Ha'aretz - McCarthyism for Jews


An interesting look from a French Jew:

Prof. Daniel Dayan uses personal anecdote to buttress his theory about the exclusion of Jews in French society. They have, he says, been pushed outside the boundaries of the French "public." This sense of being ejected from the bosom of media consensus - which Dayan himself says he has experienced - may also be seen as a window on the hidden motives of the man, who does confess that he isn't objective and admits that he is "making a case."


"About two years ago, I was interviewed by the popular weekly Telerama," says Dayan. "The reporter approached me as an expert on the media - I had been interviewed as such on other occasions - and asked me general questions. I don't remember exactly how the subject arose, but during the interview I observed that if the public discourse in France on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so slanted in Israel's favor, how can we explain France's use of the term intifada without mentioning the parallel Israeli term, which certainly exists, to describe the conflict? The reporter smiled in embarrassment and said: `Well, we won't be able to publish something like that.' I insisted. The reporter talked with her editor and finally they decided my quote would be published, but in the headline over the interview it said `Jewish expert.'"[...]

FrontPage Mag has a piece from The Weekly Standard by David Brooks worth reading called "Socialism of Fools":

AFTER JOE LIEBERMAN completed his unsuccessful campaign for the vice-presidency, I pretty much concluded that anti-Semitism was no longer a major feature of American life. I went around making the case that the Anti-Defamation League should close up shop, since the evil they were organized to combat had shrunk to insignificance.


Now I get a steady stream of anti-Semitic screeds in my e-mail, my voicemail, and in my mailbox. It transpired that I couldn't have been more wrong. Anti-Semitism is alive and thriving. It's just that its epicenter is no longer on the Buchananite right, but on the peace-movement left.


"Hello. I'm a grandmother from Minnesota. I want to thank you for taking my call," a voicemail on my machine began recently. When you hear a message like that you sort of settle back and prepare for some civil sentiment. Then it continued. "I just wanted to know: Are you related to Paul Wolfowitz and Ari Fleischer? I can usually smell you people. . . ." At that point I deleted the thing.[...]

David Horowitz's blog re-prints a letter from a Standard reader in reaction:

Not being Jewish, I never took the whole campaign to stamp out anti-Semitism that personally. But as an occasional Christian who spent the last few months in Kuwait, I was flabbergasted by the unanimity of everybody I met--from all over the Arab world and Europe--on the subject of Israel and the Jews. That was the only thing they all agreed on: The Jews are evil. They generally ascribed superhuman powers, coordination, and intelligence to the Jews who control the world in a very sophisticated conspiracy that knows no bounds.


I realized that anti-Semitism is a much bigger and more urgent problem than I previously thought. Otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people seemed to lose their senses when it came to the subject of Israel. The hatred for Jews is palpable, even among Christians and Europeans over there. The ease with which they equated the behavior of Israel and the Palestinians defies logic. It made me fear for the future of Western civilization because it demonstrated how easily people could let hatred overcome their appreciation of things like the rule of law and individual freedom.


--Alan Huth