Anti-Semitism Kills--And Jews Are To Blame!

Via Gateway Pundit, I came across the following in Haaretz:

Nearly half of Western European believe that Jews exploit the persecution of their past as a method of extorting money, according to an annual Jewish Agency report released on Sunday.

A joint report on anti-Semitism conducted by the Agency and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs found that 42 percent of those polled by the University of Bielefeld in Germany agreed that “Jews exploit the past to extort money.”


The countries in which the highest percentage of the population agreed with that statement were Poland and Spain.

According to the Jewish Agency, there were more anti-Semitic incidents in 2009 than in any year since the Second World War. In the first three months of 2009 – immediately following Israel’s three-week offensive on the Gaza Strip – there were as many anti-Semitic incidents recorded as in the entire year of 2008.

According to the article, 8 people were killed last year as a result of anti-Semitic attacks.

Legal Insurrection examines how this plays out in Malmo, Sweden. He quotes from an article in Ynet.news:

During the interview with Skanska Dagbladet newspaper, [Malmo mayor Ilmar] Reepalu was asked whether he considered a public condemnation of anti-Semitism in Malmo. The mayor responded that "Malmo does not accept anti-Semitism and does not accept Zionism," charging that both adopt extreme positions towards certain groups.

Reepalu added that local Jews bear some responsibility for the attitude towards them, noting that "they have the possibility to affect the way they are seen by society." The mayor then urged Malmo's Jewish community to "distance itself" from Israeli attacks on Gaza's civilian population.

This is a cop out, that avoids a simple fact, as LI points out:

The excuse now is the Israeli invasion of Gaza, but that is just an excuse. From the "Zionism is Racism" UN resolution in 1975, to the exaggerated claims of Israeli killings in Jenin and elsewhere, there always is some excuse to attack Israel on campus.

Read the entire Legal Insurrection post

He quotes The Fingerman, who writes about the accusation of being Anti-Semitism has now been co-opted as a badge of honor--and that critics not only proudly accept the claim, but will also go so far as to manufacture the accusation:

an emerging trend among critics of Israel: Their eagerness to allege that they've been accused of being an anti-Semite. I do agree that some of Israel's defenders are too quick to throw out charges of anti-Semitism or "self-hating Jew," and that's lamentable and a problem. But it seems that among many of Israel's critics, claiming that you've been accused of being an anti-Semite has become some sort of bizarre badge of honor. And quite a few of those that have allegedly been accused of being an anti-Semite, according to Wieseltier's critics, either were never smeared with such a term or were only accused of making a specific problematic remark and not tarred with some broad brush of disliking Jews, as they claim.

Check out the example he gives, based on an odd argument by Glenn Greenwald.

In 2010, will everyone end up claiming to be an Anti-Semite?

Technorati Tag: Anti-Semitism and Gaza and Hamas and Operation Cast Lead.