Tuesday, March 17, 2015

"Is it Time For the Jews to Leave Europe?"

Short answer: yes. 

Longer answer in this essay by Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic.

The problem with this essay is that the answer "yes" is completely clear. Goldberg gets a bit muddled when he talks about the "why", but eventually comes to the correct conclusion. 

Although he does identify the current, most virulent streams of antisemitism, he wrongly places blame on "fascist" and "right wing" roots. He also claims that immigrant disenchantment, unemployment (in short, Marxist explanations) form the roots of the "new" antisemitism.

Here's what I mean:

"But what makes this new era of anti-Semitic violence in Europe different from previous ones is that traditional Western patterns of anti-Semitic thought have now merged with a potent strain of Muslim Judeophobia. Violence against Jews in Western Europe today, according to those who track it, appears to come mainly from Muslims, who in France, the epicenter of Europe’s Jewish crisis, outnumber Jews 10 to 1."

"That the chief propagators of contemporary European anti-Semitism may be found in the Continent’s large and disenfranchised Muslim immigrant communities—communities that are themselves harassed and assaulted by hooligans associated with Europe’s surging right—is flummoxing to, among others, Europe’s elites."

"Muslims in Europe are in many ways a powerless minority. The failure of Europe to integrate Muslim immigrants has contributed to their exploitation by anti-Semitic propagandists and by recruiters for such radical projects as the Islamic State, or ISIS."
 
"Yet the new anti-Semitism flourishing in corners of the European Muslim community would be impoverished without the incorporation of European fascist tropes."

He ultimately comes to the right conclusion with lots of first-hand evidence: there is no Jewish future in Europe. The essay is most disturbing and accurate and enraging when he speaks to real Jews, with real day-to-day experiences with virulent, physically menacing Jew-hate.

Try reading the anecdote about the Jewish physician without getting angry.

"Yardéni wanted me to meet a physician named Charles Bensemhoun, who would explain, she said, the collapsing relationship between Toulouse’s 18,000 or so Jews and its much larger Muslim population."

"Bensemhoun, who is in his mid-50s, is Sephardic, born in Morocco. Three-quarters of France’s Jews are Sephardim, chased from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia in the 1950s and ’60s."

"Many of Bensemhoun’s patients are North African Muslims. “These are people like me, who were born there,” he told me outside the school’s synagogue."

“We speak the same language, literally”—he says he and his patients move easily between Arabic and French—“and we understand each other in very deep ways. They’re very comfortable with me as their doctor.”

"He went on, “But it’s changed in recent years. Now their children are telling them, ‘Don’t go to the Jew,’ ‘You can’t trust the Jew.’ They’ve become radicalized. It’s upsetting. The new generation is anti-Semitic in a way that we haven’t experienced.”

"Are these patients listening to their children? “Yes,” he said. “In some cases, yes.”


 Then, read about how Jews cannot travel safely to their school in 2015 France:

"Once we get here we’re safe,” one of the students told me."

(Really?)

“Getting here from home is the hard part.”

"Many of the students live in distant and equally perilous suburbs, including Sarcelles, the site of anti-Jewish riots this past summer; and Créteil, where Jews have suffered beatings and rapes by anti-Semitic gangs"

This essay also confirms my feeling that the Anne Frank house should be burned down and shut down. It's an industry, has been cynically "universalized", turned into a "brand" and is not particularly Jewish in any way, shape or form.

In conclusion, one can only concur that for Jews in Europe, as one of Goldberg's interlocutors points out, there is only a choice between le cercueil ou la valise—“the coffin or the suitcase.”