INTERNATIONAL ANTI-SEMITISM: ARE WE ENABLING IT BY DEFAULT?

Writing for frontpagemag.com, Kenneth Levin has provided a very scholarly, very complete – and very unsettling – commentary on the proliferation of international anti-Semitism (from its usual high level to a much higher one), in which he accuses several entities which could be doing something about it of doing little or nothing.

Mr. Levin\’s piece is very long by web-article standards.  But I have tried to excerpt a few of its most salient points (you\’ll have to click here and read it all to understand how completely he references each one):

Incitement and indoctrination are at the heart of the Jew-hatred raging through the Arab and broader Muslim world and now infecting much of Europe.

Within the Palestinian realm, both Palestinian governments – the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza – regularly call for annihilation of the Jews.

Similar genocidal rhetoric is a fixture of media, mosques and schools throughout most of the Arab world and, largely through Arab financing and disseminating, has become a constant theme in much of the wider Muslim world and within Muslim communities elsewhere, not least in Europe.

Beyond explicit calls for genocide, anti-Jewish indoctrination entails labeling Jews as sub-human, blaming them for virtually all the world\’s ills, characterizing them as a disease within the body of humanity, and attributing to them the most reprehensible qualities and the most vile crimes. This demonization of Jews routinely draws upon both old anti-Jewish Islamic texts and classic European anti-Semitic materials including medieval European blood libels, the czarist-generated “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda and caricatures.

The United States has largely remained unscarred by this ugly bigotry. But incitement to it exists in America as elsewhere, and major American institutions, whose exposure of the hate-indoctrination as it flourishes in the Middle East and has spread across the globe could have a salutary effect, have instead been essentially silent. By their silence they serve, in effect, as enablers of anti-Semitic hate indoctrination.

Three major American institutions are particularly culpable, not least because they are all especially well-positioned to have a positive impact were they acting otherwise.

1) The Obama Administration. Throughout his tenure President Obama has said virtually nothing on Muslim anti-Semitic hate indoctrination.

The Administration\’s refusal to even acknowledge Muslim anti-Semitic hate indoctrination and its consequences was recently, and rather dramatically, reflected in President Obama’s reference to the murder of four Jews in a Paris delicatessen. The killer, a Muslim imbiber of the genocidal anti-Jewish incitement widely purveyed in mosques and Muslim media, openly declared that his intention was to kill Jews. Yet the President characterized the murderer simply as a “violent, vicious zealot” and the slayings as the “random” shooting of “a bunch of folks.”

2) Mainstream media. The promotion of genocidal Jew-hatred, although virtually ubiquitous in the Arab and broader Muslim world, is rarely noted in mainstream American media, whether leading newspapers, news services, television networks, or, except for Fox, cable news networks.

Among print media, the New York Times, America\’s “newspaper of record,” whose priorities regarding what is newsworthy still have considerable impact on what stories are covered by other media outlets, has consistently failed to cover Palestinian and broader Arab and Muslim anti-Jewish hate indoctrination. This failure has been compared by many observers to the Times\’ providing no more than minimal and perfunctory coverage to the mass murder of Europe\’s Jews during the Holocaust. (The Nazi program of genocide was publicly reported and confirmed by late 1942.)

3) Academia. One might think that if there were any place the phenomenon of contemporary genocidal anti-Semitism in the Arab and broader Muslim world would receive attention it would be in academia, particularly in Middle East studies departments; but one would be wrong. It is the exception among such departments to address the issue and, for example, an undergraduate in most universities which offer Middle East studies degrees can earn such a degree without the matter ever having been addressed in any of his or her classes.

That these three institutions – the Obama Administration, America\’s mainstream media and American colleges and universities – are essentially silent on the incitement and indoctrination stoking the new anti-Semitism is not mere coincidence. All three are marked by the prevalence of so-called “progressivist” political perspectives, and all are predisposed to look at the world through the prism of an anti-Western bias and sympathy towards non-Western cultures and ideologies. Their silence regarding anti-Semitic hate-mongering in the Palestinian and broader Arab and Muslim worlds is in large part bound up with this mind-set, and in the service of their “progressivism” they are helping the world progress towards increasing acceptance of new campaigns aimed at the mass murder of Jews. 

A very important article on a very important subject.  I hope you use the link I have provided and read every word.