'Seventy years after Holocaust, 170 million Europeans aren't ashamed to admit they are anti-Semites'
Photo: Reuters
Israelis don't care about global anti-Semitism
Op-ed: What's the point of talking about a 'Jewish state' in a country where public opinion has absolutely no interest in world's attitude towards Jews?
Last week, the world's enlightened public opinion was shocked by an issue which should be close to Israelis' hearts too. The shock was caused by the publication of the global anti-Semitism survey,
which was commissioned by the American Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and conducted by one of the most respectable research companies.
They are pronounced anti-Semites: They identify with at least six of 11 negative stereotypes about Jews which anti-Semites believe in (starting from "Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their country" through "Jews have too much power in the world of business and finance and in the media" to "Jews are responsible for most wars in the world").
About 60,000 people aged 18 and over from 100 countries were sampled, and the findings are indigestible. Seventy-four percent of the adult public in the Middle East and North Africa, 34% of the public in Eastern Europe and 24% in Western Europe are anti-Semites.
Ongoing Hatred
Noah Klieger
Op-ed: ADL survey proves that while anti-Semitism is very common in Muslim countries, it originates in Christianity. There is only one way to fight it.
Only in a dozen countries in northern Europe, in English-speaking countries and in Southeast Asian countries, the hatred of Jews can be defined as a marginal phenomenon.
Let's imagine that we are at a railway station in a Polish or Bulgarian or Hungarian city. According to the survey, every second person in the crowd surrounding us is an anti-Semite. In the Paris Metro we'll encounter 40 anti-Semites among every 100 passengers. Among every 10 passengers on the Vienna, Berlin and Brussels underground, we'll find three anti-Semites. The same applies to Moscow.
One in three adults in Guatemala, Paraguay and Costa Rica is an anti-Semite. There is no difference between the Greeks and Turks in terms of their attitude towards Jews: Seventy percent of the adult population in these countries is anti-Semitic. And if we're at a market in an Arab-Muslim town, it is likely that eight of every 10 people around us are anti-Semites.
Seventy years after the Holocaust hell, 170 million adult Europeans are not ashamed to admit that they are anti-Semites. Near Europe, in the Middle East and North Africa, there are another 200 million anti-Semites.
I am intentionally not using the expression "hold anti-Semitic opinions." Following French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, I also believe that a person does not "hold" anti-Semitic opinions but that anti-Semitism characterizes him as a person. It is an essential component of his authoritarian personality, a term which has been used by sociologists and psychologists to describe people who are inclined to support totalitarian, populist and authoritarian movements. And anti-Semitic ones.
The ADL survey can be used as a comprehensive forecaster of the results of the upcoming European Parliament elections, in which we are expected to see many gains by different populist parties and movements. The anti-establishment neo-fascist populism sweeping through Europe does not appear to be particularly dangerous for the Jews at the moment, but the irrational burning hatred towards the "gang of government and capital," which is shared by all these populist movements, could turn into anti-Jewish hatred in a flash. As we know from history.
Personally, I was amazed not just by the high rates of anti-Semites in Eastern Europe and in countries where most citizens have never even met Jews, but also by the soaring, sweeping hatred towards Jews in Arab-Muslim countries.
In the book "Une si longue presence" ("Such a long presence"), historian Nathan Weinstock attributes the complete ethnic cleansing of the Middle East and North Africa from Jews to traditional anti-Semitism, which is deeply rooted into the religion, culture and structure of the Muslim society.
Weinstock expresses his astonishment quite a lot, but fails to offer anything new; many have engaged in the Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism phenomenon, and it's enough to mention Prof. Bernard Lewis, Prof. Robert Wistrich and philosopher Albert Memmi. Those who contributed greatly to the silencing of the issue, and painted an ideal and clearly false picture of the relations between Jews and Arabs in the Arab countries, were and still are the loudest spokespeople of political orientalism in Israel.
I thought that the media and academia in Israel would respond to the survey at great length. That didn't happen. The global anti-Semitism report was swallowed up in the reality TV commotion, drowned in the Olmert-Zaken storm, and evaporated in the hot air of the Rivlin vs. Bibi affair.
I wonder what's the point of talking about a "Jewish state" in a country where the public opinion has absolutely no interest in the world's attitude towards Jews.
