Hating the Jews: The Rise of Antisemitism in the 21st Century 9781618110404

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HATING THE JEWS

The Rise of Antisemitism in the 21st Century

Antisemitism in America ‡”‹‡•‡†‹–‘” Eunice G. Pollack ȋ‹˜‡”•‹–›‘ˆ‘”–Š‡šƒ•Ȍ

HATING THE JEWS The Rise of Antisemitism in the 21st Century

GREGG RICKMAN

Boston 2012

The opinions and characterizations in this book are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the United States Government.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: a bibliographic record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

Copyright © 2012 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN - 978-1-936235-25-4, Hardback ISBN - 978-1-618110-40-4, Electronic Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press in 2012 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

This book is dedicated to my children as well as all children that they may not suffer the hostility of violence, indignities of prejudice, and the capriciousness of indifference.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 Introduction The End of History? The Times Are A-changing. . . . . . . . . .8 Chapter One Durban, 9/11, and the Mattress Mice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 Chapter Two We’re Semites Too: Europe’s Muslims . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55 Chapter Three Denial and Deligitimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .92 Chapter Four The Missing Limb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Chapter Five Doing the “Right Thing”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

Acknowledgements In writing a book like this, on a topic of this nature, there are so many people to thank and so many who cannot be thanked due to the nature of this issue. Yet it goes without saying that I could not have moved forward without the help of Ken Marcus and the great generosity of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research. Additionally, there are others: Karen Paikin Barall, who served as my assistant for more than a year and provided wise counsel, a unique understanding, and a passion for fighting antisemitism that contributed in so many ways to the good fight. Barry Lowenkron, the assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, the first of two people in that position I served under during my tenure at the Department, who was a great leader of the Bureau and a supportive, understanding friend and great advocate for human rights, the Department and the country. Maureen Longus, in my office, who was another assistant who very much “made the trains run on time” and made it bureaucratically possible for things to happen. Aviva Raz-Schechter, in Israel, who headed the lonely fight against antisemitism from within the Foreign Ministry, is a stalwart defender of the Jewish right to live without discrimination. In the United States Congress, I have to thank former Senator George Voinovich for his steady support of my office, my mission, and me. The Senator, who played an important role in forming the office, helped in so many ways to advance the fight against antisemitism as well as other forms of discrimination, and was a dedicated public servant who well represented his state in the congress and his country every day of his time in office. Along with the Senator was the late Congressman Tom Lantos, whom I had the honor to meet with concerning the fight against antisemitism, as well as when I served on the House International Relations Committee. His passing was a loss to us all, and the victims of antisemitism lost much with his departure. Congressman Chris Smith, who has long been an advocate the fight against such hatred, is a great 6

Acknowledgements

congressman who cares. I worked with him first as a staffer on the Committee, then at the OSCE in Brussels in 2006 and again in Bucharest in 2007. Congressman Eric Cantor helped with the fight while on the US Delegation along with Congressman Smith at Bucharest. He led the delegation well and understood all too well the enormity of the problem. If there is one man who understands the importance of the fight and works so tirelessly each and every day on behalf of Jews in distress it is Rabbi David Niederman of Williamsburg, New York. His passionate, undying efforts to save the Jews of Yemen, of Iran, and of other endangered communities is both historic and a blessing for those who are lucky to receive his care. He cares, fights, and never stops working on behalf of Jews around the world. It has been a true honor working with him on such noble causes. There are other experts who provided inestimable help through advice, suggestions and scholarly help. Among them are Mike Whine of the Community Security Trust in London; former Bundestag Member Gert Weisskirchen; Stacy Burdett of the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith in Washington; Rabbi Abe Cooper and Mark Weitzman of the Simon Weisenthal Center in Los Angeles and New York respectively; Rabbi Andy Baker of the American Jewish Committee in Washington; Dan Mariaschin of the B’nai Brith in Washington; Chaya Singer of the World Union of Jewish Students in South Africa; Judea Pearl of Los Angeles; Bernard Lewis of Princeton; Harold Rhode of Washington; Natan Sharansky of Israel; and Evan Malnick of Rockville, Maryland. I could not forget to thank my family, my wife and three children, for allowing me the honor of serving in this position and traveling so often as I did. Not only did they endure that, but they also allowed me the time to write this book and for all of that, I am eternally grateful. Finally, to all those who suffered the pain and indignities of antisemitism both past and present, it was an honor to have worked on your behalf, even if to have lessened the pain if not to prevent it altogether. Everyone should be granted the blessing to work on behalf of one’s people on such an important and noble mission, even in the face of such overwhelming prejudice. For that I am eternally grateful.

Introduction

The End of History? The Times Are A-changing So which is it? Jews are a success story, or Jews are a plague? Don’t mess with Jews, or blame Jews for everything in sight the moment you get drunk? Jews are victims (expulsions, pogroms, the Holocaust), or Jews are victimizers (rapacious bankers, shyster lawyers, land-grabbers and ethnic cleansers)? Jews are devils and sub-human vermin (a Nazi trope), or Jews are God’s chosen people? —Stanley Fish1 This latest anti-Semitism did not surface suddenly, in a vacuum. It forms part of a historical continuum that was only briefly interrupted, if at all, following the Second World War. Where did it all come from, what makes it so resistant to suppression—and will it ever end? —Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney2 For half a century Arab strongmen and Muslim partisans, Persians and Egyptians, socialists and nationalists and monarchists, and pan-Arabists and pan-Arabists, traditionalists and the Party of Ali, have all sunk their teeth into Eretz Yisroel and worried it down to bone and gristle. —Michael Chabon in the Yiddish Policeman’s Union3

Wherever I traveled as the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat AntiSemitism, I was always asked a simple question: why, after the Holocaust, has antisemitism returned? The answers were complicated: 1. The fall of the Soviet Union 2. The rise of post-Khomeini Iran 3. The decay of the old Palestinian/Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) resistance 4. The rise of Jihadi Islamism 5. The rise of Europe’s second-generation Muslims 8

The End of History?The Times Are A-changing

In short, the end of the Soviet Union and of the old Palestinian/ PLO resistance, both of which were connected politically, militarily, and financially, explains the collapse of the old order. The rise of Jihadi Islamism and, by connection, post-Khomeini Iran is, in turn, dependent on the former two events. Finally, the rise of Europe’s second-generation Muslims has proven to be the catalyst for this century’s steep rise of antisemitism and has been the beneficiaries of the totality of these events. Together, these movements have contributed to the intensification of antisemitism in the twenty-first century. *** For Jews in the twentieth century, the story of antisemitism was the image seared into the cultural memory of concentration camps and Nazi Germany. As Tony Judt had written about the sublimation of violence into the abhorrence of the same, During this war violence was directed not just against soldiers but above all against civilians (a large share of the deaths during World War II occurred not in battle but under the aegis of occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide). And the utter exhaustion of all European nations—winners and losers alike—left few illusions about the glory of fighting or the honor of death. What did remain, of course, was a widespread familiarity with brutality and crime on an unprecedented scale. The question of how human beings could do this to each other—and above all the question of how and why one European people (Germans) could set out to exterminate another (Jews)—were, for an alert observer like [Hannah] Arendt, self-evidently going to be the obsessive questions facing the continent. That is what she meant by “the problem of evil.”4

This conversion to a disdain of violence and to empathy for the underdog cannot be overlooked. This sympathy would play an important part in Soviet policy and helps explain Europe’s evolving views toward Jews, Israel, antisemitism, and Muslims in its midst. The Soviet Union provided an unfortunate successor to the Nazis as the monolithic persecutor of Jews, although Stalin had initially supported the founding of the State of Israel and opposed a British role in the Middle East. The Soviets were shocked at the extent and depth 9

Introduction

of the support for Israel exhibited by Soviet Jews. They were stunned by the spontaneous pro-Israel demonstrations that greeted then-ambassador Golda Meir upon her arrival in Moscow in 1948. As former Israeli diplomat Walter Eytan attested, “The USSR had concluded that the existence of Israel was a menace to its own domestic order and suddenly its attitude toward Israel was reversed.”5 For the Soviets, Israeli opposition to Soviet communist expansionism was inexcusable. They could not countenance this type of behavior from Israel. Worse was the Jewish support for Israel within the Soviet Union, which was seen as a bourgeois sign of support for religious affiliation as well as nationalism, which was abhorrent to their ideology. From then on, if the KGB wasn’t accusing Jewish doctors of trying to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders in the infamous Soviet-contrived 1952 Doctors’ Plot,6 their Eastern European satellites were harassing Jews, chasing them from their jobs, and denying them their personal freedoms. At first, the Soviets had supported the creation of the State of Israel because of the latter’s opposition to Great Britain in Mandatory Palestine, but when they found that Israel would not do their bidding against the British and the Americans in the Middle East, they cynically turned on her.7 Israel became a new enemy for the Communists and another battleground with the United States, which, as Bernard Lewis pointed out, now recognized advantages to siding with Israel in that competition.8 This competition led to Soviet- and American-backed proxy wars. Soon, the Soviet Union, with its Gulag system and oppressive antisemitism, led to discrimination and eventual mass emigration. Soviet policy in the Middle East was therefore predicated upon conflict and sought to exploit differences between Israel and its neighbors. In this ongoing battle, the Soviets now made Israelis—and the Jews overall—an enemy. Galia Golan, a preeminent Israeli analyst of Soviet Middle Eastern behavior, explained, “It is undeniable that the Soviets exploited this conflict to facilitate their entry into the region in the 1950s, supplying arms, training, and political assistance to the Arab states involved while emphasizing the American commitment to Israel.”9 Yet more than forty years of economic stagnation coupled with the burdensome cost of an arms race with the United States began to take its toll on the Soviet Union. The forced dependence of its satellites, along with severe economic mismanagement, created a need for changes in 10

The End of History?The Times Are A-changing

the Soviet system. Changes in economics, foreign policy, and overall transparency forced upon the empire by the Soviet Communist Party secretary general Mikhail Gorbachev promised hope to many, but also allowed nationalists, who were looking to bolt from the Soviet orbit, to take advantage of the weakened Soviet state. At the same time as Gorbachev’s restructuring or Perestroika was taking place, a Soviet client state in Iraq had, with Soviet and American support, pushed the bloodbath that was the Iran-Iraq War to a merciful end, but not before a million people were dead on both sides. Yet a moribund Iraq, needing funds to pay its debts, left post-Khomeini Iran free to pursue its hegemonic designs. As Khomeini indicated in his will, his calls for liberation were not restricted to Iran:10 This is not the work of anyone or anything except divine assistance that has awakened nations, particularly the Iranian Muslim nation and has guided it from darkness into light: The Light of Islam. Let me say at this point that this politico-religious testament of mine is not made to the noble people of Iran only. Rather, it is recommended for all Islamic nations and the oppressed peoples of the world regardless of religion or nationality. I humbly pray that Almighty God does not leave us and our nations to ourselves even for a moment. May He not withhold His blessings from the children of Islam and the cherished Muslim combatants.11

Although Iranian radicalization was a dangerous new addition to an ever-inflamed area of the world, the concept was by no means a new one. This radicalization had been building for decades in other countries of the region, and importantly in Europe as well. According to former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and Middle East specialist Reuel Marc Gerecht, The seeds of Muslim radicalization were planted in Europe in the 1950s, when the Muslim community was small and Muslim organizations, usually inspired and aided by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, were in their infancy. Although it’s difficult to know with precision (European scholarship and security-service interest in European Muslim communities really started only in the 1980s), the wave of radicalization that struck the Middle East in the 1970s and culminated with the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 seems to have hit Europe hard in the mid- to late 1980s. 11

Introduction

This was the era when Saudi Wahhabi missionary activity, in large part born to counter Iran’s revolution, exploded worldwide. By the 1990s, Saudi cash and Saudi-financed instruction and preachers were everywhere in Europe. When Al Qaeda’s missionaries arrived in the late 1990s, they had only to follow the path already cleared years before by the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabi preachers. By the late 1990s, the Brotherhood and the Wahhabis had become nearly indistinguishable.12

Milton Shain, a professor at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, explained this problem further and discussed the formation of the divide between Arab Muslims and Jews: Socioeconomic and political instability added fuel to worsening Muslim-Jewish relations in the wider Arab world, including Egypt, Syria and Libya . . . Once the Jewish State was established, Jews in Arab lands were seen by many as a “fifth column” and a target for regular outrages.13

Within this context of increased radicalization, a series of events occurred within a short time of each other that began the transformation to a new and dangerous world order. In August 1988, the eight-year Iran-Iraq War ended; the Saudis and U.S.-bankrolled Jihadi Muslims were finally victorious over the Soviets in Afghanistan, forcing a retreat in February 1989; and Ayatollah Khomeini died in the same month, signaling a new stage in the Iranian revolution. Moscow’s withdrawal from Afghanistan suggested that violent Jihadi Islamism could also be a powerful force to counter the United States and its allies in the Middle East and beyond. With the fall of the Soviet Union two years later, the United States became the world’s only superpower and thus the target of jihadists in the Muslim world bereft of the financial, military, and strategic help and support structure of the Soviet Union. At the same time, there were now countries in the region—such as Yemen and Pakistan—that became subject to those very same jihadist forces, and needed American economic and even military support. Moreover, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, although significant for the end of the Soviet Union and a victory by proxy for the United States, unleashed a force that the United States would soon come to regret. The rebel fight against the 12

The End of History?The Times Are A-changing

Soviets would have very negative outcomes for the United States and the West, and particularly for the Jews. The rebels’ victory would also have a powerful effect in Saudi Arabia. As Atlantic journalist Mary Anne Weaver wrote in 1996, Washington’s financial commitment to the jihad was exceeded only by Saudi Arabia’s. At the time the jihad was getting under way there was no significant Islamist opposition movement in Saudi Arabia, and it apparently never occurred to the Saudi rulers, who feared the Soviets as much as Washington did, that the volunteers it sent might be converted by the jihad’s ideology.14

Al-Qaeda, which had expelled the Soviet infidels from Afghanistan, felt it equally just to evict American forces from Saudi Arabia. Thus, it now took up the banner of jihad against the Kingdom, with the goal of ridding it of the presence of the United States and of the royal family as well.15 Al-Qaeda hatred had every reason to believe that other Saudis would share their animosity for the United States. As the former Washington Post reporter and analyst Thomas Lippman wrote, The American response to the September 11 attacks confirmed their most negative feelings about the United States. When Washington imposed visa restrictions on Saudi travelers, froze the assets of various Islamic charities, and incarcerated hundreds of Muslim men—all while supporting Israel in its efforts to suppress the Palestinian uprising with bloody attacks that Saudis watched every night on television—it provided an opening for the most anti-American elements among Saudis to say, in effect, “We told you so” to their pro-Western compatriots.16

Added to this anti-Americanism was an increase in financial support for terrorism. By mixing religious beliefs, tools and interpretations with financial purposes, without proper regulations and controls, Saudi Arabia opened an avenue for terrorism financing through the traditional Zakat, a legal almsgiving conceived as a way for purification by the Prophet that turned into a financial tool for terrorists.17 13

Introduction

Prince Salman, governor of the Riyadh Province, suggested the supposed benevolence of such support when he said in November 2002, “If beneficiaries had used assistance for evil acts, that is not our responsibility at all.”18 The Saudi Ulema or supreme religious authority wanted to Islamicize as much of the country as possible. Spreading the faith was equally important. Expanding Islamic influence at home and abroad through mosques, schools, and books, and through the training of imams, achieved that purpose. At the same time as Al-Qaeda showed itself to be virulently antiAmerican, its views of Jews and Israel proved to be no less toxic. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Al Qaeda has always defined its enemies as the “Jews and Crusaders,” referring even to the American forces in the first Gulf War as the “Crusader-Jewish alliance.” Bin Laden, in one of his early public statements, which he issued in 1994, also attacked what he considered the Saudis’ official endorsement of the Oslo peace accord. Still, until 2002, Israel and the Jews were only on Al Qaeda’s peripheral view as a strategic target. Al Qaeda was, like many in the Middle East, committed in principal to the liberation of all Muslim lands and holy places, among these the Palestinian areas and the Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem, but it was busier attacking its primary target—America and did not direct any resources toward attacking Israel or Jews.19

So entered another force to stir anti-Semitism and opposition to Israel. *** The Palestinians, whose fortunes depended on the Soviet Union, were coerced by Gorbachev to pursue a new form of struggle through negotiation. To gain the trust of the Arab world and to convince the West of the sincerity of his new international policy termed, in English, “New Thinking,” Gorbachev needed to prove Soviet commitment to ArabIsraeli peacemaking in more than theory. Yet this carried the risk of losing radical Soviet allies in the region. A. Vasilyev, writing in Pravda on Soviet-Arab relations in February 1989, asserted, “Let’s be frank: The new ideas in Soviet foreign policy have confused some of our traditional 14

The End of History?The Times Are A-changing

close friends—the representatives of revolutionary democrats, communists, and other left forces.” Yet, Vasilyev declared, “We need one another economically. The geographical proximity and continental scale of both the USSR and the Arab world condemns us to mutually beneficial cooperation.” In the same vein, Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze declared a week later in a well-publicized speech in Cairo that “Upheavals in the Near East always affect us very strongly. The Soviet people are especially sensitive to anything that happens here, because tension in this region costs us dearly, in all respects, including materially.” Disruptions in the Middle East affected the Soviet Union because of its Central Asian republics’ Muslim populations, but more importantly it affected the Soviet Union’s traditional Arab allies in the then-ongoing competition with the West. As sensitive to the region as Shevardnadze asserted the Soviets were, they set their sights on two goals with relation to Israel: modifying the PLO’s stated intention to destroy Israel and reestablishing their own diplomatic relations with Israel. These steps could persuade the United States to accept the USSR as a legitimate partner in Middle East diplomacy,20 and at the same time transform the Palestinian struggle with Israel. The Arab “resistance,” or the PLO, had been fostered, promoted, trained, and funded by the Soviet Union. The PLO conducted raids and spectacular terrorist attacks against Israeli targets around the world, prompting Israeli retaliation. Now it would have to change. Thus, it was the Soviets’ efforts to save the Soviet Union, in part by restructuring its relations with the world, that led them in turn to urge, even to force, Perestroika or restructuring and “New Thinking” on the Palestinian Arabs. Pushing the Palestinians to accept Israel’s existence and to negotiate with her on terms of mutual acceptance was a Soviet idea that led to the thaw and welcome respite to the Intifada that had been launched by the Palestinian Arabs in 1987. By 1993, the Oslo Peace process had produced tangible results, leading many in Israel and the West to believe that peace in the region was possible. As Oday Abukaresh, the Atkin Research Fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation [sic] in London, wrote, After the second Gulf War and the Americanization of economic and political systems, the Middle East witnessed a fundamental 15

Introduction

leap in many vital sectors that affected the cultural and informatics infrastructure. After the Oslo accords both Palestine and Israel were significantly affected by this new world political system and the half-century conflict began to take serious steps towards a solution and reconciliation, in addition to action to solve neighbourhood conflicts related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The region saw a tremendous expansion of the peace and conflict resolution “industry.”21

Yet the hopes raised by Oslo were eventually dashed by the Second Intifada, initiated by Yasser Arafat. According to Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of a founder of Hamas and its terror campaign, Yasser Arafat and the other PA leaders had been determined to spark another intifada. They had been planning it for months, even as Arafat and Barak had been meeting with President Clinton at Camp David. They had simply been waiting for a suitable triggering pretext.22

As his presidency neared its end, Bill Clinton attempted to recreate the success of Camp David and achieve a final, lasting settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It became apparent, however, that Arafat could not simply say yes to an agreement, nor could he commit to truthful negotiations. According to then-prime minister Ehud Barak, in interviews with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, Arafat was incapable of dealing with Israel honestly: They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie . . . creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn’t. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as “the truth.”23

Instead of coming to an agreement with Barak, Arafat unleashed the forces of the Second Intifada, and the war with Israel was renewed. Yet, as Yousef attested, Arafat soon lost control of the Intifada to the more radicalized forces of Hamas, which launched “suicide bombings” across Israel: “Soon, however, Arafat discovered that the battered boxer he had 16

The End of History?The Times Are A-changing

set back on its feet was made of sterner stuff than he had imagined. The streets were the natural environment for Hamas. The boxer had gotten its start there, and it was there that it was at its strongest.”24 As with every struggle with Israel, Israel’s response to Palestinian aggression was met with antisemitism abroad. This time, however, the coming of age of the second generation of European Muslims brought another wave of violence, in this case against Jews in Europe. As a French government spokesman stated in June 2002, antisemitic incidents were carried out there by “poorly integrated youths of Muslim origin who would like to bring the Mideast conflict to France.” Those “poorly integrated youths” were so situated because of Europe’s sympathies for the underprivileged and for Muslim culture, which it did not wish to challenge. Yet in reality, the youths’ low level of integration was self-imposed, and Europe’s sympathies failed to challenge their status. The result was a level of antisemitism unseen on the continent since the 1930s, before the Holocaust. Hamas, which opposed the PLO’s disorganized, corrupt governance and its seeming surrender to Israel in the Oslo accords, had grown out of the first Intifada. Funded and trained by Iran, it considered itself the new champion of the Palestinian resistance. Yet the true intent of Hamas is made clear in its covenant, which openly states its opposition to Israel and Jews: The covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) reveals its face, presents its identity, clarifies its stand, makes clear its aspiration, discusses its hopes, and calls out to help it and support it and to join its ranks, because our fight with the Jews is very extensive and very grave, and it requires all the sincere efforts.25

For many Arabs, then, resistance to Israel meant violence and not negotiations, and following the PLO’s seeming acceptance of a peace process with Israel they sought other forces to support, namely, Hamas and Hezbollah,. Both groups soon came under the influence and support of revolutionary Iran. Palestinian Perestroika fell under the weight of its own hypocrisy. With these events, the world changed dramatically. The fall of the Soviet Union was hastened by the newly emboldened Jihadi Islamic 17

Introduction

forces’ determination to spread their absolutist rule beyond Afghanistan. A post-Khomeini Iran was free to pursue its hegemonic and antiWestern, anti-Israel agenda. Together, these would spell terror for the West and particularly for Jews around the world. Although the 1990s seemed like the “end of history,” as Francis Fukayama described the victory of liberal democratic rule, the supposed peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis was undermined by the growth of forces in the Arab world far more devious and dangerous than their previous standard bearers, the PLO. The Palestinians, led by the PLO, were being asked first by the Soviets and then by the Americans to shed their violence in favor of peaceful coexistence with Israel. At the same time, the cease-fire provided an opportunity for the PLO to govern, which exposed its inadequacies and corruption. Armed financially, physically, and ideologically by its Iranian patrons, Hamas provided Palestinians in the street with an alternative to the weakened and compromised PLO. It promised an end to corruption and a viable—and violent—alternative to Israel. Hezbollah, in turn, provided an armed force bent on Israel’s destruction. Together with other religiously motivated terrorists and terrorist organizations, it too advocated a program of genocidal antisemitism. With the emergence out of Afghanistan of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, antisemitism received a global imprimatur. It is vital to understand, as Matthew Morgan pointed out, that “religiously motivated terrorist groups grew sixfold [sic] from 1980 to 1992 and continued to increase in the 1990s . . . terrorism in modern times has not, until recent years, been so dominated by religious overtones.”26 *** In September 2001, the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance took place. Designed to promote solutions to racial intolerance and discrimination, the conference, in fact, did the opposite, promoting antisemitic hatred. According to numerous participants, Jewish and Israeli participants were systematically denied the opportunity to promote policy positions, and Israel was vilified by protestors as a Zionist, racist state. Jewish participants were taunted in street protests and inside the conference hall. According to U.S. officials, the situation became so intoler18

The End of History?The Times Are A-changing

able that Secretary of State Colin Powell decided to withdraw the U.S. delegation. Only days later, four U.S. airplanes were hijacked, three of them being flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With the attack on the United States came the War on Terror and Terror’s war on the West, a war directed as much against Israel and Jews as against the West. Central to this war was the renewal of genocidal antisemitism and a worldwide campaign dedicated to boycotting and isolating Israel and blaming Jews for every anti-Arab/Muslim incident or slight, real or imagined. Once the Soviet Union crumbled, that protection and central address for antisemitism was eliminated, but into the vacuum poured Muslims from many regions and dogmas, all unified by a common goal. Europe’s Muslims viewed the supposed martyrs of Hamas, Hezbollah, and AlQaeda who filled that void as fighting the oppression that was no longer being countered by the Soviets or the moribund Palestinian resistance. European Muslims were convinced that they faced the same kind of oppression in Europe as Muslims confronted in the Middle East. And just as the Jihadis blamed the Jews for their problems, so would Europe’s Muslims. While they had never accepted Israel’s existence, Arab leaders’ violent intent toward her had been kept in check by the bipolar world of the United States–Soviet rivalry. If things got too hot in the Middle East, steps were taken—sometimes to the extent of war or brinksmanship— that even in the most extreme circumstances would only be allowed to go so far. At the same time as “peace had broken out” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, however, mosque building was on the rise in Europe, creating the places in which radical imams from Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia would radicalize the second generation of European Muslims, who remained poorly integrated into the economies and societies of the nations where they had been born. These mosques provided the infrastructure and the personnel for the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the Al-Qaeda perpetrators of the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, for 9/11, for the London bombings, and for the increasingly rampant antisemitism directed against the Jews of Europe. It is the confluence of all these events to September 11, 2001, that I will use to answer the question of why antisemitism rose again and 19

Introduction

how it became so violent. This history will be of vital importance to understanding how Muslims around the world began a resurgence of violence—a resurgence ignored by the West, to its detriment and to that of Jews everywhere. For groups from the Nazis to the Soviets, the Palestinians, the Jihadi Muslims, and Muslim populations all over Europe, the Jews have become the focus of hatred, blame, conspiracy, and vitriol. At the least, the eliminationist rhetorical antisemitism of the Nazis seems to have survived into the present day, sustained by the Soviets. As Yossi Klein Halevi explained, the linkage between Israel and the United States was a constant reference in Soviet propaganda. The two were inextricably tied together, and that legacy has survived in the hatred for both Israel and the United States. It has been transformed into the rhetoric of Muslim antisemitism, twinned with a large dose of anti-Americanism.27 Soviet patronage, training, and propagandizing may have passed with the demise of the Soviet empire, but its legacy endures. That legacy is antisemitism carried on by a new and more dangerous force, as I would see as the first U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Indeed, the world had become different, yet strangely similar to the ones that Jews had hoped was part of the past. Jews as victims had become news again, and the fear had returned.

Chapter One

Durban, 9/11, and the Mattress Mice The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. —Eric Hoffer1 Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut and other Arab centres have always contained large and prosperous Jewish colonies. Until the Zionist invasion of Palestine began, these Jews received the most generous treatment—far, far better than in Christian Europe. Now, unhappily, for the first time in history, these Jews are beginning to feel the effects of Arab resistance to the Zionist assault. Most of them are as anxious as Arabs to stop it. Most of these Jews who have found happy homes among us resent, as we do, the coming of these strangers. —Jordanian King Abdullah2 It’s become legitimate today to cross that line from criticism of Israeli policies to anti-Zionism to anti-Semitism. —Alan Dershowitz3

Jew, Jew, Jew J. K., a twelve-year-old Jewish girl from London, was on her way home with her school friend in August 2006 when they boarded a bus. Nine other students approached them. One of them, a veiled Muslim girl, asked Jasmine whether she was “English or Jewish.” When she blushed and hesitated, the girl threw gum in her hair, took her cell phone, and beat her, and then she and another of the kids pushed Jasmine down to the floor of the bus and proceeded to stomp on her face, breaking her eye socket. The group continued to pummel Jasmine until she passed out on the floor of the bus. If this was not shocking enough, not a single passenger on the bus left their seat to help her, nor did anyone bother 21

Chapter One

to place a phone call to summon help. The final irony was that the bus driver kept driving and never intervened or called for help. It was just too inconvenient for anyone present to help J. K. This is the face of antisemitism today. J. K. case, even with its flagrant violence, seems at least in the recent past to be the rule, not the exception. Take the case of Audrey Brachelle, a twenty-two-year-old North African Jew, who was attacked while walking on the street in Marseille in Spring 2007. The assault on Brachelle began as a simple robbery and turned into an antisemitic attack when her Star of David was exposed during the tussle that erupted with her Muslim assailants, who proceeded to tear it from her and then cut a patch of her hair. Members of the Marseille Jewish community confided to me during my visit there in 2006 that the cutting of Brachelle’s hair was a cynical act to replicate the post–World War II France treatment of female French collaborators with the Germans. In the final indignity, they carved a swastika in her stomach. She was so traumatized that, unlike Jasmine, she was not able to have me visit her. Whatever the location, these audacious attacks against Jews have and are occurring quite specifically because they are Jews. Worse, they are not happening in faraway, undemocratic countries where such violence is the norm but in Western Europe, a place where Jews had become accustomed to a more settled life away from the antisemitism of old. “For thirty years, we forgot about antisemitism” in France, one Jewish leader said. “When the Intifada, the World Trade Center, and 9/11 happened, then we had the spark.” *** “Today the virus of Durban has contaminated Europe,” wrote Joelle Fliss, a Jewish student delegate to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, otherwise known as Durban.4 That “virus” was the product of a gathering sponsored by the United Nations (UN), initiated in 1997 to be, as the organizers called it, “a landmark in the struggle to eradicate all forms of racism ‘requiring a strong follow-up mechanism to examine whether Governments have delivered on their promises made.’’’ The World Conference was promised to be “a unique opportunity to create a new world vision for the fight against racism in the twenty-first century.”5 Instead, 22

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according to many people I spoke with, it was a festival of hatred aimed directly at Israel and Jews equally and existentially, insulting and degrading them equally. Tragically, Durban was where the opening salvos renewing the notion of genocidal antisemitism and the violence young Jasmine faced were launched, beginning a determined worldwide campaign dedicated to boycotting and isolating Israel and blaming Jews for every incident or slight, real or imagined. Jeremy Jones, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, attended Durban and, like Joelle Fliss, was witness to the “racist anti-racist conference.” Jones recalled how early registrants at the nongovernmental forum to the main conference were given a booklet of “political” cartoons, including caricatures of Jews with hooked noses and fangs. On the forum’s second day, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was reported to be on sale alongside antiracist materials in tents outside the forum hall.6 At the hotel where the students gathered in the opening days to the wider conference at Durban, Fliss wrote of being handed a sheet. “It is the UN resolution, adopted by the General Assembly in 1975, equating Zionism to racism,” she wrote. “There is no mention that this resolution was annulled in a vote of 111 to 25, by the same Assembly, in 1991.” Fliss continued, “There’s a guy not far who is scotch-taping swastikas on the wall near a stand.”7 On August 27, Fliss wrote of a speaker at the thematic committee devoted to “ethnic cleansing, conflict and genocide”; the speaker declared that the existence of Israel is a hate crime. An audience member who dared to ask a question about a procedure was shouted down to cries of “Jew, Jew, Jew.”8 At Durban, Saudi writer Mamduh Fulatah wrote, this charge carried a special meaning for Muslims. Although normally a negative remark, the term Jew for Muslims carries an even more derogatory meaning. “The literal meaning,” Fulatah wrote, “is that he is of the Jewish faith, but the cultural connotation is that he is stingy, greedy, and malicious, a murderer of prophets and a descendant of apes and pigs. To call someone a Jew is an unforgivable insult.”9 Jones recalled the hate literature, but worse, he wrote of the ever-increasing physical nature of intimidation, name-calling, and threatening behavior. Name tags worn by Jews were taken off, and Jewish men wearing yarmulkes made sure they were hidden or covered, with each person 23

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fearing the more visual identification of Judaism, lest they become more immediate targets of attack. In relating stories of the conference to me, he expressed the helplessness and isolation suffered by Jewish delegates. Students and even people wearing media badges converged on groups of Jews convening in various places in an attempt to muzzle attempts to speak out, to denounce the intimidation and antisemitism. Too often, Jones recalled, they succeeded.10 I wrote of being surrounded by nearly a hundred people, all of them shouting, “You should not be allowed to have a stand! You, Jews, you have become racists!”11 Jewish and Israeli participants were systematically denied their voice to promote policy positions, and Israel was vilified by protestors as a Zionist, racist state. Iranians, Hamas, and Hezbollah representatives, South Africans, Palestinians, and numerous others harangued and pushed Jewish students, delegates, and anyone opposing them. The Jews were outnumbered and overwhelmed. The session scheduled on antisemitism, which was to take place on the third day of the conference, began under a cloud of fear. So great had the pattern of intimidation grown that the session planned as a successful way to cover the topic was threatened with violence against the participants. Soon after the session began, it was clear that the true intent of the session would be betrayed, and the session would be turned into an antisemitic onslaught. Victims of racism granted the right to speak, as protocol dictated, were specifically not to be interrupted. Unfortunately, as Jones suggested, this rule provided for abuse by the anti-Israel speakers who were also allowed to say what they wished, regardless of the truth, their remarks going unchallenged.12 Durban, Jones wrote, was the fault of the organizers, who “were responsible for a corrupt process and breaking their own rules as the days went on, which set the stage for what many have described as the most antisemitic [sic] international event in the post-war period.”13 When the conferees settled down to write their draft declaration, the mood, actions, and sentiment espoused by the mobs intimidating Israeli and Jewish delegations had seemingly had their effect. “The World Conference,” read the draft, “recognizes with deep concern the increase of racist practices of Zionism and antisemitism in various parts of the world, as well as the emergence of racial and violent movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas, in particular the Zionist movement, which is based on racial superiority.” 24

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According to U.S. officials, the situation became so intolerable that Secretary of State Colin Powell decided to withdraw the U.S. delegation on September 3, 2001: Today I have instructed our representatives at the World Conference Against Racism to return home. I have taken this decision with regret, because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution that the Conference could have made to it. But, following discussions today by our team in Durban and others who are working for a successful conference, I am convinced that will not be possible. I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations containing hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of “Zionism equals racism”; or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the world, Israel, for censure and abuse . . . I wish that it could have turned out more successful.14

The late congressman Tom Lantos, who would be instrumental in creating the legislation that established the Office of the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, was extremely disturbed by the events he witnessed in Durban. Months later he wrote, A number of Islamic states conducted a well-orchestrated effort to hijack the event, and they succeeded in swaying America’s erstwhile partners and forcing the United States delegation to withdraw. Although the United States walkout succeeded in preventing the most virulent anti-Israel language from surviving in the conference text, the United States sustained substantial damage in its efforts to secure an historic understanding on race and to prevent an escalation of tensions in the Middle East. Durban will go down in history as a missed opportunity to advance a noble agenda and as a serious breakdown in United Nations diplomacy.15

Only eight days after the U.S. pullout from Durban, four airplanes were hijacked, with three of them flying into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With the attack on the United States came the War on Terror and Terror’s war on the West, a war directed as much against Israel and Jews as against the West. 25

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Yet for Joelle Fliss and her fellow student delegates, seeing the attacks on television upon their return home on September 11, 2001, connected the violence and hatred at Durban with that of New York and Washington. Fliss commented, For me, as well as for all the Jews present in Durban, there is a clear connection between the attacks on the Twin Towers and the hatred we had experienced a few days back. We imagined a sort of world conspiracy. How could the chain of events not be linked? The madness of Durban had spread like a virus. After the alienation of the Jews, the entire globe will be disoriented. In Durban, all the ingredients were there: virulent anti-Americanism, hatred of the Jews, Islamist networks—of which the outreach was still unknown—in a sense, prematurely—that the conjunction of all these elements could change the world in which we lived.16

Durban paved the way, almost spiritually, for the events of September 11. The atmosphere that was created in South Africa was one of pure racism—against Jews, instigated by Palestinians and their supporters. It was an existential challenge to Israel, to Jews, and, one dare say, to the West, with democracy threatened. As the former Canadian minister of justice Irwin Cotler suggested recently, Durban was “a conference designed to commemorate the dismantling of an apartheid state [and] became a conference calling for the dismantling of Israel as an apartheid state.”17 Rabbi Michael Melchior said that the effects of the conference created a semantic nightmare for Jews which he called the Durbanization of Discourse.18 Durban’s legacy, therefore, will be an instance when evil was allowed to gain a foothold and run amok. It also proved the ancient lesson of Jewish history: the Jews are the “canaries in the coalmine.” They are a predictor of things to come. Their treatment serves as an omen. Too often, what begins with the Jews does not end with them.

The Israeli Government Is Placed on a Pedestal On October 1, 1975, Uganda’s leader, Idi Amin, stood before the UN General Assembly and attacked the United States and Israel, saying that the United States had been “colonized by the Zionists” who had gained control of the major industries and “tools of development and power.”19 26

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Amin’s attack was yet another volley in the Soviet-inspired onslaught against Israel that began in the mid-1960s out of a Soviet desire to curry favor with the Arab states. Its efforts, long promoted by the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its Eastern Bloc allies, came to fruition on November 10, 1975, when Zionism was voted to be racism in the UN, 72–35, with 32 abstentions. From this point until the repeal of this odious resolution in 1991, the equation of Israel with racism was the rallying cry for Israel’s enemies. At Durban, that cry was renewed with a historically fitting twist, the equation of Israel with apartheid. This equation spread far and wide. “We take note of the fact-finding report by members of South Africa’s Parliament who visited the Middle East in July 2001,” wrote former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils and Western Cape legislator Max Ozinsky, both quite purposely identifying themselves as “South Africans of Jewish descent” in a petition aimed at their fellow Jews. Their petition comparing Israeli policy over the Palestinians to apartheid continued, “Their report observes ‘It becomes difficult, particularly from a South African perspective, not to draw parallels with the oppression experienced by Palestinians under the hand of Israel and the oppression experienced in South Africa under apartheid rule.’”20 Kasrils and Ozinsky opened their petition with a denial of any responsibility for their actions being construed as antisemitism, saying, “Successive Israeli governments and the world Zionist movement have consistently denounced their critics as anti-Semites [sic] and blamed the Palestinians for the failure to reach a negotiated settlement. We emphatically reject these assertions.”21 Kasrils and Ozinsky took a common tactic—to identify themselves as Jews to claim a mantle of responsibility and then to deny any claim of antisemitism for what they are about to do or say. Following the momentous display of antisemitism at Durban, it seems in retrospect unique that, with the end of apartheid, the successors to that government would carry their long-running fight against that system beyond its borders with an almost evangelical zeal. Although the victorious African National Congress of Nelson Mandela had very much appreciated the successes of the Israeli nationalist movement,22 there were obvious prejudices of the new regime against Israel for its relations with apartheid South Africa.23 27

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I was told repeatedly in South Africa by academics and government commentators alike of the debt the African National Congress owed to the Palestinian movement, which publicized and sympathized with the victims of apartheid. It seemed almost a natural progression from opposing apartheid in South Africa to accusing Israel, the enemy of its loyal and supportive ally, of the same practices. As one commentator suggested to me, the government is itself a sponsor of anti-Zionism. The pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bent of the South African government is omnipresent in South Africa, present in the media, in school campuses, and even in the Parliament, as evidenced by Kasrils’s and Ozinsky’s petition, and crossing over into classical antisemitism when Deputy Minister Fatima Hajaig declared in January 2009 that “Jewish money controls America and most Western countries.”24 Apartheid, then, is the prism through which much in South Africa is seen and understood. Even the Jewish community there, in teaching the lessons of the Holocaust to black South Africans, makes the comparison with apartheid to equalize the experience, so to speak, and to make it one that Africans can relate to. In a museum display on the Holocaust experience I saw, direct comparisons between apartheid and the Holocaust were made. It is undeniable that there are real differences between the two. Nevertheless, one wonders whether this approach only enflames the comparison when the South Africans, affected by outside anti-Israel propaganda using the inversion of the victims of the Holocaust as perpetrators against the Palestinians, understand the comparison between two evils better and are thus better able to accept that propagandized link. Middle Eastern media also propagate the supposed contrast between Israel and apartheid. Al Jazeera has done so, laughingly accusing Israel of “street apartheid” through comparisons of how long streetlights remain green going into Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem compared to those on the outskirts of Palestinian ones.25 Beyond the media, there is the political manipulation of the issue. South African John Dugard’s (UN’s special rapporteur) reference to Israel’s laws as resembling apartheid and former president Jimmy Carter’s reference to the same have done much service to the misuse of the term and unjust comparison between the two systems. The 2004 initiation of Israeli Apartheid Week on university campuses around the world only spread the fallacy even further. This campus ritual furthers the 28

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identification with a propaganda created and supported by Palestinians, tricking non-Jewish and Jewish students alike. Events across American campuses in recent years only serve to broaden the appeal of this vile comparison. To understand the true contrast between the two, Gideon Shimoni explained the historical and nationalist differences between the apartheid and the Israeli-Palestinian struggle pointing to very real reasons why the two cannot be adequately compared: The answer is: the first paradigm is ontologically constitutive of the South African case, the second of the Israel case. In South Africa the essence of the struggle was for a shared civic society and for individual equality, whereas the Israel-Arab conflict was and remains in essence a struggle between two nationalist aspirations for self-determination in the same territory. Hence the prospect for optimal resolution of the conflict diverges: in the first case, marriage and sharing, in the second, divorce and dividing. Both require negotiation. Accordingly, the main obstacle to resolution of the Arab-Jewish conflict is rejection of territorial partition; the main obstacle to resolution of the conflict that developed in South Africa was apartheid.26

Despite these differences, South Africans of some note, not to mention others as well, continue to make the equation. “But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US],” wrote Nobel Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if the Palestinians were not Semitic. I  am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures? [sic]”27 Archbishop Tutu’s denial of antisemitism is clearly belied by his words perpetuating the apartheid connection, not to mention the oft-repeated claim that the Palestinians as supposedly Semitic were the same as Jews and therefore should not be discriminated against, as he claims the Israeli system of apartheid does. Aside from South Africa’s view of Israel as contrasted with its support for Palestinians, anti-Zionist propaganda labeling Israel with the slur of apartheid has become the cause celebre in the world of today’s antisemitism. Much of the extreme form of anti-Zionism has taken the 29

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shape of cynical inversion: Palestinian abuse at the hands of Israel and the supposed evil emanating from it. Forgotten are Palestinian incitement, terrorism, rejectionism, and outward violence, as in the case of Hamas’ eliminationist efforts.

“Poorly Integrated Youths of Muslim Origin” In July 2000, President Bill Clinton, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian leader Yasir Araft met at Camp David in an effort to reach a final settlement to conclude the proceedings begun at Oslo in September 1993. Arafat, unwilling or even unable to say yes to Israeli concessions, backed out of any final agreement. With demonstrations by Palestinians calling for the “Right of Return” occurring in the Palestinian territories in September 2001, Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, providing the opportunity for Palestinians to begin the Second Intifada. Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, the founder of Hamas, wrote that Marwan Barghouti, Secretary General of Fatah, wanted to launch an uprising with the occurrence of Sharon’s visit.28 Yet he soon lost control of the Intifada, having invigorated the more radicalized forces of Hamas, which soon hijacked the effort launching suicide bombings across Israel. Hamas was rising and the PLO was fading. Soon Arafat would pass from the scene. As with every similar struggle, Israel’s response to Palestinian aggression was greeted with antisemitism abroad. This time, however, the coming of age of the second generation of European Muslims brought another wave of violence, with young people taking their cue or at least being influence by the Palestinians fighting Israelis, in this case continuing the violence against Jews in Europe. Durban fanned the flames of the Intifada, spreading its violence to Europe. When crises hit, such as the fires across France in November 2005 or the Danish cartoon crisis of late 2005–2006, Europeans were awakened to the potential for such violence emanating from ghettoized Muslim communities. Launched on a grand scale, the aggression made European officials think twice about their policies regarding the Muslims in their midst, taking a toll on European policy-making options. In a general sense, Western Europe became hostage to the hyperliberalization, 30

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even pacifism, that it created in the wake of World War II in reaction to the Holocaust.29 Europe became overwhelmed by its historical guilt for the Holocaust. As Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in 2004, “By transforming Israelis into the new Nazis, Europeans relativize the Holocaust.”30 The object of this guilt fell to the Muslim community, which was seeking to assume the role of Europe’s “new Jews” and all the sympathy that entails. Bouthaina Shaaban, the Syrian Expatriates Organization minister, writing in Lebanon’s Daily Star in February 2006, suggested, “It seems like a new crusade has started against Arabs and Muslims in the wake of September 11, 2001, led by neo-European Nazism. The victims are no longer the Jews, but Muslims spread over Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, and anywhere around the globe.” Shaaban expressed what Muslims in the Netherlands reportedly maintained, namely, “a strong solidarity with their ‘oppressed brothers’ in the rest of the world. They sympathise [sic] with Muslims in Iraq, Chechnya, Palestine and Afghanistan. This strengthens their idea that Muslims all over the world are oppressed. Some feel they suffer such grievous wrongs that they turn their back to Dutch society and embrace radical ideology.”31 It was not long before Europe began to feel the effects of this spread of violence emanating from the Second Intifada and stoked by Durban. According to the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, 2002 featured significant increases across the board. The institute, which collects statistics accumulated throughout the year from Jewish organizations around the world, found alarming numbers. There were a total of 311 serious incidents worldwide, including 56 major attacks (those using violent means) and 255 major violent incidents (those without a weapon), whereas in 2001 there had been 228 violent incidents, 50 major attacks, and 178 violent incidents. Statistics for 2002 showed that antisemitic events surpassed the peak year in the 1990s for antisemitism worldwide.32 Testifying before the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on Capitol Hill on May 22, 2002, Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee reported to the bicameral body, “We have seen in these last 20 months an alarming increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Western Europe and particularly in France. By some accounts, these incidents, ranging from arson attacks on synagogues to personal altercations, are occurring at the rate of one a day.”33 31

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According to the European Union Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), the increases in violent antisemitic acts began in March and April 2002, only a month before the hearing took place.34 Because of this upsurge, the EUMC commissioned the report from fifteen European Union countries. The EUMC report’s findings, although not entirely conclusive, proved alarming. Others reports did not provide hope either: • Belgium saw a doubling of events from sixty-four in 2000. • France saw 313 antisemitic events, 193 of which were directed against the Jewish community, with many attacks reported of assaults on Jews, synagogues, cemeteries, and other properties. (According to the group SOS-Racisme and the Union des Étudiants Juifs, there were 405 incidents from September 2000 to November 2001 and 555 for the same period in 2002, according to the French Interior Ministry.)35 According to the Representative Council for Jewish Institutions in France (Crif), incidents from from 2002 to 2004—the peak year—numbered 358, 503, and 592 incidents, respectively.36 • The Netherlands saw significant increases in threats and graffiti against Jews and Jewish interests. • In Great Britain, there was a 13 percent rise in antisemitic events in 2002 from the previous year. In the first quarter of 2003, there was an increase of 75 percent from the same period the previous year. • In Austria, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) reported an increase of 70 percent (108 cases) in 2003over the previous year.37

Yet the EUMC initially and embarrassingly withheld the report in 2003 out of fear of releasing data suggesting that Muslims were in fact the cause of many of the antisemitic incidents in Western Europe. In fact, Javier Solana, the European Union’s Foreign Policy Chief, when asked by members of the House International Relations Committee about antisemitism in Europe, shockingly denied that there was any antisemitism in Europe.38 Withholding the report caused an outcry from Jewish communities around the world. Only when it was leaked 32

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to the press did details of what most assumed to be true come to light; as the report stated, “Physical attacks on Jews and the desecration and destruction of synagogues were acts often committed by young Muslim perpetrators in the monitoring period.”39 In Vienna in summer 2006, I was told that access to the Muslim population in Europe was more difficult, and true data were harder to obtain. Yet opinion surveys of European Muslims seem to substantiate Muslims’ dislike of Jews. According to a spring 2006 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project,40 • 47 percent of Muslims in Great Britain held unfavorable opinions of Jews, whereas 7 percent of the general population in Great Britain held unfavorable opinions; • 28 percent of Muslims in France held unfavorable opinions of Jews, whereas 13 percent of the general population in France held unfavorable opinions; • 44 percent of Muslims in Germany held unfavorable opinions of Jews, whereas 22 percent of the general population in Germany held unfavorable opinions; • 60 percent of Muslims in Spain held unfavorable opinions of Jews, whereas 39 percent of the general population in Spain held unfavorable opinions.

In 2003, the leaked version of the EUMC report explained that “physical attacks on Jews and the desecration and destruction of synagogues were acts often committed by young Muslim perpetrators in the monitoring period.”41 Moreover, they reported that there was a shift in public perception of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic events. Their report noted that the French Human Rights Commission (CNCDH) suggested that the increase in antisemitic attacks arose from “youth from neighborhoods sensitive to the conflict.” During the years 2001 and 2002, Danish Jewish victims as well as witnesses routinely reported attacks, identifying people of “Arabic/Palestinian/Muslim background as being the main perpetrators.”42 In a June 2002 statement, a French government spokesman suggested that antisemitic incidents were carried out by “poorly integrated youths of Muslim origin who would like to bring the Mideast conflict to France.”43 33

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The convening of the May 2002 Congressional hearing on antisemitism so soon after Durban and 9/11, coupled with the numbers that were beginning to be collected at the time, was a testament to the explosive increase of the problem and the attention that this increase caused. On Capitol Hill, in the OSCE, in the German Bundestag, and in other institutions in Europe, stories of the rash of synagogue burnings, attacks on Jewish schools, and attacks on Jewish cemeteries and ordinary Jews in the street were brought to the attention of parliamentarians in the United States and Europe. The source of these attacks, however, as evidenced by the delayed release of findings by the EUMC, pointed to a much graver problem. The effects of Durban and 9/11 were unmistakable. The effects on Jews around the world would be worse. In Europe, in France, and in the United Kingdom in particular, the effects would be overwhelming.

“A Slander on France” As attacks rose, there was recognition of the problem in some countries. In France, however, such recognition was not to be found. As attacks there increased, so did French government denials. French authorities stressed to Jewish officials that they could not adequately protect the Jewish community there because they could not even protect their own policemen in certain areas of the country.44 Yet protestations of French inability belied French responsibility for the problems laid by U.S. Jewish organizations at the feet of the French media, for sensationalist stories on the situation in the Middle East, disproportionately blaming Israel. This effect of media on the French population, particularly French Muslims, was not entirely denied in the remarks of then-French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine, who said on January 12, 2002, “We aren’t shocked at young French Jews’ instinctive support for Israel, regardless of her policy. There’s no reason necessarily to be shocked that French youth from immigrant backgrounds feel compassion for the Palestinians and are extremely upset when they see what’s going on.”45 Vedrine’s association of the sentiments of peaceful French Jews with those of French Muslim youth carrying out antisemitic attacks was outrageous, yet Vedrine’s remarks were not the only ones to inflame the situation. In December 2001, during a private conversation with the owner of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Conrad Black, French Ambassador 34

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to Great Britain Daniel Bernard referred to “that shitty little country Israel,” a remark he did not deny, regretting only that it was disclosed by Black’s wife, the journalist Barbara Amiel.46 Then- President Jacques Chirac insisted in September 2002 that there was no antisemitism in France despite the burnings of synagogues earlier that year in Villepinte and Marseille and the ramming of one by a car, and subsequent damage done to the building.47 In an interview with the New York Times, Chirac discounted, sounding insulted, the possibility that France could be considered an antisemitic country. “To imagine that France, the very first country to recognize the rights of Jews, could be anti-Semitic is propaganda, not reality. There have been a few incidents, that’s true, but we responded immediately . . . with great firmness. In no case were there any anti-Semitic demonstrations in France. Now a campaign led by certain American extremist groups has tried to denounce antiSemitism in France for political reasons and political ulterior motives . . .”48

The “extremist groups” that Chirac might refer to were American Jewish groups that were calling into question France’s commitment to fighting antisemitism. In one such event I was party to in June 2002 with the Republican Jewish Coalition, I saw firsthand France’s extreme sensitivity to the issue. A  coalition of religious groups, Jewish and Christian, with the Senate Republican Conference, organized a meeting for the French ambassador to the United States, Francois Bujon de l’Estang, with at least a dozen groups on Capitol Hill. The meeting set to take place on June 6, 2002, would have brought the ambassador together with the groups in a forum to discuss antisemitism in France. After agreeing to the meeting after an initial rescheduling, Ambassador de l’Estang abruptly withdrew from the meeting the day before it was scheduled to occur, saying that he had no obligation to meet with NGO,s despite his long record of doing so. After some clarifications, the embassy spokesman suggested that de l’Estang would have been willing to meet one-on-one with the NGOs. In reality, the ambassador came to realize at the last minute the danger of exposing himself to such a mix of groups on such a volatile subject. He made, as Jess Hordes of the Washington office of the Anti-Defamation League suggested to the Washington Post, “a terrible mistake.”49 35

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Roughly two weeks later, de l’Estang published an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled “A Slander on France,” in which he reminded readers of the many positive firsts for which France was responsible. He also castigated those “columnists turned prosecutors” who wrote about antisemitic acts in France. Suggesting that antisemitic actions will continue to be punished, he argued, “They don’t make France any more anti-Semitic than the persistence of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists makes the United States a racist country on the verge of restoring segregation or slavery.”50 Rising antisemitism and France’s seeming inability to stop the problem led to disagreements between France and Israel, and affected diplomatic reactions, according to Israeli ambassador to France Elie Banavi.51 Accusations of France being an antisemitic country enflamed passions in France. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s reaction was to state in July 2004, “If I have to advise our brothers in France, I’ll tell them one thing: Move to Israel, as soon as possible.”52

“Big Jewry, Like Big Tobacco, Is Seen as One of Life’s Givens” On January 14, 2002, the New Statesman, a magazine admittedly to the left in British society, published what could only be described as a provocative cover featuring two articles on the Jewish lobby in Great Britain. The cover, featuring a golden Star of David standing upright with its bottom point resting in the middle of a British flag as if to stab the Great Britain itself in the heart, caused outrage in the United Kingdom, and rightly so. The magazine’s editor, Peter Wilby, seemed to realize immediately that they had committed, at the least, a grave “graphic” error in posting such a cover. We (or, more precisely, I) got it wrong. The cover was not intended to be anti-Semitic; the New Statesman is vigorously opposed to racism in all its forms. But it used images and words in such a way as to create unwittingly the impression that the New Statesman was following an anti-Semitic tradition that sees the Jews as a conspiracy piercing the heart of the nation . . . Moreover, the cover upset very many Jews, who are right to feel that, in the fight against anti-Semitism in particular and racism in general, this magazine ought to be on their side.53 36

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Although Wilby accepted the offense caused by the inartful cover, the two articles, the feature of which the magazine’s cover was to evoke, belied his apology. Moreover, while admitting no antisemitic intent, he failed completely to explain why the cover image was in fact ever used. Its portrayal clearly espoused the blatantly antisemitic myth of Jews as a disruptive, murderous force in the life of a nation. In the two featured articles, this sentiment could not have been made clearer. In “A Kosher Conspiracy?,” by Dennis Sewall, the magazine sought to expose the extent of the “Jewish lobby” and its ostensible overwhelming strength in Great Britain. “Big Jewry, like big tobacco, is seen as one of life’s givens,” Sewall wrote. “According to this view, Israel has the British media pretty well sewn up. Wealthy Jewish business leaders, acting in concert with establishment types and coordinated by the Israeli Embassy, have supposedly hobbled newspaper editors and proprietors, and ensured that the pro-Palestinian position is marginalised [sic] both in news reporting and on the comment pages.54 “Blair’s Meeting with Arafat Served to Disguise his Support for Sharon and the Zionist Project,” another article, this one by John Pilger, could not have been more revealing of the magazine’s venomous hatred for Israel and presented a not-so-subtle form of antisemitism wearing an anti-Zionist cloak. “The meeting with Arafat was no more than a public relations exercise designed to placate the Arab world,” wrote Pilger. “It served to disguise Blair’s support for the Zionist project and his role as Ariel Sharon’s closest ally in Europe. Little of this has been reported in the mainstream media.”55 Thus, at the heart of this example is the underlying problem facing Great Britain that, while perhaps always lying under the surface, seemed to bubble over at this uneasy time for Jews. The atmosphere in which these not-so-subtle comments were made was not much different from that in which France’s Ambassador Daniel Bernard felt so compelled to denigrate Israel, and so comfortable doing so: ostensibly civil British society. This mindset and acceptance of “parlor antisemitism” is historic for Great Britain but is only part of the antisemitism facing Britain’s Jews. On the one hand, the abuse British Jews received was of the loutish, brutish type committed by what the British call yobs: spitting, rock-throwing, name-calling, and threatening via e-mail. This type of incident, according to the All-Party Parliamentary Group commissioned 37

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by the Parliament, occurs “more frequently but [are] being reported less frequently.”56 The Metropolitan Police in London suggested a correlation between the numbers of acts of antisemitism and the “fear of antisemitism,”57 in essence meaning fearing antisemitism seemed to make people believe they were experiencing it more. Nevertheless, there were also increased cases of cemetery desecrations and assaults on synagogues. Yet the sheer volume increased dramatically following Yasir Arafat’s reinstatement of the Intifada in September 2000. Worse, as the All-Party Parliamentary Group pointed out, the views of radical Muslims made their way into the mainstream discourse of antisemitism in Great Britain.58 A steady stream of antisemitic books appearing in Muslim bookstores bolsters that discourse of antisemitism. I have bought vile antisemitic books in bookstores all around the Middle East. I have also bought them in London, on Edgeware Street. These books debase Jews, portraying them as murderers and plotters. In these books, you can find the reportedly “devious plans” of the Jews in sharply printed copies of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the nineteenth-century farce and forgery of plans for supposed Jewish world domination, and numerous other publications. In a 2007 report from the British think tank Policy Exchange, the bookstores at one hundred British mosques were examined. Although it was comforting that radical material was found in only 25 percent of the mosques, it was precisely these mosques that were among the best-funded Muslim institutions in Britain. Worse yet, many of these mosques were upheld as worthy examples of tolerance and modernity and subjected to official recognition, even by the royal family. Their presence in these mosques makes them much more than an adornment for bookshelves: they are for perpetuating hatred. The frightening content of these books is evident. “You will not find any confusion in which the Jews did not play a role,” read one of the books surveyed, a high school text entitled, Al-Hadith wa’l-thaqafa alIslamiyya or Prophetic Tradition and Islamic Culture. “Their attempt at trying to immerse nations in vice and the spread of fornicationis one phrase written by the book’s author. “The Jews controlled this kind of trade and promoted it. They manage the bars in Europe and the United States and in Israel itself.” Policy Exchange investigators found this fine example of intolerance at the King Fahad Academy in west London.59 38

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Contributing to that mainstream discourse since 2003 has also been the attitude of the community toward the Holocaust. Since that time, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz, on January 27 because, they said, it was not appropriately inclusive of the so-called “Palestinian genocide.” Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary-general of the MCB, released a statement saying, “Regrettably the memorial ceremony in its present form excludes and ignores other ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world, notably in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” “Much as we wanted to be there,” he said, they were unable to join the memorial ceremony, but he urged the Home Secretary to make the Memorial Day inclusive of the sufferings of all people. “Genocide is the most abhorrent and outrageous crime against humanity and we are not going to prevent it by selectively remembering only some of its victims.”60 Although they accepted the invitation to participate in the annual commemoration in 2007, in 2009 the MCB again pulled out.

“Diminished Credibility” Throughout Europe, the second generation of Muslim immigrants was encouraged by the success of their brethren in foreign lands fighting the “occupation” and “persecution” by Israel. Yet they were stung by feelings of their own victimization, encouraged by Arab satellite television broadcasts and Web sites coupled with their own self-imposed isolation. They sought to assign blame for their victimization, and avenged themselves by attacking European Jewish communities and those unlucky Jews caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. People described as having “dark complexions,” or being of “Middle Eastern descent,” by their Jewish victims assaulted Jews all over Europe. Synagogues were bombed, rabbis attacked, Jews on their way to work, school, and religious services and in general simply out living their lives were assaulted and called names—r worse, stoned and chased in the streets. Following the hearings in the Helsinki Committee in Washington and the release of the EUMC report, the OSCE organized to examine the issue. They convened the Conference on Anti-Semitism in Vienna in June 2003 to discuss how to deal with the issue. From April 28 to 29, 2004, 39

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the OSCE held a second meeting, inviting the OSCE’s fifty-six member states to send representatives to discuss the problem in a conference in Berlin. Several workshops and panels were held, all dedicated to the prevention of antisemitism. Secretary of State Powell summed up the position of the United States at the conference, a policy that was handed off to me later when I assumed the role of Special Envoy. Secretary Powell said, We must not permit anti-Semitic crimes to be shrugged off as inevitable side effects of inter-ethnic conflicts. Political disagreements do not justify physical assaults against Jews in our streets, the destruction of Jewish schools, or the desecration of synagogues and cemeteries. There is no justification for antisemitism. It is not anti-Semitic to criticize the state of Israel. But the line is crossed when Israel or its leaders are demonized or vilified, for example by the use of Nazi symbols and racist caricatures.61

What was of much greater importance, however, was the landmark Berlin Declaration. In this declaration, the participating states committed to fight antisemitism and, 1. condemn without reserve all manifestations of anti-Semitism, and all other acts of intolerance, incitement, harassment, or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, wherever they occur; 2. also condemn all attacks motivated by anti-Semitism or by any other forms of religious or racial hatred or intolerance, including attacks against synagogues and other religious places, sites, and shrines; 3. declare unambiguously that international developments or political issues, including those in Israel or elsewhere in the Middle East, never justify anti-Semitism.62

The Berlin Declaration would have lasting impact. Its clear and unambiguous condemnations of antisemitism and most importantly its denunciation of violence inspired by events in Israel would be a line in the sand for the violence coming out of the Muslim ghettos and banlieu 40

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(Muslim suburbs of France) of Europe, as events in Israel “are used as doctrinal justification for violence and terrorism.”63 For the first time, the international community laid down principles designed to delineate the crimes of antisemitism. There were also calls for establishing records and statistics keeping, better police work, education, tolerance training, and most importantly concrete government action to stem the tidal wave of antisemitism. These concrete measures, repeated at the follow-up conference in 2005 at Barcelona and in Bucharest in 2007,64 were important and groundbreaking in their creation. If only the participating states had bothered to follow through and implement most of them. The fact that they did not was an impediment to the fight against antisemitism throughout my term as the Special Envoy and thereafter. The U.S. Congressional members of the Helsinki process, however, did take the issue seriously. Congressmen such as the late Tom Lantos, who had been at Durban, and Chris Smith and former U.S. senator George Voinovich, who were driven by the work of the OSCE and the unprecedented numbers of antisemitic events occurring in Europe, worked to initiate U.S. action. Voinovich had been long been interested in the subject, having met with Lantos in 2002 in another situation, where they had a conversation which turned out to be the inaugural discussion on his proposal.65 Both men wondered what our State Department was doing to deal with this rising violence. They felt these attacks were not being countered or stopped by European governments, so why could not the United States do something about the problem? With their creation of the position of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, they believed that at least there would be someone to watch what was happening and try to get the events addressed diplomatically and the issue discussed wherever possible. In April 2004, Congressmen Smith and Lantos both introduced bills in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Senator George Voinovich in the Senate, variously calling for the State Department to write reports on antisemitism worldwide and to create the position of Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Lantos, Smith, and Voinovich, as well as congressional staff, later told me that when they first proposed this position, overcoming the State Department opposition was an incredibly difficult fight. 41

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The department’s senior management had vigorously opposed the creation of the position. They were no doubt advised by the department “mattress mice”—the term is a somewhat obscure “inside the Beltway” phrase that pops up occasionally in usage by experienced Washington hands and “Politicos” as it were, who are averse to the mice’s extreme caution, which borders, in their view, on obstructionism.66 For the mice, who were career officials, political appointees came and went, and it was them and their compatriots who stayed, keeping the institutional functions alive, all in their opinion for the good. The “mice” felt great unease at the creation of a position carved out to look out for the interests of one single ethnic/religious group, namely Jews. They opposed the creation of the office strongly, warning in a “White Paper” opposing the bill that it would create issues of “imbalance, favoritism, [and] diminished credibility.”67 There were in fact other single-issue advocates in the department, but that mattered little to the opposition. “Congress has rightly chosen,” read the memo, “to highlight the human rights problems faced not only by a single religious or ethnic group but by people of all faiths without ascribing them rank or preference. This multi-faith, multi-ethnic approach should remain the norm.”68 Very real pressure had to be brought upon Secretary of State Powell to overcome department opposition to the position’s creation. Staffers told me that Lantos had loud exchanges with the department over his insistence on the office’s creation. Lantos told me he absolutely insisted on the passage of the bill and fought for it. Eventually, the bills coalesced and a unified bill was created, which passed Congress in October 2004. The bill created the office of the Special Envoy and mandated a one-time report, as well as providing the Special Envoy with the responsibility of reporting on antisemitism twice yearly, once each in the department’s Human Rights Reports and its International Religious Freedom reports. It took a while to find someone to take the position. I  had heard there were several people approached, and in December 2005, I was approached as well. I accepted the position. As a result, on May 22, 2006, I was sworn-in by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the first U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, the first such person ever appointed to handle this issue as a human rights issue for 42

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the U.S. Government, tasked with working to prevent antisemitism at its source. The secretary was very gracious, and I felt honored to have her at my swearing-in ceremony. Several members of congress attended, including Senator George Voinovich and Representative Debbie ShultzWasserman. Many leaders of the Jewish Community attended as well, and I was very energized by this gathering. Now I had to figure out how to approach this massive topic and how to go after the abusers without alienating the countries in question. Lantos told me soon after my appointment that his preferred technique was naming and shaming to push reluctant governments into action. This was a tactic quite appealing to me, because as I had learned on Capitol Hill from my years with Senator Alfonse D’Amato and on the International Relations Committee with Chairman Henry Hyde, kind words only go so far. Only when a person or institution’s interests are directly challenged will they see the logic of doing the right thing. On the Hill that works; however, at the State Department, naming and shaming might not have been the preferred option. Interestingly, though, Timothy M. Savage, a career Foreign Service Officer, did almost that in an article he published saying much of what I soon would across Europe, regarding the presence of Muslims and the effects they were having on the continent. Savage wrote, The Muslim factor is adding contours to Europe’s domestic and foreign policy landscape in more than just demographic and geographical terms. The European-Islamic nexus is spinning off a variety of new phenomena, including the rise of terrorism; the emergence of a new antisemitism; the shift of established European political parties to the right; the recalibration of European national political calculations; additional complications for achieving an ever closer EU; and a refocusing, if not a reformulation, of European foreign policy.69

In establishing this position, the goal, I was told, was to put an end to decades of indifference, if not outright opposition, to Jewish interests on the part of the State Department bureaucracy. When I was researching State Department documents from the 1940s and 1950s during the Swiss banks investigation I led for Senator Alfonse D’Amato, I had found hundreds of documents detailing the department’s indifference, if not 43

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total opposition to, Jewish interests in reclaiming Jewish property taken by the Nazis. Added to historic and documented favoritism toward the Arab regimes in the Middle East, it was generally presumed that the department was simply incapable of siding with the Jews. The department’s historical reputation, to my dissatisfaction, became attached to me at least in the beginning and preceded me wherever I went. I cannot list all the times I spoke before gatherings in synagogues, before interest groups, and in Jewish centers, and even in Hollywood when speaking with actors, writers, directors, and others, when I heard utter amazement that the State Department had not only established an office to advocate for Jews around the world but actually allowed me to operate in defiance of the well-known and assumed “Arabist” views of the department. Nevertheless, I would encounter difficulties from within the department, with arguments over mission and words predominating the disputes. As I began the duties of my new office, I found it interesting that the office that had assumed the duties of my position before my appointment, the Office of Holocaust Issues (OHI), would continue to have a small role in the formation of policy on antisemitism. Despite my request, the policy would in some ways continue as it was to my great dissatisfaction. OHI had gotten its start under Stuart Eizenstat while I was leading the Swiss Banks investigation. Eizenstat, while at the State Department, had formed the office to coordinate policy with Switzerland and to help work on the restitution battles with other European countries, as well as handle the battles expanded to others. By the time I had joined the department, OHI’s work was largely finishing up as agreements and settlements were signed.70 It seemed to me that the retention of their policy prerogatives in my area of control, uniquely only as it pertained to Europe, was a neat way to justify the OHI’s continued existence within the European Bureau. They had no review authority of anything I did in any other part of the world, only in Europe. There were times that the office would comment on issues I was working on, sending a confused message. I would discuss this with them, routinely reminding them of my office and responsibilities. Once safely ensconced in the office, I made the decision to begin making the rounds with as many ambassadors as possible. What I could not have anticipated was the all-too inconvenient nature of antisemitism, 44

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which I discovered during visits with several foreign diplomats. Being that the position was new, I was eager to make a presence, and to do so in a personal and positive way. I made arrangements to visit with as many ambassadors as possible, concentrating on the ones from Europe and the Middle East. I  trudged back and forth over Embassy Row for weeks, going from embassy to embassy, basically trying to meet with any ambassador or embassy official that would see me, simply to let them know that I was there, and in reality to let them know that I would be watching what their governments were and were not doing to protect Jews. I cannot say that I was all that eagerly received in each embassy I visited. There were countless times that I got the almost obligatory variations on lines such as, “some of my best friends are Jews,” or, “my father always did business with Jews and had no problems.” If the officials were not playing to stereotypes, alternatively, I received the equal but opposite reaction of “Why are you here? We have no problems.” One embassy official I met reacted strangely when I asked for his country’s support in the fight against antisemitism; he inexplicably began attacking the United States for events at Guantanamo Bay and the War on Terror. This seemed like a clear dodge to take me off-topic, but I informed him that we should stick to fighting antisemitism. I was ready to argue the case nevertheless. Worse, after several tries to make contact with officials at an Allied Embassy I visited there, only to be told outright that antisemitism was by no means their chief concern but that terrorism was. I suppose that with attacks having taken place only the year before, they were sensitive to their own security, and I could not quite disagree with their feelings despite how they were communicated to me. I could, however, note that my embassy host was not impolite but was distinctly cold in receiving me and made me feel I was intruding. My host did not want to talk with me and made no bones about it. His attitude conveyed a disinterested attitude, which in that year had experienced more antisemitic incidents than any other country in Europe. My appearance, it became clear, created an uncomfortable atmosphere for my interlocutors, who either felt obliged to try to appease me or cringed in defensiveness. In short, I soon discovered just how uncomfortable I made people feel—which was not always a problem for me, as it did sometimes serve to instill a bit of fear. The title on my 45

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card said it all: Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism. Worse yet, if I was appearing before them it must have seemed I was visiting because I thought their country had a problem and I was singling them out for “special attention.” Why us and why only because of the Jews?

“Purple Prose” There were times in which the problem of antisemitism was not on the front burner of the department’s interests, and I could not have expected it to be. There were a good number of people who in their own way cared very much about the problem and did what they could to help, but I soon found that although there was concern, it was limited at times to whether an incident would get in the way of other, more weighty issues. More importantly, how an issue was presented mattered nearly as much as anything else. Although I understood the importance of words and how they were presented, in few places would words have such an incredible impact on the direction of important policy directives and more importantly on the goals I was trying to achieve. In no small part were words the most important tool both the “mice” and I had to counter each other’s goals. In the legislation creating my office, Congress mandated the office and the Special Envoy with sole responsibility for writing or at least approving the antisemitism sections of two department reports, the Country Reports on Human Rights and the International Religious Freedom Report. It should be clear that not only did I have sole discretion over these sections of the respective reports, but I also had a law behind me to back up that responsibility. There were instances, however, that pointed to the need to debate, dispute, and even argue with my colleagues at the department over wording of these reports, many times with other people involved tangentially, causing a complicated affair. I found myself reminding them of the legal basis of my position. At the end of 2006, one case particularly infuriated me. As we were preparing our review of the Human Rights Report for France, among the dozens of reports we had requested to see, we felt it necessary to include in our report the brutal antisemitic murder of Ilan Halimi, a French cell phone salesman whose murder was inexplicably excluded from the ver46

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sion of the report put together by the American Embassy staff in Paris, who must have thought it unworthy of mention. It seemed odd indeed that a murder that had been front-page news across Europe and even in the United States had been excluded. The fact that 50,000 people attended Halimi’s funeral, including then-President Jacques Chirac, seemed to have been lost on the embassy staff. Halimi, who had been lured to his kidnappers by a female member of a gang led by African immigrants, was subjected to horrific treatment. He was brutally tortured, at times even while the gang was negotiating with his parents on the telephone. When he was finally found in February 2006, he had been left naked and burned in a field, left to die—which he did on the way to the hospital. Our description of the event in the next draft of the report was quite straightforward, yet report editors, to our surprise, labeled our description of the incident “purple prose.” They argued that our description of the kidnapping, beating, torture, and burning of Halimi in February 2006 was too full of emotion, and words like ours had never been used in previous reports. We disputed this assertion with research into past reports, which found that the words “beating,” “torture,” and the like were used hundreds of times previously in country reports. This ridiculous argument was one thing, but when they added to their criticisms of our draft by saying that we should not have called the attack antisemitic, I reached my breaking point. When his killers were found and extradited to France from the Ivory Coast, where they had fled, they confessed to kidnapping Halimi specifically because he was Jewish and of course, as they made a point of saying, “all Jews have money.” Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister of the time and now a former president, also labeled the crime as antisemitism. Yet despite the confessions and official recognition of antisemitic intent, the editors continued to stand their ground, and only after a week of heated and sometimes loud exchanges and a final appeal to the assistant secretary on the issue, we won only a partial victory with what I would call a halfhearted description of the event that only grudgingly called this brutal attack antisemitic. To this day, the episode leaves a bad taste in my mouth. In another instance, we were accused of using terms that were considered overstated and shrill to describe the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association as the “largest anti-Semitic attack since the Holocaust.” In this attack, eighty-five Argentine Jews were 47

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killed and hundreds injured, yet calling an attack of this magnitude antisemitic—factually correct—was just not acceptable. They argued numbers with us, suggesting that the Kielce murder of Jews in Poland in 1946 was worse. In fact, forty-two Jews were killed there. Petty as this instance was, it showed that the words, and in this case numbers as well, mattered. For me, to have to even counter their argument was a waste of time. There were often disagreements between the local embassy and my office as to terminology. In the Baltics, where history is always a present-day discussion, Nazi-era affiliations of veterans became an issue. When a government minister wrote a letter commemorating SS veterans, I sought to have that included in the Human Rights Report, but the embassy objected. After a series of discussions that continued longer than they should have, a compromise was reached. How though, I argued, could it have been a point of contention to simply mention the provision of such a letter by a government minister to a group of SS veterans? For what possible reason could we be seen as covering for such a blatantly ill-thought move to commemorate the actions of a local group of SS volunteers who participated in the Holocaust? We also disagreed with the staff of the International Religious Freedom Office, and at times embassies disagreed with our views about these reports, generally regarding the same sorts of topics, that is, descriptions of events and so on. At times, the embassies sought to downgrade our descriptions, fearing the reaction to the final report. We also disagreed with them over their depiction of events in the report on Israel and the Occupied Territories. Their terminology seemed shrill and accusatory, an approach that they generally would not take with other countries. We believed strongly that their words to describe events were bordering on antisemitic, at times making the arguments that Israel’s hostile neighbors made. These episodes, although perhaps somewhat generic by bureaucratic standards, were symptomatic of a more general practice. It was taken for granted that descriptions of incidents were to be qualified, softened, and in any way possible accompanied by a positive comment about a nation to make it seem less hostile. Anything a leader of a country might have said about fighting antisemitism, even if they were mere words with no discernible follow-up, had to be fit in to speeches, reports, and press releases. 48

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Whatever the situation, the edges had to be rounded for every description, making it less harsh and less judgmental, robbing it of its true color. We were supposed to be fighting these kinds of obfuscations in foreign countries, not with our own colleagues. To us, these episodes were another way of dulling the effects of hideous incidents that begged for our action. When the department agreed, grudgingly, to Representative Lantos’s request for a second Report to Congress on Anti-Semitism, the creation of it became a drawn-out eighteen-month affair in which every word was subjected to constant review and rewrite. The primary fear of the department was how anti-Zionism would be treated. There was a genuine fear that too much emphasis would be laid on antisemitism that stemmed from undue criticism of Israel. To deny that today’s antisemitism was heavily based on this undue form of criticism was wrong, and to the credit of those in the know in the department, this much was assumed. Yet for us to appear to lean too much toward Israel in this regard would nevertheless be seen as a problem in the Arab world, and at the same time, to blame too much of that undue criticism on Muslims would be equally harmful. Worse, to extend the blame to Muslims in Europe only made it worse, despite the incredibly overwhelming evidence to prove that point. Disputes broke out as to what to term the sections detailing the origins of the forms of abuse suffered by Jews in Europe. The solution to the problem of anti-Zionism was, in the final text, actually easier to find, as a description of where the line between criticism of Israel ends and antisemitism begins had already been provided semantically. We refer to the discussions and definitions of the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia of December 2006. This definition, which I had pushed for, was adopted as U.S. policy in the final version of the report, Contemporary Global Antisemitism, which was finally issued in March 2008. That definition reads, in part, Comparing contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis is increasingly commonplace. Anti-Semitism couched as criticism of Zionism or Israel often escapes condemnation since it can be more subtle than traditional forms of anti-Semitism, and promoting anti-Semitic attitudes may not be the conscious intent of the purveyor. Israel’s policies and practices must be subject to responsible criticism and scrutiny to the same degree as those of any other country. At the same time, those criticizing Israel have 49

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a responsibility to consider the effect their actions may have in prompting hatred of Jews. At times hostility toward Israel has translated into physical violence directed at Jews in general . . . Examples of the ways in which anti-Semitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel, taking into account the overall context, could include the following: • denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination; • applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation; • using the symbols and images associated with classic antiSemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis; • drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis; • holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.71

The inclusion of this definition was of paramount importance. If the report contained nothing other than this definition, it would still have been a vitally important document, because for the first time the description of when anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism was laid out unambiguously, and in this report, its inclusion made it U.S. policy. Could the definition have been clearer and more inclusive? Yes, but for it to have been included in a U.S. policy document was a real coup, and it still could serve as a model for other countries to adopt, following the U.S. lead. After the disputes and the back-and-forth nature of the formation of the report, it was a good explanatory effort to describe the state of antisemitism in the world. I was quite happy with the final outcome. As it was, the report explained in great detail the bias exhibited by the UN system, rigged and controlled by the Arab States through the Organization of the Islamic Conference and other groupings. Despite the lengthy process in which this report made its way through the numerous U.S. embassies for clearance, as well as the department itself, the report was received on Capitol Hill by Representative Lantos’s successor as the new chairman of the renamed Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman, with more pleasure than Lantos had felt upon 50

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receiving the first report. Lantos, who had died only weeks before the report was issued, first requested the report from me soon after I assumed the office, and called the first one as nothing better than a “high school report.” The department graciously dedicated the new one to his memory. Those more critical of the report, including Muslims in the Middle East and extremist groups, complained bitterly and especially about the inclusion of the definition of when anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism accusing the State Department of having been absorbed into the fold of a Jewish cabal, biased in favor of “Zionists” and denying any permissible criticism of Israel. “Isn’t the Holocaust being perpetuated against the Palestinian people during the last fifty years,” wrote Tariq A. Al-Maeena in the Arab News in an article criticizing the report, “a cause for unflattering rhetoric against a country whose raison d’etre seems to be the illegal thievery of others’ land and oppression of its rightful owners?” Al Maeena continued, “If that is antisemitism, so be it. It will not stop those calling for justice to the Palestinians from cowing down (sic) in the face of such dim-witted conclusions from a government that has lost much of its credibility as a champion of human rights.”72 The Arab American News claimed that the report “trivialized antisemitism to include anti-Zionism and even criticism of Israeli policies.”73 Criticism from these quarters was a sure sign that we hit the right spots for those responsible for at least for several attacks against Jews. Complaints from targets we named meant we identified the right suspects and only reinforced my satisfaction with the outcome of the effort. Yet those suspects remained the greatest challenges I faced as Special Envoy. Their antisemitism was of the genocidal, eliminationist type that in essence escaped categorization in the department’s report because of the hyperfear of appearing anti-Muslim. Calling antisemitism what it actually was, was in practice often extremely difficult for me. Because of this preoccupation for my colleagues both in Washington and in numerous embassies abroad, there were times to be sure when incidents were not convenient for them. Because antisemitism is perhaps the oldest of hatreds in the world, after all these years it was about time to confront its perpetrators and those responsible for their regulation. That was the intention behind the creation of the office I occupied. Combating these incidents required calling out perpatrators and regulators 51

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with direct statements, not deferential ones, dealing forthrightly with the host governments, and most of all getting these governments to act affirmatively. That was the hard part. It was also not always the best of situations when I visited a host nation to talk with, and sometimes browbeat, the officials responsible for these incidents and their governments’ lack of attention to them. It was especially difficult when my colleagues stationed in allied nations had to escort me around to government agencies to complain about antisemitism occurring in countries that were otherwise usually assumed to be unnecessary to criticize for most other issues. It was easy for me to whisk into town, talk about antisemitism, ask questions why the government was not doing enough to stop the problem, and then leave town. The embassy staff remained, having to reengage with the same people with whom I had talked. That remnant of my visit, I am sure, played on the minds of my hosts. To be honest, on a number of occasions I was the proverbial “skunk at the picnic.” When I met with officials, some confided that there were problems. However, others felt obliged to deny a problem or minimize its effects. In some countries, people from Human Rights Commissions pled ignorance as to the problem of antisemitism facing their country. Several denied the need to collect data on the problem, appearing surprised at the suggestion that they should in fact consider antisemitism an existing phenomenon. Overall, the governments of nations I visited were poor reporters of data on antisemitism. According to the OSCE, in 2008 nineteen of fifty-six member states reported collecting data, but only eight provided figures for the year.74 In general, government statistics were hard to come by. Most times, Jewish organizations in their respective countries were much better at and more interested in both learning of events and reporting on them. It was upon them that I routinely relied for the true nature of the problem in any given country. Tel Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute, one of the preeminent institutes for the study of antisemitism, published an annual compilation on the topic of antisemitism and relied upon the same groups I talked to in order to get numbers. Governments then were not the prime sources of information. All too often, in meetings with government officials, it was hard to get a common view of the problem. Opposing officials in the same government and country would point fingers at each other, each sug52

Durban, 9/11, and the Mattress Mice

gesting that the other was responsible for fighting antisemitic violence, not them. In short, it was the proverbial response of, “it’s not my job.” These problems will be treated in greater depth as this story continues. Suffice it to say, governments were less than thrilled at dealing with antisemitism within their own borders. I  can’t remember how many times I was asked quite defensively what the US government was doing to fight the problem in the United States, and my answer was that the problem was so much less in our country simply because “we got it.” Americans understand better now why antisemitism is wrong. Yes, there are problems, I would tell people, but we have mechanisms to solve them and resolution was being consistently applied. The effects of this showed up each year in declining numbers of incidents. Creating the same mechanisms in other countries was specifically what I sought to do with each meeting in every country I visited. Yet here we were, working to end attacks on individual Jews and those emanating from pure Anti-Zionism. These would be two very different tasks. Anti-Zionism would prove to be a major and nearly insurmountable cause of antisemitism. Some had termed it the new antisemitism. I disagreed. There was nothing new about it except for the fact that Israel as the “collective Jew” was the target. Jews around the world were being held responsible for every Israeli action. How different, really, was this from the past, with one Jew being blamed and punished for the actions of others? Soon after I entered office, Israel attacked Lebanon and its Hezbollah forces in response to attacks in which Israeli soldiers were kidnapped incross-border raids. The numbers of antisemitic attacks around the world spiked. Shortly before I left office, Israel attacked Gaza for its Hamas border attacks, and again attacks spiked. Antisemitism masking itself as Anti-Zionism was the chief burden of my office. Fighting this scourge would be the biggest fight of all, as found when I went overseas. The differentiation that was made between attacks on Jews, which were condemned, and attacks on Israel, which were not, was amazing. Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote in The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism that “the State and its inhabitants were cursed by virtually all who could claim to speak for the original inhabitants of the region to which they had returned. So the Israelis, from having been individual strangers in the Diaspora, had returned as a sort of collective stranger. Israel had become the ‘Jew of the Nations’. . . .”75 53

Chapter One

I had been told that I should separate anti-Zionism from antisemitism, avoiding the obligation to “see everything Israel does as perfect.” When I went to the UN, an official with the Humanitarian Affairs Department sighed, telling me she wished “Israel could be a normal country like everyone else that makes mistakes and like every other country could be criticized.” She concluded, “Everything is so sensitive.” Being the first to hold such a position for this or any other government, I would travel more than 250,000 miles, to twenty-eight countries around the world talking with governments and trying to instill in their ambassadors, ministers of parliaments, town mayors, law enforcement officials, professors, and NGOs a sense of the need to prevent attacks on Jews and to prosecute those committing such attacks. Although I loved every minute of what I did, there were times I found out just how difficult the world could be for Jews. I found comfort in the words of a diplomat not of this era, but from more than sixty years earlier. Charles F. Knox Jr., Counselor of Mission in Tel Aviv, wrote Washington concerning “the secret weapons of Israel” used in the victory over the Arabs in Israel’s War of Independence. In November 1948 Knox explained, “The Jewish people believe that they have no alternative but to win or be destroyed altogether . . .”76 Like Israel, despite the situation they faced, Jews around the world simply had to persevere. There was no other choice.

Chapter Two

We’re Semites Too: Europe’s Muslims We have developed an ideology of Islam-supremacism, contrary to all Islamic teachings. We have developed a theory that Muslims alone will go to Heaven, all others are going to be consigned to Hell, no matter how righteous. —Sultan Shahin1 The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind. —H. L. Mencken2 A country is not just what it does—it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates. —Kurt Tucholsky3

“Accommodation of Muslims and their religious aspirations in the Western world would create space for political and social harmony,” declared Masood Khan of Pakistan, representing the Organization of the Islamic Conference at the United Nations Human Rights Council on September 25, 2007. Masood also offered a deliberate falsehood, repeated to me by Muslims across Europe, in the Middle East, and in the United States, suggesting, “Islamophobia was also a crude form of Anti-Semitism.” He commented that “[a]s cathedrals adorned the skylines in many Muslim countries, so should minarets. Mosques with their traditional architecture should become a symbol of integration in Europe. Publications of sacrilegious caricatures were sowing the seed of discord. There was a need for inter- and intra-religious dialogue at all levels.”4 During the past twenty years, Europe has changed dramatically. Muslim immigration has grown exponentially, transforming the climate of the continent. Writing about the appearance of Brussels in the Saudi Arab News daily, Aijaz Zaka Syed explained almost jubilantly, “This is the 55

Chapter Two

heart of Europe, the seat of the European Parliament, and perhaps the capital of the coming United States of Europe.” He continued, With Arabs and Muslims living and working in this quintessentially European city, Brussels increasingly looks like Beirut, Istanbul, or any other great city of the Middle East . . . and it is not just Brussels. Scenes like these are increasingly familiar all across Europe—from London to Paris and from Berlin to Copenhagen to Amsterdam.5

Thousands of Muslim immigrants are flowing out of North Africa into France, Italy, and Spain. Disembarking there, they spread across Europe. France, for example, has become a transit route from Europe into the United Kingdom. Thousands of illegal immigrants from Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere—a large proportion of them children—are traveling into France. The Algerian Navy, for example, has found it difficult to stop this immigration from its own shores.6 With so many illegal Muslim immigrants coming to Europe, its institutions have been overwhelmed. Increasingly isolated, poor, and unassimilated, these Muslims have directed their wrath at longer-standing Jewish communities. The larger story of Muslims’ antisemitism today, their sense of victimhood, and their defensive reactions to perceived offenses from the West—and their rivals the Jews—is also important to understand. This story has serious implications for the Jews of Europe, whose willingness to endure an expansion and repetition of widespread antisemitism is limited. It took 2,000 years for the gap between Judaism and Christianity to be bridged. Yet within fifty years after the Holocaust, that gap had narrowed and, in many places, closed. During that same period, however, relations between Jews and Muslims, long characterized by violence and dhimmitude, although not genocide, steadily worsened.7 With the advent of modern Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel, that gap widened and has become an open, gaping wound. With the import of the conflict to Europe, the remnant of Europe’s Jews is once again exposed, once more the victims of rabid antisemitism. The Jews who remained in Europe—and those who were expelled or fled from their communities in the Middle East and North Africa—managed to integrate, 56

We’re Semites Too: Europe’s Muslims

raise families, and settle into a Europe that had become more accepting of them. This has made the influx of Muslims, upset at the situation of their coreligionists in Palestine and directing their frustrations toward the Jews, even harder for them to understand or bear. Through their self-imposed isolation, Muslim communities foster notions of helplessness. At the same time, importing their tribal dispute with the Jews from the Middle East to the streets of Europe, they perpetuate crude antisemitic conspiracy theories and direct violent attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions. As I was told by Jews in Amsterdam, “people are scared and we have to take measures.” Although perceiving themselves as victims, Muslims have become both persecutor and persecuted, twisting ancient and modern history to suit their current needs. Europe’s passivity and stubborn adherence to multiculturalism allow these distortions to persist and the volatile situation to fester, thereby emboldening Muslims and worsening the problem.

Numbers The magnitude of the problem can be more fully understood if one considers current estimates of the Muslim population in four Western European countries.8

Population

Muslim Population

% of World Muslim Population

Germany

4,026,000

~5%