Mick Hartley

Ben-Dror Yemini, at Ynetnews, on the new left antisemitism:

Several days ago, Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken tweeted that there was a link between “Islamic terror in Europe and European support for Zionism for more than 100 years.” He further explained that it was “important” for terrorists “to balance it out” Europe's supposedly pro-Zionist approach and that the terrorists “are helping do this.”

How nice of them. All they want is a fairer policy that's just a little less Zionist.  And so while it is true that Europeans fund countless anti-Zionist NGOs, and while this horrific propaganda and these “balancing activities” claim the lives of numerous innocent victims, Schocken is providing justifications.We could simply dismiss these comments. We could argue that the Haaretz publisher has gone off the rails. The thing is, though, that crazy opinions are the product of a constant and regular consumption of self-made ideological junk food. When poison is frequently injected into one’s veins, as a matter of routine—that Israel is akin to 1930s Germany, that Israel is an apartheid state, that Israel deserves to be boycotted, that people should vote for the anti-Zionist Joint List party—the result is that terrorism is justified, and it’s all because of Israel.  […]

The terrorists—regardless of whether they are people who were educated in mosques or small criminals who became Islamist, mainly in the incubator of France’s prisons—are not striving for freedom or equality. They are not against the West because of what it does, but because of what it is: Democratic, free, liberal. They don’t want to make Europe more “balanced.” They want to impose their unenlightened regime in every place they set foot. Their massacres are directed mainly at Muslims. It’s an “industry of death,” like the title of an article written by Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Any place reached by cells of the radical Islamic cancer—from Libya to Nigeria, from Iraq to Syria and Somalia and Gaza—is a place where there is destruction, death and wreckage. This also applies to Turkey, which is becoming more and more Muslim. It supports Hamas, yet it is hit by terror. According to Schocken, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is apparently a Zionist too. How did we not know that?

Among the Muslims themselves, there is a heated argument between the moderates and the radicals. The moderates are against any understanding or justification of violence and terror. They are the ones who exposed a significant part of what I have written here. The Schockens stand by the radicals. The moderates are in favor of adopting universal values. The radicals in insist on an unenlightened world. The Schockens provide them with justifications.

The idealization of jihad is an immune deficiency of the free world. The Labour Party’s leader in Britain turned Hamas and Hezbollah into his friends, feminist women’s movement Code Pink met with senior members of Hamas and the Taliban (a movement that murders Muslim women seeking an education), and Jewish American linguist Noam Chomsky visited Hezbollah’s headquarters and met with Hassan Nasrallah. The interesting thing is that right-wing racist David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote words that are almost identical to those of the unenlightened on the left: “Horrors of ISIS created by Zionist supremacy.” These two seemingly opposite ideologies, as we know, always end up meeting.

We have been in this situation before. The unenlightened of the past—yes, the Nazis—blamed the Jews for Europe's troubles. That was the old anti-Semitism. Today’s unenlightened, mostly on the left, argue that the Jewish state is also responsible for Europe's troubles. That is the new anti-Semitism. Schocken, might I add, defines himself as an opponent of terrorism and a “Zionist.” And with “Zionists” like him, who needs enemies anyway?