Saturday, September 27, 2003
[posted by jaed at 10:21 PM]Slippage
A lot of masks have slipped in the past two years. (I may return to this theme soon.) The indispensable Watch offers an English translation of an essay in the French periodical Liberåtion: "<La pente savonneuse de l'antisémitisme (The Slippery Slope of Anti-Semitism)":
But another group of people, far more dangerous to my eyes, also have an definitive view of things: they are all those highly respected intellectuals for whom anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism can never, no, never, contain an ounce of anti-Semitism. One could say anything about Israel and the support that Jewish communities have for it, unleash a torrent of insults on the Israeli people, define the Israeli-American axis as a new axis of Evil, name what happened at Jenin as an “Auschwitz” (dixit Saramago), compare Israeli soldiers to the SS, treat the Jewish state as a pariah among nations, without ever being accused of anti-Semitism. For them, anti-Semitism is confined to Le Pen and to Mégret. Besides, there has not been any rise in anti-Semitism in France ,the Jews are exaggerating. They’re hysterical. There is no anti-Semitism in the outer city housing estates, the fire-bombings of synagogues and the assaults on Jewish schools are “embellished” by the Jewish community...
What is serious in my view is that the perverse efforts of this little group are starting to bear fruit in French society: more and more people are saying and writing things about Israel and the Jews that they never would have allowed themselves to say or write a few years ago. They would never have allowed themselves to say such things because they would have been immediately put in their place by their neighbors, their friends and acquaintances, because their co-workers, at university or in the laboratory, would have turned their backs on them. Apparently, such opprobrium no longer exists, which is why they can say whatever they want.
