Omer Bartov on contemporary anti-Semitism

Historian Omer Bartov, the author of an important study of the German Wehrmacht on the eastern front, recently wrote about contemporary anti-Semitism in Europe: Memories Are Short, Hatred Is Forever Los Angeles Times 03/15/04.

The new anti-Semitism employs images strikingly similar to Hitler's. It condemns the Jews as controlling the world's only superpower and seeking to take over the rest of the world, as promoting a destructive policy of globalization, as supporting the allegedly criminal and illegitimate Nazi-like state of Israel. It is obsessed with fantasies of secret cabals, visions of bloody upheaval and apocalyptic devastation. Like its Nazi predecessor, it promises to do to the Jews what they are supposedly doing to the world. It is inherently, then, genocidal.

But rather than being the policy of one state, this new anti-Semitism is the domain of very different cultures, political ideologies and religious teachings. Its more soft-core manifestations can be found in the European left, camouflaged as anti-Americanism and an anti-Zionism that denies Israel's right to exist. Right-wing anti-Semitism has also come out of the shadows, as was most clearly seen when the German Christian Democratic parliamentarian Martin Hohmann publicly described the Jews as a "people of perpetrators." ...

But the new anti-Semitism has found its most lethal incarnation in the Muslim world, where it has become a prevalent subculture, a focus of identity, a rallying cry for the masses, a tool to divert attention from the real reasons for poverty and despair, and a cause for militant mobilization and destructive urges. Ranging from the speech of Malaysia's former prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, to the charter of the Palestinian organization Hamas, this rhetoric is infused with the same terrifying images of Jews that were haunting Hitler. And we know where Hitler's obsession led.

In Mel Gibson's nauseating film "The Passion of the Christ," the Jews are not satisfied with the tortured body of Jesus and scream over and over again, "Crucify him!" While Pontius Pilate washes his hands, they cry (without English subtitles), "His blood is on us."