From Gaza to Florida

Friday, January 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: The 'oldest hatred' lives, from Gaza to Florida

Jew-hating pathologies ultimately harm the Jew-hater, too.
Mark Steyn

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell "You are the brothers of 
pigs!," and a protester complains to his interviewer that "Hitler didn't 
do a good job."

In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, "You need a big 
oven, that's what you need!"

In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, "Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!"

In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of 
dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year's Day. The 
channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from Jan. 1, 
2009, but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, 
they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated 
prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those 
unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding 
that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by 
Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast "accidentally."

In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers 
are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely 
assaulted by 20 youths taunting, "Palestine will kill the Jews"; in 
Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, 
"Jews must die."

In Helsingborg, Sweden, the congregation at a synagogue takes shelter as a 
window is broken and burning cloths thrown in. in Odense, principal Olav 
Nielsen announces that he will no longer admit Jewish children to the 
local school after a Dane of Lebanese extraction goes to the shopping mall 
and shoots two men working at the Dead Sea Products store. in Brussels, a 
Molotov cocktail is hurled at a synagogue; in Antwerp, Netherlands, lit 
rags are pushed through the mail flap of a Jewish home; and, across the 
Channel in Britain, "youths" attempt to burn the Brondesbury Park 
Synagogue.

In London, the police advise British Jews to review their security 
procedures because of potential revenge attacks. The Sun reports "fears" 
that "Islamic extremists" are drawing up a "hit list" of prominent Jews, 
including the Foreign Secretary, Amy Winehouse's record producer and the 
late Princess of Wales' divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports 
that Islamic nonextremists from the British Muslim Forum, the Islamic 
Foundation and other impeccably respectable "moderate" groups have warned 
the government that the Israelis' "disproportionate force" in Gaza risks 
inflaming British Muslims, "reviving extremist groups," and provoking "UK 
terrorist attacks"  not against Amy Winehouse's record producer and other 
sinister members of the International Jewish Conspiracy but against 
targets of, ah, more general interest.

Forget, for the moment, Gaza. Forget that the Palestinian people are the 
most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the Earth. For the past 
60 years they have been entrusted to the care of the United Nations, the 
Arab League, the PLO, Hamas and the "global community"  and the results 
are pretty much what you'd expect.

You would have to be very hardhearted not to weep at the sight of dead 
Palestinian children, but you would also have to accord a measure of blame 
to the Hamas officials who choose to use grade schools as launch pads for 
Israeli-bound rockets, and to the U.N. refugee agency that turns a blind 
eye to it. And, even if you don't deplore Fatah and Hamas for marinating 
their infants in a sick death cult in which martyrdom in the course of 
Jew-killing is the greatest goal to which a citizen can aspire, any 
fair-minded visitor to the West Bank or Gaza in the decade and a half in 
which the "Palestinian Authority" has exercised sovereign powers roughly 
equivalent to those of the nascent Irish Free State in 1922 would have to 
concede that the Palestinian "nationalist movement" has a profound 
shortage of nationalists interested in running a nation, or indeed capable 
of doing so. There is fault on both sides, of course, and Israel has few 
good long-term options. But, if this was a conventional ethno-nationalist 
dispute, it would have been over long ago.

So, as I said, forget Gaza. And, instead, ponder the reaction to Gaza in 
Scandinavia, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, and golly, even Florida. 
As the delegitimization of Israel has metastasized, we are assured that 
criticism of the Jewish state is not the same as anti-Semitism. We are 
further assured that anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism, which 
is a wee bit more of a stretch.

Only Israel attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its 
very existence. For the purposes of comparison, let's take a state that 
came into existence at the exact same time as the Zionist Entity, and 
involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the 
creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of post-war British imperial 
policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a 
movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift.

But, even allowing for that, what has a schoolgirl in Villiers-le-Bel to 
do with Israeli government policy? Just weeks ago, terrorists attacked 
Mumbai, seized hostages, tortured them, killed them, and mutilated their 
bodies. The police intercepts of the phone conversations between the 
terrorists and their controllers make for lively reading:

"Pakistan caller 1: 'Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims. Keep your 
phone switched on so that we can hear the gunfire.'

"Mumbai terrorist 2: 'We have three foreigners, including women. From 
Singapore and China'

"Pakistan caller 1: 'Kill them.'

"(Voices of gunmen can be heard directing hostages to stand in a line, and 
telling two Muslims to stand aside. Sound of gunfire. Sound of cheering 
voices.)"

"Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims." Tough for those Singaporean 
women. Yet no mosques in Singapore have been attacked. The large Hindu 
populations in London, Toronto and Fort Lauderdale have not shouted 
"Muslims must die!" or firebombed Halal butchers or attacked hijab-clad 
schoolgirls. CAIR and other Muslim lobby groups' eternal bleating about 
"Islamophobia" is in inverse proportion to any examples of it. Meanwhile, 
"moderate Muslims" in London warn the government: "I'm a peaceful fellow 
myself, but I can't speak for my excitable friends. Nice little G7 
advanced Western democracy you got here. Shame if anything were to happen 
to it."

But why worry about European Muslims? The European political and media 
class essentially shares the same view of the situation  to the point 
where state TV stations are broadcasting fake Israeli "war crimes."

As I always say, the "oldest hatred" didn't get that way without an 
ability to adapt: Once upon a time on the Continent, Jews were hated as 
rootless cosmopolitan figures who owed no national allegiance. So they 
became a conventional nation state, and now they're hated for that. And, 
if Hamas get their way and destroy the Jewish state, the few who survive 
will be hated for something else. So it goes.

But Jew-hating has consequences for the Jew-hater, too. A few years ago 
the poet Nizar Qabbani wrote an ode to the intifada:

O mad people of Gaza,

a thousand greetings to the mad

The age of political reason

has long departed

so teach us madness.

You can just about understand why living in Gaza would teach you madness. 
The enthusiastic adoption of the same pathologies by mainstream Europe is 
even more deranged  and in the end will prove just as self-destructive.

MARK STEYN

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/hamas-gaza-jewish-2277487-muslims-state#