Slap at European Jewry Prompts Backlash

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URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/10005

“Europe’s Jews Seek Solace on the Right,” says New York Times Paris correspondent Craig Smith, in a peevish article that flaunts deliberate ignorance, takes a backhand slap at European Jewry, and commits an unforgivable faux pas: With callous disregard for the security of a reputable historian, Mr. Smith tears away Bat Ye’or’s legal pen name and displays her in all the nakedness -and Jewishness -of what he decrees to be her “real” name. Inside sources reveal that the Times has received a volley of letters from top-notch figures shocked at his unprofessional behavior. There is little chance that the storm will blow over without severe damage to Mr. Smith’s reputation.

The article trundles back and forth between snide insinuations and glaring inaccuracies, occasionally shifting into neutral with half-honest evaluations of the overall situation, only to lash out again, using understatement as his weapon of choice. It opens by announcing that a few Jews in Belgium have come out publicly in support of the far right Vlaams Belang party, “whose founders were Nazi collaborators.” Granting that Jews might feel slighted by the European left, where Yasser Arafat is the poster boy and Israel the whipping boy, Mr. Smith implies that hobnobbing with Nazis is not really an appropriate solution.

Of course he goes on to explain that most Jews do not vote for extreme right parties, and many are loyal to the left, just as in the past Jews allied themselves with progressive parties and then shifted positions when those parties betrayed them and their values. That’s not exactly news. So what is the article really about? Does it describe the reality that might have pushed a few Belgian Jews into the arms of an erstwhile Nazi party? On the contrary, it distorts, deforms, or erases the reality that confronts Jews in a Europe that has opted for a merger with retrograde forces in the Arab world. Former Nazi collaborators may not be anyone’s best bet, but future Islamist collaborators are not harbingers of a bright future either. This collaboration is precisely the subject of Ms. Ye’or’s recently published “Eurabia.” Eurabia is not, as Craig Smith ingenuously suggests, Europe “consciously allied with the Arab world at the expense of Jews and the trans-Atlantic alliance,” it is Europe intermixed with the Arab world in a Euro-Mediterranean umma that will efface its Judeo-Christian civilization.

How are things going in Eurabia? Not too badly, if you believe Mr. Smith. A smidgeon of anti-Semitism, a smattering of left-leaning pro-Palestinianism, a few untoward incidents: “Swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans have marked pro-Palestinian marches in some Communist-run municipalities in France.” Enough to make one wonder if the Times Paris correspondent ever leaves the green zone in the City of Light.

“Death to the Jews” rang out loud and clear in the Place de la Republique in the first week of October 2000, and echoed up and down the boulevards during four years of pro-Palestinian, anti-war, anti-Bush, pro-jihad, anti-Le Pen demonstrations. Israeli flags embedded in American flags covered with swastikas flapped in the breeze at Place de la Bastille. No caricature was too gory to smear “Bush, Sharon, assassins.” Peace marchers flying Palestinian Arab and Iraqi flags beat up Jewish boys from the left-wing Zionist Hashomer Hazair during an anti-war demonstration in March of 2003. Despite solemn promises expressed in person by Nicholas Sarkozy (minister of the interior at the time) at the Hashomer Hazair locale in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris, the case was closed without an investigation. But a video of the incident was circulating on the Internet, so the peace movement had to crack down on the swastika crowd; they set up monitors, the number of demonstrators dropped from 18,000 to 10,000 to negligible, but the swastikas were still there. And the hotheads beat up the monitors.

Mr. Smith speculates: “perhaps” 5% of Antwerp’s Jews voted Vlaams Belang. He does mention that some 65% of the Jewish residents of Antwerp perished in the Shoah, but not a word about the Muslim militia that sows terror in Antwerp today; not a word about attacks against Jews, their institutions, and their right to exist; not a word about the murder of an Antwerp Jew in December of 2004. No, Belgian Jews are reacting to “displays of anti-Semitism and the European left’s embrace of the Palestinian cause.”

Perniciously denying the extreme nature of European anti-Semitism, Mr. Smith accuses Jews of extremism. Falsely describing indigenous Maghrebi Jews as “European Jews who fled their North African homes,” he wipes away centuries of Jewish presence prior to the forced Islamization of their countries. Tearing away the well-earned pen name of Egyptian-born Bat Ye’or, “daughter of the Nile,” he throws her in with the European Jews forced to leave Arab lands “after the creation of Israel.” (Mr. Smith must know that Israel was created thousands of years ago; the State of Israel was created in 1947.) Apparently ill-equipped to engage in legitimate debate with the historian of dhimmitude, the Times correspondent resorted to an underhanded attack that rings, curiously, with an unpleasant note of querulous dhimmitude.

Ms. Poller member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. She is a novelist living in Paris.

Slap at European Jewry Prompts Backlash

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AUTHOR

Nidra Poller

Author, Paris, France

Topics:

 

  • The Middle East conflict as seen from Europe and particularly France:
  • French policy
  • media coverage
  • public opinion
  • Jewish community reaction

 

 

 

 

 


Read all stories by Nidra Poller