Islamic terrorism is the talk of the town right now, which is understandable in view of last week’s events.
Yet few realise or, to be more accurate, dare to say that large, and largely radicalised, Muslim populations don’t just produce armed terrorists who kill people. They also excrete cultural toxins that poison the air.
Of these toxins anti-Semitism is one of the deadliest, mainly because antidotes to it are historically weak in Europe.
It’s not the Muslims who pioneered hatred of the Jews. Europeans can legitimately claim priority rights, which claim they re-emphasised in such a convincing manner at the time when my parents were young.
However, the sheer horror of the Holocaust shocked Europeans and strengthened the efficacy of the antidote.
A passing remark that the Jews collude to control the whole world as they already control the banks was no longer seen as innocent banter. It was seen as a first step on the road to Auschwitz.
Hence such remarks got to be regarded as infra dig in polite society, and for the next 70 years Jews had a relatively quiet time in Europe. No one thought anti-Semitism had disappeared. Yet everyone felt relieved it was dormant.
Anti-Semitism was hibernating like a bear in winter. Just like that animal it could be awakened by a prod with a long stick. That came in the shape of the burgeoning Muslim populations.
Once their size reached a certain critical mass, they formed a formidable electoral bloc and began to exert a powerful political influence. In our sham democracies it doesn’t take long for political influence to become a mighty cultural force or even, if the influence is strong enough, a dominant one.
Politicians in search of easy votes began to cater to Muslim attitudes, and Muslim attitudes to Jews are largely informed by a line in the hadith (record of Mohammed’s words and deeds):
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”
There are other lines in Muslim scriptural sources that take a kinder view of the Jews, but these days Muslims tend to heed this one above all others. No doubt the presence of a Jewish state in the mostly Islamic Middle East has something to do with it, but Muslims themselves could explain this phenomenon much better.
What interests me here is facts, and they are disturbing. Both physical and verbal attacks on European Jews have been growing exponentially for the last decade or so, while a revolting combination of political correctness and political expedience prevents our ‘leaders’ from stamping out the emetic nastiness.
London police report that between April and Christmas last year the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes doubled compared to the same period in 2013.
According to the latest poll, more than half of British Jews (58 per cent, to be exact) doubt they have any future in Britain and are seriously considering moving elsewhere.
One can say with certainty that they are unlikely to use continental Europe as a possible refuge. For, compared to their continental co-religionists, the Brits have it easy.
Within one month last summer eight synagogues were attacked in France, with one firebombed by a 400-strong mob. While last week four Jews were butchered in a Paris kosher supermarket, another such emporium was smashed and looted last year, to the accompaniment of a mob braying “Death to Jews”.
Jewish cemeteries and synagogues are being desecrated throughout Europe with various verbal messages and graphic images, of which swastikas and porcine heads seem to be favoured.
In Germany Molotov cocktails were last year tossed into a synagogue previously destroyed in the 1938 Kristallnacht, while imam Bilal Ismail asked Allah to destroy Jews “to the very last one”.
Anti-Israeli rallies throughout Germany were inductively expanding the object of their hatred from Israelis specifically to Jews as such. Their slogans also testified to finely honed poetic sensibilities, with this one my particular favourite: “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”
Catchy slogans tend to have an inspiring effect, and a wave of attacks on Jews, Jewish shops and restaurants, along with a brushfire spread of anti-Semitic graffiti, have been reported throughout Europe.
In Rome, dozens of Jewish business owners came to work one morning to find their windows decorated with swastikas and graffiti saying “Jews, your end is near”.
In Amsterdam two Jewish women committed the egregious offence of displaying Israeli flags on their balconies. The punishment was swift: one was beaten up, the other was the victim of arson. In Belgium, a Jewish shopper was informed that her custom wasn’t welcome.
In Spain a popular playwright explained that Jews have only themselves to blame because they are incapable of living peacefully with others: “No wonder they’ve been so frequently expelled.”
Maccabi Haifa footballers were assaulted in Austria, and their match with SC Paderborn had to be cancelled.
In France incidents of anti-Semitism have increased seven-fold in the 2000s compared with the 1990s. The government refuses to let Jews defend themselves with firearms, and it won’t defend them itself, for any such defence would have to start with the acknowledgement of the dominant Muslim component in the anti-Semitic attacks.
Jews, their ability to sense danger honed by the events of 70 years ago, are leaving in droves. By some reports, 100,000 of the 500,000 French Jews have fled the country, with many settling in Israel.
In a way they are fortunate in that they have somewhere to run. The rest of us aren’t so lucky, and many of us don’t even sense the danger, which is a shame.
Europe hasn’t seen anything like this since it was ruled by Nazi gauleiters, and, though ostensibly out to murder only isolated groups, mostly Jews, those chaps were in fact killing our whole civilisation.
The Nazis weren’t diabolical because they murdered Jews; they murdered Jews because they were diabolical. The other satanic regime, that of the Soviet Union, was also virulently anti-Semitic, and only Stalin’s death prevented Soviet Jews from suffering the red answer to the brown Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism is a disease, but it’s also a symptom of a much deeper underlying malaise. None of us is immune to it, and only all of us together can inoculate our societies.
Decadence isn’t just sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and homomarriage. It’s also anti-Semitism, and it doesn’t just threaten Jews. It threatens the whole society. Us all.