Eve Garrard, writing on Normblog, tells a distressing story of a recent encounter with antisemitism:

‘Bloody Jews,’ he said. ‘Bloody Jews, bugger the Jews, I’ve no sympathy for them.’

I gazed at him, aghast. Where had this suddenly come from?

The encounter I’m here describing took place very recently, in the course of a large academic dinner at a University in another city, not my own one. It was a pleasant occasion, and the people at my table were innocuously and comfortably talking about sociological issues connected with the economic crisis, all completely harmless and (relatively) uncontentious. And then I heard the academic on my right hand side say to the person opposite him, ‘Bloody Jews.’

When he saw my appalled stare, he said impatiently, ‘Oh well, I’m sorry, but really…!’

‘I’m glad you’re sorry,’ I replied politely, collecting myself together for a fight. But then he asked, ‘Are you Jewish?’ When I nodded, this academic – whom I’d met for the first time that day – put his arm around me and said, ‘I’m sorry, but really Israel is terrible, the massacres, Plan Dalet, the ethnic cleansing, they’re like the Nazis, they’re the same as the Nazis…’

Read the rest here.

I wrote yesterday about the utter blind spot that most Western observers have shown to Sheikh Fadlallah’s antisemitism, in their reactions to his death. That post was prompted by an obituary on the website of Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV, which quoted with some pride the views of a man who many saw as their spiritual leader:

On suicide bombing:

“What martyrdom is greater than making yourself a human bomb detonating it among the enemy? What spiritualism is greater than this spiritualism in which a person loses all feeling of his body and life for the sake of his cause and mission?”

On Zionist conspiracies:

“Israel poses a great danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our modern nation, especially since it embraces a settlement-oriented and expansionist idea that it has already begun to apply in occupied Palestine and it is extending and expanding to build Greater Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile,” Sayyed Fadlullah said in one of his lectures.

On killing every Jew in Israel:

“All of Palestine is a war zone and every Jew who unlawfully occupies a house or land belonging to a Palestinian is a legitimate target. There are no innocent Jews in Palestine. They kill many of our women, children, and elderly people. They destroy our homes. They confiscate our water and freedom.”

And on denying the Holocaust:

“The Hebrew state is preparing to celebrate its 60th anniversary – 60 years since it plundered Palestine – in a festival, which will be attended by the countries of the world, most of which still support the Zionist state and consider the resistance movement to be terrorism. This is what led German Chancellor Merkel to visit that plundering country, which extorted and continues to extort Germany, using as a pretext the German Hitlerist-Nazi past, and the placing of the Jews in a holocaust. Zionism has inflated the number of victims in this holocaust beyond imagination.”

In this light, it is worth reading in full the reaction of the British ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, as published on the website of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office:

The passing of decent men

Posted 05 July 2010 by Frances Guy

One of the privileges of being a diplomat is the people you meet; great and small, passionate and furious.  People in Lebanon like to ask me which politician I admire most.  It is an unfair question, obviously, and many are seeking to make a political response of their own.  I usually avoid answering by referring to those I enjoy meeting the most and those that impress me the most.  Until yesterday my preferred answer was to refer to Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, head of the Shia clergy in Lebanon and much admired leader of many Shia muslims throughout the world.  When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person.  That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith.  Sheikh Fadlallah passed away yesterday.  Lebanon is a lesser place the day after but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon’s shores.  I remember well when I was nominated ambassador to Beirut, a muslim acquaintance sought me out to tell me how lucky I was because I would get a chance to meet Sheikh Fadlallah. Truly he was right.  If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples’ lives will be truly blighted.  The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints.  May he rest in peace.

Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV has published an obituary of Grand Ayatollah Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, who died in Lebanon on Sunday, and it makes for eye opening reading. According to al-Manar, Fadlallah encouraged suicide bombing, including against Israeli women and children; believed in a Zionist conspiracy to stretch Israel’s borders from the Nile to the Euphrates; and denied the Holocaust.

Dubbed by the media as the “Spiritual Leader” of the Islamic resistance “Hezbollah,” in Lebanon, Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlullah inspired the leaders for the resistance group, and served as a highly influential beacon of truth for all the oppressed peoples of the world.

From the pulpit of the Imam Rida mosque in the Bir al-Abd neighborhood (Beirut’s southern suburb), Sayyed Fadlullah’s sermons gave shape to the political currents among mainly the Muslim Shiite sect, from the latter half of the 1980s till the last days of his life.
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The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 was a watershed event for the Lebanese, mostly the Shiites living in the south, and the public career of Sayyed Fadlullah. The beginning of Hezbollah as an armed resistance movement dates back to that Israeli invasion. “What martyrdom is greater than making yourself a human bomb detonating it among the enemy? What spiritualism is greater than this spiritualism in which a person loses all feeling of his body and life for the sake of his cause and mission?”

This quotation and many others fumed the flame of the resistance ideology.

He supported the ideals of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and advocated the corresponding Islamic movement in Lebanon. In his sermons, he called for armed resistance to the Israeli occupations of Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, along with opposition to the existence of Israel.

He once said that the slogan “land for peace” was a betrayal of Palestinian blood and of the sacred cause of Palestine.”

“Israel poses a great danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our modern nation, especially since it embraces a settlement-oriented and expansionist idea that it has already begun to apply in occupied Palestine and it is extending and expanding to build Greater Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile,” Sayyed Fadlullah said in one of his lectures.

Sayyed Fadlullah often explains that Judaism, Christianity and Islam were all Divine religions, however he always differentiated between a Jew anywhere in the world and another Jews who comes to Palestine and take part in the occupation of this Arab land. 

“All of Palestine is a war zone and every Jew who unlawfully occupies a house or land belonging to a Palestinian is a legitimate target. There are no innocent Jews in Palestine. They kill many of our women, children, and elderly people. They destroy our homes. They confiscate our water and freedom.”

In an interview with Al-Manar TV on March 21, 2008, Sayyed Fadlullah stated:

“The Hebrew state is preparing to celebrate its 60th anniversary – 60 years since it plundered Palestine – in a festival, which will be attended by the countries of the world, most of which still support the Zionist state and consider the resistance movement to be terrorism. This is what led German Chancellor Merkel to visit that plundering country, which extorted and continues to extort Germany, using as a pretext the German Hitlerist-Nazi past, and the placing of the Jews in a holocaust. Zionism has inflated the number of victims in this holocaust beyond imagination.”

In other words, the very quotes that opponents of Hezbollah would cite as evidence of Fadlallah’s extremism, antisemitism and support for terrorism, are the quotes that Hezbollah provides to demonstrate his greatness. It is hard to imagine a clearer example of how murderous rhetoric against Jews is not just acceptable for Hezbollah (and presumably fits what they think their readership will enjoy), but is actively promoted by them. Yet this subject is absent from many obituaries in Western newspapers, and only glanced at in others. Take, for example, the Guardian, the BBC, the Financial Times, the Scotsman and the Daily Telegraph; while most mention his support for suicide bombings, his views are couched in terms that describe him as “a fierce critic of the United States and Israel” or “a fiery proponent of Iran’s Shia Muslim revolution and of Hizbollah’s armed fight against Israel”.

Fadlallah’s distinction between Jews inside and outside Israel is not much of a consolation. Firstly, because the fact he was willing to sanction the murder of every Israel Jew (but not Israeli non-Jews) is still a form of genocidal antisemitism. (If a French demagogue called for the murder of every French Jew, but said that he did not want to see Jews in other countries killed, nobody would baulk at calling that person an antisemite). Secondly, because in the 1980s and 1990s Hezbollah did use murderous terrorism as a tactic against Jewish communities around the world, most infamously killing 85 people in Argentina’s AMIA Jewish community building in 1994, so in as much as Fadlallah’s ideas influenced Hezbollah’s “resistance”, their actions were not limited to killing Jews only in Israel.

Several obituaries in Western media note the contrast between Fadlallah’s ‘liberal’ views on some social issues or his opposition to 9/11 and al-Qaeda’s global jihad on the one hand; and on the other, his unbending desire to see Israel destroyed and his belief that every Israeli man, woman and child was a legitimate target for suicide bombers. When you read his views about Jews and Israel in detail, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this inconsistency is explained, at least in part, by antisemitism.

This dissonance between Western and Islamist interpretations has been noted before. Barry Rubin called this a “Clash of Perceptions”, when looking at how photographs of injured Israeli soldiers on the Mavi Marmara were received differently in Turkish and Western media. I wrote yesterday about the contrasting narratives of leftists and Islamists involved in the Gaza flotilla. Nowhere is this clash of perceptions more obvious than in the inability, or refusal, of Western commentators to recognise antisemitism, or to accept it as a relevant framework for analysing the behaviour of actors who are hostile to Jews, Zionism or Israel.

In recent days, I have seen seven ostensibly different news stories and events that show the drip, drip, drip of criticism and hatred of Jews, Zionism and Israel.

Depressingly, there is nothing special whatsoever about these last few days. There have been no flood alerts, just the usual drip, drip drip of stories that you find in the Guardian, the Independent and any number of political websites. Nor is there anything special about the events, just more of the same drip, drip, drip of lobbying that you would find every month of the year.

Is the drip antisemitic? Is it anti-Zionist? Or is it anti-Israel? Is it fair criticism? Is it unfair criticism? Is it hateful? Is the hatred deserved?

Whatever the rights or wrongs of each solitary drip, together they leave us wading through a pool of anger, hatred, contempt, call it what you will.

It is up to you whether you feel the pool is ankle deep, waist high or reaching your nostrils. One thing is for sure, the waterline is still rising.

The last few days’ drips – more accurately, some of those that I’ve noticed – are as follows:

The opening paragraph of an article in the Guardian (5 July 2010) by its Washington columnist, Chris McGreal:

There are questions that rarely get asked in Washington. For years, the mantra that America’s intimate alliance with Israel was as good for the US as it was the Jewish state went largely unchallenged by politicians aware of the cost of anything but unwavering support.

The closing paragraph of a book review in the Guardian (3 July 2010) by one of its literary critics, Nicholas Lezard:

Well, I know what’s going to happen now. I and the blameless Review section of this newspaper will be denounced as either Hamas stooges, antisemites, or both. It would appear that unimpeachably impartial reporting from this miserable part of the world is a categorical impossibility. (I’ve seen pro-Israel websites which maintain that the residents of Gaza actually have it pretty peachy.) But whichever way you lean, this is a very important book indeed.

The obituary in the Independent (6 July 2010) of Abu Daoud, subtitled “Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1972 Olympic massacre”. Written by respected journalist, Adel Darwish, it includes this:

By 4:45am they had taken nine Israeli athletes hostage in their quarters after killing two who, they said, were armed secret agents (they were a weightlifter and a wrestling coach in the Israeli official version.)

The report in the Independent (6 July 2010) by Robert Fisk on his visit to Ketermaya in South Lebanon. Fisk’s report concentrates on the villagers’ lynching of an Egyptian murder suspect two months ago, but he reflects in passing:

The story in Ketermaya, a mixed Druze-Sunni village, is that way back in 1975, a Jewish couple who lived here – there was a tiny Jewish community in Lebanon at the time – were driven from their homes and that their son, an Israeli pilot, bombed the village in revenge during the Israeli invasion of 1982

By extraordinary chance, I was sitting on the hillside above Ketermaya in 1982 and saw the lone plane attack, repeatedly bombing the village on the morning of 7th June. There were no Palestinian fighters there – just civilians, of whom at least 50 were hiding in their homes – and they were all in their graves within 24 hours.

The reported words (2 July 2010) of Glasgow City Councillor Colin Deans, chairman of the Scrutiny Commission:

Build ever higher walls and appropriate ever more land and one day the Holocaust card will buy no more friendship or support. Then where will Israel be?

The hosting on 14 July 2010 at the Quakers’ Friends House, Euston, London of a symposium of 9/11 conspiracy theorists that will feature:

four of the most outspoken and eloquent challengers to the Zio-American imperial order that has emerged post-September 11th.

The hosting on 18 July 2010 by the same Quakers’ Friends House, Euston, London of a worldwide conference of the Hizb ut Tahrir group that only last month stated:

O Muslim Armies! Teach the Jews a lesson after which they will need no further lessons

March forth to fight them, eradicate their entity and purify the earth of their filth

Where to begin with all of this?

Is McGreal right, does anything short of unwavering support for Israel carry the kind of cost that he implies? If so, who or what is the power that lies behind such enforcement? Are they Jews? Are they Zionists? Are they Israelis? Is it a conspiracy, or is it just how those things have ended up? What are Guardian readers to make of such hidden power?

What about Lezard? He makes some criticisms of Israel in a review of a book that is critical of Israeli policy. For this, he and his colleagues will be set upon as backers of terrorism and antisemitism. What are Guardian readers to make of these slanderers? These Jews? – or perhaps they are Zionists? – or perhaps they are something else?

What about those armed Israeli secret agents, whom the “Palestinian terrorist’s” henchmen had to…err…kill in self-defence? What are Independent readers to make of a nation so cunning that it would disguise its secret agents as Olympic athletes? Masters of planning and disguise, eh.

Then again, what about those Jews who have the bloodlust of revenge: the bloodlust that would cause them (in their new Israeli identity) to disobey their squadron commander’s orders and veer off to kill 50 villagers in a one man revenge attack. What are Independent readers to make of such Jews and such Israelis?

And how about the playing of “the Holocaust card?” When will those who play that card realise that its fast running out? When will they realise that relations between Jews and non-Jews will return to pre-Holocaust standards unless Israel, the Jewish state, does what its enemies demand of it? The good citizens of Glasgow can now thank their Scrutiny Commissioner for slipping them off the Holocaust hook.

And what about Quakers’ Friends House, Euston, London? Where is the friendship in allowing these events to take place? The first will proclaim “Zio-American imperial order” responsibility for 9-11 and the subsequent “War on Terror”. And who are we to giggle and point fingers at their lunacy? Given what you can read in the Guardian and Independent about unspecified power; fake terrorist accusations; masters of disguise; and bloodthirsty avengers, why exactly wouldn’t the “Zio-American imperial order” be behind such events?

And as for Quakers hosting Hizb ut Tahrir who want Muslims to “March forth to fight them, eradicate their entity and purify the earth of their filth”, well, given what we’ve read above, hand on heart, who can really blame them? Wouldn’t they be doing the earth a favour?

And what’s that, “eradicate…purify…filth”…Holocaust you say. Oh shut up, we knew you’d call it antisemitic and we knew you’d end up playing that bloody Holocaust card.

I have written an article for Standpoint magazine’s website, discussing what the Gaza flotilla tells us about the state of the alliance between Islamists and leftists in Europe:

The working alliance between Islamists and leftists in Britain emerged out of anti-Israel demonstrations after the start of the second Intifada in October 2000, which preceded 9/11 and the protests against the war in Iraq. A decade on, anti-Zionism and the Israel/Palestine conflict remain its energizing core. There is no other conflict in the world which would have motivated Islamist and leftist campaigners to cooperate for a flotilla similar to that which approached Gaza at the end of May, with consequences which are still reverberating around the Middle East and beyond.

The Mavi Marmara, which held the bulk of the ‘flotillistas’, is a metaphor for so much of the left-Islamist alliance. There were two main types of people on board: Islamists, mainly from Muslim countries and aligned with, or members of, the Muslim Brotherhood; and European and north American leftists, from a variety of pro-Palestinian campaigns and direct action groups. What is striking is that despite sharing the same political and physical space, they had completely different narratives about why they were there, how they intended to meet their aims and even who organised the whole flotilla in the first place.

[...]

This is the wider point about the alliance in Europe of leftists and Islamists. Islamism, globally, is a movement with energy, resources, self-belief and, in some countries, real power. Socialism is anything but. It has failed in power and lost its ideological certitude a long time ago, to be replaced by a vague and, at times, contradictory, set of ideas: anti-globalisation, environmentalism, anti-imperialism and so on. This is not an alliance of equals. European leftists, so used to being the junior partner in their cooperation with Islamists at home, have given up any pretence that their support for Hamas and other Islamist movements is one of critical engagement, or that they would rather work with secular, liberal forces in Palestinian society (or even their own). In this respect, the flotilla is a metaphor for the whole left-Islamist alliance. A journey over which leftists have a semblance of influence but little real control, into a confrontation not of their own making, from which they derive no political benefit.

You can read the whole article here.

Following the convictions of two more members of the neo-Nazi Aryan Strike Force last week, the Jewish Chronicle has a fascinating background article detailing the antisemitism and violent fantasies of the group:

They were two anonymous houses in anonymous suburban terraces. But when police arrived with search warrants they found much more than three-piece suites and pictures on the mantelpiece.

Walls were adorned with Nazi flags and rooms were littered with weapons, including knives, a machine gun and rice flails. In one, a Samurai sword hung above a bed and knuckledusters were displayed like trophies.

The men who rented the houses, builder Trevor Hannington, 58, in Merthyr Tydfil, and food packer Michael Heaton, 42, in Leigh, Greater Manchester, were members of Aryan Strike Force, a sinister organisation dedicated to ridding the country of ethnic minorities – including Jews.

The founders of that group – two men whose views were so far right, they thought Hitlerite factions such as Combat 18 and Blood & Honour were too soft – believed the government was secretly run by Zionists and saw it as their duty to save the Aryan race from destruction.

They were Durham father and son Ian and Nicky Davison, who met Heaton and Hannington via the internet. Their recruits were easily seduced by the virulent antisemitism in the postings they saw on the ASF website.

Heaton, a so-called “street fighter”, and Hannington were fascinated by the infamous Tsarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hannington was later described by a judge as “a lonely man with little in his life”. He tried to impress Davison by lying about an army career and claiming he was a survival expert.

All four began writing to each other using pseudonyms: Heaton was “Wigan Mike” and Hannington “The Fist of Wrath”.

Their web postings were as extreme as any police had encountered. The forums were read by around 300 members throughout Australia, Canada and Northern Europe.

Nicky Davison, 19, told them: “As true national socialists we have a duty to fight against this. Whether it’s in the boardroom or on the streets, we will resist, we will fight. Whether we are one or a million, we will stay loyal and continue the fight.”

Hannington also posted, saying: “I would encourage any religion or race that wants to destroy the Jews. I hate them with a passion.”

In another, he wrote: “They will always be scum. Destroy ‘em with whatever it takes.”

Heaton posted more than 3,000 times before he and Davison fell out, and he left to form his own group.

But what none of them knew was that every posting and every conversation was being monitored. Police had secretly hacked into the ASF website and Davison’s private email.

When officers saw a video of pipe bombs being detonated, they raided Davison’s house in Myrtle Grove, Burningfield, Durham.

During a search they found that he had bought castor beans from America and several other items which together constituted a recipe for the deadly toxin, ricin.

They say they found enough of it in a jar in his kitchen to kill up to 15 people.

Davison later became the first person in Britain to be jailed under the Chemical Weapons Act when he got 10 years at Newcastle Crown Court. His son was jailed for two years after being found guilty of possessing terrorist manuals.

Heaton and Hannington faced a separate trial in Liverpool. Heaton was convicted of using threatening, abusive or insulting words likely to stir up racial hatred and was jailed for two and a half years. Hannington was jailed for two years after admitting stirring up racial hatred, possessing information likely to aid terrorism and disseminating a terrorist publication.

Read the article in full here.

The neo-Nazi tactic of desecrating Jewish cemeteries is one that is sadly familiar across Europe. Normally, the results look something like this:

The purpose of these kind of attack is clear: to shock and offend Jews. There is something particularly despicable about desecrating a cemetery, as if Jews are not safe, even in death, from their persecutors.

More recently, the type of people who are motivated to desecrate Jewish graves has started to change. In January 2009, during Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza,  Glenduffhill Jewish Cemetery in Glasgow was desecrated with pro-Hamas graffiti, as reported in the Jewish Chronicle:

Slogans sprayed on walls around the cemetery and on the headstones themselves pledged support for Hamas and the Scottish Nationalist Party and called for Jews to leave Scotland. One chilling slogan spread across three headstones simply read “Kill The Jews”.

Now, this trend has been taken to a new low, and to its logical conclusion. We have written before about the abuse of the Holocaust by anti-Zionists who draw false parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany, in order to make their political point. But it is hard to appreciate the breathtaking arrogance and callousness that led two anti-Zionists, one Israeli and one Polish, to daub “Free Gaza” graffiti on the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto:

Yesterday, Israeli and Polish activists met in the ruins of Warsaw’s old Jewish Ghetto.

The activists sprayed ‘Liberate All Ghettos’ in Hebrew, followed by ‘Free Gaza and Palestine’ in English on a wall of an original block in the ghetto. The block is across the street from the last fragment of the remaining perimeter wall of the Ghetto. They also hung Palestinian flags from the wall.

This was first time such an action took place in the ghetto.

Yonatan Shapira former Israeli Air Force captain and now refusnik and BDS activist said:

‘Most of my family came from Poland and many of my relatives were killed in the death camps during the Holocaust. When I walk in what was left from the Warsaw Ghetto I can’t stop thinking about the people of Gaza who are not only locked in an open air prison but are also being bombarded by fighter jets, attack helicopters and drones, flown by people whom I used to serve with before my refusal in 2003.

I am also thinking about the delegations of young Israelis that are coming to see the history of our people but also are subjected to militaristic and nationalistic brainwashing on a daily basis. Maybe if they see what we wrote here today they will remember that oppression is oppression, occupation is occupation, and crimes against humanity are crimes against humanity, whether they have been committed here in Warsaw or in Gaza’.

Ewa Jasiewicz, activist with Kampania Palestyna and one of the co-ordinators of the Free Gaza Movement who just returned from participating in the Freedom Flotilla said:

`Yonatan could have been the pilot in the Blackhawk that dropped commandos onto the Mavi Marmara that killed nine activists from our flotilla. I could have been one of them. Poland is full of the ruins of ghettos and death camps and shrines to those who sacrificed their lives in the defence of not just their communities but in resistance to fascism.

People here need to wake up and realise that occupations and ghettos did not end with the end of the second world war. These tactics and strategies of domination and control of other people and lands are present in Palestine today and are being perpetrated by the state of Israel. We have a responsibility to free all ghettos and end all occupations’.

Let’s be clear: Shapira, Jasiewicz and everyone else are free to campaign against Israel as much as they like, to condemn Israeli policy and to criticise its actions. But the Warsaw Ghetto is, effectively, a huge Jewish cemetery: over 100,000 Jews died in the Ghetto between its construction in 1940 and its liquidation in 1943, mainly from starvation, disease and random killings by their German guards. It is not a place to daub political graffiti, much less anti-Israel graffiti. If Israel had existed in the 1930s, it is possible that many of the Jews who died  in the Ghetto, or were taken from there to their deaths, would have been saved. I don’t know if Shapira and Jasiewicz thought about this when they were in Warsaw, or if they consider it at all relevant. I also don’t know if they thought about the use of boycotts as a discriminatory weapon by the Nazis to separate Jews from wider society, before exterminating them; however they did think about boycotts of Israel, because they held a Palestinian flag marked with ‘BDS’ (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) against the Ghetto wall:

If their purpose was to shock and offend, then they have succeeded. If anti-Zionists want to avoid being accused of antisemitism, they should not adopt antisemites’ lowest form of attack, by desecrating a Jewish cemetery.