The most recent victim of anti-Semitism in Europe was an elderly Jewish grandmother in France who managed to escape the Holocaust. Here is a column about it, and the mistakes and deceptions in it are numerous:
• The author asserts that “the devil that she escaped from came back to end her life.” This is a ridiculous conflation of two quite different devils. The devil she escaped from when she was young was Aryan, while the devil that did her in was Muslim. In other words, one devil was motivated by race, the other by religion.
• By implication, the author believes that no progress has been made in dealing with anti-Semitism. But progress has been made. Whites throughout the Western world are quite unlikely to have done this killing. No, this instance of anti-Semitism comes from a new source.
• It isn’t until eleven paragraphs in that the author finally acknowledges that the murderers were Muslim. Why does she wait so long to acknowledge this?
• She says that for the Islamists, “anti-Semitism is at the core of their ideology.” I don’t know about that. Their core is being strongly devoted to Islam, so strongly devoted that every other human life has no value. That means that they are anti-Semitic, but also that they are equally against anyone else who is not Muslim. Both Jews and non-Jews alike will be targeted equally.
• She says, “When Islamists ... attack Jews, down the road they will end up attacking women, gays, journalists, soldiers, policemen — they will attack all of France.” This implies that Jews have been their first victims, when in fact the very first intended victim was Salman Rushdie, a liberal Muslim (or a liberal with a Muslim background). As for women, gays, journalists, etc., all of those groups have already been victimized. Why is she ignoring them?
• She says, “Many French Jews believe that while they have tried to warn their fellow citizens that this hatred will spread and ultimately attack French people everywhere, few have listened.” I don’t know what she is talking about. Elites in the West (both Jewish and non-Jewish) insist upon continuing what I have been calling suicidal immigration – that is, immigration that allows in anyone and which considers any pressure to get them to conform to Western values as racist – while some of us who are not elites have protested. Our voices have been completely ignored. If she means that a lot of Jews at the bottom have complained, that might be true in France (though not here in America, as far as I can tell), but if she means that Jews at the top have done so, and have demanded an end to suicidal immigration, that’s just not true.
Apparently, though, this is the line we will be hearing from elites when things go wrong. They will be saying, “We tried to warn you, but you didn’t listen,” when in fact they did not try to warn us, and they were the ones who didn’t listen.
• What in fact is the cause of all this? It is not the bubbling up of hate that she seems to imply. It is not coming from the far right, but is the inadvertent result of policies from the left. It is being so worried about falling on one’s face that one leans backward till one falls over anyway. It is an open-mindedness that is so open that, as the saying goes, one’s brains have fallen out. It is trying, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, to be as open to the “Other” as possible, while ignoring how awful some “Others” can be. It is the insistence that the problem is “us” (that is, whites in Europe and throughout the Western world), which thus ignores the fact that the “Other” in one guise can be murderous toward the “Other” in another guise. It is being tolerant of the intolerant. Like it or not, this just isn’t ordinary white French people, or white Europeans, becoming racist and murdering Jews.
She also writes:
Indeed, every French citizen, every European, every democratic voice, every defender of human rights, should be worried for their future. Such attacks deeply wound the foundation of the universal values that Western countries share and in which Western people believe.
Yup. I totally agree with that. However, it is remarkable how seldom this has been said after so many Islamist outrages going back to the Rushdie affair. And every time a little peep has been uttered expressing such sentiments, along comes some elite to smash it. Think about the awful thing Garry Trudeau said after the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists: they deserved it because they were punching down. That is the basic sentiment of our elites, whether they are in France or elsewhere in the Western world.
Will our elites ever admit that we aren’t the problem?