Europe's New Face Of Anti-semitism

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WorldNetDaily.com

One of the first steps in Adolf Hitler's anti-Semitic drive in the creation of his Third Reich was instituting a ban on the kosher slaughter of animals.

Today, as a new wave of ugly, and sometimes violent, anti-Semitism sweeps through the European continent, at least five countries have banned kosher food production, and one of them is considering halting all import of kosher meat.

The latest nation to join the movement is Holland, where the move was guised in concern for cruelty to animals.

"They simply don't want foreigners and they don't want Jews," said Rabbi Michael Melchior, former chief rabbi of Norway, another European nation that bans kosher meat production. "I won't say this is the only motivation, but it's certainly no coincidence that one of the first things Nazi Germany forbade was kosher slaughter. I also know that during the original debate on this issue in Norway, where shechitah has been banned since 1930, one of the parliamentarians said straight out, 'If they don't like it, let them go live somewhere else.'"

While animal-rights activists have indeed been at the forefront of the recent efforts to ban kosher slaughter, there is growing concern on the part of people like Melchior, now an Israeli official, that initiatives spreading through Europe are gaining popularity because of deep-seated anti-Semitism manifesting itself in many other ways, from Belgium to Germany to France and Switzerland.

* On Saturday, unknown assailants hurled a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue in the Belgian port city of Antwerp, where riots by Arab immigrants began a week ago following the shooting of a 27-year-old Moroccan immigrant. About 30,000 people of Arab origin live in Antwerp. It is also home to a long-established Orthodox Jewish community of about 20,000.

* Several weeks ago, Germany announced a decision to stop all arms sales to Israel. This comes at a time when attacks on memorials to Nazi-era victims are on the rise. In at least seven attacks this year, extremists destroyed a memorial plaque at Raben-Steinfeld, vandalized a memorial in Woebbelin and a memorial column in Lutterow, and drew a swastika on the grounds of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the Nov. 9 anniversary of Krystalnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, when Nazis targeted Jewish businesses and synagogues in 1938.

* German police are investigating an incident last month where anti-Semitic disruptions occurred at a Berlin ceremony to restore a street name referring to Jews that was erased by Nazi officials in 1938. Hecklers at the event booed, whistled and shouted slogans including "Jews out" and "The Jews crucified Jesus," according to Germany's Central Council of Jews. Paul Spiegel, the group's head, said he was horrified and that the incident "reminds us painfully of the late 1920s," when the Nazis began their rise to power in Germany. The event re-established Juedenstrasse – an old German word for Jews' Street – in the western district of Spandau after years of deliberations by local officials. The name, dating back to the 16th century, recalls Spandau's former Jewish community. Under Nazi rule, the street was renamed for Gottfried Kinkel, a 19th-century poet and art historian who was once imprisoned in Spandau.

* Fiona Macaulay, public affairs director of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, says incidents of anti-Semitism have increased 400 percent in Britain since the start of the intifada in the fall of 2000.

* A one-day international conference on sanctions and divestment in London last week called for a boycott of Israel "not dissimilar to the campaign which contributed to the end of apartheid in South Africa."

Of course, it's not just Europe that is experiencing a wave of new anti-Semitism.

Avi Beker, the secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress, says in the past two years Jews around the world have experienced the worst anti-Semitism since World War II, primarily because of the effects of the Middle East conflict. In Canada, the U.S. and Europe, there have been attacks on synagogues and other Jewish centers as well as individual Jews, he says.

"Anti-Semitism, showing itself to be the most enduring and the hardiest manifestation of the racism virus, has reared its ugly head once again," says Keith Landy, the Canadian Jewish Congress president. Landy said across the world Jewish people continue to face discrimination, harassment and violence because of their faith. It is a sad day for any religion when a security guard must be posted at the door of a place of worship so people may pray in safety – a common occurrence at many Jewish synagogues, he stated. "Instead of declaring 'never again,' we find ourselves painfully asking, 'will it ever end?'"

Since October 2000, there have been 300 anti-Semitic occurrences in Canada, he said. Also, he argued, the current international attack on Israel is clear anti-Semitism.

Australia's Jewish community is also experiencing the highest level of anti-Semitism since statistics were first collected 57 years ago, figures released recently by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry showed.

Council President Jeremy Jones told United Press International there were 593 reports of anti-Semitism in the year to Sept. 30, with incidents ranging from physical and verbal assaults to firebombs thrown at synagogues and community centers, telephone threats, hate mail and e-mail.

He said there are dozens of groups perpetrating hate crimes. The main ones are the Australian League of Rights, the Adelaide Institute, neo-Nazi fringe groups and the Citizens Electoral Councils, which are followers of U.S.-based Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.

The man with the highest profile is historian Frederick Toben of the Adelaide Institute, who, like British historian David Irving, denies the existence of the Holocaust.

Jones also lamented what he calls horrific material from Muslims in Australia and singles out Sheik Taj al Din al Hilaly, spiritual leader of Australia's Muslims and one of the country's most contentious religious figures. After he arrived from Egypt in 1982, the government tried to expel him for making statements condemned as incitement to racial hatred. A Sydney Morning Herald journalist, Alan Ramsey, wrote that these included comments that Jews are the underlying cause of all wars, use sex and abominable acts of sodomy to control the world, and that Jews had a malicious disposition toward all mankind.

But it is in Europe where anti-Semitism is getting the most attention – perhaps because the Holocaust occurred just a generation earlier in the continent.

When there was an effort by Jews in Switzerland to lift the century-old ban on the production of kosher meat, an anti-Semitic backlash erupted earlier this year.

"This is a trend that is very much worrying us," said Beker. He points out that a movement in Sweden, another European nation that bans kosher slaughter, attempted to ban ritual circumcision – the quintessential rite of passage for Jewish males. "We regard this as interference in Jewish religious practices."

Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said bans on kosher slaughter are the result of activism between animal-rights extremists "aided and abetted" by anti-Semitic politicians.

"Sometimes anti-Semites will use this as a vehicle to try to isolate the Jewish community by reaching out to those who are so preoccupied with animal rights," he told Jewish Week. "The key is whether or not there is a history in that country. ... What other issues of animal rights have they engaged in to prohibit cruelty? When they begin and end with kosher slaughter, that's when I become suspect."

While the Holland ban offers some loopholes to the Jewish community in the country, the Swiss ban on shechitah may go even further. The government earlier this year considered a ban on the import of kosher meat, and the Swiss Animal Association is calling for a national referendum on barring the import of such products. A poll shows 76 percent of the population would support such a move.

"It's ominous," said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the kashrut administrator for the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher-certifying organization in the world. "This kind of legislation in Europe has to be understood in the context of European history. A person would have to be extremely naive not to think that this is linked to anti-Semitism."

Melchior makes the case that kosher slaughter is actually more humane than the practices in slaughterhouses.

"The Torah forbids cruelty to animals, and the shechitah process ensures that the animal loses consciousness immediately," he explains. "We have been dealing with this issue for many years, and there are many scientific studies that back us up."

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Anti-Semitism and Ethnicity in Europe

By John Rosenthal
John Rosenthal has taught modern European philosophy and political philosophy at schools in the United States and France. He is presently writing a book on ethnic-national politics and the principle of “self-determination.”


"Say that you’re a Jew,” Marinus Schöberl’s tormentors are supposed to have demanded as they beat him. As of this writing, three young men — the brothers Marcel S. and Marco S., 18 and 24 years old respectively, and their friend Sebastien F., also 18 — are on trial in Neuruppin, Germany for the murder of the then-16-year-old Marinus near the small eastern German town of Potzlow in July 2002. None of the accused disputes his involvement, and the prosecution’s reconstruction of the events leading to Marinus’s death is based largely on the boys’ own confessions. Marinus was not in fact Jewish, but various markers of “otherness” — the fact that the teenager stuttered, that he wore baggy “hip hop” pants, perhaps most importantly that his hair was dyed blond — were apparently sufficient to convince his three assailants that he was or might be. They “wanted to create for themselves the image of an enemy,” Thomas Weichelt, the lawyer for Marinus’s parents, has observed. A local district attorney told the Berliner Zeitung that the cruelty displayed in Marinus’s murder “represents a new dimension even for hard-baked prosecutors.” After having forced him to drink alcohol until inebriated, beaten him unconscious, and then urinated on him, the trio of assailants dragged Marinus to a nearby abandoned stable. There, having ordered Marinus to bite the side of a concrete feeding trough, Marcel S. stomped on the back of Marinus’s head with his combat boots. After Marinus, nonetheless, apparently survived this maneuver, Marcel S. crushed his skull with a concrete slab. In a statement given to the police, another witness, Nicole B., reported that Marcel S. would later describe Marinus as a “shitty Jew” and remark that as such “he didn’t deserve any different.”1

The Potzlow case is significant in several respects, not the least of which is that it will likely be entirely unknown to my readers. It has of late become common for “liberal” commentators to charge that reports of European anti-Semitism are greatly exaggerated, part of yet another “vast right-wing conspiracy” fostered by powerful media moguls (read Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black) and designed to delegitimize European support of the Palestinian cause and “deflect” European criticisms of Israel. In fact, however, coverage in the English-language media as a whole, especially indeed the American media, has tended, if anything, to understate the true dimensions of the phenomenon.



Leftist myths and leftist responsibility

In early spring 2002, a wave of anti-Jewish arson attacks swept across France. In the most spectacular of the incidents, late on the Friday night of March 29-30, a group of 10-20 masked youths used two stolen cars as battering rams to smash through the front and side doors of the synagogue in the La Duchère section of Lyon and then, with the cars still ensconced in the building, set them ablaze. According to witnesses, as the cars caught fire, the perpetrators broke into applause. That weekend, synagogues would also be set ablaze in Strasbourg and Marseille and bullets would be fired at a kosher butcher shop in Toulouse. In the following week, at least three other synagogues — in Marseille, Montpellier, and the Kremlin-Bicêtre suburb of Paris — would be the targets of Molotov cocktails (with the Montpellier attack setting on fire an adjacent building). The wooden doors of a prayer chapel in a Jewish cemetery in Strasbourg were set on fire, as was the school bus of a Jewish school in another Parisian suburb. This sudden spike in what was an already-growing trend of anti-Jewish violence in France was widely reported in the United States and even provoked some words of admonishment from President Bush. As the violence settled back into an alarmingly regular pattern, however, the interest of the English-language media waned — and this despite the fact that the more recent incidents, unlike the rash of reported violence last March and April, have included an increasing number of attacks on persons. When, for instance, just this past March, a 21-year-old Jewish student returning home from a debate on Middle East politics in Aix-en-Provence was attacked by three masked assailants who proceeded to carve a Star of David into her arm with a knife, such an event was apparently considered sufficiently banal as not to merit reporting by almost any American media outlet.2

Moreover, coverage of anti-Jewish violence in Europe has focused almost exclusively on France, with some occasional allusions to incidents in Belgium and Great Britain. This is also the case, incidentally, for most of the European coverage of anti-Jewish violence in Europe. Since the authors of the French violence are typically presumed to be (and often indeed turn out to be) North African immigrant youth from France’s dilapidated banlieues — “a group itself that is the victim of some of the worst race hate and discrimination in Europe,” according to the sympathetic assessment of Peter Beaumont in the British weekly Observer (February 17, 2002) — the assumption is then easily made that the problem is not really a European one anyway, but has merely been imported into Europe along with Muslim immigration. And the Muslim youth can, after all, be forgiven — so this line of reasoning continues — for taking offense at Israel’s “heavy-handed” treatment of their co-religionists in the Middle East conflict. This is the clear implication of Beaumont’s Observer piece, which thus appears to treat the logic of targeting French Jews in retribution for Israeli policies as somehow self-evident. We will see shortly just how erroneous an account this is even of the forces driving anti-Jewish violence among France’s North African immigrant population.

Germany, in any case, is rarely mentioned in this context. This is odd, since although the murder of Marinus Schöberl was notable for the baroqueness of the cruelty involved, it was by no means an isolated incident with respect to the anti-Jewish motives involved. The number of anti-Jewish incidents officially reported in Germany is in fact greater than the number of those reported in France. According to statistics published by the French Consultative Commission on Human Rights (cncdh), there were 924 anti-Jewish incidents reported to the French police in 2002. This figure comprises both acts of violence committed against persons or property (193) and “threats and acts of intimidation” (including under this latter heading, for example, the desecration of Jewish monuments with anti-Semitic graffiti). For the same year and covering roughly the same array of crimes, the German Ministry of the Interior records some 1,594 reported incidents. It is true that Germany has not experienced the sort of marked upsurge in anti-Jewish crime in recent years that has been recorded in France, but this is only because the German incidents, as will be seen below, form part of a much longer-term trend dating back to around the time of German reunification. With reference to its 2002 statistics, the French Commission could accurately speak of “an explosion of anti-Semitic incidents,” noting a six-fold rise. By contrast, the 1,594 incidents recorded by the German Ministry of the Interior for 2002 represent a slight decrease from the previous year, thus permitting Interior Minister Otto Schily, in light of this statistic and a similarly slight fall in reported xenophobic attacks, to announce a “success.”3 Furthermore, those German cases involving physical attacks on persons have tended on the whole to be far bloodier than the comparable French cases. Indeed, it should be noted here that the German authorities seem often to prefer not to classify particularly brutal attacks as anti-Semitic in nature even when the prima facie evidence clearly suggests anti-Semitic motives were involved. The murder of Marinus Schöberl, for instance, has not been so classified.

Despite all this, when the television newsmagazine 60 Minutes recently ran a story on the role of the Holocaust in German public debate (June 1, 2003), Morley Safer could reassuringly preface the report by noting that “most of Germany’s Jews . . . see that country as one of the safest places in the world to raise their children.” It is as if there were a sort of taboo, in light of the exterminationist extreme to which German anti-Semitism has gone in the past, on bringing Germany into too close connection with discussions of anti-Semitism today. This reticence is perhaps reinforced by the prevailing belief in American political circles that as the dominant European power — not to mention a major source of foreign investment in the U.S. economy — Germany is or at least ought to be America’s privileged European partner. Individual peccadilloes do receive coverage, such as those of the late Jürgen Möllemann, the onetime vice-chairman of Germany’s Free Democratic Party, who was accused by his adversaries of having tried to exploit anti-Jewish resentments for electoral purposes during the summer 2002 election campaign. Symptomatically, the 60 Minutes report gave prominent place to the commentaries of Michel Friedman, then vice-president of Germany’s state-sanctioned Central Council of Jews in Germany and the target of what the report described as a “blatant anti-Semitic attack” by Möllemann. But as such apparent indiscretions come up only in the context of the vigorous intra-German reactions to them, they serve in fact to reinforce the image of a Germany safely protected from the anti-Semitic excesses of its past. Möllemann, after all, was forced to resign from all his party posts, expelled from the fdp’s parliamentary faction — he was assigned a special seat in the German Bundestag, set apart from all the other parliamentarians, as if he were politically leprous — and, finally, when faced with the threat of expulsion from the party as well, renounced his party membership altogether.

And the chastening of the once-powerful Möllemann went still further. Shortly after the elections, public prosecutors opened an investigation into alleged financial misconduct by Möllemann in connection with the financing of a controversial campaign flyer. The flyer drew criticism on account of what was termed its “anti-Israeli” message, though many suggested anti-Semitic overtones as well. Although the investigation was not officially related to the content of the flyer, the impression was nevertheless created that Möllemann was somehow receiving his just deserts. The entire episode came to an abrupt and bizarre end shortly after noon on June 5 when Jürgen Möllemann, a member of Germany’s paratrooper reserves and a hobby skydiver, jumped out of an airplane and at 3,000 feet apparently uncoupled his parachute, plunging to his death. A mere quarter of an hour or so earlier, the Bundestag by a unanimous vote had withdrawn Möllemann’s parliamentary immunity, and at the very moment of his demise investigators were at his home preparing to search the premises.

The Möllemann affair had thus concluded as a sort of morality play, illustrating what will happen to a German politician who dares to engage in anti-Jewish politicking. But the problem with the apparent lesson of Jürgen Möllemann’s decline and fall is that his supposedly culpable remarks and public interventions, while clearly supportive of the Palestinian intifada and openly hostile to the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon, were not in fact overtly, much less “blatantly,” anti-Semitic. The infamous flyer, for instance, contained the following caption beside a picture of Möllemann: “Jürgen W. Möllemann has long been a steadfast advocate of a peaceful solution of the Middle East conflict: with secure borders for Israel and an independent state for the Palestinians.” Next to a picture of Ariel Sharon, the text continued: “Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rejects an independent Palestinian state. His government sends tanks into refugee camps and ignores U.N. Security Council decisions.” In the context of hysterical denunciations of a Jenin “massacre” or even “Jeningrad,” charges of genocide, and comparisons of Sharon to Adolf Hitler, this was comparatively tame stuff.

Möllemann’s only originality — and perhaps greatest sin — was to have given such free expression to his partisanship from the position of a high-profile party leader, and as a leader of a self-styled centrist party no less. If in his Middle East advocacy Möllemann was guilty of an anti-Israeli bias, then this is a guilt that is shared by virtually the entirety of the European left, ranging from relatively fringe Trotskyist or Communist factions to what might be called the establishment Green/Socialist left, which governs in Germany and until lately (with the collaboration of the Communists) did in France as well. Even the most seemingly outrageous of Möllemann’s remarks — an outright apology for Palestinian suicide bombings as a legitimate form of resistance to “occupation” — was in substance no different from remarks one could already hear with mind-numbing regularity at virtually any meeting of “anti-globalization” activists across Europe. (In the meanwhile, of course, such observations have also passed into the vernacular of what counts as political debate on college campuses across America.) As the German political scientist Matthias Küntzel writes in his book Djihad und Judenhass (Ça ira Verlag, 2002), “while the escalation of the suicide bombings should have led to increased solidarity with the largely Jewish victims and a taking of distance from the organizers of the attacks, on the left exactly the opposite transpired: the more indiscriminately Palestinian commandos killed Israeli civilians, the more frenetically was the intifada covered with ‘anti-imperialist’ applause.” Indeed, it is probably not a coincidence that Möllemann made his remark in an interview with Germany’s trendiest leftist daily: the Berlin-based Tageszeitung, long allied to the German Greens.

The outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in France has clearly been linked to this groundswell of support for the Second Intifada. For leftist commentators like Peter Beaumont, this is to be expected: It is only natural that France’s North African immigrants would feel solidarity with their Muslim brethren in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and apparently also natural that they would seek to express this solidarity by way of attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions. The then-foreign minister of France, the Socialist Hubert Védrine, himself suggested as much in a January 2002 interview when, in dismissing Israeli warnings of rising French anti-Semitism, he remarked: “One shouldn’t necessarily be surprised that young French people from immigrant families feel compassion for the Palestinians and get agitated when they see what is happening.” But this standard “leftist” account is in fact a highly deceptive foreshortening and tells us more about the biases and preconceptions of its purveyors than about the actual attitudes of France’s North African immigrants (which, as the case tends to be among individuals, are various). What is missing from it is, above all, the crucial mediating role played by the French institutional left’s own partisanship in the issue, most notably inasmuch as such partisanship has been reflected in a starkly Manichean presentation of the Middle East conflict in much of the French media. Since the privately owned leftist dailies Le Monde and Liberation are barely read in the provinces or in popular milieus more generally, the influence of publicly owned electronic media has no doubt been especially important in this connection. Coverage in the latter has persistently served to demonize the Israeli side in the conflict as personified by the “war criminal” — so termed by the Franco-German “cultural” channel Arte, although he has never been tried, much less convicted, as such — Ariel Sharon.

Shortly after the string of synagogue burnings in spring 2002, journalists from the French weekly L’Express conducted interviews with young North Africans, or “beurs,” from one of the problem neighborhoods of Strasbourg. While indeed discovering notable hostility to Israel and “the Jews,” the reporters also found that their interviewees had virtually no concrete knowledge of the Middle East conflict. They were evidently not even able to say what the plo is. “No,” one young man responded, “all we know is what we see on the television.”

The question, then, is this: What do they see on the television? After all, a first spike in anti-Jewish incidents in France occurred shortly after the showing on French television of the now-internationally famous images of the killing of the 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura, ostensibly by Israeli fire. As related by James Fallows in the Atlantic Monthly (June 2003), investigations have since uncovered evidence suggesting that the entire episode may have been staged. Whether or not this is the case, it is certain, by virtue of simple considerations of geometry, that the supposedly fatal shots could not have come from the position of the Israeli army unit that virtually the entirety of world opinion held responsible for the boy’s death. It so happens that the only footage of the alleged shooting was filmed by a Palestinian cameraman in the employ of the French public television channel France 2. France 2 has refused to release its complete rushes of the scene, which could once and for all clarify what really occurred.

The young beurs interviewed by L’Express (April 25, 2002) also were not found to have any particularly profound interest in Islam, even if the same young man who spoke of “only knowing what we see on the television” added obligingly, apparently with reference to anti-Jewish violence, that “we want to show that we’re Muslims here too.” A relative lack of interest in Islam has also been confirmed by the French police in interviews with many of the young persons of North African descent who have been apprehended and charged in the attacks. This is not particularly surprising. In fact, until lately the image of Islamists in French-North African popular culture was, if anything, likely to be a negative one. Mahmoud Zemmouri’s 1997 movie 100% Arabica, starring the hugely popular Algerian-born rai singers Khaled and Cheb Mami, depicts the imams in a French banlieue as brutal puritanical power-mongers — and as being in bed with the local political establishment to boot. The movie ends with a scene of a rai concert being broken up by Islamist thugs swinging baseball bats. (Incidentally, Khaled’s 2000 release Kenza includes a trilingual — Arabic, English, and Hebrew — duet version of John Lennon’s “Imagine” performed with the Israeli singer Noa. The song is, of course, best known for its generic pacifist sentiment, but it is at least equally relevant to recall in the present context that it also enjoins listeners to “imagine there’s . . . no religion.”)

Far from reflecting some deep-rooted and organic hatred of Jews and Israel amidst France’s populations of North African extraction, it would seem, then, that the anti-Semitic attacks are just the pursuit by other means of the latest cause célèbre of Parisian intellectuals and students, with disaffected and déclassé North African teenagers happily assuming the role of “shock troops” for their more privileged comrades au centre ville. One should not underestimate the quotient of sheer delinquency among the motivations of the perpetrators of the French attacks. The youth who set fire to Jewish monuments in Strasbourg are not likely very different from the youth who for years now have every weekend also been setting fire to parked cars in Strasbourg, apparently for the pure pleasure of it. On April 10, 2002, in one of the most widely reported incidents, some 30 masked assailants armed with baseball bats and crying “Death to the Jews!” broke up the soccer practice of a Jewish youth club in a Parisian suburb. As the soccer players scattered, the assailants took a moment to steal their sport sacks and portable telephones — the latter being the most coveted prize of France’s juvenile gangsterdom — before taking flight themselves.

All of this is not to deny that anti-Jewish stereotypes and prejudices have currency in certain North African immigrant milieus in France. But it is to say that they do not necessarily have more currency there than in other social milieus and, in any case, that the responses of the French left and the French media to the Palestinian intifada have served to make Jews and Jewish institutions seem like socially acceptable targets of hatred and contempt in France. After all, it was before synagogues began to burn in France that protesters could be seen at pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Paris carrying banners juxtaposing Sharon and Hitler or featuring a swastika and a Star of David connected by an equal sign.

The responsibility of self-styled leftists in fostering an atmosphere of fevered suspicion toward “Israelite” institutions can be further gauged by the famous remarks of José Bové, spokesman for the Confederation of French Farmers and darling of anti-globalization activists worldwide, made upon his return to France in early April 2002 from a “solidarity mission” to Ramallah. Asked to comment on the recent string of anti-Semitic attacks, Bové suggested that one ask in turn “who profits from the crime?” About six months earlier, the French academic Marie-José Mondzain had used the same phrase in a delirious article in Le Monde in order to insinuate (“Bush, Putin and Sharon!” was the author’s emphatic answer) joint Israeli and American responsibility for the September 11 attacks. Horst Mahler, the German neo-Nazi and former raf member, had likewise responded to the September 11 attacks by asking “cui bono?” In his April remarks, Bové went on to explain that “the Israeli government and its secret services have an interest in creating a certain psychosis, to make one believe that an anti-Semitic atmosphere has developed in France, in order better to divert attention.” In the meantime, Daniel Lindenberg, in a bestselling pamphlet denouncing those he has baptized France’s “new reactionaries” — including under this heading the philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, who was one of the first to call attention to the recrudescence of anti-Semitism in France — has flatly declared “the reality” of France’s problems with anti-Semitism to be “open to doubt.”



Germany: New Jews, old prejudice

y contrast to the French case, in which the recent escalation of anti-Jewish violence has followed the rhythms of Middle East politics and Parisian intellectual fashions, anti-Semitic incidents in Germany have been a regular feature of everyday life since reunification. Their proliferation first became manifest amidst the wave of xenophobic and racist violence which swept across Germany in the early 1990s and which — even though in this case too the interest of the foreign media quickly waned — has since that time barely abated. Whereas the targets of the most notorious racist attacks were persons — Turkish “guest-workers” or foreign asylum-seekers — the targets of the anti-Semitic incidents tended for most of this period to have a strictly symbolic character. Indeed, it could hardly have been otherwise. After all, as an obvious legacy of the Nazi regime’s “Jewish policy,” there were until recently an almost infinitesimally small number of persons of Jewish ancestry living in Germany (or at least such as would have, according to the Nazis’ own relatively ample criteria, counted as Jewish).

Thus, the anti-Semites in Germany have had to content themselves largely with attacks on the residual artifacts of an earlier Jewish existence — Jewish cemeteries or the few remaining synagogues — or indeed on memorials to the events which extinguished that existence. On the night of September 4-5, 2002, for example, vandals set fire to the so-called Museum of the Death March in the Belower Forest. The museum owes its name to one of the final chilling episodes in the history of the Third Reich. In April 1945, as allied forces closed in on Berlin, inmates of the nearby Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps were evacuated by the ss and led on a forced march toward the north and west. Thousands died, hundreds of them in the Belower Forest, falling victim to exhaustion, the elements, and the exactions of their guards. The arson attack on the Belower memorial occurred exactly 10 years to the day after the “Jewish barracks” at the Sachsenhausen camp were destroyed in an earlier arson attack. The perpetrators of the latest attack spray-painted swastikas and ss runes on memorial columns standing across from the museum building. On the columns’ pedestal, in meter-high letters running three meters across, they spray-painted the phrase “Juden haben kurze Beine”: “Jews have short legs.” The phrase makes allusion to the German proverb “lies have short legs,” implying that their credibility is short-lived, and hence indirectly to what Holocaust deniers label the “Auschwitz lie.”

The destruction of the Museum of the Death March did receive some coverage in the American press, but the everyday acts of anti-Semitic vandalism that have become part of German normality for over a decade now rarely do. Since late 1998, solely in Berlin and its surroundings, the following acts of vandalism took place: (1) In December 1998, the gravestone of Heinz Galinski, a former chairman of Berlin’s officially sanctioned “Jewish Community,” was blown up; (2) in October 1999, 103 gravestones were overturned in the Jewish cemetery at Weissensee; (3) in October 2000, the windows of a synagogue on the Fraenkelufer in Kreuzberg were smashed; (4) in January 2001, the prayer chapel at the Jewish cemetery in Potsdam was set on fire; (5) in March 2002, a bomb was exploded in the Jewish cemetery in the Heerstrasse; (6) in April 2002, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Fraenkelufer synagogue. It should be kept in mind that by far the greater part of Berlin’s synagogues were already destroyed either during or immediately after World War ii. The various small memorials to the persecution of Berlin’s Jews that are dispersed around the city are regularly desecrated. For many years now, a plaque commemorating the deportation of Berlin’s Jews located on the Putlitz Bridge in western Berlin has been a favorite target for anti-Semitic vandals. Since 1992, it has, among other things, been covered with excrement, blown off its moorings with explosives, and repeatedly desecrated with swastikas.

One can easily imagine that Peter Eisenman’s gigantic “central memorial” to the Holocaust to be erected in downtown Berlin will someday likewise be a magnet for anti-Semitic attacks. Its design is so abstract, however, consisting of a field with some 2,500 concrete slabs of differing heights, and so lacking in any relation to the events it is supposed to memorialize that its power of attraction for the anti-Semites may be attenuated. Nonetheless, the architects are taking the precaution of having the slabs treated with a special “anti-graffiti coating,” according to the Berliner Zeitung (January 27, 2002).

Given the relative paucity of Jews in Germany, contemporary German anti-Semitism tends to have a certain spectral quality. Anti-Semitic youth such as those who murdered Marinus Schöberl have likely never met someone of Jewish ancestry or would not have known it if they had. Indeed, in his deposition Marcel S. admitted as much, conceding that he did not know what “exactly” a Jew is.4 Not having living Jews readily available in a provincial town like Potzlow, the anti-Semite must resort to imagining them.

A very small number of media personalities, conspicuously marked for their “Jewishness,” play a significant role in this state of affairs by providing the German public with the elements of their image of what constitutes a Jew. Among these public figures, no doubt the most important is Michel Friedman, until lately the vice-president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews in Germany and host of two television talk shows, Friedman and Vorsicht! Friedman (roughly “Watch Out, Friedman!”). It was Michel Friedman, it will be recalled, who was the target of what 60 Minutes called a “blatantly anti-Semitic attack” on the part of Jürgen Möllemann during the 2002 German election campaign. Exactly what Möllemann said was this: “I fear that hardly anyone has won more supporters for the anti-Semites that, unfortunately, there are in Germany and whom we have to fight than . . . Michel Friedman with his intolerant and malicious manner, his arrogant manner.”5 This remark was widely interpreted — notably by Friedman’s direct superior in the Central Council, Paul Spiegel — as a version of the classical retort of the anti-Semite that Jews themselves are responsible for anti-Semitism. Indeed, it became common to suppose that this was actually what Möllemann said. In fairness, however, he did not, and it is by no means obvious that he even implied it. His remark referred to a particular individual (in fact two individuals, since he also mentioned in passing Ariel Sharon), not to Jews in general.

Moreover, whether or not Möllemann intended it as such, as a sociological observation his remark probably has some validity, for there can be little doubt that Friedman serves at once as a kind of support for anti-Semitic stereotypes and a magnet for anti-Semitic resentments in Germany. Impeccably clad in a three-piece suit, with his hair slicked back and an eyebrow or two characteristically arched, it has often seemed as if Friedman were consciously playing the role that the German public has assigned him. He is, in effect, the Jew whom Germans love to hate. The popular response to the Möllemann affair massively confirms this. Thus, in a contribution to an internet forum, one defender of Möllemann chose to address Friedman directly and on behalf of all his presumed compatriots: “your arrogant and revolting manner really gets on the nerves of us Germans.” In the condolence book at Möllemann’s funeral, another sympathizer wrote that Möllemann had been punished “for saying what everyone thinks.” In yet another bizarre and theatrical turn in the whole affair, on June 11, less than a week after the violent death of his political adversary Möllemann, police conducted raids at the office and home of Michel Friedman and seized three plastic bags containing a white powder. Tests subsequently confirmed the presence of cocaine. The police were reportedly led to Friedman by the testimony of prostitutes whom they were questioning in connection with another investigation. It was now the turn of Michel Friedman to resign his public offices.

The spectral quality of contemporary German anti-Semitism is not, by the way, without a certain tradition. The paranoid exaggeration of Jewish presence and thereby of “the Jewish threat” is a more or less constant trait of the anti-Semitic Weltanschauung. In the late 1990s, when Jews in Germany numbered in the tens of thousands, about a third of Germans surveyed imagined them to number in the millions.6 Even in the early 1930s, as the Nazis came to power promising to combat the “Verjudung” or “Jewification” of German society, the number of Jews in Germany did not exceed 600,000 or just around 1 percent of the population. Most German Jews, moreover, were concentrated in urban centers. As in the Potzlow of today, Jews would have been largely unknown in most rural areas. Thus, a joke which circulated at the time of Göring’s famous call for a “Jewish boycott” in April 1933 had the mayor of a small town in East Prussia sending an urgent telegram to the Ministry of the Interior: “Send two Jews immediately. Otherwise boycott impossible.”

Ironically, in light of the post-reunification recrudescence of anti-Semitism, the vast majority of Jews living in Germany today are in fact recent immigrants. Most of them have come to Germany from the countries of the former Soviet Union under the provisions of a law inherited by the Federal Republic from the last East German government. Whereas the number of Jews living in Germany was estimated at somewhat less than 30,000 at the time of reunification, it is perhaps four times that many today. More ironically still, the German government’s assumption of the obligations created by the East German law was presented as a “humanitarian” measure aimed at populations presumed to suffer from anti-Semitic persecution in their countries of origin. The immigrants are thus treated as refugees — so-called “contingent refugees,” meaning they are not required to pass through the usual asylum procedure — and classified by the German authorities, following former Soviet and current German practice, as being “of Jewish nationality.” Unlike refugees from former Soviet lands presumed to be “of German nationality” (i.e., “ethnic Germans”), they are not given German citizenship.

In what is perhaps the bloodiest and most gruesome incident of anti-Semitic violence in postwar European history, in July 2000 a cluster bomb was detonated on the platform of a Düsseldorf train station as a group of “contingent refugees” were waiting there for their train. Ten people were wounded. A five-months-pregnant Jewish woman from the Ukraine had her leg ripped off in the explosion. Her unborn child was killed as a bomb fragment pierced her womb. Although the same group of refugees, all of whom were enrolled in a German course at a nearby school, took the same train at the same time every weekday, the German authorities have declined to qualify the incident as a racist or anti-Semitic attack. No arrest has been made.

The location of the attack, furthermore, gives the lie to the supposition, frequently reproduced in the American media, that xenophobia and anti-Semitism are somehow a specifically eastern German problem and thereby a legacy of communist rule. Opinion surveys conducted shortly after reunification found, on the contrary, that East Germans were markedly less predisposed to anti-Semitic prejudices than West Germans.7 In a manner reminiscent of the receptivity of certain North African youth in the French banlieues to the anti-Semitic delirium of Islamist cadres, the demonstrated receptivity of certain East German youth to the anti-Semitic delirium of neo-Nazi cadres has no doubt as much to do with social marginalization and the search for a scapegoat as with any deep-seated ideological convictions. With the official unemployment rate in eastern Germany pushing 20 percent and the real unemployment rate much higher, the prospects for advancement of young Germans in the eastern provinces are nearly as dim as those of the average young banlieusard in France. That anti-Semitic sentiment is no more restricted to one social stratum than it is to one geographical area in Germany can be further gauged by an incident last November in the moderately well-to-do Spandau neighborhood of Berlin. Spandau, incidentally, is part of what used to be West Berlin. After many years of discussion, Spandau’s Kinkelstrasse was being re-christened “Judenstrasse” — literally “Jews Street” — the name it bore until 1938 when it had been re-named “Kinkelstrasse” by the Nazi regime. As Alexander Brenner, the current chairman of Berlin’s “Jewish Community,” attempted to give a speech on the occasion, he was interrupted by cries of “Juden raus!” (“Jews get out!”) as well as “You Jews are to blame for everything” and “You have no God.” The local fdp politician Karl-Heinz Bannasch, who was participating in the ceremony, noted afterwards that “these weren’t the skinhead people from whom we’re used to hearing such insults. These were people who belong to the middle class.”



An anti-Semitism of the elites

Even if the comments of the Spandau hecklers bore the specific mark of German history, similar observations could be made nowadays throughout at least the “old” Europe. For if anti-Semitic violence has become increasingly prevalent on the margins of the European society of today, anti-Semitic motifs are increasingly prevalent in the mainstream. No one who has spent significant time in continental Europe recently — or at least no one for whom anti-Semitism has not yet taken on the air of normalcy — can fail to have noticed the frequency with which apparently well-educated Europeans will refer, without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, to “powerful Jewish interests” or to a putative “Jewish lobby” in order to explain world or local events of which they disapprove. A Greek journalist friend even reports overhearing two well-dressed women in their early sixties commenting that “the Jews” were, after all, “too powerful” back then and they are becoming “too powerful” again today — this as they attended a showing in Athens of Roman Polanski’s saga of the Warsaw Ghetto, The Pianist!8 One can only conclude from such remarks that an alarmingly high percentage of Europeans believe that there really is some such “lobby” and that persons of Jewish ancestry necessarily perceive their interests as Jews and not simply as individuals or as citizens of their respective states or, for that matter, amidst myriad other social and personal connections.

The European elites bear a heavy responsibility in this regard, for it is their own manifest indulgence of and indeed in the classical motifs of “Jewish conspiracy” theories — notably with regard to Middle East politics and their criticisms of American foreign policy — that will have made the specific choice of Jews as scapegoats seem quite legitimate. The American public got a hint of this style of discourse in September of last year when William Safire in the New York Times (September 19, 2002) cited Rudolf Scharping, Germany’s former minister of defense, as explaining President Bush’s eagerness to oust Saddam Hussein by the influence of “a powerful — perhaps overly powerful — Jewish lobby.” It is interesting to note that, when Scharping sent a letter of denial to the Times (October 4, 2002), he disowned “blaming American Jews” for the Bush administration’s Iraq policy but went on to refer to the “understandable” interests of American Jews as being somehow especially germane to the issue. Since Scharping, like the government he lately represented, was radically opposed to any military intervention in Iraq, this amounted to a rather feeble rhetorical attempt to square the circle. As an empirical matter, furthermore, he would have had to look no further than the pages of, say, a Tikkun magazine to find American Jews and even self-styled Zionists who were as hostile to the administration’s Iraq policy as he was himself. But it is precisely the peculiarity of anti-Semitism as an ideology to efface the empirical diversity of individuals and to conceive Jews as acting everywhere en bloc.

The denouement to the controversy surrounding Gretta Duisenberg’s Palestinian flag is similarly revealing. Mrs. Duisenberg is the wife of Wim Duisenberg, the outgoing president of the European Central Bank. Having, on her own account, carried the flag in a pro-Palestinian rally in mid-April 2002 — a rally at which, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, slogans like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas!” were chanted — she then proceeded to hang it from the balcony of the Duisenberg family home in Amsterdam. When, some weeks later, Jewish neighbors called Mrs. Duisenberg to object to the presence of the flag and ask her to remove it, she is supposed to have deflected their objections with the observation that “rich Jews” are responsible for “the oppression of the Palestinian people.” This is at least how Mrs. Duisenberg was quoted in the Dutch press, based on the reports of the neighbors in question.

At this point she took matters into her own hands, going public with her account of the conversation in order to avoid any possible misunderstandings. Here again, the ostensible denial speaks more voluminously and thereby more damningly about the mindset of contemporary European elites than the original quotation. “I did not say that rich Jews,” Mrs. Duisenberg explained, “but rather that the rich Jewish lobby in America maintains the oppression of the Palestinians. Every president who is elected and who wants to be reelected must do what this lobby wants.” Her critics “will have to come up with something better than childishly accusing me of being guilty of anti-Semitism,” she added defiantly, confident that the addition of the noun “lobby” had cleared her of any such suspicion.9 In today’s Europe the presumption that the American presidency is hostage to a “rich Jewish lobby” is apparently supposed to be not a symptom of submission to archetypal anti-Semitic phantasms, but rather a sign of lucidity.

Finally, consider the observations on American foreign policy of Otto von Habsburg, heir to the defunct Habsburg monarchy and long-time member of the European Parliament representing Bavaria’s Christian Social Union. Interviewed last November by the Austrian weekly Zur Zeit, Habsburg declared the Pentagon to be “today a Jewish institution,” and thereby explained the then-pending threat to Iraq. In making such an association, Habsburg’s comments were not in fact much different from those of Scharping or Duisenberg. It was, however, in his more comprehensive and fine-grained analysis of the American conjuncture that Habsburg showed some real originality. More fully, this is what he said: “If we consider America’s internal politics, then we find that it is split in two halves. On the one hand, the Defense Department, in which the key positions are held by Jews; the Pentagon is today a Jewish institution. On the other hand, the blacks are in the State Department: for instance, Colin Powell or especially Condoleezza Rice. It is an internal conflict between hawks and doves. Currently, the Anglo-Saxons, that’s to say the white Americans, are playing a relatively minor role.” Far from earning the opprobrium of the European elites and the European media for such overtly racist (not to mention rather demented) remarks, just days after making them Habsburg was being celebrated by the European institutions and in the European press on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. Munich’s Suddeutschezeitung, for instance, ran a profile, describing, among other things, “a reception and ceremony in the Hofburg [the former imperial residence in Vienna], where Otto von Habsburg made a speech in French and German — extemporaneously as always — in honor of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, by whom he had previously been lauded.” Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president, was at the time chairman of the recently concluded European convention charged with drafting a “constitution” for the European Union. The article noted that Habsburg was soon thereafter off to yet another birthday party, this one in the Gödölö Palace in Budapest: “he is, after all, by blood also Magyar.”

The mobilization against the Iraq war has permitted such associations — of Jews, “hawks,” the Pentagon, and so on — to gain a still firmer and broader footing in the collective European psyche or what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has celebrated as an emergent “European public opinion.” Indeed, a string of remarkably similar articles that appeared in many of the leading organs of the European press last spring served to condense all the associated terms into a single term: “neo-conservatives.” A story that appeared in London’s Financial Times under the title “America’s Democratic Imperialists” (March 5, 2003) is exemplary of the genre. While adopting the register of “some people say” and affecting to nuance the claims of “leftwing demonology,” the article traced the origins of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy to a clique of “neo-conservatives” in and around the White House. Elaborating on the history of “neo-conservatism,” the authors explained that “Most of the first generation of neo-conservatives were Jewish; just about all of the later neocons were.” Interestingly, the alleged internal opposition to the “neocon” faction in the White House was supposed to be provided by none other than Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice — here gropingly identified as “realists” rather than “blacks” — and, furthermore, in complete harmony with Otto von Habsburg’s account, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and John Bolton — in effect, the presumptive “white Americans” or “Anglo-Saxons” — were explicitly set apart from the “neocons.” On the very same day as the Financial Times story appeared, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was cited in the French weekly Le Canard Enchaîné denouncing a “pro-Zionist lobby” in the Bush administration supposed to consist of Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Richard Perle — all three also mentioned by name in the Financial Times article.

If one reflects on the examples here cited, the diversity of the political currents from which they stem is striking. When it comes to suspecting shadowy “Jewish” forces behind dastardly American policies, Christian Democrats like Habsburg and Social Democrats like Scharping are apparently in perfect agreement. As ravings about the machinations of Mossad, on the other hand, have become the stock in trade of what might be called the extra-parliamentary European left, as exemplified by a José Bové, one is left wondering what the great fuss was supposed to be about last spring as the French National Front leader and reputed racist and anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen made some modest gains in the French presidential elections. Especially in light of their highly orchestrated quality, it is difficult not to suspect that the mass demonstrations called by “the left” ostensibly to prevent what was in any case a virtual impossibility (viz., a Le Pen victory in the second round of the elections) served more effectively as eyewash to obscure the extent to which anti-Semitism and a certain sort of racism (on which, more below) have installed themselves very much in the mainstream of European political discourse. In this sense, the French mobilization against Le Pen served much the same function of ritualized purging as the German campaign against Möllemann. Toddlers could be viewed at the Paris demonstration, for instance, bearing signs reading “Down with the National Front!” — prompting more jaded observers to mutter in response: “Down with the exploitation of children.”

The examples are also revealing of the manner in which the prevailing anti-Semitism in Europe forms a system with the typically more openly avowed anti-Americanism. On a popular level, this gets crudely and symptomatically expressed by the allusions to Coca-Cola and McDonald’s — those icons of supposedly “Americanized” globalization — that are a virtually constant feature of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli demonstrations and discourse in Europe. In May 2002, this author was himself witness to a pro-Palestinian rally in Paris’s Barbès district, during which the main speaker delivered a head-spinning harangue alleging that every hamburger purchased at McDonald’s creates revenues for the Israeli state which are in turn used to purchase tanks to kill Palestinian children. The conclusion that inevitably followed was that McDonald’s — and other likewise “Jewish” (sic) chains — had to be boycotted. As leftist trade unions and Jose Bové’s Confederation of French Farmers have, with various pretexts and at various times, called for just such action, their campaign against the “American fast-food giant” was now invested with the aspect of a veritable “Jewish boycott.” The comparison, it must be said, in light of the methods employed by the leftist groups — including vandalism, intimidation of customers, and the spreading of bizarre atrocity stories (one McDonald’s manager was accused, for instance, of intentionally locking an employee in a freezer) — did not seem wholly inappropriate. As it happens, it was just days after the Barbès rally that the Israeli embassy in Paris went up in flames in a fire that the French authorities immediately called accidental — even though the Parisian police admitted nearly a week later to having not yet inspected the grounds.

A poster displayed at an “anti-war” demonstration last October in Berlin provided a graphically condensed version of the same “theory” developed by the Barbès orator. On it was depicted a Big Mac with a dead baby in place of the hamburger meat, a bullet hole through its stomach. The words “Made in Israel” were written under the illustration.10 A still more fevered expression of analogous phantasms, shorn even of the real pretext of the Middle East conflict, was recently observable on the streets of Paris in the form of a sticker featuring the phrase “Sida sans frontières” (“aids without Borders”). This is a play on the formula adopted by various ngos, such as “Doctors without Borders” or “Reporters without Borders.” Above the phrase were three symbols: a dollar sign, a star of David, and a hammer and sickle. Thus, apparently America and Jews are supposed somehow to be responsible for the global aids crisis. One could hardly imagine a more extreme, or more convoluted, vehicle of demonization. The bizarre addition of the hammer and sickle ominously recalls Nazi propaganda, which alternately — or indeed seemingly all at once — made Jews the purveyors of “Anglo-Saxon” mercantile interests and of Bolshevism. Here the hammer and sickle was presumably meant to connote Communist China, which by virtue of recent reports of its own struggles with the aids virus is seemingly supposed to form part of the aids-spreading global syndicate. In lieu of the “Judeo-Bolshevik-Anglo-Saxon” conspiracy of yore, we have an apparently “Judeo-Sino-American” conspiracy of today.



A “law of ethnic groups”

There is one final regard in which Habsburg’s comments are especially representative of a more general feature of contemporary European politics, one which may in fact hold the key to the entire problem of anti-Semitism in Europe. Although the American public has remained almost entirely in the dark about this, the process of European integration has been characterized by a gradual, so to speak, “ethnicization” of political discourse and political life in the countries belonging to the European Union or which are expected to join in the near future. The introduction of “ethnic groups” as virtual actors in political life has taken place largely under the innocuous-sounding covers of “regionalism” and “minority rights.” The traditional states of Europe are supposed to be inhabited, apart from the members of their “majority” nations, by those of any number of other “nationalities” or “national minorities,” each reputedly concentrated in regions to which they are “autochthonous” and some being in principle just “branches” of the “majority” nation of a neighboring state. As they are evidently not constituted by political membership in the state — or, in other words, by the citizenship of their countries of residence, which the putative members of these “national minorities” in any case hold — such “nationalities” must, then, be conceived in “ethnic” terms, that is, as being constituted by real or imagined commonalities of “culture” and ancestry. The project of developing a “law of ethnic groups” (in German, “Volksgruppenrecht”), as championed by ngos such as the Federal Union of European Nationalities (fuen), is meant to provide a legal framework taking appropriate account of this supposedly at once ethnological and political fact, if necessary by relativizing or even amending the structures and borders of existing states. Proposals emanating from the fuen and kindred organizations have already influenced the development of European norms as embodied in documents like the European Charter on Minority and Regional Languages and the Framework Convention on Minority Rights.

In the past decade, the Balkans have served as a kind of laboratory for the “law of ethnic groups.” Largely through the “good offices” of the Council of Europe, systems of government have been devised and are in the process of being implemented that compel parliamentarians and government officials to act, in effect, as the guardians of the interests of their putative “ethnicities.” Ethnic Croat officials in Bosnia are thus supposed to represent “Croat interests,” or ethnic Albanian officials in Macedonia “Albanian interests,” and so on. The so-called Annan Plan for the reunification of Cyprus, devised in consultation with European officials and incorporating existing European norms in anticipation of Cyprus’s accession to the eu, exhibits analogous features. While it promises the administrative “reunification” of the island, it would in fact guarantee a permanent spatial and institutional segregation of the island’s residents within their respective ethnic “communities.” A European politician no less influential than Peter Glotz, who was the German representative to Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s “Constitutional Convention” for much of its existence, has not hesitated to propose forms of ethnic-national representation as an appropriate substitute for the principle of “one man-one vote” throughout Europe. Not coincidentally, the Social Democrat Glotz is, along with Otto von Habsburg, one of the founding members of another influential ethnicist think tank, the Munich-based International Institute for Ethnic-Group Rights and Regionalism (intereg). The racist dementia reflected in Otto von Habsburg’s supposition that Paul Wolfowitz represents Jews or Condoleezza Rice represents “blacks” is, in short, a dementia with which Europe as a whole is increasingly afflicted — so severely that it is attempting to translate its affliction into political practice.

What has this to do with Europe’s recent Jewish problems? Well, everything here hinges on the notion of “autochthoneity.” As noted, according to the advocates of a Europe of regions and ethnicities, a European nation or nationality must be “autochthonous” — meaning presumably that members of it have lived on the European continent for a very, very long time — and be concentrated (i.e., its members must be concentrated) in some “relatively well-demarcated traditional area of settlement.” Jews obviously, at least as they are usually viewed, meet neither of these criteria. In the terminology of the “law of ethnic groups,” they are not “autochthonous” but rather “allochthonous” or, more simply put, foreign. The same goes for the members of more recent immigrant groups, such as Turks or Algerians, who, inasmuch as they are “allochthons,” are likewise conspicuously excluded from the protections laid down by the European conventions on “minority rights.”

On May 12 of last year, as a group of 15 young beurs assaulted five Jewish teenagers on a soccer field in the Val de Marne near Paris, they are reported to have shouted the following insults: “Dirty Jews! Go back to your country! You’re not in your land!” Apparently unconsciously, the North African youth expressed what is becoming a most European point of view. Nor were they cognizant, it seems, of how easily their words could be turned against them. Indeed, whereas in 2002 most of the targets of racist violence in France were Jewish, most of the non-Jewish targets were North African or Arab. Contrary, however, to what one would be led to believe by the standard leftist vision of European racism, relatively few of the “anti-Muslim” attacks occurred on continental French territory and even fewer were attributable to the so-called extreme right (e.g., supporters of the National Front or its splinter parties). Fully 61 percent of the reported “anti-Muslim” attacks (45 out of 74 incidents, according to the statistics published by the cncdh) occurred on the little island of Corsica, where slogans like “Corsica for the Corsicans” and “Arabs get out” — as well as “French get out,” for that matter — have wide currency as graffiti and in political pamphlets. Corsican nationalist groups explicitly claimed responsibility for many of the attacks.

This is highly significant, for the greatest “beneficiaries” of the new ethnically inflected European “regionalism” in the French context have been precisely the Corsican nationalists. With the tacit support of the European institutions and the more conspicuous support of the French Greens, Corsican nationalists have been able to win concessions from the central government on devolving powers to local institutions as well as legal recognition of the island’s “cultural specificity” (though it is by no means obvious, as the outcome of the recent referendum in Corsica illustrates, that a majority of the island’s population supports either of these goals). Judging by the words and deeds of the nationalists, the preservation of such “cultural specificity” excludes the assimilation of “allochthons.” A recent “anti-Muslim” tract that circulated in Corsica referred to the “incompatibility of two communities that everything separates living together on the same land.” An earlier tract warned that “non-indigenous persons [les allogènes] should know that this land will never belong to them.”



The danger for European Jews

European “regionalism” and the “law of ethnic groups” represent a threat to Jews. They convert an individual’s “Jewishness” from a private matter of personal history (or, indeed, pre-history) into a matter of public interest. The fine-grained ethnic survey of Europe’s national populations recently co-authored by former fuen president (and current director of the South Tirolean Ethnic Group Institute) Christoph Pan makes this perfectly clear.11 As a result of this sort of exercise, “Jews” are set apart from the populations among which they live as being somehow significantly different and furthermore, to the extent that they are “allochthonous,” as “not belonging.”

All of this amounts, in effect, to a renaissance of the “blood and soil” ideology whose disastrous consequences for Jews and other “non-indigenous” persons in Europe in the past century are well enough known. Indeed, in Greek mythology, the “autochthons” are literally those who spring directly from the soil. Not surprisingly, some of the pioneers of a European “law of ethnic groups” in the 1930s were Nazi legal theorists. Several of them were successfully rehabilitated after the war and substantially contributed to the founding of the fuen and the intereg.12 To take but one example, Theodor Veiter, the longtime editor of the fuen organ Europa Ethnica, wrote in a 1938 study on “national autonomy” that “The destructive questioning of the highest human values . . . by Jewry shows that Jews are already excluded from the ethnic-national life of other nations by virtue of their mode of thought, which flows precisely from their race, and that they should therefore be excluded from the other nations.”

The dangers represented by a resurgent ethnicist or ethnic-national ideology for Jews in Europe are especially grave in light of the simultaneous resurgence, under the banner of “anti-globalization,” of a vaguely “leftist” ideology that stigmatizes cosmopolitanism — that traditional marker of the “uprooted,” “wandering” Jew in the anti-Semitic Weltanschauung — and blames the “anonymous power” of financial markets — that most important channel of supposed “Jewish influence” according to the same — for much of the world’s problems. This is not to say, of course, that every criticism of the functioning of financial markets or of free trade is automatically to be regarded as anti-Semitic. But it is to say that given the historical affinities between the critique of economic liberalism and traditional anti-Semitism, and given the highly under-theorized, largely “spontaneous” character of the anti-globalization movement, it is not surprising that classical anti-Semitic stereotypes will frequently fill the intellectual void and endow the ubiquitous but dimly perceived “capitalist” enemy with a well-known “ethnic” incarnation. It is not for nothing, after all, that August Bebel described anti-Semitism already in the nineteenth century as the “socialism of fools.”

Notes

1 “Das lange Schweigen der Mitwisser,” Berliner Zeitung (May 31, 2003). On the witness stand, Nicole B. would then deny that Marcel S. had made these remarks. Nicole B. is, incidentally, an ex-girlfriend of Marcel’s elder brother Marco and is charged in a separate case with having been an accomplice of Marco in an attack on an African asylum seeker. The Berliner Zeitung reported (May 21, 2003) that she herself threatened another potential witness from Potzlow that “if you say anything, then I’m going to stomp you and let you rot like the Jew.”

2 “Agression antisémite contre une étudiante,” Le Figaro (March 13, 2003).

3 The Ministry of the Interior reported some 1,624 anti-Semitic incidents for 2001. See “Weniger politisch motivierte Straftaten in Deutschland,” Deutsche Press Agentur (May 14, 2002).

4 “Gequält, erniedrigt, erschlagen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (May 27, 2003).

5 The comment was made on May 16 in an interview with the German public television channel ZDF. See the documentation of the “Möllemann Affair” assembled by the Mitteldeutschen Rundfunk at http://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/...und-427278.html (http://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/137198-hintergrund-427278.html).

6 The survey was conducted by the Forsa Institute for the weekly paper die Woche, which published the results in its December 24, 1998 edition. This is not to say, of course, that every such response can be regarded without further ado as an index of the anti-Semitism of the respondent. But even in the most well-intended of cases, it would seem at least to be symptomatic of an odd sort of involuntary negationsm.

7 This according to a study conducted by the Emnid Institute. The results of the Emnid study are summarized in two consecutive issues of Der Spiegel (January 13, 1992 and January 20, 1992).

8 My thanks to Loukia Richards for relating this anecdote.

9 Deniz Yücel, “Palituch am Dekolleté,” Jungle World (June 5, 2002).

10 A photograph of the poster can be viewed at http://www.dki.antifa.net/foto/20021026/index.html.

11 Christoph Pan and Beate Sibylle Pfeil, Die Volksgruppen in Europa: Ein Handbuch (Vienna: Braunmüller, 2000).

12 For details, see Walter von Goldendach, Hans-Rüdiger Minow, and Martin Rudig, Von Krieg zu Krieg (Berlin: Verlag 8. Mai, 1996).

[Rat Faced]

Strange that they go to all this length about the banning of Kosher slaughter, and how its anti-semitism.......but dont mention at all that the halaal meat is also being banned... ie the meat eaten by Muslims.

The above is about cruelty to animals, thats all... there are minimum standards allowed in the slaughterhouses and both these fall short of them.


As to Germany cutting off arms sales to Israel..well, the Human Rights abuses by that country have been upsetting the Germans for years. The final straw is probably because of a certain wall that a is being built....much like the one that the Germans spent so long trying to tear down...

I hope the UK joins the Germans in the banning of Arms Sales to Israel.

And no, that is not anti-semitism...I would welcome the ban of Arms Sales to any country that used them in such a way. Much as i approved of banning Arms sales to Iraq and Iran.

[Skillian]

11,000 words? :o That's longer than my uni dissertation has to be.

Some interesting points in there, although there are a few descriptions of isolated events that don't necessarily indicate a wider tide of anti-semetism.

To be honest, where I live in the UK I see a lot more discrimination towards muslims than jews. I would say all kinds of religious discrimination seems to be on the increase, a sad fact.

[Rat Faced]

Anyone caught plastering swastikas around in Germany is asking for trouble.

They are well and truly f***ed if they are caught. For obvious reasons, Germany has the strictest Laws in Europe regarding Nazism....

[ilw]

that is just tooo loong

Just replying to the first point in the first post, looking at the countries mentioned as not allowing cruel killing of animals, I can say that I'm not surprised and that I believe that the bans have nothing to do with anti-semitism. ( Switzerland, Sweden & Holland).

I'm not gonna comment on the rest, cos i didn't really read it all, this caught my eye though

The location of the attack, furthermore, gives the lie to the supposition, frequently reproduced in the American media, that xenophobia and anti-Semitism are somehow a specifically eastern German problem and thereby a legacy of communist rule.
Right wing extremists are more common in the former East Germany, I don't think its got anything to do with communism, there is however a strong correlation between unemployment,(&poverty) and racism. Its not really specifically anti-semitism though, I think a lot more of the anger & abuse is directed at the large number of turkish and kurdish immigrants.
Overall i personally haven't really noticed any rise in anti-semitism or racism, but I would guess the rise in anti-Muslim sentiment after Sept 11, plus the Iraq war, and the Israel - Palestine thing would in some places give rise to sympathy for Muslims and some backlash against jews.

[Billy_Dean]

Does anyone know exactly how these animals are slaughtered? I was led to believe they had their throats cut and bled to death. Is that the case?


:)

[J'Pol]

Originally posted by Billy_Dean@14 November 2003 - 19:10
Does anyone know exactly how these animals are slaughtered? I was led to believe they had their throats cut and bled to death. Is that the case?


:)
Halal Meyhod -slaughtered by making a swift, deep incision with a sharp knife on the neck cutting the jugular veins and carotid arteries of both sides; as also the trachea and oesophagus.

[Rat Faced]

I think Kosher is the same method..

There is also a movement to ban in the UK (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2977086.stm), of which im all in favour.

All that is being removed in Europe is the exemption to Jews/Muslims to stun the animals prior to slaughter, as far as im aware.

I dont think anyone is saying you cannot kill them like this...just they must be unconsious/stunned first.

[Kunal]

Originally posted by Billy_Dean@14 November 2003 - 18:10
Does anyone know exactly how these animals are slaughtered?
there throats are cut and the blood is let to drip out >_<

the whole concept behind halal and kosher meats is that it is harmless to the animal itself, so isnt the concept behind stunning a bit stupid :unsure:

(i havent read all the post, to lazy to)

[J'Pol]

Originally posted by Rat Faced@14 November 2003 - 20:59
I think Kosher is the same method..

There is also a movement to ban in the UK (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2977086.stm), of which im all in favour.

All that is being removed in Europe is the exemption to Jews/Muslims to stun the animals prior to slaughter, as far as im aware.

I dont think anyone is saying you cannot kill them like this...just they must be unconsious/stunned first.
One has to say that the "exemption" appears to be political correctness run mad.

I would suggest that if I applied to the local council / police to slaughter an animal a day, by cutting it&#39;s throat and letting it bleed to death then they may just send the RSPCA (http://www.rspca.org.uk/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=RSPCA/News/NewsFeature) to visit me.

I would also suggest that I would be prosecuted for some sort of cruelty offence. However if it is done in the name of culture / religion or whatever, then the normal rules do not apply.

I am all for equality. To me it means the same rules apply to everyone, regardless of ....

[MediaSlayer]

Originally posted by Rat Faced@14 November 2003 - 17:07
Strange that they go to all this length about the banning of Kosher slaughter, and how its anti-semitism.......but dont mention at all that the halaal meat is also being banned... ie the meat eaten by Muslims.


1st rule of Judenhass- When a discussion arises wherein you must defend your anti-semitic agenda, mention muslims/arabs often. This diverts attention away from the main issue, which is helpful for many reasons. The main one being it buys some time in which to react to the attacks on the agenda and plan for a counter-attack.

Some comments:
I don&#39;t hate Muslims, they are closely related to us genetically. However, the reason that the ban on Muslim meat is of somewhat lower significance is simple. The powers of Europe don&#39;t have a problem with muslims, therefore any talk of any anti-muslim conspiracies is a little far fetched. They don&#39;t see Muslims as a threat, or at least the wrong kind of threat, so there is no need to try to subjugate them. I&#39;m not talking about terrorism here. Can you really blame Jews for being suspicious after the holocaust(burnt offering)? Banning Muslim meat is not some "foot in the door" for some as yet realized anti-muslim movement. Can you say the same about the ban on Jewish meat?

[QUOTE]I would welcome the ban of Arms Sales to any country that used them in such a way.[QUOTE]

Don&#39;t make me laugh, Rat Faced. Are you gonna ban arms sales to your own country too? I&#39;ve spent many a nights listening to drunken ramblings by Irishmen talking about what your country did to them. I guess all of them were lying. Oh but I&#39;m sure you&#39;ll try to tell me you&#39;re not really english, or you had an irish grandfather so you "really feel" their pain. At any rate, I think it was a silly statement. Does anyone agree with me? Oh wait, Rat Faced is a mod, so it&#39;s not allowed to attack his agenda openly, otherwise you might get in trouble. So how about that poll (http://www.klboard.ath.cx/index.php?showtopic=79136&st=0) Rat Faced? IS facism dead or not?

Also, religion and politics are like oil and water. They don&#39;t mix. At various times, people have tried to mix them, and the results were bizzare. If it wasn&#39;t such a complicated subject, I would comment more, but I don&#39;t want to hijack the thread.

@everyone-I didn&#39;t really have time to digest this thread completely. I wrote this post in great haste, I&#39;m going out for a little while to eat dinner. If I was overly harsh, I apoligize. If I wasn&#39;t harsh enough, I apoligize. I am eager to hear what everyone has to say about this, even Billy Dean. :lol: See you all later.

[Billy_Dean]

Don&#39;t bring me into your racist bloody agenda you filthy jew&#33;&#33; ;)


:P

[junkyardking]

I dont why they are banning this except for maybe racist motives, the Muslim and Jewish tradtions are far better and less cruel for the animal resulting in a quick death than say an abatoir,
In an abatoir they hang them upside down stun/drug which works some of the time but can often lead animals to suffer.

Chicken factorys are the worst they hang them upside down and there heads get choped off all on a automated conveyer belt but what happens is some chickens hold there head to avoid the blades and get bits cut off and suffer before going thought the other processes that well an truly kill them.

Seems like racism to me. ;)

As for not selling arms to Israel, i would do the same as well the berlin wall pales into comparison to the Israel wall.

[Billy_Dean]

Originally posted by junkyardking@15 November 2003 - 12:48
I dont why they are banning this except for maybe racist motives, the Muslim and Jewish tradtions are far better and less cruel for the animal resulting in a quick death than say an abatoir,
In an abatoir they hang them upside down stun/drug which works some of the time but can often lead animals to suffer.

Chicken factorys are the worst they hang them upside down and there heads get choped off all on a automated conveyer belt but what happens is some chickens hold there head to avoid the blades and get bits cut off and suffer before going thought the other processes that well an truly kill them.

Seems like racism to me. ;)
Have you ever seen an animal have it&#39;s throat cut?


:)

[junkyardking]

Originally posted by Billy_Dean+15 November 2003 - 02:52--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Billy_Dean @ 15 November 2003 - 02:52)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-junkyardking@15 November 2003 - 12:48
I dont why they are banning this except for maybe racist motives, the Muslim and Jewish tradtions are far better and less cruel for the animal resulting in a quick death than say an abatoir,
In an abatoir they hang them upside down stun/drug which works some of the time but can often lead animals to suffer.

Chicken factorys are the worst they hang them upside down and there heads get choped off all on a automated conveyer belt but what happens is some chickens hold there head to avoid the blades and get bits cut off and suffer before going thought the other processes that well an truly kill them.

Seems like racism to me. ;)
Have you ever seen an animal have it&#39;s throat cut?


:) [/b][/quote]
Ever been to an abattoir?

While they claim to ban this because of Animal cruelty they have no trouble with animals being experimented in laboratories, also doesn’t stop people from hunting which if you don’t get a clear shot can result in alot of suffering for the animal.

Also I am reminded of a recent study that fish actually feel pain, yet I don’t see that getting banned either.
<_<

[Billy_Dean]

Ever been to an abattoir?

Yes. I&#39;ve also seen animals killed by having their throats cut open.

This has nothing to do with hunting. Condemning one does not mean you condone the other.


:)

[echidna]

why is it not couched as &#39;jewish and moslem ritual slaughter rights threatened&#39;?

the most virilent right wing activity i see in todays world is in the usa and israel and their close allies
and it is being perpetrated by the state and establishment
who are at least acting like extremists

and i concur with Rat Faced

:: that post was awful
quotation of external sources sould be contextualised, linked and if really long condenced [indicated by elipsces &#39;...&#39;]
all i have to see of the poster is a regugitation of a [badly referenced] collection of media clippings on a single issue,
there is no articulation of the posters own view only their reproduction of others published views

the complete lack of format made reading that a hideous experience :angry:

[MediaSlayer]

Originally posted by Billy_Dean@15 November 2003 - 01:53
Don&#39;t bring me into your racist bloody agenda you filthy jew&#33;&#33;&nbsp; ;)


:P
I guess I should be very offended at Billy Dean&#39;s openly racist comment, but for some reason I&#39;m not. Maybe its because I have a good evening out on the town, which was just what I needed to unwind from the day. However, some readers might not be so forgiving towards your silliness. The person that started this (http://www.klboard.ath.cx/index.php?showtopic=81124) thread for instance. I&#39;m beginning to think that racism IS allowed on the forum, so long as its politically correct racism, such as anti-semitism. There are other threads wherein people have been being racist, calling people "towelheads" and similar names. I don&#39;t think that is very helpful to anyone. Although I didn&#39;t save all the links, I can provide on or two for people reading this that may want proof that those things were being said on this forum. I don&#39;t think it will be needed though.

[Billy_Dean]

How was that racist? Since when were jews a race? If I&#39;d called you a catholic would that have been racist? It seems like there is one set of rules for jews, and one set for everyone else.

BTW, if I&#39;d meant that to be offensive, I wouldn&#39;t have put a wink after it.


:)

[MediaSlayer]

hehe nice. It&#39;s out of my hands, I don&#39;t really care. I&#39;m not a mod nor will I ever be, nor would they let me. If no one finds it offensive, nothing will happen. If lots of people think it was inappropriate, including the mods, something might happen. Either way, I don&#39;t care very much. It&#39;s out of my hands. Entrapment is a tool, yes Billy it is. Unfortunately it won&#39;t work with me. I&#39;m not gonna flame you. Get over it, and tell your "friends" to do the same.

[Billy_Dean]

Originally posted by MediaSlayer@15 November 2003 - 17:11
hehe nice. It&#39;s out of my hands, I don&#39;t really care. I&#39;m not a mod nor will I ever be, nor would they let me. If no one finds it offensive, nothing will happen. If lots of people think it was inappropriate, including the mods, something might happen. Either way, I don&#39;t care very much. It&#39;s out of my hands. Entrapment is a tool, yes Billy it is. Unfortunately it won&#39;t work with me. I&#39;m not gonna flame you. Get over it, and tell your "friends" to do the same.
You really do have a bad inferiority complex don&#39;t you? Or is it a perceived persecution complex? And who are my friends? The "Illuminati"?


:)

[MediaSlayer]

Originally posted by Billy_Dean@15 November 2003 - 07:17
The "Illuminati"?


:)
no comment ;)


/sarcasm off



Or is it a perceived persecution complex?

your feeble attempts at humour are so bad they are good :P :lol: :lol:

[Billy_Dean]

Well I&#39;m happy to have temporarily brightened up your sad little life.

Let me know if there&#39;s anything more I can do to ease your burden.


:)

[MediaSlayer]

well, you could start by not being so racist so things like this (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20031115/ap_on_re_mi_ea/turkey_explosion&cid=540&ncid=716) won&#39;t happen.

[J'Pol]

I found it offensive.

To describe someone as a "filthy Jew" and then pretend that it is okay because you placed a wee face symbol after your comment is not, in my opinion acceptable behavior.

Your offensive comments based on race, religion and sexuality are becoming more commonplace. Unfortunately this is desensitizing people, including the mods, to them.

[Billy_Dean]

Originally posted by J&#39;Pol@15 November 2003 - 19:44
Your offensive comments based on race, religion and sexuality are becoming more commonplace. Unfortunately this is desensitizing people, including the mods, to them.
Oh, really? My, my, I am a naughty boy aren&#39;t I?

If this were coming from anyone other than you two I might take notice. But feel free to gang up, neither of you are much on your own.





:)

[ilw]

Everyone calm down. It was a racist comment, and arguing that jews are not a race is basically semantics (and incorrect)

While they claim to ban this because of Animal cruelty they have no trouble with animals being experimented in laboratories, also doesn’t stop people from hunting which if you don’t get a clear shot can result in alot of suffering for the animal.

I can see that the same principle could be applied to hunting, but not really to scientific experiments. The law in question is all about stopping unnecessary cruelty and I&#39;m sure most countries have laws stopping unnecessary cruelty in medical experiments as well. The reason its probably not applied to hunting is because hunting has a large support base in these countries whereas kosher slaughter doesn&#39;t, I&#39;m sure the animal rights activists that managed to ban kosher would happily ban hunting if they could. Its probably more a case of people who like animals doing what they can, rather than a spiteful attack on jews.

As for the rise in racism, I think thats just a product of the increasingly multi-cultural nature of many countries in Europe. I&#39;m confident it&#39;ll pass with time, though I don&#39;t think thats an excuse for complacence. I don&#39;t feel theres any particular focus on anti-semitism and i don&#39;t think its really worth singling out.

[Rat Faced]

Originally posted by MediaSlayer+15 November 2003 - 01:30--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (MediaSlayer &#064; 15 November 2003 - 01:30)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-Rat Faced@14 November 2003 - 17:07
Strange that they go to all this length about the banning of Kosher slaughter, and how its anti-semitism.......but dont mention at all that the halaal meat is also being banned... ie the meat eaten by Muslims.

1st rule of Judenhass- When a discussion arises wherein you must defend your anti-semitic agenda, mention muslims/arabs often. This diverts attention away from the main issue, which is helpful for many reasons. The main one being it buys some time in which to react to the attacks on the agenda and plan for a counter-attack.

Some comments:
I don&#39;t hate Muslims, they are closely related to us genetically. However, the reason that the ban on Muslim meat is of somewhat lower significance is simple. The powers of Europe don&#39;t have a problem with muslims, therefore any talk of any anti-muslim conspiracies is a little far fetched. They don&#39;t see Muslims as a threat, or at least the wrong kind of threat, so there is no need to try to subjugate them. I&#39;m not talking about terrorism here. Can you really blame Jews for being suspicious after the holocaust(burnt offering)? Banning Muslim meat is not some "foot in the door" for some as yet realized anti-muslim movement. Can you say the same about the ban on Jewish meat?


I would welcome the ban of Arms Sales to any country that used them in such a way.

Don&#39;t make me laugh, Rat Faced. Are you gonna ban arms sales to your own country too? I&#39;ve spent many a nights listening to drunken ramblings by Irishmen talking about what your country did to them. I guess all of them were lying. Oh but I&#39;m sure you&#39;ll try to tell me you&#39;re not really english, or you had an irish grandfather so you "really feel" their pain. At any rate, I think it was a silly statement. Does anyone agree with me? Oh wait, Rat Faced is a mod, so it&#39;s not allowed to attack his agenda openly, otherwise you might get in trouble. So how about that poll (http://www.klboard.ath.cx/index.php?showtopic=79136&st=0) Rat Faced? IS facism dead or not?

Also, religion and politics are like oil and water. They don&#39;t mix. At various times, people have tried to mix them, and the results were bizzare. If it wasn&#39;t such a complicated subject, I would comment more, but I don&#39;t want to hijack the thread.

@everyone-I didn&#39;t really have time to digest this thread completely. I wrote this post in great haste, I&#39;m going out for a little while to eat dinner. If I was overly harsh, I apoligize. If I wasn&#39;t harsh enough, I apoligize. I am eager to hear what everyone has to say about this, even Billy Dean. :lol: See you all later. [/b][/quote]
Could you clear this post up for me?

It appears to imply that you welcome the banning of Halaal slaughter because it is of lesser significance. I&#39;d like you to clear up how "Victimisation" of Muslims is not as important as "Victimisation" of Jews.

I&#39;d also like to know how Judenhass comes into it? I never deflected away from the point that Kosher slaughter is being banned; merely pointed out that Halaal meat is also included, which hadnt even been mentioned in the articles..giving the articles a biased slant.

There are cultures that practice just about everything under the sun, are you saying anything should be allowed in the name of religious freedom? I&#39;d have to disagree. All that is happening is a loophole is being closed, and those that practice this form of slaughter now have to conform to laws that were already in place; but that previously the Jewish and Islamic communities used "Religion" as a reason to feel exempt.



If the UK is commiting Human Rights abuses with weapons sold to them by another country then:

1/ Yes, i&#39;d agree that other countries should stop selling them arms

2/ I&#39;d like to know about it, i&#39;m not exactly a "Yes" person with the Government; and i would object strongly.

If you&#39;ve spoken for long drunken nights with Irishmen, then can you tell me of one occasion we have went into Ireland, as a sovereign nation, to bomb the IRA...and kill their civilians?

The UK has a long Imperial past, and has done many things that are shamefull; just about every other country on the planet has. This includes trying to use Chemical weapons against the Kurds in the 1920&#39;s/30&#39;s.

However we&#39;re talking about 2003 now, not the past.

I dont feel "English" as you have said; and do indeed have Irish ancestors...from both sides of the border. However that is not why i dont feel English, and it has nothing to do with "Feeling their Pain" etc. I dont feel "English" as their is no "Culture" to identify with in the word...its just a place on a Map.

The Scots, Welsh etc all have their own unique culture and identity..the English dont. The North of England has far much more in common with the Scots than they do with the South of England; however i&#39;m not Scottish either. This is why I use "UK" and "British" rather than "English".....ie a recognition of the Multi-Culture total; which I can identify with, rather than the closed "English" which i cant identify with.

Saying "Oh wait, Rat_Faced is a MOD, we cant attack his agenda openly" is hogwash.. I post as me not as the board. Every thing a say is what I think....and every other MOD has their own opinions. I find the implication that i would "Punish" people for disagreeing with me personally offensive, and i would hope that I&#39;d have the support of just about everyone that posts on the board in that.

I&#39;ve had disagreements about many things, with many members... I cant think of any time it has become personal, and that i have used any of these "Powers" in that way...if so, half the Board would be on Moderation at any one time.


Is Fascism dead?

Of course it isnt. There are fascists in just about every culture/country in the world. Its something we must all stand against and fight in whatever form it takes, in my opinion. It is on the increase in many countries in Europe, and in my opinion, in the USA and Israel. I dont feel that any country in Europe is a "Fascist" state however, although there are quite a few Right Wing countries. The fact is, that both Israel and the USA, at the moment, are far more Right Wing than any country in Europe. And both are closer to being a "Fascist" State than any in Europe....neither are, but they are closer (especially Israel).



@ Billy_Dean

Yes, I know it was a Joke. It was however offensive to a generalized group of people, without any detail as to why you believe that is so. In addition, those pictures will be removed.

@ Everyone:

There is a pinned topic in "About our Website"....if you find something offensive...use it, or PM a MOD.

We arent everywhere at once, and dont see all Threads, never mind all Posts. Also, just because the Stats show us to be here, doesnt mean we are, necessarily.


Now Cool it, please.

[J'Pol]

I will happily confirm that RF does not use his position as a mod to enforce his views. Neither does he punish people for disagreeing with him.

RF - I have to disagree.

The British Government (thro&#39; the army and the police) killed Irish civilians. I believe Bloody Sunday was an example, probably the most famous one.

They also beat and tortured people suspected of being involved with terrorist groups.

They used internment, prison without trial. They invaded human liberties on a massive scale.

I know you are a former military man and that you know these things happened, perhaps they were even the norm.

[Rat Faced]

I know J&#39;Pol, and im not proud of that.... just like i&#39;m not Proud that the UK Government bombed Iraq for 10 years, and denied Medical Aid.


If you read the post again though...I was talking of going into Eire after the IRA, bombing the Republic&#39;s civilian population in the hope of "Taking Out" a couple of IRA or similar terrorists.

Thanks for your support.

[J'Pol]

Originally posted by Rat Faced@15 November 2003 - 14:21
I know J&#39;Pol, and im not proud of that....


If you read the post again though...I was talking of going into Eire after the IRA, bombing the Republic&#39;s civilian population in the hope of "Taking Out" a couple of IRA or similar terrorists.

I know you see the situation as being analagous, I do not.

The UK Government sees Ireland, at least the South as an entirely seperate nation. As such to act in the South of Ireland would be no different than to act in France, or Spain. To do that would require permission from the Government within that country.

Both the British and the Irish accept this, they are seperate nations within the EU. The situation in the middle east is not the same. The parties involved have a very different viewpoint on what land belongs to whom.

[Billy_Dean]

We didn&#39;t fire rockets into apartment buildings; we didn&#39;t bulldoze houses in revenge; we didn&#39;t take out cars with helicopter gunships;

What we did do was tackle a hideous group of murderers who indiscriminately targeted civilians, who murdered 3,000+ innocent people. Did you ever go to Ulster during the "troubles"? In my opinion, we didn&#39;t go far enough, we could have taken many more of them out, but it wasn&#39;t politically expedient to do so. The few we took out in Ulster, and the three in Gibraltar, and a couple in Belgium (?) were just the unlucky ones, we could have got a lot more if we&#39;d been allowed. The problem was, we had to operate under a different set of rules to them.

They never allowed human rights to get in their way.


:)

[J'Pol]

The British Government operated using exactly the same rules as the terrorists. They just did some of it covertly. To think otherwise would be to display a degree of naivety which would beggar belief.

They perhaps didn&#39;t publish in the newspapers the black ops which were taking place, or put the stories in the newspapers, but they went on.

To be accurate there were in fact several different groups of murders involved. The British Government may have chosen to concentrate it&#39;s activities more on one than on the rest, however that was not surprising given the background.

That is to say nothing of the points mentioned earlier with regard to internment, torture etc. The people of the North had no human rights under the British Government. Unless you accept imprisonment without trial to be acceptable. I believe (article 6 of) the ECHR has something to say about that.

[Billy_Dean]

Did they plant bombs in public places? Did they blow up pubs? Did they kill 3,000+ innocent victims?

The SAS carried out various "black" ops, as you call them. The IRA claimed 15 of their men were killed in ambushes by the SAS in Ulster, and 5 overseas.


:)

[MediaSlayer]

Originally posted by Rat Faced@15 November 2003 - 13:04

@ Billy_Dean

Yes, I know it was a Joke.
that doesn&#39;t surprise me at all that you know it&#39;s a "joke". I don&#39;t think you will get very many people to agree with you though, it&#39;s just lacks that "funny" that a real joke has. The timing of it, was more like a suicide bombing, than a joke. You mean to tell me it was a coincidence? This very intense thread about anti-semitic feelings in europe and all of a sudden a hateful "joke" about Jews? I&#39;m not that naive, sorry. your agendas are similar, even the way you argue is similar, is it any wonder your sense of humour would be similar?now as for the mod thing...

Oh wait, Rat Faced is a mod, so it&#39;s not allowed to attack his agenda openly, otherwise you might get in trouble. So how about that poll Rat Faced? IS facism dead or not?

i was hinting at something, now i will say it plainly, for all to see and judge. It looks like you condone, or even encourage Billy Dean&#39;s racist agenda by using your position as a mod. that&#39;s what i meant. Does everyone have the right to say what they want, within reason? I guess now we will see, because I am disagreeing with you in a big way. I only started reading your posts recently(one month or so), and as the saying goes "time will tell".

[Billy_Dean]

Is calling me a racist, racist? Is the claim that I am somehow "supported" by RF a claim that he is a racist? If RF condoned and encouraged me, how come he suspended me for what I still claim was a harsh decision?


:)

[Billy_Dean]

I&#39;ve just read back over this thread and if this is what you&#39;d call racist, or anti-semetic, then I think you have a real problem.


:)

[Rat Faced]

How about quoting in context?


@ Billy_Dean

Yes, I know it was a Joke. It was however offensive to a generalized group of people, without any detail as to why you believe that is so. In addition, those pictures will be removed.


Billy meant it as a Joke, that was obvious...however although i recognised that fact, I agreed with you that it was offensive. Its called people skills, if you criticise someone without wishing to escallate a situation, you recognise the intent was not that which was forthcoming.




It looks like you condone, or even encourage Billy Dean&#39;s racist agenda by using your position as a mod. that&#39;s what i meant.&nbsp;


I doubt Billy_Dean would see it that way. He was upset when i put him on Moderation a few weeks ago...hardly the act of someone encouaging and condoning the poster.



Does everyone have the right to say what they want, within reason? I guess now we will see, because I am disagreeing with you in a big way.

Yes, and you wont be the 1st, or the last to disagree with me in a big way.



Its interesting to note that you have yet to answer one question in regard to what started this "Argument" off....

ie: How is the Jewish Religious Rights of Kosher meat more important than the Muslim rights to Halaam?


You are as guilty as Billy in your overt "Racism" in this thread..Im sure you wont see it this way of course...


Just to give a little background...I do a lot of my work in Bensham, Gateshead and have many Jewish friends (it is one of the Largest Jewish Communities in Europe).. I am not anti-Jew, as you appear to want to paint me.

I admit to being "Anti-Israel", even to them...with the meaning literally that i believe the countries policies are making them look as bad, if not worse than the terrorists they are "Defending" themselves from.

I do believe they have every right to exist (although I do not believe that the country did when it was formed) and believe individually Israeli&#39;s/Jews should have exactly the same Rights as anyone else. I also believe that Muslims/Palestinians should have this right...which appears to upset you.

I also do not think that Jews/Muslims or Christians should have any more rights than anyone else, or have exemptions to a general Law of the Land...you appear to think that Jews should have these...

[J'Pol]

Originally posted by Billy_Dean@15 November 2003 - 14:57
Did they plant bombs in public places?&nbsp; Did they blow up pubs?&nbsp; Did they kill 3,000+ innocent victims?&nbsp;

The SAS carried out various "black" ops, as you call them.&nbsp; The IRA claimed 15 of their men were killed in ambushes by the SAS in Ulster, and 5 overseas.


:)
What do you mean as I call them.

You really don&#39;t know what you are talking about if you suggest that the phrase "black ops" is mine. It&#39;s commonly used, tho&#39; perhaps not in the Executive Intelligence Review.

Oh and yes they did plant bombs in public places, or at the very least assist in it being done. Were you not aware of this ?

With regard to the racism thing. We have discussed this elsewhere. To hide your anti-semitic feelings under the pretense of humour does not make it any better. Like you said elsewhere this is just my opinion.

I have never had the same feeling from RF, tho&#39; that is just my perception. He seems to object to certain specific executive action being taken by the State of Israel, as opposed to being anti-Jewish.

[chalice]

Here is a list of deaths in N Ireland and the organisation responsible.


Organisation Responsible for the death.
British Army (BA) 297
British Police (BP) 1
Catholic Reaction Force (CRF) 3
Direct Action Against Drugs (DAAD) 5
Garda Siochana (GS) 4
Irish Army (IA) 1
Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) 113
Irish People&#39;s Liberation Organisation (IPLO) 22
Irish People&#39;s Liberation Organisation Belfast Brigade (IPLOBB) 2
Irish Republican Army (IRA) 1706
Loyalist Retaliation and Defence Group (LRDG) 2
Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) 17
non-specific Loyalist group (LOY) 253
non-specific Republican group (REP) 88
not known (nk) 81
Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) 52
People&#39;s Liberation Army (PLA) 3
People&#39;s Republican Army (PRA) 4
Protestant Action Force (PAF) 37
Protestant Action Group (PAG) 5
real Irish Republican Army (rIRA) 29
Red Hand Commando (RHC) 13
Red Hand Defenders (RHD) 8
Republican Action Force (RepAF) 24
Royal Air Force (RAF) 1
Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) 55
Saor Eire (SE) 3
Ulster Defence Association (UDA) 112
Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) 8
Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) 147
Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) 1
Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) 426
TOTAL 3523.

[Billy_Dean]

Originally posted by JP***+--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (JP***)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>They perhaps didn&#39;t publish in the newspapers the black ops which were taking place, or put the stories in the newspapers, but they went on.[/b]
You really are a pedantic prick at times. I said "as you call them" because that was what you called them.

<!--QuoteBegin-JP***
Oh and yes they did plant bombs in public places, or at the very least assist in it being done. Were you not aware of this ?[/quote]
You have proof of this?

For your information, I am not anti-jewish, I am anti-Israeli. I also believe the state of Israel has a right to exist, now. I don&#39;t believe it did at the beginning. When someone defends Israel because they are jews, and tells me that you cannot seperate the two, that does not make me anti-jewish. But if that&#39;s what you want to believe, who gives a fuck, I certainly don&#39;t.

You are a persistant trouble maker, you look for it, then stir it. Maybe it&#39;s your age, if it is, I commiserate. :)



:)

[J'Pol]

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[MediaSlayer]

:P :P :P :P :P :P :P

[AussieSheila]

;) Suitably intelligent. Just what I would expect MediaSlayer.

B)

[echidna]

now that we have decended about as far as we can

i must voice my protest at the defamitory slandering of Rat Faced&#39;s good name

in my experience RF has always demonstrated a great deal of impatiality while expressing his own opinion, i have never read him presuring the tone of a discussion without stating that offence had been reported
her/his [i think is his but can&#39;t see if you&#39;ve got any hair on yer chin rf :lol: ] voice is one which i highly value reading here

PS well done once again everyone for missing the easily established yet almost universally ignored fact that lebanese and palestinians are semetic amongst others aswell as some jews and some people living in israel [they speak semetic languages (which includes hebrew)]
ergo.
israel acts and has acted anti-semetic(ly), against both of these peoples militarily, clandestinely and through policy.

[hobbes]

The funny thing about this thread is that the original poster was just venting some steam carried over from the previous night. I imagine that he didn&#39;t even read what he posted, as the contents were not important.

The two threads he posted here were in regard to: American bashing (http://www.klboard.ath.cx/index.php?showtopic=81574)

Posted the previous night in the lounge.

I am sure he just Googled these articles and posted them here in an attempt to piss people off. Notice that he has no responses in the thread.

All of this anger provoked by criticism of the word "dramedy". Unbelievable. ;)

[echidna]

Originally posted by hobbes+17 November 2003 - 01:20--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (hobbes &#064; 17 November 2003 - 01:20)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>The funny thing about this thread is that the original poster was just venting some steam carried over from the previous night.&nbsp; I imagine that he didn&#39;t even read what he posted, as the contents were not important.
...
I am sure he just Googled these articles and posted them here in an attempt to piss people off.&nbsp; Notice that he has no responses in the thread.
[/b]i think this is a large part of the problem



<!--QuoteBegin-hobbes@17 November 2003 - 01:20

All of this anger provoked by criticism of the word "dramedy". Unbelievable. ;)[/quote]


madness isn&#39;t it&#33; :blink:
the &#39;if you can do it to me, i can do it to you&#39; agument is particularly purile as a repost to prejudice

:: but it&#39;s started over &#39;dramedy&#39; for christ&#39;s sake, f*%king pathetic ::
uh oh. blasphemy :o

[J'Pol]

Puerile

[Billy_Dean]

Originally posted by J&#39;Pol@17 November 2003 - 03:04
Puerile
Your link doesn&#39;t work JP***


:)

[J'Pol]

Originally posted by Billy_Dean+16 November 2003 - 18:08--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Billy_Dean @ 16 November 2003 - 18:08)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-J&#39;Pol@17 November 2003 - 03:04
Puerile
Your link doesn&#39;t work JP***


:) [/b][/quote]
:lol: :lol: :lol:

[NotoriousBIC]

I think a correction is in order:

The production of kosher meat hasn&#39;t been banned in the Netherlands.
What HAS been banned is the non-profesional slaughter of animals during certain religious activities. (it was unofficially allowed in the past)

What DID happen that a Jewish delegation left a meeting between them and Ministry representatives, stating they were unfairly treated (yes, claiming anti-semitism).

Now, where to find the truth in that I don&#39;t know, but an all-out ban is certainly not the case.

[hobbes]

Originally posted by Billy_Dean+16 November 2003 - 18:08--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Billy_Dean @ 16 November 2003 - 18:08)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin-J&#39;Pol@17 November 2003 - 03:04
Puerile
Your link doesn&#39;t work JP***


:) [/b][/quote]
:lol: :lol: :lol:

I clicked on it, too&#33;

[J'Pol]

Originally posted by hobbes+16 November 2003 - 18:24--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (hobbes &#064; 16 November 2003 - 18:24)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>
Originally posted by Billy_Dean@16 November 2003 - 18:08
<!--QuoteBegin-J&#39;Pol@17 November 2003 - 03:04
Puerile
Your link doesn&#39;t work JP***


:)
:lol: :lol: :lol:

I clicked on it, too&#33;[/b][/quote]
Another sequel which should never have been made, eh Hobbes :P

[hobbes]

Oh, I&#39;m feeling a little queasy now.
http://thepolywog.com/copshootcop/photoalbum/images/pain.jpg

I think I just got bigboabed

[J'Pol]

Originally posted by hobbes@16 November 2003 - 19:13
Oh, I&#39;m feeling a little queasy now.
http://thepolywog.com/copshootcop/photoalbum/images/pain.jpg

I think I just got bigboabed
That&#39;s not you. He looks to "bikery".

[Alex H]

I started the American bashing thread. And yes, it was purile. I only did it to emphasise the lack of vocabulary of the writer (who was American) as I have noticed that rather than trying to find the right word, an increasing number of American writers simply make one up. I thought it was quite funny to see someone get so enraged at a criticism of their country. In much the same way that many Jews get angry when people criticise Israel.

Just because someone criticises your country or government, it doesn&#39;t mean it is a personal attack on you. I know. Lots of people in Australia hate our Prime Minister for his immigration policies, his willingness to follow Bush on whatever idiotic bombing mission he carries out, etc.

Anyway, as far as meat is concerned: I eat it, I know that an animal has to die for it, and it would be nice if the animal wasn&#39;t tortured first. Apart from that, I don&#39;t really care. I have opposable thumbs, which means I am better than the animal :o

:P

[ilw]

Originally posted by Alex H@18 November 2003 - 03:12
I have opposable thumbs, which means I am better than the animal :o

Puts you on a par with this fellow:

http://www.ecsd.com/~vic/graphics/opossum.jpg

who before he was squished looked more like :

http://www.earthfoot.org/backyard/opossum.jpg

[internet.news]

Depending on my experience of living here in Nuremberg - and comparing it
to Londons wonderful opened atmosphere between people - I have to say sadly
that the atmosphere in germany today is still dark - so I recognize it - although these times seems to be over since long time... ok, people are also just humans -
but everyones attitude counts: thati s why I share my thoughts openly.

Nevertheless there are some nice places in Nuremberg...

~nice dreams...

[bigboab]

I have just read this thread from start to finish. Old age must have set in. My simple answer to tha complete thread is &#39;When in Rome do as the Romans do&#39;

[MediaSlayer]

Originally posted by internet.news@21 November 2003 - 19:16
I have to say sadly
that the atmosphere in germany today is still dark
here are some thoughts sha&#39;re,

the atmosphere might be dark but there&#39;s always a way to make it brighter. germany usually gets blamed as being "that nation" in europe with a dark past. actually, i think europe as a whole was going through a "bad phase" and so i don&#39;t think it&#39;s right to demonize germany, it&#39;s too complex an issue to just say "it&#39;s their fault". it&#39;s everybody&#39;s fault. we have to learn to get along with each other or we&#39;re doomed to relive those nightmares over and over again. now how to get along with each other? start with the little things, be nice when your out in public, be kind to other motorists, ect... the most unhelpful thing in my opinion is those few people in society who are unhappy and try to make everyone around them unhappy. i&#39;m not just talking about suicide bombers here, there are people from my country who are the same way. so in closing, if we put the effort into it, we can all get along with each other.