The forum asserts that the most dangerous strand has its roots in Islam and that the rising number of Muslims in Europe is responsible for fuelling terror attacks, street violence and general harassment of Jews... it was revealed that the EU's racism watchdog has suppressed a report on anti-semitism because it concluded that Muslims were behind many incidents.
Deborah Lipstadt, the academic who won a libel victory after describing the rightwing historian David Irving as a Holocaust denier, this month described the "new" anti-semitism as directed at the "Rambo Jew, the Jew who is the aggressor".
"Sharon has a long record of calling Israeli critics of his policies traitors, and foreign critics anti-semites. The left is concerned that Sharon's policies are endangering Israel's future by fuelling virulent and violent anti-semitism."
The question arises of how closely criticism of Israeli policies (which, it must be said, have been somewhat hard-line in recent years) is connected with anti-semitic ideology. On one hand, it's implausible to assume that ideological anti-semites haven't jumped on this bandwagon (after all, there were reports of neo-Nazis joining the radical vegetarian/animal-rights movement looking for sufficiently zealous extremists to network with, a somewhat more bizarre scenario; closer to the situation, there were reports of neo-Nazi front groups joining the anti-capitalist protest movement, and trying to replace criticism of globalisation with discussion of "globalism", aka the cosmopolitan Elders-of-Zion bête noire). On the other hand, tarring all criticism of Israel with the brush of anti-semitism is obviously absurd, as much as accusing all critics of the Bush administration of despising Americans.
their scarcity in the arena of public discourse is no accident.
Their scarcity I am not sure what causes this, but what worries me is that the right wing christians in the USA are now some of the bigger supporters of Israel, and not the US Jewish communitiy who is fairly split on the issue.
In fact, it seems that a lot of Jews are a bit leery of the eschatological Christians who are backing Israel mainly because such whackos see it as the venue for Jesus' supposed return.
...and also because for some fundies, their support for jewish people is based on all the jews being redeemed and converted to christianity before the rapture happens.
I'd pay a dollar to see that!
One of the basest forms of cowardice is hiding behind innocent when threatened, or obscuring the distinctions between oneself and a group of universally recognized victims. Saying the American media, with their manipulative lies and coercive apropaganda, are owned by men who are Jews has somehow become the equivalent of saying the Holocaust was good thing. It is impossible to have a reasoned discussion with a man who starts, and won't stop, screaming you're a bigot whenever you suggest he's acting selfishly, to the detriment of the rest of us. I've wanted to hear from someone Jewish, someone who was clear about that personal heritage at least in a broad sense, who at the same time could make a clear criticism of the men who continue to hide behind the morally impregnable shield of historical anti-semitic persecution. Judith Butler did that in the London Review of Books. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n16/butl02_.html I'm sure there are others, just as I'm sure their scarcity in the arena of public discour