’s soul. “The dead of the human soul”, said Lanzman and ever nobody have defined it more precisely.

Each year, in this date I take out the Stendhal’s mirror and I observe the acts, the articles, and the documental that the TV, with a little bit luck, put in low audience hours. Unfortunately, always I arrive to de some conclusion: trouble us to remember the Holocaust. So much that we never do the contrition exercise that compels us, but we deal with it like a deplorable event in the history. Each year to, Loyal to an inner tradition, I take my pen, I dip it in the rage inkstand and I begin to write an article. Like a pain’s ritual. Like it was that it be, a moral obligation. Those are my marks in white and black, my revulsion in the oasis were dwell the good thinking and indifferent European Society. The Holocaust never was a German question. The Holocaust never was a Jewish question. And above all, the Holocaust never was a Nazi question. Don’t help the acts in repudiation against Nazism. Those are my stains in black and white of the immaculate text, my revulsion in the oasis where inhabit the good thinking and indifferent European Society. The Holocaust never was a German question. The Holocaust never was a Jewish question. And overall, the Holocaust never was a Nazi question. The repudiation acts are useless, when we are placed beyond all blame and beyond all questions, if with them we don’t open our putrid melon. Nazism was an outcome of many things, among them the madness of a wicked and depraved man, but its crimes were born from our responsibilities, they were nourished from the prejudices that we were created during the centuries and they act thanks to our indifference. Europe was who created the stigma against the Jew. Hitler only does the dirty work.

Stain in our beautiful commemorations. The stain of the Chamberlain’s syndrome that crosses the Europe’s dorsal spine through years. First we washed our hands. Later a Pope blessed the horrors in the intimacy. And later we know what have happened and we forget it in a prudential time. We have the planes of the extermination camps, but never have we considered that was necessary to act. In the end, with more or less exhibition. Weren’t we anti-Semite? Haven’t we in our cupboards Isabel the Catholic and her Inquisition? Haven’t we the French people claiming “dead to the Jews!” at the time that they condemned Alfred Dreyfuss to perpetual prison in Devil’s Island? We don’t haven’t placed a frantic anti-Semitic, Karl Lueger, at the Vienna’s mayoralty? We don’t were accumulated pogroms in the distant Russia? Haven’t we enlightened top man profusely Jewish hater like Paul Valery? Don’t have we sucked the notion of the deicide people at the time that we have kissed the Catholic cross? Don’t feed ourselves with the some hatred when we reform ourselves with Luther? Don’t were we even we drunk the Voltaire’s enlightenment honey? Nothing in the European history escapes to the hatred against the Jews. And, at the some time, in paranoiac duality, nothing of the best of Europe is indifferent to the Jewish contribution. Hitler was the last stage of our hatred, our executioner.

I don’t ask that we open ourselves the flesh in the public square. I only ask that we have to know where the evil was born, where the beast
makes its nest, and most of all, with what kind of blind eyes, speechless lips and noiseless ears we stay when the beast killed. Gluksman calls this attitude “the nihilist indifference”, an attitude that nowadays to occurs, in front of another nihilist phenomenon, the human bombs. In Yon HaShoa (the Holocaust Day), with millions of dead shouting their deep pain from the hollow cavities of the bad memory, with this million children that were truncated poetry, with this society that smells burned flesh and have seen the train wagons and have know the aerial maps of the massacre and have looked to the other side; with our broken Jewish soul in the black zone of our hatred; with the history’s heavy burden, the Europeans only can pronounce one word: “forgive us”.

The rest is a joke.

Trad. Isidoro Winicki
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Pilar Rahola : Diario El País. Madrid.

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Articles : Anti-semitism
Maragall, what will you say in Israel?


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Yesterday, in this same journal, Jordi Argelaguet opened the denunciation, and I know that some webs had already expressed a deep concern. A curious coincidence wants it so that the subject coincides with the polemics between Vicenç Villatoro and Antoni Bassas, on certain anti-Semitic comments that the latter allowed in his radio program.

Not such a curious coincidence, if we consider that with some other people I have already been denunciating for a while the new anti-Semitism that runs through the backbone of Europe, and which, in spite of rooting in old prejudices, has a new formulation, is mainly linked to progressive thought, and, mainly as well, is formulated in an unconscious way. When Saramago, to give but a notorious example, said that Yenin was like Auschwitz, not only he did an act of contempt towards the Holocaust that still hurts in the open wounds of millions of victims, but he also was the paradigm of a social fact: the minimisation of the Shoah not only is not alien to politically correct thought, but actually is a fundamental element of this thought. And doesn’t discomfort or unease anybody. If the comments to the radio program had been formulated in terms of classical far-right anti-Semitism, the democratic soul of Mr. Bassas would have immediately reacted; but formulated in a left-wing grammar it became easier to swallow them and identify with them. This is the risk of the new Judeophobia that runs through Europe: it is perceived as politically correct. Anything goes herein: from IU (Left United) refusing to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust on solidarity grounds with Palestinians, to the stupidities of Saramago, celebrated by the “progressives” of the world, or Spanish SOS-Racism refusing to sign the resolutions against anti-Semitism drafted by their French counterparts; ending up with the listener of the radio program who tells Mr. Bassas that Jews are the Axe of Evil. And Mr. Bassas even thanks him for having expressed his opinions! When I spoke to Mr. Bassas on the issue the day of the celebration for the League Cup at the Barça Stadium, I perceived his perplexity, and from it I draw my worries: he couldn’t understand our outrage. Which means that the new Judeophobia has rooted, in a fully natural way, in our collective thought.

From radio to written press, so prolific in anti-Semitic expressions, contempt toward the Jewish People, demonisation of Israel and especially minimisation of the meaning of the Holocaust. The last example is so grave I don’t think it can be treated merely as a question deserving a little criticism. It is, from my perspective, a sound scandal that we cannot merely oversee. The Institute for Education of the Barcelona City Council has edited a book titled Republicans in Nazi concentration camps, written by J. Pagès and M. Casas. The prologue is by M. Subirats and it was presented with honours at the Barcelona Ateneum. The book says that today, in the world, two problems exist that can be compared to the Nazi genocide: the “Wall of Shame” of Israel and the Guantanamo Military Base. They spend a whole page in describing all the barbarities done by Israel. In p. 88 they go further, address the students and ask them to draw the comparison. And from there on the book contains masterpieces like saying that, differently from the Jews, the “Republicans were prosecuted and put in camps because of their open anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist political stance”, as if they had been the only resisters. Thus they forget, for example, the desperate fight of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. It took longer for Hitler to kill the Warsaw ghetto than to invade the whole of Poland. Everything keeps on in this same line: the Holocaust is never written with a capital letter, the Jews are just cited in the before-last position when they speak about who was brought to the camps, as if they had been “just some other victims”, in no place they speak about the centuries-long anti-Semitic literature that brought to the Holocaust and, with the comparison with Israeli “bad deeds”, everything is trivialised, minimised, and thus denied. That this has been written by democratic citizens is a shame; that it is presented as didactic material is a mockery; but that it has been funded by the City Council of the capital of Catalonia, with taxpayers’ money, and with honours, is simply scandalous.
I formally ask that the paragraphs of this book which minimise the Jewish Holocaust and compare it to any present-day conflict be retired. The Shoah, that is, the planned and industrialised extermination attempt of a whole people, pulling entire families out of their villages in Hungary, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Germany, with their children and grandchildren and parents, their school teachers, poets, shoemakers, musicians, and sending them to death to accomplish the hitlerian “final solution”, cannot be compared to anything. This is the first axiom of every democrat. Afterwards they can criticise whatever they want. But this book doesn’t criticise, it just laughs at the pain of six million people exterminated just for being Jewish.

I ask the question to Pasqual Maragall, who is starting a trip to Israel: will he explain to the Israelis that in Barcelona we publish public-funded books that compare Israel with the extermination camps? Mr. Carod-Rovira, who accompanies him, will explain that his party gives support to the City Council that publishes these books? When Mayor Joan Clos speaks about peace and harmony, will he tell the Jews that Barcelona is the adequate city? And all of them, what will they tell Lluís Bassat-Cohen, who accompanies them in their trip?

I repeat it in case it wasn’t clear enough: this book, in its present drafting, must be retired. First, because it is a scandal, even if the scandal is perpetrated by the progressives. Second, because it may be a Penal Offence. Third, because it has been funded with public money. With our money they are laughing at the extermination of the Jews.

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Pilar Rahola : Diari Avui. Barcelona.

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Articles : Anti-semitism Yom Ha Shoá
Slowly, like it was a mammoth awakening of its millennial dream, Europe repeats the annual ritual, and, for a single day, remembers. I don’t know if it’s me that with the age I turn more tender, but I have the impression that this year were more interviews, more ceremonies, more commemorations, maybe a little bit of meditation. I avoid the commentaries that I hear in some news programs that mixed the Holocaust with the Palestine question or minimize the importance of the horror like it be one more of the human horrors, like that there was a lot of Holocaust in the human history. In this sense tireless I will repeat: The history is plenty of barbarism and madness, but there isn’t an episode of the history comparable to the only extermination industry created by the human being. To minimize the wickedness is like to begin to understand it. And if it was something alike to the wickedness in pure state —-“evil exists”, remember to us the great Nobel Price Elie Wiesel, it was the Shoa, the Holocaust. The Shoa means pull up thousands of families, with their children, their grandparents, their fathers and mothers, pull up of entire villages, with its teachers, its doctors, its musicians, its tailors and its poets, pull up entire geographies, with its songs, its languages, its party photos, its weddings and its burials, its memory and its future, pull up all and destroy it in crematory ovens. A million children that were born Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, German, Greek, Italian, French, transferred in dead wagons, and finally killed because they were Jews. And Beyond the children, millions of people, some killed because they were marked with a stigma, homosexuals, Gypsies, revolutionaries, pariahs, another because they belonged to the eternally persecute people. In Auschwitz we burnt the Europe face, we destroyed the human geographies that enrich us and explain to us, and it was in Auschwitz were we broke the history sense. It isn’t another horror. Is our own horror, reflected in a big mirror of wickedness, were the Old Continent’s soul turn out to be the Dorian Gray’s soul. “The dead of the human soul”, said Lanzman and ever nobody have defined it more precisely.Each year, in this date I take out the Stendhal’s mirror and I observe the acts, the articles, and the documental that the TV, with a little bit luck, put in low audience hours. Unfortunately, always I arrive to de some conclusion: trouble us to remember the Holocaust. So much that we never do the contrition exercise that compels us, but we deal with it like a deplorable event in the history. Each year to, Loyal to an inner tradition, I take my pen, I dip it in the rage inkstand and I begin to write an article. Like a pain’s ritual. Like it was that it be, a moral obligation. Those are my marks in white and black, my revulsion in the oasis were dwell the good thinking and indifferent European Society. The Holocaust never was a German question. The Holocaust never was a Jewish question. And above all, the Holocaust never was a Nazi question. Don’t help the acts in repudiation against Nazism. Those are my stains in black and white of the immaculate text, my revulsion in the oasis where inhabit the good thinking and indifferent European Society. The Holocaust never was a German question. The Holocaust never was a Jewish question. And overall, the Holocaust never was a Nazi question. The repudiation acts are useless, when we are placed beyond all blame and beyond all questions, if with them we don’t open our putrid melon. Nazism was an outcome of many things, among them the madness of a wicked and depraved man, but its crimes were born from our responsibilities, they were nourished from the prejudices that we were created during the centuries and they act thanks to our indifference. Europe was who created the stigma against the Jew. Hitler only does the dirty work.Stain in our beautiful commemorations. The stain of the Chamberlain’s syndrome that crosses the Europe’s dorsal spine through years. First we washed our hands. Later a Pope blessed the horrors in the intimacy. And later we know what have happened and we forget it in a prudential time. We have the planes of the extermination camps, but never have we considered that was necessary to act. In the end, with more or less exhibition. Weren’t we anti-Semite? Haven’t we in our cupboards Isabel the Catholic and her Inquisition? Haven’t we the French people claiming “dead to the Jews!” at the time that they condemned Alfred Dreyfuss to perpetual prison in Devil’s Island? We don’t haven’t placed a frantic anti-Semitic, Karl Lueger, at the Vienna’s mayoralty? We don’t were accumulated pogroms in the distant Russia? Haven’t we enlightened top man profusely Jewish hater like Paul Valery? Don’t have we sucked the notion of the deicide people at the time that we have kissed the Catholic cross? Don’t feed ourselves with the some hatred when we reform ourselves with Luther? Don’t were we even we drunk the Voltaire’s enlightenment honey? Nothing in the European history escapes to the hatred against the Jews. And, at the some time, in paranoiac duality, nothing of the best of Europe is indifferent to the Jewish contribution. Hitler was the last stage of our hatred, our executioner.I don’t ask that we open ourselves the flesh in the public square. I only ask that we have to know where the evil was born, where the beastmakes its nest, and most of all, with what kind of blind eyes, speechless lips and noiseless ears we stay when the beast killed. Gluksman calls this attitude “the nihilist indifference”, an attitude that nowadays to occurs, in front of another nihilist phenomenon, the human bombs. In Yon HaShoa (the Holocaust Day), with millions of dead shouting their deep pain from the hollow cavities of the bad memory, with this million children that were truncated poetry, with this society that smells burned flesh and have seen the train wagons and have know the aerial maps of the massacre and have looked to the other side; with our broken Jewish soul in the black zone of our hatred; with the history’s heavy burden, the Europeans only can pronounce one word: “forgive us”.The rest is a joke.Trad. Isidoro Winicki
Pilar Rahola : Diario El País. Madrid.
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© 2004 Pilar Rahola Disseny ADES STUDIOhttp://www.pilarrahola.com/

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Articles : Anti-semitism Maragall, what will you say in Israel?
Yesterday, in this same journal, Jordi Argelaguet opened the denunciation, and I know that some webs had already expressed a deep concern. A curious coincidence wants it so that the subject coincides with the polemics between Vicenç Villatoro and Antoni Bassas, on certain anti-Semitic comments that the latter allowed in his radio program.Not such a curious coincidence, if we consider that with some other people I have already been denunciating for a while the new anti-Semitism that runs through the backbone of Europe, and which, in spite of rooting in old prejudices, has a new formulation, is mainly linked to progressive thought, and, mainly as well, is formulated in an unconscious way. When Saramago, to give but a notorious example, said that Yenin was like Auschwitz, not only he did an act of contempt towards the Holocaust that still hurts in the open wounds of millions of victims, but he also was the paradigm of a social fact: the minimisation of the Shoah not only is not alien to politically correct thought, but actually is a fundamental element of this thought. And doesn’t discomfort or unease anybody. If the comments to the radio program had been formulated in terms of classical far-right anti-Semitism, the democratic soul of Mr. Bassas would have immediately reacted; but formulated in a left-wing grammar it became easier to swallow them and identify with them. This is the risk of the new Judeophobia that runs through Europe: it is perceived as politically correct. Anything goes herein: from IU (Left United) refusing to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust on solidarity grounds with Palestinians, to the stupidities of Saramago, celebrated by the “progressives” of the world, or Spanish SOS-Racism refusing to sign the resolutions against anti-Semitism drafted by their French counterparts; ending up with the listener of the radio program who tells Mr. Bassas that Jews are the Axe of Evil. And Mr. Bassas even thanks him for having expressed his opinions! When I spoke to Mr. Bassas on the issue the day of the celebration for the League Cup at the Barça Stadium, I perceived his perplexity, and from it I draw my worries: he couldn’t understand our outrage. Which means that the new Judeophobia has rooted, in a fully natural way, in our collective thought.From radio to written press, so prolific in anti-Semitic expressions, contempt toward the Jewish People, demonisation of Israel and especially minimisation of the meaning of the Holocaust. The last example is so grave I don’t think it can be treated merely as a question deserving a little criticism. It is, from my perspective, a sound scandal that we cannot merely oversee. The Institute for Education of the Barcelona City Council has edited a book titled Republicans in Nazi concentration camps, written by J. Pagès and M. Casas. The prologue is by M. Subirats and it was presented with honours at the Barcelona Ateneum. The book says that today, in the world, two problems exist that can be compared to the Nazi genocide: the “Wall of Shame” of Israel and the Guantanamo Military Base. They spend a whole page in describing all the barbarities done by Israel. In p. 88 they go further, address the students and ask them to draw the comparison. And from there on the book contains masterpieces like saying that, differently from the Jews, the “Republicans were prosecuted and put in camps because of their open anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist political stance”, as if they had been the only resisters. Thus they forget, for example, the desperate fight of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. It took longer for Hitler to kill the Warsaw ghetto than to invade the whole of Poland. Everything keeps on in this same line: the Holocaust is never written with a capital letter, the Jews are just cited in the before-last position when they speak about who was brought to the camps, as if they had been “just some other victims”, in no place they speak about the centuries-long anti-Semitic literature that brought to the Holocaust and, with the comparison with Israeli “bad deeds”, everything is trivialised, minimised, and thus denied. That this has been written by democratic citizens is a shame; that it is presented as didactic material is a mockery; but that it has been funded by the City Council of the capital of Catalonia, with taxpayers’ money, and with honours, is simply scandalous.I formally ask that the paragraphs of this book which minimise the Jewish Holocaust and compare it to any present-day conflict be retired. The Shoah, that is, the planned and industrialised extermination attempt of a whole people, pulling entire families out of their villages in Hungary, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Germany, with their children and grandchildren and parents, their school teachers, poets, shoemakers, musicians, and sending them to death to accomplish the hitlerian “final solution”, cannot be compared to anything. This is the first axiom of every democrat. Afterwards they can criticise whatever they want. But this book doesn’t criticise, it just laughs at the pain of six million people exterminated just for being Jewish.I ask the question to Pasqual Maragall, who is starting a trip to Israel: will he explain to the Israelis that in Barcelona we publish public-funded books that compare Israel with the extermination camps? Mr. Carod-Rovira, who accompanies him, will explain that his party gives support to the City Council that publishes these books? When Mayor Joan Clos speaks about peace and harmony, will he tell the Jews that Barcelona is the adequate city? And all of them, what will they tell Lluís Bassat-Cohen, who accompanies them in their trip?I repeat it in case it wasn’t clear enough: this book, in its present drafting, must be retired. First, because it is a scandal, even if the scandal is perpetrated by the progressives. Second, because it may be a Penal Offence. Third, because it has been funded with public money. With our money they are laughing at the extermination of the Jews.
Pilar Rahola : Diari Avui. Barcelona.
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Articles : Anti-semitism
Maragall, what will you say in Israel?


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Yesterday, in this same journal, Jordi Argelaguet opened the denunciation, and I know that some webs had already expressed a deep concern. A curious coincidence wants it so that the subject coincides with the polemics between Vicenç Villatoro and Antoni Bassas, on certain anti-Semitic comments that the latter allowed in his radio program.

Not such a curious coincidence, if we consider that with some other people I have already been denunciating for a while the new anti-Semitism that runs through the backbone of Europe, and which, in spite of rooting in old prejudices, has a new formulation, is mainly linked to progressive thought, and, mainly as well, is formulated in an unconscious way. When Saramago, to give but a notorious example, said that Yenin was like Auschwitz, not only he did an act of contempt towards the Holocaust that still hurts in the open wounds of millions of victims, but he also was the paradigm of a social fact: the minimisation of the Shoah not only is not alien to politically correct thought, but actually is a fundamental element of this thought. And doesn’t discomfort or unease anybody. If the comments to the radio program had been formulated in terms of classical far-right anti-Semitism, the democratic soul of Mr. Bassas would have immediately reacted; but formulated in a left-wing grammar it became easier to swallow them and identify with them. This is the risk of the new Judeophobia that runs through Europe: it is perceived as politically correct. Anything goes herein: from IU (Left United) refusing to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust on solidarity grounds with Palestinians, to the stupidities of Saramago, celebrated by the “progressives” of the world, or Spanish SOS-Racism refusing to sign the resolutions against anti-Semitism drafted by their French counterparts; ending up with the listener of the radio program who tells Mr. Bassas that Jews are the Axe of Evil. And Mr. Bassas even thanks him for having expressed his opinions! When I spoke to Mr. Bassas on the issue the day of the celebration for the League Cup at the Barça Stadium, I perceived his perplexity, and from it I draw my worries: he couldn’t understand our outrage. Which means that the new Judeophobia has rooted, in a fully natural way, in our collective thought.

From radio to written press, so prolific in anti-Semitic expressions, contempt toward the Jewish People, demonisation of Israel and especially minimisation of the meaning of the Holocaust. The last example is so grave I don’t think it can be treated merely as a question deserving a little criticism. It is, from my perspective, a sound scandal that we cannot merely oversee. The Institute for Education of the Barcelona City Council has edited a book titled Republicans in Nazi concentration camps, written by J. Pagès and M. Casas. The prologue is by M. Subirats and it was presented with honours at the Barcelona Ateneum. The book says that today, in the world, two problems exist that can be compared to the Nazi genocide: the “Wall of Shame” of Israel and the Guantanamo Military Base. They spend a whole page in describing all the barbarities done by Israel. In p. 88 they go further, address the students and ask them to draw the comparison. And from there on the book contains masterpieces like saying that, differently from the Jews, the “Republicans were prosecuted and put in camps because of their open anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist political stance”, as if they had been the only resisters. Thus they forget, for example, the desperate fight of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. It took longer for Hitler to kill the Warsaw ghetto than to invade the whole of Poland. Everything keeps on in this same line: the Holocaust is never written with a capital letter, the Jews are just cited in the before-last position when they speak about who was brought to the camps, as if they had been “just some other victims”, in no place they speak about the centuries-long anti-Semitic literature that brought to the Holocaust and, with the comparison with Israeli “bad deeds”, everything is trivialised, minimised, and thus denied. That this has been written by democratic citizens is a shame; that it is presented as didactic material is a mockery; but that it has been funded by the City Council of the capital of Catalonia, with taxpayers’ money, and with honours, is simply scandalous.
I formally ask that the paragraphs of this book which minimise the Jewish Holocaust and compare it to any present-day conflict be retired. The Shoah, that is, the planned and industrialised extermination attempt of a whole people, pulling entire families out of their villages in Hungary, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Germany, with their children and grandchildren and parents, their school teachers, poets, shoemakers, musicians, and sending them to death to accomplish the hitlerian “final solution”, cannot be compared to anything. This is the first axiom of every democrat. Afterwards they can criticise whatever they want. But this book doesn’t criticise, it just laughs at the pain of six million people exterminated just for being Jewish.

I ask the question to Pasqual Maragall, who is starting a trip to Israel: will he explain to the Israelis that in Barcelona we publish public-funded books that compare Israel with the extermination camps? Mr. Carod-Rovira, who accompanies him, will explain that his party gives support to the City Council that publishes these books? When Mayor Joan Clos speaks about peace and harmony, will he tell the Jews that Barcelona is the adequate city? And all of them, what will they tell Lluís Bassat-Cohen, who accompanies them in their trip?

I repeat it in case it wasn’t clear enough: this book, in its present drafting, must be retired. First, because it is a scandal, even if the scandal is perpetrated by the progressives. Second, because it may be a Penal Offence. Third, because it has been funded with public money. With our money they are laughing at the extermination of the Jews.

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Articles : Anti-semitism
'Iehudi tov' Simon Wiesenthal


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The world’s conscience is not abstract, nor is it forged through spontaneous generation, like a kind of universal conscience independent of the hardheaded and exacting will that is necessary to create it. Quite the opposite, history is filled with horribly perverse and lamentable episodes that never found anyone to write about them. What is required is for a human being, rising above the wretchedness of the moment in which he lives, far above fear and insanity, to stand upright and build, with iron conviction, a conscience that calls to us and concerns us all. In short, he must awaken us, stir us up and maybe even create our own conscience. The good Jew Simon Wiesenthal, the “good Jew” who survived the full course of the Nazi horror, who saw 89 of his relatives die, who twice tried to commit suicide and who, when he was freed by American troops from Mathausen, from the final extermination camp, weighed one hundred pounds, has been, in a certain sense, the conscience of the Holocaust. Not strictly speaking the conscience of the victims, so intensely represented by every survivor who bore an arm forever marked with evil’s number, but rather the conscience of justice. It was he who coined the motto of “justice and not revenge” and, in the name of the justice that the victims deserved, dedicated his long life to finding, identifying, persuing and finally condemning the Nazi butchers. It is true that only 10% of the responsible Nazis are considered to have been brought to justice, but it is also true that some of the Nazis caught by Wiesenthal were emblematic. For example, the seizing of the opportunistic housewife who was living peacefully in the New York borough of Queens and who Wiesenthal identified as Hermine Braunsteiner, the woman who had supervised the murder of hundreds of Jewish children. Or the challenge that, on the occasion of a theatrical performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” was hurled by a group of protesters who claimed that the young Dutch girl had never lived, a challenge he took up. Five years later he identified a police inspector in Vienna as Karl Silberbauer, the gestapo official who had arrested Anne Frank. His testimony at the trial silenced the deniers forever. And memory can also tell of the identification and subsequent arrest in Brazil, in 1967, of the Austrian Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps; or that of the commandant of the Przemysl ghetto, arrested in Argentina in 1987. Or even the finding of the sixteen Nazis who perpetrated the liquidation of the Jewish population of Lvov, the first Polish (and now Ukrainian) city where Wiesenthal himself lived.

But Wiesenthal’s most defining deed in his battle against the impunity of Nazi criminals was to find the architect of the Endlösung (the “Final Solution”), the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, located in Buenos Aires in 1954, kidnapped by the Mossad, tried in Jerusalem and finally sentenced to die, which sentence was carried out in 1962. His ashes were cast beyond Israeli territorial waters, so as not to sully Jewish land. The man who had devised the deportation and death en masse of millions of Jews appears in the chronicles of horror as what Hannah Arendt would typify as the banality of evil, a mediocre and banal character with a “natural disposition” for carrying out orders. “I didn’t persecute Jews eagerly or with pleasure. It was the Government that did it. I accuse those in charge of exploiting my obedience.” The biggest murderer in the history of Europe, was almost no one ...

Dense, committed, moral and honorable, Simon Wiesenthal’s biography forces one to seriously evaluate the role of Europe and the world in the impunity of Nazi crimes. To be sure, after the Second World War the world condemned nazism and the Nuremberg trials were the most relevant consequence of that. But it is also true that, after this momentary collective catharsis, many countries became ideal refuges for Nazi criminals, they ceased to pursue them and they, the immense majority of them, have never been brought to justice. May the roles of Argentina, Chile and Brazil remain in collective shame as Nazi refuges, countries that have never performed the required self-criticism, and that even now do not recognize their explicit complicity with the criminals. In shame ... black Spain in whose Marbellas some notable Nazis did, and still do, get by, even festively. In shame too the resolute absence of self-criticism on Austria’s part, a country that ended up having as president a man with a nazi past, Kurt Waldheim, and which never has recollected its total submissiveness, as a country, to Hitler’s cause. In point of fact, far from undertaking the rigorous self-critical process to which Germany has, for decades, obligated itself, Austria has convinced the world that it was all part of the Trapp Family. Neither blame nor complicity, but instead a revolting impunity toward its past; just looking the other way ... But of all the countries that are accomplices to nazism, Syria is, without a doubt, the most flagrant, not only for having been a refuge for Nazis, but for having made Alois Bruner, Eichmann’s right-hand man, an advisor to the President, who still protects him. Wiesenthal believed that he was the only identified and located Nazi that had escaped him. But actually, did he escape from Wiesenthal? Or did he escape from a world that had lost its interest in Nazi war criminals once the Nuremberg trials had ended, and which had decided to look quickly away elsewhere, partially because of the discomfort of guilt, partially out of indifference? That it is known that a Nazi criminal is the advisor to a president who can sit at the UN, who travels and is visited, who negotiates and has influence, and that it is known and nothing comes of it tells us to what degree Jewish grief does not matter to us. In the depths of Wiesenthal’s biography this is a defeat, for it demonstrates that the hand of justice only reached those criminals that Wiesenthal or other Jewish organizations found, but not the rest of the murderers, many of whom still live anonymously and undisturbed.

In this improvised memoriam to Simon Yehudi Tov, may this shame serve as a matter for reflection: It was Jews who were persecuted, Jews who were murdered and, in spite of the words of good intentions, it has been Jews who have hunted down and judged their executioners. The world looked favorably upon Wiesenthal, but it left him alone, accompanied only by his people, the remembrance of the victims and his indomitable strength. May he rest in peace, a just man among the just.

Trad. Joe di Frances.



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Articles : Anti-semitism 'Iehudi tov' Simon Wiesenthal
The world’s conscience is not abstract, nor is it forged through spontaneous generation, like a kind of universal conscience independent of the hardheaded and exacting will that is necessary to create it. Quite the opposite, history is filled with horribly perverse and lamentable episodes that never found anyone to write about them. What is required is for a human being, rising above the wretchedness of the moment in which he lives, far above fear and insanity, to stand upright and build, with iron conviction, a conscience that calls to us and concerns us all. In short, he must awaken us, stir us up and maybe even create our own conscience. The good Jew Simon Wiesenthal, the “good Jew” who survived the full course of the Nazi horror, who saw 89 of his relatives die, who twice tried to commit suicide and who, when he was freed by American troops from Mathausen, from the final extermination camp, weighed one hundred pounds, has been, in a certain sense, the conscience of the Holocaust. Not strictly speaking the conscience of the victims, so intensely represented by every survivor who bore an arm forever marked with evil’s number, but rather the conscience of justice. It was he who coined the motto of “justice and not revenge” and, in the name of the justice that the victims deserved, dedicated his long life to finding, identifying, persuing and finally condemning the Nazi butchers. It is true that only 10% of the responsible Nazis are considered to have been brought to justice, but it is also true that some of the Nazis caught by Wiesenthal were emblematic. For example, the seizing of the opportunistic housewife who was living peacefully in the New York borough of Queens and who Wiesenthal identified as Hermine Braunsteiner, the woman who had supervised the murder of hundreds of Jewish children. Or the challenge that, on the occasion of a theatrical performance of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” was hurled by a group of protesters who claimed that the young Dutch girl had never lived, a challenge he took up. Five years later he identified a police inspector in Vienna as Karl Silberbauer, the gestapo official who had arrested Anne Frank. His testimony at the trial silenced the deniers forever. And memory can also tell of the identification and subsequent arrest in Brazil, in 1967, of the Austrian Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor concentration camps; or that of the commandant of the Przemysl ghetto, arrested in Argentina in 1987. Or even the finding of the sixteen Nazis who perpetrated the liquidation of the Jewish population of Lvov, the first Polish (and now Ukrainian) city where Wiesenthal himself lived. But Wiesenthal’s most defining deed in his battle against the impunity of Nazi criminals was to find the architect of the Endlösung (the “Final Solution”), the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, located in Buenos Aires in 1954, kidnapped by the Mossad, tried in Jerusalem and finally sentenced to die, which sentence was carried out in 1962. His ashes were cast beyond Israeli territorial waters, so as not to sully Jewish land. The man who had devised the deportation and death en masse of millions of Jews appears in the chronicles of horror as what Hannah Arendt would typify as the banality of evil, a mediocre and banal character with a “natural disposition” for carrying out orders. “I didn’t persecute Jews eagerly or with pleasure. It was the Government that did it. I accuse those in charge of exploiting my obedience.” The biggest murderer in the history of Europe, was almost no one ... Dense, committed, moral and honorable, Simon Wiesenthal’s biography forces one to seriously evaluate the role of Europe and the world in the impunity of Nazi crimes. To be sure, after the Second World War the world condemned nazism and the Nuremberg trials were the most relevant consequence of that. But it is also true that, after this momentary collective catharsis, many countries became ideal refuges for Nazi criminals, they ceased to pursue them and they, the immense majority of them, have never been brought to justice. May the roles of Argentina, Chile and Brazil remain in collective shame as Nazi refuges, countries that have never performed the required self-criticism, and that even now do not recognize their explicit complicity with the criminals. In shame ... black Spain in whose Marbellas some notable Nazis did, and still do, get by, even festively. In shame too the resolute absence of self-criticism on Austria’s part, a country that ended up having as president a man with a nazi past, Kurt Waldheim, and which never has recollected its total submissiveness, as a country, to Hitler’s cause. In point of fact, far from undertaking the rigorous self-critical process to which Germany has, for decades, obligated itself, Austria has convinced the world that it was all part of the Trapp Family. Neither blame nor complicity, but instead a revolting impunity toward its past; just looking the other way ... But of all the countries that are accomplices to nazism, Syria is, without a doubt, the most flagrant, not only for having been a refuge for Nazis, but for having made Alois Bruner, Eichmann’s right-hand man, an advisor to the President, who still protects him. Wiesenthal believed that he was the only identified and located Nazi that had escaped him. But actually, did he escape from Wiesenthal? Or did he escape from a world that had lost its interest in Nazi war criminals once the Nuremberg trials had ended, and which had decided to look quickly away elsewhere, partially because of the discomfort of guilt, partially out of indifference? That it is known that a Nazi criminal is the advisor to a president who can sit at the UN, who travels and is visited, who negotiates and has influence, and that it is known and nothing comes of it tells us to what degree Jewish grief does not matter to us. In the depths of Wiesenthal’s biography this is a defeat, for it demonstrates that the hand of justice only reached those criminals that Wiesenthal or other Jewish organizations found, but not the rest of the murderers, many of whom still live anonymously and undisturbed. In this improvised memoriam to Simon Yehudi Tov, may this shame serve as a matter for reflection: It was Jews who were persecuted, Jews who were murdered and, in spite of the words of good intentions, it has been Jews who have hunted down and judged their executioners. The world looked favorably upon Wiesenthal, but it left him alone, accompanied only by his people, the remembrance of the victims and his indomitable strength. May he rest in peace, a just man among the just. Trad. Joe di Frances.
Pilar Rahola : Diari Avui. Barcelona.
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Articles : Anti-semitism Journey to hell
“There was a time when a special place in the depths of hell was reserved for people who intentionally kill children. Nowadays, the intentional killing of Israeli children is legitimized as Palestinian armed conflict.” – legitimized and even rewarded, because those who kill children do not go to hell; they are promised paradise instead.Briggite Gabriel, a Lebanese woman who spent seven years of her life in an underground hideout, eating grass and dodging gunfire to search for water, used these grim words to speak at Duke University, in October 2004, of the self-destructive phenomenon that uses a religion and a faith as an alibi for every form of violence, in an escalation of terror that does not even stop when it comes up against what is most sacred in life. In spite of being ‘raised in a spirit of antisemitic hatred’, as she put it, the current President and founder of the American Congress for Truth went further in her self-criticism and recalled that in the current scale of things, “the difference between the Arab world and Israel is a difference in values and nature. It is barbarity versus civilization; democracy versus dictatorship; good versus evil”. Salman Rushdie has described the current degradation of Islam as a process of “paranoid Islamism” and others, like the Moroccan journalist Ali Lambret, are aware of the significance for millions of Muslims of the disastrous situation of having virtually no democratic point of reference of their own. Yet such commentators, speaking the language of morality and ethics, are all too few and far between; they are like exotic islands in a great ocean of narrow-mindedness, cultural alienation and, more than anything else, institutionalized fanaticism. And it is precisely that which makes them so exceptional and gives us the first key to the serious problem lying in store. So in order to analyse the new global antisemitism, whose many-headed hydra speaks in different accents and uses different language according to where it reveals itself, we must start giving serious thought to the matter because voices such as those I have mentioned are really exceptional. In other words, we need to analyse this narrow-mindedness, this nihilistic, totalitarian way of thinking, which is intent on distilling its pervasive poison in every corner of the Muslim world. First of all, generic thinking: is there a resurgence of the xenophobic concept, coined by William Marr in 1879 to define his Judaeophobic feelings – which is how the term “antisemitic” emerged – that in its most evil manifestation was responsible for the worst atrocity in the history of humanity? There have been so many studies on this issue – including by the European authorities – that it does not need to be demonstrated here. Day in, day out, in comment upon comment, in the media, in discussion groups, in televised debates, in political declarations and in anything that enters into the process of collective thinking, the Jews are there, an awkward, antipathetic presence, and are usually discussed, demonized or directly attacked. There is utter confusion between the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Israeli’, to such an extent that the two words are used indiscriminately, but both with negative connotations. Without too much risk of error, we might even go so far as to say that Israel has inherited all the historical demonization of Jews, and has given rise to a more prestigious form of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and directly to the present-day rabid anti-Israel feeling. To put it another way, just as Jews for centuries were considered to be a pariah people, in the current context Israel is regarded as a pariah State. And of course its President is the pariah President. As I put it at the 2003 UNESCO Conference in my paper entitled “Jews and flies”, “the umbrella of anti-Zionism is far easier to put up: it keeps off the rain of criticism and provides an intellectually acceptable facade”. That is to say, it is politically correct, which is essential for it to be propounded with ease among gatherings of the intelligentsia, through the pens of well-known writers, and from the mouths of progressive professors. It explains a phenomenon that will be my main focus, namely, the new antisemitism of the Left. This is an antisemitism that does not correspond to the classic norms of the Extreme Right, but rather to modern parameters whose ideology looks to the Left, and whose formulation does not rely on xenophobic values but, surprisingly, on those of solidarity. The main type of present-day antisemitism, as it influences the thinking of the masses and as it is reflected in news items, is responsible for the fierce anti-Israel thinking that pervades Western thought; it is imbued with political correctness; it is well thought of, it is leftist and is harnessed to justice, progress and solidarity. That is why it has so much influence and hence, why it is dangerous, elusive and probably unconscious.But before going into a more thorough analysis of the phenomenon, I think it necessary to point out the other two major types of antisemitic thinking that influence public opinion to a greater or lesser degree. On the one hand, there is classic antisemitism, perfectly woven into the DNA of collective thought, a by-product of Christianity which, in teaching us to love God, taught us to hate Jews. Since the important Nostra Aetate declaration, at the Vatican II Council, the Catholic Church certainly took a big step towards self-criticism and asking for forgiveness but there is also the fact that two thousand years of antisemitic religious culture have left such deeply ingrained prejudice, that it ends up being indelibly printed in everyone’s mind. Thus it is that, combined with the persistence in many corners of Christiandom of the concept of a deicide people, we have Mel Gibson’s infamous film “The Passion”. Without underrating the tremendous symbolic importance of John Paul II’s acts of self-criticism, or the emotional visit of Benedict XVI to a German synagogue, the mea culpa of the Catholic Church has been more a catharsis of the leadership than of the people. So we have, then, a historical stigma that continues to flourish. The expansion of Christianity is bound up with the victory of that prejudice and with the signal effectiveness of a process of demonization of an entire people whose object has been to dominate and deceive and, no doubt, breed fanatics. This antisemitism with a religious slant that over the centuries has become a cultural antisemitism, perfectly cemented into people’s minds and, hence, unconscious, explains in part the ease with which citizens of the world nowadays accept the clichés, the prejudices and the lies about the Jewish people. And the Jewish people par excellence in contemporary minds are the Israeli people. There is not much difference between the image of the hooked-nose medieval Jew, devious, mysterious and drinker of the blood of Christian children at Pesach, and the powerful Jew with a Magen David on the side of his tank with which, according to televisions the world over, he is systematically killing Palestinian children. If there had not been this building up over centuries of a cultural evil cutting through the cortex of Europe and branding it, to the point where nothing that has happened in European history can be explained without antisemitism, it would not now be so easy to sell Manichaean views of reality, twisted news items, or utter falsehoods of history. This is the basic antisemitism that prevails in the minds of citizens who still maintain that Israel is the world’s number one problem; the same approach is taken by journalists whose news items are always written up before they know how the story originated; the same antisemitism that explains how enlightened and theoretically well-read individuals can act towards Israel, like knowledgeable fools. At the conscious level, the antisemitism of the Christian religion has been overcome; but unconscious antisemitism can still detonate the powder keg.The other major antisemitic phenomenon, highly volatile and far more dangerous, is Islamic antisemitism, a real blemish across the whole of the Muslim world, from one region to another, contaminating not only the minds of the fanatics but also those who want to live in peace. Admittedly, this is not a new kind of anti-Semitism; it is rooted in the role that some Arab leaders held at the height of Nazism, as witness that pretty song they sang at the end of the 1930s in the Arab world: “No more Monsieur, no more Mister / Heaven’s for Allah, Earth’s for Hitler”. Among the pro-Nazis, the prize for Arab antisemitism goes to the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a personal friend of Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and Himmler, for his leadership role with Palestinian Arabs, his activism and his unvarnished sincerity. Al-Husseini not only gave global currency to his famous phrase: “Allah has conferred on us the rare privilege of finalizing what Hitler began alone. Let the Jihad begin. Kill the Jews. Kill them all” – but he also worked unflaggingly to make it a reality. Pogroms against Jews during the British Mandate, an attempted pro-Nazi coup d’état in Iraq, pressure on the Dutch East Indies to accept Japanese control, incitement to the native population of French Zagreb to reject the allied occupation, and exile in Germany from 1941, where he lived with every honour and enthusiastically hailed the consecration of Nazism. Among the many pearls that this sinister character bequeathed to the history of ignominy is the pressure he exerted on Hitler to prevent thousands of Hungarian Jews from leaving; and, of course, the most glorious feather in his cap, his direct intervention with Adolf Eichmann, urging him not to agree with the British Government to exchange German prisoners of war for 5,000 Jewish children who were to sail for the Holy Land. The children did not travel to Palestine, but instead were sent to the extermination camps in Poland. It was when travelling to Auschwitz that he reprimanded the guards for being too “soft” with the Jews. He was also responsible for the “Hanjar” squadron, the Waffen SS Company of Bosnians who exterminated 90% of the Jews of Bosnia. Heinrich Himmler, in gratitude, created a special school for mullahs in Dresden. One might nonetheless think that al-Husseini does not represent an Arab, pro-Nazi antisemitism, but merely his own brand of evil and madness. But that is not the case if one takes into account that he was a true idol until his death (1974), that he played a significant role in the Arab-Israeli confrontation and that, as a leading member of the al-Husseini clan (one of whose more modest branches produced another big name in the region, Yassir Arafat), even today his name inspires respect. That is to say, unlike present-day Germany which has made peace with its dark past, its guilt and responsibility, the Arab world has never engaged in any self-criticism regarding its pro-Nazi leaders, nor does it consider it necessary to take a hard look at its history (Syria provided a refuge for government advisor Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s right-hand man in the Third Reich’s Office for Jewish Affairs, and that was never a problem) and the country incorporated as though it was the most normal thing in the world the tissue of lies and falsehoods of Goebbels-style propaganda into its system of prejudices.Nevertheless, if the Islamic brand of antisemitism had been alone in its historical attachment to Nazism, it would not have become the huge success it is today. On the contrary, Islamic antisemitism has managed to combine all the commonplaces of Judaeophobia, from the religious to the social and political, and thus finds itself in a happy company that ranges from the infantile myths of medieval Christian antisemitism, through the socio-political Russian Orjana and its “Protocols”, to modern anti-Zionism (understood as a struggle against “imperialism”) or its own Koranic myths. Especially popular are the Suras devoted to Jews (“The Jews only deserve shame in this life, and to be banished on the Day of Judgement to the harshest torment”. Sura 2, 85.) As Patricio Brodsky states in his research into the phenomenon: “anti-Judaism in the Arab world is achieving self-evident status”, “it holds a central position in the dominant and single strand of hegemonic thinking in all Arab countries, and, through a State policy of repeating prejudices, it is gradually building the consensus that “Jews are not part of humanity”. It thus becomes is easy for the masses to learn the ways of stigma, prejudice and hatred against Jews. In most cases, this hatred goes hand in hand with a hatred of Westerners. After all, is the Jew not the paradigm of Western values? Films, television series – like the one shown by Egyptian state television during Ramadan – textbooks, classic antisemitic manuals transformed into best-sellers – including “The Protocols” and even “Mein Kampf” – articles and editorials, religious preaching, and so on. Antisemitism underpins current Islamic culture; it contaminates schools and news reports; it is the engine of political discourse. This is happening in the face of Western indifference, before the traditional, predictable passivity of the UN, and with the complicity of intellectuals in the free world. It does not seem to bother us that 1,300 million children in primary school are being taught the hatred that is antisemitism. And let us stress a basic fact here: teaching hatred against Jews is quite simply teaching hatred. Moreover, this antisemitism not only operates specifically in Islamic societies, but also affects social, civic and religious organizations of an Islamic orientation established in democratic societies. In fact it is practically impossible to find a single Islamic NGO that is not – in its theoretical position – radically antisemitic. Many of these NGOs are invited to congresses, present a united front and have a recognized standing. Some of them were responsible for the antisemitic scandal of the Durban Forum. I saw it at first hand at the last Social Forum in Porto Alegre, where antisemitism was happily slotted in between anti-globalization speeches, pan-Arab epics, and revolutionary tub-thumpings. This is not just about verbal antisemitism, since the majority of violent acts of antisemitism that have taken place in Europe recently have been the work of young European Muslims. The philosopher, Luc Ferry, former French Minister of Education to Jean-Pierre Raffarin and the instigator of the controversial but effective “veil law” has stated that “90 per cent. of antisemitic acts in France are perpetrated by young Arabs”. He added: “this is particularly worrying as it allows them to be better tolerated. The Left Wing feels that it gives antisemitic acts more legitimacy than if they were perpetrated by the Extreme Right”.Between classic Christian-style antisemitism and modern Islamic-style anti-Semitism there is not much space to find protection. If we add modern, self-assured, secular antisemitism, embracing the thinking of the Left, we see that the situation is far more serious than we like to admit. It is especially serious because unlike the other types of antisemitism, the antisemitism of the Left does not see itself as such, it denies its antisemitism and even considers it an unacceptable offence to be charged with it. If the Left is pre-eminently anti-fascist, how can it be branded antisemitic, given that antisemitism is an integral part of fascism? But it can, and the phenomenon that is especially virulent today is neither new nor surprising. In fact, it is rooted in the doctrinal hostility of the Bolsheviks towards Zionism, at the time of pre-revolutionary Russia, despite the enormous number of Jews who either headed or joined in the Revolution. This is not the place to detail the systematic persecution of Jews in Soviet Russia, but it is clear that Komintern watchwords soon incorporated the language of inveterate Russian Judaeophobia (the driving force of the persecutions that triggered the earliest demands for a Jewish State. The France of Dreyfuss did the rest.) and very soon they stigmatized Zionism as a counter-revolutionary petty bourgeois movement, a pawn of British imperialism and a bitter enemy of the Soviet Union. It is true that there was a notable parenthesis in the fiercely anti-Jewish slant of Soviet policy, which stands as a historical milestone. I am referring to Andrei Gromyko’s speech on 14 May 1947, at United Nations headquarters, proclaiming the Jewish people’s right to a State. “There can be no justification for refusing that right to the Jewish people if we take into account all they suffered during the Second World War”, he solemnly concluded. And it was indeed a solemn moment, a prelude to Saturday, 20 November 1947, the day when, at the provisional headquarters of the Flushing Meadows building, in Lake Success, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of the plan for the partition of Palestine by 33 votes for, 13 votes against and 10 abstentions. As stated by the renowned historian, Joan Culla, “it is very likely that without Soviet patronage - as important or more important than the North American – the State of Israel would not have seen the light of day”.But that brief idyll came neither from ideological conviction nor political will, it was perfectly explicable in terms of geostrategic interests: a USSR strengthened since the Second World War, but without any presence in the Middle East; traditionalist Arab societies where Communism had made no impression, and were governed by feudal dictatorships backed by Great Britain; ever-increasing pressure on the part of the United States against Soviet expansion (it was the start of the age of the “Truman doctrine”); Jewish communities, in Palestine, directly up against British imperialism, and with very many of its members coming from Russia, enthusiastic collective farmers and, for the most part, strong Marxist supporters. With this combination of factors and the certainty that the creation of a Jewish State would be a destabilizing factor in the Arab world that would aggravate hostilities against England and the United States (and thus be favourable to Soviet penetration), Stalin momentarily took sides and from 1946 to 1947, the world’s champion of the Left turned into an “objective ally” of the Jewish cause in the Holy Land. That did not however stop Stalin from pursuing his antisemitic policy inside the USSR and one only has to remember the assassination of the President of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the Yiddish Art Theatre playwright Solomon Mikhoels, and the imprisonment of more than 100 Jews on the Committee, accused of being “rootless cosmopolitans”. That was in 1948, the very same year that the USSR and the brand new State of Israel exchanged Ambassadors. There then came one antisemitic trial after another, one of which was marked by the famous blood bath that followed the crazy “white coat conspiracy” of 1953, the arrest of all Jewish colonels and generals, the forcing of Vycheslaw Molotov to leave his Jewish wife, and the indiscriminate killing of writers, poets, scientists and political leaders of Jewish origin. In one single night, 217 Yiddish writers, 108 actors, 87 artists and 19 musicians disappeared into the Siberian gulag. Those killed included the great Yiddish writer Peter Markish, the poet Itzhik Feffer and the writer David Bergelson.Nonetheless, the overall attitude of the European Left, under cover of the attitude held for decades by the Soviet Union with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, does not derive from age-old Russian antisemitism perfectly incorporated into the Soviet “new man”, but rather from the foreign policy pursued by Soviet Union almost from the beginning of its relations with Israel. Historians explain the – almost immediate – Soviet “change of course” in its policy of alliance-building by two basic factors: one domestic, the conviction that Russian Jews were some sort of fifth column in the service of the new State. The enthusiastic welcome Golda Meïr received from the Muscovite Jews as the new Ambassador of Israel in Moscow was, in that sense, historic. And from another, geostrategic point of view, it was easily explicable. Stalin’s calculations of a kind of “Jewish Marxist outpost” in the Middle East, were proved wrong. Israel, a random product of the Cold War created with the joint support of the Russians and the Americans, needed the delicate balance between the money of the latter (5 million North American Jews served as a life insurance) and the susceptibilities of the electorate, with 18% of pro-Soviet Israeli voters. As Culla tells us, “Non-alignment and a position at an equal distance from Washington and Moscow appeared to be the ideal formula”, and one that was adopted by Ben Gurion. Then came the Korean war, the Israeli vote in the Western camp, and the widespread communist paranoia against the Jewish conspiracy, which culminated in the famous Slansky Trial, the first in the history of antisemitism since the Shoah to speak officially of “an international Jewish conspiracy”, prosecuting and condemning several Czech Jews including the Secretary-General of the Party, Rudolf Slansky, and condemning Israel as “a spy country”. The proclamation of Zionism as “enemy number one of the working class”, a short time afterwards, fell like ripe fruit from a lengthy, demonizing trial. Upon Stalin’s death the Khrushchev policy was to be the definitive policy of the communist bloc and of virtually all Left-wing intellectuals worldwide, until the arrival of Gorbachev: wholehearted support for the Arab countries, including massive military aid, opposition against Israel in international organizations, pressure in the satellite countries against Israel, various theatrical severings of diplomatic relations, the stigmatization of Israel as “a pawn of American imperialism”, advocacy of the Arab cause, equated with liberalism and justice, and more or less explicit support for the groups of Palestinian terrorists that were soon to emerge. UN Resolution 3376, approved on 10 November 1975, which condemned Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination”, was to be the high point in a process of slow criminalization, as perfectly explicable in terms of geostrategic interests, as it was unsound in ideological and moral terms. Of course, it was also an expression of the glaring failure of the UN as a champion of fundamental rights - a failure that had begun a few months earlier, when on 13 November 1974, the UN allowed Arafat to speak in the General Assembly, carrying “a freedom fighter’s rifle”. In other words, the UN accepted terrorism as a legitimate means of struggle. Today, the sources of everything in the press, in the universities and in the intellectual world that informs a powerful current of public opinion that has turned the democratic State of Israel into the most dangerous country in the world; that portrays a democratically elected Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, as an evil figure worthy of Nazi comparisons, but never judges any Islamic dictator; that idealizes Palestinian terrorists, but contemptuously disregards Israeli victims; that elevates a corrupt, violent, despotic leader called Arafat to be the champion of romantic heroic struggle (taking the place of Che Guevara on posters of former adolescent revolutionaries, now transformed into become honoured intellectuals); that takes as its guru a winner of the Nobel prize for literature whose antisemitism is part and parcel of his dyed-in-the-wool Communism, a guru who speaks out against the Israeli security fence, constructed to save lives, but always saw the virtues of the Berlin Wall; the sources of this entire current of politically correct public opinion, cloaked in the rightness of solidarity and justice, lie in a that major historical phenomenon that was being spawned during decades of the anti-Zionist rhetoric, Jewish demonization and pan-Arabian paternalism. Although, as Alain Finkielkraut says, the European Left maintained its love affair with Israel for two decades, its attitude changed radically from the late 1960s. First, the Soviet Union’s criminalization of Israel gained ascendancy; secondly, between the demonstrations against the war in Viet Nam and May 1968, the European Left discovered the Third World as the last utopian stronghold against imperialism; and finally, the masses of Auschwitz survivors, would-be socialists and cooperative farmers, had fast become a scientific, technological and military power, and Israel had stopped being David and turned into Goliath. As Culla says, “from then on, and with the confluence between Third Worldism and classical Communism, there appeared in the West a new mythology, a new symbolic system and a new iconography: alongside the heroic Vietnamese fighters who, wisely led by Uncle Ho and General Giap, defied American imperialism in the jungles of Indochina, there appeared the Palestinian fedayin and Arafat, their leader, in an unequal struggle against Israel, Washington’s bridgehead in the Middle East”. From then on, in the diplomatic arena, the Communist bloc pitted its weight against Israel. In the military arena, time and again the USSR supplied arms to the enemies of Israel. In the sphere of violent action, Extreme Left terrorist groups formed cooperative links with the Organization of Arab Palestine to which it gave logistic support in return for training in its guerrilla camps in Lebanon. It goes without saying that, for example, German Red Army Faction activists participated in some of the most notorious Palestinian plane hijackings; or that France’s Action Directe was responsible for attacks against Israel in Paris in 1982; or that the Front for the Liberation of Palestine was in cahoots with the Italian Red Brigade and with Nihon Sikigun, the Japanese Red Army group that killed 27 passengers in Lod airport in 1972. Since it could not be otherwise, in the field of ideas there was also a consolidation of the bonds between the Left in western countries and the Palestinian struggle and those bonds, marked it is true by ups and downs, still exist today. Communism fell but the demonization of Israel continued.So despite an obvious change in the factors behind the frontal attacks against Israel by the Left, in particular the collapse of the communist bloc, not only have the frontal attacks not ceased, but recently they have intensified, attracted greater funding and prestige and have managed to assume a global dimension. It is true that there have been times when there has been less aggression against Israel and that Sharon’s coming to power that coincided precisely with a peak in the criminalization of Israel; but Sharon was more an excuse than a reason for that criminalization. The Left, the same Left that enabled “freedom fighter” dictators to enjoy impunity, that failed to report on repression in the camps of Utopia and went to bed with every kind of monster, that same Left never changed its anti-Israel stance. It will be said that, even if the analysis is true, there may be a fierce opposition to Israel, but that is not antisemitism. This may be so, and doubtless there are criticisms of Israel that cannot be said to be antisemitic. But the creation of a body of fiercely militant public opinion turning around a Manichaean view of a conflict (setting the Jew on the side of evil, and the Palestinian on the side of good), a minimization of terrorism, a selective solidarity and the debasement of news reporting to a point where it becomes the retailing of lies, all that amounts to more than just criticizing a government or a State. What is happening with the Arab-Israeli conflict does not happen with any other conflict in the world, no other country is subjected to the brutal pressure that Israel, considered guilty of all sins, has to endure; no other terrorism is viewed with the paternalism that Palestinian terrorism enjoys; and no world news is as twisted and manipulated as the news concerning Israel. Well-known intellectuals, journalists of renown and major media companies lose all rigour and reliability and become muddled when dealing with Israel. The case of Edgar Morin and the conviction for antisemitism of the prestigious newspaper Le Monde are notable examples. Some of the world’s intellectuals, when talking about Israel, would appear to be speaking not from their brains, but from their stomachs. Antisemitic prejudice? In any case, it reflects a prior demonization whose many roots are unconscious and deeply unjust and reach back far into the past.Simon Wiesenthal dauntlessly fought against the antisemitism of the Extreme Right that seared the heart of Europe and wrote the darkest chapter of its history. Yet if some of us, in unison with Elie Wiesel, used to think that antisemitism had died with Auschwitz, we now know that to be untrue. From out-and-out Islamic antisemitism, through the destructive nihilism of fundamentalism, to the educated, enlightened and “correct” antisemitism of international progressiveness, all the phenomena contribute together to a renewed anti-Jewish stigma. And it does not appear that the world’s intellectual elite is bothered by it at all, since most of them are actively creating the stigma or remain indifferent to its materialization. The treachery of intention with regard to the Jewish people is threefold: to divest Zionism of ideological correctness, in such a way as to undermine the very roots of the State of Israel’s existence; to expel Israel and its President from the concert of legitimate nations so that it loses its moral legitimacy; and thereby to place Jews outside the orbit of international law. The worst of it is that this attitude is that, while resulting from “solidarity” with the Palestinian people, it will not help the Palestinians to achieve peace. The main enemy of the Palestinians is the terrorism that kills in their name. And, given the perverse Arab utilization of the Palestinian cause, probably the only friend it can have is Israel. Nevertheless, the Left and politically committed thinkers worldwide have been so irresponsible in their uncritical paternalism towards terrorism and so fiercely obsessive in their criticism of Israel, that far from nurturing ways out of the conflict, it has consolidated and nurtured all the dead ends.Finally, and in line with Briggite Gabriel’s words with which I opened, I want to stress the Left’s glaring irresponsibility in remaining indifferent to the ideological phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism, preoccupied as it has been by its opposition to America and to Israel. The impunity enjoyed by Islamic nihilism through its emergence, expansion and deployment is due in part to a lack of collective awareness as to the danger it presents. Again, the intellectuals have got it wrong. To show this would take a long time and here is not the place to do so, but it is partly to do with the fact that the Left has always been anti-Western, and therefore not so far removed from some of the obsessions of current Islamic fundamentalism. In any case, it has been said that in Israel killings in the name of Islamic nihilism have benefited from increasing impunity, and every Israeli victim that is reviled, ignored or despised by Western intelligentsia, has prepared the way for the killings in Atocha and London. The justification of the ideology, based on a higher cause, has not been for the good of that cause but has contributed to the evilness of the ideology. So this is not just about antisemitism. It is also about irresponsibility.“Like Faust, I would have sold my soul to make a building. Then I met my Mephistopheles. He did not seem any less overbearing than Goethe’s”, said the famous architect, Albert Speer, referring to Hitler. Thus was forged the myth of the good Nazi, innocent despite belonging to the dictator’s close circle and despite becoming Minister of Armaments and Munitions. “First and foremost, I was an architect”, said Speer over and over again, while he repeatedly stated that he knew nothing of the Holocaust. Years later, Simon Wiesenthal, in a face-to-face conversation, suddenly said: “if we had known then what we know today, we would have hanged you in Nuremberg in 1946”. Speer kept quiet and Wiesenthal added: “I always knew I was right”. Today, in a sad coincidence with my writing of these last pages, Simon Wiesenthal has died. His motto “there is no freedom without justice”, prompted decades of effort, struggle and success. I think it relevant to recall here, in an improvised in memoriam, his paper on the identification of Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer responsible for arresting Anne Frank; the detention of the Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, the identification and detention of Hermine Braunsteiner, happily living as a housewife in the New York borough of Queens and who had supervised the assassination of hundreds of children during the war. And, of course, his outstanding paper on the identification, detention and subsequent trial of the diligent person responsible for carrying out the final solution, Adolf Eichmann. Observing the Eichmann trial in Israel, Hanna Arendt wrote her famous thoughts about the “banality of evil”; she was struck by the mediocrity and simple-mindedness of that horrendous figure. And on that note I will close, with a tribute to a brave Jewish combatant, who dedicated his life to persecuting evil; and with a reminder of that banal evil. Antisemitism is the school of intolerance, the prejudice that has so efficiently taught hatred and killing. To encourage it is a crime. To banalize it is complicity. Not to fight it is irresponsibility.
Pilar Rahola : Centro Simon Wiesenthal. Paris.
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© 2004 Pilar Rahola Disseny ADES STUDIOhttp://www.pilarrahola.com/

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Articles : Anti-semitism
Journey to hell


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“There was a time when a special place in the depths of hell was reserved for people who intentionally kill children. Nowadays, the intentional killing of Israeli children is legitimized as Palestinian armed conflict.” – legitimized and even rewarded, because those who kill children do not go to hell; they are promised paradise instead.

Briggite Gabriel, a Lebanese woman who spent seven years of her life in an underground hideout, eating grass and dodging gunfire to search for water, used these grim words to speak at Duke University, in October 2004, of the self-destructive phenomenon that uses a religion and a faith as an alibi for every form of violence, in an escalation of terror that does not even stop when it comes up against what is most sacred in life. In spite of being ‘raised in a spirit of antisemitic hatred’, as she put it, the current President and founder of the American Congress for Truth went further in her self-criticism and recalled that in the current scale of things, “the difference between the Arab world and Israel is a difference in values and nature. It is barbarity versus civilization; democracy versus dictatorship; good versus evil”. Salman Rushdie has described the current degradation of Islam as a process of “paranoid Islamism” and others, like the Moroccan journalist Ali Lambret, are aware of the significance for millions of Muslims of the disastrous situation of having virtually no democratic point of reference of their own. Yet such commentators, speaking the language of morality and ethics, are all too few and far between; they are like exotic islands in a great ocean of narrow-mindedness, cultural alienation and, more than anything else, institutionalized fanaticism. And it is precisely that which makes them so exceptional and gives us the first key to the serious problem lying in store. So in order to analyse the new global antisemitism, whose many-headed hydra speaks in different accents and uses different language according to where it reveals itself, we must start giving serious thought to the matter because voices such as those I have mentioned are really exceptional. In other words, we need to analyse this narrow-mindedness, this nihilistic, totalitarian way of thinking, which is intent on distilling its pervasive poison in every corner of the Muslim world.

First of all, generic thinking: is there a resurgence of the xenophobic concept, coined by William Marr in 1879 to define his Judaeophobic feelings – which is how the term “antisemitic” emerged – that in its most evil manifestation was responsible for the worst atrocity in the history of humanity? There have been so many studies on this issue – including by the European authorities – that it does not need to be demonstrated here. Day in, day out, in comment upon comment, in the media, in discussion groups, in televised debates, in political declarations and in anything that enters into the process of collective thinking, the Jews are there, an awkward, antipathetic presence, and are usually discussed, demonized or directly attacked. There is utter confusion between the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Israeli’, to such an extent that the two words are used indiscriminately, but both with negative connotations. Without too much risk of error, we might even go so far as to say that Israel has inherited all the historical demonization of Jews, and has given rise to a more prestigious form of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and directly to the present-day rabid anti-Israel feeling. To put it another way, just as Jews for centuries were considered to be a pariah people, in the current context Israel is regarded as a pariah State. And of course its President is the pariah President. As I put it at the 2003 UNESCO Conference in my paper entitled “Jews and flies”, “the umbrella of anti-Zionism is far easier to put up: it keeps off the rain of criticism and provides an intellectually acceptable facade”. That is to say, it is politically correct, which is essential for it to be propounded with ease among gatherings of the intelligentsia, through the pens of well-known writers, and from the mouths of progressive professors. It explains a phenomenon that will be my main focus, namely, the new antisemitism of the Left. This is an antisemitism that does not correspond to the classic norms of the Extreme Right, but rather to modern parameters whose ideology looks to the Left, and whose formulation does not rely on xenophobic values but, surprisingly, on those of solidarity. The main type of present-day antisemitism, as it influences the thinking of the masses and as it is reflected in news items, is responsible for the fierce anti-Israel thinking that pervades Western thought; it is imbued with political correctness; it is well thought of, it is leftist and is harnessed to justice, progress and solidarity. That is why it has so much influence and hence, why it is dangerous, elusive and probably unconscious.

But before going into a more thorough analysis of the phenomenon, I think it necessary to point out the other two major types of antisemitic thinking that influence public opinion to a greater or lesser degree. On the one hand, there is classic antisemitism, perfectly woven into the DNA of collective thought, a by-product of Christianity which, in teaching us to love God, taught us to hate Jews. Since the important Nostra Aetate declaration, at the Vatican II Council, the Catholic Church certainly took a big step towards self-criticism and asking for forgiveness but there is also the fact that two thousand years of antisemitic religious culture have left such deeply ingrained prejudice, that it ends up being indelibly printed in everyone’s mind. Thus it is that, combined with the persistence in many corners of Christiandom of the concept of a deicide people, we have Mel Gibson’s infamous film “The Passion”. Without underrating the tremendous symbolic importance of John Paul II’s acts of self-criticism, or the emotional visit of Benedict XVI to a German synagogue, the mea culpa of the Catholic Church has been more a catharsis of the leadership than of the people. So we have, then, a historical stigma that continues to flourish. The expansion of Christianity is bound up with the victory of that prejudice and with the signal effectiveness of a process of demonization of an entire people whose object has been to dominate and deceive and, no doubt, breed fanatics. This antisemitism with a religious slant that over the centuries has become a cultural antisemitism, perfectly cemented into people’s minds and, hence, unconscious, explains in part the ease with which citizens of the world nowadays accept the clichés, the prejudices and the lies about the Jewish people. And the Jewish people par excellence in contemporary minds are the Israeli people. There is not much difference between the image of the hooked-nose medieval Jew, devious, mysterious and drinker of the blood of Christian children at Pesach, and the powerful Jew with a Magen David on the side of his tank with which, according to televisions the world over, he is systematically killing Palestinian children. If there had not been this building up over centuries of a cultural evil cutting through the cortex of Europe and branding it, to the point where nothing that has happened in European history can be explained without antisemitism, it would not now be so easy to sell Manichaean views of reality, twisted news items, or utter falsehoods of history. This is the basic antisemitism that prevails in the minds of citizens who still maintain that Israel is the world’s number one problem; the same approach is taken by journalists whose news items are always written up before they know how the story originated; the same antisemitism that explains how enlightened and theoretically well-read individuals can act towards Israel, like knowledgeable fools. At the conscious level, the antisemitism of the Christian religion has been overcome; but unconscious antisemitism can still detonate the powder keg.

The other major antisemitic phenomenon, highly volatile and far more dangerous, is Islamic antisemitism, a real blemish across the whole of the Muslim world, from one region to another, contaminating not only the minds of the fanatics but also those who want to live in peace. Admittedly, this is not a new kind of anti-Semitism; it is rooted in the role that some Arab leaders held at the height of Nazism, as witness that pretty song they sang at the end of the 1930s in the Arab world: “No more Monsieur, no more Mister / Heaven’s for Allah, Earth’s for Hitler”. Among the pro-Nazis, the prize for Arab antisemitism goes to the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a personal friend of Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and Himmler, for his leadership role with Palestinian Arabs, his activism and his unvarnished sincerity. Al-Husseini not only gave global currency to his famous phrase: “Allah has conferred on us the rare privilege of finalizing what Hitler began alone. Let the Jihad begin. Kill the Jews. Kill them all” – but he also worked unflaggingly to make it a reality. Pogroms against Jews during the British Mandate, an attempted pro-Nazi coup d’état in Iraq, pressure on the Dutch East Indies to accept Japanese control, incitement to the native population of French Zagreb to reject the allied occupation, and exile in Germany from 1941, where he lived with every honour and enthusiastically hailed the consecration of Nazism. Among the many pearls that this sinister character bequeathed to the history of ignominy is the pressure he exerted on Hitler to prevent thousands of Hungarian Jews from leaving; and, of course, the most glorious feather in his cap, his direct intervention with Adolf Eichmann, urging him not to agree with the British Government to exchange German prisoners of war for 5,000 Jewish children who were to sail for the Holy Land. The children did not travel to Palestine, but instead were sent to the extermination camps in Poland. It was when travelling to Auschwitz that he reprimanded the guards for being too “soft” with the Jews. He was also responsible for the “Hanjar” squadron, the Waffen SS Company of Bosnians who exterminated 90% of the Jews of Bosnia. Heinrich Himmler, in gratitude, created a special school for mullahs in Dresden. One might nonetheless think that al-Husseini does not represent an Arab, pro-Nazi antisemitism, but merely his own brand of evil and madness. But that is not the case if one takes into account that he was a true idol until his death (1974), that he played a significant role in the Arab-Israeli confrontation and that, as a leading member of the al-Husseini clan (one of whose more modest branches produced another big name in the region, Yassir Arafat), even today his name inspires respect. That is to say, unlike present-day Germany which has made peace with its dark past, its guilt and responsibility, the Arab world has never engaged in any self-criticism regarding its pro-Nazi leaders, nor does it consider it necessary to take a hard look at its history (Syria provided a refuge for government advisor Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s right-hand man in the Third Reich’s Office for Jewish Affairs, and that was never a problem) and the country incorporated as though it was the most normal thing in the world the tissue of lies and falsehoods of Goebbels-style propaganda into its system of prejudices.

Nevertheless, if the Islamic brand of antisemitism had been alone in its historical attachment to Nazism, it would not have become the huge success it is today. On the contrary, Islamic antisemitism has managed to combine all the commonplaces of Judaeophobia, from the religious to the social and political, and thus finds itself in a happy company that ranges from the infantile myths of medieval Christian antisemitism, through the socio-political Russian Orjana and its “Protocols”, to modern anti-Zionism (understood as a struggle against “imperialism”) or its own Koranic myths. Especially popular are the Suras devoted to Jews (“The Jews only deserve shame in this life, and to be banished on the Day of Judgement to the harshest torment”. Sura 2, 85.) As Patricio Brodsky states in his research into the phenomenon: “anti-Judaism in the Arab world is achieving self-evident status”, “it holds a central position in the dominant and single strand of hegemonic thinking in all Arab countries, and, through a State policy of repeating prejudices, it is gradually building the consensus that “Jews are not part of humanity”. It thus becomes is easy for the masses to learn the ways of stigma, prejudice and hatred against Jews.

In most cases, this hatred goes hand in hand with a hatred of Westerners. After all, is the Jew not the paradigm of Western values? Films, television series – like the one shown by Egyptian state television during Ramadan – textbooks, classic antisemitic manuals transformed into best-sellers – including “The Protocols” and even “Mein Kampf” – articles and editorials, religious preaching, and so on. Antisemitism underpins current Islamic culture; it contaminates schools and news reports; it is the engine of political discourse. This is happening in the face of Western indifference, before the traditional, predictable passivity of the UN, and with the complicity of intellectuals in the free world. It does not seem to bother us that 1,300 million children in primary school are being taught the hatred that is antisemitism. And let us stress a basic fact here: teaching hatred against Jews is quite simply teaching hatred.

Moreover, this antisemitism not only operates specifically in Islamic societies, but also affects social, civic and religious organizations of an Islamic orientation established in democratic societies. In fact it is practically impossible to find a single Islamic NGO that is not – in its theoretical position – radically antisemitic. Many of these NGOs are invited to congresses, present a united front and have a recognized standing. Some of them were responsible for the antisemitic scandal of the Durban Forum. I saw it at first hand at the last Social Forum in Porto Alegre, where antisemitism was happily slotted in between anti-globalization speeches, pan-Arab epics, and revolutionary tub-thumpings. This is not just about verbal antisemitism, since the majority of violent acts of antisemitism that have taken place in Europe recently have been the work of young European Muslims. The philosopher, Luc Ferry, former French Minister of Education to Jean-Pierre Raffarin and the instigator of the controversial but effective “veil law” has stated that “90 per cent. of antisemitic acts in France are perpetrated by young Arabs”. He added: “this is particularly worrying as it allows them to be better tolerated. The Left Wing feels that it gives antisemitic acts more legitimacy than if they were perpetrated by the Extreme Right”.

Between classic Christian-style antisemitism and modern Islamic-style anti-Semitism there is not much space to find protection. If we add modern, self-assured, secular antisemitism, embracing the thinking of the Left, we see that the situation is far more serious than we like to admit. It is especially serious because unlike the other types of antisemitism, the antisemitism of the Left does not see itself as such, it denies its antisemitism and even considers it an unacceptable offence to be charged with it. If the Left is pre-eminently anti-fascist, how can it be branded antisemitic, given that antisemitism is an integral part of fascism? But it can, and the phenomenon that is especially virulent today is neither new nor surprising. In fact, it is rooted in the doctrinal hostility of the Bolsheviks towards Zionism, at the time of pre-revolutionary Russia, despite the enormous number of Jews who either headed or joined in the Revolution. This is not the place to detail the systematic persecution of Jews in Soviet Russia, but it is clear that Komintern watchwords soon incorporated the language of inveterate Russian Judaeophobia (the driving force of the persecutions that triggered the earliest demands for a Jewish State. The France of Dreyfuss did the rest.) and very soon they stigmatized Zionism as a counter-revolutionary petty bourgeois movement, a pawn of British imperialism and a bitter enemy of the Soviet Union. It is true that there was a notable parenthesis in the fiercely anti-Jewish slant of Soviet policy, which stands as a historical milestone. I am referring to Andrei Gromyko’s speech on 14 May 1947, at United Nations headquarters, proclaiming the Jewish people’s right to a State. “There can be no justification for refusing that right to the Jewish people if we take into account all they suffered during the Second World War”, he solemnly concluded. And it was indeed a solemn moment, a prelude to Saturday, 20 November 1947, the day when, at the provisional headquarters of the Flushing Meadows building, in Lake Success, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of the plan for the partition of Palestine by 33 votes for, 13 votes against and 10 abstentions. As stated by the renowned historian, Joan Culla, “it is very likely that without Soviet patronage - as important or more important than the North American – the State of Israel would not have seen the light of day”.

But that brief idyll came neither from ideological conviction nor political will, it was perfectly explicable in terms of geostrategic interests: a USSR strengthened since the Second World War, but without any presence in the Middle East; traditionalist Arab societies where Communism had made no impression, and were governed by feudal dictatorships backed by Great Britain; ever-increasing pressure on the part of the United States against Soviet expansion (it was the start of the age of the “Truman doctrine”); Jewish communities, in Palestine, directly up against British imperialism, and with very many of its members coming from Russia, enthusiastic collective farmers and, for the most part, strong Marxist supporters. With this combination of factors and the certainty that the creation of a Jewish State would be a destabilizing factor in the Arab world that would aggravate hostilities against England and the United States (and thus be favourable to Soviet penetration), Stalin momentarily took sides and from 1946 to 1947, the world’s champion of the Left turned into an “objective ally” of the Jewish cause in the Holy Land. That did not however stop Stalin from pursuing his antisemitic policy inside the USSR and one only has to remember the assassination of the President of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the Yiddish Art Theatre playwright Solomon Mikhoels, and the imprisonment of more than 100 Jews on the Committee, accused of being “rootless cosmopolitans”. That was in 1948, the very same year that the USSR and the brand new State of Israel exchanged Ambassadors. There then came one antisemitic trial after another, one of which was marked by the famous blood bath that followed the crazy “white coat conspiracy” of 1953, the arrest of all Jewish colonels and generals, the forcing of Vycheslaw Molotov to leave his Jewish wife, and the indiscriminate killing of writers, poets, scientists and political leaders of Jewish origin. In one single night, 217 Yiddish writers, 108 actors, 87 artists and 19 musicians disappeared into the Siberian gulag. Those killed included the great Yiddish writer Peter Markish, the poet Itzhik Feffer and the writer David Bergelson.

Nonetheless, the overall attitude of the European Left, under cover of the attitude held for decades by the Soviet Union with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, does not derive from age-old Russian antisemitism perfectly incorporated into the Soviet “new man”, but rather from the foreign policy pursued by Soviet Union almost from the beginning of its relations with Israel. Historians explain the – almost immediate – Soviet “change of course” in its policy of alliance-building by two basic factors: one domestic, the conviction that Russian Jews were some sort of fifth column in the service of the new State. The enthusiastic welcome Golda Meïr received from the Muscovite Jews as the new Ambassador of Israel in Moscow was, in that sense, historic. And from another, geostrategic point of view, it was easily explicable. Stalin’s calculations of a kind of “Jewish Marxist outpost” in the Middle East, were proved wrong. Israel, a random product of the Cold War created with the joint support of the Russians and the Americans, needed the delicate balance between the money of the latter (5 million North American Jews served as a life insurance) and the susceptibilities of the electorate, with 18% of pro-Soviet Israeli voters. As Culla tells us, “Non-alignment and a position at an equal distance from Washington and Moscow appeared to be the ideal formula”, and one that was adopted by Ben Gurion. Then came the Korean war, the Israeli vote in the Western camp, and the widespread communist paranoia against the Jewish conspiracy, which culminated in the famous Slansky Trial, the first in the history of antisemitism since the Shoah to speak officially of “an international Jewish conspiracy”, prosecuting and condemning several Czech Jews including the Secretary-General of the Party, Rudolf Slansky, and condemning Israel as “a spy country”. The proclamation of Zionism as “enemy number one of the working class”, a short time afterwards, fell like ripe fruit from a lengthy, demonizing trial. Upon Stalin’s death the Khrushchev policy was to be the definitive policy of the communist bloc and of virtually all Left-wing intellectuals worldwide, until the arrival of Gorbachev: wholehearted support for the Arab countries, including massive military aid, opposition against Israel in international organizations, pressure in the satellite countries against Israel, various theatrical severings of diplomatic relations, the stigmatization of Israel as “a pawn of American imperialism”, advocacy of the Arab cause, equated with liberalism and justice, and more or less explicit support for the groups of Palestinian terrorists that were soon to emerge. UN Resolution 3376, approved on 10 November 1975, which condemned Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination”, was to be the high point in a process of slow criminalization, as perfectly explicable in terms of geostrategic interests, as it was unsound in ideological and moral terms. Of course, it was also an expression of the glaring failure of the UN as a champion of fundamental rights - a failure that had begun a few months earlier, when on 13 November 1974, the UN allowed Arafat to speak in the General Assembly, carrying “a freedom fighter’s rifle”. In other words, the UN accepted terrorism as a legitimate means of struggle.

Today, the sources of everything in the press, in the universities and in the intellectual world that informs a powerful current of public opinion that has turned the democratic State of Israel into the most dangerous country in the world; that portrays a democratically elected Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, as an evil figure worthy of Nazi comparisons, but never judges any Islamic dictator; that idealizes Palestinian terrorists, but contemptuously disregards Israeli victims; that elevates a corrupt, violent, despotic leader called Arafat to be the champion of romantic heroic struggle (taking the place of Che Guevara on posters of former adolescent revolutionaries, now transformed into become honoured intellectuals); that takes as its guru a winner of the Nobel prize for literature whose antisemitism is part and parcel of his dyed-in-the-wool Communism, a guru who speaks out against the Israeli security fence, constructed to save lives, but always saw the virtues of the Berlin Wall; the sources of this entire current of politically correct public opinion, cloaked in the rightness of solidarity and justice, lie in a that major historical phenomenon that was being spawned during decades of the anti-Zionist rhetoric, Jewish demonization and pan-Arabian paternalism. Although, as Alain Finkielkraut says, the European Left maintained its love affair with Israel for two decades, its attitude changed radically from the late 1960s. First, the Soviet Union’s criminalization of Israel gained ascendancy; secondly, between the demonstrations against the war in Viet Nam and May 1968, the European Left discovered the Third World as the last utopian stronghold against imperialism; and finally, the masses of Auschwitz survivors, would-be socialists and cooperative farmers, had fast become a scientific, technological and military power, and Israel had stopped being David and turned into Goliath. As Culla says, “from then on, and with the confluence between Third Worldism and classical Communism, there appeared in the West a new mythology, a new symbolic system and a new iconography: alongside the heroic Vietnamese fighters who, wisely led by Uncle Ho and General Giap, defied American imperialism in the jungles of Indochina, there appeared the Palestinian fedayin and Arafat, their leader, in an unequal struggle against Israel, Washington’s bridgehead in the Middle East”. From then on, in the diplomatic arena, the Communist bloc pitted its weight against Israel. In the military arena, time and again the USSR supplied arms to the enemies of Israel. In the sphere of violent action, Extreme Left terrorist groups formed cooperative links with the Organization of Arab Palestine to which it gave logistic support in return for training in its guerrilla camps in Lebanon. It goes without saying that, for example, German Red Army Faction activists participated in some of the most notorious Palestinian plane hijackings; or that France’s Action Directe was responsible for attacks against Israel in Paris in 1982; or that the Front for the Liberation of Palestine was in cahoots with the Italian Red Brigade and with Nihon Sikigun, the Japanese Red Army group that killed 27 passengers in Lod airport in 1972. Since it could not be otherwise, in the field of ideas there was also a consolidation of the bonds between the Left in western countries and the Palestinian struggle and those bonds, marked it is true by ups and downs, still exist today. Communism fell but the demonization of Israel continued.

So despite an obvious change in the factors behind the frontal attacks against Israel by the Left, in particular the collapse of the communist bloc, not only have the frontal attacks not ceased, but recently they have intensified, attracted greater funding and prestige and have managed to assume a global dimension. It is true that there have been times when there has been less aggression against Israel and that Sharon’s coming to power that coincided precisely with a peak in the criminalization of Israel; but Sharon was more an excuse than a reason for that criminalization. The Left, the same Left that enabled “freedom fighter” dictators to enjoy impunity, that failed to report on repression in the camps of Utopia and went to bed with every kind of monster, that same Left never changed its anti-Israel stance. It will be said that, even if the analysis is true, there may be a fierce opposition to Israel, but that is not antisemitism. This may be so, and doubtless there are criticisms of Israel that cannot be said to be antisemitic. But the creation of a body of fiercely militant public opinion turning around a Manichaean view of a conflict (setting the Jew on the side of evil, and the Palestinian on the side of good), a minimization of terrorism, a selective solidarity and the debasement of news reporting to a point where it becomes the retailing of lies, all that amounts to more than just criticizing a government or a State. What is happening with the Arab-Israeli conflict does not happen with any other conflict in the world, no other country is subjected to the brutal pressure that Israel, considered guilty of all sins, has to endure; no other terrorism is viewed with the paternalism that Palestinian terrorism enjoys; and no world news is as twisted and manipulated as the news concerning Israel. Well-known intellectuals, journalists of renown and major media companies lose all rigour and reliability and become muddled when dealing with Israel. The case of Edgar Morin and the conviction for antisemitism of the prestigious newspaper Le Monde are notable examples. Some of the world’s intellectuals, when talking about Israel, would appear to be speaking not from their brains, but from their stomachs. Antisemitic prejudice? In any case, it reflects a prior demonization whose many roots are unconscious and deeply unjust and reach back far into the past.

Simon Wiesenthal dauntlessly fought against the antisemitism of the Extreme Right that seared the heart of Europe and wrote the darkest chapter of its history. Yet if some of us, in unison with Elie Wiesel, used to think that antisemitism had died with Auschwitz, we now know that to be untrue. From out-and-out Islamic antisemitism, through the destructive nihilism of fundamentalism, to the educated, enlightened and “correct” antisemitism of international progressiveness, all the phenomena contribute together to a renewed anti-Jewish stigma. And it does not appear that the world’s intellectual elite is bothered by it at all, since most of them are actively creating the stigma or remain indifferent to its materialization. The treachery of intention with regard to the Jewish people is threefold: to divest Zionism of ideological correctness, in such a way as to undermine the very roots of the State of Israel’s existence; to expel Israel and its President from the concert of legitimate nations so that it loses its moral legitimacy; and thereby to place Jews outside the orbit of international law. The worst of it is that this attitude is that, while resulting from “solidarity” with the Palestinian people, it will not help the Palestinians to achieve peace. The main enemy of the Palestinians is the terrorism that kills in their name. And, given the perverse Arab utilization of the Palestinian cause, probably the only friend it can have is Israel. Nevertheless, the Left and politically committed thinkers worldwide have been so irresponsible in their uncritical paternalism towards terrorism and so fiercely obsessive in their criticism of Israel, that far from nurturing ways out of the conflict, it has consolidated and nurtured all the dead ends.

Finally, and in line with Briggite Gabriel’s words with which I opened, I want to stress the Left’s glaring irresponsibility in remaining indifferent to the ideological phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism, preoccupied as it has been by its opposition to America and to Israel. The impunity enjoyed by Islamic nihilism through its emergence, expansion and deployment is due in part to a lack of collective awareness as to the danger it presents. Again, the intellectuals have got it wrong. To show this would take a long time and here is not the place to do so, but it is partly to do with the fact that the Left has always been anti-Western, and therefore not so far removed from some of the obsessions of current Islamic fundamentalism. In any case, it has been said that in Israel killings in the name of Islamic nihilism have benefited from increasing impunity, and every Israeli victim that is reviled, ignored or despised by Western intelligentsia, has prepared the way for the killings in Atocha and London. The justification of the ideology, based on a higher cause, has not been for the good of that cause but has contributed to the evilness of the ideology. So this is not just about antisemitism. It is also about irresponsibility.

“Like Faust, I would have sold my soul to make a building. Then I met my Mephistopheles. He did not seem any less overbearing than Goethe’s”, said the famous architect, Albert Speer, referring to Hitler. Thus was forged the myth of the good Nazi, innocent despite belonging to the dictator’s close circle and despite becoming Minister of Armaments and Munitions. “First and foremost, I was an architect”, said Speer over and over again, while he repeatedly stated that he knew nothing of the Holocaust. Years later, Simon Wiesenthal, in a face-to-face conversation, suddenly said: “if we had known then what we know today, we would have hanged you in Nuremberg in 1946”. Speer kept quiet and Wiesenthal added: “I always knew I was right”. Today, in a sad coincidence with my writing of these last pages, Simon Wiesenthal has died. His motto “there is no freedom without justice”, prompted decades of effort, struggle and success. I think it relevant to recall here, in an improvised in memoriam, his paper on the identification of Karl Silberbauer, the Gestapo officer responsible for arresting Anne Frank; the detention of the Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl, the identification and detention of Hermine Braunsteiner, happily living as a housewife in the New York borough of Queens and who had supervised the assassination of hundreds of children during the war. And, of course, his outstanding paper on the identification, detention and subsequent trial of the diligent person responsible for carrying out the final solution, Adolf Eichmann. Observing the Eichmann trial in Israel, Hanna Arendt wrote her famous thoughts about the “banality of evil”; she was struck by the mediocrity and simple-mindedness of that horrendous figure. And on that note I will close, with a tribute to a brave Jewish combatant, who dedicated his life to persecuting evil; and with a reminder of that banal evil. Antisemitism is the school of intolerance, the prejudice that has so efficiently taught hatred and killing. To encourage it is a crime. To banalize it is complicity. Not to fight it is irresponsibility.

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Pilar Rahola : Centro Simon Wiesenthal. Paris.

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© 2004 Pilar Rahola Disseny ADES STUDIO
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