RETURN OF THE REPRESSED: FOR EUROPEAN ANTISEMITES [WHOOPS, “ANTI-ZIONISTS”], WHAT DARK FORCES ARE BEHIND THE HOLOCAUST? ISRAEL AND THE JEWS, OF COURSE!

Why Europe Blames Israel For the Holocaust: Post-1945 Anti-Semitism: Benjamin Weinthal, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 28, 2014— The acclaimed British novelist Howard Jacobson opened his speech at the B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem last October with piercing sarcasm: “The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never.”
Why Is Germany Telling Jews Where to Live?: Michael Freund, Jewish Press, Jan. 17, 2014 — With an impeccable sense of timing, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in Israel earlier this week, attended the funeral of Ariel Sharon, and then proceeded to browbeat Israel in public.
Belgian Legislator Says Zionists Bankrolled the Holocaust: Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu, Jewish Press, Jan. 30, 2014 — A Belgian legislator who last year told the Parliament Israel is using Islamic support to overthrow Assad now has taken the podium to charge, “The Holocaust was set up and financed by the pioneers of Zionism.”
Holocaust Historian Returns Hungarian Honor Over ‘Whitewash’: Richard D. Heideman, Times of Israel, Jan. 26, 2014 — Noted Holocaust historian Randoph L. Braham is returning a high honor granted him by the Hungarian state.

A French Clown’s Hateful Gesture: Sylvain Cypel, New York Times, Jan. 23, 2014 — Sixteen years ago, the leader of the far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, deemed the Holocaust a “detail in the history of the Second World War.”
 

On Topic Links

Belgian MP Laurent Louis: When Will Belgium Support Assad in Face of "Greater Israel" Project?(video): Youtube, May 10, 2013 

Continental Drift: A Quarantine For the Sick Men of Europe: David Aikman, Weekly Standard, Jan. 13, 2014

Plan To Open Another Holocaust Museum in Budapest Faces Criticism—From Jews: Ruth Ellen Gruber, Tablet, Jan. 10, 2014

Holocaust Awareness Arrived Late in Western Europe: Manfred Gerstenfeld, Arutz Sheva, Jan. 26, 2014 

Leader of French Jewish Group Has a Plan for Countering Anti-Semitism: Downplaying Zionism: Nidra Poller, Tablet, Jan. 3, 2014 

WHY EUROPE BLAMES ISRAEL FOR THE HOLOCAUST:

POST-1945 ANTI-SEMITISM                                                  

Benjamin Weinthal                                                                    

Jerusalem Post, Jan. 28, 2014

The acclaimed British novelist Howard Jacobson opened his speech at the B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem last October with piercing sarcasm: “The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never.” However, there has been a shift in the underpinnings of anti-Semitism. Israel has become the collective Jew among the nations, as the late French historian Léon Poliakov said about the new metamorphosis of Jew-hatred. Jacobson was piggy-backing on the eye-popping insight of the Israel psychoanalyst Zvi Rex, who reportedly said: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”

The anti-Semitic logic at work here is Europe’s pathologically guilt-filled response to the Holocaust, which, in short, is to shift the onus of blame to the Jews to cleanse one’s conscience. Two German-Jewish Marxist philosophers – Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno – coined an esoteric sociological term for what unfolded in post-Shoah Germany: Guilt-defensiveness anti-Semitism. On the one hand, Adorno and Horkheimer may come across as kitchen-sink psychology. On the other hand, the explanatory power behind anti-Semitic guilt animating hatred of Jews and Israel can provide a window into Europe’s peculiar obsession with the Jewish state. Europe is largely consumed with imposing discipline and punishment on Israel. How else to explain the efforts by the German government and fellow EU member states to label products from the disputed territories? The EU refuses to apply the same label system to the scores of other territorial conflicts ranging from China/Tibet to Turkey/Cyprus to Morocco/ Western Sahara.

The origins of Europe’s disturbing preoccupation with Israel can be traced to the late 1960s. The Austrian Jewish writer and Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery recognized that “anti-Zionism contains anti-Semitism like a cloud contains a storm.” The German-Jewish author Henryk M. Broder perhaps best captured the toxic mix of pathological Holocaust guilt with the desire to dismantle Israel. In an article he wrote in the early 1980s he told his contemporary Germans: “You’re still your parents’ children. Your Jew today is the State of Israel.”

Sacha Stawski, an expert on anti-Semitism in the German media, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that “Israel-related anti-Semitism is probably the most common and most persistent form of anti-Semitism in all levels of society today.” Stawski, who is a German Jew and editor-in-chief of the media watchdog website Honestly Concerned, added: “Today it is no longer fashionable to hate Jews outright, but it is perfectly acceptable to debate about and to demonstrate against the very core of the Jewish state’s existence – in a way and with emotions unlike that about any other country.” The social-psychological theory articulated by Adorno and Horkheimer might, just might, provide a macro-level grasp of a pan-European epidemic that is fixated on turning Israel into a human punching bag.   

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WHY IS GERMANY TELLING JEWS WHERE TO LIVE?          

Michael Freund

Jewish Press, Jan. 17, 2014

With an impeccable sense of timing, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in Israel earlier this week, attended the funeral of Ariel Sharon, and then proceeded to browbeat Israel in public. Speaking with reporters, Steinmeier accused the Jewish state of “damaging” the peace process by building homes for Jews in Judea and Samaria. And in a discussion with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of Sharon’s interment, he pressed the premier to refrain from additional construction as this “could still disturb the process”. While I am not familiar with bereavement rituals in Germany, I assume they do not include insulting one’s hosts right after the burial service. And yet, while in Israel, Steinmeier apparently saw nothing wrong in doing just that: exploiting the opportunity to highlight a political issue regardless of how tasteless and unseemly it was to do so. This is not the kind of behavior one expects from a “friend,” is it?

But what is even more offensive about Steinmeier’s exploits is the German government’s historical amnesia, which has left officials bereft of any sense of irony regarding their position on the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria. After all, it was not even eight decades ago that Germany singled out Jews in the September 1935 Nuremberg laws, seeking to cast them out of civil society as a step towards “cleansing” German soil of their presence. Subsequently, in areas under German control, the right of Jews to live where they saw fit was severely restricted. One would think that in light of this dark chapter in their history, Germans would be extra careful about wading into such an issue and proclaiming where Jews can live, build or raise their families. But that has not been the case. Indeed, last summer it was widely reported that Berlin had decided to back a European Union initiative that singles out Jewish-owned businesses in Judea and Samaria. The move is aimed at targeting them for special treatment, which could include the application of unique labels of origin on products produced by Jews in the areas. Needless to say, goods made by Palestinian-run plants in the territories would not similarly be branded.

In an interview with Reuters last month, EU envoy to the Middle East Andreas Reinicke warned that if the latest round of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians fails, the EU would speed up its plans to slap labels on Jewish-made goods from Judea and Samaria. The hypocrisy behind the labeling crusade is all the more apparent when one considers that no such campaigns are being contemplated for other “disputed territories”. Hence, there is no European demand to label Chinese products made in Tibet, Russian items manufactured in Chechnya or Spanish goods from Catalonia. It seems that only when matters involve the Jewish state do European liberals insist on such measures.

This is not merely duplicity, it is discrimination pure and simple. And in the case of Germany, such a stance is especially outrageous, and the government of Angela Merkel should be ashamed of itself for going along with it. Whatever one may think of the peace process and the two-state solution, it should be obvious that treating merchandise and construction differently simply because the person who owns the factory or built the house is a follower of Moses rather than Muhammad is an act of bigotry. And in light of its own ignoble record during the 20th century, Germany and its leaders have a special responsibility to be exceptionally sensitive to such issues, particularly when they relate to Jews. No one is suggesting Germany is planning a second Holocaust, but the country must show greater awareness regarding the painful irony at work here.

In 1936 a board game called “Juden Raus” (“Jews Out”) became popular throughout the Reich. Players would move figures representing Jews toward “collection points” from which they would be deported to the Land of Israel. “If you manage to see off six Jews,” the game instructed, “you’ve won a clear victory”. Sadly, Germany is once again playing a similar game, albeit with one difference. Whereas previously the aim was to send Jews away to Israel, now their goal is to compel us to leave parts of it. But I have a bit of news for Ms. Merkel and her colleagues: no one, especially not Germany, has the right to tell Jews where they can or cannot live. In 1945, the Jewish people crawled out of the ovens of Europe and succeeded in reclaiming our ancestral homeland. Regardless of what Berlin might think or say, we are not about to give any part of it away.                               

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BELGIAN LEGISLATOR SAYS ZIONISTS

BANKROLLED THE HOLOCAUST     

Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu                                                                                   Jewish Press, Jan. 30, 2014

A Belgian legislator who last year told the Parliament Israel is using Islamic support to overthrow Assad now has taken the podium to charge, “The Holocaust was set up and financed by the pioneers of Zionism.” Intelligent people take these kinds of tantrums as harmless ignorance from a hate-mongering populist, but that is what they said in 1933. So speaking of the Holocaust, Belgium’s Laurent Louis, who has created his own Movement for Liberty and Democracy party after being expelled from the People’s Party, stood up in the Belgian legislator and performed the quenelle, the invention of Dieudonne, the so-called French comedian. The president of Belgium’s parliament condemned Louis’ theatrical hate. “I would like to reinforce my condemnation of these hateful acts,” Andre Flahaut said. The Belgian League against Anti-Semitism, a newly-established watchdog, pledged during its inaugural event to focus much of its activities on Louis — an independent member of the lower house of Belgium’s Federal Parliament. “We do not wish to offer Laurent a podium,” Isaac Franco, the league’s vice president, said earlier this week in Brussels. “But considering the tens of thousands of visitors to his website, we see he represents a threat that needs to be confronted.” Hate mongers who are elected to public office are a danger to the public. Louis has said that Israel was guilty of Nazi crimes against Palestinians, and last year he posed for pictures outside parliament while standing on an Israeli flag. Below is a video, with English sub-titles, of his speech in the Belgian parliament last May when he accused Israel of everything under the sun in order to promote a “Greater Israel.” According to Louis, that does not top at Judea and Samaria. It includes parts of Iraq, Jordan and Jordan. His speech started out with condemnation of Israel for conducting surveillance flights over Lebanon and then connected that with the IDF’s bombing Syrian trying to destabilize the country and use the Arab Spring rebellion to promote Greater Israel.

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HOLOCAUST HISTORIAN RETURNS HUNGARIAN                                  HONOR OVER ‘WHITEWASH’                                                                    

Times of Israel, Jan. 26, 2014

Noted Holocaust historian Randoph L. Braham is returning a high honor granted him by the Hungarian state.  The action is a protest against what he called the government’s falsification of Holocaust history and attempts to whitewash Hungary’s role in the Holocaust. The Hungarian state news agency MTI on Sunday quoted a letter from Braham, 91, in which the Bucharest-born scholar, a Holocaust survivor and expert on the Holocaust in Hungary, said he was handing back the Cross of the Order of Merit “with a heavy heart” following recent developments in Hungary. He also said he would no longer permit the Budapest Holocaust Memorial Center to use his name for one its research departments.

Braham, an emeritus professor at the City University of New York, wrote in the letter that: “The campaign of history falsification which aims to whitewash the (Miklos) Horthy era, has shocked me.” Horthy led Hungary into World War II as a Nazi ally. Braham said the “last straw” had been the decision by the government to erect a memorial in downtown Budapest to the 1944 German occupation of Hungary. This, he said, was a “cowardly attempt” to exonerate Hungarians from their own role in the Holocaust and confuse the issue by placing all blame on the Nazis. Hungarian Jewish leaders, historians and others have sharply criticized plans for the memorial.

“The events of 1944 are, to say the least, more complicated than a story of ‘bad’ Germans fighting ‘good’ Hungarians,” the prominent historian Krisztian Ungvary wrote in the HVG.hu news magazine. “Eichmann himself was thrilled by his experiences here, observing that the Hungarians must surely be descended from the Huns since nowhere else had he seen so much brutality ‘in the course of solving the Jewish question.’”

Hungary’s conservative government, headed by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has designated 2014 as Holocaust Memorial Year, with a series of events and initiatives planned. In October, Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister Tibor Navracsics told an international conference that the country’s leaders recognized Hungarian involvement in the Holocaust and vowed that the state will combat anti-Semitism and racism. Hungary’s ambassador to the United Nations made a similar statement last week.

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A FRENCH CLOWN’S HATEFUL GESTURE                         

Sylvain Cypel  

New York Times, Jan. 23, 2014 

Sixteen years ago, the leader of the far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, deemed the Holocaust a “detail in the history of the Second World War.” Today, a popular comic known as Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala (his stage name is simply Dieudonné) claims “not to know, between the Jews and Germans,” who’s telling the truth — “but I have my own little ideas on the subject.” We know what those ideas are: Dieudonné invited onstage at one of his shows Robert Faurisson, a “theorist” of Holocaust denial, who argues that the extermination of the European Jews is a Jewish invention.

Dieudonné, who revels in stoking controversy while hiding behind ambiguity, recently came up with a rallying gesture for his supporters. He calls it the “quenelle” (literally, a dumpling, a French version of gefilte fish). The move consists of the right arm pointed straight down, which the left hand keeps from lifting — very like the repressed Nazi salute of Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove.” Mr. M’Bala M’Bala claims this is not anti-Semitic but “antisystem,” a defiance of authority, but his true disciples have caught on, pulling quenelles in front of synagogues. On grounds that “inciting racial hatred” is illegal in France, the interior minister, Manuel Valls, decided to ban the comic’s shows, creating a furor. Canceling Mr. M’Bala M’Bala’s tour not only gave him free publicity, but it has also risked making him a victim of censorship.

At first glance, the Dieudonné affair seems a new form of anti-Jewish expression. Of course, it is. But it would be wrong to say that’s all that it is. French society has suffered from an economic and social crisis for three decades. Whichever party has been in power, the unemployment rate has hardly dipped below 8 percent since the 1980s; more than one in four young people are out of work. I recently returned to France, after six years working in the United States, to discover some unpleasant surprises. In “la France profonde,” a diffuse populism is stirring. Reminiscent of America’s Tea Party, this movement combines a nostalgic mind-set that everything “was better before” with a radical aversion to taxes and a hostility toward the detested European bureaucracy. According to a recent study, only 8 percent of French people espouse racial inequality, yet there is a palpable conviction that everything bad comes from outside: Brussels, globalization, immigration. Whatever the law says, the “freedom” to express racist, xenophobic and anti-immigrant views has reached new levels. Mr. Le Pen used to claim to “say out loud what the people think in private.” Lately, many have begun thinking out loud.

The Dieudonné affair is symptomatic of an insidious slide toward intolerance, but anti-Semitism is the least of it; racism and xenophobia manifest themselves more often as anti-Arab, anti-Muslim or anti-black. Last year, in Carpentras, a town notorious in 1990 for the desecration of Jewish graves there, swastikas were spray-painted on the headstones of French Muslim soldiers. Late in 2013, the minister of justice, Christiane Taubira, a black woman originally from French Guiana, was called a “monkey” by a National Front candidate in municipal elections; the same slur was repeated by a representative of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement, the mainstream opposition party.

Urban neighborhoods where poor African, Asian or Caribbean populations live have become increasingly ghettoized. In French political parlance, this is called a “failure to integrate,” or a “rise in communitarianism.” France has become a hotbed of tensions that has seen a steep rise in “ethnicist” views of society. It is not just Mr. M’Bala M’Bala who has flourished in this atmosphere; other comedians trot out the most hackneyed racial clichés. The phenomenon cuts across social class. Take Alain Finkielkraut, a professor of philosophy at the elite École Polytechnique: He recently published “L’identité malheureuse,” a book bemoaning the dilution of an eternal France about to be defiled by swarthy barbarians threatening to plunge “European civilization” into a multicultural bouillabaisse. Among the objects of his disgust: “Halal butcher shops and fast food.”

Mr. Finkielkraut’s sentiments echo those of Renaud Camus, a writer (not related to Albert Camus) who has denounced the “great replacement” of populations, which imposes on “the true rooted French” those who are not. Mr. Camus makes no secret of his admiration for Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie and current leader of the National Front. Such ideas have even found resonance in the media, thanks to commentators like the political journalist Éric Zemmour, who laments the fate of the “white proletariat,” helpless before the “ostentatious virility of their black and Arab competitors seducing numerous young white women.” The worst came last fall with a campaign against France’s Roma people. The previous president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had already singled out this vulnerable population of 20,000 as a dangerous nuisance — despite the fact that the Roma constitute just 0.03 percent of the population. The interior minister, Mr. Valls, has now called for their expulsion. Well might we wonder about the integrity of a politician who defends Jews from Dieudonné’s quenelle while deporting Gypsies.

The son of a white mother and a black father, Mr. M’Bala M’Bala will continue to surf a wave created by the “competition of victims” in a country that is historically “guilty” twice over: toward the Jews, for its participation in the collaborationist Vichy regime, and toward its black and Arab citizens, for its colonial past. By calling Jews “slave traders,” Mr. M’Bala M’Bala plays a game of provoking the authorities’ squeamishness about anti-Semitism, even as other expressions of racism get a pass. When Dieudonné described Ms. Taubira as a “cheetah,” there was scarcely a stir. Unless things change, this deplorable clown has a bright future.

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Belgian MP Laurent Louis: When Will Belgium Support Assad in Face of "Greater Israel" Project?(video): Youtube, May 10, 2013 

Continental Drift: A Quarantine For the Sick Men of Europe: David Aikman, Weekly Standard, Jan. 13, 2014 — The year 1946 was vintage for Churchillian rhetoric, with two speeches that significantly affected the history of the West—and, indeed, the world.

Plan To Open Another Holocaust Museum in Budapest Faces Criticism—From Jews: Ruth Ellen Gruber, Tablet, Jan. 10, 2014 —The Hungarian author György Konrád is arguably one of the best-known child survivors of the Holocaust.

Holocaust Awareness Arrived Late in Western Europe: Manfred Gerstenfeld, Arutz Sheva, Jan. 26, 2014 — Manfred Gerstenfeld speaks to Prof. of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Amsterdam University, Johannes Houwink ten Cate. For International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Leader of French Jewish Group Has a Plan for Countering Anti-Semitism: Downplaying Zionism: Nidra Poller, Tablet, Jan. 3, 2014 —In mid-December, France’s President François Hollande held a reception at the Elysée palace in honor of the 70th anniversary of the CRIF, as the umbrella organization of French Jews is known. Hollande, whose delivery is often wooden and halting, was unusually at ease with his guests and made sure to note in his remarks that he was celebrating “by extension, all the Jews in France.”