WarSclerotic

US worried by ‘rising tide’ of European anti-Semitism

White House chief of staff promises Washington will wage ‘tireless’ fight against Jew hatred

By AFP and Itamar Sharon January 14, 2015, 9:23 am

via US worried by ‘rising tide’ of European anti-Semitism | The Times of Israel.

But, but, BUUUUUUTTTTTT it has nothing to do with the islam !!!

French Ambassador to the US Gerard Araud addresses a “Gathering of Solidarity and Remembrance with the People of France and Its Jewish Community” at the Adas Israel Congregation in Washington on January 13, 2015. (photo credit: AFP/NICHOLAS KAMM)

The White House voiced alarm Tuesday at a surge in anti-Semitism in Europe and in France, after last week’s attack in Paris on a kosher supermarket which killed four Jewish people.

The violent assault on the Jewish community in France that took place on Friday afternoon was the latest in a series of very troubling incidents in Europe and around the world that reflect a rising tide of anti-Semitism,” White House chief of staff Denis McDonough said at an American Jewish committee event in a Washington synagogue.

“On behalf of the president (Barack Obama) I am here to affirm our nations’ solidarity to the French people and the Jewish community in France, and around the world, to condemn in the strongest possible terms the violent attacks of last week,” McDonough said.

“We will not waver in our commitment to combat the scourge of anti-Semitism,” McDonough stressed, adding that: “from the president on down, you have my commitment that we will wage this fight tirelessly, and together.”

Recalling Obama’s mentioning this week that France is the United States’ oldest ally, McDonough said “we stand in solidarity with the French people and share this steadfast commitment to the values of liberty, free expression, coexistence and religious freedom that were so cruelly and violently assaulted in Paris last week.”

The kosher market attack, carried out by jihadist Amedy Coulibaly, followed a shooting days earlier at satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were killed by brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi. Seventeen people lost their lives in the three-day killing spree all told.

But the market attack was just the latest to raise fears among European Jews. It followed killings at a Belgian Jewish Museum and a Jewish school in southwestern France in recent years. France particularly has seen numerous incidents of hate crimes, harassment of Jews and the common use of anti-Semitic slogans in anti-Israel demonstrations.

In an emotional speech to the French parliament Tuesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls spoke out against what he called “the new anti-Semitism,” which was being spread via the Internet.

“How can we accept that in France, we still hear about the death of Jews? How can we accept that people are killed because they are Jewish,” he asked. “When the Jews of France are attacked, all of France is attacked.”

The UN is planning to hold an informal meeting on the growth of anti-Semitism on January 22 in response to a request from dozens of nations, including Israel, the United States and all European Union members.

The 37 countries sent a letter to General Assembly President Sam Kutesa on October 1 calling for a meeting in response to “an alarming outbreak of anti-Semitism worldwide.” That was well before last week’s attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris.

The letter, whose signatories also included Rwanda, Uruguay, Canada and Australia, noted Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s statement last August expressing concern at the spike in anti-Semitic attacks.

“At rallies, crowds have chanted ‘Gas the Jews” and ‘Death to the Jews,’” the letter said. “Firebombs have been thrown at synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses have been vandalized.”

The countries said they were requesting a meeting of the 193-member world body because “a clear message from the General Assembly is a critical component of combatting the sudden rise of violence and hatred directed at Jews.”

Israel’s UN Ambassador Ron Prosor said Monday: “We have a great deal of work to do to move this issue from the headlines to the history books.”

The January 22 meeting will feature a keynote address by French philosopher and author Bernard Henri Levy and speeches by representatives from several countries.

France is home to the third largest Jewish community in the world, with a population of some half a million. Around 7,000 Jews from the country moved to Israel in 2014, a record number that officials expect to be topped in coming years. Jewish Agency head Natan Sharansky recently said he sees over 100,000 Jews moving to Israel from France in the next two decades.

In wake of the killings, Israeli leaders have stepped up a drive for French Jews to move to Israel in the face of increasing anti-Semitism. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of those who urged emigration, telling the French Jewishj community that “Israel is your home.”

Such remarks have been said to anger the French government, which has vowed to combat anti-Semitism and defend its Jewish citizens.

French Ecology Minister Segolene Royal, who attended the Jerusalem funeral of the four Jewish victims on Tuesday, reassured the victims’ families and all those gathered of the French government’s commitment to to preserve and protect the Jewish community, which she called “a source of pride” for France.

“Anti-Semitism has no place in France. That is the message given by the millions who marched,” she said. “The messages ‘Je Suis Charlie’ (I am Charlie) and ‘Je Suis Juif’ (I am Jewish) resonated throughout the streets.”

At the funeral, President Reuven Rivlin also called on the world to fight “rabid anti-Semitic incitement,” but stressed his desire to see French Jews move to Israel by positive choice, rather than under duress.

“Much has been said since the murders, on the issue of the immigration to Israel of French Jewry. My dear brothers and sisters, Jewish citizens of France, you are welcome. Our land is your land, our home is your home, and we yearn to see you settle in Zion,” he said.

“However, returning to your ancestral home need not be due to distress, out of desperation, because of destruction, or in the throes of terror and fear. Terror has never kept us down, and we do not want terror to subdue you. The Land of Israel is the land of choice. We want you to choose Israel, because of a love for Israel.”

AP contributed to this report.

Fear of an Anti-Muslim Backlash

January 13, 2015 by Daniel Greenfield

via Fear of an Anti-Muslim Backlash | FrontPage Magazine.

It used to be that the media would at least wait a day before sweeping the latest victims of Muslim terrorism into the trash to refocus on the looming “anti-Muslim backlash” that never actually comes.

The increase in Muslim terrorism however has made it risky for the media to wait that long. 24 hours after a brutal Muslim terrorist attack, there might be another brutal Muslim terrorist attack which will completely crowd out the stories of Muslims worrying about the backlash to the latest Muslim atrocity.

The massacre at Charlie Hebdo was quickly followed by a massacre at a kosher supermarket and somewhere in between them the Islamic State in Nigeria had wiped out the populations of sixteen villages.

With so many Muslim attacks crowded together, the media had no choice but to take a deep breath and dive in with its “Muslim backlash” stories.

The Voice of America ran its “Muslims fear backlash” piece while the bodies were still warm. The Los Angeles Times rushed out its “Muslims fear backlash” story before the Kosher supermarket massacre. It quoted the Muslim spokesman for the National Observatory Against Islamophobia asserting that it is Muslims who suffer after such attacks. Muslims however weren’t the ones who suffered. The four dead Jews at a Kosher supermarket did the suffering at the hands of a Muslim gunman.

While Muslim murderers were still prowling France for victims, the media was making the story about the perpetrators, not the victims.

And Muslims around the world lined up to join the “Fear of a Backlash” party like it was an exclusive nightclub. Both Belgian and Swedish Muslims claimed to be afraid of a backlash after the Paris attacks. At least those Swedish Muslims who weren’t calling for Allah to “multiply such attacks.”

Even Detroit Muslims got in on the act. Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR in Michigan, claimed, “We are concerned about backlash against Muslims in the west.”

Walid had endorsed the historical Islamic mass murder of Jews on Twitter and stated in a sermon, “Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah? They are the Jews, they are the Jews.”

Even while Jews were set to be murdered by a fellow exponent of Walid’s anti-Semitic ideology, the media was pandering to his phony claims of victimization thousands of miles away.

The Muslim backlash narrative insisted that the real victims weren’t Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, Philippe Braham and Francois-Michel Saada dying in a Kosher supermarket in France, but Dawud Walid, the anti-Semitic spokesman for a hate group closely linked to terrorism over in Michigan.

Is it really a backlash that Muslims fear or a moral reckoning?

In the rush to make bigots like Walid the victims, instead of the actual men and women being murdered in the name of his violent ideology, the hard questions about the connection between the historical Islamic anti-Semitism bandied about by Dawud Walid and the modern massacres of Jews go unasked.

The murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had its roots in an Islamic political and legal tradition of punishing blasphemy that has continued uninterrupted for over a thousand years. The murder of four Jews in a Kosher supermarket was part of a great Islamic tradition that began with Mohammed. The defenders of the “Prophet” began by killing blasphemers and then continued his work by killing Jews.

Muslims are not the victims of the Hebdo massacre. They are not the victims of mass murder in a Kosher supermarket. They are not the victims of the Sydney Siege.

They are the perpetrators.

When the media rushes to print interviews with Muslims claiming to suddenly be terrified of an imaginary backlash, it is marginalizing and silencing the real victims of Muslim violence who have been the subjects of a Muslim assault for over a thousand years complete with literal lashings.

Not every Muslim supports what happened, but the history and theology of Islam support the ends of silencing blasphemers and killing Jews, if not necessarily the provocative individual means.

The root cause of Islamic violence is Islam. Everything else, from poverty to YouTube videos, is subsidiary at best.

The cries of “Islamophobia” and the claims of a backlash silence the victims of Muslim terror and encourage social blindness to the next Muslim attack against Jews, Christians, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists and countless others.

The Muslim backlash story is a great media tradition that dates back to at least September 11. While the streets of downtown Manhattan were still streaked with the ashes of the dead, the media began running stories about Muslims who were changing their clothes and putting up American flags out of fear that the maddened patriotic rabble would shortly begin massacring Muslims.

The mass anti-Muslim riots after September 11 never materialized; just as they never materialized after the Sydney Siege in Australia or the latest Muslim massacres in France.

The worst thing the media came up with in Australia, after touting its phony #Illridewithyou hashtag warning that Muslims were being persecuted, was three men and one woman holding up a sign reading, “Death to ISIS; Get Out You Rag-Headed F___s.”

They were immediately interviewed by police on possible charges of Isisphobia.

If the police had been as assertive in going after every Muslim in Australia waving a “Behead all those who insult the Prophet” sign, Australia would have been a lot safer.

And if the Australian media had been as aggressive in going after Sheikh Monis, as it did after a few young men waving Australian flags on a shopping center roof, the murder of two Australians in a café might not have happened.

But instead of fighting Jihadists, the media and politicians are determined to fight the threat of a backlash to Muslim terrorism. The obsession with the backlash however implicitly admits the existence of Islamic terror and sidelines it to instead focus on the reaction to it as the greater threat.

On one side are bodies heaped across Europe and America. On the other is the occasional slice of pork on a mosque door, a little graffiti scrawled on a wall or a dirty look on public transportation.

One is genocide and the other is petty vandalism.

We don’t need any more earnest interviews in which Muslims claim that they are the real victims of Muslim terrorism because they now feel “unwelcome” when the bodies of non-Muslims still lie in the morgue.

Try comparing an “unwelcome” feeling to being dead.

It is that sense of self-pitying Muslim victimization that leads easily to Muslim violence. Violence is often sanctioned by victimhood. That Muslims believe themselves to be the victims is nothing new. The Nazis also believed that they were the victims. So did the Muslim killer in a Kosher supermarket who claimed that ISIS, with its mass rapes and genocidal campaign, was the victim of French intervention.

If European Muslims really want to end atrocities like the ones that took place in Paris, instead of making themselves into the victims, they should examine the complicity of their religion, their politics and their sense of victimization in perpetrating them.