Updated: 4/2/2003; 7:18:14 PM.
More Than Expression
Online magazine about art, music, and politics. Host: Jennifer Medlock
        

Friday, March 21, 2003

Protect the Jewels

Please read this and spread it far and wide; I AM A JEW; therefore I am

forwarding this to everyone in my email list...I will not sit back and
do nothing. -Melissa K. Chaikof

In Belgium, thugs beat up the chief rabbi, kicking him in the face and
calling him "a dirty Jew."

Two synagogues in Brussels were firebombed; a third, in Charleroi, was
sprayed with automatic weapon fire.

In Britain, the cover of the New Statesman, a left-wing magazine,
depicted a large Star of David stabbing the Union Jack and an Oxford
professor Tom Paulin, a noted poet, told an Egyptian interviewer that
American Jews who move to the West Bank and Gaza "should be shot dead."

A Jewish yeshiva student while reading the Psalms on a London bus was
stabbed 27 times.

"Anti-Semitism", wrote a columnist in The Spectator, "has become
respectable . . . at London dinner tables." She quoted one member of the
House of Lords: "The Jews have been asking for it and now, thank God, we
can say what we think at last."

In Italy, the daily paper La Stampa published a Page 1 cartoon: A tank
emblazoned with a Jewish star points its gun at the baby Jesus, who
pleads, "Surely they don't want to kill me again?"

In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his
tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, with rifle in hand, is
sitting on the sepulcher. The caption: "Non resurrexit."

In Germany, a rabbinical student was beaten up in downtown Berlin and a
grenade was thrown into a Jewish cemetery. Thousands of neo-Nazis held a
rally, marching near a synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath. Graffiti
appeared on a synagogue in the western town of Herford: saying "Six
million were not enough."

In the Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish worshippers and smashed the
windows of Kiev's main synagogue. Ukrainian police denied that the
attack was anti-Jewish.

In Greece, Jewish graves were desecrated in Loannina and vandals hurled
paint at the Holocaust memorial in Salonica.

In Holland, an anti-Israel demonstration featured swastikas, photos of
Hitler, and chants of "Sieg Heil" and "Jews into the sea."

In Slovakia, the Jewish cemetery of Kosice was an invaded and 135
tombstone destroyed.

But nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than
in France:

In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In
Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were
synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseille; as was a Jewish school in
Creteil. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov
cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words
"Dirty Jew" were painted.

In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks
and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in
Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.

According to the police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12
anti-Jewish incidents per day since Easter 2002. Walls in Jewish
neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming "Jews to the
gas chambers" and "Death to the Jews."

The weekly journal Le Nouvel Observateur published an appalling libel:
It said Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian women, so that the relatives
of these women will kill them to preserve "family honor."

The French ambassador to Great Britain was not sacked -- and did not
apologize -- when it was learned that he had told guests at a London
dinner that the world's troubles were the fault of "that shitty little
country, Israel."

"At the start of the 21st century," writes Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a
well-known social scientist, in a new book, "we are discovering that
Jews are once again select targets of violence . . . Hatred of the Jews
has returned to France." But of course, it never left. Not France; not
Europe.

Anti-Semitism, the oldest bigotry known to man, has been a part of
European society since time immemorial. In the aftermath of the
Holocaust, open Jew-hatred became unfashionable; but fashions change,
and Europe is reverting to type.

To be sure, some Europeans are shocked by the re-emergence of Jew-hatred
all over their continent. But the more common reaction has been
complacency.


They are making a grievous mistake. For if today the violence and
vitriol are aimed at the Jews, tomorrow it will be aimed at the
Christians. A timeless lesson of history is that violence rarely ends
with the Jews.

Militant Islamic extremists have been attacking and killing Jews long
before they attacked and killed Americans on Sept. 11th.

The Nazis first set out to incinerate the Jews; in the end, all of
Europe was ablaze. Jews, it is often said, are the canary in the coal
mine of civilization. When they become the objects of savagery and hate,
it means the air has been poisoned. If Europeans don't rise up and turn
against these Jew-haters, it is only a matter of time until the
Jew-haters rise up and turn against them.

We can understand anti-Semitism among the French people. There is
nothing the French love like their traditions, and on the question of
hating Jews, they certainly have tradition galore. What, however, can
explain the denial and lack of action on the part of French officials?

Simple. There are between 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 Muslims presently
living in France and many more arrive daily. There are only about
600,000 Jews still living in France. Moreover, France is the number one
European exporter to Iraq, totaling over two billion dollars per year in
exports since 2000. To those who are at a loss to explain why French
elected officials seem "helpless" to stem the tide of anti-Semitism, I
say the reason is pretty obvious.

This is a war against each and every one of us, Jewish or not, Israeli
or not, religious or not, right, left or center. Israel is only the
publicized front line and if you are not in Israel, and the fight has
not arrived at your front yard, just wait. Or, perhaps, we shouldn't
wait. We cannot wait inactively and hope to have security and peace for
our children or ourselves. We dare not privately rail against
irrational, virulent hatred while letting the world believe that we
remain disinterested, accepting our lot with equanimity or, worse,
resignation. We can and must do more than simply grieve..

So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a
person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from
depravity, to do, at least, these three simple things:

First, care enough to stay informed. Don't ever let yourself become
deluded into thinking that this is not your fight.

Second, boycott France. Only the Arab countries are more toxically
anti-Semitic and, unlike them, France exports more than just oil and
hatred. So boycott their wines and their perfumes. Boycott their clothes
and their foodstuffs. Boycott their movies. Definitely boycott their
shores. If we are resolved we can exert amazing pressure and, whatever
else we may know about the French, we most certainly know that they cave
in to pressure.

Think of all of the people of good conscience that you know and let them
know that you and the people that you care about need their help.

Our only strength is the strength of our community and there can be no
community without communication.

This is really scary stuff, read it very carefully and thoroughly. We
cannot allow this to continue. You MUST pass it on to as many people as
you know, so we can curb this hideous anti-Semitic wave and squelch
it.....before it grows and engulfs us all.





You may also be interested in the below message received from the Simon
Weisenthal Centre



A NEW ANTISEMITIC VIRUS SEEKS TO BLAME ISRAEL AND ITS SUPPORTERS
FOR THE WAR IN IRAQ!
TO: CONCERNED CENTER FRIENDS

RE: A NEW ANTISEMITIC VIRUS SEEKS TO BLAME ISRAEL AND ITS
SUPPORTERS FOR THE WAR IN IRAQ!

America's Jews are under attack.

Voices from both the right and the left are playing the
antisemitism card with glee as they righteously blame the Jews for
America's war with Iraq. What's worse, the silence from more moderate
voices in America is deafening.

One-time Presidential candidate and CNBC commentator Pat
Buchanan, in a just-published article in the American Conservative,
blames the conflict with Iraq on the State of Israel and a 'cabal' of
neoconservatives, the majority of whom are Jewish and supporters of
Israel. Among Buchanan's vitriol: "We charge that a cabal of polemicists
and public officials seek to ensnare our country in a series of wars
that are not in America's interests. We charge them with colluding with
Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords."

What is truly frightening is the fact that this anti-Israel,
anti-Jewish rhetoric is not coming from the lunatic fringe. It is now
creeping into the American mainstream -- helped by bigots like Buchanan
and Rep. James Moran.

The fact is, it is now in vogue to blame an Iraq war on
Israel and American Jews.

Just read what else Pat Buchanan had to say: "We charge them
[American neoconservatives; read: Jews] with deliberately damaging U.S.
relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or
supports the Palestinian peoples' right to a homeland of their own. We
charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic
and Western world through their arrogance, hubris and bellicosity." And
in summary of his remarks, Buchanan writes: "They charge us with
antisemitism. False. The truth is, those hurling these charges harbor a
passionate attachment to a nation not our own that causes them to
subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an
assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America."

And on another front, Democratic Congressman James Moran is
still feeling the heat (even after his apology) for his recent remarks
asserting, "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish
community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this." Moran
went on to perpetuate the old canard of a powerful group of Jews
machinating behind the scenes when he said, "The leaders of the Jewish
community are influential enough that they could change the direction of
where this is going, and I think they should."

Even more shocking, this sentiment reflects a new canard
that is alarming and must be stopped: that support of Israel is
outweighing the better judgment of American Jewry and forcing U.S.
President Bush and his advisors to pursue war. You and I know that these
assertions are baseless: Never mind that Jewish support for American
military action to disarm Saddam Hussein's Iraq is identical with
non-Jewish Americans at 59%.

Of course, this is not the first time Buchanan has singled
out Israel and its supporters for censure. No matter what the issue,
Buchanan draws a straight line to blame the Jews. But in this case, he
has had the audacity to lay the most serious crisis facing the United
Nations and the U.S. at the doorstep of the Jewish State and those who
support her.

The war in Iraq may be over in a matter of days, or perhaps
weeks. But the war against the Jews will continue long after the troops
have returned home. We are determined to fight this and all lies about
the Jewish people with our most powerful weapon: the TRUTH. But we need
your help to put a stop to the Buchanans and Morans of the world.



11:32:16 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jennifer Schulz Medlock P. O. Box 49135 Greensboro, NC 27419 Other writers as noted.
 
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