Antisemitism strong

Editorial

The opening of the London Summer Olympic Games has brought with it controversy over the International Olympic Committee’s refusal to allow a moment of silence in memory of the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches 40 years ago by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Games.

This cloud was further darkened by Israeli officials who last week expressed the erstwhile unspoken fear that Israeli athletes in London may be targets. The concerns of Israelis are rightly shared by others, after Britain’s parliament issued a report calling into question the entire security apparatus for the Games. And, the worry that Israelis may be targets is justly magnified by the atrocity in Burgas, Bulgaria, in which a suicide bomber killed five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian driver, and injured dozens more.

Israel’s domestic civil security infrastructure – probably the most advanced in the world – has made the sight of burned-out buses like we saw in Burgas, a horrific but increasingly distant memory. Having failed to perpetuate terror inside Israel, it is only logical (in the sense that terrorist mass murder can be ascribed such a word) that they would take the fight to other places. This, of course, is the larger fear borne of the Burgas brutality.

This summer also marks the 18th anniversary of the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in which 85 were killed and hundreds wounded. In sum, this is a summer of sad memories and worrisome developments.

The world, for the most part, assures itself that this brutal violence against and murder of Israeli civilians is merely part of a tit-for-tat foreign conflict. The mass murder of Israelis – in Munich, in Buenos Aires, in Burgas – is simply the cup of human unkindness overflowing from the Middle East into otherwise peaceable parts of the world. This is not Jew-hatred in the sense we knew it in the early part of the 20th century or before, most of the world tells itself.

Yet, even as much of the world reassures itself that there is a parity, at least of sorts, between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the murder of Israelis and Jews abroad, another part of the world chants “death to the Jews” and carries signs warning “Prepare for the real holocaust.” These extremists are dismissed as cranks, unrepresentative of anything significant in the global body politic, and there is the incorrect belief that Israelis and Jews will be safe and secure if or when they come to a satisfactory entente with the Palestinians.

And yet, as the world denies that the virulent antisemitism rampant across much of the Arab and Muslim world is anything more than a legitimate political position, we are reminded that stereotypes, prejudices and scapegoating are not as remote as we would like to believe.

The Financial Post’s Lawrence Solomon is currently writing a series on Jewish approaches to contemporary politics. His piece in last Saturday’s paper drew attention to a jaw-dropping survey we inexplicably missed when it was released three years ago. (William Kristol, writing in The Weekly Standard at the time, noted that the study received little publicity, and asked rhetorically, “I wonder why?”) Neil Malhotra of Stanford Business School and Yotam Margalit, a political scientist at Columbia, conducted a survey of 2,768 American adults. They analyzed “people’s responses to the economic collapse and tried to determine how antisemitic sentiments might relate to the ongoing financial crisis.”

The survey asked, “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” and a range of answers was offered: a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, not at all. Among non-Jewish respondents, almost one in four – 24.6 percent – blamed “the Jews” in levels from moderate to a great deal. When non-Jewish respondents who replied “at least a little” were factored in, the numbers rose to 38.4 percent.

Solomon brought the survey to our attention in order to point out the seemingly incongruous divergence between the results for self-described Republicans and Democrats. The study’s authors found it “somewhat surprising” that “Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so [a statistically significant difference].” This is surprising, the authors said, because of “the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic party’s electoral coalition.” While this divergence is interesting and bizarre, both sets of numbers are too high. This is the real news here, which was too much overlooked when it was first released.

If there is a lack of global outrage over the mass murder of Jews (or Israelis, as the world more comfortably categorizes the dead), this seemingly unrelated survey may help explain it. Terrorism is generally defined as targeting innocent civilians. For a shockingly significant minority of Americans – and probably far greater numbers of people in other parts of the world – there may be no such thing as an “innocent Jew.”

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