Bojan Pancevski, Matthew Dalton, David Luhnow and Karolina Jeznach
WSJ, Oct. 30, 2023
“Both reactionary Islam and the radical left in the West are both opposed to Western hegemony and they see the Jewish state in this region as the quintessential expression of Western domination. It is a toxic combination.”
A Star of David crudely daubed on the doors of Jewish homes in Berlin. An Orthodox Jewish man punched in the face on a London bus. Threatening letters sent to a prominent Jewish politician in France.
Across Europe, where centuries of pogroms and the Holocaust nearly wiped out Jews, those who remain have taken a double blow. The first is the grief and shock from the Hamas attack on Israel that shattered an assumption that at least there, Jews were safe from the kinds of attacks that mark their history in Europe.
The second blow is a rise in antisemitic incidents following the attack and amid Israel’s military campaign against Islamist militant group Hamas. The U.K., which harbored Jews fleeing continental Europe during World War II, has recorded at least 805 antisemitic incidents since the Hamas attacks, the highest ever across a 21-day period and more than the total for the first six months of the year, according to the Community Security Trust, a Jewish group that has been tracking antisemitism since 1984.
France, Germany and other countries have also recorded a jump in incidents, including Molotov cocktails thrown at a Jewish center with a synagogue and school in Berlin. On Oct. 24, German police arrested a former Islamic State fighter who served a prison sentence for membership of the militant group on suspicion of planning to drive a truck into a pro-Israel rally, prosecutors said.
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