This Bright Spot in the Sun. posted by Richard Seymour

If a spiteful buffoon like Louis Farrakhan urged every black person in Britain to move to some corner of Antarctica*, say, in order to escape racist attacks, I hazard a guess there would be hilarity, indifference, (and approval from racists).  But when Ariel Sharon takes up the battle-axes on behalf of Jewish citizens living in France, he gets several brusque, irritated paragraphs from the French foreign minister and disapproving comments from French Jewish leaders.  The difference, of course, is relevance.  Israel has always appointed itself as the vanguard of Jewish interests, and its supporters are all to willing to dismiss its Jewish detractors as "renegades" (Elie Weisel).  But, as usual, there is more to it.
 
Ariel Sharon didn't stop with France:
 

He told a meeting of the American Jewish Association in Jerusalem that Jews around the world should relocate to Israel as early as possible.

 
Yes, Jewish people living in New York are going to take up their shit and move to Haifa where they are confronted by lunatics of every stripe and subject to the possibility of catching part of a suicide bomber in the face - if they're lucky.  Israel can't be a particularly appealing destination even for Jewish citizens of France, where anti-Semitic attacks are indeed on the rise.  And there is, in France, a serious and growing movement against the racists and anti-Semites, reflected in the mass demonstrations mounted in response to the apparent attack of a Jewish woman on a train (it turned out she was neither Jewish, nor attacked, so at least she didn't waste time with any facts.
 
But one finally gets Mr Sharon's real point when one considers this: 
 

He added that France faced a new kind of anti-Semitism based on anti-Israeli feelings and propaganda.
He pointed out that France had a large Muslim community estimated at less than 10% of population, or about five million.

 
One gets the message.  Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and Muslims are its chief progenitors.  There has indeed been a detected increase in anti-Semitic attitudes and attacks in Europe, but there has been an even bigger increase in Islamophobic attitudes and attacks - which we can now thank Mr Sharon for pointing out.  The bulk of anti-Semitic attacks are carried out by young white males, not Muslims.  If one were going to make a racial connection, one could just as plausibly note that there are 6 million Jews in Israel, you know, and...  But Israeli anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism is not unfamiliar.  One recalls Ehud Barak's famously learned discourse on how, after all, those Arabs don't have the Judeo-Christian guilt complex that would prevent them from lying.
 
The proper response to racism is not to encourage its victims to flee, much less flee to a country whose history, politics and expansionism makes it a more dangerous place for those who are seeking refuge.  It is to join them in solidarity, to fight beside them, fight for their right to live here unmolested.  Israel's politics are for this reason, doubly reprehensible: in its foundation, it is a racists' solution to the problem of Jewish oppression in Europe; in sharing the racists' purview, it has not found it difficult to oppress others and to legitimise such behaviour with the kind of discourse that once stigmatised them.
 
 
* It's a land without a people...