"The New Anti-Semitism". posted by Richard Seymour

Norman Finkelstein describes how everytime Israel loses some moral face, the pro-Israeli lobby in the United States produces another version of 'The New Anti-Semitism' . In the Eighties, the 'new anti-Semitism' thesis was propounded by such neoconservatives as Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. Now we have efforts by Daniel Pipes, Phyllis Chesler, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Miriam Greenspan and Abe Foxman, the bespectacled beardie of the World Jewish Congress.

Recently, there have been sustained efforts made by Campus Watch and others to victimise pro-Palestinian academics, resulting in the public defamation and intimidation of Joseph Massad at Columbia University . In Britain, a less organised but no less noxious campaign was mounted against Muslim student, Nasser Amin .

The Pew Research Centre recently cast doubt on claims of a 'new anti-Semitism', stating that:

Despite concerns about rising anti-Semitism in Europe, there are no indications that anti-Jewish sentiment has increased over the past decade. Favorable ratings of Jews are actually higher now in France, Germany and Russia than they were in 1991. Nonetheless, Jews are better liked in the U.S. than in Germany and Russia. As is the case with Americans, Europeans hold much more negative views of Muslims than of Jews.

There are other reports of increasing anti-Semitic attacks in European countries, but the likelihood is that this remains a marginal phenomenon, largely carried out by young white males , and in some cases by Muslims reacting to episodes in the Israeli-Palestine conflict. There is little to justify complaints of a 'new anti-Semitism', unless one expands the concept - as most of its proponents do - to include valid criticism of Israel.

And finally we come to France, where Ariel Sharon recently ruffled some feathers by suggesting that French Jews should move to Israel in order to escape the country's 5 million Muslims.

Direland reports this morning on the victimisation of a French sociologist named Edgar Morin and the newspaper Le Monde, the former for having written, and the latter having published, an article condemning Israeli repression against Palestinians. Direland notes that Morin has received the support of "Paul Ricoeur, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Alain Touraine, the historians Pierre Nora, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and also the former Portugese president Mario Soares, Theo Klein, the former president of CRIF, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (an alliance of nearly all of France's respectable Jewish organizations which is considered the "voice" of French Jewry), and Jean Daniel". They have signed a petition pointing out that:

[T]he article expresses great distress at the disastrous consequences of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the world, especially in France, where it has provoked both Judeophobia and Arabophobia. The article underlines with indignation and sorrow that the experience by the Jews of persecutions and humiliations for two millenniums have hardly stopped humiliations and persecutions being inflicted on the Palestinians. In the mind of the authors, recognizing this contradiction carries with it respect of the memory of past suffering. It is an elementary principle of knowledge and of judgment that every sentence is given its full meaning by the complete text in which it is written, and that every text is explained by its context. In fact, the rest of the article makes it clear that the criticisms are addressed, not at a people, but at an occupant --indeed, the article itself makes that clear, saying: 'This logic of contempt and humiliation is not the particularity of the Israelis, it is the particularity of all the occupations, in which the conqueror sees himself as superior compared to a people of sub-humans.'

Yet, the France-Israel Association and Lawyers Without Borders took Morin, his co-authors and the editor of Le Monde to court, accusing them of "racial defamation and justifying terrorism". Morin won the initial case, but on appeal a court in Versailles found that the article had included 'anti-Semitic statements'. An English translation of the article is here .

The real tragedy of such efforts is that they obliterate the distinction between genuine anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel and its policies. This obscures a vital difference. It also means that the phrase "anti-Semitism" is associated in many minds with neo-McCarthyism and attempts at suppressing legitimate political speech, whereas it should be associated with perhaps the greatest crime in history, the attempted extermination of Europe's Jews.