Who's to Blame for Rising Anti-Semitism?

As anti-Semitic incidents proliferate in Western Europe, the burning issue seems to be: who is to blame? Should we all blame right wing populists like the German AfD and the French Marine LePen or should we blame the politicians, like German Chancellor Merkel, who opened her nation to Muslim anti-Semites?

Obviously, the leftist media is spinning as fast as it can. It’s true enemy is the radical right, and thus, anything bad must be the fault of the right. Recently, The New York Times Magazine reported that German anti-Semitism was being caused by a resurgent German right.

Jonathan Tobin wades through the propaganda and arrives at the facts (via Maggie's Farm):

Earlier this month, a New York Times Magazine story earlier titled “The New German Anti-Semitism” reported that “police statistics attribute 89 percent of all anti-Semitic crimes to right-wing extremists.” But the same article went on to question that statistic. According to the Times, when German authorities can’t directly attribute a motive for an attack on a Jewish target (and they often cannot), they ascribe it to the Right. But a European Union survey of German Jews conducted last year showed that a plurality of Jews who say they experienced anti-Semitic harassment said the perpetrators were Muslim extremists. Yet, as the Times noted, the German government has been insisting that country’s anti-Semitism problem has not been imported from the Middle East….

Yet the government seems far more focused on the threat from the right and the growth of what it describes as Islamophobia in response to the massive influx of Syrian refugees who arrived after Merkel opened up the borders to them.

Surely, the authorities in Germany and other European countries could have predicted that an influx of Muslims would produce more anti-Semitism:

As in many other European countries, the recent wave of immigrants from Muslim and Arab countries has created a vast new constituency for Jew-hatred. There is a long tradition of contempt for Jews in Islamic culture that has only been exacerbated by their resentment over the creation of Israel. Muslim expressions of hatred for Israel and Jews are now indistinguishable from the anti-Semitic invective of many Europeans. This has created a bizarre alliance among Muslims, leftist academics, and other elites who aim to delegitimize Israel, Zionism, and Jews.

Writing in The Spectator Daniella Greenbaum Davis reminds us of a recent survey of European attitudes toward Jews:

An ADL study from 2015 highlighted some interesting data regarding anti-Semitism within German society, and in western Europe more broadly. Eleven classically anti-Semitic ideas were posed to respondents. For each of the 11 statements, Muslims living in Germany had a much higher rate of responding “probably true” than did the overall population when asked the same question. Asked whether Jews “have too much power in international finance markets,” 74 percent of German Muslims agreed, compared with 29 percent among the overall population. When asked whether Jews “are responsible for most of the world’s wars,” 33 percent of German Muslims agreed, compared with 9 percent among the overall population. When asked whether Jews “think they are better than other people,” 40 percent of German Muslims living in Germany agreed, as compared to 16 percent for the overall population. And so on and on and on.

When it comes to the European right, the verdict is mixed:

Most Jews don’t feel comfortable making common cause with parties such as AfD or Le Pen’s National Rally party, despite shared concerns about Muslim violence. But the notion that those parties, for all their troubling baggage, are responsible for the increasing anti-Semitism doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In the case of the AfD, the party has earned the enmity of the Jewish community for its resistance to Germany’s “culture of remembrance,” in which Holocaust education is compulsory and memorials have proliferated. But AfD has also gone out of its way to state its support for Israel and made clear that it would like improved relations with Germany’s Jews.

Let’s not forget, Tobin reminds us, that the intelligentsia in these countries has joined the Palestinian cause and has worked long and hard to attack and discredit Israel:

Both the French and German governments have said the right things about opposing anti-Semitism. But academic and other elites have helped delegitimize Israel and Jews in the name of anti-Zionism, and this has inevitably led to tolerating violence against Jews at the hands of Muslim immigrants.