[WCUSP] Fwd: New "Anti-Semitism" to Nuclear Holocaust-How Israel is Engineering the "Clash of Civilizations"

[Odile Hugonot Haber]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karen deslierres <karendes at umich.edu>
Date: Sep 25, 2006 7:01 PM
Subject: New "Anti-Semitism" to Nuclear Holocaust-How Israel is
Engineering the "Clash of Civilizations"
To: Karen deslierres <karendes at umich.edu>




Weekend Edition


 September 23 / 24, 2006

>From the New "Anti-Semitism" to Nuclear Holocaust

How Israel is Engineering the "Clash of Civilizations"

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth.

The trajectory of a long-running campaign that gave birth this month
to the preposterous all-party British parliamentary report into
anti-Semitism in the UK can be traced back to intensive lobbying by
the Israeli government that began more than four years ago, in early
2002.

At that time, as Ariel Sharon was shredding the tattered remains of
the Oslo accords by reinvading West Bank towns handed over to the
Palestinian Authority in his destructive rampage known as Operation
Defensive Shield, he drafted the Israeli media into the fray. Local
newspapers began endlessly highlighting concerns about the rise of a
"new anti-Semitism", a theme that was rapidly and enthusiastically
taken up by the muscular Zionist lobby in the US.

It was not the first time, of course, that Israel had called on
American loyalists to help it out of trouble. In Beyond Chutzpah,
Norman Finkelstein documents the advent of claims about a new
anti-Semitism to Israel's lacklustre performance in the 1973 Yom
Kippur War. On that occasion, it was hoped, the charge of
anti-Semitism could be deployed against critics to reduce pressure on
Israel to return Sinai to Egypt and negotiate with the Palestinians.

Israel alerted the world to another wave of anti-Semitism in the early
1980s, just as it came under unprecedented criticism for its invasion
and occupation of Lebanon. What distinguished the new anti-Semitism
from traditional anti-Jewish racism of the kind that led to Germany's
death camps, said its promoters, was that this time it embraced the
progressive left rather than the far right.

The fresh claims about a new anti-Semitism began life in the spring of
2002, with the English-language website of Israel's respected liberal
daily newspaper, Haaretz, flagging for many months a special online
supplement of articles on the "New anti-Semitism", warning that the
"age-old hatred" was being revived in Europe and America. The refrain
was soon taken up the Jerusalem Post, a rightwing English-language
newspaper regularly used by the Israeli establishment to shore up
support for its policies among Diaspora Jews.

Like its precursors, argued Israel's apologists, the latest wave of
anti-Semitism was the responsibility of Western progressive movements
-- though with a fresh twist. An ever-present but largely latent
Western anti-Semitism was being stoked into frenzy by the growing
political and intellectual influence of extremist Muslim immigrants.
The implication was that an unholy alliance had been spawned between
the left and militant Islam.

Such views were first aired by senior members of Sharon's cabinet. In
an interview in the Jerusalem Post in November 2002, for example,
Binyamin Netanyahu warned that latent anti-Semitism was again becoming
active:

"In my view, there are many in Europe who oppose anti-Semitism, and
many governments and leaders who oppose anti-Semitism, but the strain
exists there. It is ignoring reality to say that it is not present. It
has now been wedded to and stimulated by the more potent and more
overt force of anti-Semitism, which is Islamic anti-Semitism coming
from some of the Islamic minorities in European countries. This is
often disguised as anti-Zionism."

Netanyahu proposed "lancing the boil" by beginning an aggressive
public relations campaign of "self-defence". A month later Israel's
president, Moshe Katsav, picked on the softest target of all, warning
during a state



visit that the fight against anti-Semitism must begin in Germany,
where "voices of anti-Semitism can be heard".

But, as ever, the main target of the new anti-Semitism campaign were
audiences in the US, Israel's generous patron. There, members of the
Israel lobby were turning into a chorus of doom.

In the early stages of the campaign, the lobby's real motivation was
not concealed: it wanted to smother a fledgling debate by American
civil society, particularly the churches and universities, to divest
-- withdraw their substantial investments -- from Israel in response
to Operation Defensive Shield.

In October 2002, after Israel had effectively reoccupied the West
Bank, the ever-reliable Abraham Foxman, director of the
Anti-Defamation League, lumped in critics who were calling for
divestment from Israel with the new anti-Semites. He urged a new body
established by the Israeli government called the Forum for
Co-ordinating the Struggle against anti-Semitism to articulate clearly
"what we know in our hearts and guts: when that line [to
anti-Semitism] is crossed".

A fortnight later Foxman had got into his stride, warning that Jews
were more vulnerable than at any time since the Second World War. "I
did not believe in my lifetime that I or we would be preoccupied on
the level that we are, or [face] the intensity of anti-Semitism that
we are experiencing," he told the Jerusalem Post.

Echoing Netanyahu's warning, Foxman added that the rapid spread of the
new anti-Semitism had been made possible by the communications
revolution, mainly the internet, which was allowing Muslims to relay
their hate messages across the world within seconds, infecting people
around the globe.

It is now clear that Israel and its loyalists had three main goals in
mind as they began their campaign. Two were familiar motives from
previous attempts at highlighting a "new anti-Semitism". The third was
new.

The first aim, and possibly the best understood, was to stifle all
criticism of Israel, particularly in the US. During the course of 2003
it became increasingly apparent to journalists like myself that the
American media, and soon much of the European media, was growing shy
of printing even the mild criticism of Israel it usually allowed. By
the time Israel began stepping up the pace of construction of its
monstrous wall across the West Bank in spring 2003, editors were
reluctant to touch the story.

As the fourth estate fell silent, so did many of the progressive
voices in our universities and churches. Divestment was entirely
removed from the agenda. McCarthyite organisations like CampusWatch
helped enforce the reign of intimidation. Academics who stood their
ground, like Columbia University's Joseph Massad, attracted the
vindictive attention of new activist groups like the David Project.

A second, less noticed, goal was an urgent desire to prevent any
slippage in the numbers of Jews inside Israel that might benefit the
Palestinians as the two ethnic groups approached demographic parity in
the area know to Israelis as Greater Israel and to Palestinians as
historic Palestine.

Demography had been a long-standing obsession of the Zionist movement:
during the 1948 war, the Israeli army terrorised away or forcibly
removed some 80 per cent of the Palestinians living inside the borders
of what became Israel to guarantee its new status as a Jewish state.

But by the turn of the millennium, following Israel's occupation of
the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and the rapid growth of the oppressed
Palestinian populations both in the occupied territories and inside
Israel, demography had been pushed to the top of Israel's policy
agenda again.

During the second intifada, as the Palestinians fought back against
Israel's war machine with a wave of suicide bombs on buses in major
Israeli cities, Sharon's government feared that well-off Israeli Jews
might start to regard Europe and America as a safer bet than Jerusalem
or Tel Aviv. The danger was that the demographic battle might be lost
as Israeli Jews emigrated.

By suggesting that Europe in particular had become a hotbed of Islamic
fundamentalism, it was hoped that Israeli Jews, many of whom have more
than one passport, would be afraid to leave. A survey by the Jewish
Agency taken as early as May 2002 showed, for example, that 84 per
cent of Israelis believed anti-Semitism had again become a serious
threat to world Jewry.

At the same time Israeli politicians concentrated their attention on
the two European countries with the largest Jewish populations,
Britain and France, both of which also have significant numbers of
immigrant Muslims. They highlighted a supposed rise in anti-Semitism
in these two countries in the hope of attracting their Jewish
populations to Israel.

In France, for example, peculiar anti-Semitic attacks were given
plenty of media coverage: from a senior rabbi who was stabbed (by
himself, as it later turned out) to a young Jewish woman attacked on a
train by anti-Semitic thugs (except, as it later emerged, she was not
Jewish).

Sharon took advantage of the manufactured climate of fear in July 2004
to claim that France was in the grip of "the wildest anti-Semitism",
urging French Jews to come to Israel.

The third goal, however, had not seen before. It tied the rise of a
new anti-Semitism with the increase of Islamic fundamentalism in the
West, implying that Muslim extremists were asserting an ideological
control over Western thinking. It chimed well with the post 9-11
atmosphere.

In this spirit, American Jewish academics like David Goldhagen
characterised anti-Semitism as constantly "evolving". In a piece
entitled "The Globalisation of anti-Semitism" published in the
American Jewish weekly Forward in May 2003, Goldhagen argued that
Europe had exported its classical racist anti-Semitism to the Arab
world, which in turn was reinfecting the West.

"Then the Arab countries re-exported the new hybrid demonology back to
Europe and, using the United Nations and other international
institutions, to other countries around the world. In Germany, France,
Great Britain and elsewhere, today's intensive anti-Semitic expression
and agitation uses old tropes once applied to local Jews -- charges of
sowing disorder, wanting to subjugate others -- with new content
overwhelmingly directed at Jews outside their countries."

This theory of a "free-floating" contagion of hatred towards Jews,
being spread by Arabs and their sympathisers through the internet,
media and international bodies, found many admirers. The British
neo-conservative journalist Melanie Philips claimed popularly, if
ludicrously, that British identity was being subverted and pushed out
by an Islamic identity that was turning her country into a capital of
terror, "Londonistan".

This final goal of the proponents of "the new anti-Semitism" was so
successful because it could be easily conflated with other ideas
associated with America's war on terror, such as the clash of
civilisations. If it was "us" versus "them", then the new
anti-Semitism posited from the outset that the Jews were on the side
of the angels. It fell to the Christian West to decide whether to make
a pact with good (Judaism, Israel, civilisation) or evil (Islam, Osama
bin Laden, Londonistan).

We are far from reaching the end of this treacherous road, both
because the White House is bankrupt of policy initiatives apart from
its war on terror, and because Israel's place is for the moment
assured at the heart of the US administration's neoconservative
agenda.

That was made clear last week when Netanyahu, the most popular
politician in Israel, added yet another layer of lethal mischief to
the neoconservative spin machine as it gears up to confront Iran over
its nuclear ambitions. Netanyahu compared Iran and its president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler.

"Hitler went out on a world campaign first, and then tried to get
nuclear weapons. Iran is trying to get nuclear arms first. Therefore
from that perspective, it is much more dangerous," Netanyahu told
Israel's anti-terrorism policymakers.

Netanyahu's implication was transparent: Iran is looking for another
Final Solution, this one targeting Israel as well as world Jewry. The
moment of reckoning is near at hand, according to Tzipi Livni,
Israel's foreign minister, who claims against all the evidence that
Iran is only months away from posssessing nuclear weapons.

"International terrorism is a mistaken term," Netanyahu added, "not
because it doesn't exist, but because the problem is international
militant Islam. That is the movement that operates terror on the
international level, and that is the movement that is preparing the
ultimate terror, nuclear terrorism."

Faced with the evil designs of the "Islamic fascists", such as those
in Iran, Israel's nuclear arsenal -- and the nuclear Holocaust Israel
can and appears prepared to unleash -- may be presented as the
civilised world's salvation.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He
is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of
the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and
available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press.
His website is www.jkcook.net