Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism

http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/about_yad/what_new/temp_what_new/temp_index_w
hats_new_ahlmark_speech.html

Combatting old/new antisemitism

Speech at Yad Vashem, April 11, 2002 

The international conference âThe Legacy of Holocaust Survivorsâ at Yad
Vashem, Jerusalem, April 8-11, 2002

By PER AHLMARK

Some people have a feeling of emerging anti-Jewish threats before the rest of
us realize what is in the offing. We know who they are, those women and men
sensitive and knowledgable enough to recognize the first signs. Why do so many
Survivors of the Shoah sense before they see? 

>From their past they know how so called âinnocentâ insinuations about Jews
quickly grow into accusations. And accusations â if we do not combat them -
could later on become discrimination and legislation and separation. Then the
road to violence and murder and annihilation is open.  

That is the terrible process which  thousands of Survivors always remind us of.
A major legacy of the Survivors: they try to make us avoid the fate that
destroys not only a people but  civilization and humanity itself.

A great mentor of mine, and of all of us here, and of millions more, will be at
Yad Vashem today.  He survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald. When I first met Elie
Wiesel in the 70Âs he told me: the deniers of the Holocaust try to kill the
Jews a second time. Not only that, he underlined. Rehabilitate the murderers
and they can murder again.

In a speech Elie Wiesel once said: âLet us remember the heroes of Warsaw, the
martyrs of Treblinka, the children of Auschwitz. They fought alone, they
suffered alone, they lived alone, but they did not die alone for something in
all of us died with themâ.

What died with them? My answer is: what died was the creed that there are
limits of human cruelty. Now we know: THERE ARE NO LIMITS. The Holocaust proved
that evil ideology, built on hateful fantasies, combined with total power, and
met with appeasement could bring our societies to atrocitities never seen
before. 

Survivors have often sounded the alarm because they know what is at stake. By
doing so they have strengthened democracy in a way no others could. We listen
to the Survivors in order to survive. 

They have also taught us two other truths. First, antisemitism always starts
with Jews, it never stops with Jews. Jew-hatred, if not contained, almost
always develops into assaults on other groups and minorities and finally
undermines democratic institutions and the rule of law.

So the struggle against antisemitism is a task for Jews and non-Jews together.
Antisemitism is a prejudice among non-Jews â therefore it is a duty for us
non-Jews to resist it. However, Jews are the first victims of this non-Jewish
disease, and they usually know much more about it than non-Jews. Consequently,
it is an obligation for Jews to combat antisemitism in order to defend
themselves and our societies.

Thus,  Jews and non-Jews  have to be standing here shoulder to shoulder.

And, secondly, always take the antisemites seriously! Do believe that they
believe in what they are saying! The most catastrophic mistake of the 20th
century was that tens of millions of people did not think that Hitler actually
meant what he wrote and said.

Our assumption therefore must be that the Jew-haters of the 21st century are
not pretending.  The non-Jewish world must now realize that current anti-Jewish
charters by individuals, organizations and countries are documents you should
study and be prepared to encounter.

It might not be just rhetoric â or rather: rhetoric could, when circumstances
permit it, explode and become guidelines for actions.

And now let us together tell and teach people around the world that one
astonishing thing with antisemitism is its flexibility. Minister Melchior did
so in a brilliant and blistering speech in Geneva three weeks ago, when
addressing  the UN Human Rights Commission. You know of course that the UN has
elected to this commission - the purpose of which is to strengthen human rights
â several nice, liberal, peace- and freedom-loving  countries like Libya,
Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria, and of course Cuba and China (and some other
tyrannies) ! At the same time they have kicked out the United States of
America,  the most important democracy in the world.

Rabbi Melchior in his speech in Geneva underlined the adaptability of
antisemitism. Of course it cannot change its goal: to attack the Jews. But it
can change its face, its strategy, its rationalization and part of its
vocabulary. 

Antisemites of different centuries have usually aimed at destroying the then
centre of Jewish existence. Once Jewish religion was the target. When Judaism
did not surrender Jews were expelled or killed. In the 19th century, when race
became the word of the day, the Jews were attacked for being an evil race â
that propaganda peaked with the Nazis. 

And today, when the Jewish state has become a centre of identity and a source
of pride and protection for most Jews, Zionism is being slandered as a racist
ideology.

Naturally, I do not regard criticism of Israel as antisemitism. It is as
legitimate to oppose certain Israeli policies and decisions as it is to
scrutinize any other nation. 

But anti-Zionism  today has become very similar to antisemitism. Anti-Zionists
accept the right of other peoples to have  national feelings and a state, and
to defend that state. But they reject the right of the Jewish people to have
its national consciousness expressed in the State of Israel, and make that
state secure.  Thus, they are not  judging Israel on the basis of the same
values as when judging other countries.  Such discrimination of Jews is called
antisemitism. 

Also, they are often exploiting antisemitic stereotypes when condemning the
Jewish state. Anti-Israeli incitement with anti-Jewish connotations is
repeatedly expressed in for example the press, mosques, radio-TV and textbooks
in the Arab world. Islamists very creatively borrow images from the Middle East
conflict and give them a new twist or spin when illustrating why Jews can never
be trusted. Jews seek world or regional power. The Jews conspire. Jews deceive
other people and are cruel when it comes to both ends and means. Jews are
strong in the art of bluffing and weak when it comes to character and
truthfulness. And, as usual, the âProtocols of the Elders of Zionâ has
proved what Jewish strategy is about. 

Holocaust denial has become routine, so have parallells between Israel and the
Third Reich. We have âto confront the new Nazi plague which is nesting in
Israelâ, wrote a Syrian paper. Palestinian TV portrays Israeli soldiers as
rapists and cold-blooded murderers. The Mufti of Jerusalem stated that âitÂs
not my fault that Hitler hated the Jews, they hate them just about
everywhereâ. Another Friday sermon on Palestinian TV told Muslims âto have
no mercy on the Jews, no matter where you areâ. kill themâ. and those
Americans who are like themâ, etc.

We must take such outbursts seriously!  When new generations of Arabs and
Muslims are  contaminated  with this hatred,  it also makes peace and trust and
cooperation between Israel and its neighbours increasingly difficult.

Anti-Zionists, explicitly or implicitly, question the entire existence of
Israel, which means  that millions of Israeli Jews have to be fought and
probably killed. And deliberately suggesting massmurder of Jews - openly or in
vague formulas - has always been seen as the most extreme form of antisemitism.
Those anti-Zionists, who advocate the destruction of the Jewish state, should
be put in a similar category.

Sometimes anti-Zionists claim that they are not against Jews but âonlyâ
against the Jewish state. Suppose that someone said: âI am only against the
existence of Great Britain but I am not anti-British!â Or if somebody told me
that âI love Swedes, but Sweden should be abolishedâ. None would take such
statements seriously. It is hard to love or respect a people and  hate their
state.

And never forget Durban!  Several of the draft statements preparing the Durban
meeting, which should have been an anti-racist conference, were in fact part of
an ideological pogrom against Israel. They suggested that Jews were not
primarily victims of the Holocaust but perpetrators of another holocaust,
against the Palestinians. Antisemitism did not mean hostility against Jews but
âZionist practices against semitismâ. It sounds ridiculous, but that crap
was part of the program from the other side. 

In spite of the shameless demagoguery of these drafts, most democracies did not
react with any energy at all, until very late last summer. I salute the
systematic efforts to inform and warn EU nations and other free countries
through a diplomatic campaign  passionately carried out by Minister Melchior
and his collegues. They could not prevent Durban from becoming an antisemitic
festival, but they totally changed the outcome of the final, official Durban
declaration.

How come that the democracies â except Israel and the United States and maybe
Canada â  did not immediately realize what was going on? There is a paradox
here. Today there are more democracies in the world than ever before. An
increasing number of UN members have governments, which got their power through
free elections and free speech.

This is not 1975: no Communist empire â instead a democratic Europe from west
to east. Latin America has experienced surprising victories for freedom; so
have parts of Africa and East Asia. And the United States is today the only
superpower. These facts suggest that it would be a fairly easy match for the
free countries today to resist Arab and Muslim verbal anti-Jewish aggression in
the international arena.

Yet, the Durban humiliations did occur. And our adversaries will strike again.
In several agencies of the United Nations, Israel-bashing has become a
political ritual. That has been monitored in detail by for example the UN
Watch, an independent institution in Geneva, and in outstanding lectures by Law
Professor Irwin Cotler, also member of the Canadian Parliament. They have
proved that the demonization of the only democracy in the Middle East is a
central part of the new anti-Jewishness. Israel is branded by the dictatorships
as a systematic violater of all sorts of human rights. When this country is
described  âas the enemy of all good and the repository of all that is
evilâ, Cotler says in his analysis, it becomes a âteaching of contemptâ
within the UN. 

He regards this a parallell to the medieval indictment of the Jew as the
âpoisoner of the wellsâ. Portraying Israel as a leper state makes it the
âpoisoner of the international wellsâ. And Professor Robert WistrichÂs
summary is that âthe accumulation of anti-Israeli resolutions (at the UN) is
liable to cause the complete delegitimization of the Jewish stateâ.

The constant singling out of one nation as the enemy of humanity  is in fact a
campaign directed against the Jewish people. We have seen that many anti-Jewish
outbursts in a number of countries have been rooted in condemnations of Israel
exploiting an antisemitic terminology. Attacks on synagogues have  been
triggered by a defaming language about the conflict in the Middle East. 

Words lead to actions. And  propaganda lines by Muslim radicals have been
supported and repeated by extremists both on the Right and the Left in the
Western world. And yet the media in the West, especially in Europe, are
reluctant to link violence and terrorist acts to their ideological
inspirations, including antisemitic obsession. Do always bear in mind how the
journalist Daniel Pearl was murdered. His last reported words were: âI am a
Jew, my mother is a Jewâ. Then they cut his throat.

Such acts of murderous barbarism should not make us forget the vulgarization of
language in quarters assumed to be civilized. It very often happened in the
20th century that people who regarded themselves âintellectualsâ became
fellow travellers of fascism or communism without being members of  political
parties based on those  ideologies. Now in the 21st century - in the chattering
classes often linked to massmedia, politics, government administration or
universities â we quite often encounter people who condemn Israel with an
excistement, that reminds us of anti-democratic movements. I am not referring
to majorities in the Western world but to often significant and influential
minorities.   

The French Ambassador to Britain, at a dinner party in London recently,
described Israel as âthat shitty little countryâ.  He has not been removed
by his government, and he has many allies in the European elites. Ambassador
Bernard has helped us to realize how widespread this new anti-Jewishness is.
âThat shitty little countryâ! The columnist Andrew Sullivan was right when
saying that Israel has become âthe object of hate that dare not speak its
nameâ. We here at Yad Vashem dare speak its name: antisemitism.

Not only dare we, we have an obligation to do so. Never, never be silent about
the daily attacks in France now against Jews and synagogues. It is a shame for
all of Europe that many French Jews today cannot send their children to school
without beeing deeply worried about their security. I look forward to the words
on this from Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, whom many of us admire so much.

Also a fairly large number of Christians in several countries are still
influenced by the legacy of anti-Jewish theology. Resist and reveal them when
they, for religious reasons, express their hostility against Israel! 

And when the Radical Left in Britain  reacts to antisemitic statements in their
countryÂs mosques by not reacting, by hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, we have to
tell the ugly truth.  Them and other anti-Zionists we refute by quoting Martin
Luther King Jr: âWhen people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews â make no
mistake about itâ.

And finally we should not hesitate to describe the fanatic and determined
danger to democracy that comes with totalitarian Muslim fundamentalism.
Professor Yehuda Bauer has called it âthe greatest antisemitic threat of the
start of the 21st centuryâ. His conclusion is that it does not resemble
âoldâ Arab antisemitism; it is closer to Communism and Nazism as it longs
for a global rule and the destruction of the old value system, the civilization
of âthe Jews and infidelsâ as they call it.  This fundamentalist Muslim
ideology, Bauer says, âuses the unmistakable language of genocide, of
annihilationâ.

So, we have a number of very good reasons to support Rabbi MelchiorÂs idea of
creating The International Commission to Combat Antisemitism (ICCA). That body
should learn from the Survivors of the Shoah to  make the necessary wake up
calls. I hope this  organization will be clear in defining the increasing
threat of the old/new antisemitism. To wind up: compared to most previous
anti-Jewish outbreaks this one is often less directed against individual Jews.
It attacks primarily the collective Jew, the State of Israel. And then such
attacks start a chain reaction of assaults on individual Jews and Jewish
institutions.

   We certainly could say that in the past the most dangerous antisemites were
those who wanted to make the world Judenrein, free of Jews. Today the most
dangerous antisemites might be those who want to make the world Judenstaatrein,
free of a Jewish state.

XXX

PER AHLMARK - writer and author, former Leader of the Swedish Liberal Party and
Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, founder of The Swedish Committee Against
Antisemitism, columnist in Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm), has published a number
of books on politics, ideology, international conflicts, and poetry. 


Human Rights Watch:                    

http://www.greekhelsinki.gr/english/reports/GHM-Reports-Greece.html